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Long Reviews

The editor’s own in-depth reviews, excerpts, and background information on selected neglected books. This section is the centerpiece of this site.

Five Star Final, by Louis Weitzenkorn (1931)

Suggested ad layouts from the pressbook for Five Star Final.
Suggested ad layouts from the pressbook for Five Star Final.

For the last couple of years, I’ve closed most nights by watching one of the hundreds (thousands?) of early sound movies made in the period commonly referred to as Pre-Code, from the introduction of sound in the late 1920s to the adoption of the Motion Picture Production Code (often called the Hays Code) in 1934. Technical limitations aside — and these have as much to do with the quality of film stock and the blasé attitudes of studios towards preservation as with the shortcomings of the recording equipment of the period — these films manage to squeeze a lot of story into 60- to 75-minute packages.

But recently, I’ve begun to explore the literary roots of Pre-Code, gathering some of the stories, novels, and plays that provided the source material for many of these movies. Although studios did use original stories devised by member of their writing staffs, the majority of Hollywood A-list movies (and a healthy share of the B-movies) were adapted from existing literary properties. Often, the adaptations wandered far afield from the original works. A notorious example is the 1934 film based on Willa Cather’s novel A Lost Lady, which transplanted Marian and Captain Forrester from 1890s Nebraska to 1930s Chicago, jettisoning almost everything except character names and a skeleton of the plot along the way. Cather was so disgusted with the result that she forbade further use of her work by Hollywood for the rest of her lifetime.

Louis Weitzenkorn’s play Five Star Final, which debuted in New York in December 1930 and was transformed into a film starring Edward G. Robinson that was released by Warner Brothers nine months later, sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from Cather’s A Lost Lady. Both play and movie are scathing attacks upon “yellow journalism” — the unscrupulous practices of tabloid newspapers that, sadly, continue to be seen today. A veteran of New York City newspapers, Weitzenkorn came up through the ranks until he became editor of one of yellow journalism’s worst offenders, the New York Evening Graphic, which was known by its critics as the “Porno-Graphic.” He only lasted a few months in the job, though, finding it too hard to stomach the necessary ethical compromises. One of his colleagues on the Graphic, Frank Mallen, later wrote that, “He never liked anything about it. As a matter of fact, he didn’t know why in hell he ever got tangled up in it.” After tendering his resignation, Weitzenkorn boarded a ship for France and decided to work out his feelings about the Evening Graphic and its ilk in dramatic form.

Five Star Final debuted in December 1930 and was a critical and popular success. Over a year after the Wall Street crash, theater-goers in New York still had an appetite for social criticism, and Five Star Final delivered it fast and unfiltered. As John W. Perry wrote in Editor and Publisher, the play is “a venomous, sullen, and bitter castigation of that sensational fringe of American newspaper making which has only one god — circulation — and which, for the sake of this god, will sacrifice honor, decency, and self-respect without the quiver of an eyelash.” Arthur Pollock, a widely-syndicated critic, said the play “froths at the mouth considerably” and would have been more effective with a little toning-down. The Daily Worker’s reviewer took a strict Marxist view: “Since it is bourgeois criticism and not workers’ criticism, it mixed in a lot of snobbish disgust at the workers,” characterizing the Gazaette’s readers as “soda jerkers and fat chambermaids.”

In Five Star Final, Weitzenkorn portrays the transgression and redemption of Randall, his fictional counterpart, editor of the Evening Gazette. Prodded by a circulation-hungry owner, he agrees to run a serial about a scandal from 20 years past, in which a distraught young woman named Nancy Voorhees murdered the employer who had seduced and impregnated her and then refused to take responsibility for his act. Found innocent by a sympathetic jury, she slipped from the public spotlight and seemingly disappeared. Randall soon manages to track her down though, and his publicity tears down the facade of a normal life Nancy and her husband have created. The relentless sensationalism of the Gazette’s coverage ultimately leads the couple to commit suicide.

Ad for the original New York production of Five Star Final.
Ad for the original New York production of Five Star Final.

Five Star Final ran for 175 performances on Broadway and several touring companies took the play around the country in the following months. Warner Brothers bought the film rights for $25,000 and began lining it up as a feature for Edward G. Robinson, the studio’s hottest star from the success of his protrayal of the Al Capone-like Rico in Little Caesar. Warners’ most productive director, Mervyn Le Roy (six feature films in 1931 alone), was assigned to direct. There was a slight delay in the film’s release, however, because Weitzenkorn’s contract prohibited Warner Brothers from going out to theaters until the last touring run of the play ended.

As scripted by Byron Morgan and Robert Lord, the film may represent the closest thing to a faithful adaptation short of an actual filmed stage production. After reading the play — one of the relatively rare examples of a Pre-Code source play that was published — I watched the film again, following along from the book, and was struck by how extensively Morgan and Lord reused Weitzenkorn’s text. Indeed, more than just dialogue, whole pages of which are essentially reproduced word-for-word, but also the act/scene structure and even staging directions.

Use of split screen in Five Star Final
Use of split screen in Five Star Final.

Although Weitzenkorn had no film experience when writing the play, his staging made the film easy to translate into a shooting script. While there are just seven locations used in the play’s 19 scenes and Weitzenkorn called for the use of a revolving stage floor that would allow several scenes to be performed in two or three locations simultaneously. This was innovative for theaters but Le Roy could easily reproduce the effect using the split-screen technique perfected early in the sound era. Le Roy also eliminated several brief scenes from the play that had less to do with advancing the plot than with creating the atmosphere of the Gazette’s typical readers.

Dropping one in particular — set in “Trixie’s flat” — avoided running afoul of state censors with its unsubtle suggestion that Trixie and her flatmate are prostitutes. Another, in “the apartment of a colored couple,” makes the film a bit less offensive to current sensibilities than the play. Its omission, on the other hand, probably leaves today’s viewers wondering what the references to “Clearing House numbers” was all about. (See this item from the Harvard University Press blog for an explanation of how numbers rackets in Harlem used the daily transaction totals from the New York Clearing House as the basis for the daily betting.)

Edward G. Robinson's character washing his hands in Five Star Final
Edward G. Robinson’s character washes his hands in Five Star Final.

One aspect of the film that draws the attention of viewers now, on the other hand, is absent from the play. Several times in the film, Robinson is shown diligently washing his hands. Robinson and Le Roy came up with the idea, and it works well on several levels. Although the term obsessive compulsive disorder hadn’t come into widespread use at the time, the behavior not only shows the stress Robinson’s character feels in continually being forced to engage in duplicitous and exploitive practices but symbolizes his desperate attempts to cleanse his guilty conscience. Its last instance also provides the set-up for one of film’s best lines when Aline MacMahon, playing Robinson’s secretary, castigates him, saying that “You can always get people interested in the crucifixion of a woman.

Five Star Final (the play) has not shared its film version’s longevity. One watches the film now for its brisk direction (despite running nearly 90 minutes), sharp dialogue (much from the play), and ensemble acting. Frances Starr and H. B. Warner, Warner’s stock players are particularly effective as Nancy Voorhees and her husband, one of more believable examples of marital love onscreen from the time. Tabloid journalism is every bit as awful now as then, but at least we’re saved from the onslaught of papers attempting to produce three, four, five, or more editions in a single day. And so while the film still works as entertainment, Weitzenkorn’s play is only of interest as a historical artifact today.

Five Star Final the film was even more successful than the play, making a profit of $500,000 over its costs and earning a nomination for Best Picture at the 5th Academy Awards (it lost to Grand Hotel). Warners recycled the story in 1936 in Two Against the World, with Humphrey Bogart in the lead and the setting changed somewhat awkwardly (the age of 24-hour news broadcasting was still almost 40 years away) to a radio station. Louis Weitzenkorn moved to Hollywood for a few years, contributing to screen plays for 24 Hours (1931) and Men of Chance (1932), before returning to New York and the newspaper business. In the early 1940s, he moved back to his home town of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and tried writing another play, but he died in 1943 when his clothes caught fire as he was fixing a pot of coffee in his apartment.

Five Star Final: A Melodrama in Three Acts, by Louis Weitzenkorn
New York: Samuel French, 1931

La Douleur, by Marguerite Duras (1986)

Cover of the UK edition of La Douleur by Marguerite Duras.

Marguerite Duras is hardly a neglected writer, having at least a dozen books currently in print in English and having kept a number close to that in print since first hitting her stride with English readers in the 1960s. Her 1984 autobiographical novel L’Amant (The Lover), which won the Prix Goncourt and has been translated into over 40 languages, is considered a 20th century classic. And several parts of La Douleur (The Pain), which was published in the U.S. as The War: A Memoir, were incorporated into Emmanuel Finkiel’s 2017 film, Memoir of War. Yet despite Duras’s fame, the film, and the book’s profound power, the American edition of La Douleur (New Press) dates back to 2008 and the British edition (Flamingo) to 1987.

La Douleur collects six texts, two straight memoir, two autobiographical fiction, two wholly fictional, so the book’s American title is somewhat misleading. In addition, the texts are presented not in chronological order, but — in my opinion, at least — in order of merit, and the first three are far better than the last.

The book takes its title from Duras’s first piece, La Douleur, drawn from the diary she kept over the weeks when she waited for news of her husband, Robert Antelme. A writer and member of the Resistance, Antelme had been arrested by the Gestapo in July 1944, just six weeks ahead of the liberation of Paris by Allied forces, and like thousands of Resistance members before him, sent from Fresnes prison to a concentration camp in Germany.

Duras’s and Antelme’s marriage had already been strained by the death of their child in 1942, and by 1944, Duras was involved with the editor Dionys Mascolo, referred to as D. in the book, and intent upon divorcing Antelme. This fact hovers over her narrative, contributing to her anxiety and sense of survivor’s guilt.

In April 1945, as the Allies advance into Germany and begin liberating prisoner of war camps, French prisoners start arriving in Paris and Duras’s hopes lift. But at the same time, so do images of Buchenwald, the first concentration camp reached by American and British troops: the piles of corpses, the ghost-like skeletons of the surviving inmates. She associates one photo in particular with Antelme: “In a ditch, face down, legs drawn up, arms outstretched, he’s dying. Dead.” A few of Antelme’s associates, mere shadows of their former selves, return from Buchenwald and speak of seeing him but losing him in the chaos of the camp’s last days.

Then, in May, François Mitterrand, referred to in the book by his Resistance name, Morland, calls from Germany. Assigned by General De Gaulle as a liaison to the American forces liberating camps in Kaufering and Dachau, Mitterrand was passing through one of the blocks at Dachau when he heard his name spoken, so faintly he barely processes it. He recognizes Antelme — and recognizes that the man is perhaps hours from death. He enlists the help of Mascolo and another friend, and quickly arranges paperwork and uniforms so the two men can drive to Germany and help smuggle Antelme out of the camp. Mitterrand understands that the man is too weak to survive the Americans’s usual regime for reviving inmates.

The whole passage of Antelme’s discovery, rescue, and return to Paris in the back of Mitterrand’s car takes perhaps five pages, but they’re among the most suspenseful and emotional I’ve read in many years. Just blocks from Duras’s apartment, Mascolo stops to telephone: “I’m ringing to warn you that it’s more terrible than anything we’ve imagined.” When she sees Antelme’s body being carried up the stairs of her building,

I can’t remember exactly what happened. He must have looked at me and recognized me and smiled. I shrieked no, that I didn’t want to see. I started to run again, up the stairs this time. I was shrieking, I remember that. The war emerged in my shrieks. Six years without uttering a cry.

Then begins the slow, painstaking process of bringing Antelme back to life without killing him. In the first days, he cannot even eat, merely taking in sips of pale broth. “His legs look like crutches…. When the sun shines you can see through his hands.” For days, his survival is in doubt and Duras thinks, “My identity has gone. I’m just she who is afraid when she wakes.”

But survive he does, and as Antelme regains his strength, Duras must test it by breaking the news: “I told him we had to get a divorce, that I wanted a child by D.” By August, they are able to travel to the Savoy for a holiday and Antelme is able to read a newspaper: “Hiroshima is perhaps the first thing outside his own life that he see.”

Antelme and Duras did divorce and Mascolo became the second of three husbands. Antelme wrote a memoir of his time in the concentration camps, L’Espèce humaine (The Human Race) in 1947, after which, Duras writes, “he never spoke of the German concentration camps again. Never uttered the words again.”

The texts that follow “La Douleur” jump back in time. “Monsieur X, Here Called Pierre Rabier” relates the cat-and-mouse game that the Gestapo agent who arrested Antelme plays with her in the weeks before the liberation. Rabier appears to be a French collaborator but Duras believes him to be German. He entices her with promises to ensure Antelme will be treated well but she suspects his real aim is to get her to betray other members of the Resistance — Mitterrand in particular.

It’s a potentially lethal game they play. “Every time I’m going to see Rabier — and this is to go on right to the end — I act as if I were going to be killed. As if he knew all about my activities. Every time, every day.” As days pass and the Allies near Paris, however, Rabier’s own situation grows more complicated. She looks at him and thinks, “I suddenly see him as an extra in a farcical tragedy…already stricken by a death that is itself devalued, not genuine, deflated.” Mascolo tells her the Resistance plans to kill Rabier, but in the end, he is arrested and Duras testifies at his trial. And then he goes “completely out of my head…. He must have been shot during the winter of 1944-1945. I don’t know where.”

In “Albert of the Capitals,” the last of the three strongest texts, Duras relates an episode in the first days after the liberation, when the Resistance exercised summary judgment on some collaborators. She and another Resistance member hold a waiter, a man known as Albert of “The Capitals” (a café), as a hostage, expecting him to be executed. It’s almost the mirror image of the Rabier piece: Duras recognizes she holds the power of life and death over the man and the dubious ethics involved in the situation. She watches as Albert is savagely beaten in an attempt to get him to disclose how he communicated with the Gestapo.

The story is written in the third person. Duras is Thérèse, she tells us in an opening note, and the approach may have been necessary to enable her to deal frankly with her own responsibility for Albert’s torture. Set in the context of the two preceding pieces, it completes a portrait of the moral and ethical intricacies involved in the Occupation of France and the retribution against collaborators in the first weeks after liberation.

If it were up to me, I would reissue these three pieces separately and encourage them to be read widely, particularly by Americans. One thing I observed in twenty years of life in Europe is the resistance of many Europeans to view the world in black-and-white terms, and I suspect this stems at least in part from the experience of living under various occupations — German, Soviet, Allied. As Duras shows in La Douleur, simple distinctions of good and bad, right and wrong, are luxuries that people have to abandon to survive under an occupation. Even if it’s as petty as doing a little bartering in the black market, trade-offs between ideals and practical needs are constantly being negotiated. Duras tries to understand her choices in La Douleur, but she does not forgive them completely, and this seems the best that anyone who looks back to such times can expect.

I watched Memoir of War after finishing La Douleur, and it seemed like a case study in the problems of adapting books too faithfully to the screen. For one thing, it’s hard for me to believe in the realism of a film shot in color with the polish of today’s commercial productions when this is a time I know best from grainy black-and-white newsreel footage. For another, it’s almost impossible for today’s actors to convey the sheer frailty of people who’d lived under rationing for years, even less under the severe deprivations of concentration camps — or their costumes the decrepitude of clothes that have been lived in for years, mended and threadbare, shiny from wear. And finally, in holding to the framework of Duras’s first-person diary and memoir texts, Finkiel has to rely heavily on voiceover by his star Mélanie Thierry when voiceover is a technique best used infrequently and sparingly. One doesn’t go to a movie to listen to someone read from a book — something Irving Thalberg or Sam Goldwyn probably said more than once.

La Douleur, by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray
London: Collins, 1985
Published in the U.S. by Pantheon as The War: A Memoir

Escape from Berlin by Catherine Klein (Käthe Cohn) (1944)

Cover of Escape from Berlin by Catherine Klein

Catherine Klein stands in Berlin’s Tiergarten station saying farewell to her husband, who’s leaving on a train to Amsterdam, a visa to England in hand. Both Jews, after years of attempts, he has managed to secure safe passage out of Germany by virtue of being a doctor, one of the few skills considered worthy of emigrant status by the British. She will have to wait until he can arrange for her to join him. It’s the first of August, 1939.

Klein’s memoir of her experience of living as a Jew under the Nazi regime and her near-miraculous escape in 1942 is easily the most gripping book I’ve read in many months. Even before the war starts just a month after her husband’s departure, she details the succession of measures that progressively restrict the rights of German Jews — sometimes moving at glacial speed, then, as after Kristallnacht in 1938, in a sudden brutal sweep. At first, they comply, turn inwards, try to cope.

Then coping is not enough: “Whisky, sedatives’ and bridge cards become necessary commodities.” Her husband’s practice is taken away, then their apartment, then their belongings inventoried. They are harassed on the streets, friends are beaten up, arrested. When he leaves for England, she writes every day, expecting their separation is temporary. Then Germany invades Poland, Britain and France declare war in response, and they are trapped on different sides. “Every bomber setting out from here may bring death to you every bomber you watch taking off may mean death to me,” she writes in a letter she knows cannot reach him. “I am not defeatist, you know that better than anyone, but I now believe that we will not see each other again.”

Alone now, she has fewer resources, fewer defenses as the war provides the rationale for stepping up the pace of persecution. She has to find a room in a “non-Aryan” house. Along with other healthy Jewish women, she is pressed into work at a factory supplying equipment for the Army. The rationing and restrictions on movement experienced by all Germans are imposed even more strictly on the Jews, and in 1941, she is forced to wear the yellow Star of David so that conductors can keep her from using busses and trams, shop owners refuse her entrance, Aryan doctors refuse to treat her. When her father suffers a severe heart attack one evening, she spends hours trying to find a doctor who will come to his bedside. By the time she succeeds, she returns to find him dead.

Jewish couple in Berlin wearing yellow stars, 1941.
Jewish couple in Berlin wearing yellow stars, 1941.

An American reporter befriends her, invites her to parties at the embassy, passes her goods — peanuts, coffee — now considered contraband. He begins to concoct various escape plans, but the war manages to foil them all. A visa to Switzerland with the possibility of a ship from Genoa? Italy’s declaration of war against France and Britain in June 1940 rules that out. Passage across Russia to Vladivostok and a ship to America? Hitler’s invasion of Russia a year later cuts off that route. Then, Germany’s declaration of war against the United State in the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 lands the reporter and other Americans in internment as enemy aliens.

Early in 1942, she is awakened by screams and cries of pain from somewhere nearby. “A pogrom!” she thinks, fearing that the Nazis had decided to abandon all pretense and simply exterminate the remaining Jews in their beds. She discovers, however, that the sounds come from a former schoolhouse just down her street. Puzzled, she asks a neighbor about the sounds.

“Do be quiet, for God’s sake,” she whispers fiercely. “You will lose your head if you go on talking like that! You know just as well as we do what it is.”

