Development was the first novel published by Bryher, pen-name of Annie Winifred Ellerman. It was the first of three loosely-fictionalized autobiographical novels, followed by Two Selves (1923), which was first published by Contact Editions, the Paris-based press established by Robert McAlmon and West (1925). All three of the books are virtually unattainable in first edition, but the University of Wisconsin Press did reissue the first two books as Two Novels: Development and Two Selves, edited by Joanne Winning, back in 2000.
Development takes Nancy — Bryher’s fictional self — from her earliest conscious memories at the age of three or so to her first visit to the Scilly Isles around the age of 17. The Scillies were deeply important to Bryher, to the point that she took the name of one of the isles as her pseudonym, and the remote wildness of the Scillies seems to have motivated her to reject many of the customs and values of the conventional world she’d been raised in.
Bryher was one of Dorothy Richardson’s closest and most loyal friends, and Richardson’s Pilgrimage, which was itself (to some extent) a fictional autobiography, was clearly an inspiration. As in Pilgrimage, the story is told through the stream of the lead character’s consciousness, but in Bryher’s case, there’s a certain stiffness to the stream, if that makes any sense. Pilgrimage radiates such a vibrant sense of living in the world; in Development, on the other hand, the world is seen through a very literary/rational sensibility. And, frankly, one perhaps a little too satisfied with its own opinions — something it was refreshing to see is not unique to young men.
Perhaps this is because Bryher felt she had been born the wrong gender. As she once wrote her long-time lover, the American poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), “I am quite justified in pleading I ought to be a boy—I am just a girl by accident.” At a very young age, Nancy finds herself thinking, “Her one regret was that she was a girl.” When many little girls wish for dolls, Nancy dreams of owning a pocket-knife. She longs to be a sailor, imagines stowing away on a ship when she turns fourteen: “Why was she born with a boy’s heart when she might not go to sea?”
Little of Nancy’s knowledge of boys comes from first-hand experience. The only child of an enormously wealthy father — Sir John Ellerman, Bryher’s father, owned shipping lines and newspapers and was likely one of the richest men in Edwardian England — Nancy rarely have the opportunity to play with others. “Henceforth, her games should be shared with her elephant, a safer and quieter companion” than a girl she encounters one day in front of her house in Cornwall. She also learns about the world through books written for boys, especially the historical novels of G. A. Henty. Although Bryher never mentions the novelist, it’s clear that her first inspiration is Henty’s 1887 novel, The Young Carthaginian, A Story of the Time of Hannibal. Nancy begins to write her first novel: “Hanno was a Carthaginian boy. He was nine years old. He was very glad because he was going on his first campaign” — taking her hero’s name from one of Henty’s leading characters. The allure of Carthage fades, however, when she sees the actual remains of the city “a darkness of mud, a greyishness that held no violet about it, set with a few bleak stones.”
If Bryher/Nancy is sure she was meant to be a boy, she’s equally sure she was meant to be a writer. Even more frequent than her dreams of the sea are those of writing a book. One reason that language has such importance for Nancy is that she is a synesthetic. As she grows, her associations between words and colors grows more intense — “until her whole vocabulary became a palette of colours, luminous gold, a flushed rose, tones neither sapphire nor violet, but the shade of southern water.” This sensation extends even to letters: “Seven letters were white, C, G, Q, S, T, O, and U; three of the others were black, D, E, and I. W was crimson; H, M, and Y were various shades of gold and primrose.” Because of Nancy’s fascination with language, Development is as much as anything a bibliomemoir — long before anyone was tossing that word around. We follow along as she falls in love with Shakespeare, partly for his poetry, mostly for his history, dislikes Keats, gorges herself in the lush exoticism of Salammbô. The third and final section of Development, “Transition,” is a catalogue of the reading of her late teens, each book leading her towards the one she is preparing to write. Fortunately, when she does put pen to paper, she sticks to original material: “The intervals of her reading Nancy filled with her own manuscript, wrought neither of imagination nor remembered stories but of the one experience she knew from end to end — herself.”
Before this last burst of the intellectual development in her late teens, however, Nancy has to endure her middle passage: boarding school, or as Bryher un-subtly titles this section, “Bondage.” Like Bryher, Nancy is sent relatively late to a girl’s school, joining the Fourth Year and quickly being progressed to the Fifth. Her two years, though, seem an eternity. A decade before Antonia White’s Frost in May, fifty years ahead of Deschooling Society, Bryher was scathing in her criticism of mass education. Downwood — the fictional equivalent of Queenswood, the school Bryher attended — is a typically grim English boarding school, “one of the coldest, bleakest places she had seen, with open windows, worn-out carpets, and a mass of white paint inside, and outside a long weedy lawn and a few flower-pots.” While slightly more comfortable than Dicken’s Dotheboys Hall, Downwood is hardly better in its approach to instruction. Rote learning, repetition, memorization, and progress in locked step are the hallmarks of its regime, compounded by ruthless conformity. Nancy learns never to mention she has travelled widely. Having never really known other children, she finds them more like cattle. “For the first time the spirit of the crowd — an oppressed thing in turn oppressing, judge of outward aspect only, blind to the finer shades, with the strength of the sloth, the ferocity of a brute — weighed her and weighed her distrustfully.” The effect of being in class is deadening: “Not a girl was idle, joyfully idle; not a mind was interested; not a thought was alert.”
As much as we sympathize with Nancy, there is a certain superiority in her views towards her classmates that’s hard to like. She pities them “the poverty of their monotonous restricted thought.” Indeed, as much as I enjoyed Development, I found it undermined by a deep-seated solipsism. For great stretches of the book, it really does seem as if no one else exists. At one point as she recounts Nancy’s experiences around the Mediterranean, for example, Bryher writes, “Unshaken from her Italian allegiance, Nancy left, one January morning, for Algiers.” Nancy is at this stage around the age of 10 or 11. Nancy didn’t leave for Algiers — she most certainly went along as one of a party led by her mother or father or both. Ditto for the visits to Egypt, Greece, Italy, France, Spain, etc.. Did Nancy have a governness? A tutor? Apparently not. In reference to her own parents, the words “mother” and “father” appear just three times each. Looking back, I see I had much the same impression about Bryher’s much-later non-fictional memoir: “The Heart to Artemis is remarkably depersonalized. If Bryher were to take a Myers-Briggs test, I’m pretty sure she would prove to be an NT. We learn a great deal about her thoughts and very little about her feelings. For a life so full of experiences, it’s almost creepily dispassionate.”
Development was in some ways Bryher’s most successful novel. Published in both England and the U.S., it went into second printings. One reason was the controversy stirred up by her account of Downwood. After publishing an article titled “Cramped School Girls” that summarized Bryher’s descriptions of the school, The Daily Mail solicited “the opinions of our readers, particularly those who have attended such schools as are the subject of Miss Bryher’s outspoken criticism.” Over the next few days, numerous women wrote in. One girl said “To pass examinations was the main object at my school. The rules were particularly stupid.” A former teacher said she had led “the cramped life of a nun,” though she felt the experience of the war meant that many were coming back “with a far more human outlook.” A Miss Cowdroy, principal of Crouch End School, however, thought that schools like Downwood had become “as extinct as the dodo. Every modern school aims at complete self-development and self-expression.” One father supported Bryher, writing that “Parents need to insist upon the reform of the mid-Victorian system,” while Avery H. Forbes, a teacher with 38 years’ experience argued somewhat ironically that “girls are far better taught than are boys of the same age.”
Bryher responded with a letter to the editor, rejecting Miss Cowdroy’s argument and suggesting that schools like Downwood weren’t becoming extinct fast enough. She spread the fault widely if evenly: “I blame the parents. It is their duty to insist that a suitable and healthy education should be given to their children…. I blame the teachers. They should insist on freedom of life and thought…. I blame the children themselves. They should fight for an education that will fit them for their future life….” The Mail, however, gave the last word to Miss Angela Brazil from Coventry, who said she’d received letters from hundreds of schoolgirls, most of whom wrote of the “gorgeous fun” they had at school. Despite Miss Brazil’s optimism, though, sadly too many of Bryher’s criticisms of Downwood remain valid for our schools a hundred years later.
Development, by Bryher London: Constable, 1920 New York: Macmillan, 1920
In a biographical sketch, G. E. (Gertrude Eileen) Trevelyan wrote of her time at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford: “Did not: play hockey, act, row, take part in debates, political or literary, contribute to the Isis or attend cocoa parties, herein failing to conform to the social standards commonly required of women students.” If we go by Hot-House, her fictional account of one young woman’s three years at Oxford, it’s clear she didn’t think much of those standards. Trevelyan said her chief accomplishments at Oxford were developing “smoker’s throat and a taste for misanthrophic reflection.”
Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan from the Oxford Chronicle, June 17, 1927
She didn’t omit mention of her winning the 1927 Newdigate Prize for English verse — the first ever by a woman. The novelty of the award led to the story being picked up by wire services and reprinted in newspapers worldwide — in everything from The Daily Mail to The St. Louis Daily Livestock Reporter to The Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser. Trevelyan was presented the prize at the Encaenia ceremony, following the award of degrees honoris causa to Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander during the First World War, Field Marshal Viscount Edmund Allenby, who freed the Middle East from the Ottoman Turks, and Etienne Gilson, a French philosopher. The day before, there had been a total eclipse of the sun, the first visible in England since 1724, and most of the male students at Oxford had taken the event as an excuse to leave early. “This,” The Oxford Times asserted, “doubtless explained the presence in the gallery of many undergraduettes in their quaint hats.” Trevelyan herself chocked up the publicity surrounding her award to astonishment at “evident revolutionary tendencies at work in the University.” The fact that the University Council had decided, just two weeks prior, to limit the number of women students to 620 suggests it wasn’t much of a revolution.
Trevelyan made her analogy for Oxford’s women’s colleges clear on her title page, including a definition from Chamber’s Dictionary: “Hot-house: a house kept hot for the rearing of tender plants.” Anyone who’s ever been in a hot-house knows that in addition to providing an benign environments for growing plants, their warm, humid atmospheres can also be suffocating. This certainly seems to have been Trevelyan’s view of her own school. From reading Hot-House, one gets the impression that what Queen Anne’s College — Trevelyan’s fictional stand-in for Lady Margaret Hall — fostered was not learning or personal growth but gossip and relentless surveillance. Everyone seems to keep track of everyone else. When Mina, the impressionable young woman at the center of Trevelyan’s story, runs down the hall in her pajamas and collapses in a hysterical fit outside the door of a fellow student, it’s all anyone talks about the next day.
In the servant’s hall: “Lyin’ on the floor, she was, all rolled in an eiderdown. Cryin’ somethin’ cruel.”
In the kitchen: “Did you hear that? How one of the maids saw a stewdent rolling on the floor in New Building corridor and screamin’ fit to bring the house down?”
In the Common Room: “Yes, in the New Building corridor. On Sunday night.”
In the Senior Common Room: “What’s this story about Cook wandering round the passages at night?”
One thing I admire about Trevelyan’s work is that in every one of her books, she dives into the deep end and really submerges herself in her subject. In the case of Hot-House, this means she brings the reader into the walls of Queen Anne College and keeps us trapped inside its claustrophic atmosphere without a break for almost 400 pages. The book opens as Wilheminia Delacroix Cook — Mina — a new first-year student, rides along Parks Road, returning to her room after having tea with Alec, a friend of her brother. We follow like a camera as she weaves through the streets, past Keble, across the Broad, by the Bodleian Library and into the gates of Queen Anne. The college presents a predatory image: “Crouched, throwing out wings, like tentacles, along side the road and away, at hidden angles, towards the river.” It grabs Mina into these tentacles and this is the last time we get a breath of fresh air for the next three years.
Trevelyan could be accused of over-egging her cake. Mina is immature even by undergraduate standards, impressionable, obsessive, and given to exaggeration and excessive rumination. Her emotional amp goes all the way to 11. The grim old heads in the Senior Common Room take her measure early on: “Rather unbalanced, you know. Nerves and so on. Not quite the right thing for the college, perhaps.” Mina is quickly swept up in the first weeks’ welcoming activities:
What a rush. Lectures, and all the things you had to get for your room, and so many Third Years and Second Years asking you to cocoa. (And why did they call it cocoa? It never was cocoa. And they always made some joke about its being something else. Was that why? And people always popping in and out. So exhausting.
Mina’s college career careens through a series of crises, most of her invention and fueled by her desire to impress everyone by the intensity of her responses. At first, this seems to be the persona she’s chosen to take with her fellow First Termers — the family, as she calls them. When her mother falls ill early in the term, she announces, “Dears, Mina may have to desert her family soon”: “I must. It’s absolutely indicated. I must go and stroke the lamb’s head.” Anyone who’s been in a high school drama club will recognize the type immediately.
The problem, though, is that Mina buys her own act. She quickly latches onto her tutor, Mlle. Claude Morlaix, a no-nonsense woman with little time or sympathy for her student’s desperate need for approval and, worse, affection. By the middle of the second term, classmates are murmuring behind her back: “Mina seems frightfully keen on her, doesn’t she?” To them, she refers to Morlaix as “the lamb,” tenderly but also slightly dismissively. Unfortunately, she uses the same language in her own thoughts, becomes convinced that it is Morlaix, not she, who’s the dependent. To make matters even worse, Mina has a competitor — Erica, a recent graduate. Morlaix and Erica share a flat outside of college and similar attitudes towards its environment: “It’s rather awful living in. So many people and none of them real.” When Morlaix suffers an eye infection and is out of action for weeks, Mina assumes the role of savior. “One must, simply must, rescue the lamb somehow. One couldn’t … absolutely and definitely could not … simply abandon the unfortunate infant to that … that woman.” Morlaix, of course, has no interest in being saved, especially not by some high-strung undergraduate.
