“Doctor, connected with hospital, requires in private practice, light colored girl. Must be neat and obliging.”
“Well, Lydia,” said the woman seated at the desk, “what’s happened? Didn’t that job do?”
The young coloured girl stood before her, quietly dressed, straight and tall, her colour light as a Spanish beauty’s.
‘Yes, ma’am,” she said. “I didn’t take that job. I just didn’t take it. That’s all.”
The woman rapped the desk with the end of her pencil.
“You know you can’t pick and choose in times like these,” she slid sharply. She picked up a card from the box-index, and read it out with bitter emphasis: “Doctor, connected with hospital, requires in private practice, light coloured girl. Must be neat and obliging. Now what,” she said impatiently, “did you find to object to?”
“Nothing,” said the tall girl. “I didn’t do no objecting at all. He wanted a girl to sleep there at night. I likes to go home. That’s all.”
“Well,” snapped the woman at the desk, “if you want work, Lvdia, you’ll have to make some concessions.”
“I makes concessions every day I lives,” said Lydia, “but I do like to sleep the night alone. This doctor, he don’t want to sleep alone. That’s what the neat and obliging means.”
The woman’s face flushed dark with anger.
“You people have no sense of truth!” she said. “Don’t come here talking about an eminent man like that! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, making such an excuse!”
This sketch, from the the story-a-day anthology 365 Days that Kay Boyle edited with her then-husband Laurence Vail and her friend Nina Conarain, is one of the most powerful in the entire book. Pregnant with her third child, Boyle found herself with the burden of filling the many gaps in the collection left by contributions that were never submitted and contributions fundamentally out of keeping with the design and spirit of the anthology, which aimed to portray the year 1934 imaginatively through 300-word stories inspired by a particular news story headline from each day. And so, perhaps in desperation as pieces failed to arrive in response to requests, she began reaching out to everyone she knew — friends, acquaintances, neighbors, and in this case, her mother, Katherine.
It makes me long for the book Katherine Boyle never wrote. “I makes concessions every day I lives” is such a stunning statement. Matter-of-fact, resigned to the situation yet never failing to bear witness to its fundamental injustice. It’s a perfect example of the kind of breathtaking writing that jumps out of the pages of this remarkable collection.
365 Days, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936
Unemployed Crowd Benches of New York Parks as New Year Begins
Charlie huddled in the doorway, protected somewhat from the tugging wind; but when he saw the old lady approaching with her dog, he squared his shoulders and walked towards her with something of his old carelessness. He whispered: “It’ll be easier, the first time, to ask an old dame. It won’t be so shameful.” The old woman stopped and peered over her nose glasses at Charlie, surveying his wrecked shoes, his dirty reddened hands, his unshaven face. The terrier bitch stepped forward, dancing in the cold, and sniffed his trousers, making a whining sound.
All at once Charlie’s jauntiness vanished. The set speech which he had rehearsed in the doorway went out of his mind. He spoke rapidly in his terror: This was the first time he had ever begged. She must believe that, for God’s sake. He wasn’t a bum. He’d had a good job until just a few months ago. This was the first time, and he hadn’t eaten for almost two days. He was a man with self-respect and she must believe that. It was important. She must believe that, for God’s sake.
The old woman opened her bag. She dropped a dime into his palm.
Charlie sat on a bench in Washington Square, clutching the coin tightly, crushing with his heels clods of soiled and brittle snow. In a little while he would get up and buy something hot for his gnawing belly; but first he must sit here a little longer and adjust himself to shame. He rested his face against the iciness of the iron bench, hoping that nobody could guess his degradation by looking at him. He thought: “I sold out pretty cheap, didn’t I?”
William March only contributed two sketches to the story-a-day anthology 365 Days that Kay Boyle edited with her then-husband Laurence Vail and her friend Nina Conarain, but they are among the very best in the book. This one in particular is like a haiku of the Great Depression: brief, deft, perfect. It’s exactly reflective of the design and spirit of the anthology, which aimed to portray the year 1934 imaginatively through 300-word stories inspired by a particular news story headline from each day.
365 Days, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936
Title page from Written with Lipstick by Maurice Dekobra (1938).
One of my Neglected Books guilty pleasures is the work of the prolific French novelist Maurice Dekobra. There was a time when Dekobra was among the best-known and most successful authors in the world. His books are said to have been translated into over seventy languages, and there was a time when no novelist came close to him as a precursor to Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann for American readers: our titan of titillation, if you will.
Dekobra’s books are like fresh garlicky potato chips: heavily seasoned and hard to resist, but not good to overconsume. From everything I’ve read, he was a man of monstrous ego. A man who, had the great Victor Hugo himself been around at the time, wouldn’t have hesitated to tell le maître des Les misérables to step aside as he paraded down the Champs-Élysées.
Dekobra’s egotism enabled him to blithely ignore his own ignorance. Reality and research were for the timid and unimaginative. The fact that he knew nothing about a subject never prevented him from making up his own facts. And if their foundations and construction seemed a bit jury-rigged and unstable, no matter: speed was what mattered most. As long as the reader kept turning the page, credibility took a back seat to pure forward narrative momentum.
Cover of Reader’s Library (UK) edition of Prince or Clown by Maurice Dekobra.
In his 1929 novel Prince ou Pitre, published in English as Prince or Clown, for example, he invents an entire Balkan country, Phrygia, its language and culture. The Phrygians, for example, consume massive amounts of yarka, their national drink. Yarka, Dekobra informs us “made from distilled tomatoes and geranium leaves.” Geranium leaves are, in fact, edible and have been used to season dishes, supposedly; but distilled tomatoes? (The answer turns out to be yes, according to drinks website SevenFiftyDaily (“The Arrival of Tomato-based Spirits: European distillers are betting on Americans’ fondness for the nightshade with a new crop of liquors”) — so get your yarka franchise going today!)
Then there is the Phrygian language, which is capable of expressing things hitherto unthought and unfelt:
“Afafna!” “Afafna?” “That means in Phrygian, ‘By the body of my mother, I am overcome with zodiacal emotion.'”
Dekobra presents us with other bits of Phrygian: Tchik zaga houm-houm crakoi (“I’m feeling better” — I think); Zurbe Barigoul! (um .. sorry, not a clue); Djouk! (you can probably figure this one out yourself). (I must omit Kayout Kagda, as that would be a spoiler.) He also offers us a remedy for accidental poisoning: “Give her a spoonful of milk every two hours, a cup of cod liver oil, boric acid and gum-arabic.” (OK, admittedly this is probably what the finest GP in Paris would have prescribed … in 1729.)
Not surprisingly, Dekobra also had a high opinion of his high opinions. American and English newspapers loved to offer their readers his grand pronouncements on everything from love and marriage to food. And especially, women. He was, after all, “The Man Who KNOWS Women.”
From the London Sunday Dispatch, 11 December 1938.
Dekobra would argue that his ideas were grounded in careful and objective observation. When he visited in New York in January 1930, for example, he told reporters that he had come to conduct a study of American women:
From the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 19 January 1930.
Nevermind that upon debarking the week before, he felt confident in announcing that what American women needed was a good shaking:
From the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 11 January 1930.
By the time he’d ended his American tour, he was ready to set down his conclusiong about American women and American romance in algebraic precision:
From the Long Beach Sun, 30 August 1931.
Ten years later, as a refugee from occupied France, he predicted with striking inaccuracy the economic landscape of the postwar world:
From the Montreal Gazette, 2 April 1941
When Dekobra turned fifty, he thought it was time to offer the world a larger piece of his mind. His autobiography, published in English as Written with Lipstick, is part memoir, part stories polished to perfection at countless dinner parties and rounds of drinks with friends — always showing Dekobra to his best advantage — and part pontifications as solemn and authoritative as any declared from a balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square in Rome. These last are easy to spot in the book: they’re always in numbered lists. There are, for example, four key failings of English women:
They do not understand how to choose their dresses — above all, to choose colours — too much apple green and red geranium.
They marry without careful consideration — before they know whether the man is suitable.
They talk too much about their household affairs.
They are too fond of bridge.
At the end of his chapter on “The Adventuress” (“chief character in tens of thousands of novels in every language under the sun”), he provides us with his “Articles of Association for Adventuresses” — or, “Ten Commandments for Love’s Highwaywomen”:
Choose an original name — Thea, Belkis, or Mareva.
Confide to men under strict secrecy that you are the niece of a revolutionary executed in prison, or the natural daughter of a Balkan king [from Phrygia, for example].
Although you may have taken you M.A. at Oxford, speak English with a Russian accent, slightly flavoured with Bulgarian and just a suspicion of Hungarian.
Have a favourite flower — a red lily or a Brazilian cowslip — that you won the first time you were kissed on the lips by a Cossack general at the age of sixteen.
Introduce anecdotes into your conversation. Remark casually, for example: “‘In summer it is warmer than in winter,’ as the great Lao-Tze has said.”
Always live at a hotel. An adventuress has no use for a kitchenette.
Wear an antique ring on your little finger — one that used to contain deadly poison and was used by the Florentines in the days of Lucretia Borgia.
If you happen to be spending a few days at Margate [surely Dekobra didn’t write Margate in his French original], say to the man who is paying you attention, “My dear, I have just arrived from Stamboul.”
Procure a number of leading Continental hotel labels and stick them on your new luggage. An adventuress who does not travel is like a panther without teeth.
An adventuress does not eat eggs and bacon for breakfast. She takes snails on toast, six olives, half a pound of caviare, and an aspirin tablet in a glass of absinthe.
When he returned to France after the war, Maurice Dekobra continued to publish several novels a year into the 1960s, but hardly any of these were translated and published in English. To readers now accustomed to fug, Lolita, and Playboy, Dekobra’s brand of footsies-as-sex seemed as outdated as Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang. Which is a bit of a shame, as Dekobra’s postwar novels were, according to Claude Duneton, precursors to Frédéric Dard’s fast, furieux, and funny San Antonio novels.
