The Neglected Books Page

Wilding Graft by Jack Clemo (1948)

30 April 202314 July 2022

First US edition of *Wilding Graft* by Jack Clemo.

This is a guest post by Louis Hemmings.

It’s not every day that you might turn on a television without referring to any guides and get to see a dramatised documentary based on a mystical, blind and deaf poet. That programme, ‘The Different Drummer’, in Easter 1980, was my introduction to Jack Clemo. I was spiritually and literary smitten by his unusual story. He saw himself as a poet, novelist, autobiographer, short story writer and Christian witness. The latter description as important as all that preceded it.

As Clemo highlighted in his first autobiography, Confession of a Rebel, he was, from a conventional point of view, unschooled. I myself was a partially schooled poet and wrote from an explicitly Christian point-of-view. As far as I knew, no evangelical-yet-literary poet, like Clemo, existed in Ireland.

I wanted to connect with him, so I wrote, enclosing a small chunk of bog turf as something illustrative of Ireland, just as the Cornish clay was an important symbol to him. Soon I got a reply about the dilemmas and challenges of being both convinced Christian and poet:

… Very few poets since Hopkins have felt this tension between Christianity & art, & I can see why my books & the TV film of my early struggle must have made special appeal to you. When one looks at the general cynicism & triviality of most modern poets, it’s clear that only a faith in redemption, personal guidance & victory in Christ can free a poet from illusion & disillusion…

In time I went to visit Clemo in his small stone cottage, at Goonamarris Slip, Cornwall, where he had been born and lived. The gloomy landscape was all concrete grey. Hills of clay tips surrounded his cottage. Clay dust discoloured everything. However, he turned that stark and ugly landscape into many meaningful metaphors in his prose and poetry.

You may wonder how I communicated with this blind and deaf poet and author. His wife instructed me how to communicate, spelling out sentences letter-by-letter on his rough skinned palm , each sentence requiring a telegram like full stop, for clarity.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but I did not expect such immediate and intimate contact! Clemo’s roughly-accented replies were difficult to decipher at first. After a few hours of my tactile tracing of words and his guttural verbal responses, I got exhausted. Then we continued many conversations on Christian faith, literary hopes and my upcoming marriage, using manual typewriters instead. We exchanged a hundred letters between 1980 and 1994. As far as I know, I became his sole protégé.

After a few false starts, Clemo’s unusual literary breakthrough came when his first novel, Wilding Graft, was published by Chatto and Windus in 1948. It sold an impressive 2,000 copies in the first week in UK. Not at all bad for a first publication.

The plot precis of Wilding Graft:

Set in the clay mining country of Cornwall during WW2, Wilding Graft turns on two characters, Garth Joslin and Griffiths. At the start of the book, Garth has just returned from his mother’s funeral. His relationship with his fiancée, a somewhat frigid and ill-matched girl named Edith, has been disintegrating as his mother’s mental illness has developed, and has finally ended – taking with it Garth’s good reputation in the area—after a flirtation with Irma Stribley, a London girl on a brief visit to relatives in Cornwall.

Garth’s mother, broken from nursing her husband through his final illness, had attempted suicide at the time of Edith’s marriage to another man, and had spent the last four years of her life in Bodmin mental asylum.

Garth, being (unconventionally) Christian concludes that there must be some divine plan working itself out through all that has happened, and determines to wait for it to become plain: to wait for Irma to be brought back to Cornwall.

As L. A. Thompson wrote in his thesis, Jack Clemo, 1916-55: The Rise and Fall of the ‘Clay Phoenix’:

Wilding Graft was written to show how God works and triumphs over atheism, paganism and worldliness… Clemo believed the novel was ‘given to [him] by God as a prophecy for [his] own life’ and as such it developed extra significance. He did not consider it to be a projection or fantasy, but his own future fictionalised: first healing and then marriage, with both just around the corner.

The original publisher’s blurb invited comparisons with Hardy and Powys, and very few reviewers failed to acknowledge the similarities. Expressions of Clemo’s Christian faith caused both praise from Professor of English Mary Ellen Chase and consternation from Maurice Lane Richardson.

Chase, writing in the New York Times, praises Clemo on a number of fronts, and has great sympathy for his Christian outlook. She stated that Wilding Graft an “should deserve attention both from those who like an excellent story and from those who are interested in the novel as a form of art…” She also goes on to say that: “the slow, exhaustive and yet tense treatment of tremendous human conflicts belong to the the 19th rather than 20th century novel….(giving) a certain stature seldom seen in distinctly modern fiction.”

However, writing in the Times Literary Supplement on 27 March 1948, Richardson praised Clemo for his depiction of the region and recognised his potential, but criticised him for including too much ‘mystical religiosity’ and not enough ‘humanism’. As Luke Thompson wrote in his thesis:

It was as though Clemo had been caught between the desires to write a popular potboiler, such as many of the working people used to enjoy, and a literary work of artistic value. As it is, the novel stands alone, a unique and powerful gesture, a page-turning romance with an undercurrent of divine interference and a surface of realism uncommon in writing about Cornwall….

I would be lying to say I enjoyed Wilding Graft’s regional and rather stilted plot. Rather, I read it as a unique accomplishment by a disadvantaged author who saw life through a Biblical lens of hope.

In 1981, at 65, Clemo received an honorary literary doctorate from the University of Exeter. Not bad for a blind and deaf autodidact author who went against the tide and who attended no college.

By the time of his death, in 1994, Clemo had published ten poetry collections of poems. He also had published a second novel, Shadowed Bed, as well as two autobiographies, Confession of a Rebel and Marriage of a Rebel. His third novel The Clay Kiln was published posthumously.

The University of Exeter, UK holds an archive of his manuscripts and papers.

For more information, see the Wikipedia article on Jack Clemo.

________________________________________________________

Louis Hemmings worked for much of his life in various bookshops: second hand, religious and a mall bookshop. He also sold used theology books online from 1994 until 2014. His writing has principally been poetry but after a late entry into college, at the age of 62, discovered he could write credible fiction. His third and last novella, A Boarding School Boy’s Regrets will be self published September 2022. Louis collaborates with photographers and artists for his WordPress and Youtube channels. Louishemmings.com.

Johannesburg Friday, by Albert Segal (1954)

23 June 2022

Peter Kerr writes from New Zealand to recommend Albert Segal’s first (and apparently only) novel Johannesburg Friday:

This must be regarded as a “neglected book”. I came across it by chance in my grandfather’s bookcase.
Set in Jo’burg, possibly in the early Fifties, the book presents the points of view of four members of the Leventhal family on the Friday before a long weekend Yom Kippur. They are parents, Sophie and Sydney and the middle two of their children, Laurie (an apprentice druggist) and Jessie (a law clerk). The book has four chapters devoted to each. Each is beset by personal, spiritual, familial and societal considerations that are often at odds with the turbulent and tense struggle to maintain one’s ground in the big city; in this case it’s Jewish culture and religion that is at stake.
The mother is devoted to family but this devotion brings worries about status, money and its scarcity, her husband’s health and the decline in his fortunes, scandal and gossip and finding suitable Jewish matrimonial matches for her kids. She treats the Bantu servant, Sixpence as “too much of a nonentity to be regarded as a person”, vilely.
Laurie, the middle son, has caused consternation on two fronts. He wants to give up as an apprentice pharmacist and take up writing. This is anathema to parents who have scrimped and sacrificed to send him to college and, on qualifying, on the way to a status job (although not in the same league as a surgeon or medical specialist). The other front is Poppy Harris, a Gentile young woman who was once a boarder with the family. They are desperately hot for each other and desperate measures are adopted. Poppy is another source of loathing and denunciation for Mrs. Leventhal.
Mr. Leventhal is yet another cause for concern. As a young man he has prospered in real estate as the Witwatersrand gold fields burgeoned. Once married he rediscovers his religion. It brings him his greatest comfort and guidance. He has given away his prosperous career and now finds solace and a retreat in owning a shabby book-store in the city. He is aware that his decisions have brought economies to his family, about which he is concerned, but it is his Jewish faith and culture that predominate. He is a sad and fading personality.
Unlike the daughter, Jessie, who is fully alive, intelligent and capable in a variety of jobs in a male dominated commercial world. She works in a lawyers’ office, one of whom acts for Africans who suffer daily indignities. She is in love with the lawyer’s son, but this relationship has run into a Jew/Gentile impasse that causes her grief and resignation, at least from her job.
This is a very good book; it is a first effort for Segal, about whom I know nothing. The only disappointment is that no story can develop because the book’s structure is bound by the confines of a single day. The detailed characters embodied in the novel cry out for a plot or plots.
It’s interesting to know that Jo’burg was a tough dangerous city well before the 1970’s when the townships erupted in revolt. The likelihood of uproar and dispute in the street is ever present. We’re aware of an overriding suspicion between the different cultures and peoples who have washed up there. The same unease infects the Leventhal family. There’s a sense that it’s all a temporary set up. Unspoken thoughts will one day be realised.
I’d love to know more about Albert Segal. Did he write anything else? What became of him?

Albert Segal, from the dust jacket of *Johannesburg Friday*.

Peter thought that readers of NeglectedBooks.com might be able to shed some more light on Segal’s life and work.

There are at least a dozen copies of Johannesburg Friday available for sale, most of them fairly cheaply. The book was published in the summer of 1954 by Geoffrey Bles in the U.K. and McGraw-Hill in the U.S.. McGraw-Hill must have given its edition respectable marketing support, because reviews appeared in newspapers across the country as well as in a number of national magazines like Saturday Review.

In the New York Times, Ann Wolfe called it “Less of a novel than a Joycean close-up of a self-contained family,” a book in which Segal’s purpose was “to stage the inner drama of a simple family’s life,” but one enriched by its setting in a country where there were such dramatic differences in how different peoples were treated. The Kirkus Review credited Segal for a portrait of the Leventhals that was “virtually a biopsy” but concluded, “The fact remains that Segal has yet to learn to tell a story of some kind.”

Some reviewers were even more brutal. In The Baltimore Sun, Lynwood Kniesche called it “a singularly unremarkable book in almost every respect.” And he castigated Segal for how little about he incorporated his setting: “It may very possibly be that Mr. Segal, who was born and raised in this city, has, as a consequence, become either blind or blasé” to it. On the other hand, Barbara Merline of The Los Angeles Times, thought Segal had been very aware of the larger life of Johannesburg: “These four lives are ingeniously threaded into the seething torment of the city — a city driven by fear and hatred, a city in transition. The author keeps a fine balance between his characters and background in a warm and moving story.”

One noteworthy review appeared in the September 1954 issue of Jewish Frontier. In it, Harold U. Ribalow compared Johannesburg Friday with Nadine Gordimer’s first novel, The Lying Days. Of Gordimer, he wrote, “In her novel she revealed an unusual talent and showed once again that she wrote not only as a lyric artist, but as a woman aware of her Jewishness and the situation of the Jew in South Africa.” He was more critical of Segal’s book:

Nadine Gordimer indicates that she may yet produce the novel of Jewish life in South Africa. Although Albert Segal tries to do that in Johannesburg Friday, he does not quite manage it.
For one thing, Mr. Segal has attempted to write a novel with as little dialogue as possible. This makes for static story-telling and, alas, some dullness. Nevertheless, Mr. Segal is a talented writer and his characters do come to life….
Mr. Segal, in describing the cross-currents attacking Jew and Gentile, white and black, never forgets to reveal that his Jews are uneasy, uncomfortable and, in a deep sense, unhappy in South Africa.

Another interesting perspective is offered by the several reviews in journals aimed at black readers. In Jet magazine, its reviewer wrote:

Although Segal points up the plight of the African, he is overly careful in his handling of the European’s treatment of the black majority. An African is caught stealing a purse from Jessie and is turned loose at her request. An African servant rapes a white girl and is sentenced to the gallows, but the judge sympathizes with “any man whose passions might be whipped up during the course of his duties,” and breates white women’s behavior before African men. Johannesburg Friday is rich in excursions into Jewish living, but the telling is in such detail that action sometimes drags, interest lags.

In Phylon, a literary journal from the historically black Clark University in Atlanta, John Reinhardt wrote:

Segal has deliberately minimized externalities and concentrated on the com- plex emotions sustaining the seemingly trivial actions. The introversion and rigidity of Mrs. Leventhal, the ambivalence and paranoia of Max, and the estrangement and anxieties of son and daughter determine the life of this family and at the same time seem to symbolize the seeds of turmoil in a seething continent. Especially is this true when the passions and impulses of whites and blacks are juxtaposed. The native servants remain inscrutable to the Afrikaners, despite the certainty of the latter that oversimplified and obvious assessments suffice to account for the African’s bitterness. Not always satisfied by easy appraisals, Mrs. Leventhal longed for “an insight into the workings of their minds.” And in their minds resides much of the worth of Johannesburg Friday, though it is by their brawn that Johannesburg judges all issuing from the Zulu- land kraals. That her servant, Sixpence, represents more than a simple cluster of biological facts never occurs to Mrs. Leventhal. “If ever she believed him to be a human being, endowed with feelings and impulses and sensitivities, she disguised it from both herself and him.”

In the Journal of Negro Education, Mark Watkins of Howard University wrote:

The lives of these people are affected by much of what is Johannesburg, especially the struggles of the Jewish minority in the face of the ill-concealed disparagement of the gentile majority, the problem of the Bantu in the city, and the general turbulence of the times. This is a realistic exposure of human problems in a modern industrial and ethnically complex community. It is focused on Jews in the local setting of South Africa’s great commercial center, but it also is a rather good portrait of human nature and personality in general.

I’ve been able to find no trace of Albert Segal after the appearance of Johannesburg Friday (though I have not attempted to see what might be available through South African sources). If anyone knows more, please let us know using the comment feature below.

Johannesburg Friday, by Albert Segal
London: Geoffrey Bles, 1954
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954

Robert Harling

30 April 20237 April 2022

This is a guest post by Stephen Bloomfield

Robert Harling? Steel Magnolias and The First Wives Club? American playwright, actor and film producer?

No – not that one.

This one: Robert Harling, British author of eighteen titles (fiction and non-fiction) and variously a bookseller, printer, Royal Navy Reserve officer, advertising executive, typographer, veteran magazine editor and cloak-and-dagger commando. And, just possibly, one of the many candidates whose qualities came together to form James Bond in the mind of Ian Fleming. (He certainly has a good claim to this, since he and Fleming were friends of long-standing.)

Harling’s name has fallen out of public recognition. He would have been — even at his peak — a mid-list author, although sufficiently strong-selling that one publisher stuck with him throughout his writing career (and he with them, of course): all of his novels were published originally by Chatto & Windus.

Among other things, Harling had been a writer and typographer and enthusiastic amateur sailor before joining the Royal Navy Reserve at the outbreak of the Second World War. After the war, between 1951 and 1979, he wrote seven very good novels mostly dealing with journalism or having backgrounds based in the newspaper world. They were not quite thrillers, not quite literary fiction but certainly not pulp. Grahame Greene would probably have called them ‘entertainments”.

He also wrote eleven other non-fiction works, including two published before the war, on subjects as diverse as: the typography of Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden (both books being regarded as authoritative still); typographic styles; London by-ways; and famous homes and gardens.

His ability to present information cogently, his friendship and not least his wartime exploits – first in charge of a whaler off the beaches of Dunkirk, then as navigating officer on corvettes assigned to convoy duties in the Western Approaches and the Mediterranean – culminated in him being recruited by Ian Fleming to join 30 Independent Assault Unit, which undertook all sorts of specialist tasks towards the end of the war, with minimal official sanction and maximum dash and daring. He and Fleming had met at a book launch party just before the war.

After the war, Harling became a design adviser to newspapers (including The Times where he held a long-standing consultancy) and then joined Homes and Garden magazine, where he stayed as editor for twenty–eight years, nurturing a band of young journalists into distinguished authorities on cooking, interior design and gardening.

He was also a fabulist.

It was only on his death in 2008 at the age of 98 that it became apparent that much of the story of his early life had been a fiction he’d invented.

Far from being an only child orphaned young and brought up by an aunt and uncle in Brighton (the story he had told even his children), he and his brother had been brought up in Islington. His father was a taxi driver and he had married (and divorced) early. Many of his family relationships he Harling concealed, for unknown, and unknowable, reasons.

It does appear that he ran a bookshop in Holborn briefly, but whether as proprietor or manager is unclear. He spent some time at the Daily Mail but then left to work as a printer in two specialist printing houses. By the beginning of the war, he had begun to develop a reputation as a minor authority on typefaces as editor of the journal Typography. He developed at least three new typefaces which have endured and on his death was described in the Times obituary as ‘the most innovative and distinguished typographer of the last century’. Some claim!

cover of the Amateur Sailor by Robert Harling

Aside from his typographical expertise, Harling is worth remembering for a number of his books. The Amateur Sailor and The Steep Atlantick Stream, the two he wrote about his time at sea, are the equal and possible superiors of The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat, one of the most famous books about the Royal Navy in the Second World War. The Cruel Sea is not presented as anything but fiction and drew heavily on Monsarrat’s conversations with fellow officers in addition to his own experiences as an officer in corvettes and frigates in the Battle of the North Atlantic. One of the turning points in the novel, for example, comes when the ship Compass Rose is torpedoed. None of Monsarrat’s ships was torpedoed, and this stunning feat of plot and descriptive writing is all derived from second-hand information, possibly from someone involved in the sinking of HMS Firedrake in 1942.

Cover of The Steep Atlantick Stream by Robert Harling

The Cruel Sea, both the 1951 book and the 1953 film, was responsible for weaving into British boyhoods the myths and legends of the Second World War. It is without doubt, a great piece of writing that conveys the terror, stress and exhaustion of fighting a long, dogged war with the both the sea and human foes as the perpetual enemy. Harling’s books do the same, if perhaps less showily. They are less obviously fiction — although given his propensity to invent it cannot be held that they are entirely autobiographical. They are probably heavily embellished fact. They also avoid the serious flaw of Monsarrat’s book — a sub-plot of love interest in the second half of the book which grates oddly with the intensity of the main story and, far from acting as counter-point, distracts from the overall impact of the book.

The other candidates for burnishing his neglected memory are his novels based in Fleet Street – the ‘old’ Fleet street of hot metal printing and larger than life reporters and editors, particularly The Paper Palace and The Hollow Sunday.

Cover of The Paper Palace by Robert Harling

The Paper Palace, written in 1951, was Harling’s first ‘civilian’ novel and his first venture into obvious fiction. The story concerns a columnist tasked by his editor, much against his objections, to uncover the reasons behind an obituary about a Communist written by a very capitalist newspaper proprietor – in fact their newspaper proprietor. This bare plot is the means of erecting a very satisfactory scaffolding about a power struggle between the editor and the proprietor, with the columnist being the instrument by which the duel is (partially) resolved. It is an exemplary ‘Fleet Street’ novel with the relationships between the two antagonists superbly described through the experiences of the columnist.

Cover of The Dark Saviour by Robert Harling

His second novel, The Dark Saviour (1952) continues the Fleet Street theme with a New York correspondent (who may or may not be the same man) being told by his London office to investigate an evangelistic, mystical revolutionary whose emotional appeal to the population is threatening the stability of a Caribbean island — run mostly for an elite. There are multiple betrayals between the characters and, like the correspondent, the reader is never quite sure whom to trust.

Cover of The Enormous Shadow by Robert Harling

The Enormous Shadow (1955) is more obviously towards the thriller end of the spectrum; the denouement is much more ‘actionist’ than the previous two novels he had written to that date. The main protagonist is again a newspaper columnist (this time a recalled Washington correspondent) who is asked to pursue the story of the disappearance of a conscience-stricken atomic scientist. The scandal of the defections of Burgess and Maclean in 1951 were still in the front of the public memory and the novel draws on a similar context. As with the previous novel, there is a love-interest element, well-handled, which is central to the story.

Cover of The Endless Colonnade by Robert Harling

The background to The Endless Colonnade (1958) departs from the world of journalism, having as its protagonist a holidaying physician taking his first holiday after the death of his wife. Meeting an attractive Italian woman who flirts with him turns into an affair. She entrusts him with a secret that may endanger both of them; needless to say, the female character is a foundation for the entirety of the story. The format of the novel is also different from the previous three being much more like a journal written by the protagonist than a third person omniscient narrator. Without spoiling the story, the conclusion is melancholy and much like an ending of a Greene novel.

Cover of The Hollow Sunday by by Robert Harling

The Hollow Sunday (1967) returns very successfully to Fleet Street and is occasionally cited (by journalists) as being one of the best of the genre, up there with Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop and Michael Frayn’s Toward the End of the Morning. The plot concerns the introduction of new technology into the printing of newspapers and how that will up-end the economics of the business. It is another ‘power-struggle’ story with politics and adultery thrown in for good measure. The characters are both well-drawn and likeable/dislikeable as required.

Cover of The Athenian Widow by Robert Harling

The Athenian Widow (1974) continues the investigative reporter theme — not a door-stepping tabloid man but a more genteel and refined exponent of the subtly pointed question and thorough, but discreet, research. It deals with issues of truth and journalistic responsibility. Somewhat flatter than the other Fleet Street books he wrote, it is slower in both development and outcome but no less gripping on its own terms.

Cover of The Summer Portrait by Robert Harling

Finally, in 1979, came The Summer Portrait, his last novel. Harling departed radically from previous themes and chose as the main character a painter on the verge of fame who paints the portraits of two very different people as summer commissions. Through them he has love affairs, all the while caught on the dilemma of whether to commit himself to one lover, or not. It is a very satisfying read, although much slower perhaps in some ways than anything else he wrote but, again, the conclusion is almost Greene-like.

In all his books, Harling’s writing is fluid, well-paced and engaging. He is a craftsman: he does not write bad sentences; the conversations and dialogue are well-enough handled — even at the distance of thirty, forty or fifty years — to be realistic and not stilted; though, admittedly, some of the words used to describe characters might now be regarded as unusable and the concepts about the dynamics of relationships (particularly between men and women) are very much of their time.

Harling was a psychological writer rather than one who relied on twists in the plot to drive books forward. What marks out his books is the psychological depth to the descriptions of his characters — going deeper into motivations and thoughts than simply skating along on plot and action. But the analysis is not so deep or introverted to be a drag on the plot and always relevant to the decisions that the characters take. . They are not flat cut-outs responding to the plot but rather the plot is pushed on by the psychological foibles, strengths and weaknesses – even the moral dilemmas — of the characters.

Harling was able to write convincingly about the effects of the demons which drove others to do things that they were often not proud of or had to defend against their own consciences and others’ criticisms. He probably conveyed much of himself through his novels in writing about the way his characters behaved.

Engagingly, Harling writes very well about women (at least from a male reader’s perspective). Although they conform to a certain type throughout his novels they are substantial and rounded characters. Their contributions to the plot are never peripheral and most often are central. This might be seen as unusual given the time in which he is writing. Harling’s female characters might not be as forceful as those of some modern authors but they are far more than the decorative ciphers of say, his great friend Fleming or any of the other fifties/sixties thriller writers like Maclean or even Innes..