After much angst and many scenes in which the various college choruses — the family, the faculty, the kitchen help — comment on her histrionics, Mina moves on to another obsession: Professor Ferrand, a quiet English tutor recently widowed and perhaps a bit careless of his appearance. She becomes convinced she is destined to be his helpmate, an illusion he unknowingly fosters through simply being polite. When even he finds it necessary to disabuse her of any interest in having another wife, a classmate asks what she plans to do: “Do, my lamb? But … but as if that … as if that made just any difference. As if it did. In any case … absolutely in any case … there’s … there’s the edge. And one just has to jump.” Unfortunately, by this point, near the end of the Third Year, no one has much time for Mina’s melodrama. “Oh, yes, of course. Yes, I see,” the classmate replied, puzzled.
Although things are less claustrophobic in universities now — Lady Margaret Hall has been coed for decades — the artificial and self-contained nature of college life still presents adaptation challenges after graduation, particularly for anyone who stays in a dorm or fraternity/sorority house the whole time. We can recognize the despair Mina feels at the prospect of going down. “But it’s got … just got … to go on. All this. The college. It can’t just stop.” “We’re all going down, aren’t we?” a classmate replies. “It can’t make very much difference.” But to Mina, leaving school is not moving forward. For her, it’s “complete, utter, dissolution….”
By this point in the book, we feel as if we’ve spent the full three years locked in a cramped and overheated college room. The final section of Hot-House — “Bedding Out” — takes us a year or so later. Mina’s classmates are out in the world: teaching, working in a store, worried about the practical tasks of daily life. But also writing to and about Mina. Though out of school, her way of dealing with things hasn’t changed. She tracks down Alec in South Africa and pursues him, convinced the “lamb” needs her care. Rejected, she selects another object and follows him to South America. And so on. I needn’t say how the story ends.
After 380-plus pages inside Queen Anne’s College, however, “Bedding Out” seems, as Coleridge said in his famous comparison of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, like stepping from “a stuffy, hot sick-room, and Fielding to an open lawn on a breezy day.” Had the whole book been like this, I would consider Hot-House one of the better English novels of its time. But the truth is that pages 1 through 384 are in dire need of an editor.
Trevelyan’s greatest strength is her willingness to go into her fictional experiments completely. When she commits to a setting, a viewpoint, a cast of characters, she gives it her all. Sometimes, as in the case of William’s Wife and Appius and Virginia, this risk-taking pays off in stunning returns. In the case of Hot-House, I suspect some readers would feel short-changed. It’s true, as Anna Bogen has written, that Trevelyan’s treatment of Mina “wrests from the reader an uncanny mix of irony and empathy.” We can feel for her while also thinking her ridiculous.
But Trevelyan also makes some unwise choices. At the macroscopic level, the book needs to be cut ruthlessly. There is no need to dissect, re-dissect, and re-re-dissect every little crisis in Mina’s hyper-crisis-filled three years at college. The narrative falls into a predictable pattern one wearies of. At a microscopic level, there are things like Mina’s italics-laden thoughts and dialogue: a little of this goes a long way, n’est-ce pas? Worse that this — unforgivable, really — is Trevelyan’s attempt to capture the accent of Irma Lupo, a Brazilian woman loosely attached to the faculty of Queen Anne’s. One comes to dread the character’s appearance — partly because she’s used as a caustic, eating away at the fabric of just about every relationship in the school, but mostly because of sentences like this: “Eet ees a week since I meet ‘er…. I wondaired eef you know eef she ees eel?” It’s as bad as anything out of Uncle Remus Tales or any other execrable dialogue fiction from the turn of the 20th Century.
The novelist Barbara Pym read Hot-House when the book first came out, while still a student at St. Hilda’s College in Oxford. “Reading Gertrude Trevelyan’s novel Hot-House,” she wrote in her diary. “I desperately want to write an Oxford novel – but I must see first that my emotions are simmered down fairly well.” A bit of simmering down would have helped Hot-House: inside this book is are 250 pages of a terrific novel. Would that Trevelyan’s editors at Martin Secker had handed back her manuscript with a single instruction: “Distill.”
Good luck on finding a copy of the first edition of Hot-House. I didn’t even bother to link to AddAll.com because there’s nothing there. The title links to WorldCat.org, but there are just eleven library copies listed. You can, however, purchase it from the academic publisher Routledge. What you have to look for is this gripping title: Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II, Volume II, edited by Dr. Anna Bogen. Act now and you can get it for the low, low sale price of $148, or as the folks at Routledge should call it, “our direct-to-shredder rate,” since fewer and fewer institutions have the appetite for such prices and no individual readers have the stomach for this nonsense.
Other Reviews
• Leonora Eyles, Times Literary Supplement
Miss G. E. Trevelyan, as she showed in her first novel, Appius and Virginia, is undeniably a writer with an unusual gift of psychological penetration. This is displayed to the full in Hot-House, yet we doubt if any but specialists will persevere to the end of it. A psychoanalyst may read it as he would a case book, and the principals and staff of girls’ school and women’s colleges should read it as a matter of duty. But it is doubtful if many of the readers will be able to stand this “listening-in” to a neurotic girl’s thoughts and babblings, or bear the stifling monotony of the style — cleverly enough designed as it is to show the suffocating atmosphere of Miss Trevelyan’s college….
Only a deep concern about modern youth and its tendencies could drive a reader through the book from cover to cover, for it is not so much a novel as a social document and may well be laid aside with a sense of disquiet. Can Youth — sheltered Youth — really become so unbalanced, so morbid, so stifled as this. Is Oxford such a forcing-ground for pettiness and neurosis?
• Britannia and Eve
A clever book and also very difficult to read. The prose here, instead of being hurdy-gurdy, is a series of gasps and wriggles…. The principal character, a girl called Mina, has no discoverable purpose or power of reasoning, and is hard to distinguish from a lunatic.
• E. J. Scovell, Time and Tide
Hot-House has merit as art, but it is bad, because it is unbalanced, social criticism. It is a very well disciplined book. The deterioration of Mina Cook through her nine terms at Oxford is carefully and subtly observed, and for all the monotony of the narrative, which gives one a mistaken sense of repetition, there is no waste in the recording of it; indeed, the author has preserved so devotedly the unities of place and of subject that the novel is a little like a scientific monograph on some subject studied in deliberate isolation….
Miss Trevelyan could reply to this that Hot-House is not sociology at all. It is satire, and no one (except the victim) asks to be fair; it is art, which has to select and simplify and exaggerate…. But it is all rather dull. The stifling evenness of temperature makes it heavy reading, and that evenness is through all the book; for even the characters that escape from the hothouse seem to exist chiefly in their reaction to it. Any story is likely to become wearing too, when almost all its events and emotions are moonshine, existing only in the character’s imagination: and this is true of Hot-House.
• The Guardian
Where this novel falls into the hands of an Oxford man his first instinct will be to say, “I told you so.” … The book itself is written with quite remarkable skill. The heroine is one of those girls whom one calls “vague.” She thinks and speaks with the utmost incoherence. She is extraordinarily suggestible; and in the course of three years of uneventful college life she succeeds in erecting out of nothing, and brooding over and living through, a full half-dozen of emotional crises. It is an uncomfortable novel, as all really successful studies of hysteria are likely to be.
• The Sydney Sunday Sun and Guardian
G. E. Trevelyan has been so determined to give us a minutely detailed picture of life in an Oxford women’s college that the result is rather like looking at a collection of insects through a microscope. This would be endurable if the microscope were properly in focus, or the insects were at all interesting, but the author adjusts it at such a distorted angle that the mind of the normal person revolts from it. There are, moreover, running through the book sly, faint suggestions of a type of perversion not usually discussed much except by the ultra modern, and irritatingly enough, the suggestions are never sufficiently definite for us to know whether the author really intends them or whether it is our own nasty minds at work.
Hot-House, by G. E. Trevelyan London: Martin Secker, 1933
Maurice Sachs was a charmer. Jean Cocteau once warned their mutual friend, the poet Max Jacob, “Don’t trust Maurice. He’s a charmer. He would try to charm God Himself!” In writing his memoirs with utterly self-effacing candor, he managed to make his charm live on after him. Sachs wrote in the tradition of Rousseau, Stendhal, and André Gide, convinced that the greatest sin of all was hypocrisy. In the pages of his posthumously-published memoir, Witches’ Sabbath — being reissued this week from Spurl Editions — and its sequel The Hunt, Sachs admits to breaking most of the Commandments.
Though he rarely managed to complete the novels he started and few of his plays made it to the stage, Sachs knew everyone who was anyone in the world of French literature between the two world wars. Knew everyone, slept with many, stole from a few. Though a homosexual, he wasn’t averse to going to bed with a woman if it served a purpose. He also wasn’t averse to sleeping with the enemy. He seduced several German officers while living in occupied Paris and numerous members of the LVF (Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchévisme, a Nazi-friendly French military group) and Gestapo after moving to Hamburg in 1943. “My life has been nothing but one long complicity with the guilty,” he wrote. “I have always been on the side of the pariahs.”
Sachs’ grandmother had scandalized French society by leaving her husband to marry Jacques Bizet, the talented but erratic and spendthrift son of Georges Bizet, the composer of Carmen. Sachs idolized Jacques, but by the time they became close, Bizet was already bent on self-destruction. Maurice remembers Bizet playing around with a revolver one day. He “fired one bullet out the window to show me it was really loaded, and put the barrel in my mouth, right up against my palate. Then he put my forefinger on the trigger and said: ‘When you’ve had enough of life, that’s the way to kill yourself. It’s clean, and you don’t feel a thing.’” Not long after that, Bizet used the gun in exactly that way to take his life. Maurice was just sixteen.
Sachs’ grandfather was a wealthy diamond merchant, but Sachs’ parents managed to squander his legacy. When he was seventeen, Maurice had to arrange for his mother’s quick escape to England after she wrote her creditors a large check guaranteed to bounce. He disliked his family so much he fantasized in his memoir about the family he wished for: “My father comes in all muddy from foxhunting, my mother gets up from the piano where she has been singing a simple ballad.” He claimed the only things he inherited from his parents were his father’s laziness and his mother’s “lack of balance.”
His parents rid themselves of the responsibility to raise Maurice by sending him off to a boarding school. By his account, French boarding schools were just as much hotbeds of sadomasochism and homosexual as English ones. Maurice skirted the approaches of masters and upperclassmen but fell in love with a fellow student and appears to have accepted his sexual preference with remarkably little angst.
After leaving school, he set himself up in Paris with what he’d saved from his grandfather’s estate and dove headfirst into the city’s social and cultural life. “How good it felt to be twenty, in those days. This was the reign of gaiety and license,” he recalled. He met the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain and fell under the spell of his piety. Sponsored by Maritain and his wife, Sachs converted to Catholicism in 1925 and soon after entered a seminary to become a priest.
It was to be a short stay. Sachs put on his soutaine in January 1926; by the end of September, he had been ejected from the order. While enjoying a short vacation on the Riviera, he made the acquaintance of the American writer Glenway Westcott, who in turn introduced him to a handsome (and wealthy) teenager named Tom Pinkerton. Sachs fell madly in love with Pinkerton. Though Sachs maintained the relationship remained platonic, Pinkerton’s mother complained to the Bishop of Nice.
Sachs acknowledged that “I mistook an ephemeral enthusiasm for an eternal vocation.” He also confessed that he felt “a mixed delight” in the trappings of the church “that was not entirely pious.” He loved his soutaine, for example: “The black was becoming, and made me look slender.” He is also reported to have had his lined with pink silk crêpe du Chine.
He went from one institution to another. Leaving the seminary made him eligible for military service, and he was soon stationed with the French army of occupation along the Rhine in Germany. While his first job was monitoring latrines, he was soon put in charge of the officer’s library after a colonel found him reading Montesquieu at his post. About the only thing he took away from his time in the army was his lifelong friendship with the poet Max Jacob.
Back in Paris again, he indulged himself in the two vices he’d become acquainted with in the military: sex and drink. Though he claimed not to have known of their existence, he began frequenting Paris’s male brothels, including the Bains du Ballon d’Alsace, notorious as the scene of Marcel Proust’s more extreme sexual experiences. He also became a profligate drinker: “it was difficult, if not impossible, for me to sit down to a meal without having drunk about ten cocktails.”
Sachs rarely held back his passions. If Cocteau learned to be wary of Maurice’s charms, Sachs gave into his enchantment with the poet and artist completely: it was, he wrote, “total, immediate, and delicious.” “When we left this magician,” Sachs recalled, “I knew beyond all doubt that I was going to live only for him.” Cocteau’s response to Sachs was friendly but cautious.
He did, however, recommend the young man to Coco Chanel, who hired him to assemble a private library. Then “on the point of no longer counting her fortune,” Chanel gave him a monthly budget of 60,000 Francs and carte blanche in his commission. “I had no problem making a good living out of this sum,” Sachs wrote in something of an understatement. It’s unlikely that much of Chanel’s investment made it to her shelves. He took full advantage of her largesse:
I had an apartment, paintings, a car, a secretary, two servants, a masseur, expensive love affairs; I spent my nights in cabarets, my afternoons at the tailor’s, I bought books and bibelots, and this was perhaps the moment of my life when I enjoyed the highest degree of physical comfort. What young man would not have been intoxicated by so many absurd grandeurs which he believed to be the result of his personal genius?
By the time he’d exhausted Chanel’s good humor, however, he’d managed to convince other investors of his genius as well. Lucien Demotte hired Sachs to help assemble collections of French paintings that were shown in Paris and London. The pair then headed, artworks in hand, to New York, where Demotte owned a gallery on East 57th Street. Unfortunately, they landed in New York with perhaps a million dollars’ worth of merchandise which had little prospect of being sold. Sachs was able to hang onto Demotte’s coattails for a while, standing in as a groomsman when Demotte married the daughter of the Franco-American tycoon Felix Wildenstein in early 1931, but he soon had to fend for himself.
Louis Marcoussis, Giorgio de Chirico, Maurice Sachs and Moise Kisling at the Claridge Galleries, London, June 1929
He came up with a solution with the help of Harold Peat, director of a lecture tour agency. Impressed with Sachs’ good looks and suave manners, he agreed to take Sachs on as a lecturer. The only problem was: on what?