Cover of Maurice Dekobra: Gentleman entre deux mondes by Philippe Collas (2002).
However, by the time Philippe Collas’ biography, Maurice Dekobra: Gentleman entre deux mondes, was published in 2002, most of Dekobra’s work had falled out of print and, even for French readers, he was an unknown. Melville House reissued his single biggest bestseller, The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, as part of its Neversink Library in 2012, but that appears to be the only one of his books currently available in English.
Editor’s Note: This entry for June 30, 1934, written by the Swedish novelist Gustav Sandgren, offers a timely reminder of the precarious nature of freedom.
Headline: “Wanderers on the Face of the Earth” [Sweden]
The train moved out from the small station. He sat on the bench opposite me, his little dark-clothed body nervously twitching, his long white hands moving like disturbed birds. His eyes blinked behind silver-bowed eyeglasses. And I listened to him, while the landscape glided by as in a dream, silent and contourless.
“I tell you I am afraid,” he said. “You know I am an emigrant, and that I have saved my life by running away from Germany. Still it is not those facts that upset me. I am not afraid of anything happening to my body, it is not death I talk of. It is something other. Something dreadful beyond words. Something that happens not only to me, but to the whole world. You understand?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “Pardon me I — I mean I have seen and felt ten millions of respectable citizens, of kind, labouring folks suddenly turn bandits, bloodhungry animals, craving for men to put to death by kicks and blows. I say to you, I have felt it, seen it, seen my best friend and neighbour, a peaceful clerk with ink-spots on his fingertops turn wild, heard him hammer at my door with an axe to get in and kill me. Yet it is not the facts I shrink from — it is the thing behind it, the evil power, the nothingness of all that we called human thoughts and feelings. We have been cheated, we are cheated, the whole of mankind. We have lived on illusions and now they are withdrawn from under our feet… ”
“But in this country you are safe,” I tried to soothe him.
“Nobody is safe, I am afraid. I say I am afraid. It is nameless ugly things that begin to darken over us, that are to come. I seek to calm myself, but I can’t, I can’t….”
His poor little figure hooked in the corner, his clammy hands fastening to the window strap. The train moved very fast, it was as if we were thrown forward through a mist of green, through a green dead dream.
And I felt his fear.
This piece appears in 365 Days, an anthology of what we would today call flash fictions, inspired by a newspaper headline and story for each day in 1934, that was edited by the American writer Kay Boyle and her then-husband Laurence Vail, along with their Irish friend Nina Conarain.
365 Days, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936 London: Jonathan Cape, 1936
Damocles is drunk. He has imbibed a stock of whisky, a warehouse of gin and a dockyard of champagne. Before slumping over the steering-wheel, he declares that the negro hostess of the joint he is leaving is his true and only mother; the other one, the blood relative, no longer counts at all.
Damocles drives on, now jerking upright, now falling asleep. The car lurches perilously: decidedly, it would be wiser to stop. Damocles abandons his car in the heart of the Bois and sets off on foot. He talks. His voice and his words are suspended in his delirium. He walks. He talks. The trees, the planets, the earth, the sky, all seem simple to him. He fears nothing, neither the bludgeon of the police nor the assassin’s knife.
Damocles returns to the civilized parts of town. His former wrath revives. He would like to knock down a house with his fist. “All — all are heartless. They sleep. They make babies. They do not know the horror of it all.” Further on, before a butcher shop, he emits atrocious yells. In a public park, he sees a drunk asleep on a bench. Damocles thinks himself an angel or in a dream.
At dawn, Damocles rings the bell of the apartment house where he lives with his mother. In a corner of the vestibule, weeping, his mother stands in her nightgown. The concierge, attired in her petticoat, is repeating: “Your son was killed tonight in a motor accident. They have just telephoned.”
Damocles feels himself all over and discovers that he has lost his arms and legs. Now he understands why it seemed to him that night for the first time, that he had come face to face with himself.
— Michel Leiris
365 Days is an anthology of flash fiction published decades before the form had a name. American novelist Kay Boyle and her then-husband Laurence Vail were in Austria at the start of 1934 — a year, as they wrote in the preface, “that was to be characterized by almost universal unrest, by civil war, revolution, by strikes and unemployment figures reaching monstrous proportions.” They decided to “compile a record in fiction form not only of that year’s nationally or internationally important events but as well of the ordinary individual’s life.”
They collected American, English, French, German, Austrian, and Italian newspapers, along with some from as far away as Australia and Singapore. From these they selected stories they thought representative of the year’s events, movements, and attitudes. With the help of their friend Nina Conarain, an Englishwoman who later published dozens of Mills & Boon romances as Elizabeth Hoy, they wrote or contacted fellow writers and asked they to write 300-word pieces, usually imaginative, based on these stories.
Some ignored these requests. Some just wrote one or two. William Saroyan sent in an entire year’s worth of material. Boyle, Vail, and Conarain knew they would have to fill in any gaps with their own pieces, but by the time submissions stopped flowing in, it was obvious that there were well over 100 days’ worth of material still to be written. Vail contributed some, including some of the most imaginative ones, but he began to lose interest in the project as his interest in his new lover, the heiress and art collector Peggy Guggenheim, began to heat up. In the end, it was Boyle, pregnant with her third child, who wrote over a quarter of the book’s contents, demonstrating exceptional versatility in her choice of subjects and styles.
Halfway through the year, much of the edited material for the book was destroyed when a pro-Nazi group set fire to the offices of an Austrian anti-Nazi newspaper, Tyrolia, and a burning package was tossed into the beer garden of Boyle and Vail’s hotel room and exploded. Less than two weeks later, Boyle gave birth to their daughter Katherine.
When the book was finally published in 1936, reviewers seemed to delight in dismissing the project as a novelty and to note how few of the stories met their critical standards. Now, however, it is a fascinating document featuring an impressive range of contributors. Raymond Queneau’s two days are his first work to be translated into English. James T. Farrell and Henry Miller provided pieces, as did now less well-known writers as Bessie Breuer, Grace Flandrau, Arthur Calder-Marshall, William March, Evelyn Scott, and Malachi Whitaker. The overall tone is empathetic, anti-fascist, activist, and angry, yet it rarely descends into propaganda. Indeed, one wishes that a collection of contemporary writers would take on a similar project for one of our own tumultuous years.
I have been reading my way through 365 Days a day at a time and will be posting other pieces from it through the rest of this year.
365 Years, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936 London: Jonathan Cape, 1936
Advertisement for Enter a Child by Dormer Creston.
Excerpt
There must, I suppose, have been wet days during the summer holidays at Hilldrop but actually, I cannot remember a single one. It may have been on these supposititious wet days that Uncle Reggie had out his toy engine; not for us to play with; it was far too expensive, also far too dangerous for that: Uncle Reggie’s engine was a grown-up toy, an engine of importance. All the male members of the family were pressed into the service of laying down the rails — which were heavy. In this Adam house the billiard-room, drawing-rooms, hall, library, and dining-room all opened out of each other: when all the double mahogany doors were thrown back there was revealed a charming landscape of room beyond room, the whole length suffused with streams of light from the windows at one side. But when the rails were all down, crossing every room, running through every doorway, it gave a most desolate look.
But still that was not the point; the point was to make the engine go, and for such an extremely grand and impressive toy I must say I never saw anything that demanded so much inducement, that necessitated so many people to attend to it, before it could be persuaded to perform. It appeared to require not only the encouraging presence of the entire family but that too of Randall, the carpenter (who was always sent for on engine-days as a matter of course), before it could be persuaded so much as to stir. The amount of discussions, tapping, screw-turning, adjustment, and readjustment that polished brass and green enamelled object required! Matches were lit … blown out … further matches lit … the smell of methylated spirits impregnated the air. The attendant family got tired of waiting … it seemed as if nothing would ever happen … as if there would never be any other show to look’ at than that of the two bending, arguing figures of my uncle and the carpenter hiding the engine from our view.
And then suddenly there would be a cry. “She’s off!” There would be a fizzing and a puffing, and actually, yes, actually, there was the little creature moving along the rails of its own accord … beginning to go quite quickly … quicker … now really fast; and my uncle, flushed with success, and brandishing a walking stick (which he used for poking into the engine’s tender when he wanted it to stop) would run along by its side, occasionally, for some strategic purpose, vaulting over the rails. The whole family, headed by Aunt Flora crying out, “Splendid, dear Reggie, splendid!” would try to rush after him. I say try because, (being so many, there was generally a jam at the doorways.
Uncle Reggie, meanwhile, by his leaps over the rails, invariably got left behind by the engine which, now at the height of its form, would rush from room to room, a terrifying demon that no one of us dared interfere with for fear — as was constantly impressed on us — that it would either explode, burn one’s fingers, or set the house on fire. For us it was this very diabolic quality that was the engine’s charm; the delicious feeling at the back of our mind that anything might happen at any moment. “Oh, Uncle Reggie — what’s that funny noise it’s making? Is it going to explode?”
“Get off the rails, dear child! Get off the rails!” And then, seeing the engine was nearing a side line on to which she was to be shunted, “Quick, Harry, she’s coming — quick, quick — the points!” To see all the grown-ups so excited seemed very odd. It made one wonder whether at bottom they were really so very different from oneself as one had imagined.
It’s been a long time since I opened a book and was instantly taken by the freshness of the writing. I stumbled across Enter a Child when it came up among the results when I went to the Internet Archive in search of a Patricia Traxler poem. It was about a woman’s memory of an abusive relationship and the only words I could remember were “kidnappers, burglars.”