None of his books were made into films (although The Paper Palace and The Enormous Shadow were both adapted into tv plays, one with Denholm Elliott in the lead role) – which may explain to some extent their lack of longevity in the public’s interest. Given the psychological complexity of Harling’s male central characters, it is an interesting parlour game to speculate who might have played them if the films had been made: Cary Grant is an obvious candidate for the suave, worldly columnist of, say, The Paper Palace. But generally he is a little too smooth for anything else. James Mason is sufficiently hard-edged for at least three of the stories perhaps but doesn’t have the crucial self-doubt that Harling’s central characters often display. Connery might have pulled it off more often than not – especially in The Enormous Shadow and The Athenian Widow. The tough one to cast would have been The Hollow Sunday. All of the male central characters are self-doubters to some extent, analytical of their own motives and very much the dissectors of the behaviour of others, which is why the books are such good reads.

Harling was not universally popular as a colleague. Not particularly gregarious, he shunned his own (secretly-prepared) retirement party from The Times with a rude remark about such affairs being nauseating. He admitted that some of the sparkle went out of his life when Fleming died. But he also found fierce devotees in the staff of House and Garden, some of whom – the cookery writer Elizabeth David for example – became famous in their own right after being taken on by the magazine.

Perhaps his attempts to conceal his background – successful until after his death – fostered his reluctance to talk much about himself, lest he betray his story. The last book he wrote – Ian Fleming: A Personal Memoir — was completed by his daughter and published posthumously. The title was probably chosen to capitalise on the cult of Bond, since it is mostly about Harling rather than Fleming (although it does reveal something of Fleming’s sexual proclivities in passing).

The book is something of an essay at autobiography, dealing extensively with Harling’s exploits in 30 Assault Unit. But even in this he could not bring himself to tell the complete truth about his past. Perhaps, having spun the story that long (he died at the age of 98), it had become more real than the truth – so “print the legend”.

Keeping people at arms length is one way of concealing one’s own history. And private people often listen well and become the most acute evaluators of others foibles, since they are testing themselves against what they see in others and vice versa. Writing then becomes a way of explaining personalities.

But few people who do those things can write as well as Harling did.

Robert Harling
27 March 1910 – 1 July 2008

As an ex-journalist and writer of academic texts, Stephen Bloomfield is baffled why so many excellent books become neglected.

Suggestions for the 1976 Club

10 September 202110 September 2021

1976 Club Logo

For the last few years, I’ve tried to offer some lesser-known suggestions for those interested in taking part in one of the ‘net’s best and biggest collective reading events, Kaggsy and Simon Thomas’s (stuckinabook) semi-annual clubs. This coming October 11-17, they’re inviting you to read and write about books published in 1976.

Looking back, the one book published in 1976 most likely to hold a permanent place in literary history is William Gaddis’s massive wordfest and satire on American capitalism, JR*. However, coming in at nearly 800 pages, it may be a bit more than most readers will want to take on in a week. Even if you choose to listen to Nick Sullivan’s landmark audiobook version, you’re still looking at clocking in over 37 hours or roughly many people’s entire work week.

For 1976 Club suggestions, I decided to look at a couple of the “Books of the Year” features that used to be an annual fixture in newspaper book sections. In these, well-known writers and occasional celebrities were asked to name their favorite books of the year. Although those who participated often showed the professional courtesy of honoring good works by their peers (JR and E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime earned the most mentions), there are always a few unexpected or obscure titles that get mentioned. Vladimir Nabokov, for example, offered his own uncompleted novel The Original of Laura, which didn’t get published until long after his death the next year. John Cheever told The New York Times that he ended the year with George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, though he confessed that he couldn’t read it in the laundromat.

So, here, without further ado, are recommendations from year-end round-ups in The Observer and The New York Times from 1976. (Note that the Agate and Bardin are 1976 reissues of earlier books, but I’ve kept them because they’re both darned good books.):

“Books of the Year” from The Observer, 12 December 1976:

• The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood

“A first novel doing one particular, narrow thing (impersonating a furious, silly woman) superbly.” — Lorna Sage

A Literary Affair by Marie-Claire Blais

• A Literary Affair by Marie-Claire Blais

“A short, very fresh, mischievous novel about the adventures of an ingenuous French-Canadian writer in French literary circles. The poor lad, who came to conquer, is picked dry. A Balzacian story that custom hasn’t staled: compressed here and ‘pris sur le vif,’ it has the charm of a classic cautionary tale.” — Mary McCarthy

Klynt's Law by Elliott Baker

• Klynt’s Law by Elliott Baker

“A hilarious satire on parapsychology which starts on a ghastly unversity campus and ends with a bang in ghostly Las Vegas.” — Arthur Koestler

Brogan and Sons by David Batchelor

• Brogan and Sons by David Batchelor

“In fiction, I most enjoyed meeting a new novelist in David Batchelor, whose Brogan and Sons shows a skilled had, a sense of social comedy, and the gift of being serious without portentousness.”

Hard Feelings and Other Stories by Francis King

• Hard Feelings and Other Stories by Francis King

“I didn’t read much new fiction this year, but although as a rule I don’t much like short stories, I particularly enjoyed Francis King’s new collection, Hard Feelings and Other Stories. His combination of wit and unforgiving observation is always a pleasure.”

The Selective Ego by James Agate

• The Selective Ego: the Diaries of James Agate, edited by Tim Beaumont

“Consoles me somewhat for not possessing the nine-volume original, that unique Ptolemaic universe of theatre, ponies, literature, golf, music and wisecracks, autobiography and social history combined (“Today for the first time in history I put on yesterday’s shirt”). — Philip Larkin

The Viking Process by Norman Hartley

• The Viking Process by Norman Hartley

“The unputdownable thriller, the one for your last night in the condemned cell … about a sociologist in the clutches of a fiendish whiz-kid conducting a death-grapple between multinationals.” — Maurice Richardson

John Franklin Bardin Omnibus

• The John Franklin Bardin Omnibus

“A crime weirdissimo, three novels dashed off in the Forties by a man who had been a bouncer in a roller-skating rink, is much the best 95p’s worth on the market.” — Russell Davies

Hotel de Dream and An Unreasonable Man

• Hotel de Dream by Emma Tennant and An Unreasonable Man by Henrie Mayne

“Two excellent novels about life’s losers: Emma Tennant’s Hotel de Dream experiments with the stange Hitlerian fringe of menaces that hangs around the dreams of those who have failed; Henrie Mayne’s An Unreasonable Man is a more traditional but moving and funny account of the disorder that a typical English eccentric creates in the lives of others.” — Angus Wilson

The 79th Survivor by Bronislaw Mlynarski

• The 79th Survivor by Bronislaw Mlynarski

“… has not received the notice it deserves. The author, from a distinguished Polish musical family, was an officer of the reserve captured when the Russians took the Poles in the rear after Hitler’s frontal assault. He should have finished up among the 4,000 of his fellow officers shot by the NKVD in Katyn forest. But he survived. His story of life in Soviet captivity is the more moving for its unassumingness.” — Edward Crankshaw

“Authors’s Authors” from The New York Times, 5 December 1976:

• Adam Resurrected by Yoram Kaniuk

“The best contemporary novel I’ve read this year…. It deals with a half-crazed survivor of the Holocaust who is periodically incarcerated in a rehabilitation center in the Negev desert. The book is laced with surreal black humor and frilliant digressions on the destiny of the Jews. It’s the Israeli counterpart of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” — Francine de Plessix Gray

The Geek by Craig Nova

• The Geek by Craig Nova

“A hard, brilliantly visual novel which is equal in quality to early Hawkes. Few American writers have such a sensuous yet masterfully controlled style.” — William Gass

Long Distance by Penelope Mortimer

• Long Distance by Penelope Mortimer

“A stunning book about a bright, sad, witty woman in a state of emotional disarray. Must be read carefully in order to appreciate its nuances, and even then you’ll never be sure you’ve caught them all.” — Richard Yates

Waiting in Line by David Walton

• Waiting in Line by David Walton

“Strange stories set mostly in Southern California and therefore surrealist and socially realist at the same time.” — E. L. Doctorow

* As Robert Nedelkoff has correctly pointed out, JR was actually published in October 1975.

Julia Rank on Lady Eleanor Smith’s Red Wagon (1930)

30 April 202328 August 2021

Lady Eleanor Smith with circus folk, from the Sphere (1933) — Lady Eleanor Smith with circus folk, from *The Sphere* (1933).

This is a guest post by theatre critic and researcher Julia Rank. In this article, the term ‘gypsy’ is only used when quoting directly from Lady Eleanor Smith’s work.

‘I was born dead’ is the ominous first sentence of Lady Eleanor Smith’s 1939 memoir Life’s a Circus. The doctors at the scene of her birth pronounced her dead without checking for any signs of life and threw themselves into attempting to save her mother. The midwife, with nothing to lose, had the bright idea of massaging the newborn with gin and slapping her repeatedly until she elicited a wail. Mother and daughter both survived and Lady Eleanor grew up to become a Bright Young Thing, journalist, publicist and novelist, with a particular devotion to the circus and scenes from Romani life.

Lady Eleanor Smith (1902-1945) was the daughter of Conservative MP Frederick Edward Smith, ennobled as Earl of Birkenhead when appointed Lord Chancellor in 1919, and Margaret Eleanor Furneux (a granddaughter of Joseph Severn, painter and friend of John Keats). The young Eleanor enjoyed a privileged upbringing with ponies, dancing classes and Christmases spent at Blenheim Palace (her father was one of Winston Churchill’s closest friends). Despite growing up in the heart of the establishment, she was drawn to Romani culture from an early age, teaching herself the language and making the serendipitous discovery that her paternal great-grandmother was a Romani woman named Bathsheba (apparently the Lord Chancellor was proud of his ‘romantic’ origins rather than trying to conceal them, while at the same time exaggerating the humbleness of his middle-class Birkenhead upbringing).

Like her contemporary Nancy Mitford, Smith’s formal education was centred around learning to speak French. A happy experience at Queen’s Gate School, South Kensington, alongside lifelong friends and fellow Bright Young Things Allanah Harper and Zita Jungmann, was not to last. She was sent to boarding school but ran away, after which she completed her education with an extended stay with an aristocratic Belgian family who lived at the Museum of the Congo outside Brussels. On her return to England, she refused to ‘come out’ as a debutante as was expected for a young lady of her background and decided instead to pursue a career in journalism.

Through her social connections, Smith landed a role writing a twice-weekly ‘Women’s Gossip’ column for an evening paper but disliked “publicising a loathsome clique of nitwits”. She then worked as cinema critic, which she found more convivial. Highlights included introducing Katharine Hepburn and Elisabeth Bergner to British audiences(and being introduced to Hitler’s policies by the Austrian-Jewish Bergner).

Cover of first US edition of Red Wagon — Cover of first US edition of *Red Wagon*.

A stint travelling with a circus as a publicist provided ample research opportunities for Smith’s first novel Red Wagon (1930). Red Wagon is far from culturally sensitive. Nevertheless, it stands up as a gripping yarn even today.

Inspired by Victorian showman ‘Lord’ George Sanger, “one of the finest types of English circus man”, the novel tells the life story of self-made and (mostly) benevolent circus dictator Joe Prince in flashback form. In the novel’s present day, the circus is no longer the national institution it was in previous decades nor is Joe Prince quite the “roistering king of the road, a plutocrat among nomads” he once was. One of his daughters has settled in suburbia and the other, to her father’s disapproval, wants to showcase her equestrian skills for cinema.

The action then flashes back to the 1860s when Joe is five years old and his acrobat mother is killed in a fire during an American tour. After a period of fostering by a Thénardier-esque clown, he’s sent to a Dickensian orphanage. He escapes in his teens, joins a circus, works his way up through the ranks and eventually sets up his own circus, always living by the mantra ‘Circus first’.

Ad for the US edition of Red Wagon — Ad for the US edition of *Red Wagon*.

According to the Scotsman, ‘The book stands as a challenge to all those who doubt woman’s ability to write a ‘straight’ tale unmarked with the stamp of ‘feminine’ psychology’”. The novel features a male protagonist who isn’t prone to self-reflection and who pulls himself up by his bootstraps. Joe Prince is defined by his relationship with the circus and its nomadic life rather than by his romantic relationships. The novel is ‘romantic’ in terms of its setting rather than its love story.

A life-changing romance does occur, but it’s near the end and is one-sided. It’s hard not to be creeped out the way in which Joe, in middle age, marries the much younger Romani princess Sheba (surely named for Smith’s ancestor Bathsheba), the daughter of Starlina, his first crush. Sheba, who is “bought from her people for the sum of fifteen pounds”, can’t settle into the role of circus chatelaine and eventually abandons her husband and daughters to return to her community.

The depiction of Romani characters is the most troubling aspect of the novel. ‘Gajo’ (non-Romani) circus folk and Romanis are not allies. “Joe, in common with most circus children,” Smith writes, “had been brought up to despise and hate this dark race […] sometimes they attached themselves to circuses and brought disgrace to any show”. Despite Smith’s personal identification with Romani people and Joe’s coming to admire them, her Romani characters are strongly ‘othered.’ Sheba and the other Romani in the book are described as ‘wild’, witch-like,’ ‘savage’, ‘brazen’, ‘tawny’ etc. The circus itself is also described in disruptive terms, as something that allows ‘the English to take their pleasure not sadly, but almost savagely, with a boisterous brutality that would endure long into the night.” Smith feared that “It will be a dreadful day when the circus decides to become social” (but noted that she had never personally seen a mistreated circus animal).

Vita Sackville-West, writing for Common Cause, hailed Red Wagon as “a brilliantly successful first novel” and Oliver Wray of The Graphic commented, ”‘I have not read so satisfying a novel since Mr Priestley’s The Good Companions.” The Yorkshire Post found Joe Prince “a most human and likable creature… a real relief after the fantastic figures of most novelists who have touched his kind.” Of course, Smith’s title and her father’s fame may have had some influence on the praise it received. Lord Birkenhead was appalled to learn that his daughter was writing a novel and assumed it would only be published because of who he was – but he eventually changed his tune and gave her a ruby and diamond brooch representing the red wagon shortly before his death later the same year.

Article on banning of Red Wagon, from the Oakland Tribune 8 July 1930 — Article on banning of *Red Wagon*, from the *Oakland Tribune*, 8 July 1930.

Alongside the positive literary reviews, Red Wagon was the subject of a minor cause celebre. The book was banned by Glasgow public libraries when an elderly councillor proclaimed that the 28-year-old Smith “knows too much for her age” and should have “shown more reticence” in her handling of the “love incidents”. I would hazard a guess that this complaint refers to the scene in a seedy Montmatre hotel room in which Joe loses his virginity to Rose, a worldly American equestrienne: ‘He wanted her and would apparently take her without wasting any time on preliminary dalliance. He pulled her on to his knee, burying his face in the daffodil shower of her hair, kissing her wildly, roughly, madly, holding her so tight that he hurt her and she cried for mercy’. Publisher Victor Gollancz responded, “I have had many funny experiences during seven years of publishing, but this is much the funniest.” He quipped that the real reason for controversy was the title, with ‘Red’ suggesting political sympathies at odds with those of Glasgow council. Which seems unlikely: Gollancz was himself a socialist but Smith was her father’s daughter politically. The novel went into its fourth printing despite the Glaswegian objections.

Poster for the film version of Red Wagon — Poster for the film version of *Red Wagon*.

Joe Prince may have disliked the cinema, but the epic scope and flamboyant setting of Red Wagon made it ideal for filmic treatment. In 1933, it was adapted by Elstree’s British International Studios, directed by the Austrian-born Paul L. Stein and starring the American actor Charles Bickford (who went on to be a three-time Oscar nominee for Best Supporting Actor) as Joe. It was an ambitious production by British standards of the time, running 50% longer than average — 107 minutes long as opposed to the usual70 minutes.

As the author of the source material, Smith felt that she was regarded ‘the lowest form of animal life” on the film set. But she also acknowledged that novelists were not suited to adapting their own work for screen and that specialist scenario writers were required. Feeding an appetite for melodrama with exotic settings, several of her subsequent novels were turned into film, including Ballerina (The Men in Her Life), Tzigane (Gypsy) and Caravan, starring actors such as Loretta Young, Chili Bouchier and Stewart Granger.

Lady Eleanor Smith, from The Sketch (1932) — Lady Eleanor Smith, from *The Sketch* (1932).

Smith cultivated a fey, uncanny image of herself in the press and in her memoir. Life’s a Circus related childhood encounters with a ghost dog called Gyp and grisly tales told by a nanny who attended the last public hanging in Britain. In the 1930s, she lived in a flat off the King’s Road with a black cat named Satan (despite the fact she was a Roman Catholic – probably a reference to her 1932 short story collection Satan’s Circus). She conjures up images of an aristocratic, urban version of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s heroine Lolly Willowes. She died at the age of 42 after a long illness and her most enduring work is probably her Regency-era novel The Man in Grey, albeit mostly by virtue of the Gainsborough Studios’ film adaptation starring James Mason and Margaret Lockwood.

Despite its entertainment value, it’s difficult to imagine Red Wagon being reissued. Unsurprisingly, Smith’s oeuvre wasn’t included in Elizabeth Macneal’s recent list of favourite circus novels for the Guardian. However, her short story ‘Candlelight’ is included in the British Library’s Tales of the Weird anthology Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird. As a glimpse inside the imagination of an unusual aristocratic bohemian, it’s left me sufficiently intrigued to try Eleanor Smith’s Gothic short fiction.

Julia Rank is a London-based theatre critic, historical researcher and academic proofreader. Her favourite things include theatrical fiction, interwar chorus girls, and the American baritone and film star Gordon MacRae. For more information, visit her website, julia-writes.com.

Jonathan Walker on Charles Williams’ Supernatural Thrillers

30 April 202314 August 2021

This is a guest post by Jonathan Walker, whose latest novel, The Angels of L19, is published this month by Weatherglass Books

Charles Williams was a friend of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and, like them, a member of the legendary Oxford literary group known as the Inklings. Gervel Lindop’s recent biography of Williams therefore refers to him as the ‘Third Inking’, while Sørina Higgins’s blog, dedicated to his life and work, calls him ‘The Oddest Inkling’. Exactly how odd is something revealed in detail by Lindop’s biography, which I strongly recommend. Williams had a reputation for saintliness in his own lifetime, but much of his private life was more complicated than that reputation suggests, and modern fundamentalists attracted by his association with the Inklings might find his interest in magic and hermeticism disconcerting.

Unlike Lewis and Tolkien, Williams was not an academic, and attended the Inklings’ meetings for the most part only as a visitor to Oxford. His background was also quite different to theirs: he was from a lower middle-class family whose financial difficulties meant he had to drop out of the University of London after a year and take a menial job in the printing industry, though he managed to rise and become an editor at the London offices of the Oxford University Press. He was also a teacher – but he lectured in what would now be called FE: night-school classes for adult learners. (Only towards the end of his life, when the OUP had moved its offices back to Oxford during the war, did he give a series of lectures on Milton at the university, arranged by Lewis and Tolkien).

Williams wrote works of popular history for OUP, as well as poetry often inspired by Arthurian myth. But his novels, ‘supernatural thrillers’ published by T.S. Eliot at Faber, were his greatest success. The Eliot connection suggests the range of Williams’s interests: unlike Lewis and Tolkien, he was not hostile to literary modernism per se.

Though Williams is now relatively obscure – at least compared to his more famous friends – his novels pioneered a third model for fantasy writers to complement those of alternate, secondary worlds (Tolkien) or portal fantasies (Lewis). Lewis himself explains how this third model worked in a short talk he gave on Williams’s novels. These books, he said, mix:

what some people call the realistic, and the fantastic. I’d rather fall back on an older critical terminology and say that they mix the Probable and the Marvellous. We meet in them, on the one hand, very ordinary modern people who talk the slang of our own day, and live in the suburbs. On the other hand, we also meet the supernatural—ghosts, magicians, and archetypal beasts. … [T]his is not a mixture of two literary kinds. … Williams is really writing a third kind of book, … in which we begin by saying, ‘Let us suppose that this everyday world were … invaded by the marvellous. Let us, in fact, suppose a violation of frontier.’

In a portal fantasy like Lewis’s Narnia chronicles, characters from our world enter another through a magical gateway such as Professor Kirke’s wardrobe. In Williams’s stories, by contrast, representatives from other realities enters ours. In some respects his stories therefore resemble weird fiction, which is also preoccupied with the terrifying consequences of a ‘violation of frontier’. Except that for Williams these intrusions were not really violations at all. As Eliot wrote in his introduction to Williams’s final novel, All Hallows’ Eve, ‘For [him] there was no frontier between the material and the spiritual world. …. To him the supernatural was perfectly natural, and the natural was also supernatural’.

Cover of first UK edition of Descent Into Hell — Cover of first UK edition of *Descent Into Hell* (1937).

I confess that my interest in Williams is really only in his last two (and best) novels, Descent into Hell (1937), and the posthumously published All Hallows’ Eve (1945): I haven’t read any of the others, and the poetry does not appeal to me at all. But these two books are quite remarkable – not least for what they do with the idea of hell and the afterlife.

Williams is undoubtedly an odd stylist: his sentences are often crabbed and convoluted, not helped by his habit of inventing neologisms for religious or theological concepts in an attempt to avoid triggering preconceptions or taking sides in pre-existing doctrinal controversies. But he can also be a writer of great power, peculiarly alive to the far-reaching consequences of seemingly small moral choices.

In Descent into Hell, the titular journey is embarked upon by a historian, Lawrence Wentworth, who runs a discussion group for young people in his village. His downfall begins with his inability to accept that Adela, a woman from that group, has no romantic interest in him. Wentworth therefore welcomes the attentions of a succubus, a spirit form of Adela, who promises to submit to his every whim. For a fantasy writer, Williams here is peculiarly hostile to fantasy, at least when it takes the form of a denial of reality – worse, a denial of Kant’s moral imperative, the recognition that others have their own autonomy and desires independent of our own.

At the same time, Wentworth is also unable to admit to a professional error – the wound to his amour propre is too great for him to bear – and both these choices seal his fate. The hell that he enters, while still alive, is one where, having refused to accept his real relations to others and his obligations to the professional community to which he belongs, he is left alone. But not merely alone. Language is necessarily social: to speak implies an interlocutor. Without the willingness to fully imagine such an interlocutor, language itself collapses, and beyond that, even the possibility of associating things in meaningful patterns.