“But I don’t, Frau Schultze. Honestly I don’t.”

“You must have noticed that the school has been turned a temporary hospital, haven’t you? That is where our soldiers are sent when they come back from Russia with legs, hands, noses and ears frozen off. Even morphia is no use for pains like theirs. But I’ll give you a bit of advice: you haven’t seen anything, you haven’t heard anything and as for me I certainly haven’t told you anything.”

Despite the relentless propaganda of Joseph Goebbel’s machine, ordinary people still manage to retain some skepticism about the endless reports of victories. “Good news,” an Aryan supervisor at her factory remarks one day. “There were 20 British bombers in last night’s air raid, and the Luftwaffe managed to shoot down all 25.”

With every day, however, she sees her factory workroom growing emptier. More Jews are being picked up and put on trains bound for the rumored camps in Poland. She realizes that she must find a way out. “In my present situation all I can expect from life is certain death. Why not gamble for it?” she reasons. Recalling one of the more fantastic schemes mentioned by the American reporter, she contacts a man in the Italian embassy said to be amenable to selling passports and visas. He proposes to sell her the real passport on an Italian woman living in Berlin and arrange for a transit visa for Switzerland. To pay for it, she has to give him — and the woman — most of the few personal items left to her.

Käthe Cohn (Catherine Klein), 1942.
Käthe Cohn, 1942.

Even this proves extraordinarily difficult in her circumstances. How to obtain a passport photo, let alone twelve copies? Where to find a suitcase — and how to explain why it’s needed? She begins to fear that the train she will board will be one bound for a camp in the east, not Basel.

It’s unnecessary to go into the series of last-minute crises and lucky breaks that enable Klein to make it to Switzerland. The fact that this book exists already tells us that her escape attempt ultimately succeeds. But there are a few important facts that Klein had to omit in the interest of protecting people still in Germany at the time her account was published in 1944. First, her name. In a paper presented to the Jewish Historical Society of England in 1997, Charles Rubens, a relative by marriage, disclosed that Catherine Klein was Käthe Cohn, born in 1907 and married to Doctor Ernst Cohn in 1928. Even her translator, Eva Meyerhof, author of A Tale of Internment, reviewed here recently, had taken the pseudonym of Livia Laurent for the same reason.

Ida Gassenheimer, 1946.
Ida Gassenheimer, 1946.

More extraordinary, however, is the story Klein/Cohn omits completely from this book. While she describes her father’s last days and death, there is no mention of her mother. As Richard N. Lutjens, Jr. writes in his book, Submerged on the Surface: The Not-So Hidden Jews of Nazi Berlin, 1941-1945, the last great round-up of Jews in Berlin was held in March, 1943. On March 2, 1943, Klein/Cohn’s mother, Ida Gassenheimer, went to her bank to take out a little of the money she was still allowed to keep on deposit. “Frau Gassenheimer! You’re still here?!” exclaimed the clerk. “I have information that by March 5 there won’t be any Jews left in Berlin!”

According to “My Underground Life in Berlin,” a memoir she wrote with the help of her daughter, Ida Gassenheimer was advised by a sympathetic Aryan doctor to take the name of an Aryan German woman he knew was within days of death. Taking temporary refuge with friends, she wrote to registrar in the woman’s hometown and was able to obtain a copy of her birth certificate, pleading that she’d been bombed out of her home. With this, she was able to obtain an identification card and ration book and then to obtain a room — really more of a coal storage closet — in the apartment of an invalid Aryan woman. Here, she managed to survive until the Russian troops arrived in May 1945, and better, to find herself in the American sector when the Allies divided up the administration of Berlin. With the help of the occupying military government, she was able to emigrate to England in 1947 and join her daughter in 1947.

She remained there until her death in 1963. Doctor Ernst Cohn became a well-respected GP and his patients included the novelist Colin Macinnes and several members of the Rolling Stones. He died in 1979 and Käthe Cohn died in 1981. Escape from Berlin has never been reissued.

Escape from Berlin, by Catherine Klein
London: Victor Gollancz, 1944.

Mightier than the Sword, by Alphonse Courlander (1912)

This is a guest post by Dr. Sarah Lonsdale.

On the final page of Mightier than the Sword (1912), a novel about journalists and newspapers, the protagonist dies a lonely death in the middle of a maddened crowd. Humphrey Quain is a reporter for the new popular halfpenny paper The Day and is covering a riot of French wine makers protesting against government tax rises (plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose). In his short career as a ‘descriptive writer’ for his newspaper, Quain has undergone a strange transformation, subduing all human connection and emotion to become an obsessive news-gatherer and storyteller.

He dies because, in his desire to get to the heart of the story he is covering, he is trampled to death by ‘shaggy-haired’ French agriculturalists. His last thought is one of pleasure at his martyrdom, knowing he will make front page news for his paper. He is the ultimate journalist-hero, killed trying to get all the facts, and, in this, his final story, providing his paper with sensational ‘copy’.

There was a time when journalists were heroes, celebrated for exposing corruption in politics and big business, even bringing down a US president and ‘giving voice to the voiceless’, as they liked to say. During Courlander’s lifetime war correspondents became famous for risking all to cover conflict across the globe. Several, such as the Daily Mail’s beloved and respected ‘special’ G. W. Steevens, lost their lives covering the sordid reality of the Boer War in 1900. Many journalists still do try to make our world a better place but today a cynical and fragmented public is more likely to believe in journalists’ biases, that they are ‘enemies of the people’ or retainers in the pockets of wealthy proprietors or enemy powers. ‘Giving voice to the voiceless’ in the age of social media when everyone can find a platform for their voice seems also an outdated concept with connotations of ‘saviour complex’.

Producers still make films and series about the increasingly mythical hero-journalist along the lines of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of All the President’s Men. A recent US television iteration, Alaska Daily (2022) starring Hilary Swank, portrays an almost unbelievably ethical group of print journalists battling to reveal the truth about the death and disappearance of indigenous women across the state.

It may still work on the screen, but written fiction abandoned the idea of the journalist hero decades ago. The journalist in novels, from the pen, typewriter or PC of Evelyn Waugh (Scoop, 1938), Graham Greene (The Quiet American, 1955) or Lauren Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada, 2003) is inevitably complex, compromised, and morally ambiguous: much more interesting that way.

Advertisement for Mightier than the Sword.

For he (it almost always is a he ), did once exist. Indeed, in Britain, in the early years of the twentieth century up to the outbreak of the First World War, there was a veritable slew of fictions depicting journalists as heroes, even in one, Guy Thorne’s When it was Dark (1904), saving civilisation from disaster (this novel, however, contains horrible anti-Semitic tropes and would never be revived today). Many of these novels were bestsellers, evidence of a public appetite for stories about journalists righting wrongs and seeking out facts. Even P. G. Wodehouse, with his swashbuckling Psmith Journalist (serialised in 1909 in The Captain magazine) had a go, sending his upper class and university-educated Psmith (the ‘P’ is silent), to New York to expose heartless tenement landlords.

Mightier than the Sword, which went into three editions in quick succession between May 1912 and October 1913, belongs to this fleeting golden age of newspaper novels. Courlander, a journalist himself, goes into great detail describing the work of the reporter, the sub-editor, ‘runner’, compositor, photographer, printer and the army of staff that went into bringing out a daily newspaper in the heyday of the new popular press. Here is his description of the composing room, a long-since vanished part of newspaper production:

Row upon row the aproned linotype operators sat before the key-board translating the written words of the copy before them into leaden letters. Their machines were almost human. They touched the keys as if they were typewriting, and little brass letters slipped down into a line, and then mechanically an iron hand gripped the line, plunged it into a box of molten lead, and lifted it out again with a solid line of lead cast from the mould…

This kind of description may well be fascinating to the historian of newspaper production, but it is hard to see why, even in 1912, this level of detail would interest a reading public. But it may also be the key as to why, apparently, it was so popular. Courlander’s was a new and exciting, technology-driven world, when newspapers changed utterly from large, expensive, and highbrow to something that everyone could afford to buy and written in language those educated only to age 14 could confidently read. The Daily Mail, the first morning daily halfpenny in Britain, had been launched in 1896 by Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe). The stunning success of his paper, which reached a circulation of 1.2 million in just a few years, was followed rapidly by the Daily Express (1900) and the Daily Mirror (1903). These new popular papers used a combination of bolder typefaces, shorter sentences and shorter articles to attract a newly literate and newly enfranchised readership of the lower middle classes. The Daily Mail was disparaged as being written ‘by office boys for office boys’ by the then prime minister Lord Salisbury but it soon became a symbol of a new, better-connected and technologically advanced country.

In the novel, Quain’s paper, The Day, is a symbol of this modernity, its dazzling electric dome illuminating the night sky in a London still dimly lit by ‘copper-tinted’ gas. The new generation of printing presses that could produce thousands of newspapers an hour appeared miraculous, converting in seconds acres of blank white paper into ‘quire after quire’ of printed record of lives and events from across the globe. The telegraph and photography, like the digital world today, brought the far and exotic corners of the world into the hands of ordinary people. This is the wonder that Courlander was trying to evoke in his descriptions of the thundering presses, ‘like the throbbing of thousands of human hearts.’ The newspaper is a giant, selling more than a million copies a day and the older journalists trained to write Dickens-style prose are either sacked or learn to write in crisp, short sentences.

Mightier than the Sword captures this moment of transition between the old world and the new at the very dawn of mass media.

The plot of the novel is simple: Humphrey Quain, a young writer from a quiet provincial cathedral city applies for a job on The Day. He is taken on, initially struggles but then does well and is promoted to be the paper’s Paris correspondent. In between his adventures, which involve solving tragic mysteries and reporting mining disasters, he falls in love with two women but breaks things off each time: his career is all-consuming.

Quain notices he is changing, from a sensitive young man to a news hound who doesn’t care about the people he reports on: “Everything in life now I see from the point of view of ‘copy’…even at the funeral [his aunt], as I stood over the grave, and watched them lower the coffin, I felt that I could write a splendid column about it,” he confesses as he breaks off with yet another disappointed fiancée. Despite this metamorphosis he wouldn’t change his life for the whole world: from attending the lengthy committee of the Anti-Noise Society, or spending several minutes finding the right word to describe a street lamp in the dark: ‘This was the journalist’s sense – a sixth sense – which urges its possessor to set down everything he observes, and adds infinite zest to life, since every experience, every thought, every new feeling, means something to write about…his thoughts ran in metaphors and symbols.’

Although the novel made Courlander’s name (he had written four mediocre novels before Mightier than the Sword), it is unconvincing as a work of literature. Its importance lies in its ideas about popular journalism and the new industrial relations not just in newspapers, but everywhere. Quain notes that for the disposable reporters on the mass press, their words are simply another commodity, produced, ‘as a bricklayer lays bricks.’ In the final scene of the novel, Humprey Quain realises that the French rioters see him as a representative of the press, part of the political-corporate nexus that is ruining their way of life. This realisation shocks him, and only makes him want to seek harder for the truth.

An obituary notice for Alphonse Courlander.

Alphonse Courlander, like Guy Thorne, P. G. Wodehouse and other authors of Edwardian newspaper novels, was a journalist, who joined the Daily Express in the early years of the 20th century. As did his protagonist, he became famous as a ‘descriptive writer’ under the editorship of the Fleet Street legend Ralph Blumenfeld (Ferrol in the novel). In an art-meets-life moment, after the novel’s publication, Courlander was made Paris correspondent of the Daily Express but died shortly afterwards at the age of 33. In his obituary (23 October 1914), the Daily Mail asserted that Courlander died after a break-down, having ‘overtaxed his strength’ reporting on the War from Paris.

Mightier than the Sword, by Alphonse Courlander
London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912

Dr Sarah LonsdaleSarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.

Another Present Era, by Elaine Perry (1990)

Another Present Era by Elaine Perry

Harlem native Michael A. Gonzales has been on the trail of neglected Black writers for a number of years, first with his feature The Blacklist for Catapault and now with CrimeReads. More recently, he was instrumental in getting the short stories of Diane Oliver, whose life was cut short at the age of 22 in a motorcycle accident, published for the first time in Neighbors and Other Stories, just published in February 2024 by Grove Press. He wrote about his latest discovery, Elaine Perry’s 1990 dystopian novel Another Present Era, in CrimeReads just last month.

I was fascinated by Michael’s article. “Another Present Era,” he wrote, “touches on many of the same subjects (global warming, corporate greed, racism and disease) as [Octavia] Butler’s more well-known Parable of Sower, but that book wasn’t published until three years later.” It was Perry’s only published novel, though an article in Perry’s hometown Lima, Ohio News from 1990 quotes her as working on a second novel, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven But Nobody Wants to Die, which she said was “about the civil rights marches in the South during racial strife in the 1960s.” Whether it was the few and cursory reviews that Another Present Era received, frustrations with her work in progress, or just, well, life, Elaine Perry chose soon after to put her brief career as a writer behind her. Just the initial hardcover edition of Another Present Era was published and used copies are few but not (yet) unreasonably priced. It’s also available on the Internet Archive (link), which is how I read it.

The book opens with Wanda Higgins Du Bois looking out from the 58th floor of the Savings of America building lower Manhattan at a New York City beginning to show signs of the impact of climate change:

No one is out on the streets. Searchlights sweep across the sky and the fog above the neighboring blocks of four- and five-story buildings and the hypnotic stream of headlights and taillights on multilane West Street. Civil Defense klaxons wail, indicating the severity of the flood warning. Four long blasts followed by a brief silence, repeated endlessly. On her nightstand is the booklet every New Yorker has, explaining why and when the klaxons sound and what to do.

Wanda is an architect working on an ambitious proposal for the Toronto waterfront. She is alone, or so she finds her colleague and boyfriend, Bradley, is there as well. Though he greets her warmly, he soon produces a gun, spins its cylinder, and points it at his mouth. Wanda stops him, but Bradley’s distress becomes just one of the streams of psychological conflict running through her life. Bradley is distraught over the fact that he, like Wanda, looks to be a textbook Nordic Aryan when they are both African-Americans. Wanda’s mother is Black; her father the son of one of Hitler’s rocket scientists, an Air Force colonel working on the space program who used to beat Wanda with a steel ruler when she let slip that her mother was neither white nor dead.

The ambiguity of identity is a major theme in Another Present Era. Wanda looks white and identifies as Black. She soon meets an elderly German man who introduces himself as Werner Schmidt, though she recognizes him as Sterling Cronheim, a Wisconsin-born artist who became a member of the Bauhaus school in Germany and who disappeared sometime after the fall of France in 1940. Sterling pretends to be straight and pursued a brilliant physicist named Lenore Hayden throughout his time in Germany in France, despite the fact that she knew he spent many nights crusing the streets of Berlin and Paris for rent boys.

Elaine Perry, photo by Steve Bryant, from the dust jacket of Another Present Era.

If Another Present Era shows signs of first novel weaknesses, it’s primarily in how Perry deals with a complex and intricate narrative in which few steps are straightforward and sequential. This is far more a work of atmospheres and undercurrents, and Perry does not shy away from weaving her way through decades of history, scattering enigmatic and passing references as she goes. I can imagine obsessives constructing a long and elaborate concordance of all the characters, places, and cultural references in the book, much like those that have been creating for Lord of the Rings or Gravity’s Rainbow.

With its mentions of the Nazi rocket programs and the Weimar Republic, it’s easy to sense the influence of Gravity’s Rainbow in Another Present Era. Like Pynchon, Perry works on a maximalist scale when it comes to history. And she takes advantage of her futuristic setting to play with the relativity of history. People talk to each other over video phones and watch streaming television services (the German silent movie channel) while they also listen to big bands (Eddie Heywood and his Orchestra) playing on the radio live from the rooftops of New York hotels as if it were 1939. And Wanda still clings to idealistic visions of the future that certainly wouldn’t have survived the troubles of 1968:

Wanda believed in the future, not a future of space exploration, but one of the harmonious and cooperative society human-rights leaders always talked about.She really thought everyone would be like her some day, neither black nor white, but something in between. It might take decades or even centuries, but it would happen. And sooner than that, racism and the concept of race itself would become completely obsolete.

There is much about Another Present Era to applaud. Time and again, Perry tosses off remarks that shows a deeper recognition of the impact of global warmingthan most of her contemporary writers. As Wanda works on her design, she muses, “So much fanfare and civic pride pouring into the Toronto Harbourfront, but the ocean will swallow all the buildings in a matter of decades or even years.” A new generation of Hoovervilles are popping up on the landfills constructed to keep the Atlantic from swamping the streets of Manhattan, populated by climate and economic refugees, while the rich find ever more expensive ways to distract themselves. Perry’s treatment of race and identity and their complexities, innovative in 1990, seems familiar today. There is more than enough material to populate a few PhD dissertations here.

I must admit that I had a selfish motive in rushing to read Another Present Era. It’s exactly the sort of unique, utterly forgotten, and deeply intriguing book we’re publishing in the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press, and Michael Gonzales was kind enough to communicate my interest to Elaine Perry. Although she chose not to entertain a reissue at this time, I hope we will see Another Present Era return to print sometime in future. For the moment, I strongly encourage anyone looking for a strikingly original novel to track down a used copy before they become the stuff of antiquarian and rare book dealers.

Another Present Era, by Elaine Perry
New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1990

Repent in Haste (1945): John P. Marquand and the Context of No Context

Repent in Haste by John P. Marquand (1945)
Cover of first edition of Repent in Haste.

There was a time when John P. Marquand was considered the best novelist of manners in America, even — according to a Chicago Sun review quoted on the dust jacket of Repent in Haste, “the best novelist in the country.” He never made such claims for himself, and regretted Little, Brown’s decision to use the Chicago Sun quote, since it only encouraged critics to sharpen their quills, and particularly unfortunate when used to sell so slight a book.

Just 152 pages long, Repent in Haste is undermined by several things, starting with its title. It’s obviously a play on the adage, “Marry in haste, repent at leisure,” and its slender plot is about a Navy pilot who marries a pretty, convivial blonde soon after meeting her at a dance, and then learns that while he’s been out in the Pacific, she’s taken up with an old boyfriend. In fact, it’s not even slender: it’s threadbare and an unsteady skeleton upon which to hang the real story, which is about the death of chivalry.

Well, chivalry may be too grand of a word to put on it. Marquand grew up on a poorer fringe of proper Boston society, the long-standing Old New England establishing where the Lowells talked only to Cabots, and the Cabots talked only to God, as they used to say. They being people like Marquand who lived on the fringes, since the core members of Boston society were so entitled that they were oblivious to their entitlement. As a young man in Newburyport, Massachusetts, he had to go hat in hand to the home of Mr. L. P. Dodge to beg for one of the scholarships given by the Harvard Club to needy young Newburyporters. He didn’t get it, though his family did manage to scrape together enough money to send him anyway.