Amazingly, Traxler’s 1994 collection, Forbidden Words was the first title returned, but what caught my eye was the one at the end of the first line of results: Enter a Child, by Dormer Creston.1 It came from the Public Library of India, which includes a wonderful assortment of books that appear to have been left behind in the officer’s libraries of various army outposts when the British cleared out after Partition in 1947. The phrase appears in the following sentence, which was by itself enough to make me want to keep reading:
My mind, stretching out all round me to get to know the kind of world I had entered, discovered through stories read to me, gossip, and teasing that, apart from the few home figures, it was peopled by a most sinister company: kidnappers, burglars, ghosts of many kinds, a witch who lived in the nursery bathroom, and a “little man” who, if I did not behave myself, would leap like an acrobat out of the chimney.
That “little man” made me remember with some shame a story we used to tell our children about the fearsome Turtle Lady. The Turtle Lady hid in the bushes around the front door of houses and jumped out and grabbed little kids who made the mistake of wandering alone outside after dark. She would snatch them with her great clawed hands and stuff them inside the empty turtle shell she carried on her back. I’m sure the Turtle Lady held a prominent place in the “most sinister company” that peopled the world of our children’s nightmares.
Enter a Child is structured in five sketches, but in reality, it’s just two parts, one dark and one light. The book opens in the dark, in the memories of the fears that filled the author’s early years as Dolly, the youngest daughter of an upper-class English family in the late 19th century. “As regards fear I was an expert,” she writes of those days.
Her one safeguard was her beloved nurse, Mary, in whose company she spent most of her days. Yet even Mary brought fears into the child’s life. Decades before, when Mary have been her mother’s nurse, she incurred the wrath of no less than Queen Victoria herself. While walking together in Hyde Park, the mother — then just seven — had broken away to run alongside the Queen’s carriage as she was out for a ride. Seeing the child, the Queen called for the driver to stop, then instructed a policeman to escort her back to her guardian. The man asked for Mary’s name and address, and ever after Mary remained convinced that at any moment, there might come an angry knock at the family’s front door.
The thought of Mary being taken away in irons became one of Dolly’s nightmares. Imagine, then, the girl’s anxiety when she was sent away from a few days in the charge of another maid. Why wasn’t Mary taking her? she wondered. And then to discover, upon their return, that Mary had vanished.
“Please, please tell me about Mary,” she begged her mother. “When will she be here? To-night? To-morrow?” Her mother gave evasive answers and tried to distract the child with a game of “Happy Families.” But her mother’s avoidance only increased Dolly’s panic. So, she sought out another maid, Ellen, Mary’s best friend among the servants. “Why, don’t you know, Miss Dolly?” Ellen answered, matter-of-factly. “She’s never coming back! She’s gone for good, she has!”
Dolly’s parents were classic Victorian in their attitude towards children. Many days, they neither saw nor spoke to their children aside from saying good morning or good night. Her relationship with her father, in particular, had only two modes: great periods of completely ignoring her, alternating with short bursts of fearsome discipline. “My father was one of the major problems of my life,” she recalls. “A problem in the sense that I was always making little bids to enter into friendly relations with him, which little bids were invariably repulsed.”
One of these bids, heart-breaking for most parents of today to read, was when Dolly heard that her father’s birthday was approaching. She felt compelled to offer him a present but having no money and no means to shop for him, decided to create one. She cut out several pictures of bowls from a newspaper advertisement and decorated them with the brightest colors in her paintbox:
My system of painting was first to ram the paint brush with all my force down on top of the paint, and then to twist the brush this way and that. I then pressed the brush with equal force on top of the drawing, splurged it round, and would note with satisfaction a spatter of paint arrive, more or less, on the object I wished to colour.
Then, when the happy day arrived, Dolly carefully laid out her offerings in front of her father as he read his newspaper at the breakfast table. He briefly glanced over at them then resumed reading. That was the end of it.
I could not believe that nothing more than this was going to happen. I stood there waiting. The clock ticked, the breakfast things lay glistening in the strong morning light, my father continued to read. It was driven in on me that the Great Moment had come, had passed. No more notice was going to be taken of my present: my father had not accepted it and was not going to: he did not think it even worth a thank-you.
“If Miss Creston’s parents had possessed as much common-sense as the ordinary farm labourer’s wife,” one of the book’s reviewers wrote, “she would have been a far happier child, but might never have grown into so acute a writer.” “Their cruelty was the more intolerable,” he continued, “because it was unintended, and their daughter could not console herself with hating them.”
Instead, the author sees her parents’ cool uninterest as their peculiar eccentricity, just one of the many forms of it she observed among her relations. Fortunately, charm rather than aloofness characterized the majority of her family’s eccentricities, and these — related through Dormer Creston’s vivid prose — brighten the sketches that comprise the latter two-thirds of the book. As Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy later wrote in his book The Unnatural History of the Nanny, “She manages to create, out of what must have been numerically a tiny proportion of her childhood months, the illusion that she had a perfect, radiant, sunny Edwardian girlhood.”
A bit of Dorothy Julia Baynes’ pedigree.
Gathorne-Hardy was mistaken, however, in placing the book in King Edward II’s reign. Its author had, in fact, come of age by the time Edward came to the throne. Dormer Creston was the chosen pseudonym of Dorothy Julia Baynes — Dolly in the book — born in 1880 and the beneficiary of not one but two baronetages. Her father Sir Christopher William Baynes was the 4th Baronet Baynes of Harefield Place, Middlesex; on her mother’s side, her uncle Charles was Charles Edward Hungerford Atholl Colston, 1st Baron Roundway and heir to Roundway Park, a large estate in Wiltshire. When she was in her mid-sixties, she applied by Deed Poll to change her name to Colston-Baynes to emphasize her pedigree.
Roundway Park — referred to in the book as Hilldrop — is the setting for four of the five sections of Enter a Child, and a stark contrast to the grim atmosphere of the stern Victorian London home where the book opens. Every summer, Dolly and her parents would travel there to relax with a dozen or more uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandmothers. The grownups would relax in the cool interior while Dolly would explore and play outside in the baking August sun. “All this warmth, this glow, is within me as well as without,” and that warmth pervades these pages.
The house at Roundway Park around 1900.
Part of that spirit was due to her Aunt Flora, a spinster who’d sacrificed her life in “self-immolation” to Dolly’s grandmother, but who nonetheless served as a prime specimen of the art of living: “let life offer her a handful of dust and her exuberance would so irradiate it that it was dust no more.” At times, though — particularly sunset — Aunt Flora’s enthusiasm could grow tedious:
“Yes, beautiful. Aunt Flora,” I would say because I had been taught to be polite, taught, when a grown-up said anything was beautiful, to acquiesce, but in my heart hating this flaming wreckage of the day’s reassuring blue sky.
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic, dear,” Aunt Flora would murmur, disappointed in her proselyte, then, catching sight of my mother coming down the stairs, “Here, dear!” she would cry, “such a lovely sunset … you must come and look at it … did you ever see such colours!” And then, realizing I was about to slip away, “No, dear, don’t go yet, it’s changing every minute — you really oughtn’t to miss it!…Oh! Look at that long streak of yellow by the green!” And in her excitement she would drub on the glass with her fingers as if, could she only reach the sunset, she would like to pat it in approbation.
Eccentrics like Aunt Flora fill these pages with their well-meaning ridiculousness. As The Observer’s anonymous reviewer put it, they are all “strait-jacketed from the cradle in conventionality, and carefully trained to feel, as well as to be, useless.” Yet collected together and put to such activities as loading into carriages for a picnic or organizing themselves for a photograph or giving Uncle Reggie’s trainset a go, they become completely charming. “There is a lucent airiness in the writing that is often a delight,” wrote Marjorie Grant Cook in her review for the TLS.
“The essential merit of Miss Creston’s book,” Anthony Powell wrote in The Spectator “is that, although it may be … an account of a child who suffered from misunderstanding and loneliness, it is entirely free from any sense of obsession or feeling that the words have been written for the author’s gratification rather than the reader’s; a failing from which even a great writer like Proust is not entirely free.”
One reason no shadow of lingering resentment hovers over Enter a Child is that Dolly — or Doreen, as her friends came to call her as an adult — was not fundamentally out of sympathy with her parents and their values. When she was in her sixties, she would write a testy letter to the editor of The Spectator complaining about a William Plomer article proclaiming the merits of Surrealism. “As the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of culture is ‘the training and refinement of mind, tastes and manners,’ she wrote, “it can scarcely be used to describe Surrealism. Its whole motive is exactly the opposite of this definition.”
Dorothy Julia Colston-Baynes, from a family photo.
Dorothy/Dolly/Doreen never married. She took up the penname of Dormer Creston out of discretion: like Hilldrop, few things or people in Enter a Child appear under their real names. After publishing a small volume of poetry in 1919, she took up biography and earned a solid reputation as a dedicated researcher and colorful writer.
Books about royals bookended her career: The Regent and His Daughter (1932), about Queen Charlotte and her domination by her father, King George IV, and The Youthful Queen Victoria (1952). Other titles included Andromeda in Wimpole Street: The Romance of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Fountains of Youth (1936), about the artist and diarist Marie Bashkirtseff. Her best-received work, In Search of Two Characters (1946), about Napoleon and his short-lived son François, won a Heinemann Foundation Award Royal Society of Literature award. Elizabeth Bowen wrote of this book, “A sort of lyricism and freshness comes from so much of the material having been drawn from young minds. This is in the best sense — and how good that can be! — a feminine book.”
She lived most of her life in London, sharing a house on Lowndes Square with her sister Christabel. She was great friends of the writer and preservationist James Lees-Milne, who would often drop in her for tea and a bit of gossip. Doreen found a happy statis in her life. “She writes in bed every day till 1 o’clock, lunches alone, then walks at breakneck speed, she says often running; returns for tea to receive some friend or other; reads at dinner alone and retires to bed immediately” Lees-Milne wrote in his diary. “She says happiness consists in finding the right rut and never leaving it.” She suffered, however, each time her books were published. She told Lees-Milne that she went through “such agonies over reviews of her books that she often retires to bed for a week, with blinds drawn, silently weeping.”