It is a hell of solipsism. The following passage comes from the extraordinary final paragraphs of the novel:

Then everything at which he was looking rushed together and became a point, very far off, and he also was a point opposite it; and both points were rushing together, because in this place they drew towards each other from the more awful repulsion of the void. But fast as they went they never reached one another, for out of the point that was not he there expanded an anarchy of unintelligible shapes and hid it, and he knew it had gone out, expiring in the emptiness before it reached him. The shapes turned themselves into alternate panels of black and white. He had forgotten the name of them, but somewhere at some time he had thought he knew similar forms and they had had names. … There was, at the end of the grand avenue, a bobbing shape of black and white that hovered there and closed it. As he saw it there came on him a suspense; he waited for something to happen. The silence lasted; nothing happened. In that pause expectancy faded. Presently then the shape went out and he was drawn, steadily, everlastingly, inward and down through the bottomless circles of the void.

Wentworth is a living character who enters hell prematurely. Descent into Hell also features a dead character – a ghost, in effect – a wretched suicide who lingers around the site of his death in a kind of grey limbo. Near but not in the living world, he is as alone as he felt in life. But not as alone as Wentworth, since he is still able to perceive – to receive – the attention of a sympathetic woman, herself close to death, who reaches out to him.

Cover of first UK edition of All Hallows Eve — Cover of first UK edition of *All Hallows Eve* (1945).

This kind of provisional limbo state also appears in All Hallows’ Eve, and it suggests Williams’s willingness to depart from Christian orthodoxy. In traditional Christian thought, death offers a kind of terminal end point beyond which moral choice is not possible. One’s eternal fate is fixed at the moment before death. (Even if one believes in purgatory, this does not change one’s ultimate fate: everyone in purgatory will ultimately attain heaven; no one in hell will).

In these two novels, by contrast, not only is hell a place to which you condemn yourself and can enter before you die, but – for those who retain some attachment to life even after their death – moral choice is still possible. Ghosts are, in effect, invited to reconsider the meaning of their life: now that it is over, with what in their earthy existence do they wish to identify themselves? And what do they wish to transcend? Do they wish to relive and reaffirm their most selfish impulses? Or do they want to search within their histories for flickers of generosity and love, however small and faltering these might be? And they can be very small indeed: the redemption of one of Williams’ ghostly characters begins with her remembering her husband getting up in the night to fetch her a glass of water.

Williams’s novels are full of more obvious and dramatic supernatural elements: the succubus, a doppelganger, a sinister cult leader bent on world domination, the Holy Grail, a magical Tarot deck – but for me the most powerful aspect of his fantasy is the way it magnifies the consequences of seemingly small and ordinary choices we make in our earthly lives and assigns to them a cosmic and eternal significance.

Jonathan Walker grew up in Liverpool, but has lived in Glasgow, Cambridge, Swansea, Canterbury, Venice, Sydney and Melbourne. He is the author of a biography of a seventeenth-century Venetian spy, Pistols! Treason! Murder!, and a fantasy novel set in an alternate version of Venice, Five Wounds. His latest novel is a work of weird fiction set in 1980s Liverpool: The Angels of L19, published by Weatherglass Books. He has doctorates in history and creative writing.

Stella Gibbons, Early and Late

30 April 20231 August 2021

This is a guest post by Phyllis Orrick.

Stella Gibbons’s first novel Cold Comfort Farm still resonates, if vaguely, in the popular mind. “Wasn’t there a movie?” Or, “didn’t I see that on TV?” In England, “something nasty in the woodshed,” the phrase invoked by the supposedly mad Aunt Ada Starkadder, proprietress of the farm, is still a cultural touchstone almost 90 years after the book was first published.

But as wonderful a satiric comic masterpiece as Cold Comfort is, the dozen or so of Stella Gibbons’s later novels that I have read are just as — if not more — rewarding because they allow a deeper experience of Gibbons’s greatest literary character: herself.

That is not to say that she wrote the same book again and again, as so often happens with writers who strike the jackpot with their first published work; rather, she creates in each book a different prism (and sometimes more than one) through which she reveals different aspects of herself. To read multiple Stella Gibbons novels is to get to know her better and better, and she is a very satisfactory companion.

She was born in 1902, the first of three children of a quiet and sweet mother who died suddenly when Stella was in her 20s and a volatile father of Irish extraction, a “bad man, but a good doctor” (as she described a character thought to be based on him). Her childhood home life was marked by her father’s rages fueled by his unsatisfied career ambitions. In his 1998 biography, Out of the Woodshed: the Life of Stella Gibbons (Bloomsbury), Stella’s nephew Reggie Oliver quotes a letter from Stella’s daughter Laura (his cousin):

Every few weeks it was ‘That name is not mentioned in this house,’ with an accompanying shudder and pursed lips, as one or other member of the family indulged in some escapade of which the other disapproved. Consequently, sides were taken….

Stella was old enough to be affected by the experience of two world wars and the accompanying changes in British culture and society, as well as by the concomitant destruction of the English countryside and the rise of highways and car culture, all of which bothered her greatly.

Well-educated herself, and a writer who honed her skills on more than 10 years of meeting newspaper deadlines, she lets slip literary references easily understood by any conventionally educated English school graduate; she asserts unapologetically the inherent differences between men and women, the value of marriage and the power of beauty–male and female; money is usually on people’s minds, and she shows she knows how to live on meager earnings. She values tidiness and order, well-turned fashions, and sensitivity to children.

That catalog of subjects and attitudes could lead one to expect a stuffy, garrulous, old-fashioned storyteller. Instead, she takes the dross of mundane lives and spins it into fairy tales that are also down to earth. She peoples her novels with men and women whose aspirations have run aground, but who inhabit a world of metaphysical rebalancings and animistic forces that permit them some escape.

——

Bassett by Stella Gibbons, 1935 — Cover of 1935 edition of *Bassett*.

For the purposes of this essay, I am drawing on only two novels, Bassett (1933) and The Woods in Winter (1970). They come near the start and end of her writing career. And they offer the clearest example of characters that reflect herself.

Bassett was the “conventional” book she was contractually obligated to write in order to convince her publisher to take Cold Comfort. The Woods in Winter was the last book she wrote for publication, though two other novels appeared posthumously.

Bassett opens with a typically succinct Gibbons observation:

There is a simplicity which comes from living too much in the world, as well as a simplicity which comes from living out of the world.

Hilda Baker belongs to the latter group. She is one of Gibbons’s shabby heroines of no great intellectual shakes or culture, but still worth knowing better. “Sensitive and intelligent people will refuse to believe that Miss Baker could be happy. However, Miss Baker was happy.”

She is also a beneficiary of one of those coincidences Stella regularly employs: Miss Baker (who has no living relatives) has suddenly inherited 200 pounds from a distant uncle. Added to her 180 pounds of savings from her paltry salary at a paper pattern office, she is faced with a dilemma of what to do with so much money. She fears it will “Dribble Away” (Gibbons’s caps) unless she makes a plan.

She responds to an advertisement soliciting “another lady, with some capital” to invest in converting a faded country estate to a boarding house. The response, from a Miss Eleanor Amy Padsoe, is postmarked “Bassett.”

And so we are off.

The letter from Miss Padsoe leaves Miss Baker “in some bewilderment,” and indeed, it is a masterpiece of flighty asides and unintelligible confidences. However, Hilda decides to visit. Once in the village, she accepts a ride from a handsome young man in a smart roadster, a silent girl at his side.

Miss Baker learns that the girl is Queenie Catton, another of Stella’s unlikely heroines and another partial stand-in for the author herself. Raised in a loud, activist socialist household, Queenie doesn’t fit in. She is, as her family admits, “our quiet one….So far she had effortlessly resisted all attempts to make her be anything…”

When Miss Padsoe and Miss Baker eventually meet, it does not start well. They are each horrified by the other, but of course do not say so. They eventually get along, and the flowering of their unlikely friendship is a pleasure to behold.

The young man who gives Miss Baker the ride is George Shelling, half of a cold-blooded aristocratic brother-sister duo who dream up sophisticated amusements while living in the country with their widowed mother. According to Reggie Oliver, Stella admitted she modeled the Shelling menage on the family of the man who ended their engagement; he, too, lived with his sister and mother and traveled in the “free love” set.

Queenie is the bridge between these two storylines as the hired helper to Mrs. Shelling and a loyal supporter of the two Misses.

In contrast to the louche brother and sister, Miss Padsoe and Baker pursue simple pleasures with beneficial results. “At eight-thirty precisely the two ladies, washed, dressed and trim … sat down to their eggs or sardines…. The afternoon was passed in more washing up and in cutting bread and butter for tea at half-past four, and then at half-past six it was time to begin preparing for supper at half-past seven. By ten … they ate cocoa and cake like schoolgirls, and fell into bed at eleven, drunk with unaccustomed work, and slept all night.”

In typical Gibbons fashion, Bassett climaxes in a whirlwind of loose ends being tidied up in a way that is satisfying but not always expected.

Stella Gibbons, The Woods in Winter (1970) — Cover of the first edition of *The Woods in Winter*.

The Woods in Winter, the last novel Gibbons wrote for publication, seems an intentional bookend to Bassett and an autobiographical coda. She sets it in roughly the same period as Bassett , the early 30s. The early action takes place in two settings familiar to her, the seamy precincts of the North London of her girlhood and Hampstead Heath, where she lived much of her adult life.

Its beginning is once-upon-a-time-ish: “Some forty years ago, there used to be in North London a place called St. Philip’s Square…. It was not a true square, but a rectangle, open at one end to a main road, along which trams and buses ran up to Hampstead Heath; a drab yet swarming place….”

As in Bassett , Gibbons creates two characters far apart in social standing and education but reflecting two aspects of herself: Helen Green, the young aspiring poet (Gibbons’s first book was a collection of poems, favorably viewed by important figures of the time), and Ivy Gover, the old fabulist.

Helen is well-educated and moves in high-brow Bohemian circles but is not quite a part of them; Ivy is a barely literate char who has gypsy-like powers and a proletarian sureness of where she stands (she always thinks of Helen as “Miss Green”). Ivy and Helen are connected by the fact that Helen employs Ivy to clean the small, dark cottage she is renting from a mother of a friend of hers; it’s located in the Vale of Health, the same stretch of Hampstead Heath that Gibbons lived in.

Again, as in Bassett , a bit of luck visits a penurious city-dwelling lower-class female of a certain age. Ivy’s great-uncle, whom she hasn’t seen since her girlhood, bequeaths his rundown cottage in the country near where Ivy was born and where she was sent to char for the gentry at age 11.

For Ivy, the Square is a hectic place: “The Square simmered in the early autumn plague of heat, sending up its shrieks and shouts and heavy footsteps to a pair of small ears that carried two beads of heavy gold, chased with a design that looked ancient, on delicate lobes.” In contrast, Helen looks out on “a prospect very different…. a quiet little street, made up of grey pavement and a long brown wood fence, above which looked the innocent head of a may tree whose berries were just beginning to redden, all lit faintly by the gold of the ascending moon. A bird was singing, far off in the dark woods of the Heath–perhaps even a nightingale–anyway, it was a heartbreaking sound, and Helen thought that she was exceedingly unhappy.”

Ivy, suspicious of the lawyer’s big words, goes to Helen to have her read the letter about the bequest. Helen reassures Ivy that the offer is valid and that she is lucky to have it.

By the time she wrote The Woods in Winter, Gibbons had perfected the technique of dueling interior and exterior dialogs, where each participant is saying what they don’t think and thinking what they don’t say, as in this exchange between Ivy and Miss Green:

“Just think, Ivy. It’s beautiful country there. I … know it well…”
Ivy was not interested in what Miss Green knew.

This being a Stella Gibbons novel, there are a number of pairings both theoretical and actual and various courtships, not all successful. Marriage is one of Stella’s interests. Though she shows sympathy for those who take a more transactional approach, she comes down on the side of marrying for love. In this novel, there are two such marriages by its end.

Of Helen and Ivy, Ivy is the more compelling character. Here she is in her first full night in the cottage, with her dog Neb. Ivy has just said farewell to a friend of her late husband who has delivered her mattress in his van and put it in the bedroom upstairs. Just before he takes his final leave, he suggests she air it out.

Ivy ran up. Up the stairs she raced, light as a leaf, with Neb after her, and in a minute down tumbled her mattress, almost into the fire … straightening it with determined kicks from her sturdy small boot. “Airin’! It don’t need no airin’, do it, beauty?…”

The story never leaves the country setting once Ivy is settled there. The characters Stella has created play out their dances under her masterful direction.

Her final chapter brings us to the present of 1970, as Stella is entering the winter of her life (she was 68 when it was published). Helen makes a final visit to the quaint village near the woods of the title. The High Street of Nethersham is now a tangle of automobile traffic, rooftop television antennas and suburban villas.

Helen escapes the traffic and noise to walk to the hilltop demesne of the old Lord (long dead). Helen encounters one of her friends from the old days and asks about the characters whose fates we do not know. Gibbons writes, “Helen had not quite yet come to that age when one hesitates to ask after a contemporary not seen for years. But she was one the edge of it.”

Helen takes one last look at the Lord’s hill and its beeches as she heads toward “the flat, beetle-like tops of the cars, jerking, stopping, jerking, stopping, behind the hedges whose lower branches were clotted with litter and grey with dust.

There they stood, high above her and far away, solemn and still in the waning fire of sunset; towers and castles of rustling green; benign father-gods of the woods; filled with their gently-stirring life in the blue air of summer or roaring slowly in winter’s gales….

The last passage is a word-for-word reprise of Helen’s private musings some 40 years earlier when she proffered her congratulations to Ivy on her good fortune in inheriting the cottage (which Ivy rejected silently). This constancy of Helen’s attitudes within the span of the 40-year narrative is matched by Gibbons’s constancy in her outlook over the nearly 40 years that separate these novels; this is what makes Gibbons’s appeal timeless, just like a fairy tale.

In her monumental reference work, An Encyclopedia of Fairies (Pantheon, New York.1976), Katharine Briggs notes that the term “fairy” is relatively recent and is derived from “the classical three Fates … supernatural ladies who directed the destiny of men ….” Stella and her fictional stand-ins were deeply concerned with getting other people’s lives properly sorted out and in conformance with Gibbons’s deeply felt morality. Following her efforts over the decades is a source of pleasure.

Bassett is available from Penguin Vintage Classics and The Woods in Winter is available from Dean Street Press.

Phyllis Orrick is a retired academic editor and former alternative newspaper editor and feature writer. Follow her on Twitter: @orrickle

Rob Palk on Why It’s Wrong to Neglect Clarissa

30 April 20236 July 2021

Rob Palk's well-read copy of Clarissa — Rob Palk’s well-read copy of Clarissa.

This is a guest post by novelist Rob Palk.

If Clarissa is a neglected read, it might have brought some of that neglect upon itself. It’s 1500 pages long for a start and over the month I read it, I developed aches and pains from lugging the thing about. It’s in epistolary form, a mode of storytelling that resolutely declines to come back in fashion, even in an online age. Its morals are not our own. It’s about a rape, which arrives about a thousand pages in. You can see why people give it a miss. Still, you should read it. You just have to acclimatise.

Clarissa is a product of the Wild West era of the novel, when the form hadn’t quite been fixed yet. A novel could be a lawless hotchpotch of philosophical dialogues, melodrama, borrowed stories and crude farce. Clarissa played a part in domesticating the form, in erecting the dry stone walls of realism, but it still very much belongs to the rougher age. It turns, in its later pages, into something like a Christian chapbook on a vast scale.

Another cause of the book’s neglect might be that its author, Samuel Richardson, lacks glamour. He was, in every sense, bourgeois. He didn’t have the frenzied entrepreneurialism of Defoe, the worldly conviviality of Fielding or Sterne’s strenuous peculiarity. He was smug about his achievements, obsequious to his social betters and prone to tedious moralising. He wanted novels to be respectable. He seemed unaware of the streak of lechery that runs through all his work. He’d be easy to dismiss, if Clarissa wasn’t so good. Greatness doesn’t always fall where it’s expected.

His debut novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740) is the tale of a fifteen year old servant girl whose reward for resisting her employer’s sexual harassment is his hand in marriage and the riches and acclaim that go with it. Even at the time, there seemed something not right about this and the book’s denouement annoyed Henry Fielding so much he spent his first two novels taking the piss out of it, going so far as to name the first Shamela.

Richardsons’ follow up, Clarissa, came in 1748 and at first seems more of the same. Clarissa Harlowe is young, beautiful and a paragon of virtue, this virtue expressing itself in pious reflections, acts of charity and a strict system of daily organisation, which we are given in full (it’s that kind of novel). Robert Lovelace is also a looker, generous and charming, but abnormally dedicated to having it off and unscrupulous in furthering this cause. The book consists mostly of letters between Clarissa and her rather more likeable friend Anna, and Lovelace and Belford, a wavering fellow rake. Only, somehow, unlike Pamela, it slaps. The moralist in Richardson is restrained, at least for a while, and the artist in him takes over.

The eight volumes of an early German edition of Clarissa — The eight volumes of an early German edition of *Clarissa*.

Dr Johnson is supposed to have said that anyone reading Clarissa for the plot would end up killing themselves, but there is a story of sorts. Clarissa’s family are keen on her marrying Solmes, an unappealing neighbour, and when she demurs, they take the very eighteenth-century step of holding her captive. Lovelace, meanwhile, has spotted her and has Designs. In a panic, Clarissa flees with him to London and is promptly held captive again. Perhaps Dr Johnson had a point. Yet I was completely gripped.

What matters isn’t the plot so much, but something else that happens as we go on. The mad abundance of letters to and fro, the characters all being compulsive jotters down of every thought, yanks us into the action. Richardson starts to use the letters like Shakespeare uses soliloquies. His characters argue with themselves, change their minds, waver in their intents, over a long series of erotic negotiations and, perhaps for the first time in the English novel, we feel we are seeing actual human beings and can look inside their thoughts. Clarissa and Lovelace might have been supposed to represent chastity and libertinage respectively, but there’s always the feeling of actual people behind these archaic beliefs, who won’t always live up to them.

So, Clarissa is exemplary, but also stubborn, priggish and far more attracted to Lovelace than she’d like to be. Lovelace, who could have been a moustache-twirling cardboard baddie, becomes something far more complex, split between his absurd and frightening commitment to the sexual chase and his growing regard for his victim. It’s an extraordinary act of ventriloquism, so that reading the Lovelace letters, it’s easy to forget we are reading Richardson at all. It’s as though the Puritan author poured all his buried flamboyance, libido and wit into the performance, along with a smidgeon of class resentment. Lovelace is fun to read. Richardson expressed some shock at how popular Lovelace proved, especially with female readers, but it’s easy to see why this was. He’s funny, he’s intelligent. He is also, we learn, a rapist and, even knowing it was coming, his drugging and rape of Clarissa still has the power to horrify.

The first time I read Clarissa, her ordeal struck me as implausible. My 20-year-old self didn’t believe we lived, anymore, in a world where wealthy individuals ferry teenage girls into brothels with the aid and assistance of their peers. Many years later, this disbelief has passed. Apparently likeable men do monstrous things unchallenged and Lovelace is an ancestor of every charming monster, from Humbert Humbert to James Franco. Clarissa’s preoccupation with bodily autonomy is put in religious terms, but, squinting past this, it’s impressive how much Richardson noticed the difficulties women face. And in Clarissa’s friendship with Anna Howe, who teases her and playfully toys with her own suitor, he created -to this male reader- a convincing friendship between two teenage girls. There’s something heartening in one of the founding English novels being about a young woman’s act of refusal.

An illustration from a 19th Century French edition of Clarissa — An illustration from a 19th Century French edition of *Clarissa*.

After he rapes Clarissa, an alternately penitent and defiant Lovelace proposes marriage, a then standard way of saying sorry and restoring honour to all parties. Clarissa is having none of it. She forgives all who have wronged her, but is set upon leaving a world that has done its best to subject and degrade her. Here the book becomes much odder. Richardson seems to remember his business is offering life lessons and Clarissa embarks on a decline that is also an apotheosis, bidding farewell over a long 500 pages. At least half of this is great; long before they were considered diseases, Richardson seems to have understood PTSD and what looks like anorexia and the slow conversion to virtue of Lovelace’s friend Belford can still move, but some of it exasperates. My own tolerance was tested when, with a good few hundred pages left, our heroine buys a coffin. Having invented realism, Richardson swerves away into melodrama at whiplash speed and we are given a series of unlikely come-uppances and moments of repentance. Clarissa herself becomes a near saint rather than the sympathetic young woman of the opening stretch. She takes longer to die than Rasputin or Clive James. The moralising side of Richardson takes over and we are given many homilies on correct behaviour, including a demented passage where he tries to convince us that women of loose morals are ugly when not wearing make-up (this argument is not made, as you might expect, in praise of cosmetics).

Perhaps the problem comes from Richardson having no model of female excellence that wasn’t chiefly passive. All the characters line up to tell us, at dull length, how Clarissa is the most virtuous of women, but there isn’t any suggestion she could do more with her greatness than turn someone down and die. There’s a gulf between our way of looking at the world and his, and Clarissa’s death doesn’t quite cross it. You have to think yourself back into an England where refusing to marry your rapist could be an act of shocking radicalism. If you can do this, it sort of works.

If this proves too great a leap, if you can’t take Richardson’s forcing of characters who seemed to pulse with life into a sort of moral tableau, there’s still a hundred reasons to read this book. Read it for the weird moments of recognition, for the conversations we’re still sadly having, for Belford correcting Lovelace in his disbelief in female friendships, for Anna observing, after her friend is raped, that she now views seemingly good men as ones “who haven’t yet been found out.” Read it for the way erotic attraction and moral repulsion play against each other in Clarissa’s letters about Lovelace, read it for the stream of consciousness bricolage of the letters Clarissa writes when her mind is disordered, read it for the dash and swagger of Lovelace’s letters hiding an ethical abyss, read it for Anna and Clarissa’s friendship, for Richardson’s sudden moments of startling insight. You’ll roll your eyes at times but you might find yourself dabbing them as well.

Rob Palk is the author of Animal Lovers (2018, Sandstone Press) and has written for The Guardian, The Fence and the Erotic Review and broadcast on the BBC. He is currently seeking agent representation for his second novel, The Crowd Pleaser. He tweets at @robpalkwriter.

Lissa Evans Recommends Emlyn Williams’ Autobiography George

30 April 202324 May 2021

Cover of first UK edition of George by Emlyn Williams

This is a guest post by the novelist Lissa Evans

I’d never heard of Emlyn Williams before my sister gave me the paperback of his autobiography when I was about thirteen. The cover showed a sepia photograph of a boy of my own age with badly-cut hair and a tentative expression that was almost a smile.

After I read (and re-read) the book, I kept a lookout for his older incarnations: he still popped up in the odd pre-war film on Sunday afternoons, swarthily overacting; his creaky plays – once huge West End hits – were occasionally performed, largely in amateur theatre; his novel Headlong (which, bizarrely, was the basis of the John Goodman film, King Ralph) and a requisitely chilling book about the Moors Murderers, Beyond Belief, were both still in print.