“What will you talk about?” “About art.” “There can’t be more than three hundred people who are interested in that. We need three thousand. Why not talk about politics?” “Because I don’t know anything about politics.” “Just read the morning papers, and that evening tell what you read in your own words.”
Two weeks later, Peat was selling his new client as “Maurice Sachs: Famous French Economist,” whose talks promised to “Train a Spotlight on the Secrets of Europe.” Sachs also found support for his new career in an admiring member of his early lectures. Gwladys Matthews, whose father was pastor of the largest Presbyterian congregation in Seattle, was an aspiring writer who wanted to get free of her family.
Sachs claimed he told her of his preference for men but said he was interested in gaining a wife for the sake of a future political career. He charmed Reverend Matthews with the sincerity of his passion: “I love your daughter,” he told Matthews. “If you do not give your consent to our marriage, I shall marry her all the same.” Regardless of who was fooling whom, Maurice and Gwladys were married in Seattle in June 1932, her father officiating.
In Witches’ Sabbath, Sachs referred to Seattle as “Morpheus,” which gives a clue to the prospects for the marriage. The couple honeymooned in the Adirondacks then returned to the West Coast, taking an apartment in San Francisco. It was there, in April 1934, that Gwladys filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion. “Brilliant Romance to End” read the Associated Press headline for the news. In fact, what would prove Maurice’s longest romantic involvement had begun – according to the divorce papers – in February 1933 he ran off with a young Californian he refers to in the book as Henry. As usual, Sachs was honest about his dishonesty: “I had married her like a madman; I left her like a coward,” he wrote.
Gwladys, by the way, later moved to Hollywood, worked as a screenwriter and married the pioneering photographer Ned Scott in 1936. Before his desertion, she also did Sachs the favor of translating his memoir, The Decade of Illusion: Paris 1918-1928, which Knopf published just weeks after Maurice took off with Henry.
The book, now long out of print, received good reviews. “A charming and delightfully kaleidoscopic parade,” wrote C. Norris Millington in The American Magazine of Art. “staged in the smart salons, attics, theatres, studios and by-ways of France.” Millington credited Sachs for his “dramatis personae”: “practically every well-known painter, composer, musician, poet, politician, dressmaker, critic, author, bookseller, art dealer, and publisher who has gravitated to Paris in the last ten years or so.” Others thought he took his personal Who’s Who too far, noting that his index listed 770 names, or roughly three names for every page.
Maurice and Henry took the advance for Decade of Illusion and bought berths on a cattle boat returning to Le Havre. Sachs returned to a family devasted by the Depression. “Nous n’avons rien” he wrote: “We have nothing left.” Sachs’ mother had suffered a heart attack; his Uncle Richard had committed suicide. Though Sachs’ most tolerant, if skeptical, supporter, André Gide, helped him get a job editing a new series for La Nouvelle Revue Française, the money wasn’t enough to support the two lovers and Maurice had to fill in as a desk clerk at the cheap hotel where they stayed. Sachs’ description of the hotel (which he calls the Hotel Saint-Joachim but was actually l’hôtel Saint-Yves) and its residents are some of the best passages in Witches Sabbath.
A man who stays in a hotel, far from his habitual milieu, inwardly liberated, rarely constrains himself. The employee sees him naked. In two years of the hotel business, I learned a great deal about human behavior. I have seen maniacs, debauchees, paragons of virtue, monsters of anger, the timorous, the greedy, and the generous; I have observed vanity and folly, dreadful aberrations, charming virtues, conduct full of inner distinction, and incredible abasement I have watched, and a horrible spectacle it was, thousands of individuals eat, whom it was my duty to watch as they did so (spaghetti dinners were always the worst). The toilet that doesn’t work, the bath that overflows, the bed in which, in spite of everything, a lady believes she has found a mischievous flea, oblige a curious participation in the intimacy of people whom you know too much about and whom you don’t know. The intimacy that no sympathy motivates is as painful as a promiscuity of the flesh.
Even with this income, Sachs wrote, “There was almost no day when I knew exactly how we were going to eat that evening.” He admits to hanging around the bookstalls across the river from the Louvre for the purpose of stealing books. Cocteau later wrote that during this time, Sachs would stuff his pockets with toilet paper, rustling it so others thought his pockets were full of 1,000-Franc notes. “It gives me confidence,” Sachs told Cocteau.
Sachs’ way of coping with poverty disgusted some of his acquaintances. Marcel Jouhandeau, who later collaborated with the Nazis, claimed that it was his encounters with Sachs that led him to write a notorious article, “How I Became an Anti-Semite,” for the journal of the far-right party, Action Française.
Sachs was saved by the actor Pierre Fresnay, best known among English-speaking audiences for his role as the aristocratic Captain de Boeldieu in Jean Renoir’s 1937 film, La Grande Illusion. Fresnay encouraged him to write for the stage. Though most of Sachs’ attempts never reached completion, let alone the stage, his translation of the Terence Rattigan play, French Without Tears was a success. Fresnay enlisted Sachs to work as stage manager when he organized a run of plays performed on alternating nights in London’s West End in 1938. Sachs returned to Paris exhausted. It is here that Witches’ Sabbath ends. “I am leaving. I don’t know where I am going, where I shall go. To the East, if I have any luck.”
The Hunt ( La chasse à courre), Sachs’ last and incomplete memoir, picks up a two years later in May 1940, as the German Blitzkrieg was approaching Paris. Sachs had managed to attach himself to the staff of the government radio network and fled with it to the Third Republic’s final capital in Bordeaux. There, he first encountered the deceit, greed, and hypocrisy that would characterize much of French life under the Occupation. After a few weeks of sharing an over-priced bed in an overcrowded hotel, he returned to Paris.
There, he found the black market was already booming. “What was I going to do if not the black market?” he asked. Once again, Sachs relied on his charm and connections to work his way in. He became a specialist in moving jewelry and precious goods, often working on consignment. He lied and was lied to on a daily basis. “I was up to my neck in the very finest garbage,” he wrote.
And exceptional garbage it was. While rationing and deprivation was the rule for ordinary Parisians, with the right connections and enough money, the life of luxury rolled on: “the Chataigné … turned out a delectable lobster au beurre blanc, Philippe served the foie gras at the height of rationing, chocolate mousse, and meat without coupons, the Vieux Pont-Neuf, where they had cakes made with real cream, Gaffner served beefsteaks, Lola Tosch offered leg of lamb, et cetera….” It took a furious amount of wheeling and dealing to keep up this lifestyle, however, and Sachs’ accounts of his many transactions are both dizzying and mind-numbing.
After a point, however, the reader loses interest in knowing how much he took from the Duchesse d’Y or sold to the Comte de T.. Sachs came to feel the same way. “The fatigue, the boredom, yes, above all the boredom of these incessant transactions, the unreality, the roguery, the disgust I felt for myself and for others suddenly seized me by the throat,” he wrote. He teamed up with the ex-wife of one of his friends and retreated to the quiet of a village in Normandy.
In The Hunt, he refers to the woman as Pomme. In reality, she was Violette Le Duc, who later became famous for her memoir, La Bâtarde. Though they spent months together – continuing to keep up a steady black-marketing operation, only now in produce, meats and cheeses – it would be hard to tell from comparing their respective accounts. In The Hunt, Pomme is a pleasant companion with an absurd crush on him. In La Bâtarde, he is the brilliant, handsome, and talented Maurice Sachs – Le Duc refers to him by his full name at least 50% of the time. Sachs ultimately found her suffocating. Le Duc credits him with inspiring her to write:
Maurice said to me next day: “Your unhappy childhood is beginning to bore me to distraction. This afternoon you will take your basket, a pen, and an exercise book, and you will go and sit under an apple tree. Then you will write down all the things you tell me.”
That afternoon, Le Duc began to write what would become her first book, L’Asphyxie. If you are interested in a third version of this story, you can watch director Martin Provost’s 2013 film, Violette.
Maurice and Pomme were accompanied to Normandy with Karl-Heinz, a German Jewish orphan that Sachs took a notion to adopt. The Rothschild family had taken in a group of Jewish orphans ejected from Germany a few months before the outbreak of war in hopes of finding homes with good French families. One doubts two black marketeers hiding out in the country were quite what they had in mind. And Sachs’ treatment of Karl-Heinz demonstrated the dangers of boutique parenting.
Sachs was attracted by the twelve-year-old’s good looks, but as soon as the boy opened his mouth, he left his foster father with a longing to flee. Karl-Heinz was not interested in books or art or music. His ambition was to be a waiter. Sachs was glad to learn of an American Quaker organization that was arranging for orphans to be sent to families in the U.S. and soon Karl-Heinz was standing at the nearest train station, ticket in hand. “My burning love for Karl-Heinz had already been extinguished in the tepid waters,” Sachs confessed, happy to be rid of the boy’s “appealing mediocrity.”
Sachs returned to Paris and the 24×7 life of deal-making, but his luck in coming out on the profitable end of these increasingly complicated three-, four- and five-way transactions was on the wane. By the beginning of autumn 1942, he was looking for another way out.
In October 1942, Sachs finally headed East. To Hamburg. His rationale is unclear from The Hunt and none of the several biographies written since the 1960s have come up with a definitive answer, but the most likely reasons relate to lust and greed. Sachs was infatuated with the strong, self-confident blond Aryans he encountered in smart uniforms in Paris and saw a chance to carouse with more of them in the Fatherland. He also thought the Nazis would pay well for information supplied by a willing Frenchman operating inside the forced labor organization supplying thousands of workers for German factories.
Sachs managed to slip out of occupied France in November 1942, sleeping with his guide along the way. The final section of The Hunt is drawn from letters he sent back to Paris. At first, he found the experience of going to work with hundreds of other French workers tedious: several pages of The Hunt are devoted to cataloguing the character flaws and bad habits of Bretons, Gascons, and others. And “Need I add that they had never heard the word ‘conversation’ in their lives?” He was proud, however, of what he referred to as his “little Ministry of Internal Affairs.”
Sachs was in Hamburg when some of the cities’ most devastating bombing raids took place. “The city is really nothing more than a heap of charred rubble in which I still have a room without water, without electricity, almost without anything,” he wrote after one raid. Still he felt more at home than he had in occupied France. “No doubt about it, I adore this country: the only one where I find it easy to be happy, where I’m instinctively happy, as it were.” And there was no shortage of sexual partners: “There’s love for all through the town,” he reported almost giddily.
In June 1943, he wrote with excitement – and suspicious ambiguity – of getting a new job. “I am well paid, newly clothed, and well thought of,” he crowed. The job undoubtedly involved collaboration with the Gestapo, but it also provided him with opportunities to seduce young Frenchmen of the LVF and the occasional willing Nazi. He may not have known that at the age of 36, he was already being referred to as Maurice la tante — Maurice the aunt.
The Nazis were less susceptible to Sachs’ charm, however. In November 1943, he was arrested for his homosexual activities and sent to the Fuhlsbüttel prison. What happened to Sachs after this was for some years a mystery. When La chasse à courre was first published in Paris in 1947, it ended with a postscript added by the publisher stating Sachs’ whereabouts were unknown. Later, it was reported he had been lynched by inmates. Finally, a German reporter was able to confirm that in April 1945, Sachs and the other prisoners in Fuhlsbüttel were evacuated to avoid the approaching British Army and forced to march to another facility in Kiel. Walking through the snow without food, water, or proper clothing, many of the inmates died along the way. When Sachs and another prisoner failed to join the formation on the morning of April 14, 1945, they were shot in the head by a Belgian SS guard.
Le Sabbat (subtitled souvenirs d’une jeunesse orageuse — Memoirs of a Stormy Youth) caused “a considerable furor in literary and salon circles,” as Janet Flanner reported in a 1946 “Letter from Paris” in The New Yorker. One French reviewer described it as “The chronicle of a vicious drunk and pervert, whose struggles to refashion his life and regenerate his soul are blocked by a voluptuous pleasure in guilt and loathsomeness.” Even untranslated, the assessment of another reads like a seminarian’s list of venal and deadly sins: “Mal élevé, vicieux, orgueilleux, vaniteux, adonné aux pires excès, aux perversions les plus scandaleuses, homosexuel, renégat, mufle, il représente le point extrême de la jeunesse débauchée et cynique.” An American academic reviewer put it more bluntly: “Young Jew writes je as easily as Jean-Jacques.”
The book was first translated into English by Robin King in 1953 as Days of Wrath: Confessions of a Turbulent Youth. It’s a rendition best left forgotten. The TLS reviewer called the translation “slapdash” and “disfigured by an exasperating carelessness in the proof-reading.” And despite his claim that the book was of greater literary than documentary value, King also chose to bowdlerize the text. As Benedict Nicolson put it in his New Statesman review, “There can be no excuse” for King’s editorial decisions: “… reproducing parts of chapters, omitting a phrase here, a paragraph there, in so arbitrary a fashion that one is continuously driven back to the French text to discover what the author intended.”
Spurl Editions has wisely chosen to reissue the 1964 Richard Howard translation, titled Witches’ Sabbath, instead. At the time of its original publication, Anthony Powell called it “a near-classic of its kind.” Powell had an elegant way of describing Sachs’ elusive manner of dealing with facts. “Although one suspects there is little here that is not, within its context, true, the skill of the narrative makes truth almost beside the point.” Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick Modiano was so inspired by Sachs’ handling of the truth that he brought Sachs back to life as an aging and unrepentant collaborator in the first novel of his “Occupation trilogy,” La Place de l’Etoile (1968).
A year after Witches’ Sabbath, its sequel The Hunt, Richard Howard’s translation of La chasse à courre was also published by Stein and Day in the U.S. and Calder & Boyars in the U.K.. Although a much shorter and obviously incomplete book, Sachs’ charm was still on display. “There’s a racy, flaunted untrustworthiness about Sachs which keeps you on your guard just as surely as it keeps you reading,” David Williams wrote in The Daily Telegraph. The New Yorker, on the other hand, had the opposite of Robin King’s assessment, saying the book had far more documentary interest than literary merit.
Spurl Editions has done readers a great favor with its reissue of Witches’ Sabbath. At a time when people are looking for a good book to hunker down and enjoy, this is an excellent way to spend a few days while you’re barricaded behind your walls of toilet paper. You can order the book now from Spurl or from Amazon as of April 3.
