I often go trawling through old book reviews in search of lost treasure. It’s usually not the reviews that feature words like “best”, “greatest”, “finest” that hint at something remarkable worth discovering. More often, there’s a certainly hesitancy in the reviewer’s tone, a suggestion that a book is, well, not bad exactly, but a little askew. A little hard to fit into a particular mold, a little awkwardness in the constraints of prevailing notions of what fiction or nonfiction should be. These are the clues I look for.
In the case of Music in the Listening Place, Gloria Rawlinson’s one and only novel, it was Majorie Grant Cook’s caution in her TLS review that “Readers who dislike the introduction of tiny supernatural beings among average-sized human creatures … will impatiently give up this novel and thereby lose a pleasure that is like biting into a strange new fruit.” Now, I’m not a big fan of fantasy novels, but Cook’s brief description of Rawlinson’s characters — a young woman who’d “lost her wits,” a beloved brother lost in an accident, an earnest young man named Edgar Pullsides — intrigued me and I hunted down one of the few used copies to be found for sale (all in Australia and New Zealand).
“I first heard of the strange little people called Turehu from my mother,” Rawlinson wrote in an introductory note. The Turehu were half-sized, pale human-like creatures — “little white faces with russet-coloured hair.” Although she was writing less than three hundred years after the first white settlement in New Zealand, even among the Maori, the Turehu had already become mythical, something that only the very old and very superstitious still believed in.
Although Rawlinson herself refers to the Turehu as fairies, as we learn in the course of the story, their powers are less magical than psychological. In ways that even they seem mystified by, they are, on occasion — but oh, how these occasions do matter — capable of grasping insights and memories that have eluded the people they help.
Rawlinson was just twenty when Music in the Listening Place was published, and even if the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder had been given that label at the time it’s unlikely she would have used it. And yet, she understood it well, for the real story in Music in the Listening Place is not about the wondrous powers of the Turehu but about how deeply wounded people begin to heal.
The Parks are a family in shock. Mr. Park, a solicitor, forgets his keys, sets out for town on foot instead of by car, has to check his collar before leaving home to make sure there’s a tie underneath it. Mrs. Park hides inside in fear of visitors, conscious that any old friend or neighbor who stops by will observe how large she’s become from years of overeating. And their daughter Aroha storms in and out of the house, sniping belligerently at meals and claiming domain over their back yard as a haven for weeds, bugs, and birds. Throughout the day, she peers at the window of her brother Rollo’s bedroom, anxious to be ready with something to please him: a slice of ripe watermelon, or a sandwich.
Only gradually do we learn that Rollo isn’t an elusive hermit. He’s never coming out of his bedroom because he’s been dead for years, killed in an accident after Aroha insisted he take her joyriding on a neighbor’s motorcycle. Aroha has blanked out all memory of the accident and Rollo’s death save a lingering sense of guilt. She’s stuck, still acting fourteen, still pretending that Rollo is alive, if unseen. And as long as Aroha is stuck, her parents are stuck, too. Even their neighbor, Edgar Pullsides, is himself something of a basket case. Although he makes a little money selling a patent cleanser of his own invention, he spends most of his time hiding in his workshop, building puppets and toys.
On one of his infrequent sales trips around the North Island, Edgar meets a group of Turehu led by the distinguished and nattily-dressed Academic Gentleman. Although the Turehu look upon the mundane interests of the white men with some distain, the Academic Gentleman insists that Edgar must take his wife Peg, a queer leathery-skinned Turehu, back to his home. “Now, Peg, my dear Peg, my lamb, you must try and remember,” he instructs her:
Surely you can remember! It comes to this that there will be no peace in the village if you do not remember. You were the one to catch the thoughts, and are, therefore the one on whom all the responsibility rests. I wash my hands of it all. Anakthe!”
Anakthe, we come to see, is Turehu for, variously, Strewth!, Inshallah!, and “I wash my hands of it all.”
Back home, Edgar hides Peg among the puppets in his workshop, but soon Aroha — his one confidant and fellow daydreamer — learns of Peg’s existence. For some pages, neither Rawlinson’s characters nor we quite know why she’s placed this unusual catalyst in the midst of her unstable cast, but her purpose eventually reveals itself.
Had Rawlinson been exposed to Freudian psychology, we would have good reason to say that Peg’s role is to trigger a cathartic memory, the trigger that Freud and Breuer thought had the effect of “reducing or eliminating a complex by recalling it to conscious awareness and allowing it to be expressed.” But it seems implausible that even a precocious New Zealand woman of twenty with a book of poetry already to her credit would have been familiar with their work.
Instead, we have to trust that Rawlinson knew that even the deepest hurts can only be borne so long. And when Peg does finally remember, reminding Aroha of Rollo’s last words as he sped toward his certain death, she releases the Parks (and Edgar) from the limbo in which they’ve been trapped for years.
Gloria Rawlinson, 1935 (age 17).
As a young writer, Rawlinson shows a certain respect for the conventions of fiction that now seem to place unnecessary restraints on her imagination. But as a young white woman writing at a time when respect for the ways and wisdom of New Zealand’s indigenous people may have been at its lowest, she demonstrates striking empathy. The Maori characters in her book see much farther and more clearly than their colonizers. They know that the North Island is the remnant of a giant fish that surfaced in prehistoric time, that they owned and cared for the island before Captain Cook arrived, and that the Government still owes them the return of the lands stolen by law and gunpowder.
Perhaps Rawlinson understood the Maori’s perspective better than most New Zealanders of her time because she spent her first years living on the island of Tonga, where there was less of a divide between the handful of white settlers and the Tongans and she learned their language alongside her own English. Perhaps she also felt empathy because she was a victim herself, having contracted polio at the age of six, which left her confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
Music in the Listening Place came and went with no more than a few reviews, some perplexed, others appreciative, and has never been reissued. By the time the book was published, Rawlinson had fallen under the aura of the intense, talented but erratic Iris Wilkinson, who published under the name of Robin Hyde. After Hyde committed suicide in London in 1939, Rawlinson took on the role of curator of Hyde’s literary legacy, spending decades writing a biography that was finally published by Hyde’s son Derek Challis several years after Rawlinson died in 1995 at the age of 77.
I suspect that today’s readers, benefitting from the wealth and increased appreciation of fantastic fiction in the decades since the book’s first appearance, will find Music in the Listening Place, as I did, a powerful work that blends myth, psychology, and respect for indigenous cultures in ways that are quite remarkable given the time and age at which Gloria Rawlinson was writing. If it were published today, critics would not hesitate to call it a tour de force.
Music in the Listening Place, by Gloria Rawlinson London, Toronto, Melbourne and Sydney: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1938
Little Victims is not a good novel, but it is a fascinating one. When it was published in 1932, it earned Richard Rumbold the censure of the Roman Catholic Church for its open discussion of homosexuality in public schools and Oxford, but for today’s reader its far more interesting aspects relate to its psychological aspects — often apparently subconscious — and its glimpses into the lives of the trailing edge of the Bright Young Things of Evelyn Waugh’s youth.
It’s not a good novel because it’s shoddily assembled and emotionally overwrought. Rumbold purports to tell the story of Christopher Harmsworth as seen by one of his schoolmates and friends, but he also tossed in personal letters, first-person passages, and liberal use of an omniscient narrator. The story centers around the unhappy triangle of Christopher, his tyrannical and brutish father, and his high-strung, overaffectionate, and often unstable mother. When in contact with each other, these three compounds hover on the edge of an explosive reaction.
It’s clear to Christopher that his parents should never have married. Aside from money and a peerage, his mother’s family had nothing going for them and many things going against them:
Old Lord W__ was in the last stages of debauchery brought on by habitual drunkenness and constant sexual intercourse with common prostitutes during his frequent visits to London. His wife was in a lunatic asylum, and his eldest son had committed suicide for no apparent reason.
Since they did, the next worst thing they could have done was to have children. Unfortunately, his mother became pregnant soon after the wedding, and produced little Christopher, “the unfortunate victim of the muddleheadedness and idiotic notions of his forebears.”
In the race for the lion’s share of the blame for victimizing the boy, Christopher’s mother is the clear winner. She was overly affectionate. “As thousands of men were being slaughtered in the mud of Flanders,”
She suckled his lips and gave him a thousand kisses, which were her husband’s due; she slept next his bed, and in the morning he was brought into hers, and she cuddled him between the sheets. She petted him, she took him everywhere, she spoilt him. She called him “dearest” and “darling” and “sweetest,” and held him up to everybody to be admired. It was not affection, it was passion.
No wonder, then, when Colonel Harmsworth decides to send Christopher off to boarding school at 14, one leg of the triangle is severed completely: “From that moment, Christopher took a violent dislike to his father, and continued to dislike him for the rest of his life.”
Sheltered and innocent, Christopher is ill-prepared for the realities of his public school: “Homosexuality was rife there, not only among the boys themselves, but between the masters and the boys.” To Rumbold’s somewhat self-righteous narrator, “unless you are a fool or a saint it is impossible to live in a community of perverts without becoming aware of and suspectible to its practices.” In his eyes, the young man left the school four years later accustomed to thinking of homosexuality as “the most prevalent and natural of sex manifestations.”
Going up to Oxford doesn’t improve the situation. Inspecting his tutor’s bookshelves, Christopher spots, hidden behind a set of Motley’s The Rise of the Dutch Republic such titles as Sexual Physiology, Advice to Young Men and Sexual Life in Ancient Greece. Not long after settling into his digs, Christopher is visited by a fop in a blue silk shirt and carrying an ebony walking stick who invites him to a meeting of the Sitwell Society: “Yes — Edith and Osbert and Sache; they come down and speak every term.”
Christopher attempts to set himself on the upright path with a heartfelt address on socialism to the Oxford Union, only to see that “Already he was marked, stamped — as a pervert, and he would never be able to live it down.” He dons his mantle of victimhood with little resistance. After all, “the system’s to blame — that bloody system, which tries to educate you according to its absurd standards and perverts your sensibilities in the process.”
By his third year, the bright, healthy young man has a grey complection, skin roughened from “the unrelieved application of cheap cosmetics.” His bedroom as the appearance of “an untidy beauty parlor.” He spends most of his time in the company of the likes of Chum Price, a Brian Howard-like figure of extreme aestheticism who proclaims his hobby as “rescuing pretty boys.”
It’s at one of Chum’s parties that Christopher meets Henry Armitage, an older man from London who “seemed to know and to have known everybody worth knowing.” Henry takes the young man under his wing, inviting him to his London flat and for weekends at his country estate. Henry is married to Isabella Armitage, a writer and “one of London’s most renowned Lesbians.”
If the Armitages sound suspiciously like Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, there’s a reason. They are. Little Victims is a thinly-veiled roman-à-clef that takes Rumbold’s feelings toward his parents, friends, and lovers and winds them up to a fever pitch.
In real life, Rumbold became one of Harold’s protégés and lovers while at Oxford. While Christopher’s narrator portrays Henry Armitage as a sophisticated seducer, the reality is that Rumbold was a bit of an opportunist himself, particularly when it came to indulging in his fantasies. Nicolson would later write of Rumbold, “He had no control over his fantasies and day-dreams, over the alternating gusts of elation and melancholy that assailed him, over his almost incredible ignorance and therefore suspicion of the world around him.”
Rumbold published Little Victims while still at Oxford, and quickly faced the price of his youthful choices. When attending a service in the private chapel of the Old Palace in Oxford soon after its publication, Father Ronald Knox refused to offer him the Sacrament.
“When he reached me,” Rumbold later recalled, “He snatched the silver plate our of my hands and passed it one to the next person.” When Rumbold later wrote Knox demanding an explanation, Knox replied, “A few weeks ago I heard from the Archbishop of Birmingham that somebody had called attention to your novel, and asked if some public notice ought not to be taken of it.” The Archbishop told Knox that Rumbold ought not to be admitted to Communion. “The whole book is foul and offensive, and unless he withdraws it from circulation, and says he is sorry for having pbulished it, I do not see how we can allow him to receive Holy Communion.”
“I have written a very moral book,” Rumbold told reporters when news of the Archbishop’s decision became public. “I have attacked every kind of sexual licence, but my Archbishop, like most of the Catholic hierarcy, has no powers of discrimination. I wish I knew what he objects to in my novel.”
“I was at a Catholic school. People seem to believe that Catholic schools are immune from vice and different from Protestant schools. That is untrue. They are worse. How can I make Catholic schools pure unless I point out first of all how bad they are?” To some extent, he had a point. Its settings aside, Little Victims is as much a moralistic tract as Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, including its melodramatic ending (Christopher finds himself incapable of heterosexual love, goes mad, and shoots himself).
Rumbold told reporters that he would appeal to the Pope. “I feel sure his Holiness will reinstatement, being a man of great sense and intelligence,” he assured them. He swore that he would travel to Rome for a private audience with the Pope, but there’s no evidence that ever took place.
Richard Rumbold and the Oxford English Club, from an item in The Tatler, March 1933.
Rumbold’s was a life of bold promises and disappointing results. If he’d hoped that Little Victims would launch him as a bright young talent, he was soon discouraged. As William Plomer later wrote in his introduction to A Message in Code: The Diary of Richard Rumbold 1932-1961, “It was the work of a confused young man who had been subjected to exceptional strains, was unsure of himself but ambitious, and was wildly and rashly trying to assert himself.”
Rumbold suffered from ill-health, depression, restlessness, and a near-constant sense of dissatisfaction with his own life and the state of the world around him. He trained as an RAF pilot during the war but lost his commission after flying an Anson under the Menai Bridge. He translated a collection of Flaubert’s letters and wrote a biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, but never managed to produce the great novel or poems he felt he should. In March 1961, while working with his friend and loyal companion Hilda Young in hotel room at Palermo, he stepped into the bedroom and, moments later, fell from the window and was killed instantly. The Italian coroner would not rule it a suicide.
The one subject that most interested Rumbold was himself. Little Victims was his first and least successful attempt to portray his life and his intense feelings toward his parents and others. He later revisited the story in his autobiography, My Father’s Son, first published pseudonymously as “Richard Lumford” in 1949. His third version can be seen in the diaries edited by Plomer. Plomer asked for its readers to think kindly of his late friend:
I myself knew Richard well for nearly a quarter of a century. I found him, in the face of his recurrent troubles, a courageous and exceptionally honest man, warmly affectionate and unembittered. Not one line in the papers he left and nothing I have heard about him, whether in his lifetime or after his death, has made me think otherwise. His courage and honesty light up the evidence of his lifelong battle to overcome his troubles and fulfil himself as a person and as a writer.
Little Victims, by Richard Rumbold London: Fortune Press, 1933
My feelings for The Steagle are a combination of awe and disappointment, sort of like what many felt about Evel Knievel’s attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon in 1974. I admire Irvin Faust’s courage and audacity in trying to write about madness in a way that no one ever had — yet acknowledge that his results failed to hit the target. Somewhere short of the far side of sanity, The Steagle’s drag chute ejects and the book crashes in a messy jumble of words.
If some sharp publisher were to reissue The Steagle today, the book’s cover grab line could be, “A MAD MAN GOES MAD.” For both Faust and his hero, Harold “Hesh” Weissburg, are button-down, sport coat and tie wearing, salarymen of the early 1960s. Five days a week, Faust goes to work as a New York City public school guidance counselor and Weissburg teaches 17th Century English literature to bright-faced undergraduates. They have wives, mortgages, insurance policies, and daily commutes.
Like Don Draper of Mad Men, they’ve been drafted, uniformed, shot at. They’ve also been indoctrinated in American mid-century culture: comic strips and comic books, radio shows and movies, 78 RPM discs and sock hops, sports pages and the streets of Brooklyn. As Jack Ludwig put it in his New York Times review, “Everything is here, as current as Mad Magazine: Billboard America, brand-name America, America the blur seen from the window of a speeding train or car, the plotted-and-pieced America airplane passengers know best.” It’s the same combustible mixture that fueled all of Faust’s work, and all it takes is a spark to set it off.
For Hesh Weissburg, the spark is the news that Russian nuclear missiles have been spotted in Cuba. It triggers a psychotic break that leads him to interrupt his lecture on the mystique of the hero in Elizabethan literature and begin raving about Willie Mays and baseball, descending rapidly from rant to bizarre Brooklyn kid code:
(which condenses in the more comprehensible “YOU AND ME HAVE BEEN CONNED, BILKED, SCREWED BYE THE GREAT SPORTSMEN THAT TOOK OUR CLOSEST FRIENDS FROM US, AND THEN REACHED THE SINISTER FINALITY WITH THE KIDNAPPING OF THE GREATEST OF THEM ALL WHO OF COURSE IS WILLIE MAYS….”). Leaving his students gaping in bewilderment, he walks out of his class and heads to the airport, grabbing a flight to Chicago (“FLY NOW, PAY LATER!”) that starts a week-long dash about the country in search of….
Well, just what Weissburg is looking for is clear to neither himself nor us. It could be security in a moment of existential anxiety, but it could just as well be something as simple as the certainty of his 14-year-old comics/sports/radio/movie-obsessed self.
Chatting to his seatmate on board the flight to Chicago, Weissburg pretends to be Hal Winter, successful Broadway producer, and in this guise he checks into the Blackhawk Hotel, orders the best steak dinner and French wine in the place, and seduces a beautiful woman before heading off to his next stop. He visits Notre Dame to indulge a fantasy of being the Fifth Horseman in the football team’s legendary 1924 backfield lineup, Milwaukee to relive a romance from his G.I. days.
As he hops from place to place, Weissburg shifts from one fantasy character to another: Bob Hardy, brother to Andy of the movie family; Rocco Salvato, former high-school bully and present gangster; George Guynemer, son of the French flying ace of World War I; Cave Carson, son of doomed spelunker Floyd Collins; and, finally, Humphrey Bogart.
Weissburg heads for ever more artificial versions of the American dream in his manic race to stay one step ahead of the news of possible global annihilation. To Vegas:
Ocean’s Eleven. Sinatra. Judy. Thirty thousand a week. Sun. Desert. Red neon. One-armed bandits. Action. Faites vos jeux. Les jeux sont faits. Nothing Monaco. Nothing Miami. Nothing Reno. Pools. Tanfastic. Bikinis. Action. Vegas.
Finally, when he reaches Hollywood, his mind jumbles together fragments from his cultural and personal memories into a climactic sequence in which he refights World War Two, single-handedly triumphing over all of America’s enemies. I can only convey the verbal cacophony that Faust creates by reproducing two sample pages below.
Like Weissburg’s “OBB” Latin, one can, with patience, decypher this linguistic jumble. Perhaps, in future, scholars will painstakingly extract and identify each of the shards of cultural reference scattered around this ruin. On the other hand, this may be a case where it’s better to take in the effect at a glance and move on.
For the trick in successfully portraying madness in fiction is that the novelist can never fully surrender control to the madmen. Otherwise, language risks becoming word soup. And there’s a lot of word soup in the last pages of The Steagle.
The book had its share of admirers back in the Sixties. Richard Kostelanetz called The Steagle “the most perceptive breakdown in all novelistic literature.” “Of the many new novels I have read in the past three years,” he wrote in TriQuarterly several years after the book’s first publication, it was “the only one that struck me as fusing the three virtues of originality, significance and realization at the highest levels of consistency.”
Jack Ludwig, the Times’s reviewer, felt that it was a mistake to characterize the book as comedy or satire: “It is funny and great in its take-offs. But it is at bottom compassionate, comic and sadly accepting. As long as reality is what it is, fantasy must serve man as refuge.” Time magazine, on the other hand, lost patience with Faust’s verbal fireworks: “This pop novel pops so violently that it cannot safely be perused without welding goggles.”
Lobby card for The Steagle (1971)
Faust’s failure didn’t dissuade Paul Sylbert from staging another attempt, however. Five years later, screenwriter and director Paul Sylbert adapted the book for AVCO Embassy Films. Richard Benjamin did his best to capture the mad panache and manic energy of Hesh Weissburg, but there was no way that Sylbert could have caged Faust’s beast into an 87-minute package. It didn’t help that the first-time director was working for legendary director-breaking producer Joseph E. Levine. Working at a time before director’s cuts were invented, Sylbert had to take his frustrations out on the printed page, publishing his account of the disaster, Final Cut: The Making and Breaking of a Film in 1974.
The Steagle, by the way, took its title from an amalgamation that echoes Faust’s zest for cultural integration. The Steagles were a short-lived creation that the National Football League devised during the manpower shortages of World War Two, combining the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers into a single team.
The Steagle, by Irvin Faust New York: Random House, 1966
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.
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.
Sister Amiee Semple McPherson.
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.)
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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
I have been on a streak of novels that tug insistently at the reluctant Freudian in me. Dinah Brooke’s The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert was, by the author’s admission, an act of reparation for her own father’s failures as a husband, businessman, and father. I’m working my way through the small oeuvre of Richard Rumbold, who spent much of his life engaged in a civil war with his father and other proxy father figures.
Even without context, Mark Benney’s novel The Big Wheel (1940) is full of dangling psychological threads that cry out for a good tugging. At the core of the novel is the strange relationship between the narrator, a former burglar named Harry Carne, and an ambition and hyperactive young journalist named Eric Felton. The two men meet when, hoping to make a little money after his release from Holloway prison, Harry tries to sell a few articles to Eric’s newspaper. Eric becomes fascinated with Harry and soon invites him to take a spare room in his flat and start working as Eric’s assistant, a job that mostly involves churning out articles under Eric’s name.
Eric’s concept of journalism seems to have been developed from years of reading the stuff that filled the back pages of London papers:
Journalism was a constant exercise in selecting from a grim, mechanised world its trivial accidents and hazards, and refocussing them until all else was blotted out of the world picture. It kept him in a ferment of small surface excitements, and it was these, communicated into his writing, that made him a good journalist. If a film-star had chosen an Amerindian for her fourth husband, if a cow was born in Wilshire with reindeer horns, the fact would keep Eric in continuous bubbling enthusiasm for hours.