But I’m sure that George, his early autobiography, will outlast the lot. From the opening it has precision, style and wit, as well as a dash and sparkle that is all its own, and it doesn’t matter if future readers know nothing about his relatively fleeting fame, because this book’s not about a famous person – it’s about someone who wants to be famous.

He writes with brilliance about his childhood egotism, of how, after seeing a schoolmate, Kate, lying in an open coffin, dead of pneumonia, he imagines – in heart-wringing detail – his own deathbed, funeral and eulogy: ‘Never another like him…’. The chapter ends: ‘Ten minutes later I was changed into ganssi and courduroys and in the field playing rounders as if I had not died at all. Or Kate either.’

Born in 1905, he grew up, Welsh-speaking, in Flintshire, the oldest son of an (intermittently) drunken publican and his long-suffering wife, but this is emphatically not a misery memoir – the parents’ marriage survived into loving old age, Williams senior pulled himself together and took a steady job in the steelworks, and both parents adored George, their gifted eldest son, who went from village junior school to the local grammar:

‘He has got to pass first’ said Mam, as he lit his pipe, ‘and there’s the trip, five miles, how would he get there every day if he did pass?’
‘In a tank’ said Dad, without a flicker. ‘I shall have one sent over from the works.’

From the grammar school, George won an Oxford scholarship and went on to a career in theatre and film. When (under his stage name Emlyn Williams) he starred in the smash-hit thriller, The Case of the Frightened Lady, the steelworks block-booked the cinema in Connah’s Quay, and Dic Williams had the prime seat at the centre of the balcony.

Penguin paperback editions of George and Emlyn by Emlyn Williams — Penguin paperback editions of *George* and *Emlyn* by Emlyn Williams.

The narrative trajectory that takes his son to university is fabulous, but then a sort of drift and lassitude take over the story – the last quarter of the book is perhaps less satisfying, but it’s nevertheless intriguing. Williams falls for another undergraduate, loses the ability to study, drops out and follows the siren call of theatre to his first tiny role on stage. (Emlyn, his second autobiography – also enjoyable – takes up the story at exactly this point.)

But my favourite part of George has always been his days at the grammar-school, where he was nurtured by a superb language teacher, Sarah Cooke (later immortalised in his hit play The Corn is Green) and where he started to unleash his extravagant imagination in print. Asked to invent 3 sentences to include ‘inordinate’, ‘vehemence’ and ‘parsimonious’, George, who had just read an article on the Romanovs in The News of the World, went to town: ‘Rasputin, eerie werewolf of all the Russias, staggered up to the Czarina, his filthy locks inordinately matted as he flung a mere kopek to the subservient servant, for he was a parsimonious monster.’

This boy was never, ever going to settle for a job in the steelworks….

George: An Early Autobiography, by Emlyn Williams
London: Hamish Hamilton, 1961

Lissa Evans is a former television producer and the author of V for Victory and other novels. You can learn more about her work at LissaEvans.com.

Ann Kennedy Smith recommends Two Books about Women at Cambridge

30 April 20239 May 2021

Postcard of Newnham College, Cambridge, 1902.

This is a guest post by the literary critic Dr. Ann Kennedy Smith.

It’s not hard to think of fiction set in Cambridge, from E.M. Forster’s Maurice (written in 1913-14, published posthumously in 1971) to Dusty Answer (1927) by Rosamund Lehmann and, more recently, Laura Barnett’s The Versions of Us (2015). But I’m convinced that well-written nonfiction can bring an authentic story to light in a way that no novel can. My research is on Cambridge’s first women students, university wives and college tutors (link) and there’s nothing like hearing their own voices, in the form of memoirs and biographies based on their letters and diaries. Here I focus more closely on two of these books.

Mary Paley Marshall’s memoir What I Remember was published by Cambridge University Press, 1947. It’s a slim volume, only 50 pages long, with a jaunty introduction by the historian G.M. Trevelyan who writes:

If people who knew not the Victorians will absent themselves from the felicity of generalising about them for a while, and read this short book, they can then return to the game refreshed and instructed.

What I Remember begins, as many good stories do, with a happy childhood. Mary’s was spent in a rose-covered country rectory, where her father Reverend Thomas Paley encouraged his daughters’ education: ‘We had a father who took part in work and play and who was interested in electricity and photography’, she recalls. She moved to Cambridge in 1871 as one of the University’s earliest women students and one of the ‘first five’ at Newnham College; Girton College had begun two years previously. The idea that unmarried women could live apart from their parents and attend lectures was, as Paley Marshall said herself, ‘an outrageous proceeding’ at the time.

Soon after she arrived in Cambridge, she became fascinated by Political Economy because of Alfred Marshall’s lectures. He was ‘a great preacher,’ she observes, who spoke passionately about the need for women’s equality in education and quoted from George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss. With his encouragement, Mary was one of the first two women to sit for the University’s final year exams in 1874 and she became Newnham’s first residential lecturer.

By the mid-1870s the Pre-Raphaelite era of colour in dress and house decoration had dawned all over England. As Florence Ada Keynes later wrote: ‘Newnham caught the fever. We trailed about in clinging robes of peacock blue, terra-cotta red, sage green or orange, feeling very brave and thoroughly enjoying the sensation it caused’ (By-ways of Cambridge History (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1956, first published 1947)). The college room that Mary studied and slept in was, like those of her students, papered in William Morris designs and hung with Burne-Jones prints. At the age of twenty-five she was that rare thing in Victorian times, an unmarried woman who lived independently from her parents and earned a good income doing a job she loved.

Then she and Alfred Marshall married and accepted posts at the newly founded University College, Bristol, where they taught and together published a textbook on The Economics of Industry (1879). Their working marriage seemed the ideal of an intellectual partnership that Mary had dreamed of, and What I Remember describes the happy years the Marshalls spent in Sicily and in Oxford before returning in 1885 to Cambridge. Alfred was made a Professor and published The Principles of Economics (1890) and Mary returned to her post at Newnham, where her inspiring teaching would have a great influence on one student: Winnie Seebohm.

‘This is the true story of a young woman who lived in the later part of Queen Victoria’s reign,’ Victoria Glendinning writes at the beginning of A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter, her biography of Seebohm.

But do not be misled into thinking that because it is history it has nothing to do with you. 1885 is yesterday. It is probably tomorrow too. — From A Suppressed Cry

The prize-winning biographer of Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell and Leonard Woolf, among others, Glendinning took as her first subject her Victorian great-aunt Winnie Seebohm, but the book is no less powerful for Seebohm’s obscurity. A Suppressed Cry was not much noticed when it was published in 1969 and it disappeared from view until it was reissued by Virago in 1995 with a new introduction by the author.

The issue at the heart of A Suppressed Cry is how a young woman from a close-knit Hertfordshire family rebelled against their loving claims on her and achieved her ambition to study at Cambridge. The Seebohms were linked to other Quaker clans in what Glendinning describes as ‘a tight genealogical spiral’ with banking and scholarly connections. Winnie’s father was the economic historian Frederic Seebohm, and she grew up with her siblings and invalid mother in an idyllic house called the Hermitage in rural Hitchin. Despite her obvious intelligence, Winnie was expected to be a ‘good daughter’, contented with flower-arranging and visiting her Quaker relations until a suitable husband was found for her. But she decided that ‘no woman (it is not my business to consider a man’s life) has any excuse for living a life that is not worth living’.

So, in 1885, at the age of 22, she took the gruelling Cambridge entrance exams and won a place at Newnham. A Suppressed Cry reproduces some of the touching letters and diary entries she wrote there. Winnie was thrilled with her college room, her new friends and the freedom to spend her days reading books and writing essays. She adored her tutors, particularly Mary Paley Marshall, who taught Political Economy ‘from a philanthropic woman’s point of view’. ‘She is a Princess Ida,’ Winnie told her sister, thinking of the heroine of Tennyson’s poem The Princess who founded a university for women.

She wears a flowing dark green cloth robe with dark brown fur round the bottom (not on the very edge) – she has dark brown hair which goes back in a great wave and is very loosely pinned up behind –very deep-set large eyes, a straight nose – a face that one likes to watch. Then she is enthusiastic and simple. She speaks fluently and earnestly with her head thrown back a little and her hands generally clasped or resting on her desk. She looks oftenest at the ceiling but every now and then straight at you.

Winnie wanted to become a teacher just like the marvellous Mrs Marshall, but her time as a student was heartbreakingly brief. After just six weeks at Cambridge, she fell ill and was brought back to the Hermitage to be nursed by her family. ‘How queer it looks to see everybody so leisurely here!’ Winnie wrote to her classmate Lina Bronner, confessing how she longed to return to Cambridge. ‘I imagine you lingering on dear Clare Bridge, and King’s spires will be looking grey and sharp against the sky.’

Her kindly tutor Mary Paley Marshall also wrote to her. She was the only woman Winnie knew who seemed to have it all, combining fulfilling academic work with her role as a wife. ‘If she is the woman of the future, I am sure the world will do very well,’ Winnie wrote in her diary. It was one of the last things she wrote. She died after a severe asthma attack – though she may also have had undiagnosed anorexia – just a few weeks later. Expected from childhood to suppress her ambitions and put others’ needs first, Seebohm was, in Glendinning’s memorable description, ‘left stranded on the shores of the nineteenth century’.

Mary Paley Marshall’s married life was far from the ideal that Winnie perceived. In the early 1880s Alfred turned against the idea of women at Cambridge: ‘it is not likely that men will go on marrying, if they are to have competitors as wives’ he told LSE founder Beatrice Webb. He insisted that The Economics of Industry, the book he and Mary wrote together, should be pulped and in 1897 he voted against women being awarded Cambridge degrees. But unlike Winnie, Mary was a survivor and she had the final word. After Alfred’s death in 1924 she co-founded Cambridge University’s Marshall Library of Economics. She worked there for nearly twenty years and her portrait now hangs above the library staircase opposite his.

What was left out of (or ‘forgotten’) in Mary Paley Marshall’s memoir What I Remember is at least as interesting as what was put in; and the cheering counterbalance to Winnie Seebohm’s sad story is the continuing success of Newnham, which celebrates 150 years as a women’s college this year.

Dr Ann Kennedy Smith is a freelance writer and researcher based in Cambridge. Her book reviews and essays have been published in the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Slightly Foxed and the Journal of Victorian Culture among others. You can follow her blog and other activities at AKennedySmith.com.

Ian McMillan Recommends Five Books by Neglected Poets

30 April 202326 April 2021

L to R: Pete Morgan; Philip Callow; Haorld Massingham; Anne Cluysenaar; Agneta Falk. — L to R: Pete Morgan; Philip Callow; Harold Massingham; Anne Cluysenaar; Agneta Falk.

This is a guest post by Ian McMillan

Let’s face it, most poets are neglected (or they think they are) and, oddly, even when poets published by small independent presses are out of print, they’re still somehow in print because the publisher has got loads of copies of unsold books under the bed and in the wardrobe in the spare room.

Here, though, are five poets who seem to be out of print; two of them are so out of print that I almost lost their books. I found them under the bed, of course.

Cover of The Grey Mare Being the Better Steed

• Pete Morgan: The Grey Mare Being the Better Steed, Secker and Warburg (!973)

In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Secker and Warburg had a fantastic poetry list, including poets like James Fenton, Jon Hollander and writers known in other fields like Erica Jong. For me, Pete Morgan was one of the best; his poetry is lyrical, beautifully constructed and written for performance. Pete was one of the poets I took as a model for the freelance life when I was a young poet starting to make my way in the literary world: he did workshops and gigs and school visits and wrote copy for advertising firms; anything to keep the wolf from the door. The Grey Mare Being the Better Steed was his first collection and it brims with work that begs to be performed, like ‘My Enemies Have Sweet Voices,’ which Al Stewart later turned into a song. His other Secker books A Winter Visitor and The Spring Collection are well worth hunting out.

Cover of Cave Light by Philip Callow

• Philip Callow: Cave Light, Rivelin Press (1981)

Philip Callow was a marvellous novelist as well as a poet; his novels like The Hosanna Man and The Story of my Desire are well worth reading. The wonderful Bradford-based Rivelin Press, run by another neglected poet, David Tipton, published a number of Callow’s collections, including this one, full of beautifully observed poems of love and the natural world: ‘After you hear the rustle in a denim shirt/of a pocketful of apple leaves/Gathered by your pocket under eyes of apples.’

Cover of Frost-Gods by Harold Massingham

• Harold Massingham: Frost Gods, Macmillan (1971)

Massingham always suffered from being a couple of years below Ted Hughes at Mexborough Grammar School, so his work seems to be endlessly in Hughes’s long shadow. I’ve always enjoyed Massingham’s imagistic, Anglo-Saxon influenced, word-drunk work. In later life he made a living as a crossword complier under the name Mass, and that makes sense to me because his poems can often feel like crossword clues, as in the poem ‘Cow’: ‘Tub-sided galleon-/But O, her walk, stalwart, a wonder of hundredweights/Borne by sure bone.’ Marvellous!

Cover of Double Helix by Anne Cluysenaary and Sybil Hewat

• Anne Cluysenaar: Double Helix, Carcanet Press (1982)

Anne Cluysenaar was born in Belgium in 1936 and I knew her when I was writer-in-residence at Sheffield Poly in the mid-1980’s; she taught English and Creative Writing and had an evangelical zeal for the power of poetry to change lives. Double Helix was published by Carcanet Press in 1982; it’s a remarkable example of hybrid writing, being a combination of Cluysenaar’s poem and her mother’s prose memoirs and letters; the writing bridges the generations and invites us to examine our own pasts. Tragically, Anne was killed by her son in 2014.

Cover of Here by Choice by Agneta Falk

• Agneta Falk: Here by Choice, Trigram Press (1980)

Agneta Falk is a Swedish poet who was born in 1946. She lived in the endlessly creative enclave of Hebden Bridge for many years until she moved in the late 1990’s to the equally creative enclave of San Francisco, where she’s still very active on the literary scene. Here By Choice is her first pamphlet and I’ve always enjoyed her striking and unsettling lines like ‘A car goes by/rocking the floor boards/the wood creaks/like petals of red roses/hitting the tarmac.’ Or, from her poem ‘Hanna’: ‘She knew nothing of fear or hope/laying her bare bones in the/arms of soft lichen.’

Ian McMillan is a poet and host of BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. His most recent book is Yes But What Is This Exactly?, published by the Poetry Business in 2020.

Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon, Lunatics of Genius

30 April 202317 April 2021

Cover of first UK edition of You Were There — Cover of first UK edition of *You Were There* (1948).

This is a guest post by David Quantick

And so they sat and talked and drank and even sang a little. And the Puppa came beaming up with fresh supplies, and the Mumma sat at the desk and scolded the Puppa roundly because he hadn’t done anything wrong.
And at a table in the corner a pair of palooka writers looked on fascinated and invented fantastic names for them, and imagined their life stories.
The palooka man had a shock of black hair like a Japanese doll without a fringe, a moon-shaped, moon-coloured face that looked like a moon that needed shaving, and ash all over him. His name was S.J. Simon.
The girl palooka looked like a Semitic sparrow. She was Caryl Brahms.
And they didn’t know what the future was to hold for them either.
But you could bet your monomark there’d be a lot of laughter in it.
From You Were There.

I didn’t know what a monomark was when I first read this (an ancestor of the postcode, apparently) but the rest made complete sense to me. It is the final paragraph of the last novel written by Brahms and Simon, completed by Caryl Brahms after S. J. Simon’s death in 1948 and, entirely appropriately, it is the story of their first meeting. Even now I find it moving, because for me it is one of the best farewells of all time. It’s a tribute to a novel-writing partnership that lasted only eleven years but in that time produced eleven books, several short stories and a host of films, stage plays, radio broadcasts and television adaptations. They were called “lunatics of genius” by the press; they invented at least one genre between them, and while only one of their joint novels is currently in print, they remain my favourite writers of all time.

Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon, from *Too Dirty for the Windmill*, by Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin (1986).

Caryl Brahms was born Doris Abrahams in Surrey in 1901. S.J. Simon – real name Simon Jacobovitch Skidelsky – was born in Ekaterinoslav in 1906, the son of Russian Jews who emigrated to France after the revolution. The two first met when they were fellow lodgers at a house on Finchley Road, and they first worked together on contributing subjects for the Evening Standard cartoonist David Low; forming an instant rapport, they soon decided to collaborate on a novel. They had known success in other areas – Brahms had written a very A.A. Milne-esque slim volume of verse called The Moon On My Left, while Simon (as noted elsewhere on this site) was one of the best bridge players of all time – but the decision to become a novel-writing duo was a brilliant one.

Cover of first UK edition of A Bullet in the Ballet — Cover of first UK edition of *A Bullet in the Ballet* (1937).

The first Brahms and Simon novel, A Bullet In The Ballet, was an instant hit. The first of several comic murder mysteries set in the world of dance, A Bullet In The Ballet combined expert knowledge (Brahms was a balletomane and brilliant theatre critic), superb character writing (the member of the Ballet Stroganoff company are fantastical creatures, rendered just the right side of caricature), and a new way of writing crime fiction, that of introducing a long-suffering detective (Inspector Adam Quill) into a closed world of people whose self-obsession, egotism and devotion to their craft would make, frankly, anyone want to murder them.

Cover of first UK edition of Six Curtains for Stroganova — Cover of first UK edition of *Six Curtains for Stroganova* (1945).

But mostly it was the humour that made A Bullet In The Ballet so good. Characters as disparate as modernist choreographer Nicholas Nevajno, always trying to cash a bad cheque, and the prima donna Stroganova, always hoping for six curtain calls, were depicted in a prose style that combined, unexpectedly, the floriate excess of the ballet world with a new kind of bone-dry wit. One of the great joys of reading Brahms and Simon is their unique way of turning a sentence, the way they can convey changing moods in a sentence, one minute mocking the foolishness of human beings and the next bringing out unexpected sympathies. For lunatics of genius who could write at the same pace as their beloved Marx Brothers, Brahms and Simon were also full of heart and love for their creations. Almost, to use one of their favourite turns of phrase, they might be sentimental writers.

Cover of first UK edition of No Bed for Bacon — Cover of first UK edition of *No Bed for Bacon* (1941).

A Bullet In The Ballet was the first in a long series of Stroganoff novels, but Brahms and Simon were unable to restrict themselves to ballet mysteries: their other great achievement – many would say greater – was to, essentially, invent the historical comedy. Most people would say that the best Brahms and Simon novel is 1941’s No Bed For Bacon, and it would be insane to argue against this notion (although I will try soon). No Bed For Bacon, written during the London Blitz when both writers were air defense wardens, is not just a magnificent imagining of the London of Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, it is possibly the greatest comic novel of all time. Part romance – it tells the story of Shakespeare’s affair with the lady-in-waiting-turned-boy-actress Viola, it’s also part history lesson (a scene where old seadogs recall the victory over the Armada, written at the last minute to up the word count, is poignant and moving) and it is entirely, outrageously funny. Only a stone carving or a genuinely bad person could not love it.

Shakespeare sprang to his feet. ‘Master Bacon,’ he demanded passionately, ‘do I write my plays or do you?’ Bacon looked at him. He shrugged.
From No Bed for Bacon

Cover of first UK edition of Don't, Mr. Disraeli — Cover of first UK edition of *Don’t, Mr. Disraeli* (1940).

And great though No Bed For Bacon is, it is possibly not as great as the duo’s other notable historical novel, the epically glorious Don’t Mr. Disraeli, which is nothing more and nothing less than a comic tribute to the entire 19th century (its authors said that it was “not a novel set in the Victorian age but a novel set in its literature”). Based around a Victorian reworking of the Romeo and Juliet story, with Capulets and Montagues replaced by Clutterwicks and Shuttleforths, Don’t, Mr. Disraeli is also infected with the spirit, marvelously, of J. W. Dunne’s long-neglected but at the time hugely-influential An Experiment With Time, which proposed that time was not linear at all but rather simultaneously occurring everywhere, a viewpoint adopted by J. B. Priestley in An Inspector Calls and other plays. Brahms and Simon use Dunne’s notion to present a Victorian era where anyone can appear in the book so long as they lived or died in the 19th century: thus the Marx Brothers and the Duke of Wellington exist side by side, while Victoria herself appears many times at every stage of her life, from dowager widow to young bride. Stuffed with vignettes, running gags (even the title of the book is a catchphrase) and moments of great power (a montage concerning the poor of London is worthy of its roots in Henry Mayhew), Don’t, Mr. Disraeli may sometimes lack the lightness of No Bed For Bacon, but it is an extraordinary achievement.

Cover of first UK edition of Trottie True — Cover of first UK edition of *Trottie True* (1946).

Brahms and Simon have always been immensely popular with other writers: Don’t, Mr. Disraeli was admired by Evelyn Waugh, who namechecked it in his Sword Of Honour trilogy, while No Bed For Bacon is one of Neil Gaiman’s favourite books. Their work has been adapted for stage, radio, television and cinema: particularly worth watching are the film versions of Trottie True and No Nightingales. They wrote superb short stories for Lilliput magazine, some of which were collected in To Hell with Hedda. And when Simon died suddenly in 1948, Caryl Brahms found a new collaborator in Ned Sherrin, with whom she worked until her death in 1982. Not enough of their work is currently in print, aside from No Bed For Bacon, which enjoyed a brief flurry of new recognition when people flagged up its accidental and coincidental similarity to the Tom Stoppard-scripted movie Shakespeare In Love. Now it is the 21st century and it has been three quarters of a century since the “Semitic sparrow” and the man with the moon-shaped face wrote together, but they will always be my favourite writers, and those of many other people. Much of their work is out of print, but copies of their books are easy to find online, and other readers will be drawn to them as I was.

And if I had one, I’d bet my monomark on it.

David Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Night Train, was published in September 2020. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.

The Flutter of an Eyelid, by Myron Brinig (1933)

30 April 202311 April 2021

Covers of the 1933 edition of The Flutter of an Eyelid (L) and the Tough Poets Press reissue (R) — Covers of the 1933 edition of *The Flutter of an Eyelid* (L) and the Tough Poets Press reissue (R).

This is a guest post by Barry Alfonso

“God has always smiled on Southern California,” wrote Carey McWilliams in 1946. An abundance of blessings filled the landscape from the shoreline to the mountains – there was no excuse to feel empty or sad. Yet there has always been a brooding undercurrent to the region, with plenty of sinister shadow lurking amidst the sunshine. Huge clouds of guilt hang over the wide blue skies, brought westward by seekers hungry for self-reinvention who never quite escaped the sins and failures they left behind. There’s a sense of doom on the balmy breezes, as if the Lord might turn on His ungrateful children at any moment.

