fbpx

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.

Two Thousand Million Man-Power, by G. E. Trevelyan

Cover of Two Thousand Million Man-Power

After reading G. E. (Gertrude Eileen, for the record) Trevelyan’s fascinating Appius and Virginia back in September, I became intrigued to learn more about her life and work.

And soon discovered there really wasn’t much — at least within the confines of the Internet — to be discovered. She was born in Bath, grew up in Reading, attended Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, was the first woman to win the Newdigate Prize for poetry, moved to London, pursued a career as a writer, was injured in the Blitz in October 1940 and died four months later.

She wrote eight novels in the space of seven years, all apparently quite different in subject and approach. Of these, only one — her second novel, Hot-House (1933), based on her Oxford experience — is in print. Not that you’d know it. The book was reissued in 2017 with the exciting title, Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II: Volume II, part of a series edited by Anna Bogen. Of the rest, less than twenty used copies are available for sale, most of them going for over $100. Her last book, Trance By Appointment (1939), is not to be found outside a dozen libraries scattered around the world. Even the book covered here, Two Thousand Million Man-Power (1937), no copies available for sale, so I must include a link to its WorldCat.org listing.

I hate to use blurb-speak, but if I had to sum up Two Thousand Million Man-Power in one line, it would be “John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. meets Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road in London between the world wars.” The book is both about how a man and woman — in this case, Katherine, a school teacher, and Robert, a chemist (as in scientist, not pharmacist) — meet, share their dreams, then watch as those dreams are slowly eroded by the relentless friction of everyday life. And it’s about the swirl of events going on in the world around them, many of which make not the slightest impact, a few of which slam into them like a car spun out of control.

The Dos Passos connection comes from Trevelyan’s frequent use of a motif resembling the “Newsreel” feature in U.S.A., the last volume of which appeared the year before Two Thousand Million Man-Power was published. Trevelyan peppers her text with snatches of news of the world, using the technique almost like the chorus in a Greek tragedy. Thus, when Katherine suggests she and Robert have a child because “We could afford it now” and “Things are improving everywhere,” the news provides the evidence:

The successful trials of R.100 were completed. A Dutch scientist was working out a scheme for the production of artificial rain. A Beam wireless service was opened between England and Japan. A pilot flew over six thousand miles of African jungle to carry anti-hydrophobia serum to a missionary. Agricultural machines in France were grading and marking eggs at the rate of a hundred and twenty a minute. Escalators were speeding up, the biggest building in the Empire was in course of construction at Olympia, Katherine and Robert were in their white-enamelled kitchen one Sunday afternoon, washing the tea-things in instantaneous hot water and hanging them to dry in an electrically heated rack.

Like Yates’ Frank and April Wheeler, Robert and Katherine see themselves as superior to most of their neighbors and co-workers — at least at first. They meet in a League of Nations debate (Katherine envisions the League’s headquarters as a glowing “Temple of Justice” on the shores of Lake Geneva). Having been dissuaded by his father from pursuing an academic career, Robert works in the lab of the Cupid Cosmetics Company Ltd. but labors away in his room at night, trying to discover “the precise mathematical formula for the nature of Time.” Katherine disdains the mundane worries of her fellow teachers (rumors the London City Council will let married teachers go) and lovingly darns Robert’s socks at night, knowing he’s engaged in an effort of profound significance.

As they become more deeply involved, though, that business of married teachers becomes more relevant. Katherine cannot bring a man to her room. Robert’s landlady keeps close track of the frequency and duration of Katherine’s visits. They spend endless hours walking up and down along the Thames. Trevelyan shows a keen awareness of how public and private mores and spaces conspired against single people:

Every twenty yards or so, where a tree overhung the pavement, or at the farthest point between two street lamps, they passed a couple pressed against the wall or pushed into a gateway. Some of the couples were speaking in low voices and some were quite quiet. As she passed them Katherine would draw away from Robert, just a little and without meaning to: just a very slightly wider strip of pavement between them. He came near again, not noticing. “They’re like us,” he said. “Nowhere to go.”

They marry eventually — secretly at first, to avoid losing their rooms and Katherine losing her job. But Robert invents a new formula for a make-up remover and the royalties allow them to rent a small house in the suburbs, complete with hired furniture, wireless, and vacuum cleaner. Of course, being out in the suburbs has its disadvantages, so soon they buy a car on installment as well.

And if you know anything about 20th century history, you know what comes next:

In the last week of September the bank rate rose to six per cent; the Stock Exchange closed for two days; England went off the gold standard. On the first of October Robert lost his job.

Robert joins the army of unemployed, and one by one the appliances, then the car, and finally the house go away and they find themselves trapped together in a dismal pair of rooms, with nothing to do but scour the job notices, write ever-more-desperate letters of application, and grow more frustrated with each other. Katherine takes a job at a sad girls school run out of a Bayswater house and allows her contempt for Robert’s failures to show more openly. Each day he brushes off his one last threadbare suit and heads into the city with a few pence in his pocket; each day he comes home defeated.

He knew he had to get a job, because of Kath. Kath couldn’t go on, he couldn’t go on letting Kath. He plodded along with his eyes on the windows, hair-cut and small tailors, Apprentice wanted, Smart Lad to learn. He knew there was a job somewhere, and he had to find it. He turned a corner and came face to face across the street with a slab of house-high hoardings, Bovo for Bonny Bairns, and a grinning crane-top in a gap between roofs. He knew suddenly with certainty that he would never get a job. He stopped short and read it over, Bovo for Bonny Bairns. It meant nothing to him and the crane meant nothing, and it meant nothing that a dingy house or two had been pulled down and hoardings were up house-high along the site. But when he had first seen the five-foot blue letters on the red ground, and the slanting crane-head and a yard or so of tiles on the next roof, he had known he would never get a job.

It takes sixteen months for Robert to find a job, by which point he hovers just short of suicide. Trevelyan’s depiction of the grim ordeal of unemployment rivals anything in the first half of Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. And Trevelyan shares Orwell’s cynical assessment of capitalism’s effects on the individual. “They might always have been like that, he a coward and she not really caring about anything, but they hadn’t known it,” Robert thinks. “That was what the machine had done to them, shown them one another. Each had seen the other as something the machine didn’t want.”

It would be interesting to take a closer look at the parallels between Trevelyan’s work and Orwell’s. The powers of capitalism — abetted by the opium of consumerism — depicted in Two Thousand Million Man-Power are every bit as relentless and dehumanizing as anything in Nineteen Eighty-Four. When their fortunes take a turn again for the better, Katherine grows harder and colder (her hair in “tight, metallic waves”), like a well-tempered piece of machinery. Robert, on the other hand, edges closer and closer to insanity:

When he thinks about it, he can see the rims of his glasses, he tries to push the glasses further on so that he can’t see the rims; he finds he can always see them; now he has once seen them he can’t stop seeing them: he is conscious of seeing everything through the small round portholes of his glasses, as if he were seeing it through the end of a tunnel; he can always see the frame edging the picture. It gets on his nerves, always seeing the rims: he blinks, and the blink becomes a habit; he frowns, and stretches his brown and frowns, trying to drag the frame further on.

In the end, his only way to survive is to surrender: “There’d been a time when he used to believe in things, and in Kath, and in himself, and now he didn’t believe in anything.”

I’m no expert in British literature, but it seems to me that Two Thousand Million Man-Power could well be seen as the closest counterpart to The Grapes of Wrath one could find among British novels of the Thirties. It carries a powerful punch in both social and psychological terms. It could easily bookend Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s social history of 1930s Britain, The Long Week-End — only the title would have to be changed to The Seemingly Endless Week. And it serves as another demonstration of the need to rescue G. E. Trevelyan’s work from the slough of neglect where it’s lain for the last eighty years.

Two Thousand Million Man-Power, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: Victor Gollancz, 1937

The Last Blue Sea, by David Forrest (1959)

Cover of first edition of David Forrest was the pen-name of Australian writer, academic and historian David Denholm (1924-1997). Among his numerous works of non-fiction, including an acclaimed history, The Colonial Australians about the early white settlement of the country, were a few novels. The Last Blue Sea, published in 1959, was his first. The book drew considerably praise and attention when released in Australia and the US. However, the novel went out of print by the early 1970s and was then largely forgotten. Penguin Books Australia published a reprint in
1985 but the book has remained off the shelves since.

Forrest, a veteran himself of WW2, fought with the 59th Battalion of the Australian Army in New Guinea in 1943. That unit, although it had fought as a regular formation in the First World War, had been down-graded to a part-time reservist (militia) unit during the inter-war years. When the Second World War began, the 59th was re-assembled as a militia force. During the war, such militia units, comprised of conscripts and a smaller number of part-time reservists, formed a large part of the Australian army after 1942.

During the war, there was considerable animosity between the militia units and the men of the AIF (Australian Imperial Force), the latter comprising the volunteers who enlisted in the early part of the war. With some justification, the AIF units regarded themselves as better-trained, more professional and more motivated than the Militia men, whom the former nick-named “Chockos” i.e., chocolate soldiers who always melted under fire. There was no doubt that some militia formations deserved their poor reputations, especially those that remained garrisoned in Australia and were rife with in-discipline, desertions and poor morale. Yet some militia units performed remarkably well in the New Guinea Campaign, most famously at Kokoda in 1942. One can say “remarkably” considering the often poor training, lack of equipment and indifferent leadership many militia units were burdened with (some men arrived in New Guinea literally never having fired a rifle before).

With this background in mind, Forrest’s novel depicts a Militia unit—the 83rd battalion—in the campaign in eastern New Guinea in 1943 as US and Australian forces advance northwards, slowly pushing back the Japanese. The story is told from the viewpoints of a number of characters, including the battalion’s senior officers. But the primary focus is on one platoon and, in particular, on one of its’ sections comprising a Corporal and eight privates.

If the novel has any main characters, they would be two privates, 19-year-old Ron Fisher, a Bren-gunner and 26-year-old Robert “the Admiral” Nelson, a former schoolteacher and now an Owen (Australian-made sub-machine-gun) gunner. Nelson, the oldest of the section, has the fatherly role of the group. Yet even he, with his worldly wisdom, appears in awe of Fisher, an enigmatic figure, mature far beyond his years and whose background is only hinted at but indicates that he survived a tough childhood and is now a man that understands life more than many men twice his age.

The platoon engages the Japanese in the steaming, thickly forested steep slopes of New Guinea. The enemy, under-supplied and starving, fight desperately and with suicidal courage. In this struggle, there is no quarter, the enemy is never examined close-up, he remains a distant, hated figure. The militia men have to endure the taunts and insults from their AIF cousins. As the platoon advances through a ruined town, watching them are some AIF commandoes who snort with contempt “any battle they start, we have to finish.” The army is on a race against time, not just against the enemy but against the jungle and its climate. The campaign must be won before too many men succumb to malaria and before their rotting uniforms literally fall from their bodies.

The potential weaknesses of the militia is personified in one soldier of the section, private “Nervous” Lincoln who deserts early in the campaign but is caught and returned to his unit. He nearly makes it through to the very end of the advance before succumbing to his fear. To modern eyes, this might redeem him but as far as his comrades are concerned, “they would remember all their lives that Lincoln was not with them.” A major theme of the novel is the meaning to human existence that can be discovered by the endurance of hardship and danger. The Pacific Ocean (the “last blue sea” of the title) becomes a symbol as it slowly, tantalisingly becomes nearer as the exhausted soldiers advance through the jungle against the surviving enemy. A symbol of promise, of peace, of a just reward for hardship, sacrifice and duty. As the novel progresses, it becomes apparent that faint-hearted types like Lincoln were the exception, not the rule. “Their uniforms were rotting and falling apart, but their weapons were spotlessly clean.”

The novel explores the inner musings of the characters. In this, it anticipates such a device employed in the 1998 war movie The Thin Red Line although Forrest’s novel is not as dreamily lyrical as that film. Like all war novels published prior to the 1970s, there is a curious lack of coarse language, a reflection of the need to satisfy censors of the day. One critic did suggest that the novel’s depiction of Australian soldiers lacked the cheeky humour that they were known for, saying the Aussies in this novel are “way too serious and philosophical” in their manner. That might be unfair, given that these half-trained soldiers had been sent to one of the harshest terrains of the war against one of the most fanatical enemies, so a sombre mood might be understandable. In one later scene, Nelson, now a walking wounded case, is sent back to the rear accompanied by a younger injured soldier. The two crippled men have to climb a forested mountain, through clinging mud and steaming rain, their wounds crawling with infection. Seeing that the younger man’s will and strength is failing, Nelson saves him by goading him, “Didn’t you have to fight for anything, Jonesy? Was life just dished out to you on a silver plate?”

In another scene during the long trek back, Nelson says to Jones, “You can make this mountain mean something. I climbed a mountain once. When I was your age. And then I wasted the next seven years. You see, I should have gone on and climbed the next mountain. Only when I was over the first one, I sat down. I had to come to New Guinea to wake up to myself ….”

The Last Blue Sea remains curiously little-known in Australia, despite the lavish attention bestowed on this nation’s military history. It is one Australian novel that deserves a fresh audience.

This is a guest post generously contributed by Peter Hill [email protected]

The Last Blue Sea, by David Forrest
Melbourne: Heinemann, 1959

A Walk in the Sun, by Harry Brown (1944)

A Walk in the Sun was a slim war novel first published in 1944 which generated considerable hype and attention upon its initial release, followed closely by a successful film version. Yet, despite the praise of many reviewers and the conviction that this was a major work of war fiction, the book was soon forgotten. Perhaps it was obscured by the euphoria surrounding the end of the Second World War or more likely, it was elbowed aside by the spate of more self-important ‘big’ war novels that emerged in the United States in the post-war era.

Harry Brown (1917-1986) was an American writer & poet who achieved a measure of success in the post-war era. Born in Maine and educated at Harvard, Brown had works of poetry published in 1941 after winning several poetry awards, including the Shelley Prize in 1939. Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbour, Brown enlisted in the military in July 1941, serving in the US Army Engineers Corps. After the United States joined the war, the army put Brown’s writing skills to use by assigning him to the staff of Yank Magazine in 1942, a job he held until the end of hostilities.