Like Harry, Eric has come up from the tenements, self-taught, full of rough edges, and prone to the allure of bright, shiny objects — and people. “Eric liked to view himself as a patron of genius,” Harry observes, but the geniuses Eric was attracted to tended to be eccentrics: “Anyone who dyed his hair green, or wore shorts in winter, or expounded cosmic themes in an unintelligible gibberish, stood a fair chance of being entertained by Eric.”
Just how Eric affords to be so generous is a bit of a mystery until Harry meets Phoebe, a woman with murky connections who, he gathers, is both Eric’s lover and patroness. Harry’s first sight of Phoebe is as she emerges from Eric’s bedroom one morning, and his description of her dressing is almost bilious in its hatred toward older women:
She seemed to have none of the normal woman’s feelings of pudicity, and no awareness even of her grotesque appearance. She made no attempt at concealment as she divested herself of coat and nightgown before stepping into her undergarments. She moulded herself into tight corsets with apparently no sense of the obscenity of the kneading motions whereby she subdued her flesh. Busily she drew on her stockings, and fastened her suspenders, chattering brightly all the while about her darling Eric and her pleasure that he had at last found a friend who was at once a wide boy and a nice boy. [A “wide boy,” in British slang, refers to a man who lives by wheeling and dealing, often criminal.]
Harry learns that it’s Phoebe who’s paying for Eric’s flat. When Harry asks just what he does for her in return, Eric is vague: “Oh, odd things. Just ideas like the wheel and that club you saw.”
“The wheel” is the big wheel of the title, a large Ferris wheel, part of a small amusement park set up on a vacant lot in East London. The Ferris wheel is equipped with enclosed cars just big enough for two people to sit in comfortably. Eric’s “idea” was to run the wheel very slowly, allowing couples just enough time and privacy to enjoy each other’s company in ways that London offered few clean and cheap alternatives for.
This is just one of Phoebe’s ventures. She is a rising star in the London underworld, an entrepreneur busy expanding her little empire into horseracing betting and penny casinos in Brighton. She has her hooks into the police, with a growing roster of bent cops, as Harry discovers when he gets on Phoebe’s wrong side. As affectionate as she seems toward Eric, he knows Phoebe wouldn’t hesitate to throw him under a bus.
He knows this because she’s already done it to her own son. Jim, an ex-boxer who works as the “Big Wheel’s” bouncer, has done a stint in prison himself, as he tells Harry:
“Wodger get done for?” he asked sympathetically. “Screwing,” I said. “The berks!” he said feelingly, and added: “I done a carpet at the Ville.” “What for?” I asked. “V’lent assault,” he said. “But somebody mixed it for me. I never done it, they mixed it for me. Found me fingerprint on a broken bottle what somebody’d been glassed wiv; en said I done it. But I never! Me, I don’t use glasses.”
What Jim doesn’t know is that his mother had arranged for his prints to be put on the bottle by one of her crooked cops. She was taking revenge for some wrong the generally harmless palooka had done.
This is just one reason why Harry hates Phoebe, though. Another is that she’s a little too much like his own mother, who, it’s clear, was both a prostitute and a minor operator. Harry sees his criminal record in patently Freudian terms: “Always the fundamental object of my burglaries had been to win my way back to acceptance by the Phoebes — to force their respect, to share their expansive, explosive life.”
The dynamics among the men in the book is equally rich in nuances, whether intended or not. “I’m not a pansy!” Eric protests at one point, but his actions suggest this is not a black-and-white situation. The language that Benney uses at points is difficult to read today as simply poetic:
With a rueful movement of his lips, he [Eric] reached across the table and touched my hand; it was the gesture of one willing to forgive, but unable to forget. “That’s all right,” he said sepulchrally. “You two [Harry and a woman] go ahead and enjoy yourselves.” Then he drank off a glass of beaujolais at a gulp and took up the bottle to re-fill.
When Harry contemplates taking up with Margaret, the woman in the above scene, his language is equally open to analysis: “Living with her, I should always be her dependent, a hungry mouth at her paps, a leech on her arteries.”
The characters in The Big Wheel are too unstable for anyone to expect a happy ending. It takes far too long, however, and Benney introduces too many unnecessary detours before this house of cards collapses. Like other novels from this period I’ve read, The Big Wheel seems to cry out for an editor with a sharp pair of scissors. I get the impression that for every Max Perkins and Edward Garnett, there were a hundred other editors who gave their authors’ manuscripts a quick glance for spelling errors and passed them along for typesetting.
But there are also wonderful bits of writing scattered throughout these pages. A cheap cafe in the early morning before the breakfast rush: “Charwomen wash the corpse of time killed, and downstairs, in the lavatories, one’s footsteps echo hollowly as in a marble mausoleum.’ [OK, perhaps hollowly needs to go back to the thesaurus it came from.] Convincing details of life in poverty: a neighbor asks for change for the gas meter; when Harry notices he has two ha’pennies in his hand, the man explains that he’s keeping them to put on his mother’s eyes when she dies. It’s also a rich source for your vocabulary, one cited numerous times in Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of the Underworld: berk (slattern); nark (rat); on the rory (down and out); straighten (to bribe).
Record of Henry Degras’ third prison sentence, 1932-1933.
Benney’s account of the London underworld in The Big Wheel seems almost sociological in its detail, it’s understandable, for formal sociological research would be his ultimate destination. Born Henry Charles in the East End in 1910, he grew up in the world of The Big Wheel. His mother was a prostitute. He was taken up by a small-time stage performer and adopted the man’s last name of Degras. It was as Henry Degras that he served three sentences in prison, the last, for fraud, at Wandsworth.
Cover of US paperback edition of Low Company.
After his release in mid-1933, he was befriended by the publisher Peter Davies, who encouraged him to take up writing. The result, an autobiography titled Low Company, was published in 1936. By then, he’d married for the first time, to a woman named Phyllis Benney. Given his real criminal record, Davies recommended Degras take up a pseudonym, and he chose the name of his wife’s late brother: Mark Benney.
Peter Davies ad for Low Company.
Low Company was an immediate success. George Orwell, one of the toughest critics when it came to working class literature of the time, called it “one of the best lumpenproletarian books of our time.” The book was so well done, Newsweek informed its readers, that “the publishers feel impelled to swear it isn’t a literary hoax.” Every major paper and magazine gave it enthusiastic reviews, and Peter Davies encouraged his protégé to try his hand at fiction as well.
His first attempt, The Scapegoat Dances (1938), got mixed reviews. James Agate felt that Benney had “acquired a style of which any writer ought to be thoroughly ashamed.” But even the poorest reviews held out hopes for better. The next year, he put his writing skills at the service of one of his underworld acquaintances, producing What Rough Beast? A Biographical Fantasia on the Life of Professor J. R. Neave, Otherwise Known as Iron Foot Jack Neave. Neave was a “wide boy” well known around Soho, who, as Matt Houlbrook puts it in Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 (2005), operated at various times as “strongman, club manager, antique dealer, con artist, and street phrenologist.”
The Big Wheel (1940) was considered a big improvement over Benney’s first novel. Reviewing the book for the Tribune, Orwell wrote,
It is about the London sub-world, the dreadful civilization of pin-tables, cheap night clubs and furnished single rooms, where sport, crime, prostitution, mendicancy and journalism all overlap…. Its distinctive mark is its acceptance of the lumpenproletarian outlook, its assumption that the world of narks, pimps, eightpenny kips, punchdrunk boxers and rival race-gangs is as eternal as the pyramids.
V. S. Pritchett called Benney “the highbrow of the lower depths and the only novelist we have who really knows the Soho underworld” and estimated that the novel’s strongest points were “wit, a restless, over-excited mind, a bottomless pessimism, and a wonderful ear for the dialogue of his people.” Frank Swinnerton, who often found other novelists wanting in comparison to himself, offered begrudging praise: “Mr. Benney can be tiresome, but he is interestingly tiresome, and his people and their seamy streets are real.”
Swinnerton’s comment offers a clue to where Benney’s real interests lay. If the most successful elements of The Big Wheel are its details of London underworld life, it’s because Benney was, fundamentally, more interested in being a recorder than a creator. In 1939, he married Jane Tabrisky, a graduate of the London School of Economics who’d worked earlier for the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. When the war broke out, he attempted to enlist but was rejected for medical reasons. He then went to work at an airplane factory, an experience he turned into his third and last novel, Over to Bombers (1943).
After the war, he was able to get a civil service job as an Industrial Relations Officer with the Ministry of Fuel and Power. The Ministry sent him to report on conditions at coal mines around Durham in the northeast of England, which led to his 1946 book, Charity Main: A Coalfield Chronicle. Following this, he decided to undertake a study of conditions in British prisons and sought advice from Mark Abrams, who was pioneering techniques in polling and surveys. Gaol Delivery, published in 1948, led to further social science work and, ultimately, to an invitation to teach sociology in the undergraduate College at the University of Chicago.
Mark Benney at Shimer College, 1962.
Though he was the only member of the Chicago faculty with no college education whatsoever, Benney thrived in the university environment. As he later wrote, “I think that if I had known in 1950 that such a course as Social Science 2 was being offered anywhere in the world I would have strained all my resources to take it. It was ironical that I found myself now in 1951 both taking and teaching it.” Benney went on to work with David Riesman, whom he later referred to as his “champion.”
In 1959, Benney took a job on the faculty of Shimer College in Mount Carroll, Illinois. The small school, small town atmosphere of Shimer didn’t suit Benney, who was by then on his third marriage and still retained a few habits from his underworld upbringing. He left after a few unhappy years that he documented in his last book, a memoir of his “reformed” life after Low Company, titled Almost a Gentleman (1966). His last years were spent as a researcher for hire for government and academic institutions. He died in Clearwater, Florida in 1973.
The Big Wheel, by Mark Benney London: Peter Davies, 1940
“Hot off the oven of our own time” was the verdict on new novel The Big Firm, according to The New York Times of 20th February 1938, in a review which also found it “unusually significant” and “distinguished as a work of literary art”. The novelist was the forty-three-year-old British writer and left-wing activist Amabel Williams-Ellis, who, although fulfilling the description of “neglected” today, in her lifetime was used to commanding press attention.
I began investigating Amabel’s story after visiting Plas Brondanw, the Snowdonia ancestral home of her husband Clough Williams-Ellis, architect of the fantasy village Portmeirion, and seeing her name on a plaque commemorating their marriage in 1915. Though Amabel was described only as a daughter, sister, wife and mother in the guidebooks, I followed my hunch there might be more to her than that and began digging. I found that in a career spanning seven decades of the twentieth century Amabel had published over seventy books. Six of these were novels, mainly written between 1925 and 1939.
One sign of her present-day obscurity is the difficulty I have had in buying copies of these novels, and what follows relies on my memory and notes of reading the book in the British Library in pre-pandemic times, as well as my own research into her life.
Born in 1894, Amabel was the daughter of the influential editor-proprietor of The Spectator, John St Loe Strachey, and grew up in a family where celebrity was normal. Dinner with a prime minister, story time with Rudyard Kipling, chess with the governor of Egypt and tea with the explorer Mary Kingsley were normal experiences for a girl whose relatives included the biographer Lytton Strachey and the painter Simon Bussey.
From the French magazine Excelsior spread on the wedding of Amabel and Clough Williams-Ellis in 1915.
When journalists and photographers turned up at her wartime wedding in a rural chapel in Surrey at an hour of the morning intentionally chosen to evade them, chasing the bride and groom down the hill to their getaway car, they came for her not Clough. She was both a Jazz Age socialite and an activist with serious politics and a steely work ethic. Despite the war being over and Clough being offered alternative employment as an architect, the Army refused to discharge her husband at the end of the war until he had written a history of the Tank Corps, so Amabel sat down and wrote it for him, finishing it just in time for the birth of their second child, Charlotte, in 1919.
The Big Firm(1938) was Amabel’s fourth novel. It was written in an atmosphere of increasing international tensions and crisis – Hitler’s annexation of Austria took place within weeks of its publication. Completion of the novel had been complicated by the concussion Amabel suffered when she was struck by a car while visiting her mother and her friend and author Margaret Storm Jameson helped proofread the draft for publication. The Big Firm tells the story of Owen Wynne, a scientist who works in microbiology research and his love affairs with two women, Caro and Nicola. The big firm of the title is Consolidated Scientific Products, which employs Owen and prevents him from publishing his research. Owen’s political leanings are left-wing; the plot concerns his attempts to prevent arms and scientific products being sold to the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War. The action moves remorselessly and thrillingly to the climax in which Owen and Nicola race to intercept a shipment intended for a mysterious cargo ship moored off the coast of North wales.
Characters who wrestle with strong political principles when others seek to corrupt them are a feature of The Big Firm. When Nicola, the wife of a Labour MP and committed member of the Labour Party herself, hears her husband preparing to compromise to gain a government post, her respect is lost. “This isn’t the moment when responsible leaders ought to stress our fundamental socialist policy,” he tells her. “We’ve got to soft pedal, otherwise the Labour Movement will be destroyed.” Nicola decides she must leave him. To her, his pragmatism is “false and horrible.” Her decision to end the marriage over this difference of political views might seem extreme to us, but in the context of the 1930s politics compromise could mean appeasing dangerous forces.
Amabel recognised the threat posed by Hitler to world peace when he came to power and advocated action to prevent full scale war. To this end, in July 1934, she travelled to New York to give evidence to the American Inquiry Commission, which was collecting information about conditions in Germany in the hope of getting the US government to take notice. Amabel described her missions to Berlin that year, the death threats she had received, and the treatment of Jews and Communists. “There is not only no right or justice in Germany, there is no truth,” she told the commissioners.
For the rest of the 1930s, Amabel campaigned against Fascism. She was put under surveillance by the British secret service as a result. Her son Christopher was killed in 1944 in Italy at the age of twenty-one, and she often wondered whether she had done enough to prevent the war. Amabel always suffused her writing with the issues which most concerned her, and in this light The Big Firm is part of the history of the anti-Fascist movement in the 1930s.
To the New York Times’ reviewer Jane Spence Southson, it was the scientific background of The Big Firm that stood out. A wife of one of the directors of Consolidated Scientific Products declares in a speech that although many people think of themselves as contemporary, they don’t have the first clue what is going on in the world of science. Southson notes that this will not be true for readers of the novel, which she considers more masculine in tone than any she has ever read by a woman because it is so detailed and knowledgeable on its subject. Reviewing Amabel’s memoir in 1983, Michael Holroyd noted that her working method was always to write a book in order to learn about its subject, and she would have been very much following her inclinations in the case of The Big Firm.
The masculine tone Southson referred to may have been a reference to its descriptions of the inner workings of Owen’s employer, CSP, an environment rarely written about by women at that time. Amabel had a track record of writing about technical “male” subjects established when her first published book detailed the development of the tank as a weapon of war. When she wrote a careers guide aimed at boys and girls in 1933 called What Shall I Be? she visited work places personally and interviewed the people who worked there to gain insight into what their work actually entailed. At a chemical plant, she observed astringently, “for some unexplained reason women are hardly ever employed…. Probably this is just a custom of the trade, for their seems to be no other objection.”
Amabel Williams-Ellis in the 1930s. Photo by Howard Coster, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery
Amabel always said that if she had been a boy, she would have chosen to be a scientist. Given no formal education or encouragement to go to university by her parents, she became a writer instead, but ensured that her daughter Charlotte became a scientist after studying at Cambridge University. Charlotte’s daughter, Dr. Rachel Garden, also a scientist, told me that her grandmother had a well-hidden insecurity about her lack of formal education which she rectified by asking questions of experts. It is probable that this kind of research lay behind her convincing portrait of a research scientist facing moral dilemmas at work in commercial industry.
In her testimony before the American Inquiry Commission in 1934, Amabel made a point of saying that the Nazi regime was suppressing women’s rights, that Nazis held that women were to be wives and mothers in the home only, with the primary task being to raise “fine warriors.” In Britain at that time, opportunities for women were slowly improving but the belief that women had to choose between family and career was still dominant. As a writer, Amabel was always concerned with women’s feelings about their lives.
Both Caro and Nicola, the women in The Big Firm, are struggling with complicated emotions towards traditional female roles. When the novel opens, Owen is having an affair with Caro, a woman of whom her family say, “all girls want to elope with their schoolteacher or with the butcher, or eat hasheesh, or run away to sea. They all want to – but Caro does.” Caro is lost. She realises that clinging to Owen will not give her the purpose she craves. Married women confuse her: “Could she, did she even desire to become like them, so peaceful…so blank…annihilated?”
But what, she wonders, is her alternative?
“You remember I tried to be a Doctor once? It was too difficult . . . oh, well! Anyhow, I believe a lot of women don’t stick things because they find it hard to believe enough in themselves…to think the work that they do, is all that necessary.”
In the 1950s, Amabel would write bitterly about the way in which society’s “uncreating unbelief” in a girl’s “power to do anything worthwhile” held young women back from reaching their true potential. Perhaps this is what she was implying with the deeply unhappy Caro.
Meanwhile, Owen and Nicola have been working together as part of the Industrial League Against War. They acknowledge their love for each other on the journey to Wales to intercept the suspicious cargo ship. Nicola has realised she is pregnant with her husband’s child and looks at Owen with “the desperate eyes of a creature in a trap.” In the end, Nicola and Owen decide to be together and love the child nonetheless. It is not going to be an easy romance, but the reader feels it might be a successful one.
Both Caro and Nicola are wrestling with their roles in a society which is not built for their benefit. This was a theme Amabel would return to, most notably in her 1951 work of nascent feminism The Art of Being a Woman.
In the late 1930s, Amabel was a modern woman writing about issues which still resonate today. Why then, is she so unknown? One answer to this question could be the variety of genres Amabel wrote in. Her dozens of books include biography, politics, memoir, feminism, parenting, anthologies of fairy tales and science fiction, and non-fiction books for schools. By the time of her death in 1984 the novels, none of which were written later than 1951, were forgotten and (if her work was mentioned at all) she was considered “a writer for children.”
Another answer lies in the fact that she was a woman. A male reviewer of her autobiography (who complained that she failed to say enough about all the famous men she had known and talked too much about herself) decreed her a writer “fated to be known by her menfolk”. This was an unjust self-fulfilling prophecy, but the growing fame post World War Two of her architect husband Clough Williams-Ellis and Portmeirion overshadowed Amabel’s own achievements. Portmeirion is such a flamboyant and colourful vision it is hard for Amabel’s narrative to have space within it, and the Williams-Ellis name today is synonymous with both the village and the pottery begun by Amabel and Clough’s daughter Susan.
Amabel herself recognised that her legacy might have fared better if she had written with her birth name when she called her memoir All Stracheys are Cousins. In the majority of Amabel’s books I borrowed from The British Library, the same pencilled hand had struck out Williams-Ellis on the title page and annotated “Strachey”. In the eyes of The British Library she was a Strachey.
A recurring note in Amabel’s writing is her hope for the next generation of young women. In The Big Firm, a schoolgirl called Lou tells Nicola that she wants her own life to be different:
“I should want to be able to say I was a something – you know, a doctor or a writer or a vet or something. I’m certain that if I was doing politics like you, I should want to be a member of parliament or in the cabin … not just a person who makes speeches.”
Amabel Williams-Ellis cared deeply about her family, but she was also very resoundingly “something” in her own right and The Big Firm is convincing evidence of this.
This is a guest post by Jayne Sharratt. Jayne is working on a biography of the writer and activist Amabel Williams-Ellis. Follow her on Twitter: @jayne_sharratt.
The Big Firm, by Amabel Williams-Ellis London: Collins, 1938
Covers of the Eridanos Press and Marsilio Publishers editions of René’s Flesh by Virgilio Piñera.
“Whereas English distinguishes between ‘flesh’ and ‘meat,'” translator Mark Schafer writes in an introductory note to René’s Flesh, “Spanish fuses the two concepts in the single word carne, which is used in phrases like ‘flesh of my flesh’ and ‘flesh and blood’ as readily as in ‘meat pie.'” The two concepts of meat and flesh fuse in the Spanish title — La carne de René — as they fuse in its story. This book is a powerful reminder that the human body is a package of meat you will ever read.
I was introduced to the work of Virgilio Piñera when I read Cold Tales, his collection of absurdist, surrealist, yet viscerally realistic short stories. No one’s stories are quite like Piñera’s. If I tossed out names like Borges, Ionescu, or Kafka, you might get some sense of his work — and it’s certainly of the same caliber, worthy of being considered as among the great writers of the 20th century — but you would likely make the mistake of thinking you knew it because you’d read theirs, and Piñera absolutely deserves to be read on his own.
I’m not sure I’d recommend René’s Flesh as the book to start with, though. There’s always a certain disorienting effect to Piñera’s work. As one Goodreads reader put it, his stories take place “in noplace in notime.” Locations are unnamed and the era could be anywhere from the 1920s to today. There are enough details — clothing, furniture, shops, trappings of government and church — to make the settings seem familiar, but at the same time, nothing specific enough to say we’re in Cuba or Argentina, where Piñera lived at different times, or Spain or the United States.
And then there are his subjects, things like the train as big as the world or the climbers whose bodies are broken into smaller and smaller pieces as they tumble from a mountaintop. Piñera takes things we know and stretches them to the point where they seem grotesque or ridiculous or both.
René’s Flesh is a novel that takes one thing we know — that we humans are creatures of the flesh, which means in Spanish, at least, that we are also creatures of meat — and stretches it to lengths that are not just uncomfortable but deeply disturbing. The novel opens as René, a young man just turned twenty, joins a queue outside a butcher shop. The shop is overflowing with meat and the hungry people are clamoring to buy as much as they can.