Southern California has long done strange things to writers. Poets, novelists and journalists have found fear and loathing among the drowsy Spanish Colonial bungalows and palm tree-shrouded grottos of the region. From the working-class ansgt of John Fante to the exalted consciousness of Aldous Huxley, writers have been unsettled, and sometimes driven mad by the sheer beguiling pleasantness of the place. Its promise of freedom has seemed like a curse to even adventuresome artists. Even a brief exposure to Southern California’s insinuating vibes can rewire the brain of the most workaday scribe.

From what I’ve read, Myron Brinig’s time in the region was relatively brief. Like so many others, the Minnesota-born, Montana-raised author headed West in the late 1920s seeking work in Hollywood. His first novel Singermann (1929) earned critical praise for its vivid depiction of the hardscrabble lives of Butte, Montana’s Jewish community. Brinig apparently wasn’t successful in getting on the screenwriting gravy train that rewarded Ben Hecht and other novelists of the era. He did find companionship for a time as part of a bohemian group centered around poet/bookseller Jacob Zeitlin in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighborhood. This circle of creative types, athletes and assorted freethinkers spent time congregating at a beachside swimming club in nearby Palos Verdes. Brinig was made to feel welcome – he seemed to be another footloose dreamer looking for companionship and inspiration. The group thought Brinig was one of them – “he had a way of winning your confidence,” Zeitlin recalled in an interview many years later.

As it turned out, Brinig was repulsed by his new friends and the hedonistic lifestyle they embraced. Like a sponge soaking up toxic fluids, he absorbed as much sun-ripened decadence as he could stand, then squeezed it out through his spleen into a sprawling, surreal novel titled The Flutter of an Eyelid. Published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1933, the book had a difficult birth thanks to threatened litigation, received mixed reviews and quickly disappeared from view. Over time, it took on legendary status as a vividly vicious satire of L.A. eccentricity and excess. By the 2000s, rare copies sold in the $600-$700 range. L.A. historians like Mike Davis ranked the book with Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust (published six years later) in its scathing depiction of pre-World War II L.A. The Flutter of an Eyelid became a lost touchstone from a vanished era of Angelino history.

Now back in print after nearly 90 years thanks to Tough Poets Press, Brinig’s book still has the power to surprise, confuse, irritate and fascinate. Readers looking for a taut, reporterly exposé of Golden State flakiness and corruption won’t find it here. Though not a personal confession in any normal sense, The Flutter of an Eyelid is a brazenly subjective take on what Brinig saw, heard and felt during his L.A. sojourn, a wildly uneven farrago of hallucinogenic vision, potboiler dialogue and droll caricature. At its best, its prose embodies the psychic breakdown that its convoluted storyline attempts to tell.

Two illustrations by Lynd Ward from The Flutter of an Eyelid — Two illustrations by Lynd Ward from *The Flutter of an Eyelid*.

Brinig sets the stage for the disorienting scenes to follow at the start of the book. Novelist Caslon Roanoke boards a ship headed for California in hopes of escaping the grey, tradition-encrusted confines of his native New England. As he sails into Los Angeles Harbor, he feels “possessed by the sun, as if climbing a steep ladder of golden rings to the sky’s zenith.” Very quickly, he gets to know an assortment of oddball pleasure-seekers who enjoy insinuating conversation, morbid home decoration ideas and crème-de-menthe baths. Everyone seems pretentiously unaffected. “The people are so natural they’re grotesque,” he says of the locals. “Here, all life is a series of breathless tangents shooting off from the center of the reasonable.” Hanging over everything is the power of the brilliant California sunshine, giving the novelist the sensation of its light running through his veins.

At this point, Brinig could have concentrated on sketching believable portraits of the quirky men and women who frequented the watering holes of late Jazz Age L.A. That’s not his goal here – whether through careful calculation or sheer self-indulgence, he draws the reader into the diffusive, sensually overloaded minds of his characters by blurring the distinctions between dream and reality. Nothing is fixed for the denizens of Alta Vista (the beachside town based upon Palos Verdes). The glittering, shifting waves of the ocean mirror the churning emotions and unhinged morals of Caslon’s new friends. The very idea of a “fact” is challenged early in the novel. A host of New Age self-empowerment philosophies and paranoic conspiracy beliefs that have become La-La Land cliches are anticipated in the unmoored fancies explored here.

Like a sideshow psychic shuffling through a tarot deck, Brinig contrasts and pairs up the novel’s supporting characters. Sensitive young “pagan” hunks Antonio and Dache revel in homoerotic fantasies that lead to delirium and death. Frustrated composer Jack – a “mannish” young woman portrayed with sympathy – longs for signs of affection from Sylvia, an artist’s muse who is also Caslon’s object of desire. A striking blonde who longs for her absent husband, Sylvia’s fluttering eyelids – symbolic of her veiled desires and fickle attentions – are frequently referenced throughout the novel. She is the topic of the book’s most memorable exchange:

“And you?” [Caslon] dared to address her at last. “What do you do?”
“I give and receive pain,” she said.
“Ah, that’s interesting,” said Caslon, already in pain.

There are more sinister figures as well. Mrs. Forgate is a creepy older woman who has spent time in Europe, where she poisoned several husbands. She savors rare liqueurs, wears black satin shoes that are “startlingly like miniature coffins” and speaks pleasantries that seem “to peer, green-eyed, from behind cerements and tombs.” Her presence allows Brinig to add decadent J.K. Huysmans/Aubrey Beardsley dark colors to his otherwise sunny landscape. Why the rest of the Alta Vista crowd tolerates Mrs. Forgate’s malevolent presence is not clear. She does provide Brinig with a fulcrum for deadly subplots, however.

There’s at least one famous person depicted in exaggerated form here: Sister Angela Flower, a thinly-disguised caricature of Aimee Semple McPherson, L.A. superstar evangelist of the 1920s-‘30s. A flamboyant master of publicity who blended fundamentalist Christianity with a flair for show biz and raw sex appeal, McPherson had been controversial for some time before Brinig arrived in town. Her famed Angelus Temple church was in Echo Park; Brinig may well have seen her leading services. Whether the author saw Sister Aimee in action or not, he infused his portrait of Angela Flower with both loathing and a certain appalled respect for her innate charisma: she “lives, breathes, and shouts sex, without ever quite knowing it … (and) preached Christ with the eyes of a predatory animal and the lascivious mouth of Salome.”

Sister Angela informs a handsome, “brainless” young sailor named Milton that he is the reincarnation of Jesus and convinces him to attempt walking across the waves off Santa Monica Beach. This event occurs at the exact middle of the book and ties together (loosely) several of its occurring motifs. Milton/Jesus begins his stride upon the water, then falters when Sylvia flutters those pain-inducing eyelids of hers. He sinks out of sight, touching off a riot among Angela’s followers watching on the shore. In a scene that anticipates the mob violence at the climax of The Day of the Locust, the crowd reacts to Milton’s drowning by “stampeding like a herd of senseless wild animals…drowning along with the others who thought that they heard Jesus calling to them from the drear, dim depths of the melancholy ocean.”

By this point, it has been established that Caslon is creating these events by writing about them – the boundaries between the subjective and objective have been erased with the stroke of a key. Caslon is “unable to know when he was still at the typewriter or away from it. Was it a nightmare he was having, a hallucination more real than reality?” He attributes this omniscient psychosis to his environment: “Ever since I arrived in California, I seem to have become possessed of clairvoyant powers…sometimes, I write things before they happen.” His characters have independent thoughts and realize they are trapped in the world he is creating. “The thing to do was capture Roanoke and amputate both his hands so that he could no longer write a single word down on paper,” Antonio says. His friend Carlos adds, “We are prisoners of a page, and yet we continue to live like desperate flies whose legs are entangled in the glue of a poisonous sheet.”

Is Brinig anticipating postmodernism with this brain-teasing twist? There are echoes of Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author here, as well as anticipations of existentialism and the experimental fiction of Alain Robbe-Grillet. The literary conceit Brinig indulges in captures the essential unreality of the Southern California mindset remarkably well. The egomaniacal dream of self-recreation that brought so many to the Golden State is taken to its logical (if insane) conclusion. While this works well as satire, it does little to make the reader care about Flutter’s characters. Caslon – the world-creating hero of the story as well as its victim – is not exactly a sympathetic figure. He pines for Sylvia and tries to save Jack from the mass destruction he knows is coming (he’s writing it, after all), but mostly he feels like “a visitor to Dante’s Hell” who is forced to endure the “germs of genius and the worms of wantonness” who populate the place. Such descriptions don’t encourage you to invest a lot in what happens to these sun-soaked wretches.

Brinig’s satiric edge slips from caustic into cruel in his portrayal of Sol Mosier, a feckless artist manque apparently based upon Jacob Zeitlin. Like the author’s real-life friend, Sol is a small-time Jewish businessman who longs for authentic experience and Walt Whitman-like poetic epiphanies. After failing spectacularly as a workman, he drags his wife into a quest for decadent pleasures that spirals out of control and finally takes her life. Along the way, Brinig comments about Jews in general, mocking them collectively for their self-obsession and clannishness. Being Jewish himself, Brinig seems to be working out some personal issues in writing about the hapless, doomed Sol. Whatever the motivation behind the character, Sol was close enough to Zeitlin in particulars to raise legal issues before Flutter was published. A threatened lawsuit caused Farrar & Rinehart to tone down Sol’s more objectionable aspects in print. Still, as California historian Kevin Starr noted, “Even by the most forgiving standards Brinig’s caricature of Zeitlin edges into anti-Semitism.” (Though unsuccessful as a poet, Zeitlin continued on as a bookseller and secured his status as a beloved figure in the L.A. literary community.)

Advertisement for The Flutter of an Eyelid — Advertisement for *The Flutter of an Eyelid*.

Gratuitous personal attacks are all part of the boiling bouillabaisse that is The Flutter of an Eyelid. The mechanics of the book are often creaky and turgid: a gothic subplot involving a decayed Spanish family and a murder-suicide bogs down the narrative towards the end. More could have been made of Angela Flower and her hold on the Midwestern retirees who comprise her besotted flock. In describing the petty obsessions of his characters, Brinig tries the patience of the reader with logorrheic laundry-lists of words and objects. He is at his best when he soars into psychedelic flights of language that skirt the ridiculous to achieve something nearly sublime. There’s an acid trip intensity to some of its passages, such as when Antonio and Dache share a cozy folie a deux before the latter drops dead from poisoning:

He knew the graceful, instantaneous leapings of deer as though shot forth from some great cosmic sling; the slow, curling indolences of snails, and the plodding, prowling intricacies of lobster and crab. He knew what it was to be a man and a woman, a wild deer and a cat prowling stealthily over leaves in search of a bird or a mouse. And he knew the tumbling cascades of moon-touched music that pour from the abandoned throats of nightingales… sometimes he was a snake, long and dazzling, and knew each separate, scintillant particle of earth.

The Flutter of an Eyelid ends with a gleeful depiction of California sliding into the ocean, sending the good, bad, and indifferent alike to a watery mass grave. (The powerful Long Beach earthquake struck Southern California around the time Brinig was completing or delivering the novel.) Listening to reports of the catastrophe over radio while safely back in New England, Caslon knows that he is responsible. He discovers that the manuscript of his book has been transformed into a damp piece of coral, leaving no trace of the fantasy he made reality.

In the real world, Brinig’s novel soon vanished as well. In an unsigned review published May 14, 1933, the New York Times pronounced Flutter a failure: “The fantastic elements are not sufficiently integrated with the realistic ones; the wit and satire are neither subtle or piercing…. The book is, in short, insufficiently amusing.” Brinig quickly returned to the more sober, realistic fiction he was known for, eventually scoring a notable success with The Sisters (1947), which was adapted into a film starring Errol Flynn and Bette Davis. Less popular novels continued to appear into the following decade. Long before his death in 1991, Brinig had slipped into obscurity.

For all its uneven prose, improbable plot convolutions and nasty caricatures, The Flutter of an Eyelid compels interest and even admiration. There’s nothing I’ve read that’s quite like this lush hothouse garden of a novel. Clearly, this was a story that Brinig needed to get out of his system: once he purged the noxious sunshine from his bloodstream, he never wrote in this vein again. Flutter may be an ephemeral expression preserved in literary amber, but its flipped-out bitterness in the face of seeming beauty still speaks to the Golden State experience. God could smile on Southern California, but Myron Brinig could only laugh, grimace and feel a little sick.

Barry Alfonso is an author, journalist and songwriter. He is a founding member of the San Diego Comic Convention and a 2005 Grammy Award nominee. His most recent book is A Voice of the Warm: The Life of Rod McKuen (2019). More information can be found at barryalfonso.net.

The Flutter of an Eyelid, by Myron Brinig
New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1933
Arlington, MA: Tough Poets Press, 2020

S-s-s-sh, by Kathleen Mary Carmel (1948)

29 October 20237 April 2021

Cover of S-s-s-sh by Kathleen Mary Carmel

This is a guest post by the writer David Quantick.

“You didn’t have time to think about the dangers of a raid in the cipher room of the secret service sabotage organisation. You were too bloody annoyed.”

There are many mysteries about this book: they start before the book has even begun, in the authorial blurb, and they continue even after the book has ended.

In the endpapers of the dust jacket, an anonymous writer says of S-s-s-sh that “readers of her Contract for a Corpse should find this, her latest book, even more satisfying”. There is, in actual fact, no evidence of that a book called Contract for a Corpse ever existed, while the only other novel published under Kathleen Mary Carmel’s name – Secret Service – turns out to be a French translation of S-s-s-sh. “Kathleen Mary Carmel” is itself a pen name, made out of the author’s real names, and S-s-s-sh, while a small classic of genre fiction, is not what the writer is most famous for.

Kathleen Withers and S. J. Simon, courtesy of their family.

Kathleen Mary Carmel was best known as Carmel Withers. Nicknamed, inevitably, Caramel, she was a brilliant and highly respected bridge player, and it was through that game she met her future husband S. J. “Skid” Simon. They both represented their country at bridge and even appeared on TV television programmes playing bridge before World War Two.

Skid was a household name, a brilliant analyst and a formidable player who was not only the author of the influential Why You Lose At Bridge (a book that is immensely readable even if you know nothing about bridge) but also, with Caryl Brahms, one of the most popular writers of the 1930s and 40s. (I shan’t write about Brahms and Simon here, except to say it was as a lifelong fan of their work that I came to Kathleen Mary Carmel and S-s-s-sh: despite their own reduction in fame, Brahms and Simon’s work, which ranged from historical comedies to ballet-related detective novels, has had many fans, from the late Ned Sherrin, who wrote with Caryl Brahms and completed her autobiography, Too Dirty For The Windmill, and Neil Gaiman, who ranks Brahms and Simon’s No Bed For Bacon very highly indeed.)

When I came across mention of Kathleen Withers in Too Dirty For The Windmill, I wanted to find out more about her, but there was very little information out there. I managed to acquire a copy of S-s-s-sh (as well as its French translation) and spent a while trying to find the elusive Contract for a Corpse without any luck. All I knew was that she had a file in the National Archives related to her real-life work in ciphers during the Second World War, that she was a champion bridge player, and that she had been married to SJ Simon, who predeceased her by only a year.

S-s-s-sh is an excellent book. From its dedication – FOR THE CIPHER ROOM MICHAEL HOUSE – via its unsentimental tone, appropriate for a murder mystery set during the carnage of a world war, to its satisfactory conclusion, this is a novel that’s entirely convincing in its milieu and entirely chilling in the way it follows its murders and the reason for those murders. Along the way, we are engrossed in the minutiae of life in a wartime cipher department – the flirtations between male officers and female staff, the triumph at cadging an extra piece of toast and marmalade, the sheer exhaustion of working in near-impossible conditions to save the lives of countless men and women – and we are caught up in a bigger picture: this killer’s agenda is, unsurprisingly, entirely connected to the greater drama of worldwide conflict.

It is also a funny book, a suspenseful book and at times a chilling book. The scene where the narrator reports that she has found a woman’s body stuffed into a cupboard plays out with humour at her superior’s bureaucratic bluster but also with casual horror – “I was tired, the smell was sickening and now into the bargain I was getting bored”. And, as befits a story set in the small, cramped world of a cipher unit, where everything is a secret and everyone lives in each other’s pocket, throughout there is a sense of claustrophobia and paranoia quite at odds with the increasingly cosy way that current WW2 novels portray Britain at war, all country lanes and boffins cycling off to Bletchley. S-s-s-sh is a book that’s full of the mundanity of war and all that it implies.

By the sound of it, this dry, half-humorous, half-serious tone was entirely typical of the author, whose death in 1948 (it was reported as suicide) was deeply mourned by her fellow bridge players. “It is at this moment at once a pride and a tragedy of remembrance that the writer of this brief memorial recalls that he was for long her partner and her friend,” wrote one of her obituarists, Guy Ramsey. Friends and fellow players recalled her wit and intelligence, and it is clear that she was more than a match for her anarchic, chaotic and popular husband (who died of a heart attack after a television appearance).

Kathleen Mary Carmel Skidelsky, née Withers, deserves to be remembered for more than one excellent novel (I am hopeful that one day S-s-s-sh will be reprinted), and it looks likely that she will be: while researching this piece, I came across the work of Shireen Mohandes, a writer and expert on bridge history. Ms Mohandes has been researching Kathleen’s life in some detail, and brought several important facts to my attention: you can read her work at www.mrbridge.co.uk/library (she was also kind enough to source the accompanying photograph and to ask permission from Kathleen’s family to reproduce it).

For now, however, it’s enough to read S-s-s-sh for its lucid, convincing depiction of a novel world of terror, and to remember Kathleen Mary Carmel as both a writer and a person of distinction.

[Editor’s note: When S. J. Simon died in July 1948, just hours after appearing on television with Terence Reese, it was front-page news on most British papers, even though the Times incorrectly identified Caryl Brahms as his wife. His death devastated his wife, who suffered from severe depression thereafter and took her own life with an overdose of barbiturates just days short of its first anniversary. S-s-s-sh is so rare that the only copy listed in Worldcat.org is at the British Library.]

Headlines of Kathleen Withers' death — Stories on Kathleen Withers’ death from the *Daily Mail* and *The Times*.

Tony Baer recommends The Girl, by Meridel Le Sueur (1978)

24 March 2021

Three editions of The Girl by Meridel Le Sueur — Three editions of *The Girl* by Meridel Le Sueur.

Tony Baer wrote to share his enthusiasm about Meridel Le Sueuer’s novel The Girl:

Small town Minnesota farm girl moves to the big city of Minneapolis/St. Paul in the depths of the 1930’s Depression. The girl works in a speakeasy, lives with a prostitute, and falls in love with one of the more handsome petty criminals. He gets her pregnant, she refuses to have an abortion. She then agrees to be the wheelman for a bank robbery. The robbery fails, with enough blood and guts spilled to leave her alone and having to fend for herself and her unborn child in a dark cold world.
The book is not a complete success as momentum slows significantly after the ramp up to the bank robbery.
But the words ring true, full of a poetic oral realism of the era.
At the time she wrote the book, Le Sueur was a member of the Communist Party. But the book didn’t find a publisher until the 1970s, when John Crawford, who had started a new publishing house, the West End Press, got Le Sueur’s consent to rifle thru her basement for musty treasures.
When Le Sueur had tried to get left-wing publishers interested in the book back in the 1930s, they didn’t like it. It showed “lumpen tendencies,” portrayed “degenerates” rather than “virtuous Communist women,” had too much cursing and sex, used the Lord’s name in vain, was “defeatist in attitude” and “lacked revolutionary spirit and direction.” In other words, it was true.
She was then blacklisted in the 40-50’s, unrepentant before the House Unamerican Activities Committee.
Not Communist enough for the left, too communist for the right.
The Girl was written by splicing together a number of oral histories from different women who participated in a workers’ alliance writing group in the 30’s, sharing their personal stories with Le Sueur. She took one piece from a bank robbing wheel(wo)man, one piece from a bootleg shootout widow, one piece from a girl birthing a child after escaping an asylum, and so on.

“Some samples of the prose, which, once again, I really dug”:

“Better be hiding, I said, better be running, better be on the lam, better fade away. Yeah, he said, better not be seen, and I saw his terrible eyes looking, shaking like dice–snake-eyes.”
“Ganz suddenly brough his huge mutilated hand back and struck me full in the face. I fell down, I thought, forever, into the dark earth. I thought the light would never be so bright again.”
“But keep your mouth buttoned up, he said to me. You keep yours, I said. And I ran out and down the stairs, past the clerk at the desk, and into the street, and I looked back and saw all the windows behind me brightly lighted and the smooth furniture inside and the nice beds. I always wanted to see what they did in there. Now I knew. I ran into the park and I touched the trees and I leaned down and picked up some dirt and ate it. It tasted bitter…..And I kept walking and looking at men and now I knew something. This is what happened. Now I knew it. I was going to know more. Nobody knew anything that didn’t do it. Down below you know everything and there are some things you can never tell, never speak of, but they move inside you like yeast.”
“You can’t sit in a barroom alone after it’s quiet. I got desires now, wild, like the dark sweet fruit of the night that breaks on your tongue. How can you sit down now in any room, and mend your stockings and polish your nails and maybe think about your mother, with your flesh like the wild breaking of spring, like a tree after a storm, weighted to the ground and rainwater in your throat and your hair springing wild out of your skull and the strong root terrible in the earth with bitter strength?”

West End Press published three editions of The Girl, first in 1978, then in a revised edition in 1990, and a third in 2006 after the University of New Mexico Press had picked up the West End Press catalogue. Sadly, the only books by Meridel Le Sueur that appear to be in print now are the two from the UNM Press: The Girl and I Hear Men Talking, a collection of her short stories.

Crime Pays Royalties: the Autobiographies of Thieves

1 March 20211 March 2021

The exploits of George Manolesco, "Prince of Thieves," from the Pittsburgh Press, 20 September 1905 — The exploits of George Manolescu, “King of Thieves,” from the *Pittsburgh Press*, 20 September 1905

Ever since Daniel Defoe published his novel Colonel Jack (1722), readers have been fascinated by the lives of career criminals. Although, as Defoe spells out in his lengthy original title of the book, his hero “was made Colonel of a Regiment” and resolved “to dye a General,” the core of Jack’s story was the “Six and Twenty Years” he spent as a thief.

Thieves’ stories appeal to both the sinner and Puritan in us. Neglected Books fan Tony Baer describes a curious homegrown example from early 19th Century America titled Narrative of the Life of John Allen, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the Highwayman, Being His Death-bed Confession to the Warden of the Massachusetts State Prison (1837):

Short, surprisingly readable, unapologetic, plain language life story of a burglar. It’s surprising to see that people were actually able to write in fairly modern American English in 1837. Mainly a series of stories recounting various crimes and time in prison. Unfortunately, he died about 2/3 of the way through the story, so the end of the book is written in the 3rd person by the warden. According to Wikipedia, and probably more interesting than any content in the book, is this factoid: “The book is most often associated with the copy in the collection of the Boston Athenaeum. This copy was bound in the author’s own skin, tradition holding that Allen requested that a copy of his confession be bound in his skin and given to John A. Fenno, who had earlier resisted Allen’s attempt to rob him.”