After the war, Brown turned to writing as a full-time profession. By the early 1960s, he had produced four novels, a play, several collections of verse and he had written several Hollywood screenplays and had collaborated on a number of others. His play A Sound of Hunting (1946) was later filmed in 1952 as Eight Iron Men while his 1960 novel The Stars in their Courses inspired the 1966 John Wayne Western El Dorado. Screenplays that Brown worked on included The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and Ocean’s 11 (1960) and he was co-recipient of an Oscar for best screenplay for A Place in the Sun (1951).

A Walk in the Sun was Brown’s first novel, a work he wrote during his spare time while working for Yank. Released in 1944, the novel was an instant success, receiving much praise and it was serialised in Liberty Magazine that same year, expanding its audience. A film version was released the following year, directed by Lewis Milestone (of All Quiet on the Western Front fame). Critics received the novel warmly upon its initial release, the New York Times calling it the “best novel of the war.” Yet the novel quickly slid into obscurity during the next few years, as did, albeit to a lesser extent, the accompanying film version.

In just a few short years, the United States had advanced from an isolationist country ravaged by the Great Depression into an industrial and military super-power. Among the intelligentsia of the US, the final vestiges of the cultural cringe (inferiority complex) towards Europe were being eradicated as American artists and writers now felt able and emboldened to take their place on the world stage. For the American literacy scene, an event as momentous as the Second World War demanded a great and important novel, a new War & Peace for the 20th century. When Brown’s novel appeared in 1944, for a brief moment critics thought that the great American war novel had already arrived. Yet the post-war years saw a steady succession of WW2 novels, all generating attention and impressive sales, all of them big and long (some might say bloated and over-long). The war-novel “boom,” that lasted a decade and a half after 1945, began with Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions which both appeared in 1948, followed by Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny and James Jones’ From Here to Eternity (both 1951). Bringing up the rear came other (as popular albeit less-regarded) novels such as Leon Uris’ Battle Cry (1953), Anton Myrer’s The Big War (1957) and David MacCuish’s now-forgotten Do Not Go Gentle (1960). Brown’s book was simply swamped by this crowd of “big” war novels.

Looking back after nearly three-quarters of a century, it appears that while Brown’s little novel was perhaps over-praised upon its release, it is also true that it had been unjustly neglected in the decades since. The novel begins at the sharp end, in the early dawn, a landing barge carrying a platoon of GIs is approaching the coast of Italy. The novel is intentionally vague on the details- there is no mention of a date, or the exact location, there is no backdrop to the story, nor any explanation of the wider campaign of which this little group is a part of. As the novel begins, the platoon CO Lieutenant Rand has just been wounded in the head by shrapnel from a nearby shell, a freak casualty from one of the few shots the enemy has fired. The senior Sergeant, Halverson, is now in charge. Shortly after landing on the beach, Halverson leaves his men to go find the Company Captain but never returns, a victim of an enemy machine-gun nest. Command now falls to Sergeant Porter, a job he does not want.

The rest of the novel follows the shrinking platoon as it advances inland. Most of the men are veterans, having seen action in North Africa and Sicily. Some are already war-weary and one man will be claimed by combat fatigue before the morning is out. The novel is a simple one, the time span it covers is only half a day from dawn to early afternoon. No locations are mentioned, as far as the reader knows, it is just somewhere on the Italian coast. No context is supplied, the dwindling platoon seems to be on their own, marching inland towards an enemy-held farmhouse. The ending is ambiguous, there is no neat conclusion. It is like the author has simply taken a neat slice from the progress of one day in the life of an infantry unit in a combat zone. Only the reader has the benefit of hindsight, knowing that this is merely the first morning of what will be a very long and bloody campaign of which few of the platoon, if such a rate of attrition continues, will see the end of.

The style is straightforward and unpretentious. After the lengthy and self-important novels mentioned above, the simplicity of this little work seems refreshing. The characters in Brown’s novel only concern themselves with the present. There is no sentimentalising about memories of home, no musing on the deeper meaning of the conflict, no debates on the wider implications of what they do. As British regulars used to say in the Great War, these men are “‘ere coz they’re ‘ere.” There is certainly the influence of Hemingway but I would argue that Brown’s novel has more in common with the “Hard-Boiled” crime novels of the Thirties with its direct simplicity and its bluntness that nonetheless avoids explicit detail. A contemporary review in the Nation argued that Brown’s novel owed more to the short stories of James Thurber rather than Hemingway, as the novel does not have the righteous anger of the latter. That argument is valid, Brown’s characters may gripe and grumble but they do not rage against their fate. Like the characters in Thurber’s works, the members of the platoon are ordinary, decent men caught up in un-usual (or in this case, extreme) circumstances. Despite being a tiny fragment of a vast machine, they retain their identity as individuals. Despite the untidy confusion of war and the unjust randomness of who dies and who survives, these men remain compelled to keep going.

This is a guest post generously contributed by Peter Hill [email protected]

A Walk in the Sun, by Harry Brown
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944

The King of the Barbareens, by Janet Hitchman (1960)

Cover of Peacock edition of The King of the Barbareens
The King of the Barbareens is a memoir of a childhood spent as a bit of jetsam tossed about in the social welfare system that existed in England in the early part of the 20th century. Apart from an impression of watching an Armistice parade at the age of two, Janet Hitchman’s first memories are of living with Gran and Granfer Sparkes in their little house at the end of the “loke” in a village outside Norfolk.

“Another one of your grandchildren, Mrs. Sparkes,” people would ask when seeing the child for the first time. “No, no relation of mine. None whatever.” She slept in a tiny old cot next to Gran and Granfer’s bed, with no bed clothes and just a piece of flannel for warmth. All she knew was that Gran Sparkes had promised her dying mother that the child could stay with her.

Elsie May Fields — the name Janet Hitchman found on her birth certificate — had been born in July 1916 to Margaret Ames, a seamstress. Her father’s name was left blank. On the back was penciled “Frederick Burrows, deceased 27.9.1916.” Doing a little digging on a genealogical site, I learned one reason why little Elsie was given up to the care of others. Burrows had been killed while serving on the Western Front. Her mother was a widow with two children and had clearly had an affair with Burrows several years after her husband’s death. What family Elsie might have had didn’t want to claim a soldier’s bastard as their own.

Over the next fifteen years, Elsie was carried along through an almost random series of arrangements. When a lump behind her ear was diagnosed as a mastoid, she was taken into a hospital where the treatment and recovery, in the days before antibiotics, was long and painful. Brought back to the Sparkes, she was quickly taken away again when a social worker decided the conditions in their home were too filthy for a child, and placed in the care of a widow:

As we sat at tea I brought forward a problem that had worried me since we met.

“What shall I call you?” I asked.

“What did you call Mrs. Everett?”

“Aunt Ada; but I’d rather call you Mummy.”

“Thass all right. I er bin called a thing or two in my time. Mum’s better than most of ’em.”

Then one day, when Elsie was about nine, Mum came in and said, “Elsie you’re going away tomorrow.” The girl was transferred to Gimingham Hall, where a Mrs Huntly and a small staff cared for a home full of elderly women, “all a bit ‘gone’ in the head.” As an adult, Hitchman concluded it was a private mental home and her transfer was probably a mistake. There were 25 “inmates,” several troubled teenage girls, and one other girl close to Elsie’s age. After her initial shock at seeing the women in the home rocking back and forth in their chairs or polishing a single piece of silver for hours on end, she accommodated to her new home. The inmates were gentle with her, Mrs Huntley a bit too concerned about heaven and hell but generally kind. The one thing that most disturbed her were the “pig-killing screams” that some of the women made when it came time to be bathed. “It will be all right,” one of the women on the staff told her. “It is only noise.”

“It give me a pain.”

“You mustn’t let it. It is only noise. You’ll hear worse and louder before you die.”

“There isn’t any worse noise that someone afraid.”

“All the noise of Hitler’s bombardment has not shaken me in this opinion,” Hitchman added.

Once again, the current picked up Elsie and carried her along to another foster home, and then to the Thomas Anguish Hospital School of Housecraft for Girls in Norwich, a charity home for teenage girls. Elsie found the home “a very happy place,” and the women in charge encouraged her to pursue her love for writing: “Once when turning out the box room Miss Hayhurst had unearthed a pile of obsolete hand bills, advertising some long-forgotten church bazaar. She met me on the landing and said: ‘Would you like these, Elsie: you can write on the backs.’ I have never in my life received a present that gave me so much pleasure.”

Despite, this, though, Elsie had a strong rebellious streak, and one day was called into the office and informed she would be moved to one of Dr. Barnardo’s homes. “‘Barnardo’s,’ I gasped, ‘but that’s a reformatory.'” The Barnardo Home outside Norwich she was sent to was, in fact, a very well-run and progressive institution for its time. “It ran like clockwork; it was magnificent,” Hitchman writes. “I loathed it.”

At thirteen, a veteran of a dozen different placements, Elsie was perhaps too independent a spirit to benefit from the safe, clean, and very efficient environment, which primarily aimed at rescuing children from the most desperate conditions of poverty and neglect. “At Barnardo’s drawing breath was our only freedom; and then it had to be drawn silently.” She was given free access to books and had time to find a quiet corner and read, and she devoured what the home could supply. It was then that Elsie decided to change her name to Janet after reading Jane Eyre. She would later write a biography of Dr. Thomas Barnardo, They Carried the Sword (1966).

After three years at Barnardo’s, Janet was taken to a boarding house in London to study for the civil service exam. The plan was for her to become a postal clerk. She rebelled again, however, and found herself, at the age of seventeen, fending for herself. She took a place in a hostel for young women and got a job in the shipping department at Debenham’. But the cost of room and board — meager to begin with — left her with almost nothing. She slept most of her time off sleeping: it was her cheapest option. “I suppose it sounds a shocking thing for a seventeen year-old girl to spend all her spare time asleep; but there it is; I was waiting for something to happen, enduring the dust and noise of the dispatch room in a kind of coma, until somebody noticed I was quietly dying.”

Janet Hitchman, 1968
Janet Hitchman, 1968
Fortunately, a move to another department, one with windows, and a raise in pay saved her, and she began to explore London — at least as much as she could with just three shillings a week in pocket money. She moved on from the store to a series of seamstress jobs and ended up, almost by accident, as the stage manager for a small but lively theater company. That led to meeting a young designer, Michael Hitchman, marriage, a child, divorce, and surviving unhappily as a domestic. “The great thing is not to be dependent on other people,” she writes near the end of the book, in what could stand as the orphan’s motto.

The King of the Barbareens leaves Hitchman at the age of forty. “Life has been much easier since I faced the fact that I am not a very nice or likeable person,” she writes. Religion, in the form of a Quaker community, has provided some consolation. And she has finally achieved her ambition of earning a living as a writer.

Hitchman went on to write for The Observer and other papers. She wrote a number of plays and radio productions for the BBC, the Barnardo biography, and in 1968 a novel, Meeting for Burial, based on several people she knew from the Quaker community in Norwich. Her best known book was Such a Strange Lady (1976), the first major biography of Dorothy Sayers, which received generally favorable reviews despite Hitchman’s not being given access to Sayers’ private papers. She died in Norwich in 1980.

“Time and again throughout my childhood,” Hitchman writes in her memoir, “I had heard people shrug off my orphan state with the words, ‘Well, what you’ve never had, you can’t miss.’ There was never a greater fallacy.” “I wanted relations, people I could call mine by right, not courtesy.” While rich in the variety of characters Hitchman recalls, The King of the Barbareens is a powerful account of what it’s like to be truly alone and powerless in the world.

The King of the Barbareens, by Janet Hitchman
London: Putnam, 1960

Canaille, by Kathleen Sully (1956)

Cover of Canaille by Kathleen SullyIn his Observer review of Canaille, Kathleen Sully’s second book, John Wain wrote, “one never knows what she will do from one page to the next, only that it will probably be something surprising.” After reading over a dozen of Sully’s novels, I can say that truer words have rarely been written.

Canaille (French for vulgar, roguish, blackguard) collects two novellas, “For What We Receive” and “The Weeping and The Laughter.” Neither is the least bit like the other, and while “For What We Receive” is a bit in the vein of Canal in Moonlight, Sully’s first novel, and Through the Wall, which followed a year later: life among the hardscrabble poor of industrial England, the bread-and-drippings set. Although she occasionally descends into “we were poor but honest” sentimentality, Sully never softens her edges. “For pity’s sake use your snot-rag, Nat” is the opening line, and personal hygiene is no one’s strong suit in this book.

Nat is Nathan Mellowe, a likeable but clumsy and slow lad working in a garage. The six Mellowes live in a shack at the edge of town, Mr Mellowes being a farm laborer whose primary skill is shoveling. Nat and the rest of the Mellowes come to the rescue of Beryl, the garage’s pretty typist, when she is left in the family way by a Yank lothario passing through town, and he and Beryl wind up married merely to provide her with a semblance of propriety when the baby arrives. A few more bumps along the road of their life and, with the help of family, co-workers, and neighbors, something more grows from their Platonic relationship. “For What We Receive” might well be subtitled, “It Take a Village to Make a Marriage.”

“The Weeping and The Laughter,” on the other hand, might be described as a nightmare within a dream about a nightmare, and even that isn’t close to being accurate. It opens in a hospital ward, where an elderly woman with her leg in a cast is furiously writing out an account of a dream. It it, she escapes in the night from a hellish boarding house, perhaps a brothel, and encounters an equally mysterious man as she stands on a bridge contemplating suicide. “I learnt to get out of myself: I used to flow through the top of my head, go to the window, jump off into space and fly about like and owl,” she tells him.

She then relates how she married a Scottish fisherman and lived with him and his mother in a rough stone cottage by the sea. Winter sets in, the mother dies, and she is sitting there by the fireside, knitting the man’s socks “and hating it with all the hate I had.” Then she is the woman of the house in a fine city residence, surrounded by convivial friends, when she floats away again:

Sitting, sitting, sitting, and eventually thinking nothing, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, feeling nothing but a sense of smug possession.