René, however, is there for a different purpose. His father Ramón wants to teach his son to love flesh. “My dear child, tomorrow, the day you turn twenty, I will put you in possession of the secret of the flesh.” (Bear in mind Schafer’s use of the word “meat” in his translation when talking about the human body and “flesh” when dealing with food, which I’ve tried to follow in this piece. However, as Schafer also warns, “to, as it were, help flesh out Piñera’s vision … wherever the word ‘flesh’ appears, it may be understood as ‘meat,’ and vice versa.”)
Ramón is not a flesh lover: he’s a flesh worshipper. His taste for the flesh is “a preference so passionate as to constitute a veritable priesthood and even a dynasty, something that is passed on from father to son, that is jealously bequeathed to keep the enthusiasm alive.” Ramón is a mysterious figure who’s uprooted his family in midnight moves throughout René’s childhood: “Some people asserted he was a traveling businessman, others, an engineer, some, a smuggler, and there were even people who declared him an assassin.”
Covers of Italian, French, and Portuguese translations of René's Flesh
Unlike Ramón, René abhors the flesh. His father’s passion for flesh, his murky role in some international conspiracy related to its worship, is the reason his family has been on the run for as long as he can remember. The sight of great slabs of beef, severed pig’s heads, steaks, roasts, and sausages in the butcher shop sicken him. Worse yet, in Ramón’s eyes, his son has yet to accept that being a creature of meat comes hand in hand with the reality of having to endure pain.
Pain — from cuts and wounds and torture — is a given when René joins his father in the Cause. Ramón, like his father before him, is a leader in the Cause, a worldwide revolutionary movement: “I am chief of those who are pursued, who pursue those who pursue us.” That sentence embodies marvelously the isolation, the circular logic, that binds so many extremist groups. For those in the Cause, “The pursuit never ends, it is infinite; not even death would bring it to a close.” When Ramón dies, René will carry on, and so on and so on. There is no suggestion that the Cause will ultimately prevail.
And what is the Cause fighting for?
“Over a piece of chocolate.” Many years before, the ruling powers forbade the people to eat chocolate. Protests led to riots, which led to underground movements that converged into the Cause.
But, René objects, “I’m never seen you drink chocolate.”
“You think we’re so foolish as to be seen with a cup of chocolate in our hand?” Ramón replies, “What we’re defending is the cause of chocolate.”
San Sebastiano, by Maestro dagli Occhi Spalancati (c. 1470).
At this stage in the Cause’s history, what it’s defending has, in fact, become irrelevant. All that matters is that the Cause is a struggle for which its believers must be willing to experience pain as well as to inflict it. In fact, given the circular logic of its belief, the two acts can be fused into one. shows a painting of St. Sebastian, the early Christian martyr. But unlike traditional depictions of St. Sebastian, this martyr is his own punisher:
This St. Sebastian was drawing arrows from a quiver and sticking them into his body. The painter had shown him in the moment of sticking the last one into his forehead. His arm was still raised, his fingers now removed from the end of the arrow and seeming to fear that this arrow hadn’t sunk definitively into his flesh.
For this reason, René is sent off for training. His school has a specific purpose: “Knowledge must be beaten into a person,” its director informs him. The only textbook at the school is the human body — “everything a man needs to forge his way into the flesh of another man.” If the Cause is going to produce men prepared to torture their pursuers, it must also teach them to experience pain: “a body deprived of pain isn’t a body but a rock; that the greater the capacity for pain, the greater the vitality.”
As one of fifty freshmen, René is muzzled, strapped into a chair, and subjected to increasingly powerful electrical charges. Their skins burn and sweat drips off their noses and fingers. Then, the rest of the students are instructed to creep up, to sniff around their bodies, trying to detect the subtle differences in the amount of pain they are suffering.
When René fails to show an acceptable level of pain, he is singled out for special treatment. He is forced to listen to a record endlessly repeating the same insistent lecture:
Attention, René! René! Attention, René! René! René! … Why do you not want? Do you not want because wanting, you do not want or do you want because you want not to want? Do you want wanting or do you want not wanting? How do you want?
When this brainwashing treatment fails, Swyne, the school’s chief torturer, decides that René is too impervious to pain. He must be softened up through the most direct method. And so he sets to licking René from head to toe. Soon, squads of students are stripped to the skin and put to the task. The licking goes on for hours. Days. It’s essential they succeed, for it’s René’s destiny to be a leader. “Cannon fodder comes in two categories,” Swyne tells him: “leader meat and mass meat.” Leaders are those “who aren’t just tortured, but who torture themselves and in turn torture others, inventing new models of torture.”
René’s Flesh follows the conventional formula of a Bildungsroman, covering the formative years and education of (usually) a young man. But writing 200 years after Voltaire, Piñera’s Candide is hypercharged with the forces of mass production and totalitarianism. There is no garden at the end of René’s journey.
There is so much to unpack in this book I can only scratch the surface. I haven’t even touched on the use of doubles (René meets a man who’s paid to have himself surgically altered to look exactly like his father Ramón), or the collusion between church and state, or deformity (the millionaire known as Ball of Flesh) or dual significance of arrows (Cupid’s arrows vs. St. Sebastian’s arrows). This is not a book one likes, but it is a book one admires — although, as Raymond Souza put it, “Pinera’s writings inspire the kind of admiration that a surgeon’s scalpel produces.”
Photos of Virgilio Piñera by Ida Kar (1964). Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery
Piñera was a gay man who lived under the dual repression of the Catholic church and reactionary leaders like Juan Perón and Fulgencio Batista. What he would have experienced as the pleasures of the flesh were considered deadly sins and criminal acts. It’s not surprising that the Cause takes St. Sebastian as its ideal. As Richard A. Kaye has written, “gay men have seen in Sebastian at once a stunning advertisement for homosexual desire (indeed, a homoerotic ideal), and a prototypical portrait of tortured closet case.”
René’s Flesh is often grouped or compared with José Lezama Lima’s novel Paradiso. Both writers were Cuban and homosexual, both novels dealt with young men growing up as outsiders in their worlds. However, René’s Flesh is, in my opinion at least, a much more relevant and accessible book. Despite the strong role of Catholic symbolism, Piñera’s use abstraction and exaggeration make this a story that can be appreciated by just about any reader on the planet. I called Cold Tales the best discovery I made in 2017, a year I devoted exclusively to short story collections. Barely one month into this year, I’m not afraid to call René’s Flesh my discovery of 2021. If Rhinoceros and The Trial can be considered 20th century masterpieces, then so can René’s Flesh.
[Although René’s Flesh was published in Mark Schafer’s excellent translation as part of outstanding Eridanos Press Library series in 1990 and two years later by Marsilio, it’s been out of print for decades and the few used copies available go for prices starting at $140. Fortunately, the book is available in electronic format on the Internet Archive (Link), which is how I read it.]
René’s Flesh, by Virgilio Piñera, translated by Mark Schafer Hygiene, Colorado: Eridanos Press, 1990
The Miserable Child is a six-year-old English girl abandoned in a dismal boarding school in the south of England. Her mother is in a sanatorium, her father, as the title suggests, is in the desert — in this case, serving with Montgomery in Egypt. It’s the autumn of 1942. At the school, they have whalemeat stew for lunch: “There is a war on, you know.”
The little girl knows she’s been abandoned: “Daddy Daddy Daddy, you don’t think of me at all,” she complains. “You imagine that I am secure, but there is no security for me if you are about to die.” In the desert, Monty has a Plan. A great offensive against the Germans is in preparation. The girl, of course, knows nothing about this — at the time.
In telling the story of The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert, Dinah Brooke adopts both the perspective of a frightened and lonely little girl in 1942 and of her adult self, aware of history with a big H (the battle of El Alamein) and a little one (her father’s being evacuated with a case of jaundice before the attack). At school, “The Miserable Child is alone and panic-stricken.” At the same time, however, she also wanders around the front in Egypt, observing the progress of the battle: “The Miserable Child wanders up to Kidney Ridge, where the enemy are launching heavy armoured counterattacks…. She prowls around the battlefield like a jackal, a hyena, sniffing at bodies as the sun rises high and the heat and the flies and the stench rise with it….”
Brooke switches perspectives instantly, without offering us signal or clue. It makes reading a disconcerting experience but also adds to the impact of the narrative. Though things follow a roughly chronological order, we are never quite sure of where the narrator stands. Are we seeing things through the eyes of the Miserable Child in the moment or through the eyes of the woman whose memories of her miserable childhood and knowledge of other facts provide context not available to the girl?
We are one-third of our way into the book before it becomes clear that this is really the story of the father, not the child. The son of a steel-makng family in the North, Bob is a promising young man, ready to work his way up the ladder at the works, eager to push for improvements. His judgment is not always sound, however. He has a bit too much of a taste for drink and he marries a fragile, artistic woman suffering from TB. When the war comes, he is happy for the opportunity to escape into the Army, placing his daughter into a convenient school and enjoying a spree in London with his best friend’s wife before shipping out.
Though Bob proves unfit for service and returns to a post with the steel works, his promise has already faded. He knows neither how to accommodate the growing role of the trades unions nor how to keep the trust of the financiers or government ministers. So, he heads to Kenya to launch himself again, divorcing his first wife and picking up another along the way. The Miserable Child, of course, is left to make her way at the same miserable school.
The construction firm he joins in Kenya goes bust, and Bob takes to drink while his new wife’s popularity among the clubmen leads to mocking comments behind his back. He gives up Kenya and the wife and heads back to England. Within weeks, he’s lying in a locked ward for alcoholics, admitted through the collusion of his brother and the presiding physician.
From here, Bob’s story is one of steady decline, with most of his time spent in jail or asylums. Everyone agrees he’s a fine fellow. On the few occasions when he’s able to visit his daughter, in school or in London or on the maternity ward after the birth of his first grandchild, everyone comments on his manners and charm. It’s just that he can’t take care of himself, let alone anyone else. And so he leaves the Miserable Child there in the hospital facing the prospect of raising her child without the help of her own parents.
With only what we’re told in the book, we’re left wondering what Dinah Brooke was trying to do in The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert. We feel sympathy for both father and daughter, but what is the point of this account of their miseries?
Fortunately, Brooke gave us her answer in “An Obsession Revisited,” an essay she wrote for Fathers: Reflections by Daughters, a collection edited by Ursula Owen and published in 1983 by Virago. “I was obsessed with my Dad for twenty years,” she writes.
You could almost say I made a career out of him – or out of the lack of him. Do people whose fathers are more present in their lives become so obsessed? I never lived with him after I was three, hardly saw him between the ages of seven and twenty-five, yet the amount of energy I focused on him was phenomenal.
“It would be hard not to describe his life as a failure,” she acknowledges. Like Bob in the book, his father ran a steel factory — Lysachts Steel Works in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire. He married a painter with lung problems, hit a plateau in his rise in the firm, and shrugged off the fetters of that life by joining the Army and warehousing his daughter in a boarding school. After the war, he divorced, remarried, went to Kenya and failed to make a new start. And from there, as Brooke puts it, “He became an alcoholic, went mad, and spent most of the rest of his life in asylums of varying degrees of Dickensian horror.”
Joseph Brooke and his daughter Dinah in 1938. From Fathers: Reflections by Daughters.
In hindsight, she sees the novel as an act of reparation — a posthumous attempt to establish kind of relationship she never had — and of restoration (of her father’s reputation):
I mean look, a book, printed pages, hard covers, shiny pictures. Just look at you, see what a mess you made of your life? You’re much better like this. Neat, full of good things, fixed, appreciated. You really fucked it up didn’t you, you silly old man, but don’t worry, I’ll make it OK. I’ll rewrite your life for you, not improving things much — playing around with the facts a bit, yes; putting you into the army instead of the air force so I can have some nice games with Monty at El Alamein, but not papering over the cracks; not trying to make you appear better, more successful, a better father.
Joe, while I’m writing about you I feel as if I’m pushing something uphill. Making a tremendous effort, as if I have to act both parts at once, the parent and the child. I did so want you to be a father to me. I did so want someone to be a father to me. You did the best you could. It wasn’t a lot. The desire was there, but the execution was feeble.
It wasn’t enough, though. “I was really hooked on fathers,” Brooke admits. She wrote another novel (Death Games (1976)), in which “a suicidal daughter pursues her father through the horrors of war-torn Vietnam, and finally, in the heat of the afternoon, she makes love to him, and as he comes he has a heart attack and dies.” In an early fictional instance of self-harming, the daughter holds lit cigarettes to her skin just to feel something.
“Thank goodness I’ve finished with that little lot,” she concludes.
There’s another twist in the story, however. In “An Obsession Revisited,” Brooke mentions spending six years at the ashram of the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. After becoming interested in the Bhagwan’s teachings in London, she travelled to India and made several short stays, during the last of which the Bhagwan annointed her with a new name, Ma Prem Pankaja.
Brooke decided to bring her children along and to settle in India for the long term. As she later wrote,
So we went, and settled into a run-down ex-British Raj house next to the ashram, surrounded by mangoes and palm trees. The only trouble was the kids didn’t like it much. The schools were dreadful, and there weren’t any kids their own age, turning ten, around the ashram. My daughter was having quite a good time, but my son desperately wanted to go home, and I more and more wanted to stay.
So, Brooke took her children back to England, left them in the care of their father, the actor Francis Dux, and returned to India. Brooke’s close friend, the writer Sally Belfrage, joined her and remained at the ashram for the better part of a year. Belfrage later published an account of the experience, Flowers of Emptiness: Reflections on an Ashram (1981), that offers an independent, if not entirely objective, view of Brooke’s time as a sannyasin (convert).
Belfrage was outraged by Brooke’s decision to leave her children behind. She also wasn’t convinced by Brooke’s embrace of her new faith. “They make her wear only orange,” Belfrage wrote, but in Brooke’s case, “It’s not by any means the shaven-headed-saffron-Buddhists-of-Oxford-Street sort of thing — Dior or Chloe will do as long as it’s orange,” and she looked “as Vogue-y as ever.” To Belfrage, the Rajneeshis were nothing more than a cult: “If Bhagwan were Billy Graham, they’d be out crusading; if he were Charles Manson they’d be out killing….”
Brooke returned to England, having decided against following the Bhagwan to his new enclave in Oregon, around the time that Flowers of Emptiness: Reflections on an Ashram was published. Feeling attacked by her friend, Brooke wrote an article titled “The Myth of the Responsible Mother” that appeared in The Guardian in May 1982. “I’d like to say something about motherhood from the point of view of this character, which was me,” it began.
Headline from Dinah Brooke’s article in The Guardian, 31 May 1982.
“Leaving my children certainly did not happen easily or casually. Being an averagely neurotic, guilt-ridden middle-class Englishwoman I manage to make it as difficult as possible for myself and everyone else by endless agonies of indecision,” she admitted. In her response to those who criticized her decision, Brooke also pointed to experiences recounted in The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert:
Among the myths to which I have subscribed is the one which decrees that children can only be happy rolling around like puppies in large groups wearing the minimum of clothes and not being forced to learn anything — because of course I was an only child and went to boarding school and had to wear a uniform.
And her feelings during this separation were perhaps not that different from those of her father over those years in the boarding school. “Most of the time I didn’t miss them at all,” she confessed. “My mother wrote regularly, sending photos and telling me how they were.”
After two years at the ashram, Brooke returned to England to spend Christmas of 1977 with them. When she returned to India, however, “I couldn’t stop crying. I cried for six weeks, almost all day, every day.” “Somehow,” she recognized, “all the sorrow of my own childhood were condensed into this endless crying.”
Discussing her situation, the Bhagwan suggested that Brooke was making the mistake of trying to take responsibility for her children’s feelings. She came to accept this view. “My parents are not responsible for the way in which I experience my life,” she informed The Guardian’s readers, “and neither I nor their father are responsible for the way in which our children experience theirs.” She felt justified in her choice: “I spent six years with an Enlightened Master, and not gift that life has to offer can be greater than that.”
As one can imagine, not everyone agreed with Brooke’s conclusion. The Guardian printed a number of angry responses to what most seemed to consider a “self indulgent” article. “I’m sorry that Dinah Brooke got so little out of being a mother,” wrote one. “My stomach churned on reading about Dinah Brooke’s six-year stay in India sans children,” wrote another, who couldn’t imagine spending even six days away from her own.
Dinah Brooke effectively disappeared from the printed page after “An Obsession Revisited” was published. In the short biographical remarks that preceded the essay, she wrote, “Returned to London. Ran a market stall, met Derek, now Mahabodh. Work as temp. sec. and freelance journalist. Tomorrow?” From what I’ve been able to determine, although Brooke had worked for The Observer and others prior to taking up fiction, her work after the ashram wasn’t for any major papers or magazines. [2023 update: Perhaps more will be revealed with the republication of her novel Lord Jim at Home by Daunt/McNally Editions.]
The Miserable Child and her Father in the Desert, by Dinah Brooke London: New Fiction Society, 1974
To someone who grew up in California, a place like Wisconsin seems both drab and exotic, the sort of bland nowhere you would never want to visit deliberately. This may be the prevailing view, but that’s not how I thought of the Badger State when I lived in San Diego. I remember discovering Michael Lesy’s classic book Wisconsin Death Trip in the early ‘70s. Its grim prose and even grimmer photos from the 1890s captured a world as darkly fascinating as H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham for me. The Wisconsin countryside seemed like a vast empty plain where human affairs — quiet tragedies punctuated with loud explosions of insanity — could play out. Living in a supposed paradise at the far end of the continent, Californians tend to think of the Midwest as irredeemably dull, filled with the sort of stunted people who don’t have the gumption to move West. To me, though, books like Lesy’s made the case that places like Wisconsin were filled with mystery, shadowy secrets, old houses harboring old people possessed by twisted dreams.
A lingering association of the Badger State with things stark and spooky led me to pick up a paperback copy of Good-Bye Wisconsin (Signet edition, 1964) at a San Diego used books store in the 1990s. The author of this short story collection was Glenway Wescott, a writer completely unknown to me. Reading it, I was struck by his lyrical prose and the empathetic treatment he gave to his damaged and morally confused characters. Years later, I ran across Wescott’s novel The Grandmothers at a library sale in the Pittsburgh area. This 1927 novel — apparently a best-seller that went through at least 24 printings — was a much deeper dive into the moody Midwestern landscapes and tormented characters that Good-Bye Wisconsin dealt with. I recently re-read it and found it an even richer experience the second time around.
Glenway Wescott, 1933.
On the surface, The Grandmothers treads the same ground covered by Sherwood Anderson: commonplace scenes rendered with a poetic touch, filled with repressed, thwarted men and women who turn into grotesque exaggerations of themselves when their hurts and grievances remain buried too long. Anderson generally dealt with Midwestern small town life rather than more isolated rural folk, but the same sense of rigid Protestant proprieties draped over chronic regret and moldering obligation is present in Wescott’s novel as well. Both Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and The Grandmothers feature an adolescent boy with artistic inclinations who strongly resembles the author at a similar age. That said, Wescott seems to accept and embrace the failings and cruelties of the society he grew up in with a greater sense of forgiveness than Anderson does. And while Westcott is more literal and less parable-like in his accounts of his characters’ lives, his poetic language is even more mystically evocative than Anderson’s. The Grandmothers doesn’t mythologize its gruff, semi-articulate men and wounded yet indominable women so much as surround them with a visionary glow. Its prose heightens the normal world and makes you see it with renewed color and vibrancy:
“They went down the Mississippi on a river boat. There were whisperings of the water and a sound of kisses around the prow as it advanced through regular ripples that were like a wedding veil…”
“The east was covered with tiny clouds like the torn bits of paper which a newcomer finds in a dismantled house; the sun entered the sky like such a newcomer.”
“As a flying seed will debauch a whole meadow with flowers, one kiss, one caress not even wished for, had spoiled her peace of mind, even her good health.”
The arc of The Grandmothers is simple and reminiscent of similar narratives. A group of families move to frontier Wisconsin before the Civil War and intermarry, establishing lines of descendants who prosper or succumb to ill fortune (mostly the latter) as the world enters the 20th Century. Wescott treats nearly everyone with respect and at least a modicum of sympathy — there are no real villains in the book. He doesn’t shy away from bringing out the more unpleasant and downright bizarre qualities of his characters, though. One of the grandmothers of Alwyn (the stand-in for a young Glenway Wescott) suffers from excessive prudery and takes to hiding small household objects to torment her husband. The couple’s poisoned but enduring marriage is summed up in a bitter vision: “During their last years it was as if they lay on one deathbed — the dying hands interlaced by habit, by hatred of each other and love of God, the dying mouths murmuring truths without pity and complaining still.” (I read this and thought of certain photographs in Wisconsin Death Trip and shuddered a little.)
At times, the slow-seeping toxicity within these family relationships gets a tad claustrophobic. Those who wander away from the ancestral homesteads generally come to no good, though their travels do add some excitement. Black sheep Evan Tower runs off to fight in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, deserts the army and hops a freighter for London, marries an Italian woman and ends up living with his wife and children under an assumed name in New Mexico. These adventures provide contrast to the severe monotony of rural Wisconsin life, throwing its grinding routines and unyielding moral codes into starker relief.
Wescott parses the subtle shadings within old-fashioned Protestantism without displaying disdain or boredom. (Unlike Sherwood Anderson, he doesn’t flaunt his pagan instincts.) The lives of the most publicly religious are portrayed in the least flattering terms — the “stringless harp wrapped up like a mummy in the music room” found in a minister’s home suggests his overall stuffiness. It is the women in the book — most of them thwarted or broken by love — who seem to possess the most life-affirming faith. Believe in a forgiving God and the promise of heaven makes the sorrows of the everyday world easier to accept. Yet that isn’t the whole story – as the book nears its conclusion, Wescott makes clear that hard-shell Methodism, habitual labor and flattened expectations still allow for nobility and satisfaction if not joy. The “dignity of citizenship” and “the perfect and tender monotony of an uneventful married life” deserve celebration, something Anderson (let alone fellow Midwestern chronicler Sinclair Lewis) might not concede.