[For the long and strange history of binding books in human skin, see Megan Rosenbloom’s recent Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin.]

The Autobiography of a Thief, by Charles Reade — An early edition of *The Autobiography of a Thief*, by Charles Reade

The Autobiography of a Thief has been a perennially popular title, used, by my count, at least six times since Defoe. Charles Reade, who once competed with Dickens in terms of popularity with Victorian readers, took it for a short novel: The Autobiography of a Thief (1857). Reade, who was an advocate of social reform throughout his life, was careful to correct his narrator’s commentary. When the narrator writes that he “took with me three pounds ten shillings” from an Edinburgh baker after finding the work there too hard, Reade footnotes,

“Took with me.” No such thing. “Stole” is the word that represents the transactions. Always be precise. Never tamper with words; call a spade a spade and a picklock a picklock; that is the first step towards digging instead of thieving.

Cover of Jottings from Jail by Rev. J. W. Horsley — Cover of *Jottings from Jail* by Rev. J. W. Horsley.

A more authentic autobiography of a thief can be found in the opening chapter of Jottings from Jail; Notes and Papers on Prison Matters, by the Reverend J. W. Horsley (1887). Horsley, who served as chaplain at Clerkenwell Prison, collected oral histories and letters from inmates he came to know there. Horsley carefully annotated these accounts to help his readers decipher the criminal argot, such as in this inventory of the clients of a pub in Shoreditch popular with the East End’s underworld:

The following people used to go in there — toy-getters (watch-stealers), magsmen (confidence- trick men), men at the mace (sham loan offices), broads- men (card-sharpers), peter-claimers (box-stealers), busters and screwsmen (burglars), snide-pitchers (utterers of false coin), men at the duff (passing false jewellery), welshers (turf-swindlers), and skittle-sharps. Being with this nice mob (gang) you may be sure what I learned.

W. L. Hanchant later reprinted this autobiography in his 1928 book, The Newgate Garland; or, Flowers of Hemp, which collected poems, songs, and letters from London’s most notorious prison.

Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief by Hutchins Hapgood — Cover of *The Autobiography of a Thief* by Hutchins Hapgood

In 1903, journalist Hutchins Hapgood collected the oral history of a New York City pickpocket and petty thief in The Autobiography of a Thief. Many were sceptical of whether Hapgood’s thief was real or imaginary. He was probably a little of both. But the book was rich in details of how small-time crooks of the Bowery operated. Here, for example, is how “molly-buzzing” — stealing women’s pocket-books — worked:

We worked mainly on street cars at the Ferry, and the amount of “technique” required for robbing women was very slight. Two or three of us generally went together. One acted as the “dip,” or ” pick,” and the other two as “stalls.” The duty of the “stalls” was to distract the attention of the “sucker” or victim, or otherwise to hide the operations of the “dip”. One stall would get directly in front of the woman to be robbed, the other directly behind her. If she were in such a position in the crowd as to render it hard for the “dip,” or “wire “to make a “touch,” one of the stalls might bump against her, and beg her pardon, while the dip made away with her “leather,” or pocket-book.

Although it was never published in English, the autobiography of a thief who styled himself as royalty in the criminal world appeared in Berlin two years after Hapgood’s book. George Manolescu’s Ein Fürst der Diebe. After leaving his native Romania, Manolescu quickly developed a taste for high-end burglary and specialized in robbing jewellers and jewel owners, particularly from their suites in the finer hotels of the Riviera, Baden-Baden, and other stylish watering holes. Manolescu’s book is said to have inspired Thomas Mann’s unfinished masterpiece Confessions of Felix Krull.

Cover of I was a Bandit, the Crime Club edition of Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook — Cover of *I was a Bandit*, the 1930 Crime Club edition of *Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook*.

Two decades later, another international thief, Eddie Guerin, recounted his adventures in his 1928 book Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook. Tony Baer describes it as follows:

Amazingly well told autobiography of a career criminal who specialized in bank robberies.
Eddie grew up in Chicago in the 1860’s to the 1880’s. He published the book in 1928 at age 67, motivated in part by a desire to counteract his portrayal by his former flame in her book published slightly earlier: Chicago May, Her Story, by the Queen of Crooks.
There’s plenty of adventure, including blowing the safe of the American Express building in Paris, only to be double crossed, caught and sent to Devil’s Island in French Guyana to serve a life sentence. He later escaped and returned to the States, Canada and on to London where he continued a life of crime, narrowly escaping assassination by Chicago May and her new boyfriend.
What I dug most, however, was Guerin’s ‘underworld vernacular’ (his phrase—not mine—tho I suppose I’ll steal it now from this long dead thief).
The prose is precise, hardboiled, and terse. Just how I like it. He does not tell you. He shows you. With efficiency and enough flair to entertain without being at all showy or pretentious.
What I am now quite perplexed about now is whether the hardboiled school of writing was really drawn from Hammett and Hemingway, as we were always led to believe—or whether it was more some part of the zeitgeist. There appears to have been an underworld vernacular shared by cops and robbers and hoboes and day laborers alike. A dirty realism that people spoke around that time that finally made it pen to paper in the late 20’s.
Highly recommended. A real joy to read.

Cover of Stealing Through Life by Ernest Booth — Cover of *Stealing Through Life* by Ernest Booth

Around the same time, Alfred A. Knopf published two closely-related criminal memoirs. Grimhaven, by Robert Joyce Tasker (1928), is an account of a convicted burglar’s time at San Quentin Prison. Tasker took up writing while in prison and eventually sold a number of articles about his experiences to Mencken’s American Mercury. While at San Quentin, Tasker met another inmate, Ernest Booth, a veteran thief in for a failed bank robbery. Booth decided to try his hand at writing as well. As Tasker recounts in Grimhaven, the two men decided to avoid competing with each other:

In the end we drew up an oral compact that I would write only of prisons, and he would write only of criminals not yet in prison. We talked of the various things my experiences had taught me and decided that he should write the story of a bank-robbery, giving it every detail, with every emotion recorded.

Booth’s own book Stealing Through Life appeared less than a year after Tasker’s. With a record far longer than Tasker’s, Booth took a rather Nietzschean view of the criminal class:

There are those of us — thieves and poets — who are born intact. Complete. The stern realities of life are inverted and become only so many evidences of unreality. Within our selves we have a complete world of our imagination…. Within this realm of our own possession we retreat when confronted with things that do not fit into our preconceived scheme of things-as-they-should-be.

“We are the odd ones. The criminals, the geniuses, the builders of Utopias,” he boasted.

Cover of Angels in Undress, the US edition of Low Company by Mark Benney — Cover of *Angels in Undress*, the US edition of *Low Company* by Mark Benney

In 1936, three-time convicted burglar Henry DeGras published his account of growing up in the London underworld of prostitutes and “wide boys,” Low Company: The Evolution of a Burglar, under the pseudonym of Mark Benney. Released in the U.S. a year later under the odd title Angels in Undress, the book received wildly enthusiastic reviews, including from such notoriously tough critics as Rebecca West and George Orwell. Although his publisher Peter Davies touted Benney as “the man who committed a hundred burglaries,” Benney’s crimes had been mostly minor felonies. His last conviction was for skipping out on installment payments for a phonograph. Benney went on to write several novels about the world he’d grown up in, most notably The Big Wheel, discussed here recently.

Cover of Hustler! The Autobiography of a Thief by Henry Williamson — Cover of *Hustler! The Autobiography of a Thief* by Henry Williamson.

In 1965, R. Lincoln Keiser edited the memoir of a petty thief, Henry Williamson, Hustler! The Autobiography of a Thief. A case worker for Cook County, Keiser got to know Williamson, a recent parolee from the Illinois State Penetentiary, and taped over a hundred hours on interviews which he condensed into this book. Although its cover appealed to a general audience, Keiser’s account was more sociological in nature and included commentary from Dr. Paul Bohannon, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University.

Cover of Killer: A Journal of Murder — Cover of *Killer: A Journal of Murder*, by Thomas E. Gaddis and James O. Long.

In 1970, Thomas E. Gaddis, best known for The Birdman of Alcatraz, his 1955 story of prisoner and amateur ornithologist Robert Stroud, collaborated with James O. Long and in compiling the recollections of a truly nasty piece of work, the serial killer Carl Panzram. Robberies were the least of his crimes, but there were plenty of them. As Tony Baer describes it,

Prior to his execution in 1930, Panzram and his death row guard became friends, and Panzram made a parting gift of a short autobiography, first published in 1970 as Killer: A Journal of Murder by Thomas Gaddis, who fills in gaps in the narrative with chapters written in the 3rd person.
The first-person confessions from Panzram to be the most compelling bits of writing. He is completely unapologetic, yet recognizes his own monstrosity. He is not trying to leverage the confession for profit, titillation nor commutation. He recognizes that publication will come after death, and thus seems pretty liberated to simply tell his tale in simple unadorned prose.
The writing is lean and uses common no frills language. He does terrible things out of misanthropy and greed. But basically just feels like he’s “paying it forward” on the ill treatment he’s received from others.

Panzram was a textbook example of recidivism: “What time I haven’t been in jail I have been either getting out or getting in again,” he wrote. His coldly amoral voice is chilling:

In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all these things I am not the least bit sorry. I have no conscience so that does not worry me. I don’t believe in man, God nor Devil. I hate the whole damned human race including myself.

Cover of The Thief, the Autobiography of Professional Thief Wayne Burk — Cover of *The Thief, the Autobiography of Professional Thief Wayne Burk*.

The Thief: the Autobiography of Wayne Burk, Professional Thief (1971), an as-told-to book written by Los Angeles Times reporter Ted Thackrey, Jr., is perhaps the most insufferably self-satisfied of all these accounts. Burk claimed to have stolen over $15 million, though that number is hard to believe after I located a few stories of Burk’s exploits, such as his 1948 stick-up of the bar at the Hotel Il Trovatore in Bakersfield, California, where he made off with a whopping $185. Burk’s moral calculus is notable for its relativity:

Nobody in this world can ever say they starved because of anything I ever did. I don’t rob poor people; they ain’t got enough money to make it worth the trouble. I never screwed around with the stock market; there ain’t no one in this world can say I make their father jump out of a window because of something I pulled with a stock to make myself richer while everyone else in the country loses. I never made a motorcar that was so cheap and crappy that it got the people who drove it killed. I never put out a medicine that crippled people or gave them cancer, and I sure never shot some poor guy just because I didn’t happen to like his looks. If I put anybody out, I had a good reason — money!

Which sounds a little like the man who boasts that he’s screwed a lot of women but never messed around with anyone’s daughter.

Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief, by Andrew Keith Munro — Cover of *The Autobiography of a Thief* by Andrew Keith Munro

Alexander Keith Munro’s The Autobiography of a Thief (1972) proved to have been a work in progress. Less than three years after writing, “I had a tremendous amount of excitement out of being a burglar,” Munro apparently found the call of adventure irresistable and was sent up for stealing £23,000 in valuables from the country home of Sir Kenneth Clark, the art historian and broadcaster.

Excitement seems to be a common theme in these autobiographies. In The Boxman: A Professional Thief’s Journey (1972), Professor William J. Chambliss’s case study of a career burglar, Harry King shares the profound observation that, “It’s exciting and I really believe that it’s the excitement that makes it appealing.”

Cover of Where the Money Was by Willie Sutton and Edward Linn — Cover of *Where the Money Was* by Willie Sutton with Edward Linn

The most purely entertaining of all these memoirs is the legendary bank robber Willie Sutton’s Where the Money Was (1976), which he wrote with Edward Linn after his release from Attica State Prison in 1969. Like Munro and Harry King, Sutton found the thrill of planning and committing robberies more addictive than their rewards:

Why did I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life. I enjoyed everything about it so much that one or two weeks later I’d be out looking for the next job. But to me the money was the chips, that’s all.

As imaginative as some thieves may be, they continue to stick to traditions when it comes to titles. When Bruce Reynolds, the mastermind behind the 1972 Great Train Robbery came to tell his story, he called it — you guessed it — The Autobiography of a Thief (1985)

Hallelujah, I’m a Bum: What to Read After Waiting for Nothing

3 March 202131 October 2020

Hobos being moved out of Los Angeles, c. 1933

The Glasgow-based independent publisher the Common Breath recently reissued the Great Depression classic of homelessness, Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing, and the initial response of readers has been quite enthusiastic. I think a lot of today’s readers may not have been aware before now that there was a wealth of good writers beyond John Steinbeck who dealt with the impact of an economic and social catastrophe that reached as far back as the mid-1920s. So, I wanted to take this opportunity to mention some of the other remarkable books written in the 1920s and 1930s that focused specifically on life “on the bum”: the experience of the homeless, unemployed, and often desperate men and women who drifted about America in search of something to hope for.

The grandfather of all American hobo books is probably Ralph Keeler’s Vagabond Adventures (1870), which I wrote about in one of my earliest posts back in 2006. Keeler got around by steamboat instead of railroad, but his life of wandering and casual labor set the pattern that thousands would follow. Vagabond Adventures is so old that it predates the word hobo, which seems to have sprung up in the 1890s and which, according to etymologist Anatoly Liberman, has an uncertain origin. By the 1893 edition of the Funk & Wagnall dictionary, however, the establishment had already passed its judgment on the hobo: “An idle, shiftless wandering workman, ranking scarcely above the tramp.” Tramp, in fact, was the label preferred by poetic types, starting with W. H. Davies’s The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) and continuing through Harry Kemp’s Tramping on Life: An Autobiographical Narrative (1922). Kemp’s book, however, also marked the end of the romantic notions about life on the bum.

Cover of Beggars of Life by Jim Tully

• Beggars of Life: a Hobo Autobiography, by Jim Tully (1924)

Jim Tully was probably the first to celebrate the hobo-cum-hobo life, though by the time he published this autobiography, he’d been off the road for over a decade. Still, he worked hard to cultivate his image as a bruiser and built upon it through a series of novels about boxing, carnies and circus performers, thiefs, and prostitutes. A lot of the tough-guy literature of the 1930s drew its inspiration from Tully.

Kent State University Press has reissued a number of Tully’s books, including Beggars of Life, Circus Parade, Shanty Irish, and The Bruiser, as well as the biography Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover, Hollywood Brawler by Paul Bauer and Mark Dawidziak.

Cover of You Can't Win, by Jack Black

• You Can’t Win, by Jack Black (1926)

Jack Black spent most of his life on the wrong side of the law. The novelist and historian R. L. Duffus claims that Black was credited with over half the robberies that took place in the first year after San Francisco was hit by the 1906 earthquake. In between stick-up jobs and break-ins, however, Black preferred to travel like other hobos, at the railroad’s expense. Though he doesn’t actually use the word hobo in the book, there are plenty of stories about swinging into empty freight cars and run-ins with railroad bulls. It’s likely that Black decided to write his autobiography after seeing the success of Jim Tully’s, but Black has inspired his own followers, including William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, and Black is sometimes described as “the original beatnik” (a word that’s probably just as archaic as hobo by now).

There are several different reissues of You Can’t Win available now, including a Kindle edition and an audiobook.

Cover of Bottom Dogs, by Edward Dahlberg

• Bottom Dogs, by Edward Dahlberg (1929)

Bottom Dogs, Dahlberg’s first novel and largely autobiographical novel was written in Brussels but centers on the year or so that he spent bumming around the West after he was discharged from the Army. Dahlberg’s alter ego, Lorry, is what country songwriters call a ramblin’ man: “He didn’t care if he never saw any grub, he wanted his freedom, he wanted to knock about, hit the road whenever he felt like it, bum around the country.” And he arrives in a new town in typical hobo fashion:

… [H]e looked down; the train was rattling away at forty anyway; he wasn’t sure; but he knew he couldn’t jump. He’d have to wait till they got outside the yards of Ogden, Utah. He’d have to lay low, too, when he got in; he might get picked up in the streets. He wasn’t quite sure what he would do yet. Pulling into the yards outside of Ogden, Lorry jumped, hitting the coal cinders. He went down solid, bleeding at the hands and knees, and limped out of the railroad yards, stumbling toward the Lincoln Highway. He trudged along, half-heartedly hailing passing autos; he was too dirty; his shoes half off him; cinders in his ears; soot through his hair; no one would stop for him; they might think he was a stick-up.

Dahlberg was the first to test the appetite of critics and readers for a fictional equivalent of Tully and Black’s memoirs. Despite a foreword by D. H. Lwawrence, Bottom Dogs got a less than stellar reception. For Saturday Review, it seemed “to represent the vanishing point, the reductio ad absurdum of the naturalistic ‘low life’ novel,” that it amounted to ‘sub-animal reaction reported by sub-animal itself.’ “We doubt if the book helps one to understand any considerable or significant part of anything,” its reviewer sniffed.

Bottom Dogs is out of print now, but copies of the collection of Dahlberg’s first three novels that was published by Crowell back in 1976 can be picked up cheaply on Amazon and elsewhere.

Cover of A Hobo's Hornbook by George Milburn

• The Hobo’s Hornbook, by George Milburn (1930)

More cultural artifact than story, The Hobo’s Hornbook reprints dozens of hobo rhymes and songs, including classics such as “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.” George Milburn, then a budding young folklorist, collected them from a variety of sources, including interviews with hobos in towns around the Midwest. “The idea that hoboes, as a class, were imbued with the spirit of the medieval troubadours first occurred to me in 1926 when I was living on the outskirts of Chicago’s hobohemia,” Milburn wrote in the introduction. “A short distance away was Washington Square, known to staid Southsiders and suburbanites as ‘Nut Square’ and to hoboes the nation over as ‘Bughouse Square.’ In that oasis speech is free and the hoboes make the most of it. There it was that I found my first hobo elocutionists….”

The text of The Hobo’s Hornbook is available online at https://www.horntip.com/html/books_&_MSS/1930s/1930_the_hobos_hornbook__george_milburn_(HC)/index.htm.

Cover of You Can't Sleep Here by Edward Newhouse

• You Can’t Sleep Here, by Edward Newhouse (1934)

In You Can’t Sleep Here, Newhouse’s first novel, the hobo life is not a matter of personal choice but economic necessity. In the novel, a newspaper reporter loses his job and quickly drops through what little social support net existing in those early Depression days — getting evicted from his apartment, sleeping in flophouses and park benches, standing in soup kitchen lines, and finally sharing a crate in a Hooverville. The novel reflects the energetic radicalism with which Newhouse and many others responded to the economic devastation that followed the Stock Market crash. As one reviewer wrote, “Starvation has a remarkable effect on the intellect; the latter becomes susceptible to ideas to which, in the pride of its security, it had been stubbornly closed.”

You Can’t Sleep Here is extremely rare now, but you can find it online if your library has access to HathiTrust.org: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006498559.

Cover of Boy and Girl Tramps of America by Thomas Minehan

• Boy and Girl Tramps of America, by Thomas Minehan (1934)

Despite its somewhat childish title and a certain simple-worded prose style, this is a serious anthropo-/socio-logical study of the tens of thousands of young people made homeless, destitute, and itinerant by the Depression. Minehan spent several summers riding the rails and collecting observations and interviews in places like Chicago’s Bughouse Square. The New York Times’ reviewer was grateful for Minehan’s factual approach: “Congratulations are due to Thomas Minehan that he did not attempt to make literature out of the material he has put into this book. The stark, brutal, vivid, uncompromising realities of life he has set down in it are more important for his purposes, and for any use that could be made of them, than any literary product into which they could have been transformed.”

Boy and Girl Tramps of America is available on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/boygirltrampsofa0000unse

• Somebody in Boots, by Nelson Algren (1935)

Algren’s first novel, it drew upon his experiences in Texas, where he lived for a year or so after graduating from college. While there, he became so destitute that he stole a typewriter and landed in jail for a spell. The book sold poorly when first published and Algren preferred to draw attention to A Walk on the Wild Side, the 1956 novel into which he worked a number of elements from the earlier work. Of Someboy, Algren later wrote, “This is an uneven novel written by an uneven man in the most uneven of American times.

Still, it’s full of details that demonstrate that Algren was no dilettante when it came to his time on the bum. He records verses like those found in Milburn’s collection:

The roundhouse in Cheyenne is filled every night
With loafers and bummers of most every plight ;
On their backs is no clothes, in their pockets no bills.
Each day they keep comingfrom the dreary black hills.

He also recounts the tales that hobos tell each other about railroad bulls and sheriffs to avoid — like Seth Healey in Greenville, Mississippi:

He’ll be walking the tops and be dressed like a ’bo, so you’ll never know by his looks he’s a bull. But he’ll have a gun on his hip and a hoselength in his hand, and two deputies coming down both the sides ; your best bet then is to stay right still. You can’t get away and he’ll pot you if you try. So give him what you got and God help you if you’re broke. When he lifts up that hose-line just cover up your eyes and don’t try any backfightin’ when it comes down — sww-ish. God help you if you run and God help you if you fight; God help you if you’re broke and God help you if you’re black.

Somebody in Boots has been reissued a number of times, most recently in 2017 by IG Publishing, with an introduction by Colin Asher, author of Never a Lovely so Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren.

Cover of Hungry Men by Edward Anderson

• Hungry Men, by Edward Anderson (1935)

In this, Anderson’s first novel, an unemployed musician travels around America as a hobo until he stops in Chicago and forms a band with other homeless musicians. They get arrested after a fight breaks out when they refuse to play the Communist anthem, the “International.” Anderson was skeptical of the likelihood that the Depression would lead to revolution: “”Every idle man becomes economic-minded. He starts wanting to know why this man has a chauffeured Packard and he can’t get his three dollar shoes half-soled? But the American isn’t going to turn socialist or communist. At least not in this generation.”

This may accounted, in part, for Tom Kromer’s disdain when he reviewed Hungry Men for The New Masses. Kromer found it paled beside his own novel: “You will see no Jesus Christ looks in the eyes of Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men, no soup-lines that stretch for a block and never start moving, no derelicts dying of malnutrition on top of lice-filled three-decker bunks while the mission sign outside flashes ‘Jesus Saves’ on and off in the dark. In a word, you find no Hungry Men.”

According to Anderson’s biography, Rough and Rowdy Ways: The Life and Hard Times of Edward Anderson (Tarleton State University Southwestern Studies in the Humanities (Hardcover)) by Patrick Bennett (1988), however, Anderson spent two years “in the twilight world of vagabonds, riding the side-door Pullmans across the nation — San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, Boston. Now and then he turned to riding his thumb along the highways, although he felt that hitchhiking was ‘like sticking your tail out and every time somebody passes they kick it.'”

The University of Oklahoma Press reissued Hungry Men in the early 1990s, but it’s out of print now. A Kindle version, however, is available from Amazon. Anderson’s second novel Thieves Like Us, which was filmed by Robert Altman in the 1970s, has been included in the Library of America’s volume Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s.