Marquand was just three years older than F. Scott Fitzgerald, but in comparing the two men, those years put them into different generations. Marquand graduated from Harvard in 1915, which meant he was able to join the National Guard and serve in France as an artillery officer after the U.S. entered the war, while Fitzgerald never got closer to the trenches than Long Island. Where Fitzgerald achieved huge success with his first book, This Side of Paradise, Marquand spent almost twenty years churning out workmanlike magazine stories and adventure novels, including his Mr. Moto detective books, before attaining critical and commercial success on a scale equivalent to Fitzgerald’s with The Late George Apley (1937). Apley, which was a conscious satire of proper Boston society, along with his next novels, Wickford Point (1939) and H. M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), all of them set around Boston, forever marked him as a specialist in a certain time and place.

But that characterization is a mistake. What Marquand is, more than anything, is a specialist in the experience of being on the brink of change. And that’s where the comparison with Fitzgerald is most illuminating. Both Fitzgerald and Marquand would make enough money from their writing to buy their way, at least temporarily in Fitzgerald’s case, into a “better class.” The difference is that Fitzgerald quickly lost any illusions about the qualities of this class. Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby smash up things and creatures and then retreat “back into their money or their vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess.”

Marquand and most of his protagonists, on the other hand, may no longer really believe in the old orders but when they look into the future, they see a nihilism that causes them to grab the few certainties they still understand and hold on for dear life. William Briggs, the correspondent who takes Marquand’s place as the observer in Repent in Haste, wants to believe that Lt. Jimmy Boyden, the Navy pilot he befriends, holds onto the same certainties:

They both must have read the American Boy magazine, and The Adventures of Frank Merriwell, and the works of the late Ralph Henry Barbour. They both must have learned not to lie, and not to go back on the crowd. No matter who you might be, you were exposed to certain precepts of conduct. You learned the Lord’s Prayer, and that Christ had risen from the dead, and that you must pledge allegiance to the flag, and that we had fought the British and gained our independence because we could lick anybody in the world.

But the war Marquand and Briggs had known in 1917-1918 and the one experienced by millions like Boyden were fundamentally different. As Marquand had seen on his reporting trips to the Pacific, the scale of the operations could only make one thing in terms of machines and factories producing on a massive scale. The flotilla Briggs sees before the assault on Ulithi “was the greatest concentration of warships that the world had ever seen. They extended over the rims of the horizon, so many that he wondered how an organization could exist that could supply and group and count them and send them on their way.” No wonder that Briggs finds himself thinking not of the soldiers and sailors as individuals but as “a bulk of expendable human material.”

Repent in Haste - Bantam paperback edition
Repent in Haste – Bantam paperback edition.

Briggs first meets Boyden at a press conference organized at Pearl Harbor, where reporters hear from a dozen or so recent medal winners about their exploits. Except the men are embarrassed and taciturn and the reporters frustrated at the attempt to feed them material. “These boys would never be able to put their thoughts into words,” Briggs thinks. He runs into Boyden later, though, and the flyer cajoles Briggs into paying a visit to his parents and wife in East Orange, New Jersey when he returns to New York City.

When he does, he finds Boyden’s parents and their home stereotypes of mid-century American middle-class life, with all its accoutrements: “There were antimacassars on the parlor chairs and the radio had Jacobean legs and an inlaid front and the gas stove would cook without watching and there was an automatic electric toaster and an electric percolator in the breakfast nook.” When he visits Daisy, the wife, however, he finds her having an open affair with another Navy officer and intent on getting a divorce as quickly as possible — and she convinces Briggs to carry the bad news back to the Pacific.

The news proves harder for Briggs to deliver than Boyden to take. Boyden shrugs it off as just one of those things that happen during a war. Boyden’s nonchalance, his near-apathy toward the deaths of some of his fellow pilots and crewmen, staggers Briggs. “Did you ever get to thinking what anything was about?” Briggs asks — meaning, does he ever think about why he was fighting, what he hoped to see in the peace afterward. Boyden replies, “What the hell do you mean, what anything was about?” (When he had asked General George Patton a similar question during the battle for Sicily, Patton had snapped, “All this God-damn tripe about the four freedoms!”)

Repent in Haste - Popular Library edition.
Repent in Haste – Popular Library edition.

Neither Briggs nor Marquand knows what to do when faced with this utter disregard for the old certainties and values they had grown up with, had held onto for the lack of any others (chasing after material rewards and filthy lucre being, of course, beyond the pale, or at least, the domain of the lowest of all types: New Money). Edmund Wilson noted this failure in his New Yorker review:

The story creates suspense; it has point; it is based on first-hand observation and conscientiously accurate reporting; and it says something rather intelligent about the difference between the older generation of Americans and the young generation of the war. The only trouble is that, here, as elsewhere, Mr. Marquand hasn’t the literary vocation — or maybe metier is the better word. A novel by Sinclair Lewis, however much it may be open to objection, is at least a book by a writer — that is, a work of the imagination that imposes its atmosphere, a creation that shows the color and modelling of a particular artist’s hand. But a novel by J. P. Marquand is simply a neat pile of typewritten manuscript.

That last comment stung Marquand. He didn’t claim to be a great novelist, but he felt his work was more than a pile of typewriting. But if Repent in Haste is a failure, it because neither character nor author could imagine how to carry on in a world where the old certainties were replaced by … nothing. As John Gross puts it in his survey of Marquand’s work, “If the Jimmy Boydens represent the future, then what kind of future could it possibly be with nothing surviving from the past which a middle-aged correspondent could recognize as familiar?”

This question ties to the subject of the book I read just before Repent in Haste, George W.S. Trow’s Within the Context of No Context. Trow’s book — the 1997 edition, that is — is built around the title essay, which appeared in The New Yorker in 1980. Trow’s essay argued that television, more than any other development in his lifetime, replaced a system of values where context mattered with one where “the work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no-context and to chronicle it.” Trow’s critical argument has not, I think, aged well, particularly since the world of television in 1980 is now as old and past as the world of George Apley and William Briggs was in 1980.

What is far more interesting about Trow’s book, particularly in the context (sorry) of Marquand’s book, is his introductory essay, “Collapsing Dominant.” Unlike “Within the Context,” this piece is far more autobiographical. And one of the autobiographical elements specifically relates to Marquand, whose son Trow knew as a classmate at Exeter and whose books were read by his father and his classmates’ fathers: the fedora-wearing men of the Establishment as it existed after the war. Trow calls Marquand’s Point of No Return (1949) the most important novel of the Marquand-John O’Hara oeuvre:

It tells the story of a man from the milieu I am describing whose values are in conflict. He has taken his liberal arts education (the one owned by the upper class) seriously; on the other hand, he is in competition for high office at his bank. Which way will he go? The story is poignant from the point of view of this moment. No one who showed the mildest suggestion of the kind of conflictedness Marquand’s hero was feeling could get in the door of his bank now.

In 1951, Philip Hamburger published a profile of Marquand in The New Yorker. Its subtitle, “A Portrait in the Form of a Novel” was inspired by Apley’s subtitle, “A Novel in the Form of a Memoir,” and even its cover design echoed that of Apley. In it, Hamburger deliberately aped Marquand’s style, both of prose and of structure, working flashbacks into the framework of one day’s journey from New York City to Newburyport that “Allison Craig” (Hamburger) takes with Marquand. The day culminates in Marquand’s presentation of a paper to the Tuesday Club at the very same house where he’d gone to ask Mr. L. P. Dodge for that Harvard scholarship. Now, he is no longer the supplicant. He has been accepted into the fold:

They told him quietly how fond of him they were; how glad they were that he had gone out to the far corners of the world, had written his books, and had brought back just such knowledge as he had displayed this evening. Marquand looked as gratified as a man receiving an honorary degree from the college in his home town. After all, it was something to have best sellers behind one, to read a paper, to be among friends, to have made good. And yet, Marquand felt in his heart a sadness about the past. The past was there, and the past was real, and it could never be wiped out.

And there we have it, the bow with which Hamburger neatly secures his portrait of Marquand. Marquand is the voice of those who feel that the past is here, the past is real, and can never be wiped out.

Others studied Newburyport in even more detail that Marquand. Over the course of two decades starting in the 1930s, W. Lloyd Warner and Paul Lunt led a team of sociologists that conducted extensive interviews and surveys of the inhabitants of what they referred to as “Yankee City.” As reported in their first book on the project, The Social Life of a Modern Community (1941), Warner and Lunt saw this same attitude defining how traditions were not only passed along but used to enforce the status quo:

The young are dependent upon the old for learning the social tradition and for acquiring their social status. This domination of the young by the old insures social stability over successive generations and thus maintains the continuity of a social system

The subordination of the young by the old enables their indoctrination and preserves established values. But what William Briggs encounters in the Pacific is a situation in which the very expendability of the young gives them the privilege to reject those values.

George Trow saw this from another angle. The established values shaken by the war simply could not survive. What can never be wiped out is not the past but change: “I realize now that I am a man from a broken tradition who was convinced by the theater of a moment that his tradition was unbroken and that he was the heir to it.” When he and his classmates arrived at Exeter in 1957, they were “being asked to pretend that the moral dilemmas of a Marquand Hero were alive and kicking, which they were not.” By 1980, when his classmates had children the same age, none of them remembered what the dilemmas of a Marquand Hero were.

But neither Trow nor Hamburger give Marquand due credit for observing, if not fully understanding, as Edmund Wilson was. That paper Marquand delivered to the Tuesday Club at Mr. L. P. Dodge’s house in Newburyport, where the members of the club assured Marquand that the past was real, was “Ascension Island.” It’s reprinted in Thirty Years, and it’s worth quoting to illustrate that Marquand — like his fictional counterpart Briggs — could see the materialistic future, the future where the context was not “no context” but commerce in place of tradition:

Whenever I hear someone say that there is no unified national spirit and no culture in the United States, I think of our airports in Africa, India and the Pacific. It may be true that the Englishman far from home dresses for dinner and has his Number One Boy bring in his gin and tonic, but in all his centuries of colonizing he has never brought his civilization with him wholesale, as our armed forces have brought theirs in this war. Machine shops, plumbing, air conditioning, outdoor movies, ping-pong tables, boxing rings, Time, Newsweek, the weekly comics, Pocket Books, Gillette razors, Williams’ Aqua Velva, Rheingold beer, Johnson’s baby powder, Spam and Planters’ peanuts, all followed our army to the war for the edification of dark-skinned men in G-strings and for the shocked amazement of the French and British.

By the time Marquand presented this paper, he had taken the trip reported in “Return to the Stone Age,” also in Thirty Years. He returns to the same airfield on Kwajelein Island that William Briggs lands on in Repent in Haste. In just four years, all of this has become as expendable as Briggs’ human material:

It had been a boom town when I had seen it in the early months of 1945, one of the main crossroads of the Pacific, and it was a ghost town now. The temporary barracks, which except for the runways and roads, crowded nearly every available square foot of this coral islet, were not built for the moist and humid air of the central Pacific. Every bit of metal on the island was already in advanced stages of corrosion. Water coolers and letter files were crumbling. Typewriters only had a few months’ lifespan. Even a bronze plaque in the island chapel, placed to commemorate the dead in the island invasion, was already almost illegible. Worse still, the hardware, the nails and screws holding the buildings together, the locks and doorknobs, were all beginning to give way.

Marquand clearly saw the same evanescence of “tradition” and “the past” as George Trow. What Repent in Haste demonstrates, sadly, is that instead of attempting to understand what happens when the past is wiped out, he — like his heroes — just held on tighter to the very things that were disappearing.

Repent in Haste, by John P. Marquand
Boston: Little, Brown, 1945

Soul Wounds, by Al Schak (1934)

Soul Wounds by Al Schak (1934)

I’m often asked how I find the books I write about. And no matter what I say, I know the only truthful answer is, “Serendipity.” It’s hard to look for something you don’t know about. Instead, you stumble across it. This is one reason I love a well-stocked used bookstore, particularly one that’s only loosely organized. I’m fortunate in living just down the road from one of the West’s hidden treasures, the Montana Valley Bookstore in Alberton. I’ve probably scoured its shelves at least twenty times over the years, but interesting things still pop up out of nowhere on every visit.

Most recently, I came across Soul Wounds, subtitled A Novel of the World War. That subtitle alone told me that it was published before world wars had to be numbered. But what intrigued me was the fact that it was published here in Missoula, Montana. This is not a hotbed of publishing and never was. The Missoulian Publishing Company devoted its energies to putting out the town’s newspaper and only rarely published books and then mostly local interest items. There was no information about the author and if there’d ever been a dustjacket, it was long gone. So this was an unknown quantity — but then, so was the very first neglected book I ever discovered, which was also a novel about World War One: W. V. Tilsley’s Other Ranks.

Like Other Ranks, Soul Wounds opens in media res. Hagen, an infantryman, is slogging through the mud and the dark as his company works its way up to take position in the front line of trenches just prior to an assault. It’s still winter, so this is one of the first American units to go into combat after America’s entry into the war. Aside from a few weeks’ stay in hospital to recover from a leg wound, Hagen will remain in or near the front lines almost continuously until the Armistice and take part in at least five major assaults.

The youngster in his company — still a teen and kept out of the brothels by the other men in his unit, Hagen will, by the end of the war, be considered one of the “old men,” one of the few from the original company to survive. He will endure shelling, gas attacks, relentless gunfire, and suicidal assaults across No Man’s Land, and even manage to overtake and capture a German machine gun nest.

Like many volunteers, Hagen comes to war with naive notions. Raised in a town on Flathead Lake in Montana, his one exposure to the military prior to joining up was when his mother sewed him a little soldier suit out of a cousin’s former uniform. Herrick, a poet who was living in Paris when the war broke out, tries to straighten him out: “You check your body, your mind, your soul, at the entrance, and you leave the check as a fee for admission. Once you get in you cannot get out.”

Herrick may have been a poet before the war, but there is no poetry in Soul Wounds. Schak writes in staccato, almost telegraphic prose:

A flash, a roar, beside him. His ears almost burst. The mud reeled as something pushed him over into it. There was a sting in his left knee, his forehead felt numb and heavy. He was faint. Another roar and flash, another, another, not so near him. A shot spat into the mud in front of him. His leg was burning. Shots struck, sput, sput, the parapet before him, flicked the mud near him. They’ll keep it up, he thought, and one of them’ll get me.

Only once does Hagen knowingly kill a man. In the final weeks of the war — not final to Hagen and his fellow Doughboys, for whom the Armistice comes as a surprise — he shoots a German who has come close enough to speak to him. By then, Hagen is numb with combat fatigue:

He did not think of it for a long time. Whether he was too utterly tired to fel anything, or whether the ceaseless horror and misery had calloused him, or whether he had become so dulled by the terrific pounding on his nerves and mind and body that he had lost some of the attributes of a human being, he never knew. He never found such questions entering his sickened mind. He was to completely overwhelmed by the front to wonder what was happening inside him.

When the war does end, however, the duty does not. Hagen’s unit is among the first Allied forces sent in to occupy the Rhineland. They spend months in a Germany town near Koblenz and Hagen is billeted with a German family. He sees the photo of a German soldier on the mantelpiece — an uncle killed in the war, he learns — and begins to see the human side of his former enemy while he awaits orders to return home.

Aside from the this final chapter about the initial occupation period after the war, there are many parallels between Other Ranks and Soul Wounds. Both focus on a single young infantryman, both stay tightly bound to the experience of being in the front lines, being in combat, with few and brief episodes of rest in the rear. Both are written in spare, artless prose. And both books are highly autobiographical with few nods to fiction aside from the change of names.

Al [Bernard Alfred] Schak was born in Minnesota in 1899 to Danish immigrant parents, one of five children. His family moved to Bigfork, Montana, when he was still young. He enlisted in the Montana National Guard in 1916, even though he was underage and slight of build, and was assigned to the 163rd Infantry Regiment. His older brother Walter also enlisted after the U.S. entered the war in 1917, and the two brothers sailed for France on the S. S. Leviathan in December 1917.

Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. and Al Schak, 1938
Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (L) and Al Schak, Missoula, Montana 1938.

Al served in the 163rd and later in the 26th Regiment under Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. He fought in six major engagements: Montidier, Cantigne, the Marne, St. Mihiel, the Argonne Forest, and the Meuse. He was wounded several times as well as missing in action, resulting in his mother twice being notified of his death in combat.

Sometime in the early fall of 1918, Al Schak felt the impulse to write a poem. As he later related, he borrowed a pencil, used the envelope of a letter from home, and wrote the following, which was published in the Literary Digest in October 1918:

NEAR NO MAN’S LAND

There wa’n’t no bugler there a-blowin’ taps;
The regimental chaplain, tho, was ‘round;
An’ I’m a tellin’ you as how I’m feelin’ blue,
‘Cause they put my rookie Buddy in the ground.

I showed ‘im how to do “right shoulder arms”
An’ told him all a doughboy oughta know;
We slept together, but to-day he sleeps
Near “No Man’s Land,” beneath the mud an’ snow.

He said ‘is ma an’ sister back at home
Kissed ‘im a dozen times in fond good-bys,
An’ when ‘e talked about ’em I could see .”
That look o’ longin’ shinin’ in his eyes.

I hate to think o’ how ‘is mother feels
— A mother’s loneliness is worse ‘n mine.
I’d write ‘is folks a letter, only that
This writin’ business ain’t much in my line.

I don’t know what to do when I’m off post.
My Buddy’s gone; an’ seems like all I know
I’d like to put a flower on ‘is grave
Near “No Man’s Land,” beneath the mud and snow.

Like Hagen, after the Armistice, Schak crossed into Germany and served with the occupation forces until he was repatriated in 1919. He had a difficult time adapting to civilian life at first and received relief from the Montana Veterans’ committee several times. He and his mother moved to Missoula around 1921 and he enrolled at the-then Montana State University (now University of Montana) as a special (i.e., not assigned to specific graduating class) student.

He seems to have thrived as a college student. He was the sports editor for the campus paper, The Sentinel, and published several stories in the university’s literary magazine, The Frontier. He joined the Sigma Phi Episilon fraternity and served as its chapter secretary. He graduated in 1924 with a degree in journalism.

Al Schak’s brother Walter was assigned as a motorcycle dispatch rider after the 163rd arrived in France, and he was wounded when a shell landed nearby as he was carrying orders just prior to the attack on Cantigny. Al Schak describes the incident in Soul Wounds:

It was late in the afternoon. The head of Hagen’s company was approaching a crossroads. A cloud of dust spurted out of the woods and a motorcycle with a sidecar zipped past the crossroads. It had not gone fifty yards past when a shell sent the driver hurtling into the field alongside the highway. Odds and ends of the machine flew up in a cloud of smoke and dust. The sidecar was obliterated.