The final chapters of the novel lay the older generation to rest as Alwyn’s growing awareness of his family heritage comes into focus. Wescott notes that Alwyn spied upon his family, “studied to convict them,” even as he watched his grandmothers slowly die. He compares his desire to write to the art of taxidermy, an attempt to simulate life out of selected pieces of the dead past. As she wastes away, his maternal grandmother mistakes Alwyn for her son and tells him, “You know, you are my only sweetheart.” Whether this parting benediction is given to the wrong person is irrelevant. Wescott finds an all-embracing love in the resolute endurance and collective heartbreak of his ancestors.
In its sometimes bleak, sometimes tender depiction of a vanished world, The Grandmothers anticipates Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels. There’s a quietly compelling drama to the stories that both writers tell about the Midwest, as well as an attempt to describe ordinary men and women with as much perceptiveness and nuance as possible. They share a deep empathy for the overlooked and undervalued. I haven’t seen Wescott’s name invoked in reviews of Robinson’s fiction. Those who admire her work would find The Grandmothers worthy of discovery.
I have visited Wisconsin many times over the past two decades. I’ve seen the sorts of places Wescott described in The Grandmothers and maybe even met the descendants of the people he wrote about. The mysteries of the Badger State still haven’t been dispelled for me. I hope they never are. If I need to revisit them, I will return to The Grandmothers one more time.
The Grandmothers, by Glenway Wescott New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1927
When Pantheon published Bryher’sBeowulf in 1956, one of its reviewers, R. T. Horchler, wrote, “Those who know Bryher’s historical romances will be surprised that Beowulf is a contemporary war novel, about the bombing of London in World War II.”
I have to confess that over the decades I’ve known about Bryher and her work, I always assumed that Beowulf was a historical novel — something from English history along the lines of The Player’s Boy (Shakespeare) or This January Tale (the Norman Conquest). It was only when I was browsing through a bibliography of World War Two fiction recently that I discovered my mistake — and quickly located a copy.
What’s more surprising, however, is that Beowulf has never been published in England. Bryher had, in fact, written the book in late 1943 and early 1944 while living in London as a refugee with her partner, the American poet H. D.. As Bryher later wrote in her war memoir, The Days of Mars, “The English refused to publish Beowulf. They do not want to remember. It was a documentary, not a novel, but an almost literal description of what I saw and heard during my first six months in London.”
Instead, after she returned to France following Liberation, Bryher was encouraged by her friends Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier to translate the book into French. Tt was published by Mercure de France as Beowulf: roman d’une maison de thé dans Londres bombardé in 1948. Bryher later repaid the favor by dedicating the American edition of the book to Beach and the memory of Monnier.
Monnier in particular loved the book, declaring in a French review, “As for myself, I should like better to have written it than most of the books that are spoken about.” Beach, who met Bryher in the 1920 when her then-husband Robert McAlmon brought the writer into Shakespeare & Co., saw a connection between Bryher’s behavior on that first visit and her approach to her subject in Beowulf:
Bryher, as far as I can remember, never said a word. She was practically soundless, a not uncommon thing in England; no small talk whatsoever — the French call it ‘letting the others pay the expenses of the conversation.’ …. She was quietly observing everything in her Bryhery way, just as she observed everything when she visited ‘The Warming Pan’ teashop in the London blitz days — and, as Beowulf proves, nothing escaped her.
Beowulf takes place over a few weeks in the course of the Blitz. It centers on a modest tea shop, the Warming Pan, run by Misses Selina Tippett and Angelina Hawkins. Bought with a legacy left Selina from her years in service, the tea shop runs on a mixture of hospitality and the altruism of its owners, who are willing to look past rationing restrictions to slip an extra cake to a hungry young soldier or to allow a lonely old man to spend hours nursing a cup in the corner.
There is no plot per se. Bryher simply introduces us to the Warming Pan, its owners, help, and a selection of its customers. She begins with Horatio Rashleigh. Old, lonely after the death of his wife, and no longer producing paintings that anyone wants, he survives on a tiny allowance given begrudgingly by a cousin. As if old age and widowerhood weren’t bad enough for him, war has left him thoroughly bewildered: “Why, this war was raging because people wanted to make haste, were shoddy, indifferent to detail, selfishly avid of some temporary laurel, unlike the anonymous craftsmen who had spent a lifetime on some obscure corner of a cathedral wall.” Horatio would have been happier living before the Industrial Age. “The artist abhors engines,” he observes to one of the few people who will still listen to him.
To the Warming Pan come an array of noncombatants. Colonel Ferguson, an expat returned after years in Switzerland, in hope of offering some service to some part of the government — with no clear notion of what, where, or how. Adelaide Spenser, a suburban wife in for a day of shopping, to whom the war is inevitable if undesirable: “If people make guns, it is human nature to want to use them.” Ruby, the waitress, worried each night that her family’s East End tenement will be destroyed by one of the German’s “century” (incendiary) bombs. The only soldier to appear in the whole book is Joe, a childhood friend of Eve, one of Selina and Angelina’s lodgers. Joe is also the only person who appears to thrive on the war — leading Eve to think, “It was a comment on civilization that it had taken a war to settle him into his right place.”
The Warming Pan is the culmination of a dream Selina has fostered through the decades she spent caring for an invalid, Mrs. Humphries. “Tearooms had had a special meaning for Selina. She associated them with freedom.” Freedom might seem an odd thing to associated with a tearoom, but in Selina’s mind, “Only those people who lived obedience for six and a half days of the week knew what liberty was.” The Warming Pan fulfils a need — serving as something like “a cross between a village shop and the family doctor.”
Selina has cultivated the art of the standard. “With the shortage of eggs and currants, all experiments had gone.” “Nowhere in all the district,” she reflects with pride, “had good standard things”: good farmhouse tea, nice crumpets and gingerbread, rock cakes and buns” — “the sort of food people wanted after a hard day or some hours of freedom too precious to waste on lunch.” Adrienne Monnier understood the value of these staples in wartime: “It is surely as a distributor of manna that Selina Tippett considers herself and fulfills her task. Complete manna, since tea with her is accompanied by perfect toast and excellent pastry,” Monnier wrote in an essay collected in Les Dernières Gazettes.
In offering these bedrocks of the English diet and a warm, hospitality place in which to enjoy them, she is not just running a business but improving morale. “For if clients came in to lunch and went off cheerfully afterwards, they, in turn, would affect their relatives and their maids.” “It was inspiring really,’ she thinks, “how much one solitary woman could do in defence of her native land.”
Her partner, Angelina Hawkins, is one of those tweed-cloaked Englishwomen whose energy could power a thousand homes. While Selina minds the shop and caters to its customers — never chatting too long or allowing too much familiarity, mind — Angelina is off doing battle with the war’s many attempts to interfere with and disrupt normality. “It added such richness to life, making so many contacts,” she thinks “hearing and learning so many things even if occasionally something went wrong.” It’s no surprise to learn, for example, that Angelina had roped Selina into taking classes in Esperanto before the war, or that Bryher characterizes her as “what the French called ‘an amateur of meetings.'”
A woman drinking tea atop rubble from the Blitz.
War’s inevitable disruption of norms and the earnest attempts by the English to defend them is the overarching theme of Beowulf. To Adelaide Spenser, war is “a queue and a yellow form with blank lines that had to be filled up with the stub of a broken pencil.” To Selina, it’s “an endless succession of rainy days in a small country place on a brief summer holiday.” There is something satisfying in how many characters find solace in the thought that they can always write a sharply worded letter to the Times.
And no one is as ardent a defender as Mr. Burlap, the veteran civil servant Colonel Ferguson visits in the vain hope of finding a position. Arriving at his office one morning to find his secretary’s desk has been requisitioned, Burlap’s reaction is a gem of stiff-upper-lip-ness: “I am worried, I have been worried, but am I to understand that … unauthorized persons have entered this room where I am engaged, oh, in a very humble and insignificant manner, in guiding the destinies of a war-racked country and have removed the tool with which you aid me in such labours?”
The Beowulf of the book’s title refers not to the monster of the Old English saga but a plaster bulldog that Angelina Hawkins brings in one day to serve as the Warming Pan’s mascot:
“In a salvage sale, opposite the Food Office. I can’t keep a dog, I know, in the raids, but it’s so cheerless without one. I was afraid at first that you might be tempted to call him Winnie, but then I thought, no, here is an emblem of the whole of us, so gentle, so determined….”
“And so stubborn,” Adelaide Spenser interjects. And despite the fact that Selina, Horatio, and almost everyone else in the shop finds Beowulf the bulldog ugly and in bad taste, he does, in the end, serve his symbolic purpose, perched atop a bomb crater outside the shop, a Union Jack tied around his neck.
If Beowulf has a documentary quality, it’s no coincidence. As Bryher wrote in The Days of Mars, it had a real-life equivalent:
Hilda had discovered the Warming Pan some years earlier and usually went there for lunch. Up to 1941, its owners, Selina and Angelina, supplied their clients with soup, meat, two veg and dessert for two shillings and ninepence. They were country people, they bought all the ingredients they could directly from farms and the cooking was plain but excellent. Such places are now extinct. I liked it because, as I said, I could go there without fear.
And it was the sight of a plaster bulldog that inspired Bryher to write the novel:
I saw a huge crater at the end of Basil Street. Somebody had fetched a large plaster bulldog, I assume from Harrods because they were then on sale there, and stuck it on guard beside the biggest pile of rubble. At that moment Beowulf, my war novel, was conceived.
Even the sad old painter Rashleigh came from her experience: “We had corresponded for years,” she wrote, “and as he earned his living painting miniatures on ivory of the Victory, what else could I call him but Horatio?”
At just 201 pages in the American edition with generous margins, widely-spaced lines and each chapter set out by separately-numbered pages, Beowulf is more novella than novel, but Bryher packs a lot into her carefully chosen words. Monnier considered it a “little classic” and one American reviewer called it a novel “in which all the excess baggage has been thrown out.” Reviewing the book for the New York Times, Orville Prescott wrote that Bryher “has succeeded so well in her modest project that Beowulf could serve as a loving memorial to the millions of Londoners who carried on, as one of Bryher’s characters said, ‘after all the nervous people must have left.'”
Cover of Schaffner Press edition of Beowulf
Marianne Moore, writing in the Saturday Review of Literature, compared Bryher’s tribute to the spirit of “Keep Calm and Carry On” to Colonel Ferguson’s small but honest attempt to come to the aid of his country:
Like the Colonel’s return, Bryher’s work is always an offer of services. Beowulf is not only a close-up of war but a documentary of insights, of national temperament, of primness and patriotism, sarcasm and compassion, of hospitality and heroism, a miniaturama of all the folk who stood firm.
It’s wonderful, therefore, that British readers will finally have a chance to enjoy Beowulf for themselves. In October 2020, Schaffner Press, a small U.S. independent publisher based in Arizona, will be releasing it for the first time to in the U.K.. It can be pre-ordered now from Hive, Blackwell’s, Foyle’s, and Waterstones, among other outlets, and U.S. readers can find links to a variety of sources on the Beowulf page on Schaffner’s website.
Beowulf, by Bryher New York: Pantheon Books, 1956 Tucson, Arizona: Schaffner Press, 2020
Most writers will be forgotten. While there are plenty of examples where a writer’s work has been neglected through deliberate acts of suppression, there are far more where the neglect is due to the lack of any deliberate act of remembrance. Fortunately, when it comes to the work of British women writers of the 1920s to 1950s, there have never been so many people committing deliberate acts of remembrance on a daily basis. Beginning with the ground-breaking Virago Modern Classics series, publishers such as Persephone Books, Dean Street Press, Handheld Books, Turnpike Books, NYRB Classics, and the recently-launched British Library Women Writers are busy bringing the work of dozens of writers back to print. Dozens of book bloggers are helping promote and celebrate these reissues. Academics are collaborating through such initiatives as the Middlebrow Network and Transatlantic Literary Women. And through his Furrowed Middlebrow blog, Scott Thompson continues to reveal just how rich and vast the ranks of these women writers were.
Yet even with all these hands to the task, some remain overlooked. Take Honor Croome for example. She published five novels between 1943 and 1957, all of them received with enthusiastic reviews that praised her precise prose style and her sensitivity to the qualities of even her most unlikeable characters. Two — the ones discussed here — deal with the relatively popular subject of the experience of women during the Second World War. And yet not only have her books all fallen out of print but her name doesn’t even appear in what is likely the most comprehensive catalog of the writers, Scott Thompson’s Master List on Furrowed Middlebrow. It’s not through lack of trying. But when being lost and forgotten is the default end state for writers, there can never be enough deliberate acts of remembrance.
And so I want to take a few minutes to recognize Honor Croome’s work by looking at her first two novels: O Western Wind (1943) and You’ve Gone Astray (1944). O Western Wind focuses on the lives of four women and their children while You’ve Gone Astray deals with just two — yet it’s the latter which ultimately has a broader scope.
O Western Wind opens on a crowded passenger ship crossing the rough waters of the Irish Sea, on its way to take hundreds of British women and their children to safety in Canada. Most of them are in the Third class compartments: “One can get away from the smell of ship in the first class lounges and even, occasionaly, in Tourist; never in Third. There is oil in it, and brass, and sea salt, and, particularly in Third, disinfectant, and bad sailors find it conducive to seasickness.” Sitting in the Third class bar are two cousins, Margaret and Cora, happy to have their children settled for the night.
Margaret is older, longer married; Cora is younger, wed to an RAF bomber pilot, and stunningly attractive. “I wish I could feel like Cora looks, at the end of a day like this,” Margaret muses. In the lounge, they meet Mary Hallam, a nervous mother, with a two-year-old daughter and just months from delivering a second child. To these three women, Croome adds Daphne Torrance — divorced with two teenage sons and an eye for available men — and then takes us through their first year of life as evacuees.
The women are settled outside Boston with the help of a local refugee committee. The contrast with wartime England strikes them as soon as they leave the train station: “No sand-bags or strong-points anywhere. No road-blocks, no sentries. Not a man in uniform to be seen. Not a plane in the sky. No one carrying gas-masks. No steel helmets on the policemen. A carefree, lovely land. And tonight there would be lights again.”
Margaret and Cora and their children end up in a remote country house. The peace and quiet of their surroundings seem unworldly after life in crowded, busy, noisy London:
Margaret and Cora, like dwellers on another planet, went marketing and swept and scrubbed and cooked, tended their children, drank their tea, and sat by the fire, evening after lonely evening. They had the children; they had housework. There — as mothers and drudges — they stopped short. It was a great deal, but a great deal was missing. Friendship meant an envelope with a printed slip “Opened by Examiner 3697” gummed over one end.
“Whole tracts of faculties lay idle,” Croome writes, and in both novels she examines the uneven and often unbalanced mix of domestic, economic, and intellectual demands that women who take on the responsibilities of child-rearing have to meet. Margaret thinks, only half-jokingly, “We should have been Victorian wives…. Then we should have found this a lovely, lovely rest.” Except, as she quickly adds, that probably would have meant she would have had eight children to care for and Cora four.
Eventually, the Greater Boston Hospitality Committee brings the four women and their kids together to live at Southwood, a large mansion left empty after the death of its dowager owner. In some ways, it comes to seem even more artificial than the isolation of their farmhouse in the country. Everything around them speaks of wealth, luxury, comfort — but it’s all given by the grace of the Hospitality Committee. “It seemed as though several new layers of unreality had interposed themselves between them and the great tragedy from which they had cut themselves off; and in their varying ways they fretted against their physical good fortune.”
I was often remind of Paul Cohen-Portheim’s Time Stood Still, his account of four years spent as an internee in a British camp during the First World War. Like him, these women are not abused in any physical way; and yet, the very artificiality and limitations of their situation become, in the end, a sort of torture. And like Cohen-Portheim, Croome’s women find that “The worst tortures of camp life were due to the small failings of one’s fellow creatures everlastingly in evidence.” Margaret thinks at one point:
For the duration, Clive Torrance would infest the dinner table. For the duration, they would have to check their conversation to keep it within Mary Hallis’s scope. For the duration, they would chit-chat with Mrs. Torrance about nothing in particular. Margaret found herself wanting, frantically, to hear the sound of a masculine voice, preferably several of them. I’m not turning into a man-hunter, I’m resigned to celibacy, but I am tired of being a full-time hen….
It is only after several crises that Margaret, whose voice seems to speak Croome’s own thoughts most often, finds a way to look beyond the walls of their comfortable but indefinite existence. “There would be moments of black depression,” she thinks, but she can at least “distinguish between the superficial and the real, now.”
O Western Wind draws in part on Honor Croome’s own experiences. She left Liverpool bound for Canada in July 1940 with two children (and, like Mary Hallam, within weeks of delivering another). Although the family would eventually settle in Ottawa after John Croome was appointed head of the British Food Mission to Canada, Honor and the children spent over a year living as refugees in Westwood, Massachusetts outside Boston. While there, she wrote a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe taking exception to another British refugee’s suggestion that Americans were not showing sufficient gratitude for Britain’s sacrifices: “You owe us much, we owe you much,” she wrote. “Among other things each owes the other for their share in our joint victory over Hohenzollern Germany. Of what those shares were, let our dead as well as our dollars speak.”
When the Croomes returned to England in 1946, they needed a much bigger cabin. They were now a family of seven, bringing along three sons born in Canada. In other words, Honor Croome managed to produce two novels and three children during her own indefinite existence in the US and Canada. Her capacity for work seems astonishing. Both before and after the war she was a frequent reviewer for The Economist, and one of her editors, Sir Geoffrey Crowther, once said of her speed in reading, “A thousand pages in her sight are but an evening gone.” The same may have been true for her speed in writing. She must have been one of those rare writers who can work in short snatches, for she dedicated her second novel to “John, Ursula, Gilbert and David, because they occasionally kept quiet.”
Yet in neither book does Croome suggest that the solution to a woman’s challenges in juggling both family and a career is simply to work harder. You’ve Gone Astray (1944), in fact, is a demonstration that this is a recipe for failure. In some ways, the book is a prequel to O Western Wind: taking place between the early 1930s and the first year or so of the war, it follows two women — Linda and Kitty — from a short spell of sharing a flat in London through marriage, children, and successes and failures at work.
You’ve Gone Astray is far more about Linda than Kitty. Kitty — slight, beautiful, flirtatious and starting out as a writer of romance novels — is more of a leitmotif than major character. Though we enter the story through Kitty’s eyes, it’s Linda — tall, Amazon-like, with a fearsome intellect (if less formidable practical knowledge) — with whom we spend most of our time.
The daughter and niece of vigorous Edwardian activists, Linda feels somewhat guilty for taking a job with a reform-minded organization called the Housing Plan rather than heading off to India to run a hospital as her aunt did or crusading for women’s right as her mother did. Her work brings her in contact with Hugh, a journalist with a strong interest in social reform, and soon the two are married — and Linda is pregnant.
As she tries to raise her daughter while continuing to work for the Housing Plan, she realizes she’s missing out. On burning the midnight oil with colleagues, on a pint after work, on the Budapest Conference. She struggles with the cognitive dissonance of being both mother and manager: “She had to turn dislocating psychological somersaults, morning and evening, Saturday and Monday, switching from the role of expert and organizer to that of suburban housewife and back again.” And the simply physical toll: “She was almost always tired.”
Kitty encounters the same issues when she becomes pregnant several years later than Linda. She expresses a feeling my wife often recounted during her pregnancies: “It’s so inevitable. As though something had you by the scruff of the neck and were whispering in your ear, ‘You can’t get out of this. You can’t get away. You can’t talk your way out, no one can help you out, it’ll happen, I’m not sorry for you, my name is Nature.'” Unlike Linda, however, Kitty can afford to park her son with a kindly couple in the country while she types and socializes away and her husband — present in the book for little more than the essential biological moment — is off on archaeological expeditions.
Croome captures the blur of considerations and commitments that must swirl through the head of any working mother:
… waking with an eye on that clock, working, still with an eye on that clock, frantically, among perversely uncooperative kitchen utensils and crockery, listening desperately for Mrs. Pratt’s click at the gate, picturing the London train remorselessly pulling out of the station a mile away; crawling home in a rush-hour train, supper menus and unfinished business dancing an unholy saraband in her brain; listening to Mrs. Pratt’s chronicle of leaking taps, spoiled potatoes, mistakes in the grocery bill, and misdeeds by Diana (more a problem child than ever these days); flinging off her town clothes, flinging on an apron, plunging through the preparation for supper, with scarcely time to give Diana a good-night kiss; spending her evenings on endless letters to agencies and to the malevolent half-wits or mere phantoms whom those agencies recommended.
In a sentiment many women might share, she adds, “Linda yearned for a good servant as a prisoner for freedom, as a miser for money, as a sick man for health.”
The strain of it all takes its toll in numerous ways, leading to arguments, separation, even death. There are some grim chapters in this book. And though Linda and Hugh find some happiness on the other side — and Kitty finds an escape from her worries — Croome doesn’t offer us happy endings, just sustainable compromises. She was nothing if not a realist.
Croome’s own background bore some resemblance with Linda’s. Her mother, Mildred Minturn, was an American socialite who graduated from Bryn Mawr, where she became a close friend of Frances Fincke, later wife of the famed judge Learned Hand. In fact, Fincke turned down Hand’s first proposal to marry because she and Mildred had planned to live together and pursue careers as scholars and social reformers. Bertrand Russell met Mildred while she was at Bryn Mawr and the two maintained a flirtatious relationship even after she married Arthur Hugh Scott, an Englishman, in 1906.
Mildred took graduate classes at Barnard and traveled widely after leaving Bryn Mawr, visiting Japan and Europe and taking a desert caravan in Egypt with a fellow classmate. She was outspoken in her views, writing frequent letters to magazines in England and the U.S., and translated French Socialist Jean Jaures’s Studies in Socialism shortly before her wedding to Scott. She struggled, however, with health problems and died in 1922, when Honor was just a teenager.