Cover of A Horse in Arizona, by Louis Paul

• Horse in Arizona, by Louis Paul (1936)

This is a picaresque novel by the long-forgotten novelist Louis Paul. Though the story centers on the travels of two ex-doughboys after World War One, Paul incorporated elements from the life of his better-known friend, John Steinbeck. It’s perhaps less of a hobo book than a book of many unsuccessful attempts to be hobos. The lead, one Resin Scaeterbun, accompanied by his Army buddy Copril Ootz, wind back and forth across the States in search of idleness.

As Paul told an interviewer, “They want to become bums, to give their whole souls to the art of bumming. But they find themselves circumvented and defeated on every hand.” But, he complained, “In a competitive economy, it is very hard to avoid work.” Instead, Resin finds himself at various times a bootlegger, fight promoter, poet, reporter, pornographer, and screenwriter, ending up in the thoroughly disgraced profession of bookseller. One reviewer wrote that Paul “writes as Rube Goldberg draws cartoons, with a delicious sense of the ridiculous.”

Horse in Arizona was published in England as Hallelujah, I’m a Bum. I’ve got to track this one down.

Five Neglected Hollywood Novels: An Interview with Kari Sund

24 September 2020

Bette Davis reading from The Petrified Forest

Kari Sund is a PhD student at Glasgow University working on a thesis about the Hollywood novel. She’s following in noteworthy footsteps: the late novelist and memoirist Carolyn See published her own dissertation, The Hollywood Novels: An Historical and Critical Study way back in 1963. I contacted Kari recently to ask if she’d share some recommendations from her wide reading in this genre, and she generously agreed.

What got you interested in novels set in Hollywood? Were you a film buff who got interested in literature or a literature buff who got interested in film?

Definitely the latter. I first became interested in the Hollywood novel when I was doing my Postgrad in American Literature, though the course didn’t focus on the genre. One of the texts on the core course was John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, and when I had finished reading this my Kindle recommended that I read Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, which I had never heard of, but absolutely loved. As both the works were published in 1939 and both were set in California during the depression era, I wanted to write about their differing depictions of the Western Dream in American Literature, drawing from Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893).

Around about the same time, I was writing my dissertation on the portrayal of alcohol, waste and occupation in the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and this led to me reading his unfinished Hollywood novel The Last Tycoon (1941). That set the ball rolling: the more Hollywood novels I read, the more I wanted to read. What most surprised me was the fact that until reading Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, I hadn’t come across discussion of the Hollywood novel as a genre. I had taken undergraduate modules on twentieth-century American literature, and a postgrad in American literature, but the genre hadn’t been covered and it wasn’t even mentioned in any of the American lit anthologies on my shelves. That added a layer of intrigue to the topic for me, which I find always helps when you are going down a rabbit-hole.

Cover of Merton of the Movies

1. Merton of the Movies (1922) by Harry Leon Wilson.

This is perhaps the first Hollywood novel to become a best-seller. It’s interesting to compare what contemporary reviewers said to how the book’s remembered now. The New Republic’s reviewer, for example, said “for the thousands who will laugh with Mr. Wilson there are millions who might read his story and see nothing in it to laugh at at all.” Harry Leon Wilson has a reputation as a comic novelist (e.g., Ruggles of Red Gap): is this a comic novel or a tragi-comic novel?

For me Merton of the Movies is a tragi-comic novel, and it really surprises me how many scholars, critics and reviewers refer to Wilson’s work as simply comic. There is no doubt that it is laugh-out-loud funny at times. Merton is a small-town shop assistant who wants more from life and dreams of finding success as a serious actor. He moves to Hollywood, struggles at first, but eventually finds fame in slapstick Keystone Kops-style comedy westerns due to his remarkable likeness to an existing Western star.

The only problem is that Merton has a deep disdain for these comedies, seeing them as the lowest form of acting. But when a director recognises the humorous scenarios created by Merton’s tendency to take himself far too seriously, he exploits this, putting Merton in a comedy role without telling him. Merton thinks he has finally got the serious Western role of his dreams. This is hilarious, of course, but because all Merton’s colleagues and bosses on set are part of the ruse it’s also humiliating to witness. Merton finally reaches the level of fame and success he has long dreamed of, but by a means which he has always scorned – slapstick comedy – and so there’s a bittersweet element to this.

It’s definitely difficult to feel sympathy for Merton at times because he is pompous and judgemental, but Wilson’s novel speaks about the culture of the Hollywood film-factory utilising human beings for its own means, a culture which countless Hollywood novels would continue to explore into the 20s, 30s, and still do today. Merton can bring you tears of laughter and of pity, definitely a tragi-comic novel, and a wonderful read.

Some years ago in The New York Times, Nora Johnson called Merton of the Movies“>Merton of the Movies one of the Hollywood novels that had become “dated as old valentines in their innocence and their view of the movie capitol as exciting, amusing, certainly loony, but harmless on the whole.” Is this a fair accusation?

I don’t think this is entirely fair, no, mainly because I don’t feel that the novel depicts Hollywood as harmless. Wilson captures the excitement, or rather obsession, that people felt about potential fame and success in the field of acting, and that’s a dream that I don’t think has ever fully left Western culture. But with this obsession comes a resulting difficulty in distinguishing between reality and fantasy – another theme which Hollywood novels have continuously explored – and this is one of the main concerns of Merton of the Movies. Merton experiences delusions in his humdrum life back home, like getting into fights with mannequins at work as he envisions himself in a Western saloon scene, and becoming the laughing stock of the town when he tries to steal a local horse as his trusty steed.

After he has made the pilgrimage to Hollywood he ends up so destitute that he finds himself secretly living on film sets and nearly starving, and it is because his hold on reality is so loose that he is able to normalise this situation. He constantly filters the events of his own life as they might be depicted through a Hollywood memoir, or fan-magazine interview, with a famous star. Wilson’s narrative depicts these scenes in a comedic style, but Wilson himself was not a fan of Hollywood and there is an undeniably serious message in this novel about how harmful an extreme obsession with Hollywood, film, and the cult of celebrity can be.

The exploration of this theme has endured not only in fiction, but also in films about Hollywood and the West. Sunset Boulevard (1950), Mulholland Drive (2001), and more recently Ingrid Goes West (2017), all explore the distortion of reality through their character’s proximity to, or obsession with, Hollywood and celebrity. Ingrid Goes West links this to the use of social media in modern culture, exploring how we distort our own portrayals of reality via platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, and how these portrayals in turn impact our perceptions of our own lives. So, I don’t feel that Merton of the Movies“>Merton depicts Hollywood as harmless, nor do I think that the work is dated given that one of its main themes is still so relevant today. Johnson’s words do resonate in respect of one aspect of the novel though, and that is the fact that Merton still finds success in Hollywood, even if it isn’t his preferred role.

Scholars like John Parris Springer have observed that Wilson gives in to the fairy-tale perception that dreams really do come true, and I have to admit that I also find it disappointing that he somewhat endorses the idea that anyone could make it in Hollywood.¹ This truly was a harmful message, one that was bringing thousands of starry-eyed young people to the film-capital in search of fame, only to be met with disappointment and sometimes destitution. Yet without this ending—Merton’s success—it would have been a completely different novel.

Cover of Minnie Flynn

2. Minnie Flynn (1925) by Frances Marion

Frances Marion was the highest-paid screenwriter (of either sex) in the 1920s. What does Minnie Flynn tell us about Marion’s view of the industry she was so successful in?

This picks up where I’ve just left off with Merton of the Movies. In Cari Beauchamp’s compelling work Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood (1997), she writes that Marion wanted the novel to be “a warning to the thousands of women she saw pouring into Hollywood full of optimism and without the slightest idea of what lay ahead”.² So Marion was open that this was a cautionary tale for young girls coming to Hollywood to try and make it as actresses.

At the time when Minnie Flynn was published, people were travelling to Hollywood in the thousands to find fame and success only to find that even extra roles were impossible to get because there was such a vast pool of hopefuls to select from. Hollywood had more budding actors than it needed. Marion’s message was that even for those young girls who did find work, it would not necessarily be the experience that they envisioned.

The novel follows a young girl, Minnie, who starts out as an extra in the East coast film industry. She is given an introduction by a minor actor she meets at a ball and who is interested in her romantically. Minnie doesn’t find massive stardom, but she does find moderate success and moves to Hollywood to continue her career.

Marion really emphasises the serious pitfalls, and one of the main ones is the loss of trust in friends and family members. Most of Minnie’s loved ones use her for what they can get when she is at the peak of her fame, and are nowhere to be found when she is down-and-out, it’s quite tragic. Then there is the added fact that, for most, fame rarely lasts.

Marion also makes it explicitly clear that women trying to make it as actresses were objectified sexually, often from a young age, as part-and-parcel of the casting process. This is one of the most significant aspects of the novel for me, as it reflects that a culture which still exists today – as we have seen in the last couple of years with the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the Me Too movement – has been deeply ingrained from the early years of silent film.

Marion confessed later that she spent four months writing the first four chapters and then finished the rest of the book in just six weeks. The “tough guy” novelist Jim Tully said she “was guilty of the artistic murder of a beautiful character.” Did you notice any significant shifts in style or quality in the course of the book?

I wasn’t aware of this when I was originally reading it, and I think it would lead to a different reading experience, so it makes me want to read the novel again! There are some aspects of the work which instantly come to mind. For example, Minnie moves from the East coast film industry to the West coast film industry, and her time in Hollywood is short in the grand scheme of the novel. I was surprised by just how much of the novel is set in the East and how little is set in the West, though this was also an aspect I enjoyed as I felt it highlighted the relevance of the East coast film industry to Hollywood, another topic which my thesis gives focus to.

As for Tully’s accusation, I guess the answer depends on how we consider Minnie as beautiful. From the start she’s described as physically beautiful but Marion also emphasises the many flaws of Minnie’s character: she is selfish, fickle, shallow, and pretty mean! If Tully means that the character was beautifully crafted, then I would agree, but I also felt the ending was effective, not rushed. Minnie ends up being used by partners, lovers, family members, and so-called friends. By the close of the book she is destitute, having lost her fame and her looks, and she’s punishing herself for her fate.

Cover of reissue of Minnie Flynn

Note: Kari got this beautiful copy of Minnie Flynn a few years ago from Ben Smith, who ran a Kickstarter to get the work back into publication (and who may have a spare copy or two for sale): Frances Marion’s Lost Novel Minnie Flynn – A New Edition

Cover of Twinkle Little Movie Star

3. Twinkle, Little Movie Star (1927) by Lorraine Maynard.

This is a children’s book — what might be considered YA (Young Adult) fiction today. What interests you about this book in the context of your research?

Hollywood-related fiction for children plays a huge role in my research. The first film-related novels to be published about Hollywood were in the form of series-works for children, so they really hold a formative position in the genre, yet these and all works for children are consistently dismissed from scholarship. Because of this, I assumed that they would be irrelevant to the larger genre, yet when I started reading these works I was struck by the similarities in the themes they explore, but also by the fresh perspectives that they bring to the genre, and so I felt they warranted more attention.

The most interesting aspect of Twinkle for me is the depiction of a child star – Vivi Corelli – and that stars experience of working in the film-industry of the 1920s. The story is almost wholly set in Hollywood, bar a few visits for location shooting, yet the universe we encounter in the novel really exists in a vacuum of film sets through the eyes of a child. Through this novel, Lorraine Maynard depicts and condemns the working conditions for child actors by detailing the dangers which Vivi is at the mercy of because of those conditions. It also touches on the use of animals in the industry, as Vivi’s co-star is a beloved dog, Scamp.

Illustration from Twinkle Little Movie Star — Illustration from *Twinkle Little Movie Star*

Would you consider Maynard’s child star, Vivi Corelli, a precursor to Shirley Temple?

Absolutely. Lorraine Maynard herself had worked as an actress for a short period of time when she was a teenager, so she would have had experience on film sets and in studios, and would have been familiar with the phenomenon of child stars in America. Variety also claimed that this work was allegedly based on “Baby Peggy” (Diana Serra Cary) who was one of the first child stars of the silent movie era, a real-life precursor to Shirley Temple.

Cover of Remember Valerie March

4. Remember Valerie March (1939) by Katherine Albert

Like Frances Marion, Katherine Albert wrote from insider knowledge of working in Hollywood. Yet The New York Times reviewer wrote, “It would be shocking to think that her people represent a cross-section of Hollywood, and this reviewer is left unconvinced by the jacket’s assurance that such is true.” Having read a fair share of Hollywood books by now, how realistic did the book seem to you?

For me, this is a good example of a Hollywood novel being unfairly dismissed based on its authorship and the subcategory to which it belongs. The work is female-penned, focuses almost entirely on the career of an actress and has elements of romance and sensation in it. Having dissected bibliographies on the genre and having now read a fair amount of scholarship on it, works with these characteristics have often been dismissed since—and they were not even given serious attention at the time of publication either. There is nothing in this work which strikes me as more or less realistic than the next Hollywood novel.

Remember Valerie March takes the form of a mock star exposé narrated by Conrad Powers, who’d directed most of March’s films. It focuses on Valerie’s personality, her rise to fame, her acting roles and methods, and the events of her personal life. The writing is sometimes deliberately sensationalised due to it being a mock-exposé, yet the story remains believable. The New York Times review wasn’t the only one to disparage the work: Hollywood novelist and scriptwriter Budd Schulberg dismissed Valerie March, along with Minnie Flynn and a number of other works about women’s experience in Hollywood as “Glamour Books, glorified fan magazine stuff”.³

This was the common view of these works in the 1950s and there hasn’t been much to contradict this stance in Hollywood scholarship since. This is one of the reasons I feel these works warrant further exploration. Given the prevalence within the genre of surrealist novels like The Day of the Locust (1939), satires like Carroll and Garrett Graham’s Queer People (1930), and tongue-in-cheek works like Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One (1948), it does become difficult to distinguish this genre as “realistic”.

One thing that sets Remember Valerie March apart is the fact that Albert related the story through the voice and perspective of a male narrator–Conrad Powers, the director who discovered Valerie March. Why do you think Albert made this choice?

I’m not sure why, but it makes for a complex portrait of a Hollywood actress. In part, it’s a necessary measure to fit with the mock star-exposé form the narrative takes. At the time, the relationship between an actress and their director was something which film fan magazines and Hollywood gossip columns would often focus on as part of their preoccupation with revealing “insider” stories (and something we still read about in gossip magazines today!), so on more obvious level it would encourage an existing readership who were interested in Hollywood to buy the novel.

I don’t know if this was Albert’s conscious intention, but I also felt the narrative perspective highlighted the way in which women in Hollywood were—and often still are—filtered through male perspectives, and this is another reason why I selected this work for focus in my thesis. Conrad Powers has a close relationship with Valerie, and at times quite a strong ability to influence her decisions. I don’t think that Albert intended for the reader to always take Powers’ view of events at face value, but for them to question if there was a different perspective.

Cover of In a Lonely Place

5. In a Lonely Place (1947) by Dorothy B. Hughes.

You’ve written that “For me, this is neglected in the sense that it’s not traditionally considered to be a Hollywood novel, but I think there’s a really strong argument for it being one!” How would you make that argument?

This ties in with a larger existing scholarly debate over how much of a link to Hollywood a Hollywood novel should have. Some critics think that a Hollywood novel should have a specific and significant geographical setting in Hollywood, while others feel that Hollywood doesn’t need to be a specific or central setting, but can be more of a “symbol rather than setting”, in the words of Jonas Spatz.⁴ To play devil’s advocate, I don’t really agree or disagree with either, or not yet anyway!

The genre has such an enormous and diverse collection of novels, all of which have varying degrees and forms of involvement with Hollywood as either a place or an industry. Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park (1951) isn’t even set in Hollywood, but with an overarching concern with the film industry and the people in that industry, no one can deny its status as a Hollywood novel. Then you have works like Remember Valerie March (1939), which are very distinctly set in Hollywood, painting a clear picture of living and working in Hollywood even down to what interior design is popular with the stars. Yet, as we have seen with the review you cited, it is still critically dismissed for being unrealistic or inaccurate.

In A Lonely Place (1949) hasn’t been discussed within the genre – to the best of my knowledge – and it isn’t recorded in any bibliographies of the genre, and I believe this is because of the book’s delicate involvement with Hollywood. Hughes goes to great lengths to utilise the geographical area, as the protagonist Dix Steele drives round specific streets at night, haunting hotspots where he *spoiler* looks for murder victims. The geographical element is very much there, but many would argue that there is no actual concern with Hollywood as none of the characters or plots are prominently involved in the film industry.

Much of Dix’s urge to kill, though, comes from a feeling of resentment which is clearly linked to class, money, and lifestyle. He pretends to be a novelist and tries to exude the casual superiority of a man of leisure. But, of course, this only betrays an inferiority. He is financially dependent on an uncle he hates, and the perpetual land of sunshine and beautiful film-people represents, for Dix, a fantasy which he has been shut out from after serving in the war.

His experience is such a truly stark contrast to the leisurely life which was consistently promoted in Hollywood through consumerism. This lifestyle was promoted through the films being produced, by the publicity machines of film studios, by the fan magazines, even in the shop windows you would pass as you walked down the street. The message was that this life of leisure was attainable if you only looked the part.

Dix is trying desperately to look the part but only feels an increasing sense of unbelonging that adds to his resentment. I would argue that there could be no better setting to fuel this type of resentment than Hollywood itself. So, though it might seem almost like an incidental setting – just the backdrop to a serial killer’s hunt – I think Hollywood is the essential setting for In A Lonely Place. I don’t think this novel could be set anywhere else and still have the same associations.

One last question: some people say that Hollywood and the movie business is an artificial environment, so fictions set there are inherently stilted or simplistic. Others say it’s an environment that distills, drawing out and intensifying aspects of the world at large. Where do you side?

From the Hollywood novels which I have read I think the genre tends to draw out and intensify aspects of the world at large. An idea which you come across frequently in scholarship on Hollywood and the Hollywood novel pre-1950s is that Hollywood was being perceived and portrayed in these novels as a “microcosm” of America. This idea doesn’t always resonate with me when I’m reading Hollywood novels, but I think in a great many of these works Hollywood is definitely being used to explore some of the larger social, cultural, and artistic concerns which people were experiencing at this time.

The early works I examine from the 1910s and 1920s reflect the changing perceptions of social class in America, women’s role in the workplace, concerns and excitement over industrialisation, invention, and technological advancements being made. I really haven’t read one Hollywood novel that I’ve found stilted or simplistic. Instead, even the least complex works still provide insight into significant aspects of the film industry and reflect larger concerns over cultural or societal issues, and if we are examining Hollywood and the film industry from a historical perspective these are extremely valuable insights.

Footnotes

¹John Parris Springer. Hollywood Fictions: The Dream Factory in American Popular Literature. Norman. University of Oklahoma, 2000.

²Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood. California, University of California Press, 1997.

³Budd Schulberg. “The Hollywood Novel.” American Film (Archive:1975-1992), vol. 1, no. 7, May 01, 1976, pp. 28-32.

⁴Jonas Spatz. Hollywood in Fiction: Some Versions of the American Myth. Mouton, The Hague, 1969.

Kari Sund Kari provided the following profile: I’m studying for my PhD in American Studies at Glasgow University, and my thesis is on the Hollywood novel genre pre-1950s. Other research interests include F. Scott Fitzgerald, and particularly the role played in his novels of alcohol, work, and waste. As a part-time student I also spend my time working in financial services, hospitality and teaching. My Twitter handle is @karichsund and my email address is [email protected], would love to hear from anyone with similar research interests, or fellow part-time PhD students as it’s always nice to connect with those who have a shared experience of this!

Candidates for the #1956Club

26 September 202019 September 2020

The 1956 Club logo
For about five years now, Karen Langley (Kaggsy of Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambles) and Simon Thomas (of Stuck in a Book) have instigated a semi-annual event in which people around the world take a week to read and write about books published during a particular year. The next round, coming up the week of 5-11 October, will look at books from the year 1956.

1956 was a terrific year for what I might call good but not stuffily great books. Perhaps the best example is Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, which won her the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and which is much loved for the spirit embodied in its opening line: “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.” This was Macaulay’s last novel; also appearing in 1956 is Anthony Burgess’s first novel Time for a Tiger, the first book in his Malayan Trilogy.

To encourage folks to take advantage of the #1956Club while also discovering something beyond what’s readily available for instant download or overnight delivery, I’ve put together this list of 10 long-forgotten and out of print books from 1956.

• Solo, by Stanford Whitmore

A first and only novel about a jazz pianist working in Chicago. In the Sphere, Vernon Fane wrote, “Mr. Whitmore’s hero is an eccentric young man who describes himself as the last individual in the world, is a brilliant jazz pianist and, by his almost total independence, makes himself as many enemies as fans.” In the Guardian, Anna Bostock found Whitmore’s knowledge of Chicago and jazz “fascinating … with its own values, manners, and language, and the author’s sure command of these gives the novel something of the quality of a good travel book.” In the Observer’s year-end wrap-up, John Wain wrote that he’d under-praised Solo, “which has stayed in my mind very firmly since January, and show no sign of dissolving.”

Cover from For All We Know by G. B. Stern

• For All We Know, by G. B. Stern

A novel about the theater and all the personalities around it. In the New Statesman, Michael Crampton wrote that it “throbs with the passionate, false life of the stage. Everybody strikes poses, and there’s a good deal of sharp elbowing up right and down left in the crowd scences. But I find that green-room novels, like salted almonds, are insidiously to my taste.” Isabel Quigly praised Stern’s ability to manage a vast cast with sublime nonchalance. “For All We Know (a suitably airy title) is about one of those brilliant, fictional families with ramifications so complex that even with a family tree at the beginning you can hardly tell by the end exactly who is whose great-aunt or grandmother or second cousin. But it doesn’t really matter; what does is the frightful, fascinating buoyancy of plot, characters, conversations and, of course, plain narrative.”

Cover of The Brazen Head by John Cowper Powys

• The Brazen Head, by John Cowper Powys

One of Powys’s last books, described as a phantasmagoria and set in Wessex at the time of Roger Bacon. “A profusion of odd characters — barons, sorcerers, giants, enchantresses — appear and disappear, argue, tangle and disentangle, evacuate, copulate or die,” wrote Tom Hopkinson in the Observer. Hopkinson found the book a molten, formless mass — but didn’t think that mattered much. “The book’s chief quality,” he wrote, “lies in the author’s immense erudition and expansive kindliness of heart, which gleam, whenever they are allow to, through the boisterous confusion of action and the ceaseless babel of talk.” Both Stevie Smith and Angus Wilson named The Brazen Head one of their books of the year. “It is beautifully, deeply weird and also happy,” wrote Smith, while Wilson called Powys “still the most original living English writer.”