When I picked up an old Panther paperback copy of Penelope Gilliatt’s novel One by One at Bookcase, a veritable treasure trove of old books near the cathedral in Carlisle just a few weeks ago, its cover blurb was already a bit too real: “London is once again an isolated, panic-stricken city … in the grip of a fearsome plague that has killed 10,000 by the third week of August.” Now, like Polly Talbot, Gilliatt’s protagonist, I am holed up in my home, advised to avoid venturing out in the interest of containing a new and dangerous virus — which made reading this book a particularly unsettling experience.
It’s impossible not to look for parallels between Gilliatt’s fictional epidemic and today’s COVID-19 pandemic. Polly’s husband Joe is a veterinarian, but he becomes involved early in the response to the mysterious illness that begins taking lives as Europe swelters in a July heatwave — first helping out in a laboratory, then as a lowly orderly in a make-shift morgue and finally seconded as a doctor in a London hospital as the numbers rise. Aware of its contagion potential, he insists that Polly — seven months pregnant — remain at home weeks before the government responds and takes steps to quarantine London from the rest of the UK.
Cover of Atheneum US hardback edition of One by One by Penelope Gilliatt
As in today’s crisis, the government is slow to act: “People were asked, but not ordered, to avoid travelling in and out of London.” Swimming pools are shut; the infected are isolated in their homes, food and supplies being brought to them by civil defense workers in protective gear. “For many days, far too many, no one in power grasped the danger because everyone was busy trying to find a scapegoat.” Before long, however, most of the city is shut down. Racketeers posing as undertakers take away corpses and set them alight with petrol in empty lots. As in time of the Black Death, survivors find themselves confronted by the overwhelming presence of death, but few are equipped with a faith to cope with it: “The difficulty of living without any system for thinking about dying was unacknowledged, and for that reason very acute.”
And as we are seeing now, some respond by grasping at war as an analogy. “In the emergency the right thing to do was to stir other people to a sense of outrage, to make a stink about it and hope it could be turned into the Armada or Dunkirk or anything but a biological affliction.” At the same time, those at a distance from the worst affected find it hard to break out of their everyday concerns. Over a few days before London is fully quarantined, Polly is able to visit her mother and her friends in the countryside. There, the discussion is not about the virus but about the scandalous public school careers of various MPs: “Our friend was always a great beater…. I should say he has beaten at least half the Cabinet.” The topic shifts then to speculation about closeted gays and unfaithful wives. The old boys express some sympathy for the PM’s wife and her series of ever-richer and fatter lovers: “I always think of Daphne like that, pressed out like a wafer by the great weight of men traveling over her, bumpetty bum, bumpetty bum.” When one finally turns to acknowledge Polly, he asks about the parties she must be missing.
“‘I shouldn’t think there are many,’ she said. ‘Too many of the guests are dead.'”
“It’s not on to mope,” the peer cautions her. As she approaches London on her return, she sees an orange glow in the distance. Burning corpses.
Cover of Secker & Warburg UK hardback edition of One by One by Penelope Gilliatt
In the novel’s final chapters, the focus shifts from the epidemic writ large to the individual stories of Polly and Joe and situations having little to do with the illness. Polly manages to get out of London to the safety of her mother-in-law’s house by the sea, but finds the potential for harm there — emotional from Joe’s mother and medical from her degenerative GP — far worse than anything in London. Meanwhile, the Press (Gilliatt uses the capital P to hammer home her point), having first made Joe into hero for his selfless hospital work, turn him into a pariah by digging up evidence of a teenage experiment with homosexuality.
It is in these pages that Gilliatt’s aim becomes clear: to skewer the Establishment (using the capital E with which it was hammered in the 1960s) for its complacency. She sees in how upper- and upper-middle class parents cared for their children — including their gay children — indicators of how these children (now the adults in charge) deal with the epidemic:
You never gave him a chance to get near you. You shoved him into a grey flannel suit and sent him to some prissy dame’s-school when he was six, you gave him a meringue or something when he had a good report and you saw that he had his castor oil and you took him to those god-awful mournful churches without even believing a word of it yourself; and that was it. Then you packed him off to boarding school for more of the same when he was eight. Eight. And it went on for ten more years.
In other words: pack them up and get them out of sight. Unfortunately, as is often the case with fiction, messages can get in the way of stories, and One by One ends with what The New York Times’ reviewer, Martin Levin, called a “climactic non sequitur.”
One can identify, in hindsight, which reviewers considered themselves part of the Establishment by their verdicts of the book. Writing for The Listener, Hilary Corke regretted that Gilliatt had chosen to mix good old fashioned science fiction with “social satire and commentary.” Marigold Johnson, the TLS reviewer and never one to blunt her arrows, found the book “Too much of a rag-bag of protest, comic observation, emotional analysis, fantasy and cleverness.” Anthony Burgess, whose own novels were often similar rag-bags, loved it: “If it had a fault, it was the best fault imaginable: more action and characters and ideas than the small space could carry.” Johnson did, however, credit Gilliatt for displaying a “passion and intelligence … far too rare and ambitious for one to wish that it had been written in any other way or to forget the impression it leaves.”
One of Penelope Gilliatt’s obituaries
One by One was Penelope Gilliatt’s first novel and though it’s also her shortest, its mix of sharp and strong set pieces of description and dialogue and hazy passages of internal monologues suggest that her fictional talents were better suited for the short story form. Although Gilliatt is primarily remembered now as a film critic, she left behind a considerable body of fiction, most of which can be found online at the Open Library (Link), including One by One. When Gilliatt died of alcoholism in 1993 at the age of 61, her friend lyricist and playwright Betty Comden, wrote, “What a glowing further career she might have had, and what beautiful, inventive, never-to-be-written pages this cleverest of all sausages [a bit of British slang Gilliatt often used] might have produced we will never know.” Were she alive today, however, she would also be among those at most risk in the face of our real-world epidemic.
One by One, by Penelope Gilliatt London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1965 New York: Atheneum, 1965
This is a sad book: a daughter’s memoir of her mother’s prolonged and painful death from cancer over the span of four years. It’s an even sadder book when you know what came after it.
Betsey Barton was born in comfort and grew up in luxury. Her father, pioneering advertising man Bruce Barton, didn’t invent the concept of boosterism, but he certainly refined it. His 1925 bestseller, The Man Nobody Knows, gave aspiring American capitalists a “Get Out of Purgatory” card by assuring them that Jesus — “the world’s greatest business executive” — wanted them to get rich. As a founder of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBDO), still one of the world’s leading ad agencies, he came up with brand names and slogans that are woven into our vernacular: General Motors; General Electric; and Betty Crocker, to mention a few. Barton went on to become a prominent Republican congressman representing Manhattan and advocating the Isolationist cause at the start of World War Two. During the run for his third term as President, FDR loved to mock Barton and fellow Isolationists Joe Martin and Hamilton Fish III with his phrase “Martin, Barton, and Fish” (to the rhythm of “Winken, Blinken, and Nod”), but his mockery had little effect on Barton’s wealth or social standing.
Betsey Barton (left), from Town and Country magazine, 15 July 1934
Barton’s only daughter Betsey was in the spotlight from the time she had her coming-out ball. Her picture appeared regularly in newspaper society sections and the pages of slick upscale magazines. In 1934, not long after being photographed for Town & Country, Betsey was severely injured in an automobile accident. Her back was broken and she was left paralyzed from the waist down. Three years later, while spending a winter holiday with her family outside Phoenix, the ambulance carrying her to a hospital for routine physical therapy went off the road, compounding her existing injuries and leaving her with severe nerve damage.
Photo of Betsey Barton from 26 February 1937 Pittsburgh Post Gazette
At first, Betsey and her parents hoped she would recovery her ability to walk, but after years of expensive and unsuccessful treatments, they came to accept that her condition was irreversible. As she experienced just how many challenges everyday life put in the path of a disabled person — even one with all the advantages of money and position — Betsey became an advocate with a cause. And when the first American servicemen began to return from combat with similar injuries, she became a writer as well. Her first book, And Now to Live Again (1944), was a call for these men not to lose hope.
Though she described herself as a nonprofessional, Betsey Barton wrote with the credibility of someone who’d been through the same experience. Her message was simple: in losing one life — a life free of injuries — these men had won a new one, a life “that in many delicate and tender ways is a far better one.” She recognized her readers would be skeptical. “Had I read this years ago when first I lost the use of my legs I would have thrown down the book in disgust,” she admitted. She offered herself as an example of both the potential for rehabilitation and its many opportunities for setbacks. “I have done all the wrong things and made all the mistakes it is possible to make and still survive.” But she also addressed the practical considerations of the handicapped: “Going into restaurants, going into subways, going out to dinner … become monstrous affairs demanding will power and planning and concentration.”
After the war, she continued to take an active role in the cause of the disabled and made frequent visits to military hospitals to talk with and support G.I.s undergoing rehabilitation. She turned these experiences into fictional form with her 1948 novel, The Long Walk. Set in an Army hospital, the story focuses on the “difficult” patients — the men who resist rehabilitation, sunk in their hopelessness and self-pity. Barton placed herself in the story in the person of Janet, a wheelchair-bound young woman whose presence is intended — but with mixed results — to boost the mens’ morale. While most reviews were complimentary, one British critic noted a weakness that runs through much of her writing: “The country which Miss Barton explores with so much sympathy and understanding is entirely that of the mind, and its physical setting is negligible.”
Around the time The Long Walk was published, Betsey’s mother was diagnosed with colon cancer. Having relied heavily on her mother’s support through years of therapy, the news hit Betsey with exceptional force. As Love is Deep is the diary of Esther Barton’s long and ultimately unsuccessful battle with cancer and her daughter’s even longer struggle to come to terms with her mother’s death.
When she returned to New York City to be with her mother, Betsey wrote, “I was met by a stranger. A nervous, thin woman with what appeared to be suddenly whitened hair greeted me in the library.” The woman she had left “well and strong and full of life” was now shaking and hesitant. And worst of all for her daughter, she wanted to be left alone. “Mothers don’t ask to be left alone very often. They are the available members of the human race,” Betsey noted, frustrated at being unable to reciprocate the support she’d been given. Even when the two women sit together, Betsey finds herself “filled with a sense of desolation” at her mother’s silence.
This separation becomes a major theme in their relationship and a primary source of the feelings Betsey struggles with after her mother’s death: “So I stood outside her, as I was to do so often in months to come, filled with admiration at her ability to continue on with life as it had always been, terrified at the lack of communication.” Ironically, another accident ensured that Betsey could not be with her mother at the end. When Esther Barton died in November 1951, Betsey herself was laying in a hospital room, having slipped in her bathroom and fractured her left thigh. She was unable to attend the funeral.
The Arizona desert had by then become the Barton’s second home and the setting becomes Betsey’s spiritual refuge over the following years. It also became a practical refuge when the family’s home in Foxboro, Massachussetts — the home she grew up in, a small Colonial cottage expanded through numerous additions — was condemned and had to be demolished. Esther Barton had lavished years of collecting on the house’s furnishings and Betsey now watched “all the lovely things within it” being dispersed to scattered family and friends. “The house could be looked upon as a symbol of a time of life and through tears I could come finally to accept that what I missed was the fact that the time of life was over, must be over, for all of us.” In the desert, she found “a different kind of thinking” as she looks out on the long vistas towards the mountains: “Relationships, too, perhaps, are different because they exist within these lovely dimensions.”
As her mother was dying, Betsey channeled some of her energies into a second novel, The Shadow of the Bridge (1950), set in an exclusive New England girls’ boarding school. There is no mention of this in As Love is Deep, but it’s perhaps significant that one of the two main characters in the novel, Alida, is haunted by the memory of her mother, who died when the girl was still a child. While novelist Sterling North thought the book was “a beautifully organized, exquisitely told story, enriched by a real mastery of abnormal psychology,” most critics were much harsher. “This story of adolescent anguish is clearly written, with earnest intensity, but it casts little light upon ancient trials and the intensity itself is of such an unrelievedly banal order that it is something of an embarrassment,” Gertrude Buckman wrote in The New York Times. “There is freshness neither in the writing nor in the conception or drawing of characters or situation.”
Even though As Love is Deep is just 144 pages long, it took Betsey Barton seven years to write. Though she claims to reach some sense of what we casually refer to as “closure” — “the present was returned to me at last” — there is an underlying and unresolved conflict evident throughout. Early in the book, she writes,
I have given up the idea of working on myself, lost faith in it, since I have learned that will power, no matter how faithfuly applied, cannot restore my ability to walk. At one time I had thought that, despite all medical dictums, my force of will could cure me. Now I know differently. My interest in esoteric knowledge has not waned. It is only that I have suffered the disillusionment of not being able to bring about a miraculous healing of myself.
Both And Now to Live Again and As Love is Deep are filled with calls to find peace and perspective in love, beauty, and spiritual matters. “If we look at it right,” she argues, “even when we are doing what seems like nothing but the drudgery of physical exercise, we are working with divine tools, sacred tools, following the holy laws that will lead us out of disease into ease.” Yet one senses that Betsey Barton was herself never fully convinced. Her own physical challenges rarely allowed themselves to be ignored for long.
On the morning of Thursday, 13 December 1962, readers of The Los Angeles Times were greeted with a headline announcing Betsey Barton’s death. The morning before, Betsey’s live-in nurse found her floating face up in the pool outside her house in the hills above Bel-Air. Her wheelchair lay at the bottom of the dead end. Tracks in the lawn and deck indicated Betsey had wheeled herself up to and into the pool. The watch on her wrist read 4:40 AM. The police reported that acquaintances said that Betsey had been despondent over her increasing health problems. Though no note was found, the death was ruled a suicide. Her father funded a fellowship in his daughter’s name, administered by the World Rehabilitation Fund, to support the work of rehabilitation therapists and clinics in Third World countries and provide hope even though Betsey Barton ultimately lost hers.