Honor had a most cosmopolitan upbringing. She spent her early years in France, where her father taught at l’École de l’ Île-de-France, a French boarding school run on the model of an English public school. She attended a girl’s school in Switzerland (an experience she used as the basis for her 1955 novel, The Mountain and the Molehill), the Hayes Court School in Kent, Bryn Mawr College in the US (for a year — “I did not flunk out,” she was careful to note), then the Sorbonne in Paris, and finally the London School of Economics.
After the LSE, she wrote her first book, The Approach to Economics, then landed a job at the New Fabian Research Bureau, a left-leaning organization involved in statistics and planning — most probably the inspiration for the Housing Plan in You’ve Gone Astray. Soon after, she married John Lewis Croome, who’d been a year ahead of her at the LSE.
Honor Croome, from a 1944 newspaper article
In 1935, as she informed the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin, she took a job as political secretary to Lady Astor. She wrote that “It’s tremendous fun” but also tiring: “I am rapidly going grey and can hear imaginary typewriters and telephones in my dreams.” A year later, she wrote that she left the post “owing to (a) nervous exhaustion and (b) incompetence” and “returned to the fleshpots and to society of son [John] and heir aged 2½.” “Very nice, too,” she added. She gave birth to a daughter, Ursula, in 1936 and wrote her classmates that she was busy with a family “to cook for, a job to hold down, and book to see through the press.” The book she referred to was her weightiest economic text, The Economy of Britain: A History, published in 1938, which she co-wrote with R. J. Hammond.
After nearly six years in the US and Canada, Croomes returned to their home in Claygate outside London in 1946 and Honor resumed her work as an economist and journalist while continuing to write and raise her children. She published her third novel, The Faithless Mirror in 1946 and began publishing articles for the general public in magazines such as Home & Garden. Included in Who’s Who’s starting in 1950, she answered the book’s pro-forma questionnaire by listing her primary form of recreation as “domesticity.” She published two more novels in the 1950s: The Mountain and the Molehill and The Forgotten Place (1957). She also published a further economics text, Introduction to Money in 1956.
When she died in 1960, The Economist made an exception of its practice of being “anonymous by conviction as well as by tradition” and printed a black-boxed notice of her passing. “To those who knew her,” the editors wrote, “every piece she wrote could only be hers; to those who did not, her reviews were no less identifiable, running like a strong shining thread through these pages. The style was the woman.”
They paid tribute to the high quality of her prose: “The cutting-edge and quality of what she wrote was that she knew, respected and was mistress of the English language. It was almost impossible to alter or cut her contributions.” As a reviewer, she was “lively and learned in the right sense of both words; sensitive but never soft; humane and good-humoured but never sentimental or trivial; critical, sometimes in a biting and indignant fashion, but never censorious; a civilised human being with a zest for life and people as well as understanding of great ideas and arguments.”
“It is hard to believe that there can ever be another like her,” The Economist piece concluded. “This is understatement,” responded Sir Geoffrey Crowther in the next issue. “Such beauty, such wite, such capacity to understand other people’s minds, sometimes even better than they do themselves, such capacity to move with grace in so many different fields from housewifery and writing about it to the most abstruse theoretical economics — all these in combination made her unique.”
Perhaps this post will now motivate other readers to discover Honor Croome’s unique qualities as a novelist.
The sweet spot for my individual strain of nostalgia is right around 1965. That was about the time I began to get an allowance and to be free to wander around on my own — which, taken together, meant I could go to Saturday matinees, buy comic books, baseball card, and model airplanes, and eat at the snack bar. In other words, begin to exist as a semi-autonomous consumer of then-contemporary culture. I knew, of course, that I was on the outside of the real world — the adult world — but at least now I could press my face up against the glass.
There were many things about the adult world I didn’t understand, but there were a few things that I knew for sure belonged to adulthood. Driving and cars, of course. Smoking and drinking. Hairdos for women and suits and ties for men. Cocktail parties and dancing. These were all things I saw my parents doing, wearing, going to, talking about — but the guides to the adult world I trusted most were magazines like Life, Time, and (when I could sneak a peak at it) my dad’s Playboys.
From LIFE magazine, 1965: Debutante Anne Morris on a date at The Embers in Manhattan.
The adult world I saw in the ads and photo spreads in these magazines is the world of Edwin Gilbert’s The Beautiful Life (1966). Everything that constituted “the beautiful life” — the life led by the best people, the in-est of all the In Crowds — as represented in the magazines can be found here. Slim, straight-line, minimalist dresses; Twiggy-style short hairdos; glamorous women in evening gowns on the arms of rich, handsome men in tuxedos; discotheques and designer living rooms; pop art and dinners at the Four Seasons.
As a work of fiction, it’s moderately above average. Gilbert made his living writing well-constructed but somewhat superficial novels that offered readers glimpses into worlds they probably didn’t have access to: the late-stage 400 (Silver Spoon, 1957); silver salver diplomacy (The New Ambassadors, 1961); Detroit auto executives (American Chrome, 1965); old money (Newport, 1971). He was a craftsman whose sales and reputation depended more on consistency than genius.
This shows most in Gilbert’s choice of protagonists. Bayard Burton “Grove” Grovenour is a 30-something heir with old money and new ideals. He and his daisy-fresh wife Rosemary return from the Siberia of suburban Connecticut to dive into the deep end of Manhattan life, taking a penthouse apartment at 1027 Fifth Avenue as their modest pied-a-terre. Grove wants to save New York from godless modernistic architecture and city planning. Rosemary just wants to belong. Grove fails spectacularly; Rosemary manages to reach the epicenter of In-ism, becoming the icon everyone wants at their party or on their magazine spreads. But none of that much matters: they are merely the jetsam Gilbert tosses in to lure the sharks, remoras, and other prey and parasites of High Society.
It’s not the story that matters here, anyway. The best way to enjoy The Beautiful Life is as a time-capsule. It’s like a trip back to the poshest parts of Manhattan when to be rich, young, and white in Manhattan was to be at the apex of the food chain.
But that’s not what makes the book interesting. Grove, Rosemary, and all their rich friends are, after all, pretty dull stuff. It’s the ecosystem that serves, entertains, dresses, drives, houses, feeds, doctors, and otherwise supports them Gilbert meticulously documents that raises The Beautiful Life above its mid-60s airplane reading peers.
Gilbert structures his book as a series of set-pieces, each taking place at a specific address, each hosted by a particular enabler, starting with Andrew, the doorman of 1027 Fifth Avenue. Andrew “knows his air of solicitude is both pleasing and proper to their rank (or what they might wish their rank to be)” and maintains careful control of the hierarchy of the building’s tenants through the nuances of his service. Mrs. Alfreda Peysen, 44-year resident and minked-and-bejeweled heiress, gets “his warmest (seniority) greeting.” Young Mr. Grovenour, newly-arrived and prone to poking around at the base of the trees along the sidewalk, on the other hand, gets just enough politeness to cover up Andrew’s contempt.
Next, we meet Katherine Reeves, the stiff-coifed, tight-lipped real estate agent who shows the Grovenours their prospective apartment. Their judgment of the place, of course, is far less important than her approval of them. She finds “simple satisfaction from passing judgment on the lowly and on the highly who come within the precinct of her verdicts.” As a result, Gilbert tells us, she is “one of the happiest of human beings.”
Smirnoff ad from LIFE magazine, 1965, with Killer Joe Piro and Skitch Henderson.
Gilbert’s tour of High Society’s courtiers and household staff continues with a visit to Big D’s, the Park Avenue discotheque where DJ Ray Noonan (a surrogate, perhaps, for Killer Joe Piro) takes control over a crowd of the idle and powerful each night:
Watch him now: a record is playing on the first turntable; a second record is already silently spinning on the second turntable; a third is in place. As the first disc nears its rockrolling end, Roy deftly drops the arm onto the second platter so that one overlaps the other and he reaches to the control panel and juices up the volume so that the changeover is made with kinetic brilliance; and then he dials it down again and prepares the record to go next on turntable number three.
But this is not the artistry for which he is paid. Roy’s gift lies in his ability to pace the dancers, and to anticipate their moods: Is the Frug blasting too long? Is the age group changing? Is fatigue or boredom seeping in? Has he caught the signal from the bar that business needs to be escalated?
Roy, an ex-GI from Oklahoma who quietly seeds his fat tips into a house for his family in Queens, has classified all the fauna that congregate on his dance floor: “the old Crust and the young Crust, the Cafe Mafia, the Jets, the Pop people, and a few, a very few Just Plain Money.”
Gilbert’s tour continues with a lunch visit to Le Trianon, overseen by Claude Troube, who enforces the restaurant’s code with a velvet-gloved iron hand:
His attention is also sensitive to the welfare of the diners, particularly to those who are new to his tables, those who might violate any of a number of decrees: pipes and cigars are interdit; cigarettes are permitted but not between courses. It is also to be understood that since too many martinis before dining anesthetizes the senses, the waiter will not serve more than one, possibly two, cocktails; but not a soupçon more. As for the so-called health diets of some Americans who fuss about the use of butter, cream or salt — such idiocies will not be tolerated here.
In the course of the book, we meet Chet Darnell, the fresh-faced juvenile of 46 who tickles the ivories for the private parties of the most exclusive clientele; Lorio, maître d’ “haute coiffure who turns each customer “from a flat-heeled, over-scrubbed, dull-suited, tight-curled nonentity into a chicly shod, clad and coiffed creature of infinite allurement’; Martine, who dresses them at her by-name only boutique, and Dolores the masseuse, catering to the oft-divorced and accustomed to “working on the same body while the name keeps changing.”
From LIFE magazine 1966: “At Arthur, in New York, the country’s most famous discotheque, the patrons lend a bizarre air to the club, arrayed before a Mondianesque background in their Op art mad rags. In foreground is director, Sybil Burton Christopher.”
We hang out in the chauffeur’s room in the garage of 1027 Fifth Avenue and in the apartment of Hank Hartley, art dealer to the elite, who helps them cover their walls “with paintings of monumental cheeseburgers, colossal Coke bottles, cans of baked beans, soaring syringes, F.B.I, posters, ceiling-high photos of Clara Bow’s face and Elizabeth Taylor’s mouth, and many other fine artworks of this genre.” We visit the atelier of Waldo Stryker — Andy Warhol stand-in — who produces these paintings to fund the art films he forces his patrons to endure:
There followed a shadowy view of an amorphous room which contained a bed on which lay a long-haired, pock-faced girl in white leotards; she was reading a book and she would wriggle around sporadically, and then putting the book aside would stare languidly to her left. The camera would hold on her for what seemed an interminable time as she stretched her body and began undulating in a clumsy and prolonged exhibition of sexual frustration or, if you chose, desperate longing for human recognition and affection. Alternating with these views, the camera would swing leftward to show nearby a brutish young man of outsized shoulders and biceps, attired in the glossy black deep-sea diving gear of a frogman, as he kept checking his twin-tubed oxygen tanks and his elongated spear gun, working away with total masculine preoccupation.
In silence the film’s monochromatic images continued their alternating rhythms with absolutely no variety and with no regard for time until the final shot, which was sustained for nine minutes as the camera held on the girl’s blemished face, the only relief coming when a fly, which touched down on her cheek, caused her to twitch the insect away.
As we swirl along through the haunts of the hoi-polloi, we watch as earnest Grove is discreetly shuffled off to the fringe as an idealistic nut-case and Rosemary becomes a star entrant in the popularity contest, “in full combustion as she hastened her pace, projecting her personality, driving fiercely to hold onto her rating in the popularity poll, the trophy that confirmed her position as one of the prize tigers running in the annual New York In-ism Sweepstakes.” The lesson, I suppose, is that success is hollow, but Gilbert makes Grove’s righteous failure look pretty hollow, too. The only characters who truly seem happen in this book are all the extras who open the doors, spin the records, tinkle the ivories, drive the cars, and otherwise make sure that the Good Life, if not really all that good, is at least comfortable. They seem to have the wisdom to stay on the sidelines of the Rat Race and carefully manage the bits of cheese they collect.
You can have your Jane Austens, or go back to the Regency days courtesy of Georgette Heyer, or the tea-cosy days courtesy of E. M Delafield. When I’m suffering from a serious spell of nostalgia, keep that land spreadin’ out so far and wide — just give me Manhattan in ’65.
The Beautiful Life, by Edwin Gilbert New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966
How does a book or writer get forgotten? There are a few instances where it’s a matter of deliberate suppression: who in Nazi Germany read the work of Stefan Zweig or Thomas Mann after their books were burned? There are cases where it’s a matter of institutional prejudice, such as the tendency of university English departments to ignore the work of women writers and people of color. Cultural disinclination is a big factor: until magic realism burst upon the scene with One Hundred Years of Solitude, Latin American literature was considered as obscure specialty subject in the U.S. “Canadian novelist” is a label still dismissed by many American and U.K. readers; and “French Canadian novelist” is almost the kiss of death, as the example of Marie-Claire Blais illustrates. Product distribution channels disable as much as they enable access to writers’ work: where U.K. books routinely leap over to U.S. bookshelves, one in ten of the same number of Australian titles make the trip across the Pacific.
But the most common and by far most effective way things get forgotten is inertia. Forgetting is the human condition. Dementia is only noticeable because it’s such an aggressive form of forgetting. Remembering takes effort, and if no one makes the effort, the inevitable result is that people and what they accomplished in their lives are forgotten.
Take Allan Turpin as an example. He published ten novels in his lifetime, most of them in the space of a little more than dozen years between 1964 and 1977. All received favorable but not glowing reviews: praise for his light, sophisticated comedy, mild caution over his old-fashioned style. None of them were ever reissued. When he died in 1979, there was no notice in any of the major papers. He died without heirs and left his entire estate to the Royal Literary Fund.
If Turpin is remembered at all today, it has nothing to do with his writing. In 1925, he and a young woman named Molly Ackland convinced themselves they were in love and decided to get married. He was 22, she was 19. He had little experience of romantic love and neither had experience of heterosexual love. The marriage was misguided from the start and was ultimately annulled. Molly Turpin began wearing male clothing, transformed herself into Valentine Ackland, became a poet and met and became the lifelong companion of the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner. Richard Turpin — born Allan Richard Turpin, he was known to his friends as Richard — exited stage left and disappears from Ackland’s story.
Part of the problem with the marriage, as Ackland later wrote in her memoir For Sylvia, was Turpin’s confusion over his own sexuality: “Richard was without any experience of women, and he was suffering from remorse and fear because of certain homosexual relationships he had enjoyed recently. ‘Enjoyed’ is the important word. He was now horrified to remember that he had been happy.” Her suspicions may have been well-founded. After the annulment, Turpin remained single for the rest of his life and census electoral records show him sharing an address with another man or a married couple.
Turpin shared some of Ackland’s desire to write, though it manifested in a very different way. Where she wrote confessional poetry, he converted his own experiences into a diffident sort of comic fiction. His first novel Doggett’s Tours, published as Richard Turpin in 1932, drew from the several years he spent as a tour guide on the Continent. His first love was for the theatre, but he had little success there. A comedy titled “The Fare Includes Romance” was produced in 1933 and closed after a week. His adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw was forgotten just as quickly in 1946.
James remained, however, a dominant influence on his writing. On the strength of The Laughing Cavalier, I would describe Turpin’s work as Evelyn Waugh channelled through Henry James: his pages are peopled by ridiculous people, his paragraphs riddled with sentences of near-Jamesian convolution:
No particle of her was excited by George, fair-haired, as pink-cheeked as a girl, naïve, awkward, diffident; with the wrong ties, slovenly speed, and an unappetizing background; given, once his diffidence had worn off, to a great deal of rather foolish laughter and talk about nothing; generous, but feckless, and apparently without ambition ever to be anything more than a clerk on 30/- a week; a young man who, although the least knowable of young men since he never knew himself, seemed on first acquaintance rather boringly knowable and predictable; an absurd young man who, nevertheless, like all men, took his feelings seriously and could be alarmingly melodramatic and sentimental — than which nothing is less attractive when you don’t want it.
If Turpin’s style owed something to James, his attitude could be attributed to Waugh (or perhaps, going back a generation, as Turpin often seemed wont to do, Wilde). “I think that animals are fortunate in that their relationship with their parents is healthily short,” Turpin’s narrator announces at the start of The Laughing Cavalier. “Rather than see children exposed to the enormous risk of being brought up by their own parents,” he argues, “I would prefer state rearing. A visit to hospital must convince anyone of the extraordinary amount of disinterested humanity that exists where there is a need for it.”
The Laughing Cavalier was one of what Turpin at some point intended to be an eight-novel sequence called Memoirs of a Naïve Young Man. The naïve young man, Geoffrey Gillard, clearly becomes a fictional stand-in for Turpin himself once one discovers the coincidences between Gillard and Turpin’s life.
Allan Richard Turpin was born in 1903 to Frank Turpin and Clara Turpin (née Gillard). At the time, Frank Turpin’s profession was listed as “stamp dealer” — the same profession as George Gillard, the narrator’s father and the subject of the book. An earlier volume in the Memoirs series, Innocent Employments, describes the rise of this stamp business. As in the book, Richard Turpin joined his father in the business after a few unsatisfactory years as a tour guide. A passenger list from a trip he made to the U.S. in 1927 identifies Turpin as a “philatelist.” In 1930, Turpin and his older brother took over F. B. Turpin when their father retired.
Laughing Cavalier, a portrait by Frans Hals (1624)
Turpin/Gillard takes his title from Frans Hals’ famous 1624 portrait Laughing Cavalier. Remembering his father as seen through his son’s fourteen-year-old eyes, Turpin describes “a man who, although his thick auburn hair and pointed imperial were quite impressive, was, beneath them, unexpectedly short and rather self-indulgently plump; a man who, because of this beard, his rich red complexion, and light blue, constantly smiling, not very penetrating eyes, rather resembled, everyone said, Hals’s Laughing Cavalier, of which we had a colour print in the hall; a man than whom, in fact, no one could be more amiable and less terrifying.”
George Gillard disappoints his son by his obstinate insistence on being himself. It’s not the obstinacy that irritates: it’s his father’s blithe disregard for how relentlessly mundane his taste, talk, habits, thoughts, opinions — even his gestures are. Though a tremendous success in his stamp business, he is utterly lacking in ambition. Though he can afford to go to the theatre regularly, he enjoys the most formulaic romance every bit as much as something by Shaw. And yet, to his son’s annoyance, he is also “the most universally liked man I have ever met.”
If you pick up The Laughing Cavalier hoping for a Waugh-like dissection of the older generation, however, you’ll be disappointed. Writing reflectively at 66, Turpin finds it harder to maintain the uncompromising standards of a twenty-something. “If I did not admire my father, I, as I have already suggested, loved him much more than I knew,” he writes about halfway through the book.
George Gillard’s greatest failure in his son’s eyes is his failure to adequately mourn the death of his wife. Although her son acknowledges that his mother, who was often ill through his childhood, often left his father in the position of having to attend social engagements solo, he is shocked when — just six months after her death — he begins to court another woman. “If he had not murdered my mother, he had, in my youthful eyes, committed a crime that was almost the equivalent of murder”: “he had not regretted her death.”
Choosing to close up and sell off the house his sons had grown up in, George falls from an exotic-looking younger woman he meets when viewing a prospective new flat with his son. Turpin’s description of their accidental encounter contains one of the many gems of observation that are studded throughout the dense weave of his prose: “We moved across the sitting-room and, at the door, confronted the ladies, who were just about to wander in. There was the usual exchange of ‘sorries’ by which the English cover their acute embarrassment when proximity forces them to recognize the existence of strangers.”
Fifty-seven to the woman’s thirty-five, ready to retire from a successful but not wealthy business, George fails to see the limitations of his attraction, much to his son’s further exasperation. To everyone’s great relief, when the woman does let him down, she does so with enough grace as to merely deflate, rather than shatter, his ego, and a much more suitable mate is soon found. Turpin lacks the cold-bloodedness to leave any of his characters in shreds.
And this may offer a clue to why Allan Turpin’s work has become forgotten. It was just this quality that appealed to Turpin’s original reviewers. Claire Tomalin wrote that, “With fewer ponderous generalisations and more laughter this would have been an even better book: as it is, it deserves a place in the rich chronicles of the English petty bourgeoisie of our century.” Robert Baldick, in The Daily Telegraph, observed that “If Mr. Turpin cultivates a small plot of literary earth, he tends it with exquisite skill, and the results are never disappointing…. Few authors have written so perceptively about the father-son relationship: it is high time Mr. Turpin’s quiet talent was more widely recognized.” Instead, Turpin’s quiet talent was forgotten soon after his last book was published. This is good but unshowy work. The lack of cold-bloodedness is considered a virtue in a female middlebrow novelist: gentle-hearted satire has long legs in this era of Persephone Books and the Dorothy Whipple revival. In a male middlebrow novelist, however, gentle satire is reason enough to let his work slowly moulder into earth.
I’ll admit that when I first started reading The Laughing Cavalier, I was put off by the Jamesian-ness of Allan Turpin’s prose. But at a certain point, probably no more than a chapter in, I found myself relaxing, giving in to the leisurely pace, appreciating the subtlety of observation and the lightness of the comic touches. And once you adapt to Turpin’s Edwardian speed, the journey becomes much easier to enjoy.
The Laughing Cavalier, by Allan Turpin London: Michael Joseph, 1969
It’s a little surprising, given how George Floyd’s dying words “I can’t breathe” have been heard around the world and ignited such widespread protests against institutional racism and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, that no one has noted their echo in the title of Ronald Fair’s novel We Can’t Breathe. A largely autobiographical novel of growing up as a black child in Chicago during the Second World War and after, Fair called it “the work of my lifetime, the book I’ve been trying to write for 10 years.”