Her sister Christabel, who died not long after Enter a Child was published, was even less fond of publicity. Lees-Milne recalled a guest at one of Doreen’s lunch parties going to the lavatory in her house and finding Christabel sitting on the toilet, a Pekinese on her lap, reading a novel. “I attributed this to the sister’s intense shyness and reluctance to meet Doreen’s friends,” he wrote.
Enter a Child proved Alfred A. Knopf’s adage that many a book dies on the day it’s published. It came out in October 1939, earned good reviews, and vanished. There are no used copies available online and only a dozen library copies listed in WorldCat.org. Fortunately, it is available on the Internet Archive in electronic formats.
1 Among the other titles containing the phrase is a fascinating 1935 study titled Children’s Fears by Arthur T. Jersild and Frances B. Holmes which catalogued and analyzed an impressive and unsettling list of fears that included “queer, ancient, wrinkled, deformed persons,” “being shut in a small space,” “going up or down in an elevator,” “being abandoned by parents,” and “darkness plus imaginary characters other than animals.”
Enter a Child, by Dormer Creston (pseudonym of Dorothy Julia Colston-Baynes) London: Macmillan, 1939
Back in March, I posted a short item about two forgotten novels I’d come across in an advertisement in the Times Literary Supplement. Neither received much attention and both quickly disappeared from sight.
I was interested in knowing more about both books, so when I had the chance to visit the British Library for a few hours recently, I requested copies of both and took advantage of the book scanners available in most of the library’s reading rooms to grab a few pages from each. The Library’s copyright policy restricts one to copying one chapter or 5% of a book. I stretched the allowance a bit and scanned in two chapters from each.
I wish I could say great things for both books, but of the chapters of Bargasoles I read, I can only say that Geoffrey S. Garnier was probably smart to stick with visual art. Bargasoles purports to be a comic novel, but the comedy might best be described as lumpy.
Let’s move on, shall we?
In Our Metropolis, however, is blissfully silly. It could have made a fun little B comedy movie starring one of those English actresses with a name like Nova Pilbeam or Enid Stamp-Taylor. It’s almost a parody of itself. Take the first lines of dialogue spoken in the book: “Sweetheart?” “Darling!” “Sherry?”
Elizabeth and Ralph Ware are sophisticated, funny, and broke. “Gentlemen in bowler hats queue up at the door all day,” she complains. Cooped up in their apartment all day, she longs for a little chatter, a little small talk from Ralph. He buries himself behind a newspaper. Frustrated, she strips naked in front of him. “Are you mad?” Ralph exclaims, concerned that their son might walk in. “I promise to conceal all the facts of life from him so that he can get all the information required from the lavatories at Eton,” she assures him.
You can tell this book was published during the Phoney War. Hitler is part of Elizabeth and Ralph’s world, but he hasn’t yet become an existential threat. Asked if she’s been teaching their son geography, Elizabeth replies, “Geography went out when Hitler came in. What’s the good of learning anything about Central Europe with him nipping about in frantic fashion, changing the boundaries out of caprice every five minutes or so?”
I didn’t have time to read the whole book, but I can tell you that they all head off happily to India, well-paid position for Ralph in hand, leaving their creditors behind. What happens in between Chapter 2 and the end, I can’t say, but I have a feeling it matters less than whatever Elizabeth manages to come up with. If In Our Metropolis is at all successful as a comedy, I think it’s most due to her.
If you’re interested in the only sample available outside a handful of libraries, feel free to check out this PDF of Chapters 1 and 2.
In Our Metropolis, by Phyllis Livingstone London and Melbourne: Hutchinson & Co., 1940
Some thirty years ago, Richardson was rehearsing a play directed by Basil Dean. The latter was the last of the old-time directors on the British side of the Atlantic. By “old-time,” I mean abusive, cruel, sarcastic, and contemptuous of actors. His American equivalent, albeit far younger, would be Jed Harris. Mr. Harris, however, has changed. So far as I know, Mr. Dean never did. Richardson was an important actor at the time but not yet a film star nor one of the classic theatre’s leading lights. In this particular production, it had been decided to open “cold,” which means no tour of the provinces and no previews before the opening performance. Throughout the rehearsal period. Dean was nasty and autocratic with most of his actors, but left Richardson strictly alone. In fact, practically no conversation, pleasant or otherwise, passed between them. “Good morning, Mr. Richardson”; “Good morning, Mr. Dean”; “Good night, Mr. Richardson”; “Good night, Mr. Dean” was about the long and short of it. The night before the play opened, the cast performed a dress rehearsal with only Basil Dean out front. He stopped the performance quite often, either to change entrances and exits, lighting and cues for the stage manager, or merely to abuse the skills and talent of one actor or another. Late in the evening — midnight or thereabouts — Richardson made an exit which Dean considered important. He stopped the performance and asked the stage manager to bring Mr. Richardson back on stage. A moment later, Richardson stood soberly before the footlights.
Dean rose from his seat and ambled down the center aisle. When he reached the first row, he spoke softly. “Mr. Richardson,” he said, “do you think it possible that at some moment between now and tomorrow evening you could learn to leave the stage like a gentleman?”
Richardson gazed blandly back at his director and then all but murmured, “Yes. I believe I could.” He thereupon turned away, left the stage, continued on past the wings, the dressing rooms, the stage doorman, the alleyway, took a taxi for the railroad station, a train to his country home, told his wife what had taken place, instructed her not to call him to the phone for any purpose, and never opened in the play. For several days, his telephone rang hourly, but only Mrs. Richardson heard the pleadings, cajolements, blandishments, and inducements offered by producers, playwright, and fellow actors. It would seem perhaps cruel to deprive one’s innocent colleagues of employment, but if the play had been really good they would have gotten someone else. In any case, they didn’t. The play closed before it opened, and Dean’s directorial charisma sustained a smarting blow. Richardson—single-handed—caused what amounted to a silent revolution in the treatment of English actors by directors.
George Stevens and Method Acting
Only at the Actors Studio (granted its drawbacks and parochialism) can the actor ask question on question with impunity. Only there can he seriously explore the mysteries of his craft without being looked on as a neurotic pariah…. [T]he Studio remains a house of questions and stands, therefore, as an oasis in the lip-cracking desert of pay your dues and take your orders and grab the money and run for the cat-house…. I cannot say that I have stopped asking questions, but I have certainly stopped believing that honesty is the best policy. Because it isn’t. Not when directors are kings.
Good directors understand all this, of course, though they don’t often say so out loud. Good film directors understand exactly the reverse, and they are quite correct. During the filming of The Greatest Story Ever Told, George Stevens (a really excellent film director) was queried by an actor as to “motivation.” “Young man,” he said, “while you were resting yesterday, I went up in those hills over there and I shot a lot of sequences with a herd of cattle. Not one of those cattle asked me a question about motivation and, believe you me, they did just fine.”
It is not that I am a particularly avid drinker, but one partial to a glass of beer or a glass or two of wine with a meal, and then a lift at the start of the evening—apart from specific drinking occasions; but since I came to Finland I have been goaded almost to a Finn’s method of dispatching the glass, or usually it’s the bottle, put before him, by the difficulty of getting the fancied nip at the place and moment when I fancied it. And with the difficulty has gone such disapproval ranged against one’s request for help.
“Can I have a beer, please? Oh, not without food? Well, I’ll have some ham. Oh, not here at all? I can have milk? Oh, thanks. In the restaurant opposite? Yes, thanks. Yes, I like milk, and sour milk too. No, I have nothing against milk. I’m being quite serious. Some food, I agree, tastes as good with it. . . .”
“. . . Oh here you don’t serve beer at the bar? Only spirits at the bar, but beer at the tables? Beer is allowed when one starts one’s lunch? . . .”
“. . . Oh, I see, if I am in such a hurry — for a drink, that is” (I’d been waiting for twenty minutes) — “I ought to have gone to a higher grade of restaurant? Oh! . . .”
“. . But there isn’t a bar anywhere! I’ve looked already down a dozen streets. No, I don’t want a meal. You see, in this weather I get so cold, I need a shot of cognac. No, I don’t want an illicit bottle. I’d settle for a beer if there was a pub in sight. …”
“. . . Here is my passport, so I can order what I like? It’s not recorded in a book, in the case of a foreigner? So I’ll have three bottles of Fundador, your number 3985, and a bottle of 4497, and some 6413, yes, two bottles, and how about 2022 for an akvavit? You have no views upon it? No, it’s not for a name day. No, I am not buying it for a Finnish citizen. You see, it is such a walk to get here, and the hours are awkward, and it’s all so difficult, I’m just buying it, to have, to offer to people, to have an occasional drink by myself. Oh dear!” — for the square-faced matron, an officer of the government at the government store wielding this monopoly, with Finns along the counter whispering their orders then waiting while the details were recorded in their individual books, then popping the liquor into an attache case or some such dissimulating carrier, felt, she felt that my attitude was wrong. I can’t say why, but I suppose I didn’t show that I knew it to be devil’s milk. The need was proffered but not the guilt.
So I called on the painter hoping for a sherry, and the chance of again looking at his paintings that were slashed as though the vibrant colors had themselves at that point torn the canvas, but of course all his opened bottles were empty. And as I saw him about to open a whisky and remembered what that in particular did to him, as the need to drain it would speed up, I cried out that I was on the wagon, and he checked himself and his wife brought coffee (and his gestures, I noted, as with other Finns, while handling the bottle had been underlined as though this were the momentous side to life) and after some moments we could talk again as usual. I slipped away back to the Suusanens. It was second-best to sip sherry alone—from bottles hidden in my suitcase and wrapped in woollies against a telltale clink—but no one here understood the sipping. Mrs. Suusanen disliked liquor in the home, bar the little she imported. So I secretly drank, as the girls smoked, and as Aarne toned down his record playing, and as Marjatta perhaps had once hidden her love of crime beneath the pillows. We were linked in the Lutheran underworld.