As Love is Deep, by Betsey Barton New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1957
If we were to trust Virginia Faulkner, the “Lost Generation” had no desire to be found. In The Barbarians (1935), her account of the Bohemian life of expats and war veterans set in Paris and on the Riviera in 1922, to be “disoriented, wandering, directionless” was more fun than having to be tied down to any particular plan. The Barbarians — a loose cluster of creative types — painters, a sculptor, a writer, a pianist, and a gigolo — value independence over all:
Because their work was concerned with the forms of things, they had little time to bother with problems of behavior when in the presence of substance. They possessed great singleness of purpose, and because they found simplicity in all that they most admired they tried to regulate their lives as simply as possible. What they disliked they avoided or ignored, or pretended was non-existent. Life all students of reality, they were experts at make-believe. Like all people who must live intensively, they were sometimes cruel and impatient. Like all specialists, they had a good many blind spots.
This sounds remarkably insightful coming from a writer who was all of 22 when The Barbarians, but bear in mind that Faulkner was nine years old in 1922 and had spent less than a year in Europe, mostly attending a tony girls’ finishing school in Rome. So, there’s far more in this book one has to attribute to precocious powers — of either observation or imagination or probably both. “Tauchnitz had taken the place of experience,” Faulkner writes of one particularly naïve young woman, but it might have truer for the author herself than she might like to admit.
Faulkner later wrote scripts for Fred Allen’s radio show and dialogue for Hollywood comedies, and her talent for rapid-fire conversation in an absurdist vein takes center stage in much of The Barbarians.
“There are so many things to think about. For instance, did it ever occur to you that there are an equal number of hands and feet in the world — at least to start with?”
“And the thumb is the strongest of the fingers?” said Phip helpfully.
“And monkeys have knuckles,” contributed Beppo. “At least, I think they do. Funny how you never associate a monkey with a knuckle.”
“And if we didn’t have fingernails, what would we scratch with?” said Marie.
“Do you suppose if we weren’t subject to itching we’d have fingernails?” inquired Andreas.
“Pulling off the fingernails was a medieval form of torture,” said Sarkesso.
“The Chinese take great pride in long fingernails,” said Lise valiantly.
“And short feet.”
“And many a foot is not twelve inches long.”
“And there is a kind of worm called the inch-worm.”
“And it is very hard to tell one end of worm from the other.”
“Can worms back up?”
This provoked quite a long discussion which ended by Lise and Beppo going out to get some worms….
Faulkner also tries her hand at romantic farce involving mistaken identities and hiding under beds à la Feydeau and proves herself a quick study. The Barbarians collectively foil Baroness Von Schanzburg’s attempt to arrange a marriage between her daughter and a passing American millionaire (“An income for herself from the son-in-law was not essential but would be acceptable,” she muses) and spirit her off to their Left Bank suite of garrets.
With no apparent talent aside from looking beautiful, she’s soon convinced by a ne’er-do-well to join him selling fake native artworks to tourists in the middle of the Sahara. Faulkner may have taken a page from Evelyn Waugh’s just-published A Handful of Dust in that the girl finds herself held prisoner by an especially sadistic local trader. Unlike Waugh’s Tony Last, however, several Barbarians come to the rescue, and the comic crew rides laughing into the sunset.
When it came time for The Barbarians to be published, however, it was Faulkner herself who was the butt of jokes. As the story came out in May 1935 when the New York Supreme Court granted her an annulment, one night two months before Faulkner had been entertaining friends, including Tallulah Bankhead, at her hotel. As more drinks were poured, the party flowed out of the hotel and into one or more nightclubs, until at 3 A.M. the next morning, she was standing up in front of the Justice of the Peace of Harrison, New York pledging to love, honor, and obey one Everett Weil, whom reports identified as a “cotton converter,” whatever that is/was. Hours later, Faulkner awoke, finally sober, to find Weil bringing her breakfast in bed. Faulkner, who was likely gay and in any case in no mood to get hitched, fled the scene and began a frantic search for the fastest route to an annulment. A few papers picked up the story in March, but when the court ruling came out on 15 May 1935, The New York Daily News gleefully put its best headliner writer to work:
Headline from The New York Daily News story on Virginia Faulkner’s short-lived marriage
“Fifteen Scotch highballs preceding a dawn elopement mystified Virginia Faulkner so thoroughly that she didn’t know what was happening until the blissfully happy bridegroom, Everett V. Weil, revived her with a platter of scrambled eggs of his own making in his apartment at 42 W. 74th St. Then she fled,” the article opened. You can hear the copy writer chuckling as he went to town on this story. “He Scrambles, She Scrams,” quipped a subheading. It ended with testimony from her application: “All she remembers of the honeymoon’s final chapter, she deposed, was that the bridgegroom gave her his card and phone number as she was leaving his apartment, and said: ‘Call me up some time.'” Not even Faulkner ever managed to come up with a story quite as wild as that.
The Barbarians, by Virginia Faulkner New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935
When I spotted the yellow1 spine with the title Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! and the name of Eileen Winncroft below it while browsing through the shelves here at UEA, I knew I had spotted a live one: rare, audacious, and somehow overlooked in the sometimes cultish fervor for novels by British women from the 1930s. That title alone is a bundle of potential psycho-sexual-social interpretations, and I knew I would have to read the book to see just which direction Eileen Winncroft took it.
Now, some readers might stop at the second sentence: “‘Breakfast, poops,’ he murmured in a homosexual Oxford accent.” We’re obviously in comic territory, but not everyone would find the joke funny today. Winncroft might have considered herself a sophisticate — and her narrator Forest is quite open-minded when it comes to heterosexual love — but when it comes to gay men and women, her humour sinks to the level of Benny Hill:
“Do stop stroking each other; you look like a couple of pansies.”
But she only made them worse and they picked dog daisies and stuck them behind each other’s ears and smacked each other’s bottom and called each other darling and behaved in a manner in which young men do in that pretty pub so near the Green Park.
Sean is a poet and would-be writer, while Forest is a mother and bread-winning writer. It’s Forest who worries about being able to buy her daughter new Wellies while Sean spends hours sunning himself in a deck chair, épuisé et fatigué. Be a Gent is, at least at the start, a comedy of role reversals. “Never in her wildest dreams did she think of Sean as a husband… She felt too much of a gent to need a husband then.” The problem at the root of their marriage, in fact, is that Forest sees Sean as an object: “… much as he despised his long, slender body it had at least got him a wife, whereas his inspired brain had not even got him enough to eat.”
That doesn’t stop Forest from turning out newspapers articles for pregenant women on “how much your husband could help in these last few tiring months.” For Forest is in her last few tiring months as the novel opens. And when the household is increased with a healthy baby boy (Robin), the population is quickly rebalanced by a sickly adult man as Sean — at his mother’s expense — is sent away to a sanitorium in Switzerland. Leaving Forest alone to manage affairs.
I use the word affairs with tongue firmly in cheek. Not only does Forest have to pop up to London and make the rounds of Fleet Street in search of freelance writing gigs, she also has to sort out childcare, lodging, food, finances, and transportation. To this extent, Be a Gent is utterly up-to-date. It may, in fact, be the best account of life as a freelancer written before the phrase “gig economy” lit up some sadistic capitalist’s brain. More than a few writers will recognize the editors Forest has to deal with:
“I adore the article you had in the so-and-so yesterday. Now, that is exactly the kind of thing I want. Why don’t you give me that kind of thing instead of this kind of thing.” Picking up her last article for them and curling up their lips at it.
Outside the practical realm, Be a Gent is about a game of musical chairs, with Forest the player and a series of men the chairs — once she’s got rid of Sean through a divorce pulled off like a rabbit from a hat. There is Charles, the unfailingly charming and reliably caddish man about town. Martin, the magnificent doctor who proves to have a different girl for … well, several days of the week. An enormously wealthy Frenchman smitten with Forest — but she with him? Not so much. It all ends like these games do: the music stops and the player plops down on the chair that happens to be within reach. It doesn’t really matter which man Forest ends up with.
Winncroft admits that none of her characters, including Forest, are particularly admirable. “The next story I write will be about quite different people. Really nice normal people.” But since she only knows one at the moment, she invites her readers to send “names and addresses of any others you know so that I can have a few minutes’ talk with them and get a complete picture of them for the story.”
Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! is a little needle of a tale about surviving as an independent woman wrapped up in so many layers of fluff I suspect almost no one felt the barb when it came out. Neither Forest nor Winncroft took herself seriously enough to brood over anything. And the prose speeds the reader along in endless strings of conjunctions:
And then Susan got affected…. And that, of course, opened the heavens…. And while all this fun was going on…. And, of course, Forest accepted…. And the pretty girl he loved…. And Forest returned home…. And every week she tried not to see Martin….
It’s not all like this, but I counted strings of sentences starting with “And …” running on for as much as two pages. Winncroft set a high standard for breathlessness in her prose.
To her credit, she was writing something of an ironic self-portrait. Eileen Winncroft was, in fact, a pseudonym of a pseudonym. To the millions of readers of the Daily Express, she was Martha Blount, one of a trio of women’s page columnists — along with Anne Edwards and Eve Perrick — masterminded by Lord Beaverbrook and all taking their names from friends of the poet Alexander Pope. A few years before Be a Gent came out, Martha Blount provided regular updates during and after her pregnancy. In real life, Martha Blount was Mrs. Neil Macloughlin (her second husband) and their son — known to the Daily Express as Simon Blount — Shaun Macloughlin went on to become a writer of radio dramas for the BBC and, more recently, to found the English Through Drama program. And Mrs. Macloughlin was the former Mrs. Franckeiss and, in the beginning, Henrietta Pryke from Sussex. It took a good hour digging through genealogical databases to unravel that thread.
As Eileen Winncroft, she went on to write a second novel, Angels in Ealing (1939), with a very different tone entirely — a story involving a real angel and a real divine power. Then, over a decade later, she collaborated with a German woman, Else Wendel, in writing Hausfrau at War (1957), a memoir of life in Germany during the Second World War.
Hutchinson catalogue listing for I Am Going to Have a Baby
As Martha Blount, she appears to have had a deal with Hutchinson in 1937 to write a book based on her Daily Express columns to be titled “I am Going to Have a Baby.” The book was announced in Hutchinson’s catalogue with the promise that it would contain “advice on matters which, if overlooked, may be disastrous.” Unfortunately, the book appears never to have been published: not even the British Library has it. Now we know the reason for World War Two. Much later, in the 1960s, Martha Blount finally offered her advice to mothers in a little paperback titled, A Time for Joy (1968). Tandem Paperbacks gave it far less hoopla than “I am Going to Have a Baby,” despite the fact that the former appears to have been largely based on the latter.
1The UEA Library has the second printing, which had a simpler, all-yellow binding. For those of you keeping track.
Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent, by Eileen Winncroft (pseudonym of Henrietta Macloughlin) London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1938
Financial Times has the best two opening sentences I’ve read in a long time:
William Longfellow Wollacombe, the Royal Academician, an upright figure with whiskers and the face of a statesman, a man of great truth and purpose you would have said, endowed this world somewhat bountifully with children. Indeed, he was a shade careless about it, not sufficiently distinguishing between his own field and his neighbour’s with the result that the stern visage which has now gone out of fashion stamped itself rather freely on the new age, though with diminishing incisiveness.
The wonderfully vague sense that adultery and bastardry are rather like atmospheric phenomena that take place beyond one’s control conveyed here sets the tone perfectly for the comic clash at this book’s core. If the painter Wollacombe floats through his world blithely unaware of his impact on it, he is positively razor-sharp compared to his poetess wife, Ella, sometimes referred to as “Love-in-the-Mist.” On her brief and infrequent passes through the family’s home in Kensington, she is apt to stumble into one of the many children rambling unsupervised around the place, say “I seem to know you,” and then call out indefinitely, “Give him a penny!” before passing out again.
There are, in fact, thirteen Wollacombe children, bearing artistic names such as Leonardo, Perugino, Rubens, Ingres, Veronese, Gentile, and Lippi and even more artistic manners: “They wrote, painted, made sculpture or played instruments from birth.” They gather like birds when they need to eat, descend upon unwitting grocers, taking away whatever foods strike their fancy, and signing off on hugely marked-up bills against their father’s account. Fortunately, Wollacombe is among the great artistic successes of the Victorian age: “He painted Cows. No gallery in England was complete without a number of Wollacombe Cows; no private house without one or two reproductions.”
One Wollacombe, however, is the odd number in this baker’s dozen: Titian. When his mother asks, “And what are you going to be when you grow up? Painter? Poet? Sculptor? Musician?” he snaps back, “None of that nonsense for me. I’m going into business!” Financial Times, in other words, is a fable about an ant in a world filled with grasshoppers. Unlike his siblings, Titian’s soul aches for order, and he insists on being sent away to boarding school. Fraser passes over this period with an observation some might find applicable to the current Conservative government:
We do not want to follow Titian through his schooldays: nothing could be duller. He used, later, to say that his schooldays were the happiest of his life. Men do say that. It shows they ceased to develop a short time after they left.
Titian takes all the pennies given by his mother and deposits them fastidiously in a Post Office account. And when, after leaving school, he rises quickly through the ranks of a commercial firm (his specialty is collecting outstanding debts), and is recruited by Kettering, the era’s grand financier, his father bids him a bitter farewell: “I can’t say I’m sorry you’re going. I never thought any one of mine would have sunk so low.”
Financial Times perfectly illustrates the principle that tragedy is the flipside of comedy (and vice versa). We laugh at the continual discord between upright Titian and the rest of the Wollacombe tribe. They accept him with a breadth of mind, a tolerance for all types, even a sort of affection — “rather like the affection of a scientist for some example of Neanderthal Man.” To him, though, their tolerance merely proved them utterly lacking in principle. To Leonardo et al., Titian is sad but comic figure. To the author, however, he is ultimately a tragic figure — for it’s clear from the start whose side Fraser’s on.