In the novel, Hagen later learns that the motorcycle rider was his brother (also named Walter). Hagen is able to visit Walter at his field hospital, but his wounds are too severe and he dies and is buried in France. In reality, Walter Schak was returned to the U.S. and cared for in an Army hospital in Utah, but he died of complications in 1920 and was buried with honors in the town cemetery in Kalispell, Montana.

Al Schak worked as a reporter for the Missoulian after graduating from college, but he struggled with alcoholism and health problems — problems that would likely be diagnosed as symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder today. He worked for years on Soul Wounds (an apt euphemism for PTSD), which may have been published as a goodwill gesture by his old paper, for there appear to have been no reviews of it anywhere.

Twenty-seven years after the war, with France liberated and the French Army settling back into its pre-war routines, the paperwork for the award of the Croix de Guerre medal was located and Al Schak was finally decorated. The citation read in part,

Private Schak, still in his teens, came across a man from his unit shot in both hips and pulled him to cover. Unable to move him without help, he called to other members of the outfit. When they ignored him, he drew a .45 revolver and pointed it at the nearest men and told them to put the soldier on a litter and carry him back to comparative safety. Private Schak went with them, and when one of the litter bearers was killed, he grabbed one end of the litter and they took the wounded man to medical aid. He then rejoined his outfit and started forward through the bursting shells.

Headline from <em>Missoulian</em> article about Al Schak's death, November 15, 1945.
Headline from Missoulian article about Al Schak’s death, November 15, 1945.

He had little time to enjoy his belated recognition, however. During the night of November 14, 1945, a lit pipe he had forgotten in a living room chair caused a fire that destroyed his house. Firemen found his body in the kitchen. Luckily, his mother, who lived with him, was visiting a daughter in California. Al Schak was buried with military honors in Missoula, though his gravestone states a unit he never served with. He was 46.

Al Schak’s gravestone.

Soul Wounds, by Al Schak
Missoula, Montana: Missoulian Publishing Co., 1934

A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding, by Sylvia Wright (1969)

Publishing is almost as notorious for its misleading packaging as the recording business. We may never know what Doubleday’s remit to the Paul Bacon design studio was for Sylvia Wright’s A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding, but the vaguely romantic cover that was supplied in response represents in not the slightest way the book’s contents. For one thing, this is not a novel but a collection of three novellas. And three novellas that in no way resemble the sort of narrative a fan of Georgette Heyer or Anya Seton might expect.

Sylvia Wright doesn’t even pretend to know how to write such a book: “How do you make fiction?” she asks in the opening line of “Fathers and Mothers,” her opening novella. After contemplating fiction’s components — information, characters, plot — she confesses within a page or so, “I cannot grasp this craft.” And in the subsequent 180-some pages of the book, she makes no attempt to.

Although one can detect the influence of Nouveau Roman at some points, Virginia Woolf at others, there is no deliberate imitation here. In fact, it would be easier to place A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding in the context of the wave of American experimental fiction just then making itself known in the work of Donald Barthelme, William Gass, Robert Coover, and others. Except even that suggestion is misleading, since Wright’s career as a fiction writer (well, even though she claimed not to grasp the craft, it’s the most convenient label we have at hand) was too brief to allow any sort of network of influences to form. None of the three pieces in A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding were published previously and this is her only work of fiction.

Sylvia Wright was not a naïf, though. Soon after graduating from Bryn Mawr, she learned about both novel-writing and publishing when she and her mother worked with Mark Saxton to turn the 2300-page manuscript left by her father, Austin Tappan Wright, into publishable form. Though its bulk (over 1,000 pages even after editing) put off many readers, Islandia (1942) became, and remains, a cult favorite, a blend of utopianism, fantasy, romance, and what today we’d call steampunk.

Sylvia Wright
Sylvia Wright, 1969.

She translated that experience into a job on the staff of Harpers Bazaar, eventually earning her own monthly column of humorous observations on life. A couple dozen of these were collected and published in 1955 as Get Away From Me With Those Christmas Gifts. Many have titles like, “My Kitchen Hates Me” and “How to Make Chicken Liver Pate Once.” But one piece has worked its way into our vocabulary: “The Death of Lady Mondegreen.”

In it, Wright recalls learning a Scottish ballad, “The Bonnie Earl O’ Moray,” as a child. In particular, she memorized the lines, “They have slain the Earl o’ Moray/And Lady Mondegreen.” Only, in the balland, that last phrase is actually “And layd him on the green.” “I saw it all clearly,” she wrote:

The Earl had yellow curly hair and a yellow beard and of course wore a kilt. He was lying in a forest clearing with an arrow in his heart. Lady Mondegreen lay at his side, her long, dark-brown curls spread out over the moss. She wore a dark-green dress embroidered with light-green leaves outlined in gold.

“It made me cry,” she writes. When she did finally learn the correct wording, she clung defiantly to her version. It was better. And this led her to champion her invention: the mondegreen. For Wright, mondegreens are not errors. They are portals into other worlds:

If you lay yourself open to mondegreens, you must be valiant. The world, blowing near, will assail you with a thousand bright and strange images. Nothing like them has ever been seen before, and who knows what lost and lovely things may not come streaming in with them? But there is always the possibility that they may engulf you and that you will go wandering down a horn into a mondegreen underworld from which you can never escape.

Wright got her mondegreens from poetry, newspapers, and advertisements. Popular music lyrics have been a rich source for them, even when many of us didn’t know they had a name. And Wright was right in viewing them as transformative. A mondegreen, for example, turns Jimi Hendrix’s ode to LSD, “‘Cuse Me While I Kiss the Sky,” into a celebration of homosexual love: “‘Cuse Me While I Kiss This Guy.”

And perhaps the notion of mondegreens is a clue to understand what Sylvia Wright is doing in A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding. In the first novella, “Fathers and Mothers,” the reader can reconstruct a straightforward story: a Greek mother and father are sharing an apartment in Boston with their son, his American wife — the narrator, but only sometimes — and their infant grandson. The father is suffering from lung cancer. They have come to America to get the best medical care. After months of treatment, the father dies. The family returns to Athens for his funeral.

But that’s what’s happening in the background. In the foreground, the thing that attracts Wright’s attention is how her in-laws (in real life she was married to a Greek man, so presumably this is somewhat autobiographical) deal with their new world. Part of that new world is cancer and sickness and too many hours in the hospital. Another part is America is another part. They are Greek. At home, they can glance out their apartment and see the Acropolis. Ancient Greece and modern Greece are intertwined.

So naturally, one would expect similar things in America. “Have there been preserved here some of the songs and stories of the old Indians, so that one can get a sense of their rhythms, their sonorities?” the mother-in-law asks. A natural question. Except that even today, most Americans would be stumped to indicate any aspect of the culture of our indigenous peoples that hasn’t been processed through Longfellow, the Boy Scouts, and Hollywood. All we know is the transformed version.

The mother-in-law, in particular, is the transformative agent in this family. When not at the hospital, the father-in-law spends most of his time lying limp on the couch. The mother-in-law is the one questioning norms, pushing for routines to be changed, not being satisfied by the status quo. “Now, if this were a story,” Wright observes, “a real story instead of whatever it is, then this could be interpreted and the story shaped to advance through the interpretation.” And those interpretations “would serve the delicious purpose of turning the mother into the villain.”

But which is the truth? The interpretations — the mondegreens — or “the information,” as Wright refers to one of her elements of fiction? The tension between the two alternatives runs like a motif through all three novellas. In the second, “Dans le Vrai” [In truth], the “story” is about the narrator’s visit to her sister and nephew in upstate New York. It’s the late 1950s or early 1960s: the great Federal interstate highway system is in the midst of being built. The characters go to see a section under construction nearby, a great excavated gash through the countryside.

Then, suddenly, the narrator announces, we’re in a new story, a story within a story called “The Thruway.” Or is the narrator the story?

I am the Thruway. I live in a new world in which I must stretch myself to touch, to contain immeasurably unexpected combinations. I will link discrepancies. No, I will be discrepancies, encompass contradiction, and out of that compute what meanings — what secrets — out of what snail-like and dreary settled pasts will now freshly dart what pleasures in rooms without shapes, corners, of dimensions I cannot now imagine. Ah, yes, I will be reconciled — No, not be reconciled, never be reconciled, that will be the strength — but action — one’s life will be —

Following Sylvia Wright through her fictions is like watching someone trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces have the same color but just ever-so-slightly different shapes. She takes a piece of “the information,” places it against reality, sees where it fits … but also where it doesn’t. And so she sets that piece down and tries another. Which way does the mondegreen work? Which represents truth? The piece or the rest of the puzzle?

If this makes A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding sound maddening … well, it is. But only in the sense that Sylvia Wright refuses to accept the simple solutions. She is every bit as perceptive into the gestures and mannerisms and pretences of individual characters as Virginia Woolf or George Eliot, and there are plenty of moments of just the sort of pleasure one gets from reading about the interactions of human beings in more conventional fiction.

But she also reminds me in some ways of one of the most challenging and frustrating writers that ever lived, Dorothy Richardson, who puts such extraordinary effort into trying to get her impressions right — and yet always adds, “Yes, but there’s still something more.” Despite its extraordinarily odd title, A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding may be the best work of fiction I’ve read this year.

Sylvia Wright died of cancer in 1981 at the age of 64. She published no other books after this, though she left an unfinished biography of her great aunt Melusina Fay Peirce, wife of the philopher and mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce.

Oh, and a shark-infested rice pudding is the punchline of a joke. You’ll have to read to book to get it.

A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding, by Sylvia Wright
Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1969

Fortune Grass, by Mabel Lethbridge (1934)

Advertisement for Fortune Grass by Mabel Lethbridge
Advertisement for Fortune Grass from the Daily Telegraph.

“Darling, are you sure it will not be too much for you?” Mabel Lethbridge’s first husband asks when she is pregnant and he learns his father has cut him off without a penny.

“Nothing is too much for me,” she replies. Which could well serve as this remarkable woman’s motto. Her portrait ought to be printed next to the word resilience in every English dictionary. Fortune Grass covers a little over ten years in her life, but what a lot she packed into those years!

Born in 1900, she lived an itinerant life as she, her sister, two brothers, and their mother trailed around the British Empire following her father, a soldier of fortune. When Mabel grew sickly (mirroring her parents’ marriage), her mother took the children to Ireland, where Mabel thrived in the quiet rural setting. Her mother then dispatched her to an archetypal horrible boarding school — a stay that was short-lived.

With the start of World War One, the family moved to Ealing and her sister and older brother headed off, one to be a nurse, the other into the Army. Though just 16, Mabel felt frustrated at having to wait two years to join the war effort. So, she lied. Mabel was nothing if not ruthlessly pragmatic and would, as we come to see, cheerfully wield a lie in service to what she considered a good cause.

Dismissed from nursing when the truth about her age comes out, she lies again — to both the recruiters and her mother, who thinks she is sewing uniforms — and volunteers for the dangerous work of assembling shells in a government munitions factory. No matter how many crude safety measures the Ministry of Defence tried to put in place, the women working there were never more than a stray spark away from death. “That’s the last shell, by the time you’ve done that the milk will be here,” one of her fellow workers says one afternoon when Mabel has been there for just over six weeks. “The last shell! The last shell!” she thinks. And then:

… a dull flash, a sharp deafening roaf and I felt myself being ’hurled through the air, falling down, down, down, into darkness. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. . . . Mother! . . . Mother! Leghe! Reggie! [Her brothers.] Wouldn’t someone come? Wouldn’t someone speak to me? I lay quietly on my side. Now a blinding flash and I felt my body being torn asunder. Darkness, that terrifying darkness, and the agonised cries of the workers pierced my consciousness.

When she comes to, Mabel reaches down and discovers her left leg below the knee has been blown off. Her whole body has been peppered with shrapnel and she is blind and almost deaf. Most of the other women in her hut are dead.

Evacuated from the scene, she wakens again in the hospital. A familiar voice, Tattie, one of her friends from the plant, is by her side. But Mabel’s greatest fear is for her mother: “Oh, Tattie, Tattie,” I sobbed, “I have lost my leg and I am blind, but you won’t tell Mother, will you?”

From the Daily Mirror, 18 May 1918.

For her sacrifice, Mabel is awarded the Order of the British Empire — at the time, the youngest person ever to win it. Because of her injury, the Viscount officiating, rather than she, had to get down on his knees to present it. The medal is not enough, however, to change how her family viewed her condition. “Don’t you realise you are a cripple?” her mother asks when Mabel declares her intent to go out and find work again. Other relatives give her the cheapest of hand-me-downs — a skirt with a large burn in the back: “That’ll do for Mabel, she never goes anywhere.”

But Mabel refuses to be a victim. She teaches herself to walk, first with crutches, then a cane. She stuffs some clothes into her purse, climbs aboard a bus, heads to Whitehall, and gets a job filling out for a ministry. After she finds a room she can afford in a miserable women’s hotel, she writes to inform her mother, begging her to stay away.

The squalor of the hotel and its older inhabitants — widows and spinsters who “exuded an air of tragedy” — combined with the tedium of her work and her still-weak condition and soon Mabel has to obtain a medical waiver and stop working. Stop working for ministry, that is, because what now commences is a whirlwind two years of jobs, relationships, and living arrangements.

Mabel washes dishes in a restaurant, sells matches at Tube stations, cleans stoops in Westminster and Knightsbridge, minds stalls in Borough Market, hawks newspapers, poses for art students, operates a crank organ, and works at least a half dozen other jobs. She sleeps in the bushes along the Embankment and works as a live-in companion. She co-habits with “Daddy,” the demobbed Army officer with whom she’d started a correspondence during the war — despite the fact that he’d married another woman in a mad moment — then falls in love with his cousin Noel, who moves in with them.

“Peggy the chair girl,” from the Sunday Pictorial, December 3, 1922.

In her own mad moment, she decides she and Noel must get married. And in nearly the same moment, she devises the scheme by which she makes her first fortune: renting folding chairs to people waiting in queues outside West End theaters. From offering a handful of chairs outside the Ambassador Theater, near the apartment she shares with Noel, “Peggy the Chair-Girl” expands her business in the space of a year to one involving thousands of chairs and several franchisees. She even finds herself in the midst of a turf way when a group of thugs attempts to take over her concession outside the wildly popular revival of Gilbert and Sullivan musicals in 1922.

Article about Noel Kalenberg’s failed suicide attempt, 1922.

Her marriage to Noel, however, proves a complete failure. Claiming to be studying for the bar, he is nothing but the polar opposite of Mabel: lazy, snobbish, and a drunkard. Mabel decides within the first month that she must leave and says so to Noel. She then marches out to manage the chair rentals at the Ambassador. Standing on the sidewalk outside the theater, she and the patrons hear two shots from the direction of her apartment. She rushes upstairs to find Noel has attempted suicide. There is a great hubbub and Mabel is briefly suspected of murder.

Like everything else he puts his hand to, suicide is yet another failure for Noel. He recovers and Mabel takes him back in. Mabel is carrying his child, but that doesn’t prevent him from knocking her around and drinking up her earnings. The situation only gets worse when he stops studying for the bar and his father cuts off his allowance.

Ad for Mabel Lethbridge, Estate Agent (1934).

Yet none of this gets Mabel down. Her water breaks as she’s vending chairs. She delivers the child and promptly goes back to work, carrying the baby in one arm and passing out chairs with the other. And she soon manages to dispatch Noel off to his family in Ceylon. As we leave our heroine at the end of Fortune Grass, she has just established herself as the first woman estate agent in England. And she’s just 28!

Mabel Lethbridge went on to write two more autobiographies and rack up another marriage and many more accomplishments, making herself a wealthy and widely popular woman in the process. By the time she died, she’d been the subject of a “This is Your Life” television show and included in the historic BBC “Great War Interviews” series.

Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, who knew her as “Granny Mabel” in the 1960s, just before her death, mentions Mabel in her book The Slow Train to Milan:

I was always frightened of cupboards, ever since the day in Cornwall at Granny Mabel’s when a leg sprang out and hit me, and it was her leg, with her thick stocking and built-up shoe, and I screamed and dropped it, and Granny Mabel laughed. I had been seven at the time, and I had never realised that Granny Mabel had only one leg. Mabel Lethbridge O.B.E., who didn’t like you to miss out the letters after her name, and who had worked in a munitions factory during the First World War when she was sixteen. The factory had been bombed, and a whole wing of the nearest hospital had been cleared for survivors, but Mabel alone had survived with one leg blown away, and the other ruined. She had received her O.B.E. in hospital from the King. Granny Mabel, who had been everywhere, and married a millionaire and who could swear more than any sailor on the quay at St Ives.

So, the next time you feel, as they say in Texas, like climbing aboard your pity pot, think what Mabel Lethbridge would do in your shoes — one of which had an artificial leg stuck in it!

Fortune Grass, by Mabel Lethbridge
London: Geoffrey Bles, 1934

A Jingle-Jangle Song, by Mariana Villa-Gilbert (1968)

Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press ad for <em>A Jingle-Jangle Song</em> by Mariana Villa-Gilbert.
Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press ad for A Jingle-Jangle Song by Mariana Villa-Gilbert.

Mariana Villa-Gilbert, who died recently at the age of 86, spent most of her life as a largely forgotten writer. Her last novel, Manuela: A Modern Myth, came out in 1973 and, like the previous five and her one short story collection, The Sun in Horus (1986), quickly went out of print and have never been reissued.

Such is the fate of a writer whose work earns the half-hearted verdict of “interesting.” Her first novel, Mrs. Galbraith’s Air (1963), about — well, not so much an affair as an attraction — between bright schoolboy and an older, sophisticated married woman was nuanced and complex but perhaps at a level a bit beyond its author’s reach. When I read it last year with some anticipation, I found that what was meant as subtle too often came out as muddle. I gave up several chapters into Manuela when the comic satire seemed to lose all connection to reality, though I still plan to take it up again in hopes that the problem was less with the book than with my tired brain.

Villa-Gilbert probably took her title of A Jingle-Jangle Song from Bob Dylan’s early hit “Mr. Tambourine Man,” for it takes place in a brief moment, probably around late 1964, when there seemed a chance that the American folk revival from which Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, and other singers might wash ashore in England with similar success. Sarah Kumar, Villa-Gilbert’s heroine, is undoubtedly modeled on Joan Baez, with similar long black hair, olive skin, piercing dark eyes, and otherworldly voice.

Arrived in London on a brief stop en route to appearances in France, Sarah is taken by a British DJ to an opening at a Pall Mall art gallery and subsequent after party. Jet-lagged and uncomfortable, she drinks far too much and finds herself hanging over the sink in the ladies’ room. Which is where Jane, an older woman and wife to the exhibiting sculptor, comes to her aid. Jane cleans Sarah up and escorts her to a quiet couch to sleep it off.