Direction North: A View of Finland is an unusual sort of travel book. John Sykes was a Quaker who volunteered to serve as an ambulance driver with the Finns during the Winter War with the Soviets. One night, a doctor pointed at one of the wounded soldiers in his ambulance and remarked that the man — a working class labor organizer — had it in him to become Prime Minister of Finland one day. Sykes looked at the man and felt an immediate connection, one that stayed with him years after the war. And so he undertook to locate the man when he had some time to spend in Finland on the way back from a visit to the Soviet Union.
He finds the man, Pekka Suusanen, now a manager in a large textile factory in Tampere, and moves into a room in the Sussanen’s apartment. Despite the family’s hospitality, it’s something of an awkward situation because, well, as Sykes puts it, Suusanens always seem to be longing for time to be alone and seek’ “as Finns seemed to do, the kernel within the kernel of his thoughts.” For Finns, the ideal vacation would be “to find a retreat where at least for a fortnight no other human would intrude his presence. There would only be you there, and God. God would wrap you about with his silence. . . .”
“You have to get used to silence in Finland,” he writes. “It is a major part of social communion.”
Sykes — whose somewhat effusive prose style is evident in the passage above — does manage to divine some of the underlying tensions in Finnish society in the 1960s. Even with the country’s prosperity and the elevation of men like Pekka into the establishment, there are deep-set rifts — between labor, with its Communist roots, and capital, between the Finns and the Swede-Finns who still hold the old money and the old ties to the Swedish nobility. They all seem to culminate in Pekka’s resistance against the idea of accepting the gift of a house by the lake — every Finn’s dream, as Sykes sees it — from his company.
The contrast between Sykes’ open and spontaneous manner and Pekka’s dogged stolidity also provides Direction North with a certain comic air. Pekka often reminded me of my father-in-law, who used to greet visitors with, “I hope you have a hotel and restaurant for yourselves tonight.” There’s an occasional sense that Pekka plays up his grimness just to get a rise out of Sykes.
Things in Finland have probably changed since 1967, but Direction North can be enjoyed as an oddball bit of human comedy even if you never plan to go there.
Direction North is available in electronic formats on the Open Library: Link.
Direction North: A View of Finland, by John Sykes Philadelphia and New York: Chilton Books, 1967
Lou died on June 2, 1941. He was unmercifully young — only thirty-eight.
Our last Christmas together was in 1940, and to keep Lou occupied I held open house at our home in Riverdale, as I frequently did that last year of his life. He was not bedridden at the time, and he never knew that his illness was fatal. He used to come downstairs and sit and talk gaily to our friends, assuring them that he was well on the road to recovery. Every time he said it, my heart skipped a beat.
Lou’s greatest joy that Christmas was the arrival of a group of youngsters of whom he was in charge as a New York City Parole Commissioner. He had been appointed to that position by the late Mayor La Guardia. Mr. La Guardia realized that keeping Lou busy with youngsters would occupy many empty moments he might spend brooding about his illness. To me it has always seemed a measure of Mayor La Guardia’s stature and understanding that he appointed Lou for a ten year term. I don’t know of anything that did more for Lou’s morale.
Lou Gehrig being sworn in as New York City Parole Commissioner by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, 1939
Many of the boys in Lou’s charge were once tough characters. When they first came to see him, I thought we were being invaded by the Dead End Kids. But by the time Lou finished talking to them, he had begun to jolt some of the toughness and bitterness out of them. He understood their problems because he had been raised in the same type of neighborhood as most of them.
Sitting around the Christmas tree that holiday eve, Lou talked about the meaning of Christmas. I thought it was a miracle that he was able to interest these boys with a religious theme, but then Lou could charm a bird out of a tree. As each boy left that night, he handed Lou a small present. There were tears in Lou’s eyes as he accepted their gifts, because he knew the sacrifices the boys had made to remember him.
After they had left, Lou talked proudly about the boys, and I could sense his feeHng of achievement.
Then he started to talk about baseball, as he often did when we were alone. He recalled the time the New York Yankees went to the Orient for a post-season tour. I had gone along with him. It was a triumphal tour, and in Tokyo Lou won the last game with a home run in the tenth inning.
“Remember Christmas in Singapore, Eleanor?” he asked suddenly. “The time you learned that your fearless baseball hero husband was a complete coward?”
We laughed as he recalled it, and we sat there talking about our trip. Actually, Lou was anything but a coward. But he was referring to a Christmas day in Singapore when we were standing in front of tlhe hotel. Lou’s face had suddenly become ashen, as if he had seen a ghost over my shoulder. I turned around and saw a snake charmer pick up a flute. As he played, the most awful-looking cobra came up out of a basket and did a hideous shivering dance—twisting and writhing in the air.
Lou took one horrified look and bolted into the hotel. “If I had been that fast on the base paths,” he said to me as we sat talking about it years later, “I’d have broken Ty Cobb’s record for stolen bases.”
Lou became very tired. As I watched his pain-wracked body climb the stairs, I knew I would soon lose him. I did, of course, but I have the memories.
Eleanor Gehrig
Christmas with Ed Sullivan is a collection of Christmas short stories by authors such as Ring Lardner, Christopher Morley, Pearl Buck, and Alexander Wollcott, interspersed with letters from celebrities of the time sharing Christmas memories with the columnist and variety show host. Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstein II, Gene Tunney, Ted Williams, Edith Piaf, Dinah Shore, and others recall happy times from childhood. James Cagney and James Garner tell stories of visiting soldiers and sick children. Clark Gable, Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, and Moira Shearer remember Christmases spent on the road far from home. In Perry Como’s case, it was a lonely Christmas night spent in a diner in Cleveland:
The first thing I noticed there was that the people sitting at the tables were alone. No couples. Just single, lonely people like myself. By that time, I was feeling so sorry for myself and each one of them, I didn’t feel like eating. After a few moments I felt someone tap me on my shoulder. It was the waiter standing, pad in hand, waiting patiently for my order. He didn’t look much happier than I did and I thought of his having to work right through Christmas Day. Just to make him feel better, I ordered a bowl of soup.
The soup was cold when it arrived, and I began to push it aside, but when I glanced up and saw the waiter’s sad expression, I ate all of the soup, feeling that Cleveland was farther from home by the minute.
That night in the restaurant was the lowest point in my life. I sat there staring at the empty soup bowl and made a resolution I’ve never broken. No matter how much we would ever need money again, I promised myself, I wouldn’t spend another Christmas away from my wife and children. It is the one holiday when no person should be alone. You either share Christmas with people you love, or it turns into the longest, most meaningless day of the year.
Here’s hoping you’re sharing this Christmas with people you love: it’s always better than cold soup in Cleveland.
Christmas with Ed Sullivan New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1959
For seventeen years, seven days a week, Joe Berman has efficiently presided over his newsstand at the corner of Eighty-sixth Street and Broadway. He opens it before five in the morning. Mrs. Berman, wearing a smart hair-do and a Persian lamb coat, relieves him for an hour at breakfast and for two hours in the afternoon and wishes that he would take things easier. But with the exception of this interlude of relief, Joe is alert and on duty until six thirty. Today is one of his crudest days. The temperature is 16° and a freezing wind rushes wildly up the two blocks from the river. Joe has an electric heater that keeps his feet from freezing, but the front of the stand is open to the weather. He wears a Navy pea jacket and woolen cap and stands behind a pile of magazines. Although his customers suffer in the cold, Joe is smiling and business-like and makes no complaints. He is used to the weather. Having been outdoors for so many years, he is probably in more vigorous health than most New Yorkers. Piled high with newspapers and flanked with magazines, Joe’s stand radiates intelligence throughout the neighborhood. It is the university of Eighty-sixth Street.
Being a merchant Joe sells the comic books and squalid story magazines as well as the newspapers, reviews, and intellectual magazines; and he knows all of them, including the Russian, Yiddish, German, and French language papers. He carries and gives prominent display to the New Times, which is published in Moscow. If you are interested in ideas, art, politics, racing, or news, you can hardly get along without Joe, who has the information you need. In the morning and evening the stand is blocked by hurried customers. But it attracts browsers also. Three or four people seem to be loitering in front of it and looking over the stock any hour of the day. Joe is a quiet, soft-spoken man who talks pleasantly when he is spoken to and is a mine of information about the publishing business. Since he rarely leaves his corner, it is surprising that he knows so much in detail about the people and business methods of the local newspapers. He gives me more informed gossip about the Times than I get for myself.
January 15th
When a playwright becomes successful he settles down to a busy and fascinating life in the microcosm of Broadway. For Broadway is one of the best places in which to learn and practice the craft of playwrighting. Nearly a hundred new plays turn up here in the course of a season. Good and bad, they are worth studying. Moreover, Broadway is a compact, voluble community in which plays are fiercely searched, analyzed and discussed by a multitude of keen minds absorbed in the lore of the theater. Nothing in the writing or acting of a drama escapes the sharp eyes that Broadway turns on its own product. From the point of view of craftsmanship Broadway offers a stimulating course of instruction.
But a serious writer needs more than craftsmanship in the composition of a play. He needs material; he needs material sorely. He must draw on the experience of human beings—either his own or that of other people. In this respect Broadway is virtually destitute. It is an eccentric and closed community that has very little concrete information about the life of the world. It is dependent upon information and experience brought in from the outside. President Lowell of Harvard once explained how universities acquire so much learning: “The freshmen bring a little in and the seniors take none out, so that it accumulates throughout the years,” he said.
Something of the same situation applies to Broadway. Young people bring their own experience to Broadway from all parts of the country and from all groups of society. But for the most part they are isolated from the normal experience of ordinary people as long as they isolate themselves on Broadway. For the creative writer this can be a fatal experience. He cannot write illuminating plays about life from seeing other plays or from listening to the gossip that sputters around Broadway. At some time or other he must renew his association with people. Even books are not primary sources. There is no substitute for people.