Its central theme is that of finding a way to achieve some success as a black man in a white man’s world while maintaining some remnant of self-respect. All the ingredients of ghetto life are here: poverty, prejudice, drugs, numbers runners, petty crimes, gospel churches and corner gangs, rotten landlords and decent hard-working people being ground down by the daily friction of life. Fair’s fictional self, Ernie, narrates the story retrospectively, speaking as one who has managed to escape the worst effects of this childhood.
Ernie and four of his friends form a band after they are tormented and mocked by a group of older boys. “The five of us were brothers now, and we had to fight the others for fear that they would rob us of what little manhood we had. We had to fight the others, otherwise we would have lived in such fear of them that we would not have been able to breathe.” As they grow, they confront the threats of their world: gangs and dope dealers; the ferocious, relentless rats that infest their basements and alleys; and the prejudice of most of the white people they come in contact with. At times, they find themselves in situations where the only options are fight or flight, others where it’s a choice between surrendering — or bullshitting one’s way out.
One of the boys, Willie, takes the latter approach when caught shoplifting in a white store. “Catch the nigger before he gets away!” one of the clerks screams. he coolly walks up to her, sticks a finger in her face, and asks, “Bitch, just who the hell you think you callin a nigger?” When the manager responds by slamming him against a counter shouting, “But you were stealing, boy, and you know that’s wrong,” Willie shifts gears and adopts the stereotype of the chasten, contrite Uncle Tom:
I sho do, suh, but I had to do it to get some money for my baby sister,” he lied. “We ain’t got no food at home. Honest. We ain’t even got no bread. You know what it’s like, mister, you know, to be hungry — I mean to be real hungry? My mama left home las week and ain’t nobody there to take care of the baby cep me and I had to do somethin cause we so hungry. I didn’t know what to do, mister, I swear I didn’t. I thought if I stole somethin I could maybe, you know, sell it and get some money for food. Know what I mean? Ain’t gonna call no police, are you? Please don’t, mister, please. Please. I’m sorry.
Willie proceeds to lay out a woeful tale designed to induce maximum sympathy and swears to come work sweeping out the store’s basement — knowing full well that the white manager wouldn’t recognize him if he walked into the store the very next day.
Ernie is a little luckier than his friends. Though he’s exposed to the same environmental and institutional obstacles, his mother and father stay together, they eat together each night, and no matter how dismal their apartment, he has his own bed to sleep in each night. His father encounters humiliating discrimination in trying to work in a defense plant and becomes for a time an angry and abusive drunk, but he finds a way out and Ernie has more of a sense of home and family than Willie and the others.
He also has the luck to encounter a friendly, and for the time, exceptionally enlightened English teacher in junior high school. She sees some promise in his awkward attempts at writing and gives him a book to take home and read. “I thought reading was a drag,” he recalls.
I had spent years reading about white children on farms, white men at their work, white mothers at their household chores, white animals with black spots, white families going on picnics, white grandparents coming from the country to visit their children and grandchildren, white soldiers, white generals, white sailors, white naval captains, white admirals, white explorers, white heroes, white traitors, white pilots—white-white-white-white-white everybodies with white everything they did being about as interesting to me as all of the white teachers I had had who really did not give a damn if I ever learned to read or spell or write or think.
The book Mrs. Taylor gives Ernie is a biography of Toussaint l’Ouverture, the black general who led the Haitian revolution against the Spanish and the French. After resisting it for weeks, Ernie picks it up while staying home sick and is thunderstruck. “A Negro general,” he tells his mother. “Wow, Mom, I never knew there was a Negro general did anything anywhere. A Negro! Wow, Mom, I gotta read this whole book.”
With Mrs. Taylor’s encouragement, Ernie begins to write stories set in the world he’s grown up in. When she returns his first piece, however, he is surprised at her corrections. “I was shocked to see how many times she had drawn a line through the word ‘mothafucka.'” Thinking back on the experience, he reflects,
I realize that it was a story about a mothafuckin bunch of fuckin drunks in a rotten fuckin mothafuckin town with a mess of mothafuckin other mothafuckas, fuckin around and fuckin up their lives and every other mothafuckin person in the mothafuckin neighborhood who was unfortunate enough to live in the mothafuckin city with all the fucked-up mothafuckin white people fuckin over the black mothafuckas all the fuckin time. The story ended with the only way to get out of the mothafuckin trouble in the mothafuckin world was to end up as a mothafuckin dead man, six mothafuckin feet under the mothafuckin ground.
“Is this really the way they talk?” she asks him. When he replies, “Yes, ma’am,” she responds — and here I suspect we are dealing with fiction rather than autobiography — “If that’s the way some of the people you know really talk, then I suppose I had no right to change their language.”
Ronald Fair on the cover of his 1975 chapbook, Excerpts
Perhaps this did occur. Perhaps Fair did have such an open-minded, sympathetic teacher at some point. But this anecdote illustrates why We Can’t Breathe, although undoubtedly a highly accurate picture of black life in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, fails to satisfy as a work of fiction. Ernie emerges as a young man largely unscathed. He is the survivor, but his survival seems to owe much to — well, either luck or predestination. “I had been granted immunity by the gods or by God or by the natural order of things,” he writes, “because I had been given a vision of survival without dehumanization. I would survive in spite of what happened to everyone around me.” It is hard to empathize with a character who comes off as a bit of a Teflon man. And to be honest, throughout the book, Fair’s anger is often muted by a certain amount of nostalgia for his good old days, no matter how unlikely he’d really want to turn back the clock.
George Davis, reviewing We Can’t Breathe in the New York Times, saw it as weaker overall than Fair’s first novel, Many Thousand Gone, which had been published seven years earlier and which Davis called “One of the most beautifully written books of the last decade.” Readers who turn to Many Thousand Gone for beautiful writing, however, are in for a shock. Fair subtitled the book A American Fable, but it bears little resemblance to anything Aesop ever wrote — unless there’s a version of “The Tortoise and the Hare” floating around somewhere that ends with the tortoise eating the hare.
The premise of Many Thousand Gone is simple and gut-wrenching: in a little quadrant in the middle of Mississippi called Jacobs County, wholly owned and run by the Jacobs family, slavery has never ended. Tiny, unimportant, in the midst of a state resentful of its status after the war, and surrounded by sympathetic counties, Jacobs County has managed to keep history from moving past 1864. Few outsiders — and definitely no black ones — are allowed in. The only way out for the slaves is escape. Letters in and out are censored. Black men who show any sign of resistance are beaten to death and buried. All black women are considered fair game for any white man to take in the bushes and rape.
Although Samuel Jacobs, the founder of Jacobs County, had originally strived to keep his slaves of pure black blood, over the decades the policy of his descendants towards rape has meant that there are fewer and fewer pure black babies. When the last of these is born, Granny Jacobs — like most of the black residents, she carries the name of the county’s founder — dubs him “the Black Prince” and vows to arrange his escape. When he is still a teenager, she carries out an elaborate plan by which she smuggles him to a friendly black family in a nearby county while convincing the sheriff of Jacobs County that the young man has died. The family takes him to Chicago, where he becomes a writer. The episode cannot help but bring to mind the story of King Herod and the infant Jesus.
The catalyst that sets off the chain reaction that destroys the century-long status quo in Jacobs County is when the Black Prince publishes a book about the town. He sends his grandmother a copy of Ebony with an article about it. The censor in the Jacobsville post office passes it to the sheriff, who recognizes immediately the danger in allowing the slaves in his county — all but one, the preacher, kept illiterate — see photos of black people living better than most of the whites they knew. “I can tell you one thing,” he says. “You ain’t gonna see none of them pictures as long as I’m alive.”
But word gets out and soon the slaves are curious. “They wanted to know more about the magazine, about the bright cars and fine clothes, the beautiful black women and the big houses, and especially about the schools, where colored boys and girls and young men and women learned about things the Jacobs County Negroes didn’t understand, but knew must be worth learning if the colored folks up north bothered about them.” The young black men in the county begin to talk of organizing against the whites and to placate them, the preacher writes a letter to the President of the United States:
I is writin to tell you about us because if you dont come down here or send that army down to do something to free my people they is going to kill every white man and every white woman and every white child in Jacobs County. We slaves down here Mr. President. We been slaves ever since I can remember and I been here sixty years and Granny Jacobs been here more than eighty years and she still a slave. The sheriff and Mr. Jacobs and the sheriffs deputies make us work in the fields and in the house and in the warehouse and on folks farms and in the post office and in the stores and in the jails and everywhere and aint never paid us no money cep when we ask for food or for some clothes or things like that and they dont let us leave Jacobs County. Ifen one of us tries to leave we gets kilt just as quick as swattin a fly we gets kilt. We just found out that colored folks aint slaves nowheres else cep here and we want you to free us.
The letter is smuggled out of the county. There is no reply. But months later, a carful of Federal men arrive in Jacobsville and start asking questions. The sheriff is cagey enough to keep them from discovering too much and concocts a reason to lock the agents up. Unfortunately for him and the rest of the white population of Jacobs County, however, any combustible mixture held too long and under too much pressure is bound to explode. The ending is swift, violent, and ruthless.
Many Thousand Gone is not the black equivalent of The Turner Diaries, however. This is a less a fable than a parable, a story to be told and read not literally but for its lesson. When Lillian Smith reviewed the book for St. Louis Post-Dispatch shortly before her death, she wrote, “It would be a wonderful thing if we had on our streets … storytellers telling long tales to the people. What a story this is to tell! What a soft mercy might creep into dry, hating hearts if only they could feel the poetry of this little book.” Many Thousand Gone is brief — barely more than a hundred pages — crisp, powerful as a gut-punch but told in a cool, matter-of-fact tone. There may be no actual Jacobs County, but in creating it, Ronald Fair illustrated with the precision of a haiku the damage that any inequality too long sustained can wreak upon both the oppressed and their oppressors. It’s not a book whose time has come, sadly. It’s a book whose time has never left.
We Can’t Breathe, by Ronald L. Fair New York: Harper & Row, 1972
Many Thousand Gone, by Ronald L. Fair New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965
I write this piece with a mixture of sadness and disappointment. Sadness because this is the last novel by the remarkable G. E. Trevelyan I have to write about. And disappointment because A War Without a Hero is not a book I would recommend to anyone not interested in becoming a G. E. Trevelyan completist.
Over the last year and a half, I have tracked down, either purchased (usually at greater expense that I’m used to) or copied (thanks to the British Library), read, and written about all eight novels that Trevelyan wrote between 1932 and 1939. And I’ve become convinced that her utter absence from any history or study of the English novel between the two wars has nothing to do with her merit or significance as a writer and everything to do with the tendency of literary academics to stick to well-travelled paths. I’ve contacted several dozen researchers specializing in this period over the last year and in every case had the same responses: ignorance (“Who? Never heard of her.”) and uninterest (“Good luck with your research. Goodbye.”).
G. E. Trevelyan, perhaps more than any writer of the generation that came after Virginia Woolf, followed Woolf’s advice in “A Room of One’s Own.” An only child whose father’s occupation on census forms is always listed as “independent means,” she came down from Oxford, found herself a flat in Kensington and went to work writing novels. Though she once said that she went through three drafts of every novel, she managed to produce eight in the space of as many years and in each case, to produce something that was not in any way like the others. It may have been health problems that kept her from developing a wider circle of connections to the literary world: though she died from injuries sustained when a German bomb hit her building, her death certificate also mentions that she suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis. She didn’t review other people’s books, didn’t get her photo taken at other people’s parties, didn’t travel much, didn’t lose herself to drink, sex, or politics. She sat in her room and wrote.
If she failed, it was not due to half-heartedness. In A War Without a Hero, Trevelyan built upon the experience of writing As It Was in the Beginning, which takes place entirely in the mind of a woman in her dying days and uses the stream of consciousness approach developed by Woolf, Richardson, May Sinclair and others of the generation before hers. Where As It Was involves one character’s thoughts and perceptions, A War interweaves the streams from multiple sources.
Unfortunately, none of these sources is fully convincing — and the story itself implausible if not unbelievable. The book opens as Ann Cavan, a London woman with some money and artistic interests, approaches the tiny Channel Island where she’s decided to lay low while waiting for her divorce decree. In her late twenties or early thirties, attractive, well-dressed and used to good food and fine accommodations, she has for no obvious reason set upon taking a room in a rough cottage on a tiny island accessible from a slightly larger and more populated one only at low tide.
Four people live in the house: Mrs. Hymes, a widow, her sons Matthew and Joshua, fishermen, and Davey, who is blind. They live off the fishing and a few cows and pigs that roam freely around the island. The cottage has no electricity and no running water. The island is enveloped in fog much of the time, rough and rocky all of it. This is not B&B territory.
Once settled in her upstairs room at the cottage, Ann quickly realizes there is nothing to do. She’s not a reader, not a sketcher or painter or whatever her vague artistic inclination might actually manifest itself as. And the Hymes are not much for conversation. Matthew and Joshua spend most of their time out fishing and when on land communicate in grunts and monosyllables. Mrs. Hymes is bitter, tired, and contemptuous of the silly useless woman renting her room. Davey spends his days doing little besides sitting in a chair outside the cottage.
“This is utterly hopeless and sickening and impossible,” Ann thinks early on in the book and it’s this sense that Trevelyan is most effective in expressing. Things like listening for hours to water drip from the gutters:
Water ran into the butt almost continuously. Foghorns boomed without an interval through the darkness. Revolution, earthquake, half London wiped out: lot of difference it would make, she thought bitterly. The drips were joining up, drip drip drip drip and then the pause of a heart-beat. And drip again, and pause, and drip, and drip drip dri-i-p, and a thin, trickling stream.
This is not fertile ground from which any vibrant drama is likely to spring … and it doesn’t. Ann convinces herself that Davey is a prisoner of his family’s ignorance and arranges to take him to London to see if a Harley Street specialist can restore his sight. Once Davey can see, Ann then decides the two of them will marry and break free of Mrs. Hymes’ tyranny.
But then they return to the island and make themselves at home in that upper bedroom. Able to see, Davey is transformed. Once a bore, he’s now a brute. Mrs. Hymes takes revenge by carrying out her own transformation, turning Ann from a woman of the world and into a slave:
Mrs. Hymes slapped their food on the table; she pinched her mouth. And him that’s been brought up so nice. Never let to get into no rough ways. She saw Annie standing, looking at him. “What you standing there for?” Gaping at him that you’ve done your best to drag him down and down. Done your best you have, and aren’t fit to black his boots. “Get out and shut up the chickens.”
And so it goes. Life on the island is nasty, brutish, and endless. Everything is painted in shades of grey. There is a lot of staring and hopelessness. A War Without a Hero is like the written equivalent of a bad art film. Fin.
Reviews in the Thirties tended to run under 300 words and offer little insight into a book, but in the case of A War Without a Hero, the reviewers took its measure with deadly accuracy:
• A. G. Macdonell, The Bystander:
It is very seldom that a true-blue, hard-boiled reviewer, born and bred in the trade — a tough baby, in fact — reads a book that makes him want to go and shoot himself. But if ever a book was liable to induce insanity, melancholia, tendencies towards suicide, inflammation of the eyes, and general Dostoievsky-complex, it is A War Without a Hero by Miss G. E. Trevelyan. Consider the plot for yourselves. Just run your eye over it and let me know by post-card, duly stamped, whether you think it is a reasonably likely one. An artistically-minded lady wants to be divorced from her husband. During the six-months time-lag she decides to go to a remote Channel Island, and there she lodges with a fearful family of illiterate yokels. One of them, David, a lad of twenty, is blind, and the artistic lady decides to marry him. This she does. Her life is then devoted to looking after this fiendishly dull, semi-witted youth and to washing up dishes and scrubbing floors in mid-Channel. I ask you. The real trouble about the book is that the moment the arty lady decides to marry the blind youth, all interest vanishes. You simply cannot believe that such a thing is possible, and the moment you find yourself doubting the possibility of a plot you find yourself either bored to tears, as with Miss Trevelyan, or excited beyond works, as with the late Mr. Edgar Wallace.
• Peter Quennell, The New Statesman:
A War Without a Hero is an intelligent book, but not very readable. Miss Trevelyan certainly knows how to write; but I wish that she did not mistake abruptness for vividness, and that her characters’ thoughts were not perpetually cropping up in broken bits and pieces of interior monologue scattered broadcast all over the printed text. Her story would be twice as impressive if it were half as long. Incidentally, the complete aimlessness of the central character — a young woman of means who marries the blind boy she discovers on an imaginary Channel Island — lends a sort of reflected aimlessness to the whole narrative…. After almost four hundred gloomy, capable and unsparing pages, the reader’s spirits have declined to their lowest ebb.
• The Observer:
If Dostoievsky had laid a wager that he could write an even gloomier book than The Brothers Karamazov, and if, while trying to win the wager, he had been attacked by biliousness, gout, arthritis, and neuralgia, and if he had lost all his money, and if he had been sent back to Sideria, he might well have written A War Without a Hero. And if he had, he would undoubtedly have won his bet hands down.
• Leonora Eyles, Times Literary Supplement:
In each of her previous books Miss G. E. Trevelyan used her talent to delve into morbidity to such a degrees that they fascinated while repelling the reader. In her latest novel, A War Without a Hero, the same talent for atmosphere is there, but we get very little of the compassion and humanity that lightened the others. And the story is so incredible — even more incredible than that of the woman and the ape [Appius and Virginia] — that it sometimes tasks the reader to go on with it…. In this book, as in the others, the reader gets a sense of unendurable spiritual claustrophobia, a sense of life lived in unutterable degradation of mind and body from which there is no escape. The style is very difficult; sometimes it becomes so allusive as to be hardly comprehensible. Once again Miss Trevelyan has given us an insight into things that seem to find their real place in a psychiatrists’s notebook.
• Francis Iles, The Daily Telegraph:
In A War Without a Hero, Miss G. E. Trevelyan set herself a difficult task: to depict a marriage between a lady and an oaf, and the slow deterioration of the lady to the oaf’s level. The task was too difficult; for never for an instant does the book carry conviction…. None of this will do. Ann, as she is first shown to us, would (a) never have married the young oaf, (b) if she had done so, would never have stayed with him, to be buffeted and bullied. There is a D. H. Lawrence vague fog over it all, in which ideas become personified and actions stultified because real human character is disregarded.
As an experiment in fictional technique, A War Without a Hero is a failure. As a book … well, it’s waiting there in the British Library and a few others around the world for the next time a Trevelyan completist comes along.
A War Without a Hero, by G. E. Trevelyan London: Martin Secker, 1935
Body swapping, where two characters end up in each other’s bodies is such a staple of comic and fantastic theater, fiction, and film that it’s got its own Wikipedia page, which links in turn to a list of over 100 examples of body swapping in media. Many of the modern interpretations can be traced back to F. Anstey’s 1882 novel, Vice Versa. Usually the exchange occurs between sharply contrasting individuals: a father and his son (Vice Versa); a mother and daughter (Freaky Friday); a boy and a girl (The Swap). In the case of Strange Journey, the opposites in question are a middle-class suburban English housewife (Polly) and a landed/titled member of the ruling class (Lady Elizabeth).
Polly and Tom live in one of the new garden cities ringing London that began popping up after the First World War. As much as she loves Tom and her two children, she does tire of the endless demands that other people make on her time and energy. One day, as she stands at her front gate watching a queue of traffic idling behind a bit of road work, she sees an elegant woman sitting inside a Rolls Royce and looking out idly:
Suddenly I felt a longing to change places with her, to get into that big, comfortable looking car, lean back in the soft cushions I felt sure that it contained, while the chauffeur made it glide away through the dusk to some pleasant house where there would be efficient servants and tea waiting, with a silver teapot, thin china, and perhaps hot scones, nice deep arm chairs to sit in, and magazines lying on the table.
The traffic moves, the Rolls passes, and Polly goes back into the house. A week or so later, a picture of a similar Rolls in a magazine brings back that daydream. But suddenly, Polly feels a moment of dizziness, after which her head clears and she looks down at her hands.
They are not hers. They are hands “of the sort that I should have loved to possess, white and slim, with long fingers and shining almond-shaped nails.” She finds herself in exactly the sort of place she’d dreamt of: fireplace roaring, walls lined with portraits, battle scenes, and books, and a butler bringing in the afternoon tea. She manages to mask her complete disorientation, but quickly finds herself unable to come up with the appropriate responses to the older woman sitting with her. Worse, two large dogs that wander in bristle and growl at her. “Good Lord, one would think they were seeing ghosts,” the woman remarks. After a few more moments of panic, Polly finds herself back home again.
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Over the following months, she finds herself transported to the grand country house again and again, and she begins to suss out a little about the woman whose skin she’s in. Her name is Lady Elizabeth. She is married to Major Forrester — Gerald — who appears to enjoy flaunting his interest in several different beautiful and flirtatious women. She is an avid shooter and rides to the hounds, skills which Polly utterly lacks, leading to embarrassing and awkward moments with Lady Elizabeth’s acquaintances. The shooting in particular proves particularly disturbing:
All those people who seemed quite pleasant and ordinary had taken the massacre as a matter of course. Only I had never seen things killed, except on the films, when naturally one knows that it does not hurt…. Of course I had known that such things took place; that the meat people eat gets knocked on the head, and chickens have their necks wrung, but I had never visualised what slaughter was actually like. I simply had never thought about it.
Polly struggles to navigate her passages through Lady Elizabeth’s life — just which of the dozens of bedrooms in the house is hers, for example? She also realizes how little she actually knows about the simplest protocols and assumptions of the gentry. £1,000 a year, for example, seems a fortune to her; it is, however, considered one step from the poorhouse for any young man hoping to marry into a good family. On the other hand, she’s a whiz at bridge, which astonishes everyone who thought Lady Elizabeth looked on all forms of card play with distain.
She also soon realizes that her exchanges are mutual. When she’s transported into Lady Elizabeth’s skin, the Lady finds herself in Polly’s. She’s dismayed to learn that her children love the stories of castles and knights their mother has been telling them, stumped to come up with a good explanation of how she can suddenly play the piano with ease. Worse, while she feels certain the Lady Elizabeth views her own husband Gerald with a mixture of dislike and disinterest, she begins to suspect the Lady of having designs on Tom.