Despite the fact that Fraser was an accomplished and knighted administrator and civil servant, his greatest passion was for spiritual matters, especially the possibility of transcendence, of passing from this world to another realm of immortality and beauty. He saw art as one of the means by which we can build bridges between the two worlds, and so he has no choice but to take Titian through to a final judgment in the court of immortality. In Fraser’s hands, of course, it’s a kangaroo court, and it’s painful thing to witness. Painful and sadly, from an artistic standpoint, unsuccessful. Good comedy is its own reward. In Financial Times Fraser manages to earn a fortune and fritter it away trying to make a philosophical point. “There is little left to record,” he writes on page 200 — which is where he should have stopped writing. And if you take up Financial Times — which I highly recommend — I would advise you to make the editorial choice Fraser failed to. You won’t miss what you miss.
Other Reviews
• Viola Garvin, The Evening Standard
It sparkles with laughter and mischief; heaves hugely with a deeper mirth at the eternal comedy; gravely considers the temporal world and its mad affairs; pities both the sad and sick, both sinful and sorry, though with an aloof, measured tenderness in proportion to the larger issues. Above all, being afraid neither of beauty nor ugliness, but taking experience for the enriching thing it is, not afraid either of life or death.
• Kate O’Brien, The Spectator
Because Mr. Fraser writes at speed, keeps up his design of excess, overstatement and satire, sustains in all directions, pro and con his hero, a sense of non-reality, and presents a crowd of amusingly mythical figures, formal, grotesque, decorative and theatrically-lighted—his inverted theme, which might have been merely a statement, untenable, as an effect of fireworks, develops into a sustained amusement, imperfect and uneven, but well worth reading, and containing much that is colourful and out of the common. Hit or miss anyway, it is non-pedestrian, and aims at being an entertainment.
Financial Times, by Ronald Fraser London: Jonathan Cape, 1942
This is not a book: it’s an open wound. In a prefatory note, Ewart Milne calls Time Stopped “the story of the narrator’s life as seen in retrospect after the death of this wife.” The problem is Milne’s life stopped when his wife Thelma died of breast cancer in 1964.
Milne, an Irishman who began writing after a decade working as a merchant seaman, took up residence in England in 1942. He came from Ireland through the help of John Betjeman, whom Milne contacted after being told he had been targeted for assassination by the Nazis for his vocal support of the English cause. He was assigned as a land manager at Assington Hall in Suffolk, where a school for refugee children. There he met and became involved with Thelma Dobson, a married woman whose husband was serving in the Royal Air Force. He writes in the book’s first poem:
That summer of forty-five The war in Europe all over and done And the airmen soldiers from the war returning You going to meet your first husband Then we three speaking together
“And I begged him not to be hurt/We had not deceived him,” Milne continues. To a man who seems to have worn his principles on his chest — couriering medical supplies to the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, speaking out against the Nazis in Ireland, encouraging the work of other writers — this proves to be a significant factor in what follows.
Denis Dobson agreed to let Thelma separate, after which — at least as recounted here — she began her affair with Milne. Denis then went along with her application for divorce and Thelma and Milne married in 1947. She came from a family of moderate wealth and supported Milne’s writing, which brought in little money. Never part of any particular school, considered something of an outcast in Ireland and an outsider in England, he never managed to connect himself with either literary establishment: “The English see I am not English/To the Irish I am Anglo” he writes in Time Stopped.
In the early 1950s, Milne got acquainted with the young Irish writer and balladeer Patrick Galvin and encouraged his work. They collaborated on several pieces for literary magazines and spent a great deal of time together. And, as Milne later learned, Galvin spent a great deal of time with Milne’s wife Thelma. In 1962, thinking perhaps that he would be warmly welcomed back by his native country, Milne returned to live in Dublin. Resentment is a long-burning fuel, and Milne’s rejection of Ireland during the war lingered in the minds of some of his old colleagues. Few doors were opened to him.
To make matters worse, Thelma was diagnosed with breast cancer. Milne was slow at first to react to the news: “You reproach me dead that I did not see/The gravity of your illness.” He tries to defend himself posthumously: “Love I laid my palm on your breast twenty years ago/Saying truly I suspected some evil inside there.’
Already devastated by Thelma’s death, Milne was knocked down again with news that he seems to have taken just as hard. He learns that Thelma had been supporting Patrick Galvin financially, even buying half the printing of his 1960 collection, Christ in London, from its publisher, Linden Press. He learns that the two had been carrying on an affair, practically under his nose, for years.
The revelation sent Milne into a fugue from which he emerged, over 18 months later, with Time Stopped. Every poem in the book is untitled, every poem is dated: 28 Nov 1964; 11 March 1965; 15 Jan 1966. This is, in effect, Milne’s journal, but he rearranged the entries, interspersed with short prose “Intermissions,” to show “my growth of understanding.” The result is powerful, painful, and at times almost unreadable. “This is my life since you left me alone/This rack this torture.” It can seem, at times, as if we’re on that rack with Milne. And as with any torture, one only wants it to stop.
This is one of several problems with Time Stopped. Coming from a minor poet and an even smaller press, Time Stopped received few reviews, but those all spotted its core shortcoming. “The subject matter is painful,” wrote C. B. Cox in The Spectator, “and, I think, beyond Milne’s ability to control in language.” Fellow Irishman P. J. Kavanagh gave him partial credit: “The attempt seems to me admirable — it is one of the things verse is for — but, alas, I cannot say it is successful. The pain stays with Mr. Milne and refuses to change into poetry.” I don’t know if Milne did any editing on his poems beyond their sequencing, but this often reads like 160-plus pages of raw material crying out to be rewritten down to a dozen or so good poems. You know what some of the themes are going to be. How do I live without you? I hate you for abandoning me. How do you like your blue-eyed girl Mr Death? Be prepared to see them repeated over and over and over.
But the more subtle problems stem from Milne’s blind spots. In its obituary for Milne, The Times described Time Stopped as a “harrowing elegy … written in the agonized recognition of her infidelity to him, revealed only after her death.” The following week, the paper printed a letter from Douglas Cleverdon, a former BBC producer, who wrote that the comment “deserves a footnote”:
His own lechery was notorious. To my wife’s astonishment, he made a pass at her within 10 minutes of their first meeting; and I vividly recall his indignation and sense of ill-usage when he complained to me that, in his sixties, nubile young women actually rejected his amorous approaches. He attributed this to the selfishness of the younger generation.
The hostility of Cleverdon’s letter and The Times’ decision to print it, stirred up a kerfuffle that was noted by papers on both sides of the Atlantic. T. E. Utley, the obituaries editor, justified printing the letter: “In the obituary we revealed a fact about his wife, which was very damaging; people wrote to say that he was totally awful, and justice seemed to be required.” When Cleverdon was asked to comment, he did clarify that he hadn’t seen Milne in over 20 years, but “I never liked him very much: He was conceited and absolutely shaken that girls wouldn’t lie down in front of him. But then you know what these elderly Irish poets are like.”
Perhaps the relationship between Milne and Thelma Dobson was chaste until they asked for Denis Dobson’s consent, but if it was true what other people said of Milne (and here I am assuming that T. E. Utley didn’t use “people say” in the way Trump does), then his reaction to his wife’s affair with Galvin is melodramatic and unjust to say the least:
Oh women women women Charismatic the womaniser approaches Pretended feminist matey-like says ‘Be emancipated love come to bed What of it what of that husband of yours You are free woman come to bed’ And you fall for it every time bang flat on your backs
So Thelma was just a sucker for a smooth operator — just like all women? Knowing Milne’s history, one has to wonder who was the womanizer he had in mind: Galvin or himself? Milne undermines his own righteous indignation in revealing at times, perhaps thoughtlessly, his own inclinations:
Do you remember • together sawing the fallen branches I joked and said I’d like to make love to your daughter When she grew older We weren’t married then Your daughter was a small child And you answered gaily that we would all go wild When once the war was over And everyone be free to love And no one be hurt at all As you were not by what I said
I confess that I almost stopped reading at this point. Time Stopped has been described as confessional poetry, but usually confessional poets are actually conscious of the things they’re confessing to. I may be guilty of 2020 vision in looking at these lines from 1965, but one cannot deny that there’s a certain hypocrisy at work here — one that becomes even more apparent from the extent to which Milne turns Galvin into his bête noire:
Spawn of monstrous mouth Thief of the world Treachery is his name
Flatters friendlike • takes his friend’s wife Flatters his friend’s wife • takes her purse Take her body from her husband’s bed to his own
“May he burn for his fooling you/May he burn and double burn.” The Times was not alone in describing Time Stopped as Milne’s reaction to his wife’s infidelity, but if one actually reads the book, it’s hard not to see it just as much as his reaction to Galvin’s betrayal of his friendship with Milne. Thelma comes across as a dupe, not a willful adulteress. Galvin, on the other hand, is a snake with two apples: offering love to Thelma, friendship and trust to Milne.
Galvin’s acceptance of Thelma’s financial support is nearly as infuriating to Milne as his seduction:
And for his pseudo-aiding me He got payment of handouts from you Over and over he got paid Till your handouts became a habit to you Became his way of life.
Which begs the question, of course: hadn’t they become a habit to Milne, too? Milne was a strenuous writer of letters to the editor, to numerous editors and on all sorts of topics, and in the years after Thelma’s death, their frequency and pitch both increased. In the same year that the book was published, Milne wrote a letter to The Times dismissing the protest of several young poets who burned a stack of poetry books outside the Arts Council’s offices in St. James Square. “Some of us elder poets,” he intoned, saw the Council’s embrace “as the kiss of death.” He concluded haughtily that “Poetry is its own reward. If it isn’t I suggest they try another trade….” It is, of course, so much easier for poetry to offer its own rewards when aided by a wife’s independent wealth — most of which, by the way, Thelma passed along to Milne.
I came across Time Stopped when engaged in one of my favorite games: browsing in the stacks of a well-stocked library and taking out and flipping through any odd volume that catches my eye. I didn’t know Ewart Milne or his work when I opened the book, but you can’t read more than a poem or two from it without recognizing its extraordinary character. Milne obviously intended Time Stopped to be published and read, but it has much more of the feel of a diary never meant to be shared: it is raw, awkwardly shaped, and both honest and self-deceiving in the way we all are when we try to be candid. It may not be literature — but unforgettable it most certainly is.
[As a footnote, I should say that Milne introduced the • character in these poems as a way of indicating a slight pause, rather like a rest character in written music. In some ways, this might represent the poet’s most useful contribution to literature: it’s a device I would welcome to further use.]
Time Stopped, by Ewart Milne London: Plow Poems, 1967
I started a habit of posting covers and short notes about neglected books on Twitter and Instagram last year. One of the books I featured recently was Marian Spitzer’s tribute to a legendary vaudeville theatre, The Palace (1969). I read in one of the reviews of the book that Spitzer had been a publicist for the Palace in its heyday, which piqued my curiosity and led me to do a little more research. From her Wikipedia entry, I learned that she had written several books before The Palace as well as a number of short stories, and this led me to go looking for her fiction. It wasn’t a long search: her 1924 novel, Who Would be Free, which is available on the Internet Archive.
Marian Spitzer, from the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, 7 September 1923
Spitzer was just 25 when the book was published, but she was already a veteran writer. She’d started as a publicist for the King-Bee Hive vaudeville agency when she was just 18, then switched to become a reporter for The New York Globe. By age 21, she was being invited to speak before journalism groups. One of the apparent benefits of her time as a publicity agent was developing a not-inconsiderable knack for self-promotion. She claimed she wrote the book only because publisher Horace Liveright asked her to. It was a promise she did her best to avoid. She later explained her approach to writing:
My method is this: When evening comes I may or may not have a date. Say, for sake of argument, I haven’t. I call up all the theaters where I think I make be able to graft a free ticket. Say, then, that I get turned down everywhere. Then I telephone all my friends and ask what they’re doing. They;re all doing something that they don’t want interrupted, say. Then I look around the place for a book that I haven’t read. If it’s just my luck that there isn’t, I take a last try at the theaters.
By then, if I fail again, I’ve exhausted all my resources for getting out of working. So I write.
Who Would be Free has, I suspect, substantially autobiographical elements. Like Spitzer herself, her heroine Eleanor Hoffman was born into a family of upper-middle-class German Jews living on the Upper West Side, the “Our Crowd” that Stephen Birmingham wrote about in his 1977 book. In the books’s opening chapter, she and her sister Muriel are being confirmed in a ceremony in a wealthy synagogue, alongside young men headed for Princeton and Yale. Comfortable in their place, her parents look down on Gentiles and recently-immigrated Jews from Eastern Europe. Eleanor’s mother, in particular, worries endlessly about protecting her family’s status by finding proper husbands for her daughters. Only when pushed to exasperation does she allow a word like meschugah slip into her conversation.
Who Would be Free stays true to its title: this is the story of an escape. After a classmate slips her a copy of Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, Eleanor loses faith not only in her religion but in her parents’ ability to consider her best interests. “In Jewish families, especially among the kind I come from,” she tells a Gentile friend, “you’re a prisoner to your parents, not only until you marry, but forever after, and the only satisfaction you can get is to have children of your own, and make prisoners of them.” She rejects marriage as an escape route: “That was marriage. She would belong to him. Then she wouldn’t belong to herself any more.”
After a blow-up with her mother, Eleanor storms out of the family apartment and moves in with a friend. Although she initially feels the pull of home, a few uncomfortable family dinners (“Frantic pleas, agonized wailings, extravagant promises. Threats of suicide, too.”) are enough to steel her resolve. It helps that she gets a lucky break and lands a job as a graphic designer with a theatrical producer. She quickly falls in love — with her work:
She was utterly happy. The life in and around the theater was exactly what she wanted, her idea of a dream come true. Just to be there, to listen to the plans for the new season, to chatter idly with the people who dawdled in and out of the Kalbfleisch office, to read the script of a new play and hear a discussion of who would be the best person to get for the star part, to be consulted occasionally by the art director on a point of scenic technicality or a matter of lights, that was heaven. She loved her job, she loved the strange, half-made people who were connected with her job, she loved her mode of living.