August 1st
Herman Melville was born at 6 Pearl Street on this day in 1819. At the age of thirty-two he finished the great American epic Moby Dick at his farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. A wild, terrible dance on the rim of chaos, it was, he said, ”broiled in hell-fire.” It gutted him and wrecked his health. It was also a complete publishing failure. Two years after he had finished this mighty work, all the plates and unsold copies were burned in the fire that destroyed the Harpers’ publishing plant. That was the final stroke of evil that killed the genius of Melville. He lived for forty more years like a ghost—a quiet, solitary man, walking in limbo, perhaps haunted by dreams more malefic than Captain Ahab’s obsession with the white whale. Nothing else he wrote found a public, and he was not wanted as a lecturer. In 1866 the man who had wrestled with the angry sea got a routine clerk job as a custom’s inspector and walked every morning down Gansevoort Street to an office at the waterside. For nineteen years he kept his blameless accounts as a petty bureaucrat and drew his stipend—a man damned by the indifference of other men, but denied the consolation of death. Finally death did deliver him in 1891 at 104 East Twenty-sixth Street. About a quarter of a century later America woke up to the grandeur of his achievement.
August 24th
Since New York is an ocean port the dog days have special significance. They are likely to bury us in a thick blanket of fog. Today is a case in point. Sirius is not visible this morning, nor is anything else. For the cool air from the sea moving into the heat of the city has made a dense fog that extends as far north as Westchester County. The sun comes up like a reddish gold disk. But the fog is so thick that I cannot see the river from the front windows and can hardly see across the street. Planes are grounded. Trains are late. Automobiles move slowly through a white blanket of nothingness. By midmorning the fog is gone. But the damp heat stands in the canyons of the streets. “It must be in the nineties,” a sweaty taxi driver remarks as he keeps his cab crawling through the choked and irritable jangle of Times Square. It is 85° on top of the Whitehall Building, where the temperature of New York is officially recorded. But it is probably 90° or more in the streets where New Yorkers have their being—sweaty and dirty and limp.
In the evening, I attend a theater performance in a tiny, airless auditorium near Washington Square. Little beads of sweat run down the faces of the actors. Sweat melts the starched collars of the men actors, who are impersonating elegant English society people, and the frocks of the actresses stick to their necks and shoulders. Sitting in shirt sleeves, the audience stares at them listlessly through the moist heat of a steaming auditorium. When I reach home at one in the morning the candles in the living room have flopped over in the heat and are resting their tired heads on the table.
December 2nd
“Foreigner” is a word I have come to dislike. It preserves ignorance and prejudices that are obsolete in the modern world, and draws distinctions between natives and outlanders that are not genuine. The word derives from the Latin foris which means “outside” — purely a geographical distinction that applies as logically to other towns and other states as to other nations. The word itself is legitimate; we need a word to express the idea of “outside” places. But all national cultures, like ours, preserve a number of primitive and tribal attitudes. Primitive people feared and distrusted outside groups of people. Like the American Indians, who fought tribal wars, primitive people regarded other people as their natural enemies, and fought them instinctively.
After living in the blinding glare of international events for a number of decades, we have learned many things that primitive people could not know. Through the sensitive instrument of the United Nations, we have access every day to the problems of other nations and can begin to understand the sources of international troubles. But the word “foreign” still carries with it implications of fear and distrust; and, in the bumptious American point of view, it also carries implications of inferiority. When I first went to work abroad, I felt humiliated to discover that I, too, was a foreigner. In the remote provinces of China I was, in fact, yang-kuei-tzu (“foreign devil”), or ta-pi-tzu (“big nose”). American ignorance of foreigners is not as primitive as that, but it is steeped in the ancient superstition that strangers are enemies and that unfamiliar ideas are vicious. We do not accept foreigners as individuals. This is a strange attitude for a country that, with the exception of a few thousand red Indians, is entirely composed of foreigners. No nation in the world has drawn so heavily on the rich human resources of foreign nations.
Once Around the Sun is the diary — or, more accurately, journal — that Brooks Atkinson kept during 1950. “Every year is packed with a treasure of ordinary experience. I think I shall keep a book of days to chronicle one year in the endless revolution of the universe — one human cycle in the myriad of cycles that reaches out an unimaginable distance into time, space, and poetry. Let me try to put together a microcosm of type, ink and paper — the small change of civilization.”
At the time, Atkinson had been the New York Times’ drama critic for a couple of years, after working as their correspondent in China during World War Two and in Moscow just after. He and his wife, Oriana (a novelist and travel writer), lived in an apartment on the Upper West Side and a country house in New England for summers and long weekends. Thus Once Around the Sun captures a very special civilization — that of Manhattan at a time when it sat atop American economic, cultural, and diplomatic power at a time when these were essentially unchallenged. Broadway was perhaps at its pinnacle, with mainstream theaters bursting with musicals, new talents such as Arthur Miller coming to the forefront, and Off-Broadway just beginning to establish its own place.
The Yankees under manager Casey Stengel were the powerhouse of baseball, with Joe DiMaggio and Yogi Berra on their roster, taking the World Series from the Phillies in four straight games. Manhattan was where all the major radio and TV networks had their studios, and where the leading newspapers and magazines were based. Cruise ships docking along the Hudson still brought more travelers to and from Europe than any airlines. The United Nations buildings were finishing construction, with the first employees moving in in August.
Once Around the Sun is endlessly readable, a perfect bedside book — undoubtedly better sampled from time to time than read straight through. Atkinson’s range is remarkable. A page or two after writing about Joe Berman’s newstand, he is telling us about the stars or the birds he sees stopping in a park on their way north or south or Thoreau’s call for simplicity (which he says applies more to New York than Walden because New York is “intricate, complex, and powerful.” And he offers a reminder of the spirit of liberal democracy that is so much under attack these days: “Never has there been a time of evil and violence on such a colossal scale. But these times bewail not I for one mighty reason: our allies and ourselves rose in defense of freedom at the time when the honor of the world was degraded.”
He turns his attention to the head gardener, who has been hovering in the background. They go through the houses — orchids, gardenias — a whole house full of these — a purple lasiandra climbing against a grey wall, the cool malmaisons, where he picks himself a button-hole, cherry-pie, verbena, sweet-scented geranium, and so out to the herbaceous border, his chief pride. He walks slowly, shoulders back, head high, constantly stopping to admire an effect. “But you can’t see the beauty of that, of course! I shall never be able to teach you. One can never teach anybody anything.”
In the border a small plant, flowerless as yet, is poking its head above the earth. He sees it at once and points at it with his stick. “What’s this? I’m sure I never told you to put this in.”
“Salvia, Sir William.”
“It may be salvia, but it’s not my salvia.”
“No, Sir William. There was a new kind recommended to me and I thought you might like to try it.”
“What colour is it?”
“I think it’s …”
“You think! Don’t you know?”
“Yes, Sir William. It’s red.”
“Red!” Sir William drops his voice to pronounce the word as if it were some awful mystery.
“Red!” He turns round to appeal for sympathy and, finding no one, looks up and takes the sky for confidant. “Red!” he says appalled to the passing clouds, “Red in a blue border!”
And he turns at last to the gardener: “How long have you been with me, Wilson?”
“Two years. Sir William.”
“Two years! About a record, I should think. During the whole of that time have you ever seen a red flower in this border?”
“No, Sir William.”
“No. Do you know why? Because I don’t like red. Because I won’t have that bloody colour here. I would as soon have you! And I’ll put you there next time. I’ll bury you there myself, if I see another red flower. Salvia Blue-beard. Do you understand? Blue-beard. So called, because it is blue! Take that thing out at once. You’re a nice man, Wilson, and love your wife as you should and go to church and all that sort of thing, and perhaps you’re the best gardener I have had, but you’re certainly the biggest fool. However, one has to put up with knaves or fools in this world. Which do you like best? . . . Red! Good God!”
He goes into another house, to enjoy more scents and sweetness, but here . . . horror . . . what are these things in pots? What are these THINGS IN POTS?
To us there may seem to be little wrong with them. We have seen better, perhaps. They appear to be somewhat stunted. Somewhat stunted indeed! They are wretched, they are deformed, they are miserable. And these are the flowers from which he was hoping great things, to whose beauty he had been looking forward, which to-morrow he was expecting proudly to display to an admiring rival, these these—these abortions! And they dare to shame him in his own greenhouse, to call themselves his flowers, to be second-rate, to be failures, to be rubbish in his garden! This time words, even his words, are inadequate. He is silent. But his eyes pop out of his head, his cheeks are suffused with crimson, and he dances in delirium like a dervish. Then there is a yell and up goes his stick. Crash! With one sweep five flower-pots are sent flying off the stand. Crash, crash, crash!
He waxes warm with the exercise. There were dozens of these flowers, row upon row of them, and petals and leaves and lumps of earth and fragments of pottery whizz and volley in all directions; till at last the stands are bare save for a confused litter, and he strides over the debris on the floor, out of breath, exhausted, spuffling and snorting, a purple devil of destruction, followed by a white-faced, trembling gardener.
From The Tribulations of a Baronet, by Timothy Eden (1933). Available on the Internet Archive: (Link).
From the cover of Life Questions of High School Boys
Perhaps no other moral quality affects so profoundly the stability of social institutions as that of truthfulness, including under that term both accuracy of statement and fidelity in carrying out agreements. Among business men on the stock exchange and boards of trade, transactions involving hundreds of thousands of dollars are frequently closed by merely a sign or a nod or a word, and the broker making the contract would never think of violating it or of pretending to misunderstand. The interests of business compel absolute fidelity to the agreement.