The next day, Jane and Sarah meet again in a Soho cafe. Jane is waiting to meet her husband for lunch; Sarah is trying to re-enter the world with the help of caffeine. They talk and agree to meet later. Jane is already aware of a vague attraction. Discussing Sarah with her husband after the party, she had found herself being wary of how she spoke of her:

“Twenty-two.” Carefully. And putting aside the earring now, placing it exactly — so. Afraid he might wonder at her interest, that she’d bothered to discover her age. (Oh but it was ridiculous, the way one hummed and hahed over these things. Why on earth should she be ashamed of her interest in a member of her own sex?)

Within 48 hours of their first meeting, the two are making love, both apparently for the first time with another woman. Jane’s background is one of mostly unfulfilled matrimony punctuated by a very occasional affair (her husband’s far more frequently). Sarah, however, is scarred. After losing her virginity to a professor for whom she was just one in a long string of undergraduate conquests, she fell into a five-year relationship with a messianic figure who abused her physically and emotionally. This ended when she was swept up as a rising star by her agent, who is only interested in Sarah as a property — abuse of another form.

Now caught in a torrent of recording sessions, television appearances, concerts, and revolving hotel rooms, Sarah arrives in London not just jetlagged but shell-shocked. Her attraction to Jane, is less physical than for the emotional safety she offers. For her part, Jane is drawn both by Sarah’s beauty and the intensity of her passion for living, chaotically as she currently expresses it.

A Jingle-Jangle Song falls into that narrow sub-genre of the layover romance, where some of the magic resides in the relentless approach of the departure. We all know these things can only end in one of two ways: with a wistful farewell and a heart-breaking return to normal life; or with the last-minute scene in which the two lovers decide to rescue their love at the cost of all the resulting disruption to their normal lives. Either romance or normalcy has to win. This is the logic of this particular cliche.

In the case of A Jingle-Jangle Song, however, we are left one step short of the fork in the denouement. Either Villa-Gilbert was reluctant to choose her ending or intentionally manipulating her readers’ expectations.

Mariana Villa-Gilbert, from the late 1950s.
Mariana Villa-Gilbert, from the late 1950s.

In his Guardian obituary of Mariana Villa-Gilbert, Christopher Adams wrote of the novel, “Attacked by reviewers for its lesbian content, it nevertheless gained a following in the lesbian press and stands as an important contribution to the genre.” Attacked is too harsh a word. Pigeon-holed might be more accurate. Mary Kenny, in the Evening Standard, dismissed A Jingle-Jangle Song as “yet another [unsuccessful] stab at the definitive lesbian novel, not without talent — but not wholly with conviction either” and exhorted the author: “Come, come, Miss Villa-Gilbert: we did better in the dorm at convent school.” Vernon Scannell, quite the proper Englishman in the New Statesman, admitted that “For non-lesbians like myself, the love scenes have a certain didactic interest,” unconsciously revealing just how limited was his understanding of the physical act of sex between two women took place. (And the sex in the novel is barely past the “brush of a fingertip” level.) The worst take by far was that of David Irvine in the Coventry Evening Telegraph, who concluded that the root of the problem was that Sarah Kumar “can never quite reconcile herself to the fact that she is a half-caste.”

The most insightful and enthusiastic review was that written by Gene Damon, editor and critic of the pioneering American lesbian magazine, The Ladder. Damon, whose job often involved reading the sleasiest and worst-written porn, wrote that, “For me, the reward for searching through endless hundreds of books each year is the occasional title tha tmakes all the boredom and all of the irritation engendered by many of them, worth it.” A Jingle-Jangle Song, she announced, “is one of the special books.” Damon felt that “the nature of love is discussed and examined without clinical detractions” and the sex was described in realistic yet tender terms.

A Jingle-Jangle Song was, Damon wrote, “the closest thing to a romantic novel one could expect in this time.” Still, she did note that Villa-Gilbert’s decision to switch back and forth between character’s perspectives was undermined by her use of aa third-person narrative, “which is awkward and unsatisfactory” — as indeed it is. In a book where so much of the time is spent in scenes with just the two women, it can at times prove challenging to keep track of which she is which.

Now that I read neglected books not just to write about them here but with an eye to whether they might be worth including in Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press, I can see that there is a middle ground between “justly neglected” and “reissue worthy.” It links to something I discussed back in 2020 with Álvaro Santana-Acuña, the author of Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic. “There are other works that are canonical but not classics,” he argued. “They have literary merit, but they cannot survive in the wild, so to speak. They need support from institutions—academics, publishers, national governments.” When we select a book for Recovered Books, a primary consideration is whether it’s likely to be of enough interest to current readers to make a profit, however modest. This is not, as Santana-Acuña puts it, a curatorial project.

Does A Jingle-Jangle Song deserve reissue? I agree with Christopher Adams that it has some place in the history of lesbian relationships in the English novel, and for that alone it merit inclusion in a series devoted to neglected fiction on this theme. At the same time, I think there are enough essential flaws in its execution that it is hard to argue it can stand on its own without that pigeon-holing label. As a straight white male, I am uncomfortable in making that statement. It may well be that A Jingle-Jangle Song changed some lives. It may be that its structural flaws are of secondary importance to its place in the development of lesbian themes in literature.

What should be clear, regardless of one’s view of where it best fits in our understanding of literature, however, is that it doesn’t deserve to be so obscure and inaccessible that there are no copies for sale and just around three dozen copies sitting in (mostly) university libraries around the world. This is one of the reasons why I hope the Internet Archive, the Hathi Trust, and similar initiative continue to scan and make such books available online. What we understand as literature only grows when we can find places for books like A Jingle-Jangle Song and the other works of Mariana Villa-Gilbert and many, many other writers like her.

A Jingle-Jangle Song, by Mariana Villa-Gilbert
London: Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1968

Faith, Hope, No Charity, by Margaret Lane (1935)

Dust jacket of first edition of Faith, Hope, No Charity by Margaret Lane

This is a guest post by Sarah Lonsdale.

The novel won a prestigious international literary prize in 1936, beating George Orwell, Graham Greene, Stevie Smith and Sylvia Townsend Warner, amongst others; but you’ve probably never heard of it.

Book prizes, particularly if one has access to the judges’ deliberations, tell us much about taste and contemporary literary fashion; often they tell us little about what makes a novel great, or indeed long-lived. In 1936, Margaret Lane’s novel Faith, Hope, No Charity won the English Femina-Vie Heureuse prize previously won by Virginia Woolf, Rose Macaulay and E. M. Forster. You’ve probably never heard of the novel, and maybe not even the author (unless you’re a fan of Beatrix Potter: Lane wrote a well-received biography of the notoriously misanthropic artist, author and naturalist). Competing against Lane’s debut novel for the prize that year were Graham Greene’s A Gun For Sale, George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying and, arguably the most literary of the novels considered that year, Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper. Other accomplished authors whose novels, shortlisted for the prize, fell by the wayside that year, were Rosamond Lehmann, Sylvia Townsend Warner and H. E. Bates.

The Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse of 1,000 francs (about £4,000 in today’s money), established by French publishers Hachette in 1904, added a competition for British authors in 1919 to encourage cordial cultural relations in the aftermath of the Great War. An English committee short-listed three novels each year, then forwarded these to the French judges who chose the winner. The English award lasted until 1939 and winners included Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall and Robert Graves, with the gender balance of winners roughly 50-50. The French Prix Femina continues to this day. The English committee’s criteria were that the winning novel should be a ‘strong and imaginative’ work, that the author should show promise for the future and that there should be something in the novel that should reveal the ‘true character and spirit’ of Englishness to French readers.

What was it about Faith, Hope, No Charity that felled so many literary giants but then itself sank without trace? At its heart the novel, set in the now-defunct London Docks at Wapping, is a critique of social, gender and economic relations of the mid-1930s. The main characters live in a dying and disorienting world, hovering between a Victorian past and an uncertain modernity hinted at by the dissatisfied poverty of the dock workers, clashes between the horse-based industries of the straw yards and the motor cars and growing numbers of Jewish refugees arriving in the East End. It shows that as the spectre of a Second World War loomed larger, there was not one, but several versions of Britain, as strange to each other as if they were separated by vast oceans.

Sir William Rothenstein and Margaret Lane at the presentation of her Femina-Vie Heureuse Prize for Faith, Hope, No Charity in July 1937.

Margaret Lane had been a journalist, working first on the Daily Express and then Daily Mail, writing ‘descriptive’ pieces about events she had witnessed and people she had met (including the trial of Al Capone in Chicago and a chilling interview with Frau Goebbels in 1933). Lane’s reporter’s eye describes in great detail a divided world where half-starving, tubercular dock workers vie with each other for jobs unloading luxuries destined for the wealthy inhabitants of the West End:

Certainly there was always a crowd of men, breathing frostily and stamping on the muddy cobbles by half-past seven in the morning whenever a ship was known to be coming in. The casuals would be there too, wary and anxious on the fringe of the crowd, afraid to shove in with the registered men and afraid of missing a chance. They always dispersed quickly, walking off at high speed with their chins thrust down in their mufflers, hoping to get to another call-stand where there might still be need of a few more hands… The warehouses smelled strongly of tangerines, and were stacked full of thin-looking, beautifully stamped crates of fancy goods from Japan, tinsel and Christmas decorations from the Baltic ports, frozen turkeys from Poland.

It is an environment that eventually kills young Arthur Williams, married to Ada, one of the book’s female protagonists. Lane implies this is no accidental death but murder by an unequal social and economic system. Superimposed upon this background of economic hardship run the lives of several young women. Each represents a different class: Ada, an ostler’s daughter, the lower classes; Charlotte Lambert, a dancer, precarious bohemia and Margery Ackroyd, the landed bourgeoisie. All three are trapped, living lives mapped out for them by the vastly overpowering economic, gender and social strictures of the time. Where Ada, a widow at 19, is passive, patient and dutiful, Charlotte sets out to marry a besotted young man from the landed middle class in a doomed attempt to alter her destiny. Margery, the youngest and most actively rebellious of the three, boards a train to London to escape a future of subjugated tedium in a damp country house.

None of the women end up in a happy ever after. In the bleak final scene, on a freezing December evening, each woman contemplates her entrapment. But is the scene also suggests how the three may help each other defy society and their destiny through a collaborative effort:

The three sat together for a little while in silence, finding a quiet comfort in the still room and the fire, the hot tea and fiery brandy they sipped so cautiously, and in each other. The coals settled and blazed behind the bars of the grate; the gas in its white globe purred hoarsely.

They are in the old pierhead house in Wapping, rented by Charlotte, a symbol of the fast-disappearing world of the dockside trade. The image of the fireside provides the reader with a shard of hope that rather than struggling hopelessly and individually, together these women may lead fulfilling and free lives.

The house is a liminal urban space and a home for characters on the edge of society: unmarried women and homosexual male dancers, surrounded on three sides by water. While it is firmly located in London’s East End, it is also ‘otherland,’ an extraordinary island of Bohemia sandwiched between the working-class tenements and the industrial docks and as such represents escape of a kind. In the novel, each woman takes a different journey to reach the pierhead: Ada, the widow, on foot, Charlotte, the jilted fiancee in a car and Margery, the refusenik debutante a train. Its themes of rebellion, disappointment and its examination of the ‘new public woman’ gives Faith, Hope, No Charity a modernity that was recognised by the Prix Femina committee.

The chairmanship for the 1935-1936 committee was shared between the novelists Kate O’Brien and Margaret Kennedy. Other judges that year included the artist Laura Anning Bell, the novelists Sylvia Lynd, Amabel Strachey and Netta Syrett and the poet Ethel Clifford; their comments and deliberations reveal much about how a book wins a prize.

One of the most outspoken contributors was the 70-year-old late-Victorian popular author Netta Syrett, whom the other, younger women appear to have been afraid to contradict. She described Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper, perhaps the most accomplished submission from a literary point of view as ‘a journal kept by a lunatic.’ Margaret Kennedy dismissed Greene’s A Gun for Sale as: ‘a bogus book. Intensely insincere.’ Sylvia Lynd was against Orwell, saying: ‘As with all his other books he displays a most unpleasant personality.’ And so it seems that Margaret Lane’s ‘promising’ novel was chosen by virtue of it not having anyone find anything egregious about it rather than it having any outstanding literary merit.

It was certainly a promising first novel, but not a great one. Some of the key characters are a little two-dimensional and not enough of their inner lives is revealed. The decisions Charlotte and Ada make are forced upon them and thus their ‘freedom’ lacks agency; their experiences are not transformative. The dropped ‘aitches’ of the working-class accents grate somewhat too. Although Lane wrote several other novels throughout her life, in the end, maybe it was the journalist in her that meant her greatest literary success was in biography and not fiction. There is an understanding and sensibility in her biographies of the writer Edgar Wallace and Beatrix Potter particularly, that is lacking in her treatment of her fictional characters.

Faith, Hope, No Charity, by Margaret Lane
London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1935

Dr Sarah LonsdaleSarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.

The Mermaids, by Eva Boros (1956)

Cover of first US edition of The Mermaids by Eva Boros

“He met her on the Danube Corso, on the 29th of August, 1936.” The scene is Budapest before the horrors. He is Aladar, a 30-something businessman, divorced, seeking an escape from the oppressive heat. She is an attractive peroxide blonde (“a Jean Harlow type,” he thinks). Their cafe tables abut and their glances lead to a conversation. Her Hungarian is accented, sketchy. She is Lalla, an Italian, a nightclub singer and dancer, or so she claims. He doubts her words. There is a certain frailty about her and sense of unworldliness.

He invites her to dinner but she declines, saying she needs to get home. As he helps her onto the tram, he slips his business card into her hand.

And for weeks thereafter, he returns to the same cafe in hopes of seeing her again. “Like most solitary people,” Boros tells us, “he is a creature of habit.” His persistence doesn’t pay off.

Then one day, a letter arrives in his office. It’s from Lalla, who invites Aladar to visit. “I am laid up with a cold” at the Pannonia sanitorium on the outskirts of town. She is a tuberculosis patient, he realizes.

Cover of The Doll's Smile, the US paperback edition of The Mermaids
Cover of The Doll’s Smile, the US paperback edition of The Mermaids.

Boros, who grew up in Budapest and who was herself a patient in such a clinic, captures the safe but fraught atmosphere in which some stay for years and some hemorrhage and die overnight.

Hospitals, like prisons, create their own time. Weeks pass unnoticed, while minutes seem to last for hours and days. You are aware of this change in the rhythm of time as soon as you enter the place. It affects you unpleasantly, like the smell of disinfectants and drugs. It feels like anxiety. You glance at your watch, for instinctively you know that there is something wrong with the time; that you have to come too early or too late. And you begin to wonder how long your visit is supposed to last. You are already counting in minutes and in seconds; the afternoon is never going to end. . . .

Like us, Aladar is, at first, uncomfortable seeing Lalla in her bed, walking her along the ward, sitting her on the terrace. But the ease of her talk and the friendliness of the other patients she introduces him to — bright young Franciska, charming Kati, the unassuming Count, who has been in and out of the clinic (mostly in) for decades — soon overcomes his awkwardness.

He returns the next weekend, and the next, and the next after that (creature of habit, remember?). He takes Lalla out for rides in his car, proud to be seen with a young, beautiful woman. Aladar comes during the week to meet with Lalla’s doctor (days before healthcare privacy regulations), looking for assurance that she will eventually be cured. He wants to take her away, marry her, add her to his treasures. “Yes, she is improved,” the doctor responds, careful not to confuse improved with cured — though Aladar instantly does.

Gradually, we realize the meaning of Boros’s title. Aladar has no more chance of taking Lalla away from the sanatorium for good than the prince has of taking the mermaid from sea. She understands this. On a trip into Budapest, he urges her to spend the night in town. “But remember that no hotel would accept me,” she reminds him, “What with my sputum-mug and all that.”

When Aladar does finally come to some acceptance of the situation, it is almost wholly selfish. “She couldn’t exist without her illness… She was made by her illness, she was her illness.”

The Mermaids is, as one can predict from the moment Aladar reads Lalla’s letter in his office, a tragic romance. But not a melodrama, thank God. Eva Boros is far too skillful and subtle an artist for that.

In fact, the pleasure of The Mermaids is that of putting ourselves in the hands of a masterful minimalist. Reading this book is like taking a glass of wine in the sun-dappled shade of a continental cafe. The experience is one to be savored, not indulged in. We take one glass and sit for an hour or so. Not two, and never three.

The U.S. edition of The Mermaids came with a long — and rare — tribute from Eudora Welty. “Thank you for letting me read this beautiful novel,” she wrote, likely in response to an advance copy. The book, she wrote, was a “sensitive, haunting work of a quality distinctly its own. While it probes deeply for unsparing truth, it is delicate as a flower to the senses.”

Most critics shared this view. Elizabeth Bowen, reviewing the book in The Tatler and Bystander, remarked that Boros, although Hungarian, wrote “far better English than many of us command!” She applauded the descriptions of the sanatorium’s atmosphere and residents and found that the novel “has a beauty hard to pin down. This book, I can only say, haunts me: I must re-read it.” Her fellow novelist Antonia White was equally impressed: “It is exciting, if a little disconcerting, that a Hungarian, writing her first novel in a language not her own, should produce a small gem of English literature.”

In the U.S., Granville Hicks, always an insightful and supportive reviewer, found The Mermaids “is completely unified by the mood that the author creates, and the writing has a kind of purity that takes the breath away.” On the matter of the inevitable comparisons with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Hicks argued that “Miss Boros, of course, is trying to do something very different from Mann, something much smaller than he attempted, but on her own scale she has been quite as successful, and that is a great deal to say.”

Eva Boros in Vienna, 1929. Photo by Bill Brandt.
Eva Boros in Vienna, 1929. Photo by Bill Brandt.

Though she set The Mermaids in 1936, Eva Boros had left Hungary years before. In 1928, she moved to Vienna, where she met the young German-born British photographer Bill Brandt. Like Boros, Brandt had spent time in a T.B. clinic — in his case, in Davos, the setting of Mann’s novel. Brandt fell for Boros — 21, blonde (natural), beautiful — and the two married … eventually. Brandt’s love life was never less than complicated and Boros eventually lost her taste for competition.

Her life remained intertwined with Brandt’s, though. In the 1950s, he entered psychoanalysis with a therapist named Barbara Lantos and suggested that Boros, now divorced from him but living in London as well, become her patient as well. Later, when Lantos was dying of cancer, she told her husband, a Hungarian emigre named Sandor Rakos, that he should marry Boros after her death — which he did.

Paul Delany, Brandt’s biographer, speculates that psychoanalysis may have cured Boros of the compulsion to write. The Mermaids was her first and only novel. It has never been republished.

The Mermaids, by Eva Boros
New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956

The Pole and Whistle, George Moor (1966)

“A frank novel of today’s most controversial subject.” The tag line on the cover of the New English Library edition of George Moor’s novel The Pole and Whistle is accompanied by a photo of two men having a chat in the pub over a pint and a fag. It may have been the publisher’s way of achieving some plausible deniability, given that the Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults, had yet to be passed. The subject could just as well be alcoholism, perhaps.