The bell must have clanged on, noting each hour of each day, week, month and year. The community must have gone about its business of waking, working, eating and sleeping. There must have been merry-making, and mourning, too; and there must have been accidents, blood must have flowed and music must have set young feet dancing and gay hearts beating, yet I was aware of nothing until some time, I have no notion of when, the bell stopped.

Then she is a slum mother of nine thin, hungry children, worried about lice and scabs and where the next meal will come from. Then she is in a train station, watching other people in a mirror. “One face interested me more than the others, although it was a caricature of a face.” She discovers the face is hers. She takes a train to a remote seaside village where she rents a caravan near the beach and wanders about, trying to unravel her dreams. A neighbor, a beachcomber living in a shack (shades of A Man Talking to Seagulls) recites Ernest Dowson’s poem, “They Are Not Long”:

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

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

“It isn’t true,” she tells him. “Every desire, every smile, every hateful thought, all leave their mark and are carried by us to where next we go.”

Where next we go is into a Somerset town, where Mr. Upforde, a draper, lives with his wife and their three daughters, Vera, Grace, and Lennie. Vera is lovely, Grace homely and awkward, Lennie rather peculiar, not quite all there. Mr Upforde dotes on Vera, ignores Lennie, and shuns Grace to the point where she cuts herself just to get some attention. We follow the girls through several decades and several alternate narratives, winding up in a seaside cottage where the three women, all spinsters now, sit in a fetid bath of bitterness and recrimination.

Somehow Sully manages to tie all these odd, diverse, and loose threads together in the end. It is all as convincing and unreal as a nightmare. Reviewing the book for the Guardian, Norman Shrapnel summed it up well:

A woman’s day-dreaming has, as it were, its bluff called and is transposed into real life. Where does the one end and the other begin? The writer seems to be suggesting that the boundary is subtly confusing and yet vital to disentangle, which is rather like scrambling all the eggs and then telling us to count our chickens. But again she has the power, and it is an unanswerable one, of being able to carry us with her into her fantasies.

The TLS reviewer of Canaille described Sully as “a Sunday writer,” adapting the phrase, “Sunday painter.” I think this is a fair assessment of Sully’s talent. On the one hand, she was unschooled, unstylish, sometimes incorrect in her usage (e.g., disinterested to mean uninterested). But that lack of schooling also allowed her tremendous imaginative and narrative freedom, to a degree comparable only with that of Doris Lessing and J. G. Ballard in her generation of English novelists.

(As an aside, one possible reason Sully was largely neglected even when her books were in print is the erratic quality of her dust jacket designs. When I first received Canaille, between the French title and the coarse yet artistically affected figures on the cover, I thought it would turn out to be a story set on the waterfront in Marseilles. Even Gollancz’s simple but garish canary yellow covers are better than this.)

Canaille, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1956

Canaille

The Tribulations of a Baronet, by Timothy Eden (1933)

Cover of the Spredden Press reissue of The Tribulations of a BaronetI first mentioned The Tribulations of a Baronet in a post derived from an article titled “Out of Print” from the TLS in 1961. At the time, I wrote that it “appears to be a bit like Joe Gould’s Secret, another masterful portrait of a man of great promise and much disappointment.”

Having since read Tribulations, I would now say it resembles Joe Gould’s Secret in another way: it’s also one of the best short biographies of the 20th century. In both books there is wonderful writing, unforgettable characterization, and — most exceptionally — an amazing combination of surgical dispassion and aching empathy.

Not that the two men had much in common. Sir William Eden was 7th Baronet of Auckland and 5th Baronet of Maryland, magistrate of County Durham, lord of Windlestone Hall, and father of future Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, while Gould was a Bowery denizen who claimed to be writing the greatest work of history while, in fact, he was just a little more colorful than the next panhandler. Joe Gould made promises he could never live up to. William Eden never lived up to the promises made for him by his birthright.

William’s grandfather, Sir Frederick Eden, was a scholar and advocate for social justice. His father, also Sir William, was a sober and pious man who watched six of his eleven children die, leaving his second son, William, as the eldest surviving heir. William had been a dashing soldier, a cornet in the 8th Hussars, a daring traveler on the Grand Tour, and had developed a great love of art, becoming something of a fine touch with watercolors himself. Heir to a large fortune, the seat of an old county family, and a title, William was arguably among the most privileged men in the world. Unfortunately, as Timothy — his son — writes,

Thus he was induced neither by poverty nor obscurity of birth, nor by timidity — for he was physically and morally fearless — nor by the slightest vestige of self-discipline, to restrain the exuberance of his feelings. Nature had showered upon him with an uncontrolled hand her gifts and her curses alike, and without control he received them all, and without control he expended them.

Sir William Eden, Master of the Hunt
Sir William Eden, Master of the Hunt
As Master of the Durham Hunt, he was the model of the modern major horseman: “The neatest figure on a horse I have ever seen,” another Master told Timothy years after his father’s death. But he expected his fellow huntsmen to keep to the same rigid standards or risk banishment. As a father, “he could not endure, for long, even the presence of his own children.” “Their casual irresponsibility irritated him,” and he fled the house whenever they returned from school in numbers. The one lesson he drilled them on was that of natural born superiority: “Walk as if you had bought the earth!” he proclaimed.

When unhappy with the portrait of his wife that James McNeill Whistler painted on contract, he handed a Whistler a check for a hundred guineas, which he considered a fair price for something “the size of a note.” Whistler, whose self-esteem rivaled Eden’s, responded with a snarky note. Eden offered to pay 150 guineas instead. Whistler then declared that the painting was no longer for sale. The two rams proceeded to batter away at each other, taking their dispute to the press and then to the courts in Paris. Although Eden won the suit in the end, Whistler had the last word, publishing his own tract, The Baronet and the Butterfly, skewering the knight with his own pride. “Nobless Abuse!” announced the epigraph of Whistler’s diatribe. And he eventually destroyed the painting.

Sir William’s extreme cankerousness alone is the stuff of a fascinating portrait, but there is such wonderful writing here that I must have highlighted something on every third page of this book. This opening of a chapter entitled, “The Garden of Eden,” for example, could have come from Waugh or Wodehouse:

It is six o’clock in the morning. A dove in the sycamore outside the window gurgles in delicious satisfaction. A butterfly, mysteriously detached from its fellows on the wall-paper, flutters once and disappears into the pattern. A sheep bleats, a thrush pours out its song like a cascade, the triumphant light of summer bursts through the curtains, and William Eden awakes to another bloody day.

For a long time he lies and considers the hideousness of life; the treachery of friends, the frustration of endeavour, the futility, the hopelessness of it all.

One of his great passions was for his garden. His views on gardens were as iconoclastic as his views on politics, religion, riding, shooting — well, pretty much everything. “I have come to the conclusion that it is flowers that ruin a garden,” he once wrote in an article for the Saturday Review. If his gardeners erred the least bit in carrying out his instructions, he would erupt in fury. “I’ll bury you there myself, if I see another red flower!” he raged at one. Yet, at the same time, he considered the whole exercise ultimately futile. “All this that I have done, the trees, the grass, the flowers, all this beautiful place, second to none in England, what will become of it after my death? Thrown away, wasted, on a young man with an eye-glass who thinks of nothing but hunting and polo ponies!”

In his last years, he grew only more embittered and irritable:

… no member of his family is free from offence. All, in his eyes, are conspiring and plotting against him, and he sees himself isolated, with his back to the wall, surrounded by treachery and deceit but determined to hold his own against everything and everybody, to make his enemies his footstool.

When war broke out in August of 1914, he blamed every side and tolerated none. “Don’t you go giving your money to those damned refugees!” he warned his servants and tenants. Weakened and confined to a wheelchair, he makes one last attempt to shoot and misses. Take away the guns, he instructs his gillie. “And never let me see them again!” A few months later, an old friend came to break the news that his eldest son had been killed on the Western Front. When he died in early 1915, a notebook was found at his bedside. The last entry read, “The worm of the world hath eaten out my heart.”

“Great men, whatever they may think of the world, realise that they are of it and that they must work in it, with it and through it,” Timothy writes near the end of the book. “If they are refreshed and refined by nectar and ambrosia, it is from the world that they must draw their basic nourishment of food and water.” And it is here, he concludes, that his father failed. “He had no opinion of the human heart.” In another age, he might have flourished. “In spite of these grave defects, partly because of them, such a man might have made a magnificent despot in the sixteenth century.”

The Tribulations of a Baronet was first published by Macmillan in 1933. It fell out of print for the next sixty years, until Gillian Dickinson reissued it from the Spredden Press, an independent press specializing in books about Durham and Northumberland (including the Spredden Northern Classics series), in 1993. Dickinson died in 2002 and the book has been out of print ever since.

The Tribulations of a Baronet, by Timothy (later Sir Timothy) Eden
London: Macmillan, 1933

“To my Daughter on her Birthday,” from Yorkshire Lyrics, collected by John Hartley

To My Daughter on Her Birthday

To my Daughter on her Birthday

Darling child, to thee I owe,
More than others here will know;
Thou hast cheered my weary days,
With thy coy and winsome ways.
When my heart has been most sad,
Smile of thine has made me glad;
In return, I wish for thee,
Health and sweet felicity.
May thy future days be blest,
With all things the world deems best.
If perchance the day should come,
Thou does leave thy childhood’s home;
Bound by earth’s most sacred ties,
With responsibilities,
In another’s life to share,
Wedded joys and worldly care;
May thy partner worthy prove,–
Richest in thy constant love.
Strong in faith and honour, just,–
With brave heart on which to trust.
One, to whom when troubles come,
And the days grow burdensome,
Thou canst fly, with confidence
In his love’s plenipotence.
And if when some years have flown,
Sons and daughters of your own
Bless your union, may they be
Wellsprings of pure joy to thee.
And when age shall line thy brow,
And thy step is weak and slow,–
And the end of life draws near
May’st thou meet it without fear;
Undismayed with earth’s alarms,–
Sleeping,–to wake in Jesus’ arms.

From Yorkshire Lyrics, Poems written in the Dialect as Spoken in the West Riding of Yorkshire. To which are added a Selection of Fugitive Verses not in the Dialect, by John Hartley (1898). Available on the Internet Archive (Link).

Happy birthday, Alice. Love, Dad.

The Man Next Door, by Emanuel Litvinoff (1968)

Cover of the first U.S. edition of The Man Next Door

With English anti-Semitism a matter of headline news, the time is perfect for some quick-witted publisher to reissue Emanuel Litvinoff’s second novel, The Man Next Door, which is a case study of how hate can turn a proper Englishman into a seething cauldron of antagonism and violence. Litvinoff does operate on the level of a prankster in the high school chemistry lab in a way, as he deliberately sets a catalyst — a Jewish couple with a Holocaust refugee mother-in-law — next to a highly combustible substance.

Even before David and Sylvia Winston (originally Weinstein) move into the empty house next door, Harold Bollam is an unstable compound. A mid-level manager in International Utilities, back in London after a long stretch in West Africa, Harold is having trouble adapting. “Forty-five was too old to change,” he thinks at one point. Younger men are beginning to rise above him. His wife Edna has failed him by getting older, too. And everything is slipping away from him:

The country had gone mad for gimmicks. Young smart alecks were getting in everywhere. Long-haired pop-singers bought up the stately homes, public opinion media were in the hands of queers and sensation-mongers who made England look cheap in the eyes of the world. Cheap, indeed, when black college boys became prime ministers of ridiculous “independent” states, dined with the Queen and lectured the British on the what’s-what of democracy.

Harold looks back wistfully to living in a country “where blacks were regarded as getting above themselves if they put a pair of boots on their naked feet.”

Like most objects of hatred, the Winstons don’t actually have to do anything to arouse Harold’s anger. They simply have to be. To be younger and better looking, have a pretty daughter, have a better car, have newer, nicer furniture. And in any case, it isn’t Harold who harbors a grudge: it’s them, even if they haven’t the guts to admit it. “Only the Jews hoarded their grievances, maintaining a cold, exclusive conspiracy against the world.”

As the story progresses, Harold’s ability to bottle up his resentments behind the exterior of a dignified, bowler-hatted gentleman erodes. He gets drunk, begins ranting in a pub about women, minorities, Jews, the bosses, goes to a prostitute, insults Edna. When he runs into Sylvia Winston on Regent Street, he offers her a ride home, then corners her into having dinner with him, then attempts to force himself upon her.

Yet Litvinoff somehow manages to keep the reader from utterly despising Harold. His pain, his fear, his loss of self is too palpable, too raw to see him as simply a demon. Alone in his living room, “He had a queer notion that if he went over and looked in the mirror now it would offer no image but that of an empty room.” And as his hatred consumes him and leads him to even more violence, Harold is still left with a tiny core of decency that cannot be erased.

“The British answer to Portnoy’s Complaint” Martin Levin wrote in his New York Times review — possibly one of the most inaccurate comparisons ever made by a critic. There is little funny and nothing sexy about The Man Next Door. More than anything, this is a book about how resentment builds to a boiling point when a person feels that youth, power, success, and even just self-esteem is being taken away and there is nothing to do but get angrier and angrier. And a book about how fear is the base emotion for an oppressor. It’s a book that’s relevant in the U.K, in the U.S., and in any other country where a once-secure majority feels itself losing control.

The Man Next Door is available in electronic formats on the Open Library (Link).

The Man Next Door, by Emanuel Litvinoff
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1968

The Fractured Smile, by Kathleen Sully (1965)

Cover of The Fractured Smile by Kathleen Sully

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Way Out of Berkeley Square, by Rosemary Tonks (1970)

Cover of "The Way Out of Berkeley Square"

Rosemary Tonks is now known as the poet who disappeared, thanks to a 2009 BBC program (“The Poet Who Vanished”) and features in the Guardian, TLS, the London Review of Books, the Poetry Foundation and others following her death in May 2014 and the reissue that fall of Bedouin of the London Evening, a collection of her poems and selected prose. In truth, she didn’t disappear as much as take a deliberate decision to step away from the life of London and literature she’d led since the mid-1950s. She had health problems, became a devout Christian, and spent her last thirty years in Bournemouth having little or no contact with the large circle of writers, artists, and friends she had known. Sometime in late 1981, she retrieved most of her souvenirs and papers from storage in London and burned them in her garden incinerator. In the years before her death, she read only from the Bible.