And yet people are often found ready to advocate trickery and inaccuracy in statements. Until late years it was popularly supposed that a good part of the business of a diplomat was to deceive the ruler of the state where he was resident; and at the present time in polite society we hear many exaggerated statements on minor matters, made for the sake of increasing the pleasantness of social intercourse, that are lightly excused as “society lies,” “white lies,” etc.. It is desirable that every person define clearly to himself just what he understands by telling the truth or telling a lie, and that he follow unswervingly the principle which he adopts.
Is a general justified in deceiving the enemy?
Is one of the great evils of war the encouragement of deceit?
Is an exaggerated statement of a society lady as to her pleasure in seeing a guest, which deceives no one, a lie?
Ought a ball player to let the umpire make a mistake in his favor?
Is it wrong for a catcher to draw the ball so as to deceive the umpire as to whether it crossed the plate? Why?
Probably no reputation contributes more to the success of a merchant or of a business man of any kind that that of never misrepresenting his goods and never failing to keep his agreements. Probably no reputation contributes more to the success of a lawyer along many lines of practice than that of absolute trustworthiness, and yet many lawyers seek to acquire the reputation of winning cases even by means of trickery and deceit.
Do we fully trust any person whom we have every caught deceiving us?
Do such methods pay?
Are such methods right, looked at from the point of view of the good of society?
Is there any greater blemish on the reputation of Napoleon than that of being a habitual liar?
Can the political boss afford to deceive?
What is the loss and gain to the pupil in presenting to the teacher a forged excuse for absence?
From Life Questions of High School Boys, by Jeremiah Whipple Jenks, published by the New York Young Men’s Christian Association, 1908. Available on the Internet Archive (Link).
Conner Rink Club Skate advertisement from Nicholson’s roller skating rink book
The 1880s saw a short-lived craze for roller skating in America. Operators opened up skating rinks in most major cities, and boosters like Thomas Nicholson of Boston tried to stimulate the trade by publishing tips to help rink operators pull in business with contests, spectacles, and prizes. Here are two suggestions that one hopes, for the animals’ sake, were never actually tried.
Fox Drive
If a fox can be procured, this attraction can be made extremely exciting. Before the evening for the drive the fox should be turned loose in the rink, and run about by a half dozen boys, so that the fox may become accustomed to the place. If this is not done, it is possible he would become stupefied with fear on the night of the Drive, and refuse to run at all, and thus render the Drive a failure, and a matter of regret to the Manager. Woven wire should be stretched about the rink so that the fox can not get to the audience. When all ready, turn two young men into the enclosure, and then turn the fox loose. If they fail to catch the fox in two minutes, let two other contestants try It for same time, and if they fail, still two other; and if they fail, then let all six try it, and if they are unable to catch the fox, the Manager will have provided a great deal of amusement without the expense of paying for the stipulated prize.
Pig Chase
Select for this attraction a pig weighing about one hundred pounds, but not so fat as to render him clumsy. Chase him around the rink five or six times of evenings after the rink closes, so that he may become accustomed to the floor and the lights. On the night for the Catch have the pig clipped and greased, and then turn him in the rink. Only two young men should be allowed to attempt to catch him at a chase. It should be stipulated in the “Catch” that when one contestant has hold of the pig that the other must stand aside until he either gets the pig in the basket which should be provided for him, at the judges’ feet, or gets away. A chase should be timed to two minutes. If the young men fail in this time to catch the pig, then two others try, and if they fail, two others; and if the six fail, then let all try. The pig is to be caught and carried to the basket, and laid in, and not thrown in.
“This attraction is very amusing, and will no doubt call for repetitions,” Nicholson adds. How jolly.
From Nicholson’s roller skating rink book, containing over sixty choice and novel attractions with full instructions to rink managers, by Thomas Nicholson, published by Nicholson & Bro., Richmond, Indiana, 1886. Available online at the Internet Archive: Link.
The Italians mix their officers shrewdly. Some are very ferocious looking gentlemen with fast-growing beards and grenades exploding dramatically on their caps, while others are very old men in shirtsleeves, who have some difficulty in speaking. The shrewdness of this arrangement lies in the fact that the ferocious gentlemen invariably have hearts of gold, as they are eager to welcome the visitor to a land of historical monuments and ultra-modern turismo, while the old civilians, uninhibited by such consideration, plough patiently and indiscriminately through piles of luggage, murmuring to themselves, and finally signing suitcases with a flourish of such assurance that they might be Titians making their marks on their greatest achievements.
Peter Ustinov, 1962
Should an irregularity be discovered, however, the administrative excitement is surpassed in no other country that I know. In England, they know the rules, and fine you. In Italy they rush to read the rules, and each man interprets them according to his conception of power, humanism, Christianity, honour and expediency. While one will accuse you of an assault on the very roots of the young republic, another will admonish you in clerical cadences for your lack of faith in your fellow men, and a third will just shout. Eventually they will become more interested in each other than in you, and it is at a point when the conversation has turned into an evaluation of the Partisans’ resistance on the Adriatic coast that it is quite safe to leave, with your contraband, naturally.
The Spaniards are far less reassuring. The calm is not the calm of Heath Row, the calm of the hospital corridor—this is the austere reticence of the Inquisition. The procedure is akin to a ghostly pavane, danced in the shadows of a bleak, comfortless shack. No language but Spanish seems to be spoken and if you are unable to answer the questions, that is the first black mark against you. In an oppressive silence, the white-gloved official indicates with choreographic gestures the objects he wishes to examine. The mime is hypnotic. Prostrated by the sheer weight of the true faith, you demolish your careful packing, and lay bare the innermost secrets of your shaving kit. When the ordeal is over, you are shot a smile of unexpected playfulness, which you have not the confidence to answer, and an imperious hand waves you towards the mystery of the horizon. It requires a nerve of iron, and a deep faith in the things of the spirit, to import even an undeclared tin of condensed milk into the land of the Catholic kings….
As for the U.S., well, we are all cops and robbers, and Japanese torpedoes are approaching from all directions. The marines fix bayonets and charge through your personal belongings. You are innocent till you are proved innocent, and guilty till you are proved guilty. No time to think or make your excuses. The G-men are after you, and how d’you like New York? Get these guys out of here, and get the next lot in, and what’s in that vanity case? Is that a radio? British? How does it work? We’ve gotten some smaller ones and louder ones and why didn’t you declare it?
Here there are no rules. The smuggler must talk faster and louder than his interrogator, and show a healthy interest in the baseball scores. That, if nothing else, will prove his innocence.
From “A Young Smuggler’s Guide to the Customs,” by Peter Ustinov, in Vogue’s Gallery, a collection from the UK edition of Vogue, published in 1962. Vogue’s Gallery is available online in the Open Library. It’s a reminder of those days when expensively produced magazines such as Vogue, Holiday, and Horizon aimed up, not down. Ustinov’s bit of throw-away humor appears alongside essays and stories by Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Bowen, Kingsley Amis, John Gielgud, W. H. Auden, Lionel Trilling, Tennessee Williams, and Colette. Here, for example, is Auden on the subject of opera:
Whether or not you will like opera will depend, then, I think, upon how characteristic of human nature, and how important to understanding it properly, you believe wilfulness to be. If you think that, normally, emotions just happen to people and that only a few hysterics try to make them happen, or that most human conduct is dictated by the demands either of natural appetites and aversions or of reason, then you will find opera artificial and insincere.
If, on the other hand, you believe that human beings are most characteristically human, as contrasted with any other creature, when they are doing something just for the hell of it, or that all men are constantly adopting some emotion and defending it with the same intense energy as that with which the characters in a Shavian play adopt and defend some point of view (incidentally, Shaw, on his own admission, learned his trade by studying opera), then all the usual objections of the opera-hater—the unromantic physical appearance of the lovers, the improbability of the plots, the suspension of action while the singers get things off their chests, the palpably sham scenery, will seem to you not objections but positive advantages of the medium.
Interspersed with the prose are gorgeous black-and-white portrait photos of Henry Moore, Audrey Hepburn, John F. Kennedy, Igor Stravinsky, and Hermione Gingold taken by the likes of Irving Penn, Cecil Beaton, and Anthony Armstrong Jones (AKA Lord Snowden). Everyone is bright-eyed, good-looking, talented, well-paid, and, with the exception of Sammy Davis Jr., white. Vogue’s color bar may have been discreet, but it was there, nonetheless.
It was not only the well-known writers who had contributions to make; one is forever being surprised in Dublin by the high standard of knowledge displayed by ordinary citizens in any walk or on any level of life. I had many instances of this; as he pulled me a pint, a Dublin publican said to me on ‘Bloomsday’ 1962, when the Martello Tower was opened as a commemorative museum to James Joyce, ‘I wish Joyce had been alive now to finish the book. All that grand crowd up there at the Tower today, he could have polished them off.’ ‘There’s gravel in that,‘ I said. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ he said. ‘I sent some of them word last spring that there was a great old Dublin character by the name of Ted Keogh dying in one of the hospitals there. They took no notice. Oh there was a picture of him all right in one of the evening papers after his death, but not a word to say that he was the man on whom Joyce based that famous character, Blazes Boylan in Ulysses. Not a word. Just teetotal indifference.’ ‘You’ve read Ulysses?’ I asked. ‘I bought it in Miss Beach’s shop in Paris in 1928. The nice-looking edition with a white cover and blue letters. It was the only book in the window. A wonderful book that, especially for Dublin people. I think that for other people Joyce will always be a hard one to make out.’ Not that Irishmen in general are voracious readers of books. They are not. The late Dr Best of the National Library who appears in the library scenes in Ulysses told me he had never read the book. Yeats admitted to never having finished it. Bernard Shaw Wrote me that he had never had time to decipher Finnegans Wake. Synge did not read Yeats or Shaw. James Stephens and George Moore at first meeting were aware that each had not read the other’s work. ‘You and I,’ said George Moore to Dr Best, ‘can be very good friends without your having to read any of my books.’ And Joyce, writing to Miss Weaver, said, ‘I have not read a work of literature for years.’ All of a piece throughout. The truth is that the Irish are too fond of the spoken word to bother overmuch about the written word. ‘Architecture,’ said Caréme, the famous French chef, ‘is but another form of patisserie.’ In the same mood Irishmen tend to look on writing as just an architected kind of talk. Ireland’s best exports, in fact, are her talkers, and her best imports are listeners, and she usually manages to show a credit balance. Talk is a national industry, and always it is dramatic and colourful talk with the thrust-and-parry of debate in it.