The contrast between the tentative tone of the book’s cover and the candor of George Moor’s writing, however, is striking. In fact, Moor’s ability to create a situation which is simultaneously utterly mundane and life-destroyingly risky is part of what makes The Pole and Whistle a fascinating work for its time.

John Anselm, in his mid-twenties, is working for his uncle in a chick hatchery in a large city in Lancashire (Moor was raised in Liverpool). His work is hard, tedious, and full of long days. One evening, dreading the long walk back to his apartment, he stops at the Pole and Whistle, a run-down pub just off the main square. There, as he quietly sips a pint, and then another and another, standing in the narrow “parlour,” he notices the young men in tight blue jeans going in and out through the door marked, “Singing Room.” The carefree spirit of the teenagers, the blare of the jukebox, and another pint or two releases John’s inhibitions. “Like a chameleon I changed my emotional colour with each succeeding song. I yearned for ‘Johnny’ and I flamed for ‘Norman.'”

Then, after a visit to the gents’, he encounters a sharp-dressed man in his late twenties who offers him a pint. “You were on ‘D’ landing in Stafford, weren’t you?” he asks. Frank Jeffers, just out of prison, is full of cock and confidence and not the least bit reserved about his interest in John. The two wander out and into a park, where Frank pushes John up against a tree and kisses him. “I’ll do you tomorrow night,” he tells John. “I’ll wait for you in the Pole and Whistle.”

“I had spent most of my twenty-five years as in a railway carriage where no one spoke and everyone kept his reserve,” John tells us. He has accustomed himself to loneliness as a way of avoiding the reality of his sexual orientation. “I could never be liberated from an inner watchfulness. To myself I disclosed only a slumbering awareness of what I was.” To be honest about his desire would ruin everything in his life: his job, the love of his parents, the acceptance of his community, the right to live freely outside prison.

But Frank wipes that all away with the openness of his physical and emotional attraction to John. Soon their nights all start in the Pole and Whistle and end in John’s bed, although this still requires some subterfuge to avoid the patroling bobby and suspicions of John’s landlady. Frank is even so comfortable with their relationship that he takes John home to meet his mum, almost to show off that he can make friends with someone of a better class.

For as genuine as Frank and John’s love for each other is, the fact that they are nightly committing an illegal act is not their only problem. Frank is a criminal, a petty burglar. He can never hold onto an honest job for more than a week or two and he is constantly trying to devise another easy theft. One night, Frank goes missing and stays missing for weeks. When he finally shows up at John’s flat, he confesses that he’d tried to pull a job in a nearby town, been caught, and spent some time in jail. Before long, he attempts another robbery, which also fails, and lands him in prison with a five year sentence.

If John is hoping for a discreet and (relatively) safe long-term relationship, Frank is the last man he should be involved with. Well, next to last, perhaps, after Beggy, one of Frank’s thuggish friends, who takes advantage of the absence of John’s protector to organize a session where John is gang-raped and tortured.

Feeling his world near collapse, John retains enough of a self-preservation instinct to grab a thin, implausible thread and save himself by taking a job in Japan. In a rare moment alone with his mother, he comes out to her. “I knew,” she tells him. “Only, you had so much control I thought it would be for ever.” “It is better to be dead than live without love,” he responds, adding, “The love of a man” to be clear. Their conversation ends in the most British way imaginable: “‘I accept you as you are,’ said my mother. ‘I’ll make some tea'” John replies.

Although The Pole and Whistle was a potentially controversial book when it was published (the New English Library lacked the visibility or marketing clout to attract any serious attention), it’s actually a quite ordinary and calmly-told story about inappropriate loves and learning to accept them. John loves Frank and knows they can never be together. John’s sister is involved with a married man and she and her parents accept this as a long-term relationship. John’s mother may regret the consequences of her son’s sexuality but accepts it as a fact. No one gets everything he wants and still life goes on.

The Pole and Whistle was only ever published as a paperback original and copies are extremely scarce today. But it is recognized as one of the few and one of the best English novels to deal openly with homosexual love published before the passage of the Sexual Offences Act. Dewey Wayne Gunn included it in his Gay Novels of Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth, 1881-1981.

It’s likely that the book had some autobiographical elements. After attending Cambridge, where he won several awards for his poetry, George Moor returned north, teaching in Lancashire and Wales before he moved to Japan in the early 1960s. There, he worked as an English teacher and translator. He later taught in Papua New Guinea and Iran, returning to England after the fall of the Shah. He won an award for his novella Fox Gold not long after that. This was collected with his stories “Nightingale Island” and “Bowl of Roses” and published by John Calder in 1978. He also had two novellas published in New Writing and Writers in the 1970s. Moor was a frequent entrant in New Statesman parody and satire competitions in the 1980s. He died in Burnley in 1992.

The Pole and Whistle, by George Moor
London: The New English Library, 1966

Monday Night, by Kay Boyle (1938)

“Do you mean to say I didn’t give you anything to eat yet?” one character asks another several hours into their wanderings around Paris in Monday Night. At this point, the pair has visited three or four bars and had at least a few drinks in each one of them. And the night is just beginning.

If you’re not one for drinking on an empty stomach, Monday Night may remind you of that time when you made the mistake of going out on the town with someone who considers bar nuts an entree. Bernie Lord, a medical student, arrives in Paris fresh off the train from Le Havre and meets up with a slight acquaintance from Chicago named Wilt Tobin who’s been living in France since before the First World War. His mission is to meet a man named Jean Sylvestre who has become world famous as a forensic toxicologist (though this was before the job had a name). Bernie is in awe of Sylvestre’s technical wizardry and hopes to learn a bit of the master’s craft.

Wilt is the only person Bernie knows in Paris. Literally anyone else would have been a better choice. Wilt is a writer, but somewhere along the way the pleasure of enjoying an aperitif at a sidewalk table outside a charming café has become a compulsion. Writing is now only a means to get money to drink with — that and cadging a glass or five off anyone who will listen to him. Stepping off the train in a crisp new blue serge suit, Bernie is shocked at his first sight of Wilt: “The cracked brown shoes, the grey trousers with no shape left in back or front, the paunch buttoned into the waistcoat, the shirt, the twisted tie, the soft, bristled jowls, the dark small almost fervently set eyes….” Wilt not only has “no sign of youth to recommend him, but no look left in eye or teeth to recall that he ever had been young.”

Still, Wilt feels some obligation to his friend. Luckily for him, though, their first stop, the pharmacy where Sylvestre got his start, is close to the Gare St. Lazare. When they fail to produce any further information about the man than the fact that Monsieur Sylvestre never comes there anymore, Wilt steers Bernie into the nearest bar to discuss next steps. This sets the pattern for much of the plot of Monday Night. The only difference between Bernie and Wilt and Vladimir and Estragon of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is that they’re looking instead of waiting. Oh, and drinking. In fact, each stage of looking tends to be preceded by around a half dozen drinks.

By around ten P.M., Wilt advises Bernie that it’s now either too late or too early to eat:

“The time we should have started in eating, if we were going to eat at all, was right after the first drinks, the first two or three drinks, right after the gin fizzes we had at the brasserie.” The darkness stretched before him as he walked, facsimile of that obliteration unpunctuated by mood or time that life itself and action had become…. “So now we’ll just have to hold off awhile until the red wine is out of the system,” he said. “I don’t want you to get sick the first night we’re out together. I want to take care of you, Bernie.”

Wilt not only seems to run solely on the promise of another drink but as the night wears on, he begins to take over Bernie’s quest as well. Early on, Bernie explodes at Wilt’s complete ignorance of the feats of Monsieur Sylvestre and the murderers condemned through his testimony. “My God, Wilt, don’t you know? Don’t you know about it? I thought everybody — anybody who read the papers, anyway — I thought there wasn’t anybody who–” But Wilt becomes convinced that Sylvestre is hiding a dark secret, that he is motivated less by objective truth than by revenge.

The two men head for Malmaison, on the outskirts of Paris, where Sylvestre now resides in a villa surrounded by large estate. Wilt begins to construct a psychological portrait of the chemist, examining his motivations, wondering at what it must be like to know your words will send a man to the guillotine. When they reach the villa, they learn that Sylvestre is in Lyons on a case, but his servants invite them into the kitchen, where a game of Monopoly is underway. More drinks are had as Bernie finds his will to live fading and Wilt cagily pries out information about Sylvestre.

Wilt and Bernie’s journey takes them out and back into Paris and through Monday night to early Tuesday morning. As with a bad hangover, the world they return to seems both fuzzy and jarring. Bernie no longer knows why he wanted to meet Sylvestre in the first place, and Wilt finds the solution to Sylvestre’s mystery in a newspaper headline spotted as they wait in the Gare St. Lazare for Bernie’s train back to Le Havre.

Monday Night has been described as an unusual detective story. If you accept this, then Boyle’s ending will seem abrupt and ill-prepared. But that’s the wrong way to look at the book. Boyle tells us what Monday Night is really about in its dedication, which comes from one of her unpublished stories called “The Man Without a Nation.” In that story, she writes of the “secret code” of the expats she had come to know in the course of — by that time — fifteen years in Europe:

Those who speak it follow no political leader and take no part in any persecution or conquest; nor have they to do either with a vocabulary of the rich or the poor or any country or race; it being simply one way of communication between the lost and the lost.

Wilt is one of these lost souls, one who has realized that he has stayed too long to be considered a tourist and can never stay long enough to become French. “It didn’t take me very long to find out I was in the wrong country,” he jokes to Bernie. “Only about eighteen years.” Boyle signals this awareness of being a displaced person (before that became an official term at the end of the next world war) in the book’s very first line: “You might have recognized it as a drugstore except for its situation in what might generally be called the wrong country.”

Kay Boyle based the character of Wilt on Harold Stearns, a man she and her second husband, Laurence Vail, came to know in Paris. Legend has it that after reviewing the proofs of a collection of essays by American intellectuals and artists that he edited titled Civilization in the United States, Stearns immediately booked passage to England, convinced that the United States had no civilization. In reality, it’s likely that a favorable exchange rate and the advent of Prohibition played a larger role in his decision.

As it was, he was only able to make it to Paris on the strength of a loan from Sinclair Lewis, who was in awe of Stearn’s potential. It was a loan that Stearns never repaid. Lewis later got something back, however, by referring to Stearns (indirectly, mind) as “an important habitue of the Cafe de Dome in Paris living these many years as a grafter on borrowed money.” Asked to respond by an American reporter, Stearns said he’d like to come back to the U.S. for the privilege of punching Lewis in the face.

Peter Pickem story
A “Peter Pickem” story from the Chicago Tribune, 1923.

For a while after arriving in Paris, Stearns was able to get by working as “Peter Pickem,” the Paris track correspondent of the Chicago Tribune. But then his drinking got so bad that he started to go blind and he lost that job and survived on a combination of betting on the horses and the generosity of his drinking partners. As he later wrote in his memoir, The Street I Know (1935), Stearns learned that few friends will buy you a meal, but plenty will buy you a few rounds at the bar. In his book Americans in Paris (1977), Tony Allan wrote that Stearns’s “shabby, unshaven figure was pointed out to newcomers as a warning of the dangers of the Latin Quarter.”

Hemingway was the first to commemorate Harold Stearns in fiction. In The Sun Only Rise, Jake Barnes encounters a friend named Harvey Stone in Stearns’s favorite café:

I walked past the sad tables of the Rotonde to the Sélect. There were a few people inside at the bar, and outside, alone, sat Harvey Stone. He had a pile of saucers in front of him, and he needed a shave.

“Sit down,” said Harvey. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Just looking for you.”

“Been out to the races?”

“No. Not since Sunday.”

“What do you hear from the States?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know. I’m through with them. I’m absolutely through with them.”

He leaned forward and looked me in the eye.

“Do you want to know something, Jake?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t had anything to eat for five days.”

Stearns wrote in his memoir, “I would stay up at the Sélect until dawn crept through the windows, drinking champagne and watching the boys and girls do their vaudeville stunts.”

Stearns himself described the Sélect as “a seething mad-house of drunks, semi-drunks, quarter drunks, and sober maniacs (most of whom were on the wagon only temporarily, of course, because of unkind medical favors of the fickle goddess, Venus).” It was, he wrote with bittersweet reflection, “a useless, silly life — and I have missed it every day since.”

But by 1932 — not Wilt’s 18 years, but a little more than ten — Stearns, like Wilt, knew he had stayed too long. “I was just an uprooted, aimless wanderer on the face of the earth. And a lonely one, too. I didn’t like that; I hated it. And, since there was nothing else to do, I would go into the bar and take another drink and try to forget.” With the arrival of the Depression and exodus of easy American money, however, even drinking to forget was becoming harder and harder. “With no teeth, few friends, no job, and no money,” Stearns wrote, “I naturally decided that all I could do was return to my own country — and to try to start all over. Everything about Paris had suddenly become distasteful to me; I suppose because I felt so alien and alone.”

If you’re a fan of 1930s detective fiction, you will certainly find Monday Night unsatisfactory. Sylvestre’s is not that much of a mystery. It’s really just the excuse for Boyle to send her lost soul, Wilt, and his naive companion Bernie, on their hallucinatory odyssey through the Paris night, an odyssey that will ultimately lead them both, like Stearns, back to America.

Monday Night represented both a structural and stylistic departure for Boyle. Although the plot takes place in the space of less than 24 hours, her night will seem endless to many readers. Though she sketches the people they meet in quick, precise strokes, it is Wilt and Bernie — and really just Wilt — who remains on camera, in focus, throughout the book. And in describing their wandering, Boyle switches back and forth between Wilt’s streetwise newspaperman’s chatter and rich, impressionistic descriptions of the Paris streets, scenes, and shadows. Reviewing the book in The Nation, Louis Kronenberger felt the latter “achieves strong and even beautiful effects, but shows too little restraint and has some of Faulkner’s and Wolfe’s tendency to overwrite.”

Most critics noted admirable qualities in Monday Night but felt it too much of an oddity to take as seriously as her previous novels. Otis Ferguson of The New Republic called Wilt “a sort of lost-generation Don Quixote.” Time’s reviewer found Boyle’s cast “a bunch of puzzling neurotics” and Alfred Kazin dismissed them as “manikins who walk through the book as on hot beds of coal.” Kronenberger, on the other hand, felt that part of the problem for reviewers was that their easy labels were ill-suited for Boyle:

Call her decadent and you will find an imagery that is vital and under almost perfect control. Call her lush and you’ll find prose with the delicacy, discipline, smoothness to the touch and good hard grain of carving in ivory. Call her a necromancer and then see by what homely undeniable things she sets up her rhythms and the overtone of their effect.

Monday Night has always had a small but loyal set of fans. Dylan Thomas called it “the best novel of the year” in a review for the New English Weekly and wrote Boyle a gushing fan letter that was reprinted on the cover of a 1970 reissue of the book. Doris Grumbach and James Laughlin of New Directions Press both named it one of their candidates for rediscovery in their submissions to Bill and Linda Katz’s 1983 guide to neglected books, Writer’s Choice. The editor Virginia Faulkner confided to Boyle that “Monday Night remains for me a landmark” in a letter written 25 years after the book first came out. And in the late 1940s, the actor Franchot Tone attempted, unsuccessfully, to raise money for a film version of the book, saying that its “way of story-telling makes me tingle.”

Boyle herself felt the book represented something of a breakthrough and said that she “liked it the best of my novels.” Perhaps this is, in part, because it is so overwhelmingly a book about men, about their actions and thoughts and desires. Her next few novels — Primer for Combat (1942), Avalanche (1944), and A Frenchman Must Die (1946) — would also take the world men as their focus — in combat, in mountain climbing, in wartime espionage and resistance. But most critics would agree that these attempts to create, if you will, lyrical action stories, are substantially weaker books when compared with Monday Night. Not much happens in Monday Night — if you set aside the drinking and walking — but within its small frame a moving and unsettling portrait of a lost soul can be seen.

Monday Night, by Kay Boyle
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938

Makeshift, by Sarah Campion (1940)

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

Perplexities, by E. R. Leigh (1932)

Cover of Perplexities by E. R. Leigh (1932).

As much I base most of my choices for this site on research, my heart belongs to my first neglected book love, the browsing of library and bookstore shelves in search of unfamiliar titles. As physical used bookstores become ever rarer in the U.S., I have to resort to online equivalents. A favorite technique is to select a publisher and date range and simply scroll through the listings that come up on one book site or another.

Which is how I came across Perplexities, a book I suspect I would never have found through research or physical browsing. It came up, quite simply, as the cheapest copy of a Faber & Faber title from the early 1930s I could find on AbeBooks.com. So I ordered it. I was pleased when it arrived with its dust jacket relatively intact, since this usually drives up the price.

Now, frankly, given my inveterate book buying, I tend to place my new arrivals in one of the teetering stacks scattered around my office and only return to them months or years later. But the writing in Perplexities is so spare, so lacking in artifice — so naked, if you will — that I began reading immediately:

I must write. It may be a way of fixing my mind on a logical sequence of ideas. It is ridiculous to allow one’s thought’s to run round within a desire like a squirrel in a cage.

I am the slave of an emotion, whereas I believed, not so long ago, that I had won freedom.

Perplexities’ unnamed narrator is, we learn, a French-born woman living in London and in love with a man from the North named Peter. In love — but not head over heels. No, she has seen too much for that. And so she tries to examine this new love, this new relationship, this possible future, in the context of the loves and relationships of her past.

The first of these, of course, is with her mother. A vain, beautiful Parisian, a widow holding herself to a higher standing than her husband’s legacy can support. And aspiring to a higher romantic standard as well. Protective of her prospective suitors, her feelings to her daughter are early on complicated by jealousy and a ferocious defense of her primacy as the object of desire in the house. “Whoever loved my mother ceased to know freedom for as long as they loved her.” For longer, in fact: “After she had lost the power to confer joy she retained the power of inflicting pain.”

Her mother is, in today’s vocabulary, an expert emotional abuser. “Her strength was in her tongue. She could hurt amazingly with her tongue.” Yet she also positioned her daughter to maintain and, indeed, improve her social and economic status: a good Catholic education in convent schools, proficiency in English with time spent with an English family, the Giffords.

Observing the Giffords adds to her understanding of the minefield of emotions lurking at even apparently placid family dinner tables. “Mrs. Gifford was a hard-working, devoted, conscientious wife and mother,” the narrator acknowledges. “I often wondered why her family did not leave the house in a body.” For Mrs. Gifford’s husband and children live in abject fear of her ability to inflict guilt in retribution for the smallest perceived slight:

I believe that more pain and suffering have been inflicted in the name of love than under the frank panoply of hate. Hate, at least, does not paralyse its victims by calling on their chivalry at the same time as it strikes. An enemy does not use as a shield the loud warning that he himself will be hurt if we are not careful.