The reissue of Bedouin of the London Evening has done much to restore Rosemary Tonks’ standing as an innovative and challenging poet of the sixties. Though praised when her two collections of poems were first published, her poetry is aggressive, edgy, unsettled. “Her poems matched the forceful personality, being rhetorically explosive, with more exclamation marks than anyone else used,” one of her contemporaries recalled. She was neither feminist nor conservative: more than anything, she was an individualist. Several observers have remarked that she most admired the spirit of the flâneur — “equal parts curiosity and laziness” — as embodied in the work of Balzac and Baudelaire:

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define.

She was a creature of the city. As she writes in “Diary of a Rebel,”

For my fierce hot-blooded sulkiness
I need the café – where old mats
Of paper lace catch upon coatsleeves
That are brilliant with the nap of idleness
…And the cant of the meat-fly is eternal!

Cover of Bedouin of the London Evening by Rosemary TonksShe told a Guardian interviewer in 1968 that she used to drive straight into the centre of London each morning, and then to a cafe south of Putney Bridge, where she had scrambled eggs. And the photo on the cover of Bedouin of the London Evening shows her at work at a sidewalk table, a large café-au-lait sitting beside a stack of books and papers. Bloodaxe Books is to be commended for taking advantage of ebook technology and included recordings of Tonks reading a dozen of her poems, along with an interview with Peter Orr, in the EPUB and Kindle versions.

Tonks’ work as a novelist, however, has yet to be rediscovered, for the simple reason that it’s almost impossible to get hold of one of her six novels. The cheapest copy goes for over $70, the dearest for over $400. And forget about finding Emir (1963) outside a couple handfuls of libraries worldwide (she disowned it, anyway). Thanks to the Public Library of India, however, you can find her first novel, Opium Fogs (1963), online in electronic formats.

With the help of my daughter and the University of Washington Library, I was able recently to read Tonks’ 1970 novel, A Way Out of Berkeley Square. At the time it came out, the book probably seemed too odd, too marginal to merit much consideration. “I’m thirty, and I’m stuck,” Tonks’ protagonist, Arabella, complains. Living with her father, romantically involved with a married man, and barely employed with the job of decorating some flats her father is renovating, she was neither the Victorian model of a spinster nor the Seventies’ vision of a woman taking charge of her own life. One reviewer dismissed Arabella as “30 on her driver’s license and 13 in her emotional development.”

This is pretty close to her father’s estimation. He would have her be both the Victorian spinster, serving up a hot dinner and keeping a tidy home for him, and a go-getter, diving into the business of interior decoration with a profit-minded zeal. The one thing he can’t accept is what she is:

My father can’t bear ordinary life; a woman in a dirty cardigan with two pockets on the stomach misshapen by handkerchiefs makes him bristle up, the sight of a coarsely-patterned formica table with brown tea-cup rings on it and large yellow crumbs will cause him a temporary loss of personality, his ego buries itself in one of his shoes and leaves the rest of his body to look after itself, grey, inert.

“I’m out of the habit of taking action,” she thinks. “I don’t have a proper stake in life, in the world.” She definitely doesn’t care for a future of caring for her father for decades until he dies — and then having nothing to show for it. But she’s also skeptical that there is any pot of gold waiting at the end of the rainbow of marriage and/or career:

Inside the showroom I catch the eyes of various men and women, torpid and haggard as drug-addicts, as they turn over the endless fabrics. I have never actually seen a face with an expression on it in this showroom; blanks, and more blanks with dead eyes. The suffering is awful, and it goes on and on, like writing out “I must not say bloody” a hundred times at school, until you’re free to rejoin the mainstream of life.

Yet she wonders, “Shall I take this bit of life, because if I don’t I may not have any life at all?”

Her one lifeline is her brother, who has escaped from London to Karachi, where he is trying to find the distance and energy to make a start as a poet. They write each other nearly every day — he consoling her over their father’s domination, she cheering on his efforts to embrace his new surroundings and work on his writing. When his correspondence suddenly stops, she worries — then panics when she learns after a gap of weeks that he has contracted polio and is barely surviving with the help of his cook. (This parallels Tonks’ own experience of contracting typhoid and then polio while living in India early in the 1950s.)

The crisis kicks her out of her doldrums. Though still very much dependent upon him to arrange for her brother’s care and return to England, it’s Arabella who prods her complacent father and forces the action. In so doing, she discovers a capacity in herself she had not suspected: “I’ve found out that strength is silent; it doesn’t have to be talked about, proved, or borrowed from others. It isn’t even called strength, but action.”

It’s likely that The Way Out of Berkeley Square would have a more favorable reception today. A fair number of women (and men) are stuck living with their parents into their thirties with the decline in earning power and finding the experience demoralizing and emotionally stultifying. And Tonks’ prose is studded with little gems of description. Of her father’s car: “His new Bentley is fully automatic, has doors as heavy as safe doors from the Bank of England, and a steel body as wide as a ping-pong table. Inside you serve from one corner of it, while burning hot air and noisy stereophonic music try to draw off your attention, subdue, drown and kill you.” Of her married lover’s best talent: “Now there are some men who are so good at getting women across traffic that it’s a form of love-making, in which the woman is touched, protected, and lifted forward, until she reaches the opposite pavement in a state of mild delirium.” Kirkus’s reviewer called Tonks’ prose “A decorative style but it’s all parsley.” Well, if that’s parsley, I say bring it on.

The Way Out of Berkeley Square, by Rosemary Tonks
London: The Bodley Head, 1970
Boston: Gambit, Incorporated, 1970

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You should have forced my hand.”

“Easier said than done.”

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

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

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

Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey by Herself and Frances Partridge (1983)

Cover of Julia: A portrait of Julia Strachey

Julia Strachey is hardly forgotten. In 2009, Persephone Books reissued her 1932 novel Cheerful Weather for the Wedding with a cover featuring “Girl Reading,” a gorgeous painting by Harold Knight, and way back in 1978, Cheerful was reissued along with her 1951 novel The Man on the Pier (using her preferred title, An Integrated Man) as a Penguin Modern Classic.

But neither can she qualify as a major figure in English literature, even within the narrower limits of the mid-20th century. She wrote an occasional short story and some undistinguished poetry but went through years with little or no writing to show for it. So there have to be other reasons to recommend reading a book about her life. Fortunately, there are plenty. Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey is a perfect illustration of how, in the right hands, an unpromising assortment of materials — autobiographical fragments, letters written by both women, an occasional editorial note — can be combined to create a stunningly powerful book.

Julia Strachey, age five, taken in India
Julia Strachey, age five, taken in India
Frances Partridge (then Marshall) first met Julia Strachey in 1909. Frances was nine, Julia eight, and they were in the same class at a girl’s day school outside London. By that time, Julia’s life had already been subject to a fair amount of disruption, and the situation never changed all that much thereafter. Born in India in 1901, her father Oliver, was the sixth child and third son of Sir Richard Strachey and older brother of a charter member of the Bloomsbury set, Lytton Strachey. Her mother, Ruby, was a Swiss-German beauty whose scandalous reputation was well established by the time she married the far more conventional Oliver.

The first few years in India would always hold a sunny place in her memories. Her mother was devoted to her, her father tender, their servants kind, and odd creatures — snakes, frogs, birds — wandered through its spaces. There were moments of innocent comedy as little Julia began to explore her world:

One day I wandered into a vast apartment, or so it seemed to me, next door to the dining room and normally out of bounds. As I entered I beheld to my surprise, at the far end on a kind of platform, my papa, usually so elegant in his stiff white drill suit and solar topee — standing now, a new colour (a brilliant crayfish pick) in the middle of a sort of local monsoon, with torrents of water descending in needle sprays upon his head. I had never seen him in the altogether before — didn’t even take in that that was what it was, and the scene was so unexpected that I must have stood there gaping, no doubt with the door wide open into the central dining room; at any rate I heard shouts from under the waters telling me to go out again and shut the door.

In reality, however, Oliver was profoundly unhappy. His musical aspirations had to make way for a profession. A brilliant man (he worked as a cryptographer for the British Army in both world wars), he was dissatisfied with his work. And he soon discovered that Ruby’s reputation was well deserved. When she became pregnant with another man’s child, they hastily decamped from India: Ruby to the continent, Oliver with Julia to England. They divorced soon after. (Years later, encountering Ruby in France, Oliver exclaimed, “Why, Ruby, you’ve done very well. You’ve had five children by four men, haven’t you?””By five men, Oliver,” she replied, “but don’t tell George.”

Oliver deposited Julia with an elderly aunt little interested in her care, who turned her over to a very old and very deaf Scots nanny who resented the imposition. She spent much of the next few years trying to amuse herself in the large dark house on the edge of Bloomsbury:

In the silent blackness of those teardrenched hours in bed, I would hear the clip-clop, clip-clop of the horses bringing their hansom cabs along the road outside, would hear them emerging little by little from an immense distance, and (after passing our house) retreating again little by little into a further immense distance in the other direction, thus giving me an audible statement of the incalculable remoteness of the vast Unintelligible Beyond lying all around my bedroom and the house.

Then, in 1911, Oliver married Ray Costelloe, whose mother, Mary, had married the art historian Bernard Berenson. Mary Berenson was one of the three children of Richard Pearsall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith, wealthy Americans active in the Quaker movement who had moved to England in the 1880s. Mary’s brother was the writer Logan Pearsall Smith. Her sister Alys was Bertrand Russell’s first wife. Oliver and Ray had no time for Julia, so soon after their wedding they deposited her with Logan and Alys (now separated from Russell):

Beside me towered two gigantic and handsome ladies who beamed me a welcome. I saw they were no longer young but in their middle years, because of the pepper-and-salt in their hair, and also a certain rigid stoutness, and loosening of jaw-lines. But I saw also that they were as radiantly healthy, brilliantly blooming and resplendently coloured and fleshed as the summer hollyhocks standing up beside the garden door.

All these prestigious connections had little to offer in the way of consolation for a lonely little girl who understood she was an awkward addition to their household. Logan Pearsall Smith was a manic depressive, “engulfed in a lack of interest in the living world so absolute that I was shocked. Deeply shaken.” Alys (known as Aunty Loo) took primary responsibility for Julia’s care, but she had a unique approach to the task. Aunty Loo was an Edwardian example of the kind of extreme altruism that Larissa MacFarquhar studies in her book, Strangers Drowning. She had an array of charitable causes she sustained and was constantly raiding the drawers in the house for clothing to donate. She also supplied her own needs from the piles her charities amassed:

The dresses that Aunt Loo subtracted from the American mercy parcels for wearing herself would, of course, have been taken over from someone maybe half, or maybe double her size. And it was perhaps to hide the imponderables of the fit of all these frocks of varying sizes that she was in the habit of adding, on top of any frock that she had selected for herself, a number of loose tippets, ‘Berthas’, tucked capes, frilled jackets, ‘Dolmans’ and the like. It was August, and today Aunt Loo’s assorted jackets were of thin cottony stuff. On top of all, and always taking pride of place, it was her custom to slip on a white embroidered muslin affair of broderie anglaise — whose wide sleeves easily accommodated all the other sleeves crowded within.

This last item, Julia learns, had previously been Bertrand Russell’s christening robe.

Aunty Loo also approached the world with a certain severe simplicity that Julia came to understand acted as a harsh barrier underlying any of the superficial warmth of her concern for the child. “I always feel so bad — so awfully sorry — that I can never be really fond of thee,” she once confessed to Julia. “I mean that I can’t give thee the love that thee’s own mother would have given. It’s awful that I can never give thee proper affection.” This sincere, if thoughtless, confession had the emotional impact of a sledgehammer. “It was one of those moments when suddenly a chasm opens under one’s feet, an earthquake,” Julia recalled. “I saw that I was left standing on the wrong side of it, that my home, so to speak, lay crumbled away in ruins upon the further unreachable part.”

No wonder that, as Partridge put it, Julia had “a vision of herself as entangled in a web of intransigent practical circumstances created by what she liked to think of as a hostile Cosmos.” And there is plenty of evidence here and in Partridge’s diaries that Julia suffered from a form of manic depression herself. A beautiful, effervescent young woman, she was considered brilliant company. She partied, drank, traveled, had country house weekends and affairs with the Bright Young Things and the Bloomsbury set, to both of which her pedigree offered automatic membership. She tried college, gave up after one term, tried studying art, did a bit of modeling, tried her hand at writing. She took none of it too seriously.

Somewhere around mid-1926, she met Stephen Tomlin, whom Partridge recalls as “a brilliantly talented, neurotic young sculptor, who dented the hearts or minds, or both, of most people who met him.” Julia fell for him. He … well, leaned for her. There was an attraction, but he was also bisexual and involved with a number of men, among them the painter Duncan Grant (who was living with Virginia Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell).

They married in 1927. At this point, Julia takes a turn, as the autobiography that Strachey began writing in the 1960s came to an end, leaving Partridge to work with letters, diary entries (mostly her own) and a half-dozen autobiographical pieces written in the 1950s. The record of this period is fragmentary. As Partridge writes,

It is impossible to be certain when the first cracks in the marriage began to appear, but by early 1930 problems seem to have been acute. The main root of the trouble lay in Tommy’s manic-depressive character. When in a depressive bout he drank heavily, and this in turn led to uncontrolled infidelity, followed by agonising guilt. Julia reacted by finding attraction elsewhere There were two attempts to solve their difficulties by temporary separation.