Eventually, Polly and Lady Elizabeth — as themselves — make contact and attempt to come to an understanding of how the mechanism linking them operates. Much of it seems to depend on a sort of synchronized wishful thinking, just the kind of idle daydreaming that led to their first experience. Simply arranging to meet, however, brings Polly to an understanding of just how constrained her lot is compared to Lady Elizabeth’s. “Gerald would never ask what she had been doing, and she could go to a picture gallery or a concert and nobody would think it at all queer.” Polly, on the other hand, sees that “I really had no private life at all”: “If I should feel inclined to do something quite ordinary like that, by myself, everybody in my neighbourhood would wonder why.”
The most interesting the twist in Strange Journey is not the details of how the two women are able to exchange lives — and they do, at least for a while, manage to use it at will — but the author’s attempt to pull off her own swap.
From The Bystander, 3 April 1935.
Maud Cairnes — as The Tatler and several other society-radar magazines revealed soon after the publication of Strange Journey — was a pseudonym. She was not a literarily-inclined middle class woman but the Lady Maud Kathleen Cairns Plantagenet Hastings Curzon-Herrick, eldest daughter of the 14th Earl of Huntingdon and wife of Mr. William Montagu Curzon-Herrick, whose own grand house, Beaumanor Hall, and its surrounding estate had been in his family for over 300 years. When William and Lady Kathleen were married in 1916, their wedding was called “The Event of the Week” and featured in a full-page spread in The Illustrated London News. Going by the story in The Times, I counted fourteen lords and ladies, at least eight counts and countesses, three viscountesses, one earl (Huntingdon, of course), and one each baroness, duchess, and marchioness.
A Shoot at Beaumanor Park, from The Illustrated London News, 1925. Lady Kathleen Curzon-Herrick is third from left.
Lady Elizabeth’s world was Lady Kathleen’s. Her father the Earl, and later she and Mr. Curzon-Herrick, regularly hosted great shooting slaughters at their estates. Lady Kathleen was as much at home in the saddle, if perhaps not cutting quite the same slim, elegant figure in her riding gear. She frequented the ballet, theater, and concert hall, saw her name in Court Circulars, set an example for housewives like Polly with her reputation for wit, grace … and heavy smoking.
Lady Kathleen Curzon-Herrick in riding gear, from The Illustrated London News 1928.
She was also long an amateur at the writing game. Her sister Grace recalled Kathleen writing plays the three Hastings girls would perform while still being taught at home, and in the mid-1920s, the Lyceum’s Stage Club put on a production of Kathleen’s play, “It is Expedient.” Strange Journey was her first novel, but its reviews in both England and the U.S. would have pleased most seasoned writers. In The New Statesman, Cyril Connolly — after savaging the more established Kay Boyle’s novel The Next Bride (“a very annoying book”) — praised it as “an original and charming story; a very good idea is neatly worked out, and there is something fresh and delightful about this first novel.” The Illustrated London News repaid Lady Kathleen for her many appearances on its pages by calling her book “fresh and odd, and an unusually good first novel.”
The Spectator’s anonymous reviewer, after saying that Strange Journey was “a remarkable little book: a good novel on a theme that is pure housemaid’s delight,” identified its greatest strength:
It does verge on the romantic; but it is saved, and made, by being told in the practical words of Polly Wilkinson herself. Her gaffes on her various translations into the body of Lady Elizabeth, her suburbanisms, her anguish when she finds herself suddenly on horseback in the middle of the hunting field, are all related with extreme common sense. One likes Polly Wilkinson.
Considering that the voice of Polly Wilkinson is the voice of a Lady Elizabeth translating herself into the mind of someone she could only have experienced or imagined at some remove, Lady Kathleen’s success in her first attempt at fiction is even more remarkable. And the down-to-earth tone of Polly Wilkinson’s voice is what prevents Strange Journey from sinking into cringe-worthy farce and keeps it at the level of simple human comedy:
She then opened a big jewel case in which there were several tiers. I thought it looked like a real treasure chest, when I saw brooches and necklaces, bracelets, ear-rings and rings, all in velvet compartments. I just stared. Late for dinner or not I had no intention of hurrying over my choice. I took a sort of collar of emeralds and diamonds, and put it round my neck; it looked wonderful. Then I found some emerald and diamond ear-rings, long ones, and some bangles; I put two or three of these and a big diamond brooch like a spray, that cheered up the dress a lot.
Then I saw the pearls — three long ropes of them — and one shorter one. I put the ropes on and looked happily at my reflection in the mirror.
“I think I want something on my head now,” said I, wondering if it was a grand enough party for a tiara.
Foley, who had been looking rather stunned, smiled respectfully as though I had made a joke. I gathered that it was not a tiara occasion.
Lady Kathleen made just one other excursion into novel-writing. She followed up a few years later with The Disappearing Duchess (1939), which required less of an imaginative stretch. It told of how the Duchess of Darenth went missing from a French villa while on a visit in the summer of 1913 and how an ex-Secret Serviceman found her. Sold and reviewed as a conventional mystery, it earned brief, respectful reviews: “A neat and pleasantly readable story” (TLS); “cunningly compiled to sound plausible to our expectant ears” (The Daily Telegraph).
From this point forward, Lady Kathleen faded slowly from sight. Her husband died suddenly in 1945 and much of the land around Beaumanor Hall had to be sold off to pay his death duties. When the Curzon-Herrick name appeared in the press, it was more likely to be about her daughter. She died in Hove in February 1965 at the age of 71, earning no more than a one-line notice in The Times.
Strange Journey, by Maud Cairnes (pseudonym of Lady Kathleen Hastings Curzon-Herrick) London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1935 New York: Norton, 1935
Few things give you as good a picture of life at a particular time and place as seeing what people considered satire. Satire with legs is tough to write. Barbs that seemed razor sharp at the time can strike today’s reader as dull — or worse, off-target or unsuccessful to an extent that can be excruciating to watch as a rerun. What was meant to poke the funnybone can seem like an unwelcome jab in the ribs. George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea is an example of the dangers of consuming satire too long after its sell-by date.
By the Sea is set in the remote seaside town of Plankton. When I read the book, I was sure that Plankton was somewhere along the Central California coast, but many of its contemporary reviewers were convinced it was in New England. Albee offers no good geographic reference points to anchor it, so let’s say we’re both right.
Plankton’s original name — as not even the Indians found the place habitable before the crazy white men showed up — was Zion’s Golden Strand. A religious sect named the Semi-Submersion Redemptionists, whose men wore beards like Spanish moss and women dressed “like adders in calico,” settled there around 1900 to practice their faith in peace. Which they did for several decades, until their stricture against sex in any form began to whittle their number down to a handful. Then, during Prohibition, the rumrunners moved in, using it as a quiet and safe to land fast boats full of illegal hooch. After FDR eliminated the profit margin, the town was left for the strays and stragglers to occupy.
There is Bonesetter, a retired seaman who runs the town’s drug store and lives in a loose menage with his wife and her ex-stripper sister, Zarafa. There is Manuel Ortega, known to everyone as “Spic” (and here we begin to see the stretchmarks in the satire), who lost an arm bringing a load of whisky ashore and stayed to run the general store. There are the Tatum sisters, two retired librarians, and their mother, whose dementia takes the peculiar form of believing herself to be General George Custer. And there are a handful of artists, sculptors, and miscellaneous Bohemians.
The diverse collection of Planktonians is united on one point: that success as defined by the world outside is an anathema. “The human race, friends, cannot stand success,” Bonesetter tells his fellow townspeople. “Prosperity makes monsters of us all. Plankton has never known prosperity, and never will. Plankton is a serene place, a joyful place, an undiscovered place; what the literary critics call a happy valley. Let us keep it that way.”
Of all the misfits, none is quite so ill-fitted as Myrthis Lathrop. Having been sent to university to study law by his father, Myrthis rejected the notion that commerce was a game he needed to play. “The world is a mighty tough place, my fine young liberal,” he father told him, “as you’ll find out when you try to make a dollar.” To which Myrthis replied, “The world is a mighty tough place because it’s full of men trying to make a dollar.” He decided instead to move to Plankton, where he could live in one of the old abandoned Redemptionist houses for nothing, and be a bum, making a few bucks by selling samples of plants, sea creatures, and insects to his old university’s laboratories. When we first meet him, Myrthis is spending his day lying on the ground, taking notes on the second day of the Ant War.”22 blacks still on their feet, to 112 browns.”
Myrthis is himself a bit of a parasite. His fellow Planktonians feed him, fuel him, clothe him, fix his plumbing, and when necessary, save him from drowning. As little as they aspire to material success, Myrthis’s obstinate aimlessness irritates many and maddens Bonesetter in particular. He concocts a scheme to marry Myrthis off to Vitalia, a scroungy young woman recently arrived in town.
Hoping this will force Myrthis to settle down, Bonesetter is disappointed. Myrthis and Vitalia decide to establish a newspaper, despite the fact that they have no printing press and can’t write — or at least, spell. Undismayed, Myrthis types up the first issue with its front page story, “YOUR FRIEND AND MINE THE COKROACH.” Myrthis is not just pro-roach: he is a zealous roachist. “Those of us who are a bit too sure that we are the final and fairest flower of Creation will do well to reflect upon the fact that the cokroach has been here longer than we have and will be here when we are all through.” When the universe comes to its whimpering end, he assures his readers, “it will be the roach, not Man, who will stand on tip-toe on the last charred Reef of Earth and cry farewell my brothers farewell farewell.”
Somehow, Myrthis’s piece gets into the hands of a desperate syndication agent, and the next thing you know, all of America is calling for more. Myrthis and Vitalia are swept off to New York City to make the rounds of television game shows, news shows, and talk shows, all of which offer Albee opportunities to satirize What’s My Line, The Tonight Show, and other artefacts of the time that have now grown quaint or forgotten.
P. G. Wodehouse described By the Sea, By the Sea as “like a sort of innocent Peyton Place,” which may be more accurate now than when he said it. Peyton Place long ago lost its scandalous reputation, and so, by extension, has By the Sea. When the book was marketed, the favored hashtags were #lusty and #Rabelaisian, neither of which could manage to raise the lightest eyebrow today. Yet some of the reviewers were still able to wind themselves into a righteous tizzy about it. Writing in The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Martin Quigley practically issued an invitation for a book-burning: “This is a rather pleasant and funny little summer story that has been spoiled by self-conscious and witless dirty talk. The publisher and the author are trying to justify and exploit the dirty talk on the grounds that it is Rabelaisian.” Scoring points with the chauvinists in his audience, he added, “It is remindful of a sissy trying to pass himself off as a tough guy.”
Barely two hundred pages long, By the Sea, By the Sea could easily sit at one end of the bookshelf alongside Tobacco Road and Cannery Row — neither of which, IMHO, carry much more than trace amounts of the humor and raucousness that made them favorites of a generation or two of mostly male readers. It takes a lot more to stand out as a drop-out from society in today’s world.
Not that George Sumner Albee hadn’t earned his stripes as an outsider. He’d taken to the road early in life, traveling around the world in his twenties, stepping in to save Hemingway from getting pasted by a boxer in Key West in the thirties, taking a house in Cuba’s own Key West, Varadero, in the 1950s. He was a connoisseur of the laidback expat lifestyle, capable of writing a long and gushing letter in praise of Under the Volcano to Malcolm Lowry. Lowry, replying from an unhappy spell in England, was somewhat envious: “I have an impression that Cuba must be a marvellous place in which to live, and pursue the Better Life, the Better Thing, and indeed celebrate generally the Life Electric.” Finding the political climate in England not much more enlightened that that of Eisenhower’s US, he added, “… the only thing one could do is to put one’s school cap back on and read Wordsworth, or perhaps Henry Adams, until it all blows over. Meantime it is likely that no contribution will be made to human freedom.”
Albee had made his living as something of an acceptable rebel, a gentle satirist. His first novel, Young Robert, was a semi-autobiographical jab at his own young self, a story about a San Francisco youth full of the spirit of the Gold Rush and progress with a capital P. Although he published a couple of softer, more nostalgic novels in the 1950s, he earned his living as a writer of magazine fiction back in the days when that was still possible.
Albee’s magazine fiction was often satire a soft S. His 1948 story for Cosmopolitan, “The Next Voice You Hear,” played out a premise he came up with over lunch with a friend. “You know,” he said, “wouldn’t it be something if God would come on the radio and give people such a bad scare they’d wake up and behave themselves!” He repeated the story to his friend, Cosmopolitan’s fiction editor, Dale Eunson, and Eunson told Albee the magazine would buy the story if he wrote it.
George Sumner Albee’s story, “The Next Voice You Hear,” from Hearst International-Cosmopolitan, August 1948.
In the finished product, the voice of God goes out over every radio station on Earth one day: “A plan of creation ought by rights to go forward under its own rules, but you, dear children of the Sun’s third planet, are so near to destroying yourselves I must step in. I shall spend this week with you.” As you might expect, this news sends everyone but the most deeply devout into a panic, but God’s subsequent broadcasts are written in a wholly New Testament voice. When he takes leave on the following Saturday, his voice has “the gentleness, the fondness, the inifinite patience of the voice of an older brother teaching a beloved younger brother to skate, or make a kite, or whittle”: “A planet is a school. Live, dear children, and learn.”
Poster for the 1950 movie, The Next Voice You Hear
“The Next Voice You Hear” was made into a film with the same name in 1950, starring James Whitmore and Nancy Davis (soon to be Reagan). Producer Dore Schary wrote an account of the making of the film, Case History of a Movie, soon after. James M. Cain, reviewing the book for the New York Times, wrote that “it gives a picture of movies that is almost definitive, with a singularly candid viewpoint.”
Illustration from The Saturday Evening Post, February 9, 1957.
Albee was a flower child before the name existed. In his 1957 story, “The Mysterious Mr. Todd,” an updated version of Twain’s Mysterious Stranger pleas for a town council to turn a patch of land into a park instead of a prison:
There are people in this world who like prisons. They like them because prisons lock up souls, and they believe in locking up souls. They want to see all of us in uniform, marching along in lock-step, saying, “Yes, boss; yes, Fuhrer; yes, commissar.” A prison is the sorriest place in the world, sorrier than any cemetery, because in prison you bury souls. Now what does a park stand for? A park is a scale model of what we hope we’ll turn the whole danged world into someday. A park is a place where we can walk under trees, with flowers around us, and meet our neighbors and shake their hands and ask them how things are going and meet ourselves, too, maybe, on a quiet path, and find out who we are. A park is a freespace for free men. That’s why we’ve got to choose it every time — every time! Because the men in prison are the men who never had parks.
Illustration from “Let’s Put Women in Their Place,” by George Sumner Albee, from The Saturday Evening Post, December 16, 1961.
But not all of Albee’s satire reads quite so benignly today. In a 1961 piece for The Saturday Evening Post, for example, his tongue was perhaps too deeply buried in his cheek for his self-mockery to come through. Titled, “Let’s Put Women in Their Place,” he criticizes the U.S. for being the only country where women are not banished when men sit down to talk. He sorts women into seven categories such as “The Frustrated Actress” and “The Compulsive Talker.” He then lays out a program by which husbands can retrain their wives: “Take her to court trials. Take her to visit a chemical laboratory. Play Bach to her. Read her a bit of Kant, showing her how he extrudes one idea from another. From time to time, hit her.” With a little patience and persistence, he assures the reader, “in a year’s time you may find you have a chastened, thoughtful, well-mannered, reticent woman who can actually join in a conversation without destroying it.” And if she happens to slip into her old habits, “Check her promptly. ‘How would you like a rap on the mouth?’ is a query that startles the sturdiest woman.”
This is impossible to read without cringing. If you ever wondered what men like Mad Men’sDon Draper were reading, it was far more likely to be this than the poetry of Frank O’Hara, I’m afraid. George Sumner Albee may have been lucky that he died in 1965: I’m not sure how he would have fared when the Women’s Lib movement got going.
In 1974, by the way, Paramount Studios announced that producer Jerry Bruckheimer would be filming By the Sea with a script by Steve Tesich, but the project appears to have stalled soon afterward.
By the Sea, By the Sea was recommended to me by Kate Peacocke, who wrote from New Zealand, saying her father “loved its zany humour and its gentle wisdom, and so do I.” For me, the book lands halfway between unjustly and justly neglected. If you do read it, it’s best to look for the spirit of “Mr. Todd” and ignore the brief flashes of “Let’s Put Women in Their Place.”
Other Reviews
• Vernon Fane, The Sphere
… a happy, bawdy and very funny novel indeed; Mr. George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea, which I propose to re-read often and certainly not to lend, unless it is to benighted travellers unable to get to a bookshop. Mr. P. G. Wodehouse has gone on record as finding it one of the funniest books he has read for ages and full of charm, too. He adds that it is like a sort of innocent Peyton Place, as contradictory a statement as the old master can ever have emitted. Be that as it may, he is certainly right about its being funny, and since that is a quality fairly thinkly parcelled out in contemporary fiction, I can recommend it to those readers who are free, broadminded and twenty-one.
• Dave Lipman, The Kansas City Star
If Aldous Huxley had stumbled across Plankton, he would not have had to search around bravely for new worlds. He could have loosened his tie and luxuriated in the company of somebody like Myrthis Lathrop…. There’s a theory, unproved, that a man who uses shingles from his own roof for firewood is a man worth meeting. It follows that a book in which such a man plays a leading role is a book worth reading.
• Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Guardian
the funniest book I have read in years: that is to say it is not “a riot of fun” but witty; satirical, not smart; adult, not “adult”; and like funny books from Candide to Lucky Jim, basically serious…. A young man’s book, presumably, which I wholly recommend.
• Lynn Hopper, The Indianopolis Star
Light, brassy, with serious undertones, and definitely on the wild side. A new book with more charm than most summer fiction is George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea.
By the Sea, By the Sea, by George Sumner Albee New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960 London: Victor Gollancz, 1960
When poet Charles Reznikoff died in 1976, his wife, Myrie Syrkin, gave his papers to publisher John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, which had begun collecting and issuing his poetry and other writings. A while later, Martin called Syrkin to say he’d found the manuscript of a completed novel titled The Manner Music. She knew nothing of it — and Reznikoff had usually discussed anything he was working on with her. What’s more, Martin added, it’s a Hollywood novel. For a couple of years in the late 1930s, Reznikoff had worked in Hollywood as a researcher and assistant to Albert Lewin, an acquaintance from his Brooklyn youth who’d been a protege of Irving Thalberg and worked his way up to producer. Maurice Zolotow later compared the discovery to finding a T. S. Eliot novel about banks or one by Wallace Stevens about insurance.
The Hollywood label has stuck with The Manner Music ever since. In reality, saying The Manner Music is a Hollwood novel is like saying Moby Dick is a Nantucket novel: not untrue but generally missing the point. Milton Hindus, a friend of Reznikoff and a stalwart supporter, came closer to the mark in noting the parallels between the book and Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. Both stories involve two men: one a prosperous pragmatist, the other an ascetic idealist. In both stories, the narrator is nameless; in both, he is at a loss to understand the other man’s obsession. Both are case studies demonstrating the observation of Reznikoff’s friend William Carlos Williams that “The pure products of America go crazy.”
Reznikoff’s Bartleby is a composer named Jude Dalsimer. Like Reznikoff, Dalsimer works and lives alone in Hollywood while working for a studio producer, known as Paul Pasha in the book, so that his wife could stay in New York and keep her job as a teacher. He doesn’t mingle with the other writers, avoids most parties. He rents a room in a little hotel in Santa Monica, far out the tramline from the studios. Like Reznikoff, he prefers to walk, usually for miles along the beach, down the coast as far as Redondo and Hermosa Beach.
In his introduction, Robert Creeley observes that the two characters in The Manner Music resemble two aspects of Reznikoff himself. As Reznikoff did for a time after leaving college, the narrator is a traveling salesman in dry goods, and his work allows him to meet his friend Jude in both New York and Hollywood. Like Reznikoff, who held down a steady job as a social workder for years, the narrator accepts the monotony and occasional humiliations of the work in return for its security: “Like all salesmen, I suppose, I am very patient. We soon learn to wait for hours in anterooms and to send our cards again and again and still to be pleasant and to smile.” The narrator accepts listening to Jude performing his music on the cheap piano in his apartment in the same manner. “I listened patiently then for an hour or more — most likely less — and again heard nothing that moved me.” Jude’s music isn’t to his taste — not like band music or “an old fellow singing old songs for pennies in the backyards.”
Charles Reznikoff in the late 1960s
Jude Dalsimer, on the other hand, represents Reznikoff’s artistic self. Though he wrote and published his poetry throughout much of his working life, Reznikoff never gained much recognitition for it until very late and he tended not to discuss it with many of his acquaintances. As a fellow Brooklyn poet, Harvey Shapiro once wrote, “Reznikoff devoted his entire life to verse, and whatever he did is characterized by meticulously fine and painstaking craftsmanship.” None of his poems, Hindus observed, “were made merely in order to ‘sell and sell quickly.’ They are without exception patient labors of love, pure skill and artistic integrity, and they seem bound, in time, to find fit readers (however few or many) to respond to their muted appeal.”
Jude is not particularly concerned with the success of his music: “As to whether it will be sold or not, sung or played, that is really not my business. I am not going to bother about that too much: my job is to write it. That no one else can do.” If anything, he is deeply suspicious of the American culture of consumerism. He tells of a dinner party at which a German refugee, a former concentration camp prisoner, was asked to speak. Instead of talking about his experiences in Germany, however, he told the story of a friend who’d committed suicide soon after arriving in America. “Why? Why did he do it?” the man asked. “I will tell you why. Because of the indifference here!” Late in the book, when destitute, homeless, and hopeless, he burns all his compositions in a trashcan in Central Park.