This is, I think, an observation of striking insight — and striking currency. This is precisely why the damage done by parents who abuse through martyrdom is fundamentally different from that inflicted by direct abuse.

The narrator of Perplexities is in her early 40s. Her husband, an Englishman she married for love, was killed in the war over a decade earlier. Her two children, to whom she admits she was at best only adequate as a mother (“The passion of motherhood is a closed book to me”), are grown, living their own lives, and not looking to her for emotional or financial support. Nor does she expect it: “To expect gratitude seems a commercial appreciation for returns which has nothing to do with love.”

She has a job — and likes it:

I thoroughly enjoy work myself. I can enjoy almost any kind of work, provided it aallows me to put into it the whole, no more (not for long at least), but no less.

Her male colleagues, she thinks, fail to understand this balance. Some try to fill their time away from work with hobbies, seeking fulfillment they lack at work. Others are what we would now call workaholics:

I think one of my colleagues, Smith cannot fail to return after his death, day after day, to his desk, to watch his successor going on with his work. Smith loves the office, he loves coming to it in the morning, he is the last to leave it at night, he does not know what to do with unexpected holidays, he is always ready to postpone the expected ones.

It is the independence she has won through work, widowhood, and given her own children their freedom that ultimately allows her to recognize the trap that a relationship with Peter, her Northerner, would be. He is not an equal opportunity lover: “Mutual pleasure in sex does not enter Peter’s calculations.” Even worse, he’s a thirty-something man walking around with an umbilical cord. Proposing a seaside holiday, he adds that his mother, of course, will be joining them.

Perplexities is, effect, one woman’s inventory of her experiences of love and life in an attempt to decide what to do with the rest of it. And her choice is a courageous one: “Above all, I must try to conquer fear before I die.” This, she believes, is “a crusade on which all the remaining forces of a solitary woman with a love for freedom might well embark.”

Perplexities was marketed as a novel, but even Faber & Faber struggled to classify the book. “Whether one regards it as fiction or a transcript from real life, Perplexities is a very unusual book” declares its dust jacket. Too unusual for some reviewers: “There is some championing of the cause of prostitutes and perverts, a great deal of muddled thinking, rather tediously recorded, and a complete absence of a sense of humour,” observed B. E. Tood in The Spectator.

The Bookman’s critic was one of the few to acknowledge that the narrator’s perspective was more common than some might think: “Many women will share the author’s perplexities, and will enjoy a sense of fellowship in reading this book. A sensitive, critical mind is brought to bear upon the peculiar problems of modern life, especially women’s problems, which are discussed with such sincerity and common sense as should help to clear fresh paths through the tangles of convention.”

In some ways, Perplexities anticipates by almost fifty years Alice Koller’s An Unknown Woman, another book written in an attempt to take stock of a life and decide whhere to go with it. Koller had foresaken romantic love after an early failed relationship while in graduate school and was already intellectually prepared to embrace a solitary life (though with a German shepherd as companion), and it was a path she stuck to until her death almost forty years later. But as much as I admire Koller’s book, I have to say that I suspect more readers today would respond to the simple, succinct prose and the fearless candor of Perplexities.

E. R. Leigh, according to copyright records, was the pseudonym of Jeanne Berthe Julie Rigaud, a French woman born in Paris in 1881, who married Harry Footner, a civil engineer, in 1902. Like her narrator, Jeanne Footner had two children, both of whom were in their twenties when she wrote her book. And like her narrator, she lost her husband in the war — on August 1, 1916, one month to the day after the start of the Battle of the Somme. She took her pseudonym from her husband’s middle name, Erlegh. Perplexities was her only book. Perhaps, also like her narrator, its writing helped her reach some decision. She never remarried and she died in Portsmouth at the age of 70 in 1952.

Perplexities, by E. R. Leigh (pseudonym of Jeanne Rigaud Footner)
London: Faber & Faber, 1932

The Biff and Netta trilogy, by N. Warner Hooke (1934 -1938)

Close of Play by Nina Warner Hooke
Cover of U.S. edition of Close of Play, the second book in the Biff and Netta trilogy.

I wish I had more time to write this piece, for this trilogy not only amounts to nearly 900 pages but represents one of the most unusual stories I’ve ever come across. When Striplings (1934), the first volume, appeared in America, it was acclaimed as a comic masterpiece. “A rare combination of Wodehouse and Rabelais!” declared the president of the American Booksellers Association. Reviews were so enthusiastic the book went into five printings in less than a month.

I can’t imagine anyone comparing the trilogy to Wodehouse, Rabelais, or anything remotely funny if they knew how its story ends. Though I am not usually one to take care to avoid spoilers, in this case I won’t go into details, except to say that the final pages of Own Wilderness (1938) are the most heart-breaking I’ve read in many years.

In her foreword to Close of Play, the second volume, Nina Warner Hooke wrote that she felt compelled to continue the story of Biff and Netta after being asked to so many times by readers of Striplings. “I do not yet know what is going to happen to my striplings…. Perhaps there will be more to come. Perhaps not,” she concluded. Yet to me, the narrative arc — hell, the narrative momentum — seems inevitable and irresistable, as certain as the fact that two leaves that fall into stream will be pulled downstream by its current.

So, who are Biff and Netta? Biff, eleven, is the son of Hugh Tamlin and his wife Georgina. Hugh, who “used to have something to do with the Rubber World,” now spends his days cloistered in a workshop in his estate — The Place — in Sussex, supposedly working on inventions but in reality simply hiding from the truth that his world is crumbling around him. The fine house in London he has inherited is now rented to a family of Greek Jews whose monthly checks are almost the only income he has left. He can no longer afford repairs on the buildings or grounds of the once-grand Place, is in arrears with his property tax, and has had to reduce the staff to almost nothing.

His marriage is in even worse shape. His wife Georgina has taken a lover, Henry Arthur Pybus-Glanville, known as Uncle Pi, who lives at the estate on weekends and is the only functional adult in this highly dysfunctional family. And even his affair with Georgina is largely a thing of the past, as her only interest is in riding around the country on Warrior, her prize horse, likely the only asset of real value remaining. The only part of the affair not left in the past is Netta.

Netta, eight, is the spit and image of Uncle Pi. “She had his blunt features. His nondescript hair. His throaty laugh. So there is was.” Rounding out the cast is John Johns, the sour chauffeur/gardener/handyman, and Miss Mudford, the governess. Muddy had once been a good governess, but now she is prisoner of her demons: bad teeth, “muddy skin, muddy voice, and muddy mind,” and “given to secret masturbation an pornographic literature.”

In their decay, the Tamlins have become isolated from much of the world around them. Hugh continues to receive copies of trade magazines but no longer bothers to read them. “Not many people ‘knew’ the Tamlins these days. Things were said about them. None too savoury things. The servants were a queer lot. And then there was Uncle Pi.”

The only vitality left at The Place resides in Biff and Netta, who spent their days foraging around its two hundred acres. They swim in its ponds, climb its trees, trap its rabbits and ferrets — they are almost feral in their freedom. Biff spends the summer in a single pair of shorts, literally unable to wash them unless he spends a day naked in bed. They are “extravagant children.” “They did everything with an extravagant largeness and a total disregard for consequences. They were extravagantly fond of one another.”

Too fond. Their mutual attraction is both a thing born of genuine innocence and love and one of the worms at the core of this apple, an apple destined to rot and disintegrate in a manner that is both horrifying and gripping to witness over the course of the trilogy.

If Biff and Netta are Warner Hooke’s Adam and Eve, their problem is not that they haven’t tasted the fruit of knowledge. It’s that Netta, at least, doesn’t care:

“You know I shan’t ever marry anyone but you!”
“We can’t be married, you fathead!”
“Why can’t we?”
“Because we’re related. We’re not allowed to. There’s a law about it.”
“Not allowed to? Why ever not?”
“Because we should have queer sorts of things for children.”
“Oh, Biff, what sort of things?”
“Well, things with two heads. Or six toes, or something. It’s called inbreeding. It happened to the chickens last year.”

Netta is not deterred. “We might have something with eyes all over its stomach. We might make a lot of money out of it. We could show it at Church Fêtes and charge tuppence to have a look.”

As Biff and Netta near puberty, the adults at the Place rally one last time. Uncle Pi agrees to pay for Biff and Netta to be sent off to boarding schools. Their experiences are very different. Biff grows leaner, harder, stronger — but is an outcast, treated as an oddity by his schoolmates, nursing his hatred of them, and longing to be reunited with Netta. Netta, on the other hand, no longer malnourished, puts on weight, fits in, makes friends, develops schoolgirl crushes.

When they meet again during the first school holiday, civilization in the form of conventions and moraes have intruded. Netta confides that her breasts are being to grow. “Let me feel,” Biff demands. “He thought he had never felt anything so soft.” Yet when he reaches out again, Netta draws back: “‘Don’t,’ she said.” “For the first time in their lives, they felt that a veil had descended between them.” The extravagance of their affection may have diminished, but the strength of their attraction never does. Biff abandons school, gets work as a farmhand, then runs away when he learns that Netta plans to spend her summer holiday with a classmate.

This is where Striplings ends. It’s hard for me to take Warner Hooke’s claim that she didn’t plan to carry on with the story seriously. In one of the rooms of The Place, there is a mural of a scene from a Greek myth slowly falling apart. Early in the book, Netta and Biff take guesses as to when the next piece will tumble to the ground. There are too many pieces in Warner Hooke’s narrative left dangling, about to fall, to treat it as a completed work. Or perhaps it would be better to say that she closes the book on the crash before we’ve had the chance to count the victims.

The pieces begin to fall in Close of Play:

Fifteen months later, early in the summer holidays, the horse Warrior put his foot in a rabbit hole and fell heavily, breaking his neck and Georgina’s back. Careless of Warrior. One would not have expected him to do a thing like that.

The dispassion in those lines hints at one of the peculiar qualities of Warner Hooke’s writing. She has a knack for eliciting our sympathies for Biff and Netta in all their rough tenderness — and yet can, a few sentences later, poke at her characters with the disinterest of a scientist examining a specimen under a microscope. Most of Warner Hooke’s later work were stories about animals written for children, and her instincts seem to be those of a naturalist rather than a novelist.

Nina Warner Hooke, from the New York Times, 1934.

One of Stripling’s American reviewwers, Herschel Brickell, wrote that “Very few of the considerable number of contemporary novels that have attempted to explore the strange world of the young of the human species have been so honest, so forthright and so understanding….” And the American edition of Close of Play included a letter from birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger to its publisher in which she called it “one of the most real books I have ever read and the truest study of children and adolescence I’ve had the pleasure of reading in fiction form.”

The realism of Warner Hooke’s treatment of Biff and Netta’s story is all the more striking for the utterly bizarre reality of their situation. Working as a navvy on a construction site in Brighton, Biff hears of Georgina’s death and returns to The Place. Now taller, stronger, and callous of hands and manners, he is bound to act as an accelerant in what is already a highly combustible situation. Though Netta is in the midst of a teenage romance with a neighbor, Rodney Fletcher, she finds herself drawn again to Biff. And though Biff has been living in the roughest of workman’s lodgings, he can see that The Place is on the brink of collapse. Much of its forest has had to be sold off for lumber, and Hugh, referred to the children as D.M. (Deaf Mute, for his near-total lack of interaction with anyone), is almost catatonic in his isolation.

A child-man, Biff exudes a certain confidence and power that attracts followers, and both Rodney and Netta go with him when he decides to leave The Place again. He returns to his room in Brighton and the three settle in together. They have almost nothing, yet he ensures their basic needs are met through intimidation:

Biff they feared. He subdued them from the outset. They surrendered to him because they had no alternative. If he required an extra blanket or another cup, there was little use in stating that it was not available. He went downstairs to fetch it. And if the excuse proved to have been founded on fact, he went out and bought what he wanted and charged it to Ma [the landlady].

Of course, three into two won’t go, as they say, and after a few months of pretending to be a simple working man and attempting to understand the complexities of Netta’s relationship with him and Biff, Rodney returns to his familiar middle-class life. Rodney is hands-down the most normal character we will come across. No wonder he’s destined to be among the wounded.

At this point, Close of Play ends. The last book, Own Wilderness, opens in London, where Biff and Netta are boarding with a greengrocer and his family. Netta helps out in the shop, while Biff cycles through a variety of jobs, not all of them legal, until he settles in as a delivery truck driver. Warner Hooke’s cast grows to take in the whole family and the power of the narrative is weakened somewhat as she loses the tight focus on Biff and Netta.

That is, until Hugh dies and leaves The Place to them. Saddled with debts, its buildings now so decrepit as to be barely habitable, it still has the attraction of Eden to Warner Hooke’s strange Adam and Eve. Foraging, once their pasttime, now becomes their means of existence. And now that they are both of age, Biff and Netta begin to become aware of what their neighbors are saying about their relationship.

It’s enough at this point to say that we’ve left Wodehouse and Rabelais behind long ago. We are now deep in Thomas Hardy’s territory. How we got here isn’t entirely clear, and I’m not sure it was to Warner Hooke, either. She probably didn’t work according to a plan, probably didn’t know from one chapter to the next when Biff and Netta were going to lead her. But we should be grateful that she stuck with them.

In some ways, taken together, Striplings, Close of Play, and Own Wilderness resemble a 19th Century English novel more than a modernist one. Biff and Netta’s path meanders from time to time and Warner Hooke occasionally suffers from the naturalist’s tendency to note all phenomena, even the unimportant, when some details ought to be omitted. But taken together — and as hard as these books are to locate, I cannot overstress how important it is to read the three as a single work — this trilogy is a work of stunning power, and I just regret that I am giving it less than its due with such a relatively brief assessment. Absolutely unjustly neglected; absolutely worth tapping into your local Inter Library Loan service to get your hands on. (Note: Own Wilderness is avaiable through HathiTrust.org, if you have access.)

The Biff and Netta Trilogy, by Nina Warner Hooke (credited as N. Warner Hooke)
Striplings
London: Faber and Faber, 1934
New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1934
Close of Play
London: Putnam, 1936
New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1936
Own Wilderness
London: Putnam, 1938
New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1938

The Case is Altered, by William Plomer (1932)

Dust jacket from the first US edition of The Case is Altered.

This is a guest post by Christopher Hawtree.

The Figures in the Boarding-House Carpet

Many a novel has sprung from a paragraph in a newspaper. Notable among them was that New York Times snippet about a houseful of murder victims in the Midwest which Truman Capote chanced to see — and so began the trail that led to In Cold Blood. Three decades earlier, William Plomer returned to London after a weekend away when his eye was caught at the railway station by something larger than a paragraph: posters announced SHOCKING BAYSWATER TRAGEDY.

The newspaper revealed to him — in late-November 1929 — that this tragedy had taken place in the very house where he lodged. It was a narrow escape, for it is likely that he would have joined his landlady in the mortuary had he not been out of town. She was the common-law wife of a man given to the obsession that she would succumb to any man who paid her court. Mania turned into murder as he set upon her with an open razor while their child looked on; with her dead, the man looked for Plomer, but the police were soon on the scene, samples taken — and, in due course, the returning novelist cleaned up the remaining mess.

Hardly surprisingly, that friendship with his landlady and the encounter with the blood which had spurted from her veins were to haunt him. Two years later, in the summer of 1932, he published his third novel The Case is Altered. After the South Africa of Turbott Wolfe and the Japan of Sado, this was a raw but deeply felt account of those clinging onto life by dint of a rented room in somebody else’s house.

Since his childhood, split between South Africa and terms at Rugby School, Plomer’s life had since been varied, and he knew such humble lodgings as well as Patrick Hamilton, who was to make a career from boarding houses, with such works as Hangover Square. Another boarding house novel, Marie Belloc-Lowndes’s The Lodger, inspired not only Plomer but also Norman Collins, whose London Belongs to Me has recently won new attention. One might also think of works by Muriel Spark, Emeric Pressburger, Tennessee Williams and Sarah Waters as examples of the continuing fascination of such settings, which provides dramatic unity while characters move in and out the shadows of rooms whose carpet is no longer as fresh as the time when it had been obtained on an instalment plan.

Cover of the Hogarth Press edition of The Case is Altered.

The Case is Altered proved to be Plomer’s most popular novel, one of the bestsellers of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, as had been Orlando, Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians and Saturday Night at the Greyhound. The last, by Plomer’s friend John Hampson has something in common with The Case is Altered: set in a pub, its timescale is limited and to the fore is a cruel husband.

According to Plomer, the houses in his fictional Cambodia Crescent “have the self-righteous air of a selfish and uncultivated person who thinks that he is a good and wise, and the ornamentation around the doors, windows and chimneys forms a lasting insult to the beauties of natural stone and careful craftsmanship”. As this is in hailing distance of Kensington Gardens, one can be sure that Plomer’s house would now command cool millions.

Almost a century ago, it had simply been spotted by Mrs. Beryl Fernandez (with her impoverished and ailing common-law husband Paul), who thought that with care, it could become a profitable enterprise. She planned to run with the help of her friend Mrs. Gambits, “who belonged to that numerous and depressing class of women who are not exactly of the kind known as decayed gentlewomen, but whose chief aim in life is to be taken for decayed gentlewomen”. This was an era when even Mrs. Fernandez’s modest funds could stretch to the hiring of a manservant, Mr. Empringham “with grey hair and rather a puzzled expression on his face, as though he couldn’t quite make out why life had treated him quite the way it had, or what it was likely to do to him next”.

Among the lodgers are a couple, the Rudds, forever in hope of winning crossword competitions and siring a child. They are joined by Constantia Brixworth who is down on her luck after losing her money in an American railroad scheme. She is friendly with Frances Haymer, a former explorer, to whem she regularly entertains with tales of her fellow residents, whom the writer regards with all the curious avidity that she had showed in chronicling foreign tribes.

This is a finely-observed novel. Plomer describes Miss Haymer when she ventured out, as she “used a stick with a rubber end, and tottered along on heels that were rather too high, supporting, like some caryatid, a large, oldfashioned hat, decorated with a bird or two and some fruit, as in her heyday.” Of particular interest to both Miss Brixworth and Miss Haymer is young Eric Alston, who works in a greengrocer’s “and had a very fresh complexion, as if his cheeks were reflecting a rosy glow from the apples and peaches which it was his work to sell”. Eric is walking out with a girl who works in the kitchen of a clothes shop which, called Pélagie, proclaims itself as trading in “Robes and Modes”.

And so the scene is set for lives of aspiration running into frustration and worse — none blessed with “that assurance which the possession of money brings with it”. The novel’s title has a double meaning. A Miss Brixworth says to Alston (to whom she offers tea and omelettes), “When I had more money, I used to have an ordinary afternoon tea and late dinner, but now the case is rather altered…”. And nearby the house is a pub with that very name: a plaque relates that “it was originally called The Three Cranes but in the eighteenth century a famous highwayman was caught there unawares by a young lord whom he had robbed. ‘Now, sir,’ cried the peer as soon as he had made sure of his capture, ‘it seems the case is altered!”‘

William Plomer in 1932.