Duncan Grant's illustration for the cover of Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
Duncan Grant’s illustration for the cover of Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
The one bright spot at this time was Julia’s finishing Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, which was published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1932, complete with a jacket illustration by Duncan Grant. Many of the circumstances in the novel, which takes place on a wedding day during which a woman perhaps not unlike Julia realizes she is marrying the wrong man but goes ahead with it anyway, were drawn from her own wedding day. She later told Partridge “that marrying Tommy was one of the things of which she was most ashamed.” “She was never really in love with Tommy,” Partridge observes: “She was desperately lonely.”

By early 1934, Julia had decided to make the break permanent. She went with Frances and Ralph Partridge on a long visit to Portugal and returned to a single flat in London. She spent much of the next few years making a circuit of her friends’ houses and estates: at the Guinness (brewery) estate outside Dublin; Pakenham Hall, where she saw Anthony Powell woo his future wife, Lady Violet Pakenham; Glengariff Castle with Solly Zuckerman; and many visits to Ham Spray, the Wiltshire house that Lytton Strachey left to Ralph Partridge. Just counting up the entries in the indices of Frances Partridge’s diaries, it appears that Julia made over sixty visits to Ham Spray just between 1939 and the early 1960s.

Julia Strachey in the late 1930s
Julia Strachey in the late 1930s
She also had a few flings, mostly with younger men. She and Philip Toynbee ran off to France for a holiday. He was 21. She was 36. It lasted under two months. A year later, she fell for another artist (heterosexual this time), the painter Lawrence Gowing. He was easy going, full of good humor, and absolutely committed to his work. Julia found his focus something of a novelty:

The first time I visited Lawrence’s studio I found him crouched on all fours on the handsome red plush carpet, another present from his grandmother. Beside him were paintbrushes of every size, palettes, cans oflinseed oil and tubes of paint. A half-finished canvas was laid out on the floor in front of his knees. One could see he was short-sighted by the way he seemed to be putting the colours on the canvas with the end of his long finely-pointed nose, instead of with his brushes. I at once saw that his absorption in his work was total. He was lost to the world. It was a sight I was never to forget.

They soon began living together. Though they discussed marriage, it was Julia who demurred. By the time they did marry, in 1952, their relationship was already something of an odd compromise. Lawrence took a post with an art college in Newcastle. Julia could only bear the dreariness of Newcastle for a few months at a time. He was attracted to some of his students. She increasingly worried about her age, her place as a writer, her place as a woman. And she was increasingly suffering what we can see as clear signs of depression or perhaps bi-polar disease. In Partridge’s view, her situation is captured by these lines from An Integrated Man: “She seemed to be shrieking to be released. He was looking at an animal in a trap, crying out to be saved.”

Despite Lawrence’s roving eye, they found a certain comfort in each other’s company. Julia got a job she enjoyed, working as a reader in a publishing house and they took a country cottage a half hour or so from Ham Spray. She published several pieces, including a story titled “Can’t You Get Me Out of Here,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 1960.

I won’t attempt to summarize this piece, more essay than story, but it’s unlike anything that would have appeared in the magazine at that time — free-wheeling, absurd, imaginative, comic, yet packing a devastating emotional force. Strachey takes a bizarre incident from one of her trips to Italy, in which a tree frog leapt from an arbor into a tureen of spaghetti sauce sitting on her table, was fished out with a ladle, and then hopped off, disoriented, into the nearby bushes. “I am a tree frog myself,” she writes:

And I can confirm that it is indeed a brash curiosity about queer-looking-things-far-glimpsed that starts a tree frog’s nervous speckled legs to twitch. I know it all –the lunatic leap out from the scaffolding into space, the brief whiz through colored airs, then the landing down in the dark, among yielding, treacherous, slithering things…..

But for me it is the spectacle of the very Distances themselves, Long Distances (not negligible Distances), that intoxicates. Or to put it another way, the spectacle of Differences that acts like strong drink and causes the green-speckled legs to twitch.

Later in the piece, she and Lawrence, back in England, have to take Popsy, a friend’s dog, to a kennel for a short stay. Having had the run of a farm, cavorting among the cattle as Julia took her for a last walk, Popsy reacts in shock and panic when the gate of the kennel pen is shut in her face:

At any rate her old, familiar, beautiful life was over. She had been deserted by the ones she loved; she had been betrayed into the hands of these strangers, to live out the rest of her days in this rotten few inches of earth. That’s anyway, how it was to her.

As for me, I felt, as I lay in bed that night, as if a meat axe had been thrown into my soul and was sticking there, undislodgeable. In no time I was out of the scaffolding and down in the darkness inside the old spaghetti tureen.

One cannot miss the parallels between Julia’s abandonment by her parents and Popsy’s being left at the kennel.

Julia Strachey outside Ham Spray, 1964
Julia Strachey outside Ham Spray, 1964
From this point forward, the signs of Julia’s decline became too obvious for Partridge to ignore. In 1962, she agrees to stay with Julia while Lawrence is away with Jenny, the woman he eventually comes to live with. “On the eve of setting out for three weeks married life with Julia. I’m very well aware of the difficulties and sadness that lie ahead, and also full of humility and uncertainty about my appointed task.” When Julia complains, “I can’t live alone,” Partridge confides in her diary, “What is my responsibility towards her, as her oldest friend? I am selfishly wondering, and so far my answer is: I’ll do everything I possibly can, short of giving up my independent solitary life.” (Ralph Partridge had died of a sudden heart attack in 1960.)

In 1964, not long after the death of Frances’ only son, they travel together to Rome. Frances is always alert for Julia suddenly veering off course, concerned that neither her prescription drugs nor the Italian wine are helping. In her diary entries, Frances is constantly switching between friend and caretaker: enjoying her company, ushering her out of awkward situations. A year later, after a dinner together, Frances writes with relief, “She is, after all, the person with whom I am most at ease, the oldest of my friends.” By 1970, Frances is noting that Julia “is coherent one moment, muddled the next.” Their friendship strains, breaks. Julia “flounced out of my flat banging the door and saying we are constitutionally unfit to get along with each other.” Two years without contact follow, until Frances extends an olive branch and invites Julia to dinner again. Their friendship resumes.

By early 1974, however, the reprise is at an end. “Julia has suddenly lurched into old age and it’s a distressing spectacle,” Frances writes. In July, after a phone call full of “inspissated gloom,” she cries out to her diary: “Oh Julia, Julia, Julia, Julia!” Over the next months, more pleas for help, followed by recriminations and accusations. In December, another call: “I wonder if you’d have a moment. I’ve been feeling suicidal. The doctor doesn’t send my pills and my sink’s full of dirty washing up and I have no food in the house.” Frances rebels — if only to herself: “F (silently): No. No. No.”

A year or so later, suffering from the flu and losing energy, Julia writes in a last diary fragment, “My fear is that I shall lose the only interest I still have in staying alive — namely the desire to get some of my past life materialised in my writing. But my memories — even the most vital and precious — seem to be fading also, like the daylight.” To which Frances adds, “To further this aim of Julia’s, and at the same time show her quality as a writer and a human being, has been the purpose of this book.”

Julia Strachey died in 1979. Frances Partridge died in 2004, just short of the age of 104, having published the last volume of her diaries three years before. It seems unlikely that another book like Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey will ever be published. Julia and Frances knew each other for seventy years, at their best and worst of times and had the capacity to write about their experiences with honesty, intelligence, and more than a little humor. Frances loved Julia but struggled to tolerate, let alone understand, the effects of her mental illness. Would any of us do better? Neither woman will ever rank among the major figures of their time. Yet in this book they managed to create one of the finest English autobiographies. It’s been reissued several times by Penguin, most recently by Phoenix in 2001. It richly deserves to be brought back again — and this time, for good.

Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey by Herself and Frances Partridge
London: Victor Gollancz, 1983

The Animal Hotel, by Jean Garrigue (1966)

Cover of "The Animal Hotel"

“Once a bear kept a small inn for animals. Not many, just a mole or so, a chipmunk, a cat, several birds, a sheep and a deer. Wasps and bees, also inhabitants, didn’t count because they were innumerable.” Jean Garrigue’s 1966 novella, The Animal Hotel seems at first to be just a charming children’s story. The bear is a marvelous host, a diligent housekeeper who reminds the cat to keep its fish heads in a neat pile and the deer not to leave a trail of grass in the living room. She fixes wonderful meals of seeds and berries and each night they entertain each other with stories.

During the day, they wander through the fields and forest nearby, “traveling the way a brook does, by the path of least resistance”:

True enough, it took them like the brook longer to get wherever they wanted to go, but again, what of it? Every brook may feel that its destiny magically and magnetically draws it to some distant river but does the attraction of that looming end oblige it to get there by that shortest distance, a straight line? No. The sense of other destiny is there all the way, in every flat or round stone the brook trips over, under every bush, tree or moss-ledged wall the brook passes by, and so it was with these beasts when they went out on their rambles. Every moment of divaricating, very desultory direction they took was as significant to them, as bewitching and surprising as whatever it was they thought would be awaiting them.

But soon the simple tale of the happy life led by this rag-tag clan reveals a deeper layer underneath. There a loneliness in the bear unlike the other animals. The mole was blind, “didn’t care and had never known better.” But the bear “seemed to have renounced society.”

When hoof prints appear in the forest, the animals grow concerned. Too big, too nervous, too powerful to be trusted in their household. The bear goes out to look for him, so shoo him off. But then she stays away most of the day and then she disappears entirely. Each beast begins to feel “that the great days were over and their queen gone,” and to wonder if it is now time to move on.

Then, “after days and days, a very little packet of eternity,” she returns. Bedraggled, thin, with a thick leather collar around her neck and a chain dangling from the collar. The animals brew up a pot of tea and set to nursing her back to health.

When she recovers, she tells the animals not just of how she fell in love with the horse and went with him to the land of men but of the great career she had had many years before, performing in the greatest of circuses with another horse. And just as she had escaped from the circus to build a refuge deep in the forest, so she fled again this second time. Their special world restored to the animal hotel, they can look forward to the good times going on and on and on. “Would they not go on, and forever?”

At just under 100 pages and published by a small and then-new New York firm, the Eakins Press, The Animal Hotel went virtually unnoticed. In one of its very few reviews, Denis Donoghue wrote in The New York Review of Books that Garrigue’s writing had “a Book of Hours simplicity”:

Something of this quality is audible in The Animal Hotel. But the most important thing is that she knows her powers, she knows what she can do. If you want to write fabulous prose, the best bet is to compose a fable; to get the genre right before trying to get everything else right. Miss Garrigue has done this. So she is free to turn her pretty phrases, to speak of “the curl and curlycue of her voice,” giving the language its head: “Not me, I replied, for I saw what I knew and knew what I had to do and threw up the cards, every one, all the trumps of them and the trumpets, the trumpery too, and the triumphs.”

This is Miss Garrigue’s way of restoring the magic, by writing a book of charms, making the sentences charming.

In a short memoir of the early days of the Paris Review, George Plimpton claimed that The Animal Hotel was inspired by Garrigue’s experiences living at the Hotel Helvétia and its proprietors, Monsieur and Madame Jordan, who were generous and understanding hosts. Garrigue strung a clothesline across her room to allow a group of finches to reside with her. Not surprisingly, when Plimpton was offered to take the room over after she’d left, he found it “filled with sticks, stones, moss, seeds, wings, thistles, parts of dandelions, parts of pigeon’s eggs and snail whorls, etc.”

Josephine Herbst and Jean Garrigue clowning at Herbst's Erwinna, PA house, 1957
Josephine Herbst and Jean Garrigue clowning at Herbst’s Erwinna, PA house, 1957
But there should be no mystery about the inspiration behind The Animal Hotel. “For Josephine Herbst” reads the dedication. By the time the book was published, Herbst and Garrigue were no longer lovers, but they were still involved in others lives. And they had spent much of the 1950s in a relationship that centered around the busy circle of people that swirled around Herbst’s somewhat ramshackle country house near Erwinna, Pennsylvania.

Elinor Langer provides the explanation in her superb biography, Josephine Herbst: The Story She Could Never Tell (1984):

When I think of Josie as she was in her later years — or rather, as she appeared — I see a vital woman surrounded by a circle of eager admirers, somewhat after the manner of the classic fairy tale in which a maternal figure has taken shelter deep in the heart of an enchanted forest surrounded by swarms of little people on whom she is really dependent but who are also under her spell. In the story the unorthodox household is occasionally menaced — someone is wounded or lost or word drifts in on the lips of animals about trouble in neighboring territories or from remnants of the past — but on the whole it is a safe and sufficient unit, mysteriously enveloped in a kind of protective charm. There actually was such a fable written about Erwinna, by Jean, a prose novella, The Animal Hotel, first published in the periodical New World Writing in 1956. The saga of a country lodging run by an amiable but elusive Bear whose “past was more complicated than anybody could guess” had its origin, more or less, in fact, for as the 1950s progressed, the house in Erwinna was becoming a stopping place for a group of young men and women just beginning to make their marks on the world, and Josie was very much the star…. Through their eyes the idea of Erwinna as a place of fellowship and creativity not just aloof from but superior to the world’s demands was magically reborn.

One of these young women, Jane Mayhall, later wrote that Herbst “made one feel that life was a kind of involved continuity”: “Reassurances and advisos toward attention to immediate events.” But like Garrigue’s bear, “she did suggest that there were realities beyond the moment.” As Langer shows, one of Herbst’s painful realities was Garrigue’s constant affairs and dalliances with other women and men, which by the time The Animal Hotel was published had left her lonely and forgotten.

Josephine Herbst died of cancer in early 1969; Jean Garrigue died of Hodgkin’s disease almost exactly three years later. In her last collection of poems, Studies for an Actress and Other Poems, Garrigue included a tribute to Herbst in a poem entitled, “In Memory”:

You did not doubt that you were beloved
And by good strangers, friends to you
Bearing the promised language.
Yet skeptic you could doubt
Out of a full heart
Who tried to beat the game

And did so, again, again,
And raised us leaves of hope by that
For something simple like a natural thing,
for something large, essential, driving hard
Against the stupors of too much gone wrong.
And by your intensity
Of flame against the dark
(You beat up flame,
You beat it up against the dark)

Gave us greater want
To change the heart to change the life
Changing our lives in the light that is changing
But which has no future, no yesterday.