And then she falls in love with a man — a writer, a cynic … and a Gentile. The attraction is mutual. She admires his mind, he adores her spirit of independence. Best of all, they share the same tastes: “‘It’s pretty good to like the same things,’ he said blithely. ‘but when you find someone who hates the same things you do, it’s incomparable.'” But Eleanor has already learned one lesson in love: it can be survived. “[S]he had lost him, and she had wanted to die. But after a while she had recovered. She would always recover.” Having lived through the death of her fiancée, killed in combat in France, she decides (to steal a title from Marjorie Hillis), to live alone and like it: “She had to be footloose, spiritually as well as actually,” even if that comes at the price of loneliness.
I went to see Greta Gerwig’s film of Little Women just after finishing Who Would be Free and it was tempting to draw parallels between the two stories, even to try to sell Spitzer’s book as “Little Women in Manhattan”: sisters, a war, marriage as an economic proposition, the difficulty of a woman finding a place for herself outside of marriage. Unlike Jo March, however, Eleanor Hoffman sees both marriage and her family as prisons. Much as she feels a strong bond with her sister Muriel, just a year younger and alongside throughout school and synagogue, Eleanor sees her as victim, a prisoner happy to be locked in by husband and children for the rest of her life.
In an interview after the book was published, Spitzer said, “There are seven or eight reasons why I’m not married,” the first being “that no man has ever asked me to marry him.” In reality, she was already involved with another writer, Harlan Thompson. The two would marry less than a year later, have two sons, work together in New York and Hollywood, and from all accounts spend four happy decades together until Thompson’s death in 1966. Spitzer continued to write and publish fiction for another ten years — a novel (now extremely rare) called A Hungry Young Lady (1930) and short stories such as “Out Where the Blues Begin” (from The Saturday Evening Post, July 15, 1933). In the late 1940s, she contracted tuberculosis and was bedridden for over a year, an experience she recounted in I Took It Lying Down (1951). Her final book, drawing heavily on her time as a publicity agent, was The Palace (1969). She died in 1983.
Who Would be Free, by Marian Spitzer New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924
I’m not sure what the point of this post is. There are seven copies of this book worldwide listed in WorldCat.org. There are none available for sale. If you want to read it, your best bet is to get a copy of amateurish scan I made of the British Library’s copy. There are few enough people who even read these posts in the first place. Given those odds, Lord knows whether anyone else will ever read Trance by Appointment.
Portrait of G. E. Trevelyan by Bassano (1937), courtesy of the National Portrait GalleryI have begun research on the life and works of Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan for the MA program in Biography at the University of East Anglia (Go … um, I don’t actually know what the sports teams refer to themselves as … Anglers?). From what I have been able to discover so far, sometime in 1932 she rented a flat or a room in a flat on Lansdowne Road in Kensington that she shared with 3-4 other people and where she remained, steadily writing away, producing a total of eight novels, until a German bomb hit the place and she died of injuries a few months later. She appears to have had exactly what Virginia Woolf proposed as the prerequisites for an independent woman writer in “A Room of One’s Own”: a room of her own and five hundred a year. She didn’t write reviews. She didn’t go to country house weekends. She didn’t go to parties or join them. She sat and wrote what she wanted to write.
Publishers seemed interested in publishing what she wrote. Martin Secker published her first four books; Victor Gollancz her next three; George Harrap this last one. She got consistently favorable reviews, but perhaps it was more the cachet of the Trevelyan name (G. M., G. O., R. C., Sir Charles, et al.) that attracted them. In any case, none of them ever went to a second printing, let alone a reissue. I still have to get to the archives to track down the contractual correspondence, but the dearth of copies of any of her books today certainly suggests that no one was queuing up to reserve the latest G. E. Trevelyan novel at their local Boots Book Lover’s Library.
And so, Gertrude went out of her flat on Lansdowne Road on a stretcher in early October 1940 and disappeared. The Times and a few other papers published a few lines when she died of her injuries in early 1941 and that was it. She was buried in the cemetery up the road from her parents’ home in Bath, and from what I’ve seen in terms of coverage in English literary history and criticism, they might as well have buried all of her books with her. There is nothing. I’ve gone through all the surveys of the 20th century British novel they have here in the UEA library: nothing. I went through the biographies of her contemporaries (Bowen, Greene, Orwell, Waugh, Woolf, etc.) looking for mentions of her name: nothing. The one trace is in Barbara Pym’s A Very Private Eye: a single entry, dated 4 September 1933. “Reading Gertrude Trevelyan’s novel Hot-House. I desperately want to write an Oxford novel – but I must see first that my emotions are simmered down fairly well.” I’ve been checking with a number of academics specializing in British women novelists of the mid-20th century — which is something close to a minor industry — and get the email equivalent of blank stares. Not only is her work lost, but no one else appears to be looking for it.
This is not entirely true. Just last year, the academic publisher Routledge reissued the very novel Barbara Pym got all excited over: Hot-House. Not that you’d know by anything that Routledge’s website will tell you. What you have to look for is this gripping title: Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II, Volume II. This is one of a series of novels and other narratives of university life — meaning Oxford and Cambridge — edited by Dr. Anna Bogen. The series includes Neapolitan Ice (1928) by Renée Haynes (a classmate of Gertrude’s at Lady Margaret Hall), Rosy-Fingered Dawn (1934) by Rose Marie Hodgson, and other hard-to-find titles — companion texts to Bogen’s 2015 study, Women’s University Fiction, 1880–1945 (which doesn’t actually mention Trevelyan, by the way). The way in which Routledge has packaged and marketed these books is execrable — and I’m being as polite as I can. There are only two things in Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II, Volume II: Hot-House and a 10-page introduction by Bogen. And this is what the title page says:
Title page of the 2018 Routledge reissue of G. E. Trevelyan’s Hot-House
To be fair, if you click on the “Contents” tab of the Routledge page for Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II, Volume II, you will see the following: “Table of Contents: Volume 2. Hot-House (1933), Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan.” So, it’s not like Routledge is denying they’re reissued Hot-House: they just not particularly interested in telling anyone. If you’re dying to read it, by the way, be aware that the hardback edition will cost you £110.00, which may be why UEA doesn’t own a copy.
All of which is a tediously long preface to a discussion of Gertrude Trevelyan’s last and easiest rarest novel, Trance by Appointment. Trance tells a simple and sad story. Jean, the middle daughter of a working-class London family, is a psychic. As she grows, her family comes to recognize this talent and introduce her to Madame Eva, who runs a fortune-telling business from a basement flat in Bayswater. Eva, who encourages Jean to develop her skills, then introduces her to “the Professor,” Norman Mitch, an astrologer, who sees the commercial possibilities of a “trance by appointment” business run in a better part of town. In some ways, from this point forward the story will be familiar to anyone who’s read Tolstoy’s Kholstomer, usually translated as “Strider: The Story of a Horse” — or, if you’ve read Marx, the story of labor in the hands of capitalism. The resource is used up in a relentless quest for profit, then tossed aside in contempt.
In this case, the means of production are a little unusual. Trevelyan tells much of the story through Jean’s perspective, which means that though she has visions as early as when she’s strapped in a stroller and being wheeled along the street by her sister Joyce, it takes her a while to understand what’s happening.
“Where does it come from, Mum?” “What, lovey?” “The trees and things that come when it’s dark. When you lie and look hard, but you have to keep still as still or it goes. And the bubbles that’s all different colours and jumps about, where does it come from, Mum?” “Stuff and nonsense. Is my water boiling yet?”
Gradually, the family comes to recognize that Jean has “the Sight,” but her mother caution, “It’s a precious gift to them that can keep their tongue still, but no good ever come to them that didn’t. You keep it quiet, my dearie, to yourself.” Jean tries at first to fit into the normal workday world, taking a job selling cigarettes from a little stand in the nearby Underground station. But the energy that bombards her from the thousands of souls that pass her every hour overwhelms her and she collapses. Mum takes Jean to Madame Eva, who’s happy to have “a nice, quiet, refined sort of girl to ‘elp her in the house and learn the business.”
And “Jean did love it, being at Madame Eva’s”: Eva takes the girl under her wing, shows her how to recognize the signs in a client’s expression, clothing, manners, and language that Eva relies on to produce the appearance of clairvoyance. “Remember this, though,” she advises, “everyone wants money, it doesn’t matter how much they’ve got. That’s always a safe one.” Fascinated by Eva’s use of the crystal ball, Jean reveals her ability to fall into a trance and see visions, and Eva begins to organize seances: rare occasions for which a much higher fee can be demanded.
This in turn attracts the attention of Eva’s friend, the astrologer. Trevelyan is a little too eager to let us know he’s not to be trusted: “Mr. Mitch was a bit fat, with a white face, and his hair was curly except that he oiled it down, and was starting to go bald on top, he brushed it across.” His manners are well-oiled, too — taking Jean’s hand, stroking it, murmuring, “My dear lady.” Soon, he’s talked Jean into marriage and sets her up in a West End studio — to “Get you further with the clee-an-tale.” He gives up reading the stars “to manage for Jean” and sets her on a schedule of frequent seances. He convinces Jean that the visions are communications from the dead — specifically his dear departed little sister, Daisy — and soon Jean imagines Daisy calling to her: “Jee-een, I want to talk to you, Jee-een.” Unfortunately for Norman’s plans, he also sleeps with his new wife, and with the predictable results. Two of them, in fact. And when Jean resists strapping on the seance harness again after the second child, Norman takes his anger out on her. “You can thank your Mum for that,” he snaps at his son after slapping Jean around. Although Jean continues to give readings — reluctantly, with ever greater hesitation, ever less appetite to fight or even care about her fee — Norman all but abandons her to strike out on his own again.
Most reviews of Trance by Appointment offered moderate praise. Edwin Muir, writing in The Listener, called the book “a sordid, pitiable little story, told with that cruel attention to detail which characterises Miss Trevelyan’s art.” Leonora Eyles, her most consistent advocate among critics, wrote in the Times Literary Supplement, “Once again Miss Trevelyan gives us an insight into human minds that is quite uncanny, and her Jean, though such an unusual character, is completely convincing.” The New Statesman’s John Mair, on the other hand, thought Trevelyan had wasted her time — and his: “Apart from her mediumistic talents Jean is a complete nonentity, and no writer could present her otherwise. A good novelist would never have made the attempt.”
I truly did not enjoy Trance by Appointment. It is a grim story, a story of a soul being ground down by an abusive husband and the relentless pressure to pay the rent and put food on the table. I found myself, like Jean, taking pleasure from the littlest things — yellow flower petals floating in a blue bowl or the solid, if at times ineffectual, goodness of Madame Eva.
But my respect for Gertrude Trevelyan’s talent and courage as a writer grew as it has with every one of her books I’ve read. This was a woman who grew up in a family with a prestigious name and a modest but comfortable fortune. She went to university when a tiny fraction of women did. She didn’t go out of her way to establish herself with her contemporaries or to seek celebrity. And in Trance by Appointment, as she did in her two previous books, William’s Wife and Theme with Variations, she collected material by listening, by taking in talk and attitudes and expressions while walking through the city, while riding on the bus or Underground, while standing in queues or waiting in shops, and then returned to her room in Kensington and put herself deeply, intently into a mind, a situation, a life completely different from hers.
Trevelyan’s Jean is not a specimen pinned to a piece of cardboard for disinterested examination by an omniscient narrator. She tells Jean’s story as if Jean’s sister, or Madame Eva, or Jean’s neighbor were trying to tell it, aided occasionally by Jean’s own awkward, imprecise attempts to explain what she sees. Maybe John Mair was partly right, that Jean’s is “an aimless and random mind.” Evidence of Jean’s exercise of free will are rare (but not wholly absent). But managing to tell this woman’s story and keep it utterly convincing, utterly coherent for over 260 pages is no small accomplishment as a writer. Name one other contemporary of Trevelyan — male or female — who took this kind of risk, who undertook this level of experimentation.
Gertrude Trevelyan (center) with the other contributors to Red Rags: Essays of Hate from Oxford, from The Bystander, 1 March 1933
This is a picture of Trevelyan taken in 1933 to celebrate the publication of Red Rags: Essays of Hate from Oxford, a collection to which she contributed an essay attacking the complacency of “Garden Cities,” the new suburbs around London. Who would guess that the smallest person in the group, the one woman in the photo, would be capable of leaps of imagination that would put all the men around her to shame?
Trance by Appointment, by G. E. Trevelyan London: George G. Harrap & Company, Ltd., 1939
In 1964, Sir John Gielgud convinced Richard Burton to star in a Broadway production of Hamlet. Still smoking hot from his big-screen romance with Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra, Burton was looking to solidify his street cred as a serious actor after a few Hollywood duds. Gielgud’s motivation is a little less clear, as gradually becomes clear to the rest of the cast and crew.
In any case, they shook hands and with Alex Cohen as producer, Gielgud began assembling a stellar cast: Hume Cronyn as Polonius, Alfred Drake as Claudius, a young John Cullum as Laertes, and an impressive list of veteran character actors such as Barnard Hughes, George Voskovec, Eileen Herlie, Kit Culkin (father of Macaulay et al.), and Linda Marsh. As Guildenstern, he picked William Redfield. Though just 37 at the time, Redfield already had thirty years’ experience in radio, TV, film, and theatre.
Gielgud took the cast up to Toronto in late January 1964 to begin rehearsals. Redfield began providing a running account of the process through a series of letters to his friend, Bob Mills, back in New York, and these are the letters collected in Letters from an Actor. It was nearly a month into rehearsals before Redfield hit his stride, moving from notes scratched on cocktail napkins to what eventually became at-times epic narratives of the daily/nightly goings-on on and off stage.
From the very beginning, there was a certain tension — mostly artistic — that pervaded the production. Gielgud was the epitome of the subtle and refined school of acting, perhaps the great master of underplay. And by this point, he had decades of Hamlet under this belt. As Redfield notes, “He remembers, bone-wisely, all the forty-plus years of playing Shakespearean roles; of directing his fellow actors in those roles; of observing Ralph Richardson rehearsing and playing this part, Laurence Olivier that one … and on through every degree of accomplishment and competence.”