Briskly told in nineteen chapters across some three hundred pages, the novel has something of the “tea-tabling” manner for which Christopher Isherwood praised his and Plomer’s mentor, E.M. Forster. Despite a cinema fire, dramatic incident is rare; everything turns around the simmering of domestic matters, one small table-side event knocking into another much as a billiard ball sets up a chain reaction across the green baize. Worthy of Forster, or Proust, is the observation of Paul Fernandez who chain-smokes in the dead of night, the night-lamp’s shadows an emblem of his maniacal anxiety. “The idea of cruelty (which is only a diseased form of sympathy) was beginning to exercise a fascination over his thoughts. Not content with love, and love fully requited at that, he wanted power as well, he wanted to command more love, a stronger, more intense kind of intimacy than is humanly possible, and so he began to seek how he might obtain such power.”

And so begins a descent which will take down many with it against a background which forms an indelible view of the Thirties, whether in spiritualist gatherings, a mediation upon the nature of conscience, a suggestion of the homosexuality which had been to the fore in Sado, or advertisement hoardings “covered with huge posters. Each of them showed a gigantic human figure, and each figure seemed to live in a strange world of the imagination. A giantess in evening dress was in raptures at having discovered a new tooth paste to apply to a set of teeth that looked like the keys of a piano”. Whether observing people’s tendency to walk towards a window when contemplating the future or a man who “indulged in none of those humorous sallies which are so important a part of an auctioneer’s technique”, Plomer shows those powers of description which made people relish his letters’ arrival (would there were a collection of them).

Rather than dwell on the murder which was its inspiration, one relishes The Case is Altered for its life:

an immense murmur made up of the traffic of human beings going about their business and pleasure, a rich and subtle and continuous sound which it takes more than motor-cars to make, for it must contain as well the cries of infants, the ranting of demagogues, the tapping of the blind man’s stick, the happy laughter of young girls, the vomiting of drunkards, the stirring of squirrels in their sleep, the fall of leaves, the growth of trees, the threats of blackmailers, the solicitations of whores, the shuffling steps of lecherous old men, the banter of soldiers, the coy shrieks of housemaids, the shy kisses of young lovers, the worm in the bud, and the millionaire’s last words.

The novel put Plomer’s quiet life in good stead, although he was not to know such success again until its very end, in 1973, when his sequence The Butterfly Ball was illustrated by Alan Aidridge, who brought a similar style to his work in The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics. FThough his satirical and lyrical poems are a particular delightr, Plomer may now be best known as the publisher’s reader who, in the face of opposition, persuaded Cape to take on the first of Ian Fleming’s James Bonds novels, Casino Royale, and worked closely on the rest of them.

How has the equally if differently thrilling The Case is Altered fallen from print? It last appeared half a century ago in a hardback series called the Landmark Library. Perhaps some have balked at another aspect of the Thirties. As early as page twenty-six, one learns that “even if Miss Brixworth had not been able to see at once that Mrs. Fernandez was a Jewess, it would be soon have been able to tell that she was one, by the way she began over-emphasising her partiality to bacon for breakfast”. Two pages later, she “launched out into a sea of Jewish visions of luxury and comfort far beyond her means” and further in, there is “that Jewish impulse towards grandeur so noticeable in Mrs. Fernandez”.

Plomer was a humane man. These are the tropes of an era, similar to the first edition of Brighton Rock, which featured a Jewish Mr. Big in a seafront hotel (later editions turned him into an Italian, as if that made it all right). The narrator of The Case is Altered notes that “you can never make out whether the Jews want to be aristocrats or socialists. Half-way between East and West, they maybe somewhere near the truth, if the truth really lies in paradox. Jesus Christ was the greatest and most paradoxical of the Jews. He had the most aristocratic nature imaginable, and yet he lived with the lowest of the low. He was unique, and yet expressed himself in terms of what is ordinary and universal”.

For all that “Jews kiss and kill at the same time, just as a sportsman may feel a real affection for the game he slaughters”, The Case is Altered has a power which impressed its first publisher, Leonard Woolf, a Jew. As felicitous as it is raw, here is a novel which remains as provoking as when it appeared in 1932.

Christopher Hawtree is a writer and editor. You can read more on his website, ChristopherHawtree.com, and follow him on Twitter (@chrishawtree).

The Case is Altered, by William Plomer
London: Hogarth Press, 1932
New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1932

Madam, by Ethel Sidgwick (1921)

This is a guest post by Dr. Sarah Lonsdale.

As a long-time student of early twentieth century novels, I must confess to at first being utterly confounded when I started reading Madam. I couldn’t make head or tale of the prose and the cast of characters that spun in dizzying speed before my eyes in the early sections was so bewildering that I had to draw a diagram of their relationships just to keep up.

Ethel Sidgwick makes great demands of her readers. Her meaning is like a will o’ the wisp, darting in the darkness of her elliptical prose. She is always several paces ahead of the reader, who feels as if they are dully plodding behind, in danger of losing their way completely. Even a contemporary Observer reviewer wrote that Sidgwick was “more elusive than Henry James” and that “she seems to overrate our powers of intellectual sympathy”, unaware that while she is racing ahead, her readers are stuck somewhere far behind her. But like a will o’ the wisp, one feels that if one might only grasp it, and bathe one’s mind in its light, it might illuminate a greater truth.

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Advertisement for novels by Ethel Sidgwick published by Sidgwick & Jackson.

Sidgwick was once regarded as a brilliant writer, “drawing the picture in firm, fine lines: never losing our attention, or ceasing to charm…it is supreme art,” wrote Reginald Brimley Johnson in Some Contemporary Novelists (Women) (1920). Madam is one of several novels Ethel Sidgwick produced between 1910 and 1926, earning praise for their literariness, wit and truths to be discovered under the sparkling wit of her prose. These novels, many with single-word titles such as Promise (1910), Succession (1913) and Restoration (1923) offered sharp and often humorous criticism of the manners of the British upper classes. Sidgwick enjoyed a few years of fame and popularity: regularly compared with Henry James, in 1919-20 she was offered that most glittering of accolades for an English author: a lecture tour of the United States, during which time she kept a journal that is now with her other papers held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Afterwards she dedicated the US edition of Madam, “To America. If she will accept so poor a thing in memory and in gratitude”. Her later novels, however, received less critical acclaim, being more popular and romantic. Despite having made considerable impact on both British and US reading publics, after long before her death in 1970, Sidgwick quickly had disappeared, virtually without trace. If she is remembered at all, it is only for her 1938 biography of her aunt who was an early principal of Newnham College Cambridge: Mrs Henry Sidgwick: a memoir by her Niece.

Published in Spring 1921, Madam follows the lives of a large cast of characters, from stable lads to landed gentry, in a narrative beginning just before the First World War, “the golden days, before the world lost its innocence”, and ending in the months following the Armistice. In the second half of the novel the traumatic effects of the War haunt the men who returned from the trenches, and those who were too young to fight. They are dogged not only by physical injuries but suffer an almost obsessive need to seek “fellowship with the dead”, their survivors’ guilt destroying any honest or meaningful relationship with the living. Like out-of-control pinballs, they careen wildly through London and county society, causing varying degrees of damage, from wrecking motor cars to breaking young girls’ hearts. A haunting study of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) decades before the term was even coined, Madam is, as the contemporary Guardian reviewer urged, worth sticking with until the second half fully reveals itself.

The novel’s main characters are the jovial country squire Henry Wicken, who has lost a hand in the fighting and who gently subsides into what today would be called a nervous breakdown, and his former stable boy Mott Lane, who was too young to join up but who lost all five of his older brothers in the fighting. The effects of the war on Mott are more atrocious than on Henry: he suffers from a split personality, ruins everything he goes near: bicycles, motor cars, horses and young ladies. That is, until he meets Caroline, ‘Lina’ Astley, the ‘Madam’ of the title. She recognises Mott is damaged and through her patience and courage saves him from his demons and his desire only to be with the dead. Far from the dreary cliché of the angelic feminine, Lina helps Mott in a shockingly physical and criminal way. She confronts Mott’s at once cruel and pious mother (who used to interrupt her beating of him to read out verses from the Bible), slapping her hard on the face and stealing from her a memento of Mott’s beloved brother Christopher.

In meting out criminal and physical harm, fighting fire with fire, Caroline at once fractures the idealised image of herself as the gentle angel and smashes the tomb within which Mott has buried himself alongside his dead brothers. It is one of the few sharply defined moments of a novel swathed in obliquities and ellipses, a narrative style described by one contemporary reviewer as “typically feminine” and “liable to cause irritation”.

Such assertions call for evidence, so here we go:

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Advertisement for Madam by Ethel Sidgwick.

Because he simply longed to kill Mr Forrest with Miss Astley, last edition. The poor old surgeon really thought he knew her, that was the creamy part. She was probably sitting, every day, with her despatch-case, under his eye, just as usual; even though Lancaster had kissed her, and she had – No: it must be laid up in lavender for Forrest; for Miss Astley, final edition, was simply the sequel of all the other tales. Tell one, and you found yourself telling the others, inevitably wherever you were: it all followed on.

The novel is written entirely in this style and such questions as “what does ‘laid up in lavender’ mean?” and “what are earbobs?” and “why is the horse Titus starting to speak human language?” chase each other through the frantic reader’s mind. It is “a thing heavy with lightness”, as Sidgwick wrote of a character’s argument in the novel, but it could easily be applied to her own words, tricky to pin down “because there was nothing in it anywhere to grasp.” While pointing out her difficult style, contemporary reviewers nevertheless encouraged readers to persevere. “Through the greater part of his first perusal the reader has the sensation of being lost in a maze, or endeavouring (sic) to fit together the jumbled parts of a picture puzzle, or trying to work out the meaning of a code message without the key,” confessed a New York Times reviewer of Jamesie (1918). But those who stuck with the novel, even giving it a second reading, would be rewarded with its “fine literary quality” and “piquant character drawing”.

There is indeed something deeply resonant at the heart of this war novel. The male characters emerge from the smoke of Flanders so wounded and damaged that the question of how to make sure there is never again another war would be the contemporary reader’s chief conclusion. This was Sidgwick’s aim: born in 1877 into a progressive, literary and feminist family, she wrote for the pacifist Cambridge Magazine and was a lifelong supporter of the Save the Children fund founded by her friend Eglantyne Jebb. Sidgwick also lost her own brother, Arthur, killed in action at Ypres in 1917.

Because of its difficult style, Madam will not be brought triumphantly back into publication to enjoy a second literary life as have recently the works of her contemporaries Rose Macaulay and Elizabeth von Arnim. But if ever the curious reader were to chase its oblique meaning through the prose, they will be rewarded with moments of shuddering recognition of those early, shattered months after the Great War.

Madam, by Ethel Sidgwick
London: , 1921

Dr Sarah LonsdaleSarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.

Reporter, by Meyer Levin (1929)

Reporter by Meyer Levin

“I’m interested in flaws in works of fiction,” Amina Cain writes in her recent book on writing, A Horse at Night, “in why it is possible to love a book one finds flawed, maybe even more than a book that might be considered ‘perfect.'”

Meyer Levin’s first novel, Reporter, is for me a good example of a book I loved all the while that I kept looking past its many flaws. It’s a good illustration of the fact that chronology is not narrative, for example. Its timeline runs straight through a few weeks in the life of a journeyman reporter working for an unnamed Chicago daily. One thing happens after another through over 400 lively pages, but to no particular end.

The young man dreams of earning his own byline and getting choice assignments like bring sent to Tennessee to cover the Scopes trial over the right to teach evolution. He has unique instincts, he thinks, and within four months, he calculates, he’s bound to become a star reporter:

He had brains. He could write. He could write the most human stories in the paper. The way to do was to treat every story sympathetically. That made them real. With a great, troubled heart the young reporter would go forward to interview the souls that fell afoul of the city; his limitless love would surround them all, with all their petty sins and little evils. Humanly he would write, and his writing would bear the stamp of Personality. Inside of a month he would be writing the best stories in the column. He would receive offers from all over the country.
Because he would be sympathetic. Human. He had made a great discovery in journalism.

Instead, he leaves the book in much the same way he enters: dispatched on another story. “What cha got for me? …huuuuh? Little suicide? …Crawford …Uh? …Ummmmppppphhhh …Yeeaaah ….”

On the other hand, just that last quote gives you a hint of what Reporter has going for it. Levin was among the generation of writers for whom James Joyce had knocked down the gates of “proper” writing and inspired them to run free through the streets knocking the hats off the rules grammar and spelling. And so, Levin relishes his many opportunities to spice up his prose with fireworks and explosions, as in the reporter’s fantasy of the story he’d like to write about two bootleggers caught bribing jailers for special treatment: “The bootleg twins had chicken for dinner. (Eeeeeee!) They paid Eight Dollars for it. (IlrrrrrRRRRRR!) Hal had a toothache. (Lniiiieee!) George has a pillow. (Give him a rock!) Hal smiled. (Laughs at law!)”

Ad for Reporter by Meyer Levin
Ad for Reporter.

While Levin only occasionally indulged in use of Joycean wordglue (no references to the snotgreen, scrotumtightening Lake Michigan, though it can be both those things), he must have driven the typesetters nuts with the collages that make up a typical Reporter page. A headline rarely directly associated with the story shouts from the top of almost every one: “RAID 15 RESORTS, ARREST 400”; “GIRL BANDIT GETS TWO YEARS”; “VENUS BLINKS AT CHI GIRLS’ EYES”; “ROCKEFELLER GIVES CHILD DIME.” Two- and three-column stories interrupt conventional blocks of text. As the reporter awaits instructions, the city editor breaks off to yell at another, “Listen, Fifer, that woman was taken to St. Rosa’s –”. “yyyeaaaaa, I got all that half an hour ago,” Fifer replies, and Levin proceeds to share Fifer’s report.

DISAPPOINTED CREDITOR SHOOTS WOMAN, ESCAPES Mrs. Teresa Dapaglia, 47, a widow living at 494 W. Taylor st., was shot and seriously wounded today by a man identified as Tomaso Perugino. Her daughter, Maria Dapaglia, 18, was bruised as she fell down the stairs while chasing the assailant. Both are at the St. Rosa hospital. Perugino is said by neighbors to be one of those who lost mone through investments made with Mrs. Dapaglia's late husband.
Fifer’s story, from Reporter.

If the typographical cacophony of Reporter weren’t energetic enough, we can also partake of Chicago at the height of its Jazz Age frenzy, with gangland murders, flappers, Babbitt-like conventioneers, corrupt cops and politicians, steel mills and speakeasies, and cameos by celebrities such as Clarence Darrow and D. W. Griffith. The book opens as the city editor is trying to decide whether to run with the street shooting of the slick, handsome bootlegger Vito Manfredi or the sudden death of the president of the University of Chicago (no surprise which wins out). By the end, all three Manfredi brothers have been laid out in gardenia-laden coffins.

Reporter works as fiction only in the sense that the events and the names of the characters are made up. Otherwise, it is part experiment in what might be considered creative nonfiction and part a realistic account of what it was like to be an average reporter in those days. With Clarence Darrow about to depart for the Scopes trial, the city editor is eager to learn his defense strategy, so he sends our hero to camp out on Darrow’s doorstep. Which is exactly what he does. Sit in Darrow’s waiting room for hours, hoping for a clue, a glimpse of an expert witness, or a slipped remark by the great attorney. Instead, he hears the long and sad account of an old woman hoping to straighten out her dead sister’s estate. Darrow tolerates his uninvited guest, but at the end of the day the lad heads back to the office empty handed.

Taxis, we learn, are only for special occasions. “Taxis are only for when you’re on a hot story. Taxis are only for murders or suicides or rapes or morons or fires or bombings and only when they are very special murders suicides rapes morons fires or bombings at that.” Telephones are essential tools for command and control: the city editor doesn’t like a reporter to be out of reach for more than an hour or two. But they can also be tough to find in an Italian neighborhood or a Polish one.

And Levin, who worked his way through the University of Chicago as a stringer for the Chicago Daily News and later on the staff of the Chicago Evening American, knows the fundamental challenge faced by a reporter sent to assemble a first story in the wake of an event. Entering the emergency room after Vito Manfredi’s shooting, he recognizes that he is, effectively, going in empty-handed: “Everywhere surety: everybody, everybody, seemed to know everything, except him, the giver of information. Men, men—talking, explaining, arguing — all who? All relatives? All friends? All gang avengers? Go up to each with pencil to pad and ask who are you, why are you here?” “With the gangster in his last moments were …” he writes in his head, but not being a gangland specialist, the faces are just faces.

Fanny Butcher, who was at the time Chicago’s leading book critic, wrote of Reporter, “The business of being a reporter he has reported with skill and conviction and impressiveness. The business of being a human being aside from his job, he has fallen down on.” And it’s an accurate assessment of the book’s strengths and weaknesses. We’re told the reporter’s name several times or whatever he does when he’s not on the job, but it doesn’t really matter, anymore than his inept attempts to make a connection with women. The Rochester Democrat’s reviewer credited Levin for “at least an honest effort to reproduce the life of the city reporter in all its kaleidoscopic bewilderment,” and “kaleidoscopic bewilderment” sums up just why Reporter is flawed — and wonderful.

Portrait of Meyer Levin and announcement of John Day Co.'s withdrawal of Reporter.
Portrait of Meyer Levin and announcement of John Day Co.’s withdrawal of Reporter.

Reporter was no best-seller and would be tough to find a copy of today as it is, but to make matters worse, Levin’s publisher, John Day, pulled the book from bookstores and promptly announced that it would print no more copies about six weeks after it came out in the spring of 1929. No explanation was offered and neither Publisher’s Weekly nor Editor and Publisher made any further comment on the news. Concerns about libel, perhaps? It seems unlikely, unless there was something more to the book’s treatment of a story involving burglaries by some sons of Chicago’s wealthier families.

In any case, Levin was already on his way to Palestine to report on conflicts among the Arabs, Jews, and occupying British forces and had two further novels — Frankie and Johnny (1930) and Yehuda (1931) — in the works. No one seems to have written about Reporter since its disappearance. As Figtree Books, which republished his best-selling 1956 novel about the Leopold and Loeb case, Compulsion, puts it, “Levin was a constant innovator, reinventing himself and stretching his literary style with astonishing versatility.” He may not always have been successful in an artistic sense, but as Reporter demonstrates, Meyer Levin’s appetite for taking risks could lead him — and his readers — to some colorful places.

The 1929 Club (#1929club)>
This is my contribution to Karen Langley and Simon Thomas’s #1929club celebration..

Reporter, by Meyer Levin
New York: The John Day Company