Technically, The Animal Hotel has never been out of print and you can still order a new copy from the publisher, Eakins Press.

The Animal Hotel, by Jean Garrigue
New York: The Eakins Press, 1966

The Flagellants, by Carlene Hatcher Polite (1967)

Cover of Dell paperback edition of The Flagellants
Cover of Dell paperback edition of The Flagellants

My annual visit to Montana was shorter than usual this year, but still I made sure to take a run out to the legendary Montana Valley Book Store in Alberton. I’ve been going through its stacks for years now, yet somehow I manage each visit to find something surprising. This time, it was a little Dell paperback from 1967 titled The Flagellants. Its cover, a gauzy-lensed short of a light-skinned black woman on a brass bed reminded me a bit of Maxine Kumin’s The Passions of Uxport, another Montana Valley find I wrote about three years ago. Opening it at random, I read:

Admonishing the victim to stop its whining, clean up its bloody mess, unimpeachable duty retreats, undismayed, exhausted with fellow feeling. Throughout the discipline, duty remained on a self-forgiving place. There was no need to question or justify its action; if anything the punishment was not thorough enough. The victims should have been molested, hanged from trees; their innocent prayers bombed into fragments.

Wow. This is not your mother’s Dell paperback. Flipping fifty pages forward, I read:

The complexities of organization, the created outcome, the materialization of concrete and abstract goals, were relegated to bosses, green-horned, starry-eyed idealists recently hired, bookworm intellectuals living in unreality, baggy-pants radicals classified as subversive. Talking about the boss killed just as much time. Calling him a fool for not knowing where data-processed, key-punched records were filed, resenting his issuing orders and taking two hours for lunch fueled the robots with a constant sense of worth. A common sense told them the organization would fall apart if they were not there to do the real work.

This is writing with an anger and energy that jumps off the page. It is often chaotic, a kaleidoscope with two primary colors — those of Ideal, a young black woman in New York City, and Jimson, her lover. Their relationship is violent, a hip form of mutually-assured destruction that only ends when they go flying off like riders flung from a runaway merry-go-round.

Carlene Hatcher Polite (1967)
Carlene Hatcher Polite (1967)
Carlene Hatcher Polite wrote The Flagellants after she moved to Paris at the suggestion of Dominique de Roux, an influential French writer and publisher she’d met while working as an organizer for the Michigan Democratic Party. As she later told a New York Times reporter, “I didn’t come looking for paradise. I came not to be distracted.”

It proved a smart decision, as she whipped out The Flagellants in under a year. De Roux arranged a translation by Pierre Alien and the book was first published in French as Les Flagellants by Christian Bourgois in 1966. Farrar, Straus and Giroux then bought the U.S. rights and published it in 1967.

It was fascinating to dig through the reviews that greeted the book upon its U.S. publication. If nothing else, they demonstrate just how clunk-headed the book business was back in the mid-1960s. Its racism and sexism was both institutional and blithely unconscious. Although most of the major magazines and newspapers reviewed it, usually in a batch with other novels by black writers such as William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer and Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, all the reviewers were white and, with the exception of Nora Sayre (The Nation), male.

Perhaps the worst of the lot was Prof. Francis J. Thompson’s item in the Tampa Tribune, which concluded that “the gallant Negroes who inhabit Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha are a greater credit to their race.” Little better, however, was Frederic Raphael’s review for the New York Times — a classic example of what Rozalind Dineen recently described in the TLS as “those in which the critic finds it necessary to explain the book under consideration to its author”:

It is the crisis of négritude (though a brief summer of Jewishness played its part) that has blown apart the cosy, ingrown ambitions of writer, and shouted the need for a new and direct form of fiction.

Miss Polite does not know — and her predicament is a crucial one — to whom she is speaking.

Wow again. Raphael’s summary judgment on the book? “A dialectical diatribe.”

“In its time, it was a difficult novel to take,” Dr. Laurie Rodrigues acknowledged in a recent paper on The Flagellants in College Literature. It went against too many norms of the time. It centered on a relationship between a black man and woman who intensity, violence, and power plays wouldn’t be seen again until the late 1990s with books like How Stella Got Her Groove On. It was told mostly through the stream of consciousness of the two main characters. It used language in a headlong, almost heedless manner that might have put off many readers. (Although I have to note that just a few months later, Ishmael Reed opened his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers with the following: “I live in HARRY SAM. HARRY SAM is something else. A big not-to-be-believed out-of-sight, sometimes referred to as O-BOP-SHE-BANG or KLANG-A-LANG-A-DING-DONG.” I wonder if the problem was the language or the fact that experimentation was considered the exclusive domain of male writers.) And, yes, at times Polite gets as carried away in her fury as a gospel preacher on a roll. As Rodrigues wrote, it “offers a perfect storm of aesthetic elements that, given their contextual framing, have contributed to the novel’s obscurity.”

A similar view was expressed by Devona Mallory in an entry on Polite in Writing African American Women, Volume 2. Mallory concluded that The Flagellants and Polite’s second novel, Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play were “overlooked because of their experimental and unique nature. Influenced by existentialism and satire, Polite’s unique prose style and form and her use of various African American dialects that honor the oral tradition reflect the emotional highs and lows in dancing choreography.”

I’d argue, though, that at the core of this novel lies a fierce tension between an allegiance to notions of African American traditions and a desperate drive to tear away from them. As Rodrigues writes in her paper — which is a far most insightful and thorough treatment of the book than I could manage in this short space, Polite’s novel “rigorously questions whether the South should be considered the authentic — that is, productive, empowering — source of African American culture.” In the novel’s Prologue, we see Ideal as a child, an orphan being raised under a barrage of contradictory messages from the women around her. “Walk a chalked line.” “Watch [Ideal’s] every move.” Have “the devil beat out of her constantly.” “Always walk tall. Never bow down to anything or anyone; unless, of course, you feel like bowing — quite ,em>naturally, you will then.”

Polite captures exactly the sort of messed-up perspectives that result from years of these experiences:

The tones she overheard became her mother language. the beliefs she overheard became her first fear. She would remember these sounds and images for the rest of her life. They were her roots. She would retain this life in that part of her mind that dwelled deep within her eyes — behind a frown. The images would become less distinct with time, but she would be colored by them until her dying day. The child’s head would carry the candy store where she bought stale, imitation watermelon slices, double-dip ice cream cones. She hated imitation fruit, wax flowers. Perhaps because one day she had spied a luscious-looking piece of fruit, reached for the offered apple, only to find that it was unreal.

Frederic Raphael picked an apt adjective in describing The Flagellants as “dialectical,” but he was dead wrong about it being a diatribe. Yes, she is able to see both Ideal and Jimson as victims and victimizers. That doesn’t mean she sides with either of them. Sometimes you have to stand far away from something to see it in perspective. Ironically, writing from the distance of Paris seems to have given Polite the ability to see better the nuances and complexities in the situation of black women and men in America. There are no clear heroes or villains in this story. If the women raising Ideal sent her mixed messages, it was because the world they lived in every day was full of mixed messages. Real life is like that. When Rodrigues writes that The Flagellants is “a novel that simply refuses to choose a side,” a serious reader will recognize that as a compliment.

The Flagellants is not a masterpiece. It is perhaps a bit overwritten, perhaps a bit under-developed in its characters, perhaps a bit too strident at times, a bit too obscure in others. But it is absolutely a novel worth being read and written about and argued over because it is full of energy, ideas, anger, pain, and passion –and surely these are what we want from any challenging book. If The Confessions of Nat Turner deserves to be in print and put on reading lists and course syllabi, then The Flagellants does too.

The Flagellants, by Carlene Hatcher Polite
New York City: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967

Where Love and Friendship Dwelt, by Marie Belloc Lowndes (1943)

Where Love and Friendship Dwelt, by Marie Belloc LowndesWhere Love and Friendship Dwelt, the second volume of Marie Belloc Lowndes’ memoirs, covers a period of just over ten years, but it is a nearly non-stop parade of personalities. Most of them come from French literature, art, and theatre, for Belloc Lowndes spent much of this time writing notes from Paris for a variety of English papers.

She started working as a journalist at a young age out of necessity. Her mother, Bessie Parkes Belloc, whose short but deeply loving marriage to Louis Belloc was the focus of the first volume, I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia, had inherited a considerable fortune not long after becoming a widow. But she put it in the hands of a family friend who lost it all in a series of bad investments, and Marie and her brother Hilaire spent their teens living off the charity of family.

The experience left her with a certain amount of resentment about the leisures of the English upper classes:

I had felt painfully apart from the life led round me in Sussex by the young people with whom I came in contact. From Jane Austen, onwards, this kind of life has been described in innumerable English novels. But not one of the writers, with the exception of Anthony Trollope, seems to have realized the part that money, even though in those days never mentioned, played in country house life. We were really poor, and so I could never join in the driving, the riding, and the coming and going to country houses, and occasionally to London, which filled the lives of my contemporaries.

When she returned with her mother to live with her grandmother, Louise Swanton Belloc, at her house in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, outside Paris, Marie was relieved to escape the obsession of her schoolmates and their parents over “making a good marriage.” Through her grandmother, who had a very successful career as a translator, Marie already had numerous contacts with figures in French culture and politics great and small, and these provided her not only with the material for countless articles but also many of the best parts of this book.

Many English language readers have lost sight of French literature between Flaubert and Proust, so even some of the more familiar names in Where Love and Friendship Dwelt may no longer ring a bell, but pretty much every French writer of any substance in the last decade of the 19th century appears here. Guy de Maupassant confided his passion for the English novel to her–but cautioned, “All the same, Tom Jones is a book you must not look into till you are married.” Anatole France’s taste in English literature was, as much of his work seems today, idiosyncratic: he thought Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor its supreme masterpiece.

She visited Zola and his wife in their Paris townhouse “filled–crammed is the right word–with large pieces of what they believed to be mediaeval furniture.” Only his tapestries pleased Marie: “Whether old or faked, they were beautiful, and that could not be said of anything else in his Paris house.” She saw Alphonse Daudet in his years of suffering the advanced stages of syphilis, the time recounted in his slim, stunning journal, In the Land of Pain. She walked with Paul Verlaine as he was on his last legs, near death at 51 from drugs, alcohol, and depression:

He and I once had a long talk on Hell and the Devil. Both Hell itself, and the Devil as an entity, were to him intensely real. Indeed he spoke as if Hell is a city much like Paris, and he told me he had a vivid image in his mind of what the Devil looks like. He believed in the existence of a great number of minor devils, and to them he put down many of the terrible things which happen to human beings in this world.

Other names are now long forgotten. Louise Michel, then an aging Communard, whom Belloc Lowndes visited in a sordid garret she shared with “eight or nine cats, as well as a sickly monkey.” Paul Déroulède: a great French patriot perhaps, but his Chants du paysan and Chants du soldat are probably justly neglected in any language. The Comtesse de Martel, Sibylle Riqueti de Mirabeau, known by her pen-name of “Gyp.” Belloc Lowndes calls her “By far the most original, eccentric, and, in every sense of the word, brilliant woman writer I have known.” Gyp’s Wikipedia entry describes her as “as a fanatical anti-Semite & anti-Dreyfusard.” Let us move along.

One name–Rimbaud–is somewhat disdainfully dismissed. Belloc Lowndes sniffs that none of the respected men of the time “would have admitted Rimbaud had genius. All would have followed Jacques Blanche in describing him as un mauvais petit drôle” (a nasty little creep).

Perhaps because the world it described was so much different from the one it was published in, Where Love and Friendship Dwelt was warmly received. The New York Times’ reviewer gushed, “There are so many gleaming points and glowing facets to this gem of personal reminiscence that one is puzzled which to omit in a brief account of it.” And in The Saturday Review, R. Ellis Roberts called it “fully as rich in recollection, as evocative of the past as the book to which it is the sequel.” I think, however, that Mary Crosbie was closer to the mark, writing in her Guardian review that “There is less charm–less coherence of effect–in the second than the first book.”

The focus of the next volume in this series, The Merry Wives of Westminster (1946), shifts to London, where she returned as a newlywed in 1896.

Where Love and Friendship Dwelt, by Marie Belloc Lowndes
London: Macmillan, 1943
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1944

And So Did I, by Malachi Whitaker (1939)


If And So Did I were to be published afresh today as the work of a woman in her late thirties with a number of well-received short story collections behind her, I have no doubt that it would be quite successful in its sales and critical reception. Thanks to Wild, Eat, Pray, Love, The Argonauts, The Liar’s Club, and dozens of other books, the world is ready–indeed, seems insatiable–for memoirs written by women with strong and distinctive voices.

Instead, when it was published in early 1939 in an England finding itself in a world of increasing uncertainty and dread, it received from an anonymous reviewer in The Spectator one of the most ruthless drubbings ever seen in print:

And So Did I (Jonathan Cape, 7s. 6d.) is a dangerous attempt to make new ground. It consists, apparently, in damp comments and scrappy reminiscences written at odd moments during her life in Yorkshire, and huddled together inconsequently into a full-size book. The result, from a conventional literary point of view, is worthless. Mrs. Malachi Whitaker has a certain talent for economical description; but her thoughts and feelings are dull. That she should find Ouspensky vain and pretentious, or admit that her own marriage was sordid, does not distinguish her intellect any more than her emotions. But presumably And So Did I is an attempt to exploit the personality of the author, even at the expense of deliberate literary faults…. Surely Mrs. Malachi Whitaker has been a little rash to attempt without artifice what, even had she used the greatest art, was likely to have failed.

Malachi Whitaker (Marjorie Whitaker)This reviewer seemed to want Malachi Whitaker (the pen name adopted by the Yorkshire writer Marjorie Whitaker) to take her voice and personality and retreat to the silence and domestic matters that were a proper Englishwoman’s concerns. And if this was, in fact, his intent, then he should have been pleased with the results. Whitaker stopped writing almost entirely. She published just two more stories in the next ten years and, aside from the 1949 Selected Stories compiled from her previous four collections, never published another book. She died in 1976, noted in just a few brief obituaries. And thus was another fine woman writer effectively stifled.