Both Dalsimer and Reznikoff were also great walkers and listeners. Reznikoff’s letters to Syrkin are full of things seen on his walks:
A study in tempo of conversation: a pretty big boy and a little boy are walking together. The little boy is really tagging after the other one- eager to be a fellow. The older fellow is wearing a peculiar hat and the younger fellow asks, “What kind of hat is that?” No answer. “What kind of hat is that, Stanley?” emphasizing the name. Stanley answers cheerfully, “A monkey hat.” “What kind of hat is that?” the little fellow asks again, not what kind of hat is that (namely a “monkey hat”) but what kind of a hat is that (namely, the hat you have on). And again Stanley says curtly and cheerfully, pleased with his own wit, “A monkey hat.” But, after a pause he adds, “A small round sailor hat.” Specific enough, to be sure, but the little fellow now says aloud to himself, “A monkey hat,” wondering, perhaps, if it is really a kind of hat and if so what an attractive name for a hat and could he get one …
Dalsimer’s music is also drawn from what he sees on his walks. The narrator compares one piece to the sound of the wind “blowing down a street on an April evening, rattling windows and making the swinging signs of the stores squeak.” When Jude tries to recount recent incidents, the narrator says, “‘Better yet,’ and here I lied as all salesmen lie and flatter, ‘play them.'” “Well,” Jude replies, “I was taking a walk,” and he proceeds to play.
Some of the walks in The Manner Music show us a country deep in the grips of the Depression:
As I walked along the drive again, I saw a man coming towards me; a poor man by his clothes: he had no overcoat and his trousers were of a cheap goods without the tailor’s crease. We were alone, for the day was cold and the drive was windy. I saw that he had stopped and was watching me furtively; a man of forty or fifty with an honest face, I thought, lined by cared. When I had passed, I could see that he stooped to pick up something — probably a cigar butt or cigarette that someone about to step on a bus had thrown away. Perhaps he had been ashamed to stoop for it in front of me.
The narrator has his last encounter with Jude in an automat in Manhattan. “I noticed that a seam in the collar had parted and another in the shoulder and that the thread that edged the buttonhole in the lapel was unraveling.” Asked where he’s staying Jude replies, “I have the airiest room in New York.” Only later does the narrator understand what this means.
A number of Reznikoff’s poems make their way into The Manner Music — or perhaps vice-versa. In the novel, for example, the narrator recalls,
When I left the theatre it was raining. I went to my hotel through the wholesale district, the streets of which were empty at night, rain or no rain, although busy enough by day when offices and lofts were full of people. I passed an old woman selling newspapers from the shelter of a doorway. As I bought one, I glanced down at her feet.
“You were looking at my feet, weren’t you?” she asked. “Aren’t they terrible—so big in these rubbers. But it is better to have your feet look big than to get them wet,’ she added, still dubious. “A man lent them to me. They are rubbers for a man and I had to tie them with a string. But better than to be sick, eh?”
I took shelter in the doorway, too, to get out of the rain for a moment. “But how big my feet look in them,” she went on. I wondered as I listened, Does this old woman selling newspapers in the rain on this lonely corner still think it matters how her feet look—big or small? I looked at her again: whatever she had been only life was left — and vanity.
This shows up again in a passage from Inscriptions: 1944-1956:
It was raining and the street empty. I passed an old woman selling newspapers. As I bought one I glanced at her feet. “So big in these rubbers. But it’s better than to get them wet,” she added, dubious, “and to be sick. A man lent them. They are rubbers for a man, not me, and I have to time them on with a string. But how big my feet look!” I looked at her again: only this was left — vanity.
Sirkin thought her husband might have kept the book a secret because of its portrait of Jude Dalsimer’s wife: “A petulant, pretty, notably unsympathetic female, a Zionist, a high school teacher who tactlessly keeps complaining about her fatigue and lets her talented, unappreciated husband end his poverty-striken quest in Bellevue. A roman-à-clef with a vengeance!” Reading Reznikoff’s Selected Letters, however, one sees that much of it was drawn from his letters to her. In September 1939, for example, as he saw his job with Albert Lewin about to come to an end, he wrote:
At lunch, and we go to lunch together every day, I am silent for long stretches and obviously comfortably so; now he makes conversation, tells stories I have heard before, and which he feels, somewhat uncomfortably that I have heard him tell; they are not particularly good stories, for example, how he dined with a certain friend and this friend engaged in a quarrel with somebody at another table, who was then insignificant but is now the head of a studio—a great man; I listen politely and think with some satisfaction that now I can make a suitable reply.
In The Manner Music, this becomes a lunch between Jude Dalsimer and Paul Pasha:
Paul and he went to the studio each day, but did nothing, waiting for the next move by the heads of the studio. They went out to lunch together, daily, for Paul no longer had any appointments. There was a change between them — slight but perceptible to both. Now that the relation of master and man was about to end — most likely in a week or two — they became equals again. At lunch Jude was generally silent. Comfortably so. It was Paul who tried to make conversation, who told stories which Jude had heard and which Paul felt, uncomfortably, that Jude had heard him tell.
Myrie Sirkin suspected that he wrote The Manner Music after William Carlos Williams suggested that the exercise might help him overcome a writer’s block he was experiencing in the late 1940s. “Perhaps it was the writing of this novel which enabled Reznikoff to overcome what appears to have been a psychic or spiritual blockage (whatever the causes were) to rediscover his ancient springs, to return to poetry,” Anthony Rudolf later speculated. This should not, however, diminish the value of The Manner Music. It is, in the words of Milton Hindus, “a small, multi-faceted gem” that deserves its place on the shelf of great American short novels alongside Bartleby.
The Manner Music, by Charles Reznikoff Santa Barara: The Black Sparrow Press, 1977
When Eliza Marian Butler, who published as E. M. Butler, died in November 1959, her Times obituary noted, among her many accomplishments, that “She also published two not very good novels.” Daylight in a Dream was the first, and I hope here to demonstrate that the Times writer was not only tactless but wrong.
The story in Daylight in a Dream reminded me a bit of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Solder and Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. In all three books, a character is confronted by the uncomfortable fact that they’ve fundamentally misunderstood some key aspect of their past — the kind of realization that shakes a person to the roots. In this case, however, the fiction is also an attempt by its author to look back on her experiences — in particular Butler’s experiences during World War One — through the eyes of an alter ego.
Butler’s fictional self, Miss Rawlinson, is known and feared among the other faculty at Arcady Teaching College as “Old Raw.” “Her behaviour, her silences, her very pronunciation and choice of words implied a tacit criticism of their standards of conduct.” When they all relapse “one and all into mental undress” at the end of a hard day, she holds herself erect and aloof. She refuses to engage in gossip or impugn the good character and motives of the Principal, Miss Cardigan. “You ought to be governess to the Vere de Veres, that’s what you should be,” one of them snips sarcastically. [The Vere de Veres refers to a family of stratospheric nobility invented in a Tennyson poem, the source of the line “Kind hearts are more than coronets/and simple faith than Norman blood.”]
The very qualities that alienate “Old Raw” from her common room peers were what endeared her to the women’s nursing unit she served with on the Eastern Front in Russia in 1916-17. They were “fascinated by her phraseology, by her excessive personal modesty, by her manners, by her morals, by everything that was hers.” Soon after her arrival, someone refers to her as “Heart of Oak” and this quickly becomes her universal pet-name, “Oakey Darling.” Her Red Cross commander recommends her to Dr. Everet, the head of the unit, as “a capable mechanic, as steady as a rock, hasn’t a nerve in her body or one flighty thought in her head.”
Dr. Elsie Inglis in the uniform of the Scottish Woman’s Hospital
Dr. Everet is Butler’s fictional substitute for Dr. Elsie Inglis, the Scottish surgeon and suffragette who established the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service at the start of World War One. The SWFHS organized and deployed field hospitals manned by women volunteers near the front lines in France, Romania, Russia, Macedonia, and Serbia. Inglis led the mission to Russia, which E. M. Butler joined as a translator and driver in 1916.
Already fluent in German and French and working as an assistant lecturer at Newnham College, Butler added a third language to make herself useful in the war effort. As she later wrote in her autobiography Paper Boats (1959) (available on the Open Library), “I set about learning Russian as a first step to getting out to Russia with the Red Cross or in any other way.” The Red Cross took her word that she could speak Russian and assigned her to escort four nurses down to the SWH unit already in place in Bessarabia (now part of Moldova), traveling via Norway, Sweden, Finland and down through much of White Russia and the Ukraine.
Along the way, she had an unsettling encounter with a seer while waiting to change trains in St. Petersburg. “Kakoe narod? (What people?),” the woman asked Butler. “Angliski,” she replied. “Ah,” the woman exclaimed, “Haroshi narod! (A fine people).” The woman told her to listen, then recited this list of names: “Kathleen Theresa Blake, Maude Juhemie, Rose Georgina, Theobald Blake, Fitzwalter, Francis James.” Despite the mispronunciation, Butler recognized the names of her six brothers and sisters. Butler, who later wrote an influential book on Ritual and Magic (1949), was always open to supernatural phenomena and accepted the woman’s instruction to “Go where you are waited for,” despite the warnings of the nurses accompanying her. Butler later claimed that the ghost of her first biographical subject Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau came to her while she was studying his papers and promised to make his handwriting decipherable.
Butler described her time at the front as “the happiest in my life.” In Paper Boats, she recalled odd mix of the grim and the sublime she experienced there:
At least twice every night it was my duty to collect all the bed-pans in the hospital and all the blood-stained dressings, empty them into so-called sanitary pails and stagger with them for about a quarter of a mile across the steppe to the so-called sanitary trench. It was noisome work, and frightening too, for I was nearly always accompanied by a savage pack of pariah dogs snapping and snarling at my heels. On the way back, I used to pause, drink in great gulps of air and look up at the stars. I would then become conscious of a sound never heard in the daytime. It was as if the steppe were sighing, softly, hopelessly, uncomplainingly. It was in fact the subdued chorus of the wounded men, hundreds of them, moaning in the night. They were heroically silent under suffering by day; but nature spoke at nightfall.
The dynamo powering the SWH unit in Russia was the organization’s founder, Dr. Inglis. Butler pays eloquent tribute to Inglis in Daylight in a Dream:
There was a driving-power in her fragile body which would have put a Rolls-Royce to shame, a genius for getting miracles to happen, and administrative gifts hardly distinguishable from statesmanship; for she refused to recognise impossibilities, and the hearts of her subordinates often sank like lead when she issued orders which must be obeyed and yet seemed impossible to fulfil.
A description that makes one long for such leadership today’s pandemic. In her book, British Women of the Eastern Front: War, Writing and Experience in Serbia and Russia, 1914-20, Angela K. Smith calls the SWH units “one of the most successful women’s organisations of the war”: “Of primary importance, they enabled women doctors to get to the heart of the action and save lives.” Inglis continued to work with the unit even after it became clear she was dying from cancer.
In October 1917, recognizing the increasing instability of the situation in Russia as the war was being overtaken by revolution, Dr. Inglis was ordered to evacuate her unit and take it by train to Archangel, from where it would sail home to England to be reorganized and sent to support the Serbian army fighting in Macedonia. Butler vividly recalls the long and difficult journey all the way from Odessa to the port in the Arctic north.
At one point, the driver takes the train through Moscow at high speed to avoid being stopped and attacked by rioting mobs. “Outside was the unknown and the unknowable,” she writes. “Inside, crowded together in fourth-class compartments, eating what little bully-beef there was out of battered tins, sharing knives, forks, and spoons and their inmost thoughts a handful of girls and women were living with an intensity which perhaps comes to few in a lifetime; and one of them with equal intensity was dying.”
This train journey is at the heart of the crucial revelation that comes to Miss Rawlinson. She encounters another former member of the unit, Miss Pearson, and they dine together, sharing memories. Pearson makes a passing comment to the unit’s almost losing all its supplies just before sailing from Archangel. Rawlinson is mystified and Pearson recounts a long and complicated tale of how Brook, the woman charged with getting the equipment on board, battled with recalcitrant rail officials and customs officers and managed, despite speaking almost no Russian and the imminent start of a nationwide strike, to prevent its being abandoned miles outside Archangel on a lonely siding.
This forces Rawlinson to remember the task given her at the start of the trip from Odessa: “You will place yourself unreservedly at Brook’s disposal on the journey whenever she needs help with the equipment.” When Brook had been asked who she wanted as an assistant, she had specifically picked “Oakey Darling.” Though Oakey Darling had accompanied Brook in checking on the cars holding the unit’s supplies at every stop along the way, when they arrived at Archangel she thoughtlessly boarded the freighter with the rest of the group, leaving Brook in the lurch. This, Rawlinson suddenly realizes, was why she had been ostracized — suddenly and without explanation, on the voyage back to England and thereafter. “There must be a blind spot in her somewhere,” she thinks. “That blind spot was her heart.”
E. M. Butler in her library at Cambridge
In reality, it was Butler who saved the equipment. After pleading fruitlessly with the Archangel station master to shift the cars so the equipment could be loaded, she sought Dr. Inglis in her cabin on the Porto Lisboa. “She opened eyes which looked enormous in her small, white, freckled face, and whispered: ‘You must either get the equipment on board before we sail, or stay behind to guard it. Your duty is to the equipment.” Butler returned to the rail yard, where she spotted a last lone engine being returned to its depot in preparation for the strike. “In much more fluent Russian than I have ever commanded,” she recalled, “I told him what lay in store for me if those vans weren’t shifted immediately; and to my horror and dismay I found myself pulling out the vox humana stop. That did it. Without a word said on his side, the engine was driven up to the vans, coupled to them and driven up to the quay.”
Rawlinson leaves the unit when it arrives back in England. As with the real Elsie Inglis, Dr. Everet survives long enough to salute the Serbian troops accompanying the unit as they debark in Newcastle, only to retire to a nearby hotel and die in her sleep. Butler herself stayed with the SWH through its time in Serbia, returning to England in December 1918, whereupon she was hospitalized for nearly a year with malaria.
She went back to lecturing at Newnham in 1921 and remained until 1935, when she took a full professorship at the University of Manchester. She then returned to Cambridge in glory in 1945 as the Schroeder Professor, the pre-eminent faculty post in German language and literature. Her partner, Isaline Blew Horner, was a leading scholar of Pali literature, the canon of religious writings at the core of Theravada Buddhism. In keeping with the discretion of Butler’s time, Horner names appears just once, and in an innocuous context, in Butler’s autobiography. When he reviewed Paper Boats for the Telegraph, Anthony Powell wrote, “There is nowhere else in the world except these islands where women of Miss Butler’s kind are produced, scholarly and daring lades, never wholly out of touch with a kind of Jane Austen primness even at their most rebellious and outspoken, and in the midst of unlikely adventures.”
Daylight in a Dream is a slight novel, more of a novella at a mere 125 pages. But the Times did it and Butler a disservice by calling it “not very good.” In reality, it’s the kind of book that can only be written late in life, when the blacks and whites of youth and idealism have shaded and grown subtle with age and perspective. A book of the quality of A River Runs Through It or H. L. Davis’s The Winds of Morning — books in which, as I once wrote, the author’s voice is “spare, ironic, experienced but never claiming to be wise, with a soft-spoken good humor.” It’s also a book where you get the sense that by waiting so long to tell the story, the author was able to make it as short as possible.
Daylight in a Dream, by E. M. Butler London: The Hogarth Press, 1951
Cover of A Pin’s Fee. Design by Margaret de Polnay, 1947.
I’ve probably seen Peter de Polnay’s name on the spine of books as long as I’ve been going to used bookstores, but it was only two years ago that I actually read one of his books — a relatively late novel, Blood and Water (1975). In my post, I compared de Polnay to Simenon’s “straight” novels, the ones without Inspector Maigret, which are often about the most mundane individuals finding themselves in extreme situations — on the run, committing murder, being blackmailed. Having read several more de Polnays, I’d moderate that comparison slightly. While de Polnay’s characters are every bit as unexceptional as Simenon’s, their situations tend to be more awkward than extreme, more uncomfortable than unendurable. Kind of like our situations now, if you’re lucky enough to only have to tolerate being locked down during this pandemic.
Peter de Polnay wrote nearly 100 books in the space of 40-some years and it’s pretty much a given that anyone who writes 100 books will produce a fair amount of justly neglected ones. The odds on there being a masterpiece or three among the 100 are long; but it’s a lead-pipe cinch that some of them are dreck. If anyone ever bothered to read through the entire de Polnay oeuvre, he or she didn’t bother to make their notes available, so there is no easy way to know in advance where any title you might pick up might fall on the masterpiece-to-dreck spectrum. Martin Black grabbed de Polnay’s 33rd novel, The Run of the Night, for example, and found it “not a good book…. The prose is wooden and clunky, the characters are uninspired and uninteresting.” When B.S. Johnson reviewed the novel back in 1963, he was equally blunt: “On almost every page of The Run of Night there are faults of sentence construction, punctuation, or grammar, this is the kind of novel which reads as though it was never revised (let alone proof-read)….”
I confess I chose to read A Pin’s Fee for no other reason than its cover. That bold color-blocked design — by de Polnay’s first wife Margaret — must have radiated when it sat on display tables back in 1947. It’s far more vibrant than anything else that would have sat in the fiction section, like something by Esphyr Slobodkina or Matisse in his papercut period.
The cover is by far the liveliest thing in this novel, which largely takes place in a grey, battered London still recovering from the war. Intact houses often look out on the rubble of bombed ones; when a character hears thunder from a sudden storm, he instinctly waits for the sound of sirens and collapsing buildings to follow. A few scenes take place in settings of great elegance — a cocktail party in a suite at Claridge’s — but more are in squalid flats, dingy pubs and sordid private clubs.
De Polnay moved easily in high society and low. He’d been raised in luxury, waited on by servants and governnesses, and he’d slept in flea-ridden flophouses. He’d been a hobo, tram-driver and store clerk in Argentina, maneuvered through the black marketing networks in occupied Paris, and seen the birth of his son announced in the “Court Circular” column in The Times. He’d gambled in the Casino at Monte Carlo, winning and losing a fortune, and by the time he was writing this book, just hitting his stride as a prolific middlebrow author, with sales and reviews respectable enough to assure an income high enough for summers on the Riviera and occasional lunches at the Savoy.
The cover of this cheap Harold Hill & Son reissue of A Pin’s Fee has nothing to do with the actual story.
I found reading A Pin’s Fee a bit like watching a good B-movie from the Forties or Fifties. I went along as much for the period details, the interiors and exteriors, the lighting and costumes, as for the writing and story. I half suspect that De Polnay himself wasn’t sure where he was headed when he started. The story could have been about a father with a scandalous past or intrigue with a nearby country neighbor, but it ended up being about entanglement with a woman with a mysterious history, thrice-divorced … perhaps a high-priced prostitute? He was a good 40 pages into a 200-page book before he grabbed a narrative line and ran with it.
De Polnay takes his title from a line in Hamlet (Act I, Scene 4). Hamlet scoffs at the notion he should fear approaching the ghost of his father: “I do not set my life at a pin’s fee/And for my soul/what can it do to that/Being a thing immortal as itself?” Pins being one of the first mass-produced articles of Shakespeare’s day, “a pin’s fee” was another way of saying “not worth much.” Despite the fact that de Polnay’s leading character Nigel has enough of a stock portfolio to keep him in a country house and write an occasional book review or exhibition catalogue piece, he walks through his life as if it’s worth little more than a pin’s fee. While it makes him a less than compelling protagonist, it serves him well as an observer of the swank and the skids.
This 1970 Howard Baker reissue cover is slightly more accurate. The lead character does frequent the British Museum Reading Room.
De Polnay is at his best depicting the desperation of people trying to hold onto their comfortable lives, as in this Kensington hotel filled with what he calls “evacuees from Menton” — Menton being the French Riviera resort that catered to people of a certain age and income, accustomed to good but not showy food and discreet help and able to afford a room in a respectable full-board hotel:
Not one young face, and while he waited for his food he looked first at this face, then at that, and since the food was slow in arriving he had examined every face by the time a waitress, with a melancholy squint, brought his soup. All those faces were the faces of usurers. They hung on to life, counting every second, hating every second, but none the less each new second was a second to add to the hoard.
“All those faces were the faces of usurers.” Such intermittent flashes of brutal cynicism shine like gems in the ashpile. On the other hand, it’s also some of the better passages that also betray the sloppiness of de Polnay’s prose:
He got in and found an empty compartment, but as he settled down in a corner seat he noticed that a small elderly woman was with him, nevertheless. She was huddled up in the corner, her hair was grey and she was full of angry misery. She looked at him and began to hate him. She hated him openly and conspicuously, and he couldn’t get on with The Time but had to glance at her at regular intervals: as though to be on the alert in order to duck swiftly when the hatred attacked him. She had a pale, saintly face with was swollen with hatred. Her bag, resting on her knees, was shiny black, and because her eyes were black, too, he had the irresponsible fancy that today she was wearing black eyes to match her bag.
There are several things right and wrong here. The last sentence, cut down by at least five words, should come right after “her hair was grey,” etc.. Her “face swollen with hatred” should follow. The paragraph should end with Nigel’s discomfort. The image of the old woman in the corner beaming hatred at Nigel is great, but the clunkiness of the prose diffuses its intensity.
I spent a good amount of my most recent lockdown Sunday reading A Pin’s Fee, and it was one of the more relaxing things I’ve done since this mess started. De Polnay could tell a good story even when it wasn’t clear to me — or, I think, to him — where it was going. While he was no master of prose style, he had a sure hand when it came to flawed people and their haunts. If anything, I closed the book with a renewed enthusiasm to venture further in the vast expanse of Peter de Polnay’s oeuvre.
A Pin’s Fee, by Peter de Polnay London: Hutchinson & Co., 1947 London: Harold Hill & Son, 1948 London: Howard Baker, 1970
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 