Irish Literary Portraits collects the transcripts of nine programs produced and edited for BBC Radio by W. R. Rodgers, ex-Ulster Presbyterian clergyman, poet, and as Conor Cruise O’Brien puts it in his Introduction, the “one good listener” in a land of good talkers. “He would have made a good spy, in the sense of being able to find out an extraordinary amount about the people among whom he moved, but a very bad spy if required to report anything that could harm the people in question,” O’Brien.
Rodger’s oral portraits, assembled from dozens of recorded interviews with men and women who knew these writers, do not suffer, however, from any added gloss or rosy hues. One of the things Rodgers had to take great care with was the level of gossip, back-biting, and mutual denigration that was the warp and weft of Dublin’s cultural fabric. “A literary movement,” Rodgers quotes A. E. Russell, “consists of a half dozen writers living in the same city who cordially detest one another.” As O’Brien puts is, “Dublin’s malice is enjoyably present in these portraits, but the average level of malice is distinctly — and acceptably — lower than the average level of malice in Dublin talk.” “For a long-impoverished nation, with no rich urban heritage of culture, words were both portable and inexpensive, requiring only a mouth and an ear,” Rodgers writes of the tradition of talk in Ireland. And there’s no finer tribute to that tradition than his Irish Literary Portraits.
Irish Literary Portraits, edited by W. R. Rodgers New York: Taplinger Publishing, 1973
I’m not sure I can reprint the entirety of Julia Strachey’s one New Yorker piece, “Can’t You Get Me Out of Here,” which I mentioned in my post on Strachey’s autobiography (posthumously edited by Frances Partridge), without running afoul of someone’s copyright, but I can’t resist sharing its sublime opening:
My father, whose failing eyesight prevents him from reading to himself any more, sometimes invites me to tackle our English daily newspapers with him, and to read the interesting bits aloud. The procedure goes like this: I read out one of the headlines: “‘”UNFORGETTABLE!” SAYS THE QUEEN.'” I pause. No protest, so I continue: “‘The the Queen called unforgettable ended in twenty-one gun salutes, glistening eyes, prolonged handshakes, and that happy sense of well-being –‘”
“Pass on!” interrupts my father sharply. “Next!”
I try another headline. “‘SAILORS VANISH IN CANVAS BOAT.'”
“Pass on!” says my father at once.
I try again. “‘BURIED WALLS RIDDLE. Experts are baffled by the discovery of two six-foot-wide concrete walls below the pavements in Finchley Road –‘”
“Pass!” shouts my father. I look desperately for something else. I try heading after heading.
“‘THE GREATEST LIAR,'” I proclaim, and read, “‘A man went to the psychiatrist and told him –‘”
“Pass away!” barks my father.
I turn the page.
“‘COLD STORE BEAUTIES.'” I pause a moment. Then read, “‘Mean of the lilies on view–‘”
“Pass!”
” … umm … er … well, how about ‘MR. GAITSKILL HITS BACK. In an attempt to rescue the Socialist Part–‘”
“Pass on!”
And so we seem to go on all through the paper — Pass! Pass away! Pass along! Pass!
And these words of command from my father have so hypnotized me that I have fallen now into the habit of organizing my entire life to the administrative rhythm of these commands.
Thus, seated at our country kitchen table: “No more beans to be got out of these pods — Pass along. Washing up next.”
Or, in the sitting room” “That’s just about all I can bear to read in the parish magazine today — Pass away. — Out into the square now to find old Mr. Field and ask him to mow the lawn.”
But most often it pops up to keep my thoughts in order. To prevent them coming round full circle too often and that sort of thing. Pass! Pass away! Pass on!
“Can’t You Get Me Out of Here?” can be found online in the collection Stories from the New Yorker, 1950-1960. Now pass on and get to reading the whole thing!
Born in Galicia–meaning Poland–er, now Ukraine, coming of age in Vienna, working as an actress on stage and screen, marrying screenwriter and director Berthold Viertel, living in Berlin in the days of Brecht and Weimar, moving to Hollywood just ahead of the first Nazi persecutions of Jews, becoming something of a center of the German intellectual exile community, then surviving the McCarthy Red Scare, Salka Viertel came to know, clink glasses, break bread, and shed tears with about half of the entries in James’ encyclopedia. Kafka and Max Brod dropped by her Prague apartment for supper; she and her husband worked at the legendary Berlin film studio, UFA; Eisenstein wrote to her in desperation when he ran out of money filming “Que Viva Mexico!”; she wistfully knocked back vodka shots with Garbo on New Years Eve after Berthold left her for a younger woman; her son, Peter, worked on “The African Queen” with John Huston (and later turned the story into the novel White Hunter, Black Heart). Hers was a fruit cake of a life story.
Sergei Eisenstein and Salka Viertel on the beach in Santa Monica, 1930
I was going to write up a longer post about The Kindness of Strangers, but then I discovered that NYRB Classics is about to reissue it in a few months. So, in commemoration of Independence Day, I will just quote the following story from her time in America.
Having room to spare in her house in Santa Monica in the 1950s, Salka offered the use of a studio over the garage to the black documentary filmmaker, Carlton Moss, and his wife, Lynn. Because Lynn was white, the couple hadn’t been able to find anyone willing to rent to them. A while after the Mosses moved in, Salka had an encounter with her neighbor:
In all the years I had lived on Mabery Road, I had exchanged merely friendly nods and brief greetings with my next-door neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Ferris, an old retired couple. Aloof and gentle, they did not even reproach me when my dogs dug a hole under the fence and killed their pet duck, Matilda. Lynn and Carlton had lived for some time in the “Schloss,” as Carlton called the house (pronouncing it “slush”), when early one morning, as I was watering my roses, I saw Mrs. Ferris cutting flowers in her garden. I wished her a pleasant day; she called back: “Oh, I am so glad to see you,” and came to the fence with a huge bunch of sweetpeas.
“I’d like you to give this to your mother.” I thanked her and said that my mother would be enchanted with the lovely bouquet.
Then Mrs. Ferris asked: “That nice couple over your garage, are they staying with you for any length of time?”
“As long as they wish it,” I answered defensively.
But Mrs. Ferris had more on her mind and slowly and hesitantly it came out. “You know that Mrs. A., the lady who owns that large Spanish house down the road, has been canvassing for signatures to protest your renting to Negroes?”
“No one can tell me who should or should not live in my house …” I burst out angrily.
Mrs. Ferris reached over the fence and put her hand on my shoulder. “Don’t get excited! I want you to know that no one signed. We, the property owners on this side of the Canyon, had a meeting”–apparently I was not considered a “property owner” as I had been excluded–“and my husband told them: These are friends of Mrs. Viertel. We are pleased she is our neighbor.”
Moved by the unexpected support, I thanked Mrs. Ferris profusely. But she had not finished. Taking a deep breath, she shook her head and looking reproachfully at me, added: “Yes, that’s what my husband told them, regardless of the fact that we’ve seen you driving around with that ‘Roosevelt for President’ sticker on your car.”
Dear Mrs. Ferris! This was the only time in my life I regretted not being a Republican.
Alone, she persuaded Wall Street bankers to finance her unit, Gloria Swanson, Inc., to the extent of $1,200,000, taking as consideration her box office record and her insurance policies of several million dollars. Alone, she must make the money to pay her $10,000 monthly living expenses. She must keep up her $100,000 penthouse on top of the Park Chambers Hotel in New York, her Hollywood home, her $75,000 Croton country estate. Tied to her by a monetary thread are her four secretaries, her press agent, her vice-president, her production manager, her scenario manager. Her days are a constant series of disturbances by butlers and maids, by secretaries and camera men, by electricians, and writers and bill collectors.
Hers is a mad, chaotic organization, set into the tumultuous life of a tired, worried woman whose temperamental sympathies are fluid, running in channels dammed by her assistants. Everyone and everything influences her. She listens and weeps. She hires and fires, shoots situations that are never used, orders sets, and countermands, pays for sub-titles and throws them out the window, announces that she will not be bothered by details any more, and then insists on licking each fan mail stamp. And now, in the midst of the whirlpool of her life, brave and bewildered, is Gloria, going around faster than she ever believed possible. The waves wrap her, and she strangles in the seaweed tentacles of her octopus of troubles, her responsibilities, her enormous debts, her file of lawsuits for the non-payment of her extravagant bills.
From Doug and Mary and Others, by Allene Talmey with woodcuts by Bertrand Zadig New York: Macy-Masius, 1927
Wine costs so much a bottle, ready made. When you have once got over the effort of hospitality (if it is an effort) there is nothing to do but open the bottle and wait. But tea is different, especially tea among the poor. Sometimes it is an effort in itself to go and draw the water for it. Then there’s the teapot, and the cups, and the wondering how much or how little you can put in the teapot, the urging of the fire to boil the water; even the washing-up afterwards.
And when the tea is ready, there’s the terrible gratitude you feel towards the heat of it pouring down your poverty-cold mouth. It makes your whole frame fill with ambition to fight the beastliness of the world. And it is no false ambition. It gives you a fresh start without leaving a subtle injury behind. Also, you are filled with a more powerful and tenderer gratitude to the ones who make it for you. They know how you are feeling at the moment. Tea, like death, is a great leveller.
If you loved Clive James’ 