Yet it’s hard to believe that Whitaker’s silence in print signified the stifling of her own spirit, for And So Did I is in its way one of the most original and vibrant spiritual autobiographies ever written. Whitaker took her title from a line in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: “And a thousand slimy things/Lived on; and so did I.” But it’s useful to read the lines that preceded it:

Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.

The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.

Early in the book, Whitaker writes, “For at last, I have time to take up my long-abandoned search for God and the Truth,” and this search is the thread that weaves, sometimes overtly but most of the time indirect and subtly, throughout this seemingly haphazard collage of memories and observations.

For Whitaker, the world of the spirit is never quite tangible. She envies Saul for the revelation that came to him on the road to Damascus: “Yes, lucky, lucky Saul, to have all responsibility taken from him! All that was left for him was to do as he was told, then he could be sure of eternal salvation.” No voice speaks to her from the clouds. Instead,

I can only sigh and pass on, because the Hound of Heaven and me seem to keep about the same distance apart, both lolloping along with our tongues out, downhill, and stopping at the same time for meals and so forth. I have never even felt his warm breath at my shoulder.

Church is no use in her search:

If I could find God in a church, I should be glad. But I cannot. I go often to sit in churches, both here and abroad, to think about faith and piety, and to be sorry that I possess neither. Now and then I see a good and lovely face, but it is mostly on a very old woman; and it makes me think there might be some consolation in age.

Perhaps I have no deep feelings at all, in the religious sense. I am glad to see young creatures, and leaves, and patterned beetles and snowflakes, and to savour the taste of each season. But life itself is difficult, full of unfinished ends and unfinished thoughts. I once went into Cologne Cathedral just as a service was starting, and saw a beautiful coloured show. The faces around me were moved by some deep feeling; and I stood, alone, frowningly curious but quite cold.

The abstractions of God, heaven, and eternal life can never quite compete with the intensity of the things and people she encounters every day. Her daughter pulling herself up by the back of the typewriter as Whitaker sits trying to write at it. A box of fresh peaches from a friend. A delicious meal at her sister’s, with new potatoes and mint, grilled plaice with parsley sauce, and a rice pudding cooked five hours in a slow oven. But she pulls against these temptations:

There is one part of me which greatly wants to be a good cook, but I suppress it. It is a kind of road to ruin. If I went along that road, I should look for God and the truth no more. My mind would be intent on flavours and sauces. I should have a garden full of herbs, and a quantity of fat friends. No, I’ll do it when I have to, but I will not make cooking my reason for being on earth.

Words are another temptation: “Reading flows in and out of my like breath,” she writes, a phrase I’d easily adopt as a motto. “It is something to keep my mind alive, as oxygen and–I have forgotten what else–keeps alive my body.” The books she reads populate her thoughts every bit as much as the people in her life. And the people, particularly her husband and their two adopted children, constantly draw her mind away from its attempts to escape to a more ethereal level:

Where am I? Here is my adopted son, reading the evening paper, one knee up and one knee down, his fair hair darkened on this side which is away from the light of evening. He has twisted round and shown me a hole in the seat of his trousers with an expression of great surprise. It is the first of what I suppose will be many. Baby is by now fast asleep in her cot. My husband is in London. So I suppose I should look at the living moment and find it doleful, but I don’t want to. There is a fire, and that is such good company.

Malachi Whitaker herself is such good company that whether or not one is in sympathy with her efforts to escape the mundane, And So Did I is never less than vivid and amiable. “I like to read what other people have written,” she writes, “in the hope that I can get a glimpse of the garden enclosed, through a tiny peephole”:

For I do believe that everybody owns the equivalent of a garden; a place inside themselves that they know has something really good in it; something from which they can give. But the flowers have a habit of turning to the rankest weeds during the transfer.

One can only conclude that for The Spectator’s reviewer, And So Did I turned to rankest weeds during the transfer–which undoubtedly was his fault and not Whitaker’s. As Philip Hensher has written, “Malachi Whitaker is not like other authors…. [I]t is inexplicable how English letters failed to find a place for a writer of such verve, colour, range and power.” “Life has been perfect in parts,” she writes at the end of And So Did I. And for my life, reading this book was one of those parts.

In 1984 Carcanet Press, a fine U.K. independent now based in Manchester, published a collection of Whitaker’s stories, The Crystal Fountain, edited by Joan Hart, another Yorkshire woman and writer of short stories, and followed it in 1987 with And So Did I. Paladin reissued it in paperback in 1990–the last time it was in print. However, with the recent release by Persephone Books of The Journey Home and Other Stories, edited by Hensher, there is a chance that And So Did I might see the light of day again.

And So Did I, by Malachi Whitaker
London: Jonathan Cape, 1939
Manchester: Carcanet, 1987
London: Paladin, 1990

The Weekend Man, by Richard B. Wright (1970)

There’s a sure-fire way to improve your chances of having your work ignored by English-reading audiences: Be Canadian.

Even if your work is published in the U.S. and gets enthusiastic reviews, you have a better chance of joining the ranks of Richard B. Wright than those of the few exceptions to the rule, such as Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. Wright’s death back in February 2017 was remarked with appreciative tributes in most of the major Canadian magazines and papers, but not even in the New York Times in the U.S.. One of Wright’s last novels, Clara Callan (2003), did enjoy good sales in the U.S. and is still in print, but the fact remains that he’s far more likely to be confused with the author of Native Son than recognized for his own work.

I’m no expert on the whole of Wright’s oeuvre, but it’s hard for me to believe that he ever topped his first book, The Weekend Man (1971), which has to be one of the best novels written in English in the 1970s. Technically, it’s still in print: at least, Amazon still has one new copy of the 2003 paperback reprint in stock.

The Weekend Man sits side-by-side with another underappreciated Seventies classic, Joseph Heller’s Something Happened (1974). Both Wright’s Wes Wakeham and Heller’s Bob Slocum are men of a kind that now seems almost as archaic as Bertie Wooster: white, white collar, ambitious but not inspired, sexist, unfaithful, and generally out of touch with the world around them–ironically, because it is, after all, a world made by and for men like them. “I have managed my own life rather badly,” Wakeham says at one point. Bob Slocum would certainly second that emotion.

“What is a weekend man, you ask?” Wakeham tells his readers. “A weekend man is a person who has abandoned the present in favour of the past or the future.” Wes has separated from his wife. He’s insecure about his career in the publishing house where he works. He watches a lot of television–and these were the days when you got seven or eight channels at best, and many of the empty spots were filled with old movies. So Wes tends to compare people to old movie stars. Wes’s father-in-law is “a dead ringer for Jack Oakie.” A woman “looks as happy as June Allyson” (watch any of the dozen or so movies from the 1950s where Allyson’s job consists almost exclusively of looking adoringly at her hard-working husband, or her wedding band, or both).

Wes is a case study in slow death by distraction: “If the truth were known, nothing much happens to most of us during the course of our daily passage. It has to be said. Unless we are test pilots or movie stars, most of us are likely to wake up tomorrow morning to the same ordinary flatness of our lives. This is not really such a bad thing. It is probably better than fighting off a sabre-tooth tiger at the entrance to the cave. But we weekend men never leave well enough alone. First off we must cast about for a diversion. A diversion is anything that removes us from the ordinary present.”

Unfortunately, his options are limited. The truly ambitious ones involve too much risk. A little affair on the side is good for amusement, but overwhelming passion has to be avoided. And it’s tough to kiss off the career and pursue painting or some other crazy notion when you have people depending upon your paycheck. He’s paid for an expensive German telescope to study the stars and sent for a brochure on short-story writing. But “None of these things is as good as television. At the same time, he isn’t ready to follow his father’s advice and “submit to the numbness of the daily passage.”

And so he finds himself with “a wild howling in the soul” as he sits in his apartment, feet up on the coffee table, watching yet another old movie. If he needed a theme song, it would probably be Peggy Lee’s hit from the year before: “Is That All There Is?”

There are no great revelations in The Weekend Man. And though Wes Wakeham seems, in one way, an artifact of a distant past (and the Seventies do often seem like a far more distant past), in other ways he’s like a lot of men–smart enough to catch most of the cultural references, not smart enough to take the risk of committing to something or someone no matter where it may lead. And spending a lot of nights with their feet up on the coffee table.

The Weekend Man, by Richard B. Wright
Toronto: Macmillan, 1970

I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia, by Marie Belloc-Lowndes (1941)

Cover of "I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia"

In the last summer of my mother’s life, I was sitting with her on the little lawn of her cottage in Sussex, when she said suddenly, “I feel it is wrong to repine as life goes on, for I can always say to myself, ‘I, too, have lives in Arcadia.”

She must have seen that I was wondering to what part of her life she referred, for she could look back to many delightful and remarkable experiences.

She put her hand on mine. “I mean the five years with your father, and the further nine summers I spent with his mother, at La Celle St. Cloud.”

So opens the first volume of Marie Belloc Lowndes’ memoirs, in which she recalls the uniquely gracious and intimate world that her grandmother created in her modest country home in a village less than ten miles from the center of Paris. It all began in 1867, when two friends, both pioneering English women’s’ rights advocates, Bessie Parkes and Barbara Bodichon, reunited in Paris. Bodichon was recovering from a fever contracted while living in Algiers with her husband, Dr. Eugène Bodichon, a prominent physician. Concerned at her friend’s condition, Parkes sought a place in the country where they could relax and get away from the stagnant summer air in Paris.

She came across a flyer advertising a chalet for rent in La Celle St. Cloud offered by a Madame Belloc. Madame Belloc was Louise Swanton Belloc, daughter of James Swanton, an Irish officer who had served in the armies of both King Louis XVI and Napoleon, and widow of the recently deceased painter Jean-Hilaire Belloc. She was also the leading advocate of English literature in France. She produced a steady stream of translations of Dickens, George Eliot, Sir Walter Scott, and others, and her network of acquaintances included many of the most famous writers of both countries. The chalet was on the grounds of a small tract where she lived with her son Louis and a frequent visitor, Adelaide De Montgolfier, daughter of the famous balloonist Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier.

Louis Belloc had been a busy and successful official in the Paris city government, but at some time in his late twenties, he collapsed from overwork or perhaps a stroke and was now living as an invalid with his mother. At the time that Bessie Parkes came to stay with the Bellocs, this model of Victorian rectitude, independence, and industry probably had no intention of remaining more than a few weeks.

But some kind of profound intimacy was sparked between Bessie and Madame Belloc, and soon after, between Bessie and Louis. When the two Englishwomen returned to Paris, Bessie had promised to come back to La Celle St. Cloud in the autumn. And she confided to Barbara, “I want you to know of a certain decision I have made! I have made up my mind to marry Louis Belloc.” Louis had not, in fact, asked her. “Such an idea, I feel sure, has never crossed his mind…. But he will do so when I stay with them this autumn.”

Barbara and Bessie’s family argued strongly against the marriage. They found it hard to conceive how a woman with such drive, responsible to dozens of initiatives to improve the lives of women and the working poor in England, could suddenly tie herself down to a sick man living on a tiny French estate. But an entry from her diary, written just two months after her wedding, offers a clue to the emptiness that the love of the Bellocs filled in Bessie:

How utterly my life has changed! In the old days it was always astonishing to me that with so many elements which should have made for real happiness–intelligence, great interest in literature, sufficient money, and the highest principles–my mother’s house was so lacking, at any rate where I was concerned, in real happiness….

How strange that Barbara should think I ever feel lonely! There have been times in my life when I have felt painfully alone, but never since the fortunate day when she and I settled into the chalet last spring. I remember feeling that evening as if I had stepped into a new dimension, and in that dimension I have, thank God, dwelt ever since, with increasing joy and peace.

Within a year of marrying Louis, Bessie gave birth to a daughter–Marie–and two years later, to a son, Hilaire. The couple had little time to celebrate Hilaire’s birth, because the Franco-Prussian War had begun a week before, and less than two months later, the family had to flee to England ahead of the imminent siege of Paris. Mademoiselle Montgolfier, however, remained, and her letters, along with those of Louis’ sisters, all of whom stayed throughout the long and difficult siege, demonstrate the kind of strength and dedication in the face of hardships that seems to have been given in exceptional degree to some people in that era.

When the Bellocs returned to La Celle St. Cloud after the armistice, they found that Prussian troops had looted the estate, leaving much of it damaged and uninhabitable. But Madame Belloc and Bessie plunged into the business of restoration, and within a few months were able to live there again. Their relief was short-lived, however. One day in August 1872, Louis collapsed, and he died just a few hours later. As Bessie wrote to Barbara afterward, “I had an angel of goodness by my side for five years. From the time he uttered his marriage vows, giving his whole self to me as he did then, I never had cause to regard him other than with the exceeding reverence which ended in exceeding love, which made me hold so lightly all the real difficulties of a life to which I was never blind.”

Marie and Hilaire Belloc would become two of the most prolific English writers of their generation. When she began to write her memoirs, Marie had seen, for the third time in her life, German troops invading her first home. Even though I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia was written in the time of the Blitzkrieg and the Blitz, it is very much a book of the century before. This is not to imply that it is stiff or outdated in any way. Instead, it is marked throughout by a sincerity of emotion that we have grown too jaded to trust and, hence, that seems antique. But as Elizabeth Bowen wrote when it first came out, “It is a book in a thousand, for it conveys the character of a group of people, at once civilized and original, and the atmosphere of an unusual place.”

Marie Belloc-Lowndes wrote three more volumes of memoirs: Where Love and Friendship Dwelt (1943); The Merry Wives of Westminster (1946); A Passing World (1948). I am nearing the end of Love and Friendship and can report that it maintains the same warm and intelligent spirit as I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia. Despite wartime printing limitations, Macmillans in the U. K. managed to put out a handsome set of volumes that are as pleasant to hold and read as anything I’ve come across. I started reading the series with the U. S. edition published by Dodd, Mead, but I liked the Macmillan editions so much I bought another copy just to keep.