Cover from Remember the House by Santha Rama Rau

• Remember the House, by Santha Rama Rau

A novel about an English-educated Indian young woman in Bombay (Mumbai). Isabel Quigly found it seems—and maybe is—the first novel I remember reading which takes you right away from, right beyond, the confines of western thought. And so delicately that you barely notice, till afterwards, you have spent time in another world. The surface is perfectly familiar—a light, glittering, conversational style, dialogue that often recalls Mr. Waugh in his bright young days, action at just the right pace to keep you interested but not breathless, characters beautifully disposed and organised. ” “The worn old adjective ‘brilliant’ does really apply to this extraordinary eyocation of a way of life at once familiar and remote: and so deftly, so—in a brash, lighthearted way—femininely” Quigly concluded, “that you are half lulled into thinking it just another novel about social habits: which it is, but so very much more. And, I almost forgot to say, highly entertaining, at the idlest level of appreciation, as well.”

Cover of Image of a Society by Roy Fuller

• Image of a Society, by Roy Fuller

Mary Scrutton spoke for many potential readers when she wrote in the New Statesman, “I never met a more misleading title than Image of a Society. It sounds like yet another sociological survey. In fact it is rather like a good Arnold Bennett, only it is well written [posthumous apologies to Mr. Bennett]. It is about the people who work in a large Building Society in a provincial town, and more particularly about two of them—the ambitious, cocky, extrovert executive who is fancied as the next General Manager, and the sad, intellectual parent-ridden young solicitor who falls in love with that executive’s wife. Both men are most shrewdly studied, but not at the expense of the background; the whole movement of the office is tersely and wittily conveyed.” Scrutton had exceptional praise for Fuller’s skill: “It is a beautifully organised novel, all the more moving for being closely pruned. It gave me the feeling that I had when I first read Afternoon Men—namely, that most novelists never succeed in extracting the statue from the stone at all. No wonder it is often such hard work trying to enjoy them.”

Cover of A Single Pebble by John Hersey

• A Single Pebble, by John Hersey

This short novel drew upon Hersey’s years of living in China as the son of American missionaries. An American engineer travels by upon a junk up the Yangtze River in search of a location for a dam. But the story is more in the journey and the interactions between the young Westerner and the members of the crew, lead by a man known as Old Pebble. Howard Mumford Jones wrote that the book’s narrative “is merely the occasion of the novel, not the substance of Mr. Hersey’s art. He wonderfully succeeds in purveying the slow, dreamlike journey up this ancient river. We move with the junk as if under enchantment and are as helpless as the teller of the story to alter the drift of event or comprehend the Chinese enigma.” Santha Rama Rau found that Hersey “captured all the magic, the terror and the drama of that extraordinary stretch of water.” John Wain called it “the most distinguished book I read in the year — the one I would have least hope of ever being able to emulate.”

Cover of A Dance in the Sun by Dan Jacobson

• A Dance in the Sun, by Dan Jacobson

A short novel about the encounter between two drifters and a farm family they meet on a road in South Africa. John Wain gushed about the book in his Observer review: “A Dance in the Sun is a beautiful performance, a model of how to treat a vastly complicated subject without over-simplifying, and yet without ever becoming confused. As a novel of suspense, it could be enjoyed in the simplest way, but I doubt if anyone will be able to keep his reaction dewn to this level; the real subject of the book, race relations in South Africa, is so insistently present that it will touch and move the stupidest and most calious reader.” “Altogether,” Wain concluded, “one might, without absurdity, put this novel on the same shelf with A Passage to India — and that is a very small shelf.”

Cover of The Seven Islands by Jon Godden

• The Seven Islands, by Jon Godden

A short, simple, almost artless story about a holy guru living as a hermit on an island in the Ganges and the quite unholy measures he takes when he encounters competition in the form of Dr. Mishra, who wants to set up his own commune on a neighboring island. It’s a bit parable, a bit human comedy, and a bit distillation of Godden’s many years of observing Indian manners and thought. “This gravely mischievous fairy tale has a moral too good to give away,” wrote John Davenport. “A singularly charming book.”

Cover of Jamie is My Heart's Desire by Alfred Chester

• Jamie Is My Heart’s Desire, by Alfred Chester

Jamie Is My Heart’s Desire left many reviewers flummoxed but impressed. In the Listener, Sean O’Faolain wrote that it was “impossible to summarise … all a matter of mood, atmosphere, place, temperament: New York in a strangely, Parisian dress, more Baudelaire than Bonwit Teller.” The hero lives above a funeral parlor, hangs out with a deadbeat novelist, a one-eyed priest, and a warm-hearted social worker. The trappings and atmosphere of the mortuary seeps into everything in the book — “Only the vampires are missing,” O’Faolain joked. He was not entirely off the mark in writing that “Mr. Chester is a real writer; corrupted, somehow, astray somewhere, probably in French Lit., and exile — I hazard the guess.” “Would Mr. Alfred Chester, present whereabouts unknown, please return home immediately where his talent lies seriously ill?” O’Faolain pleaded.

Cover of The Marble Orchard by Margaret Boylen

• The Marble Orchard, by Margaret Boylen

The second of only three novels that Boylen wrote before dying at the age of 46, The Marble Orchard takes the Southern Gothic sensibilities of Flannery O’Connor and sets them down in the middle of Iowa, where Boylen grew up. Lovey Claypoole, a girl blinded as a result of one of her tinkerer-inventor father’s failed experiments, spends many hours roaming the graveyard — the marble orchard of the title — and talking with her town’s outcasts. Orville Prescott, the New York Times’s oracle of the time, only read the book because his daughter forced it on him. “I had to find’ out for myself about this strange novel which some people liked so much and some people disliked so heartily,” he later wrote. “Sometimes its crackling rainbow prose seems so artificial that all sense of reality is lost. But far more often Lovey’s extraordinary talent for the imaginatively right word, for the concrete detail that will bring a whole episode into life, for a fantastic but wonderful figure of speech, makes reading The Marble Orchard an exhilarating experience.

In the end, Prescott found the book “so original in matter and manner, so startling in its verbal acrobatics and so witty in a raffish and bizarre fashion unlike anything ever printed on paper before that it ought to make Mrs. Boylen famous.” It did not, of course. But as Prescott acknowledged, “Queerly brilliant books are all too often ignored.”

If you’re running out of time to locate one of these ten neglected titles, however, here are some others worth at look. These well- or somewhat well-known and in print titles from 1956 are almost enough to tempt me to divert from my path through the land of the neglected:

• My Dog Tulip, by J. R. Ackerley

Ackerley’s loving memoir of his Alsatian dog Queenie (whose name was changed to Tulip out of concerns over inferences about Ackerley’s homosexuality) was turned into an animated feature with Christopher Plummer in the lead in My Dog Tulip in 2009. Both the film and the book are well worth looking for.

• O Beulah Land, by May Lee Settle

Settle’s third novel and the second volume in what would ultimately become known as the Beulah Quintet, O Beulah Land is about the early settlement of the Ohio Territory. Like all of Settle’s books, it combines deep tenderness towards nature and emotion with absolutely unflinching depiction of the violence that runs through so much American history.

• The Lost Steps, by Alejo Carpentier

This was really the first novel that made English language readers sit up and realize that Latin American novelists were coming up with something new — the sizzle before the Latin American boom, if you will.

• Andersonville, by McKinlay Kantor

A huge book (~800 pages) and a huge bestseller, this account of the grim conditions in the notorious Confederate Andersonville prison camp — particularly coming after World War Two and the grim images of Nazi concentration camps — helped offset (somewhat) the nostalgia for the antebellum South embodied in that other doorstopping bestseller, Gone with the Wind.

• The Tree of Man, by Patrick White

Technically, this only qualifies for the #1956Club for readers in the UK, where it was published about nine months later than its appearance in the US and Australia. Like The Lost Steps, The Tree of Man was a book that made readers in the Northern Hemisphere sit up and realize that great fiction that wasn’t just English stories transplanted were being written in Australia.

• The Emigrants, by Vilhelm Moberg

Moberg published the first of his four volume Emigrants series in 1949, but it first reached English readers in 1956. In a fair world, we’d recognize it as one of the better candidates for the Great American Novel: taken together, the four books are the closest thing we have to an epic of the American Dream in all its complexities.

• Tunes of Glory, by James Kennaway

Kennaway’s first novel, later made into a terrific film starring Alec Guinness, Tunes of Glory is a favorite with many a soldier for its knowing depiction of the turnover of traditions and generations that’s inherent in the history any military unit that wants to remain effective.

• Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, by Angus Wilson

Angus Wilson was just nine years older than Kingsley Amis but he unjustly got labeled as an old man (in contrast to the Angry Young Men), despite the fact that his satirical blade cut far deeper and sharper than Amis’s. I’m not sure he had the best judgment in his choice of titles, either, which is a shame. I’d take Anglo-Saxon Attitudes over Lucky Jim any day of the week.

• A Charmed Life, by Mary McCarthy

Although I prefer McCarthy as a critic than as a novelist, I had to include this book — which Edward Albee had to have read before writing “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — because it is so much better than the book she’s best known for (which need not be named).

• Pincher Martin, by William Golding

Another example where the novelist’s best known book pales in comparison to a somewhat lesser known work. I remember the impact when I realized, late in the book, was Golding was doing, what really was the fate of Pincher Martin. It was like that moment in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road when we learn that April Wheeler is dead: a punch in the chest that takes your breath away in shock.

• A Train to Pakistan, by Khushwant Singh

So much life, so much suffering, so much death is packed into the under-200 pages of this novel about the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. An antidote for anyone who gave up without finishing Midnight’s Children

Richard Kostelanetz Recommends 13 Neglected Classics of Experimental Fiction

27 December 2019

Richard-Kostelanetz-Artist-Leonid-Drozner — Portrait of Richard Kostelanetz by Leonid Drozner

Among the eye-opening/mind-opening experiences of my undergraduate days was discovering the marvelous world of experimental fiction. As with many other adolescent American males, Kurt Vonnegut was my gateway to this genre-bending genre, Donald Barthelme my first mainstream exemplar. The Fiction Collective had just opened its doors a couple of years earlier; Paul Metcalf had just published his farewell to traditional narrative in his collage, Apalache. One of my guides was a book I picked up somewhere in late 1976: Richard Kostelanetz’s anthology, Breakthrough Fictioneers (1973) — which remains, in my view, the best single compilation some forty years later.

I was delighted, therefore, when Richard agreed to let me share the following essay, originally intended for David Madden’s Rediscoveries II, in which writers ranging from Alfred Appel to Richard Yates recommended favorite books worth bringing back into print. Richard’s recommendations exceeded Madden’s quota, so this list didn’t see print back in 1988. It is, however, available in Person of Letters, a 2013 collection of his literary essays, and will also be included in the forthcoming Unfamiliar Appreciations.

IDENTIFYING MORE EXPERIMENTAL FICTION (1988)

An invitation from David Madden proposed that I rediscover a single neglected book title for a symposium he was editing. In reply I proposed to “do best by you if I wrote about several works of experimental fiction from the late 1960s.” He replied, “The concept of the book is that fiction writers write about their one book of fiction that needs rediscovery, rather than an article about several.” I tell him that his requirement of only one title falsifies my sense of what needs to be rediscovered now. He responded with a contract offering me fifty dollars and serial rights, nonetheless insisting that I should “focus on only one book of each writer invited to contribute: 40 writers, 40 rediscovered books.” He continues, “One essay that discussed a good number of writers, without focusing on one, would scatter the focus of our book.”

Well, my friend Madden should have remembered what I think about limitations, especially when they inhibit convictions of importance; and he should have remembered as well my own efforts, in editing anthologies, to transcend any sense of lockstep and perfunctory uniformity.

Since he sent me a contract (but wasn’t paying me enough to ensure that I play by his rules), he got the essay that, given his purposes, I thought he should have, dealing with many 1960s fictions that made radical discoveries. I offered a plethora of titles that were published in what now appears to have been the most fertile time for profoundly innovative literature in this country. (If only we knew then how unique those times were!)

Madden’s letters conjured the vision of publishers reissuing the books we rediscovered; but since he was talking about single volumes, I thought to propose a gigantic book as an addition to the Library of America, or some avant-garde equivalent (perhaps on computer disc), that would include within a single set of covers, notwithstanding differences in format and design, the following thirteen books of masterful innovative fiction:

Frederic Tuten’s The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971), which mixes paragraphs of conventional historical narrative with fictitious incidents such as Greta Garbo propositioning Mao, and such extrinsic material as verbatim (but unidentified) quotations from a variety of literary sources (e.g., Jack London’s The Iron Heel, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, Marx-Engels on the origins of the family and Lord knows what else). It’s all very erudite and subtly funny.
Emmett Williams’s Sweethearts (1967), in which the title word is subject to sequential typographic variations that, as you turn its pages in Hebraic sequence, evoke a heterosexual relationship, introducing the possibility, still scarcely explored, of writing visual fiction with minimal verbal material. (A shorter fiction on the same theme is Norman H. Pritchard’s brilliant “Hoom” [1970], published in Ishmael Reed’s 19 Necromancers from Now (1970). Here two-page spreads filled entirely with “sh” are punctuated by a progressively increasing number of spreads with other kind of wordless typographical arrangements.)
Richard Horn’s Encyclopedia (1969), in which alphabetized notations (filled with cross-references worth following) weave an ambiguous fiction about human interrelatonships, paradoxically disordering by reordering and thus forcing the reader to pursue his or her own path in experiencing the fiction. (Why haven’t we heard from this author again? He seemed too sophisticated to be a one-shot. Someone once suggested Horn’s name might be a pseudonym for Gilbert Sorrentino, who worked as an editor at Horn’s publisher around that time; but Sorrentino’s own novels are not quite so good.)
Richard Hefter and Martin Stephen Moskof’s Shufflebook (1971), ostensibly a juvenile composed of a pack of cards, one side of which contains “and the [name of an animal],” while the other side has just verbs. The sequence of possible combinations is nearly infinite, and merely for approaching that concept in a book of fiction Shufflebook, notwithstanding its slick and trivial contents, is valuable. (Another novel-on-cards from this period that should have appeared as a book [and still could] is Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots [1970], photos of which came in my mail once every fortnight. As the herd of shoes is seen in various settings, they become the anthropomorphic protagonist of an extended narrative.)
Ed Sanders’s Shards of God (1970), which is filled with obscenity at its stylistically finest. Not unlike Tuten, Sanders reinvents history, so that, say, the ghost of Che Guevara really wants nooky, or a bourgeois lady consorts with hippies in order to collect “tool drool.” (The first word in the title incidentally means heaps of cowdung and the last word announces the underlying theme of sustained blasphemy.)
Kenneth Gangemi’s Olt (1969), which portrays in exquisitely measured sentences the pathology of a man unable to regard one thing as more important than another. Also, by making his sentences so complete that each can stand apart from any paragraph, Gangemi revealed a possibility for minimal fiction composed of autonomous sentences.
William Melvin Kelley’s Dunfords Travels Everywhere(1970), which is stylistically the most innovative fiction of a once-promising novelist less visible later.
G. F. Gravenson’s The Sweetmeat Saga (1971), in which the disappearance of pop music stars named Sweetmeat, brother and sister famous since their youth, are portrayed in fragments splayed rectilinearly across the manuscript pages, its language drawing upon the elliptical style of wire services and its typography upon typewriters (so that the manuscript itself had to be photocopied for definitive publication).
Duane Michals’s Sequences (1970), which contains stories told entirely in wordless photographs. My own favorite has always been “The Lost Shoe,” whose first image shows a deserted urban street on which a man, seen only from behind, is walking away from the camera and up the street. In the second frame he drops on the pavement a blurred object that in the third frame is seen to be a lady’s shoe. This frame, as well as the next two, suggest that he departs up the street in a great hurry. In the sixth frame the man is nowhere to be seen while the shoe is mysteriously on fire. The realism of the photographs starkly contrasts with the mysteriousnes of the plot, while large changes between frames accent the absolute immobility of the camera. For this last reason the authorial perspective is, to my senses, as Chekhovian as both the work’s title and its passive acceptance of something inexplicably forbidding. Although “The Lost Shoe” begins as a photographic sequence, its ultimate impact is decidedly fictional.
Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing (1972), which resembles Michals in making the page itself the basic narrative unit; however, instead of photographs, Federman uses language shaped into a wide variety of one-page visual typewritten forms that, like The Sweetmeat Saga, had to be offset directly for publication (and are likewise fundamentally about the possibilities of arraying typewritten words on 8 1/2″ by 11″ pages, in the historic era just before computer-assisted printing!). Through these set-pieces, which reveal an unfaltering capacity for formal invention, Federman weaves several sustained preoccupations, including the narrator’s immigration to America, his poverty here, his obsessive memories, his parsimonious passion for noodles. No other “novel” looks like Federman’s contemporary reworking of Kafka’s Amerika, which was written fifty years before; yet no other in this selection is quite so rich in traditional sorts of “content.” (Mention of Federman would be incomplete without acknowledging his bilingual masterpiece, Take It or Leave It [1976], which is likewise about coming to America. However, because this text entwines two languages, it should be available on audiocassettes in addition to its initial form as print, thus putting to shame all those cassette bowdlerizations of pop books that were themselves bowdlerized before ever getting into print!
Madeline Gins’s Word Rain (1969), which by now is commonly regarded as the most extreme example of self-reflexive fiction. Steve Katz, writing recently in Michigan Quarterly Review, characterized it as “a playful, serene book that puts self-reflexivity to rest forever.” The first sign of this book’s unusual concerns and its equally rare humor is its extended subtitle: “(or A Discursive Introduction to the Philosophical Investigations to G,R,E,T,A,G,A,R,B,O, It Says”; a second is the incorporation of several concerns indigenous to other books on this list—special languages, expressive design, extrinsically imposed forms. “The saddest thing is that I have to use words,” announces Gins’s narrator, not only echoing the opening sentence of Ford Madox Ford’s fictional study of human opacity, The Good Soldier (1915), but also exemplifying that Gertrude Steinian paradox of using language to reveal both the limitations of language and the reading process.
Rather than developed in any step-by-step way, this last theme of linguistic opacity is reiterated in every section of Word Rain suggesting that the indicatively unpaginated book is best read in snatches as opposed to straight through. (The same advice can be tendered to anyone facing Finnegans Wake.) That style that is also the book’s subject is revealed through a variety of opaque styles, one of which is a classic example of verbal elegance entwined with incomprehensibility:
Each word on the page seemed ossified. The word face was a stone. The word guess was a flint. The words a, the, in, by, up, it, were pebbles. The word laughter was marble. Run was cartilage. Shelf was bone. Talk was an oak board. See was made of quartz. The word refrigerator was enameled. The word attention was concrete. The word iron was iron. The word help was wrought-iron. The word old was crag. The word touch was brick. The word read was mica and I was granite.
I have read this passage aloud dozens of times in the course of lectures, and have never ceased to marvel at its purity.
In the pages of Word Rain are numerous inventive displays of printed material: lists of unrelated words with dots between them, whole sides filled mostly with dashes where words might otherwise be, pseudo-logical proofs, passages in which the more mundane expressions are crossed out, an appendix of “some of the words (temporary definitions) not included,” even a photographed hand holding both sides of a printed page, and a concluding page of print-over-print that reads at its bottom: “This page contains every word in the book.” Though Word Rain suffers from a peril of its theme—a linguistic resistance that prevents most readers from discovering its purposes and from entering its imaginative world—it will always be an American classic to me.
Frank Kuenstler’s Lens (1964, and thus slightly earlier that the other books mentioned here), which is the most sustained example I know of prose acoherence (which is the literary analogue of musical atonality), not only from word to word but at times also from letter to letter:
mm.Pris. metier.AAA. prime.Airies. numbers.Racquet. comma.Dei. rr.1919
This opening line establishes a style that is sustained to similar widths for 81 pages, each with type ten inches high. Only recently did I become aware of this book, which contains the sort of audacious innovation we associate with the American imagination at its finest.
Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days (1967 is a book-length ironic fiction about an exhibition full of objects similar to his famous early sculpture of a soft hamburger, all placed into a Lower East Side store a few years before—the book bearing as much resemblance to its subject as those objects did to what they purport to represent. (Why Oldenburg spends so much time with world-famous sculpture and the like, when he could become a great avant-garde writer, utterly mystifies me.)

OTHER TITLES TOWARD A SECOND VOLUME (OR COMPUTER DISC):

John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968), which represents the apex of his career as an experimental fictioner.
Nicholas Delbanco’s Consider Sappho Burning (1969); ditto.
Steve Katz’s The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (1967); ditto.
Ron Sukenick’s The Death of the Novel (1968); ditto.
Kenneth King’s uncollected prose (which a small press run by me has been trying to put into print for years now, in spite of persistent neglects and scandals at funding agencies)

YET OTHER TITLES TOWARD A THIRD WHATEVER:

Willard Bain’s Informed Sources (1969), Frederick Barthelme’s Rangoon (1971), Stanley Berne’s The Unconscious Victorious (1969), Marvin Cohen’s A Self-Devoted Friend (1967), S. Foster Damon’s The Moulton Tragedy (1970), Wally Depew’s Once (1971), Irvin Faust’s The Steagle (1967), Dick Higgins’s A Book About Love & War & Death (1972), Harry Mathews’s Tlooth (1966), Edward Ruscha’s Crackers (1969), Lucas Samaras’s Samaras Album (1971), Eugene Wildman’s Nuclear Love (1972), Arlene Zekowski’s Seasons of the Mind (1969).

TOWARD A FOURTH:

Three anthologies that should be credited with efforts to establish taste, rather than exploit reputations previously established: Jerry Bowles’s This Book Is a Movie (1971), Eugene Wildman’s Experiments in Prose (1969), and my own Future’s Fictions (1971).

Canadian addenda are worth including, if you consider, as I still do, Anglophone Canadian literature to be a neglected zone within American English-language literature: bp Nichol’s Two Novels (1969) and Chris Scott’s Bartleby (1971), in addition to M. Vaughn-James’s Elephant (1970) and The Projector (1971), both of which by now seem to be precursors for the more accomplished visual-verbal fictions of Paul Zelevansky (an American).

By the late 1980s [and even two decades later], I look back upon these books and thus this period of 1966 to 1972 as a time when a developing avant-garde fortunately found publishing channels. Nearly all of these titles came from profit-making publishers, in sum reminding us that, even though manuscripts for similarly innovative books of fiction exist today, we don’t see them as often from either commercial houses or those smaller publishers dependent upon grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. At a time when mediocrity (of different kinds) prevails, it is salutary to remember what had been and thus could be done.

This essay is the best I can do for you now, David, contributing to your theme of rediscovering lost fiction without succumbing to your unnecessary requirements for uniformity. Should the conventions of your Rediscoveries II require you to attribute this baker’s dozen to a single author, consider the Great Avant-God who teaches at the University of Skies (and, alas, does not seem to be around much anymore).