I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia, by Marie Belloc-Lowndes
London: Macmillan, 1941

Lord, I Was Afraid, by Nigel Balchin (1947)

Cover of "Lord, I Was Afraid"I have a mild fascination with unreadable books. Mild because I often lack the courage or persistence to take them on, fascination because I often have the nagging sense that I should. By “unreadable,” I don’t mean truly unreadable, like the book of Pi to the millionth digit or whatever length it is, but dauntingly difficult–the sort of book that refuses to fit itself to the molds that make books accessible. Finnegans Wake is perhaps the best known unreadable book, but there are also books like Gaddis’ JR, 725 pages of dialogue with no attribution to its speakers, or Leon Forrest’s 1138-page novel Divine Days, or John Hargraves’ nearly 900-page novel in verse, Summer Time Ends.

At a mere 320 pages, Nigel Balchin’s Lord, I Was Afraid is unreadable not because of length but because of sheer oddity. It is a 320 page play. Balchin’s publisher, Collins, waved off most potential readers with this fly-leaf warning:

This is not a Nigel Balchin novel in the ordinary sense. In fact it cannot be described technically as a novel at all. The subject is one on which the author has meditated and worked for ten years—the subject of his own generation, its nature, its faults, virtues, and direction if any. To say what he has to say Mr. Balchin has composed a kind of super-play, using the devices of the theatre on a scale that transcends the possibilities of any theatre.

Although Balchin provides stage directions and scene-settings along with his dialogue, he certainly never expected any director to follow them. Otherwise, he would have asked set designers to mimic everything from train stations and air raid shelters to mass rallies and the summit of Mount Ararat just before the next great flood, in a production that would easily require a cast of a hundred or more and take something like ten hours to perform.

I picked up my copy of Lord, I Was Afraid at the Strand Book Store while in New York City some years ago. Balchin’s name was, of course, familiar to me–his novels such as The Small Back Room, Darkness Falls from the Air, A Way through the Wood, and Mine Own Executioner often pop up on lists of neglected books–but not this title. The price–$5.50–was so low that I bought the book without taking much notice of its contents. When I did, I thought, “Well, I’ll probably never read this,” and shelved it away in the basement.

When I came across it again while looking for something else recently, I felt my fascination stirring again and thought, “Well, what the hell? If I don’t read and post about this book, who else will?” And here we are.

Balchin’s title comes from Matthew Chapter 25, where Jesus tells the parable of the landowner who gave his servants money before leaving on a long trip–five talents to one, two talents to another, one talent to a third. When the man returns, the last servant says to him, “Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed; And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine.”

Nigel Balchin, 1944
Nigel Balchin, 1944
Lord, I Was Afraid is, in a way, Balchin’s parable of his own generation, the one too young to fight in World War One and a bit older than the average man in uniform in World War Two. It was also an upper-middle-class generation: his boys went to public schools, his girls hovered in limbo–too wealthy to work, not wealthy enough to be independent of potential husbands or public opinion. As his core set of seven characters–four men and three women–sit atop Mount Ararat at the play’s end, Balchin passes judgment on his kind through the voice of Methuselah: “A race that cannot accept death, but merely refuses life. A race that carries snobbery so far that it prefers to die in its own company rather than to live in any other; and which carries conceit and self-esteem so far that it would rather make nothing than make a mistake.” Or, as the voice of one character’s conscience puts it earlier in the play, “The same old mistrust of everybody else, crowned by a complete mistrust of yourself.”

In his excellent essay on Balchin, “The Effective Intelligence of Nigel Balchin”, Clive James described
Lord, I Was Afraid as “the kind of art-conscious, angst-ridden Forties novel that really belongs to the Thirties.” And in many ways, the strongest sections of the book are those set in the Thirties, when Balchin’s characters encounter the anger of organized labor and the unemployed (echoes of Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier), the rise of Mosley-like British fascism, religious zealotry (including a scene with a talking burning bush), and the ennui of endless, pointless cocktail parties:

The guests of Sheila and Raymond Murray have extracted the pleasure from three hundred cigarettes, but have not troubled to take with them a thick, blue haze and loaded ash-trays. Of some ten pounds worth of alcohol there remains enough to dirty three dozen glasses; a slight smell; and a sticky patch on the rug where that inimitable droll Punch Hopkins has spilt a glass of Martini.

Our point in time-space is the point at which the room is no longer habitable but is inhabited; at which the desire to move is rather a desire to be still in another place; at which the desire to smoke is merely the desire not to smoke, and at which the present discomfort of being too hot can only be replaced by the prospective discomfort of being too cold.

Yet Balchin’s treatment of the war and its aftermath is also rich in fantastic imagination. He sets one scene with his leading characters in the role of Roman legionnaires bewildered by the behavior of the savages they encounter in their conquest of Briton. It’s streaked with anger and bitterness, as in the scene where propagandists from the Ministry of Defence give a slide-show talk to women in a munitions factory, showing them the results of their work (“We were unfortunately unable to photograph these–er–men until some time after one of this factory’s mines had exploded beneath them as they sat at a meal: But there is little doubt that they are Germans.” And there are moments of absurdist comedy, as in a scene where a zoo is set up in Hyde Park to allow American G.I.s to examine the British public in its native habitat–and vice versa.

Perhaps the funniest moment in the book is the opening scene of the play’s last act, “1947–(i.e., Onward),” set in a department store run by the now-ruling Labour Party and constrained by rationing, lowered expectations, and lingering destruction:

ANNE (entering the lift): Woollen dresses, please.

LIFT GIRL: Woolen dresses, silk dresses, addresses, redresses, third floor new building.

ANNE (making to get out): Oh, I’m sorry. Where is the new building?

LIFT GIRL: It isn’t built yet.

On the other hand, the writing becomes strident and monotonous in an over-long scene set as an episode of The Brains Trust radio program, in which a series of stereotypes (Business Man, Politician, Socialist, Priest, Artist) offer their views of how the world should work. As stilted as their visions sound, there is little that Balchin’s characters can offer as an alternative.

Which points to the artistic problem that undermines the ultimate power of Lord, I Was Afraid. As a Fascist tells one of Balchin’s characters in a scene from the Thirties, “You would have a world without wonder–without imagination–without glorious madness–without fury and noise and colour. And then you wonder why the world rejects you and turns to me.” Balchin and his characters reject all the various dogmas they encounter over the decades and Balchin rejects their lack of beliefs in turn–which leaves us in the end with … what? One by one, in the final scene, they plunge into the rising waters, in a futile attempt to swim to the Ark slowly disappearing on the horizon. Nihilism is perhaps the weakest of all foundations to build a work of art upon.

Lord, I Was Afraid, by Nigel Balchin
London: Collins, 1947

Obituaries, by William Saroyan (1979)

When he was a young man with aspirations to become a writer, William Saroyan set himself a daily task to write for at least an hour and produce at least a few pages, no matter how good, bad, or irrelevant the results. It established a discipline that served him well for over fifty years, helping produce dozens of books and plays and over a hundred short stories. It also, unfortunately, established a habit of writing whatever came to mind and calling it work. As Bob Secter wrote in his Los Angeles Times obituary, Saroyan approached writing and life in the same way–“spontaneously, impetuously and sometimes sloppily.”

As the decades past, this led to an increasing tendency of Saroyan’s writing to read like a random walk through his thoughts, particularly as his output shifted from fiction to autobiography. Between 1962 and 1978, he published ten books that were either memoirs or journals or a combination of both. A constant theme through many of them was death–the death of family and friends, and the approach of his own death (viz. Not Dying (1963)).

So it was not entirely unexpected that he would decide, in early 1977, to set death as the subject for his daily writing assignment. Specifically, he chose the “Necrology” list in the January 5, 1977 issue of Variety for his inspiration:

I am a subscriber to a weekly paper called Variety. The 71st Anniversary Edition, dated January 5, 1977, arrived a few days ago, and I examined with fascination–on the last page, 164–the names in alphabetical order in the annual feature entitled Necrology. I had predicted that among those listed would be 34 men or women that I had met. I was not far off the mark: there were 28. But many of the 200 or more others listed were of course people I knew about, for Variety is the paper, the Bible, as they say, of show business, celebrated in song by Irving Berlin. Well, I thought, I’m very well along into my 68th year, hadn’t I better write about the people I know in Variety’s Necrology of 1976? So that is what I am doing.

Saroyan proceeded to produce 135 pieces, each about 2-3 pages long, running through the list from Alessandro (Victor) to Zukor (Adolph). Names he recognized and those of acquaintances fortunately outnumbered those he didn’t know, but fairly often he had to admit ignorance and plow on regardless, hoping his thoughts might lead somewhere interesting:

The first name on the list is Victor Alessandro, but I never had the honor. I never met him, never saw him, and therefore cannot say anything about him that might be possible had I met him. What might that have been? Well, the fact of him, the reality of him, the reality of the substance of him, or if you choose the myth, his appearance, his face, his voice, his eyes, and anything else that was there.

In this case, it was a false hope. Saroyan wanders off into the thickets, stumbles across a memory that he was in the Army when Stalin met with Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta, speculates “Perhaps everybody is everybody, no matter who,” and ends by noting, “The third name is Geza Anda, a fine name for a fine variety of reasons, but I have no idea who Geza Anda was, male or female, actor, clown, or what.”

William Saroyan, late 1970s
I suspect that readers new to Saroyan usually give up at this point, and you can’t blame them. Kirkus Reviews called the book “often close to unreadable.” But for those who hang in, the voice grows mesmerizing, his run-on sentences and rambling thoughts drawing the reader along through life after life, flashing back to diverse moments and people from Saroyan’s life, all the while returning to the fact that the days draw on toward an unavoidable end. And as the pages and names accumulate, it becomes clear that Obituaries is, as Publishers Weekly’s review put it, “an astonishing book, a profound and even original meditation about death and our only possible answer to it: the way we live.”

Remembering Saroyan in a 2008 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, his long-time friend, the novelist Herbert Gold wrote of Obituaries:

For me, three short pages, Chapter 106 … the rhythm, sly humor and shrugged-off grief, the sad recapitulation of the pleasures of simple existence, the exalted awareness of mortality, an offhand but measured conviction of moral responsibility are a peak of Saroyan’s long meditation on the sense and responsibility of life. These three pages, which I’ve sometimes read aloud to would-be writers, remind me of “Euthyphro,” Plato’s dialogue on the responsibility of fathers and sons – but with Saroyan’s unique, wise-ass sideswipes at the whole deal. “Reader, take my advice, don’t die, just don’t die, that’s all, it doesn’t pay.”

It’s worth excerpting the closing passage of Chapter 106 to give a sense of just what Gold meant:

And then Johnny Mercer died, and I know him. I knew Johnny Mercer, I saw him sometimes at parties in Hollywood, and sometimes at Stanley Rose’s bookstore, and sometimes at various other places. He wrote the lyrics, the words, to many great songs, but he also sang those songs, and he sang them well. He made good money, but his father died broke and in debt, somewhere in the South, possibly in Atlanta, and quietly Johnny Mercer went to work and paid every one of his father’s debts, even though legally he was in no way obliged to do so, it was a simple matter of pride, of a son not wanting his father to have left anybody holding the bag, and once at a party I told him that I thought he was one of the great writers of words for songs, one of the really good singers of songs, but I had lately heard about what he had done for his father, and that was the thing I now admired about him above all other things, and I was glad that he had not been able to suppress the news of his devotion to his father, and to his own sense of family, as he had wanted to do, for it is necessary for all of us to hear about such news, and Johnny Mercer in his shy way smiled and thanked me, and we talked about the stuff people always talk about at parties, especially Hollywood parties, and that stuff is never without its comedy, that is the best thing about all talk at all parties, perhaps on account of the booze, and the fact that everybody is free again for a little while, and it is permissible and in order to talk about the funny stuff in the world, what somebody said to somebody else at a time when something else was expected of him traditionally har har har har har har. Christ, reader, take my advice, don’t die, Johnny Mercer died, but don’t you, and don’t get the kind of headaches that made Johnny Mercer agree to go to the highest branch of the medical profession for the latest kind of examination and then don’t be told yes, yes sir, yes Johnny Mercer, we’ve found it, you have a brain tumor, it has to come out, because it may be benign but also may not be, and in any case, it appears to be the thing that is hurting your soul by way of pain in your head, so Johnny Mercer agreed and they did their good work, and he died, a great artist, a great man, a great son, a great living member of the human race died, and he is gone, and don’t you do it, and don’t think you may have a brain tumor, too, because thinking about it may start a little one growing in your head, watch out for giving the mystery of cells any hint of fear, because those cells may be like dogs and if they sense you’re afraid of them, they’ll go to work and start multiplying in a kind of disorganized way and hurt you so badly you will risk dying on the operating table, and then lose your bet, and die. Don’t do it.

Not every page of Obituaries manages to squeeze so much into a few lines, but enough do to make it a surprisingly moving experience. Sometimes Saroyan wanders around aimlessly. Sometimes he wanders around and manages to sneak up on himself. And sometimes he manages to sneak up on us, too. I have moments when I have a sudden vision of contracting some devastating disease and shake it off with a shudder, but until I read this passage, I didn’t realize that I was afraid that these thoughts “may be like dogs and if they sense you’re afraid of them, they’ll go to work and start multiplying in a kind of disorganized way and hurt you so badly….”

“Why do I write? Why am I writing this book?” Saroyan asks at one point. His answer is simple: “To keep from dying, of course. That is why we get up in the morning.” And so he kept on getting up and working at his daily writing task, never quite knowing where it would lead but reassured by the thought that at least he was keeping death at bay. As Lawrence Lee and Barry Gifford relate in Saroyan: A Biography, In April 1981, just a few weeks before his death, Saroyan called the San Francisco bureau of the Associated Press to dictate what he wanted to appear in his obituary as his last words: “Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?”

Obituaries is available free in e-book formats on the Open Library: Link.

Obituaries, by William Saroyan
Berkeley, California: Creative Arts Book Company

Herbert Gold’s memoir of Saroyan in the San Francisco Chronicle from 2008