Burton, on the other hand, was part of the postwar, naturalistic school of British actors and possessed of a sometimes volcanic temperament. Burton was direct. “As a tank is direct. Throw what mortar you will, a tank keeps coming until it is annihilated. I can imagine him fighting with a severe head wound,” writes Redfield. “I can picture him with an arm chopped off fighting fiercely with what remains.”
The two men almost never exchanged angry words over the production. Gielgud was far too ephemeral for that. On top of his feather touch as a director, he also chose to take set and costume to an understated extreme. The set was nothing but a barest collection of furniture and towering abstract planes painted black. Instead of period costume, the actors appeared in street clothes. “Since he is dealing with a great play and an electric star,” Redfield surmises, “he gambles that the rest of us can be efficient enough to meet our challenges without the help of fur and flugelhorns; that we can be kings without crowns, soldiers without epaulets.” In Redfield’s case, Guildenstern looks as if he could have strolled in from an insurance office down the street.
If there was anything Gielgud stressed, it was verbal delivery. He knew the play backwards and forwards and would hone in on the smallest things in an actor’s lines. “Not ‘the’ — ‘the‘” he stresses to Redfield at one point. This drives Redfield nuts, for all his admiration for Gielgud, because at the same time he continues to ignore the actor’s plea that Burton is completely mangling the speech following the the line. After one performance during the play’s preview run in Boston, he tells Phil Coolidge, who plays the Captain, “Coolidge, it’s a charming performance, but get yourself a hat. I couldn’t tell you why, but you’re nothing without a hat.” When the play finally opened on Broadway, Peggy Cass (raise your hand if you know her name from To Tell the Truth) offered Redfield a summary of the situation: “No direction for this show. Everyone was left to strike out on his own. Hume Cronyn got a triple.”
William Redfield was perhaps the ideal reporter for this beat. He had a big enough part to be in the midst of much of the action on stage and a small enough one to have plenty of time to observe. Indeed he’d realized early in his career that he’d never be a star. When he was 17, a friend told him, “You do not have a star’s temperament. You are not a killer. A star must be a killer. You will be one of the best actors in the country but you will never be a star no matter how many times you are billed above the title.”
He also had a healthy respect for just how tough the business of acting is:
The theatre is more ruthless than a factory, more expensive than a newspaper, and more closely watched than a shoe-shine boy. The theatre’s product is fearfully expensive; the theatre’s guarantee of employment is nil; the theatre’s competition is savage; the theatre’s employer’s are gamblers with the odds a good eight to one against them. Do you think the actors don’t know this? In fact, you will not meet a more tough-gutted and realistic group of people professionally speaking during your lifetime than actors. Why? Because when a play fails, Armaggedon is upon us. It even costs money to cart the scenery away.
Show me a working actor and I will show you a man with a cement stomach.
One reason the production has gone down in history is that it was perhaps the earliest example of the kind of stage-to-screen bridges one now sees in things like streamed performances from the Met. A group of television producers approached Alex Cohen and convinced him to allow a live performance to be filmed in a new process called “Electronovision.” The resulting “Theatrofilm” was shown in thousands of movie theaters around the U.S. and grossed a healthy $4,000,000. You can see it yourself on YouTube. But none of the profits benefited the actors. Redfield writes bitterly, “The financial details of this venture involved a mass screwing of the acting company so excruciatingly delicious that only a separate letter could do the tale justice.”
Sadly, Letters from an Actor was William Redfield’s only venture into print, aside from a collaboration with his friend, Wally Cox, on Mr. Peepers: A Sort of Novel (1955), a spin-off from Cox’s television series of the same name. He carried on with a busy career as a character actor until dying of leukemia at the age of 49 in 1976. You can get a small but superb example of his work in this clip from Elaine May’s 1971 film, A New Leaf, in which he tries to tell Walter Matthau’s character he’s broke:
Church, prayer, going to Sunday services and weekday evening meetings remains the center of life for some families and communities. One hundred years ago, they were the frameworks of the rituals and values of many English people, particularly those of the class of shopkeepers and lesser professions. Each denomination and sect identified itself through its practices and principles.
As Peter Fletcher shows in his memoir, The Long Sunday, the Wesleyan Chapel in their East Coast seaside town was the center of his family’s lives, the measure by which they judged themselves and their neighbors. His parents’ commitment to faithful attendance, service in countless supporting chores, and application of the church’s strictures to control their children and condemn their neighbors was the one point on which they could agree. They were united in their ability to place their brethren in precise order of damnation or salvation. They knew “who was making eyes at whom, who was being married, who was expected to die, who was prosperous, who was running for bankruptcy, who was suspected of secret drinking, card-playing and other vices.”
This was even easier when it came to other Christian churches. “I could have prepared a seating-plan of Heaven — this is where my concentric circles first come in — showing exactly where the members of the several denominations, from Salvationists to Roman Catholics, would find themselves in relation to the Great White Throne.” “Without the slightest hesitation I could have decided to whom to distribute harps and haloes, and who would be fortunate to secure ‘standing room only’ on the edge of the outer darkness.”
In all other matters, Peter realized as he grew, their primary function was to serve the other as “a catalyst precipitating resentment.” His father was to blame for all his mother’s disappointments, and vice-versa. “The one thing they had in common was their religion.” They projected their expectations onto their children, and in his zealous quest to please them by achieving all possible prizes for service, rote learning, and generally pious demeanor, Peter acknowledges that “By the time I had reached the age of fourteen I was an unsufferably self-righteous little prig.”
At that point, however, his attitude began to change, and it was primarily due to his own quiet, careful observation of the adults in the congregation. He began to notice the discrepancies between what people did and said in church and what they did after. “For reasons best known to themselves the adults were by common consent playing, and thoroughly enjoying, a highly dramatic game of ‘let’s pretend.'”
That didn’t prevent him, though, from throwing himself headlong into throng when an Evangelistic Campaign pitched its tent in town. “I was one of those into whose hands this great enterprise had been committed. I was on the inside, looking out.” He goes to all the meetings, and vies with the best of them when it came to profess his sins and ask for redemption: “the longer one person went on the longer would the others be likely to go on when their turn came. So once a prayer meeting got under way there was no telling when it would stop.”
Growing up in an environment go strenuously concerned with following the straight and narrow path did mean that certain aspects of Peter’s upbringing were neglected. Here, for example, is the sum of his father’s attempt to explain the facts of life:
“That’s a tom-cat, but it has been cut.” “I didn’t notice anything wrong with it.” “Of course you didn’t. I said it’s been cut.” His tone of voice indicated that the word, ‘cut,” had some special significance, but I hadn’t the remotest idea what it was; so after a pause, I said, Oh, has it?” My father asked: “You know what I mean, don’t you?” I answered, “No.” “Well, if you don’t know what I mean, I can’t tell you!” My father replied, and relapsed into morose silence. And that was the beginning and the end of all the parental instruction I ever received into the mysteries of procreation.
It is only when Peter enlists in the Royal Ordinance Corps several months after the start of the war in 1914 that he is able to step free of the pressure to “play along” with the rituals of his family and the church. Being treated as an anonymous and presumably incompetent recruit comes as something of a relief. And when a big, coarse, hard-drinking Welshman in his unit shows some kindness to him after Peter passes out on the parade ground, he realizes that the man is treating him in a more truly Christian manner than anything he had experienced in nearly twenty years’ daily life in the Wesleyan Church: “I have given up the religious which is nothing but the exception, extraction, exaltation, ecstasy, or it has given me up. I possess nothing but the everyday.”
The Long Sunday is a remarkable effort to understand a time, a place, and a way of making sense of the world that Fletcher himself has moved on from without ever giving the sense that he is trying to reject it or undermine it by revealing its flaws. Whatever flaws he can now recognize in his parents, their rituals and beliefs, and their efforts to pass them along to him, he is less interested in passing judgment than in achieving some perspective and balance in his understanding. And in that regard, The Long Sunday is a model of a clear-eyed but deeply sympathetic approach to revisiting one’s past.
The paperback editions of The Fire Escape trumpet its message: “The tragic, unvarnished story of a prostitute.” Which is a bit like plastering the banner line, “The Story of a Cockroach” across the cover of The Metamorphosis: yes, well, I guess you could say it is, but that’s actually missing the point in a pretty big way.
Just what is The Fire Escape about, then, you ask? Boy, you’ve got me there.
It purports to be the autobiography of the youngest daughter of a curate, a woman never quite at ease in any situation for long, and positively antsy when it comes to any of the conventions of English middle class life shortly after the First World War. Shipped off to a boarding school, she befriends Norah, a day girl, and soon they are happily playing “Torture,” taking turns tying each other up. One day she does the job so successfully that Norah’s mother rushes in with a pair of scissors to cut the cord before the victim strangles.
Moved to a school for clergy daughters only, she quickly forms a secret society, “The Red Lamp,” with a new friend, Polly, and initiate a third member by locking her in a cupboard. Yet when she comes across a dog savaging a rabbit to death, she wonders, “Was I really so cowardly that I was going to maintain an acquiescent silence my whole life?”
Sent to a teacher’s college by her parents, she quits and signs up for an art school instead, then plays truant from that, finds a landlady willing to give her the use of an empty attic to live in, and takes up day work as a cleaning woman. When her father considers resigning his living out of shame, Susan up and takes off for Dublin with a boy from school, both mad over Yeats’s poetry. Running into the poet in the street, she recites the whole of “Sailing to Byzantium” and he invites them to watch a rehearsal of his play, The Cat and the Moon at the Abbey Theatre (which puts this incident, if true, in 1931).
Rescued and brought home from Dublin, she soon returns to the attic, accessible by the fire escape of the title. Putting the kettle on, she is startled when an old man enters from the floor below. He quietly sits on the sofa and watches her, occasionally speaking in a language she cannot understand. At some point, she learns his name: Alek Nauss. Alek Nauss. Susan Kale. You see where the story goes from erratic to weird?
Over the next decade, Susan returns from time to time to the attic and has odd conversations with Alek. These she imbues with profound significance, though she manages to convey almost none of it to the reader. She falls in love with a puppeteer and wanders around southern England with him, often sleeping in the fields. He takes up with another woman and she gets a job scraping away excess lead from toy soldiers fresh from the molds. Ten hours a day for twenty seven shillings a week. Like the other women there, she merely endures it. “They endured the utter futility, the wretchedness of spending their days in scraping lead; the prostitution of their lives, in fact.”
She takes up with a poet, marries and has a son by him, then they divorce and she is forced to give the boy away to a relative. She goes through jobs and men and flats at a dizzying pace. She models for an artist, “a very ugly man.” Soon she and the artist are playing “torture” again, grown-up style. Except it’s all very British in its perversity:
One night, he suspended me by my ankles in a doorway. It was difficult because he didn’t want either to spoil the paintwork in his flat or to break my neck. It took more time than such things bearably can. We woke up to the insanity of our behavior simultaneously and didn’t meet again. He was sensitive.
Eighty-seven or so jobs later, she wanders out of a cafe and, while posting a letter, is approached by a man. “Are you doing anything tonight?” he asks. “What do you want?” “I wondered if you’d like to come to a show.” She repeats the question. “I’m game for anything,” he answers. Moments later, she agrees to sleep with him for two pounds, and suddenly she’s discovered her eighty-eighth job.
This being England in the late 1940s, setting oneself up as a prostitute involves a fair amount of subterfuge and thick swathes of middle class hypocrisy. She works mostly off ads posted in tobacconists: “Miss Domina Brand: Psychologist. Will Solve Your Problems Big or Small.” “Surely it’s wrong to put ‘Miss,’ isn’t it?” she asks. “Yes, but that’s what’ll convince them it’s not a real psychologist,” a helpful newsagent advises her.
Though a fair variety of fetishes are played out in her flats over the next decade, the one prevailing sense throughout this period is of dreariness. Susan Kale’s account of life in postwar London may capture its grey, tedious, tired attempts to keep up appearances better than any of the Kitchen Sink school plays and novels.
In the end, she gives up, worried she is running out of time. Or at least, so it appears. Because in the final pages, we return once again to the attic–now mostly a pile of rubble with a bit of the fire escape still clinging to its side. Alek Nauss is gone, dead years ago.
Is this meant as a metaphor for herself? What started as a secret place, a place where she could escape from her parents’ conventions, now just a ruin, “a broken-backed, disfigured space”? It’s difficult to tell but even more difficult to care, for by this point, the reader is likely exhausted from what has been nearly two hundred pages of “this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened” narrative that rarely offers more than a paragraph or two respite from Susan Kale’s relentless restlessness.
It is perhaps most interesting as a dramatic contrast to just about any other Englishwoman’s account of the same period. Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark undoubtedly knew of women like Susan Kale in their time, but they made sure to steer clear of their acquaintance. If there is any comparison one might draw, it is with the equally-forgotten Kathleen Sully’s early novels, particularly Canal in the Moonlight, with their odd mixes of grim poverty, black humor, and cruel fate. If any man picked up a paperback copy of The Fire Escape looking for a thrill, he would certainly have been disappointed, if not eagerly looking for the nearest bottle or narcotic instead.
The First Escape, by Susan Kale London: Putnam, 1960
I knew I was going to like Margaret Parton’s memoir, Journey Through a Lighted Room, on page two, when she writes of reflecting upon a Quaker meeting while “wandering aimlessly about the garden with a vodka and tonic in hand.”
This is the story of a woman who wasn’t ashamed by the fact that she liked a good drink, a good book, a good meal, a good piece of music, a good conversation, and a good fuck. She made her way in the working world, had an abortion she never regretted, married twice and divorced once, fell and stayed in love with a married man through two decades, raised a son and watched him die of leukemia, cared for a mother suffering from dementia, struggled with her weight, and generally held her own through lows and highs that I suspect any contemporary woman could relate to. Indeed, it’s a little surprising that Journey Through a Lighted Room isn’t better known and still in print, because the book is as fresh and frank as if Parton were telling it to us here and now.
Parton grew up in exceptional circumstances. Her mother, Mary Field Parton, was a successful writer and social activist who worked with Clarence Darrow and edited Mother Jones’ autobiography. Her father, Lemuel Parton, was a reported whose column, “Who’s News Today,” was syndicated in hundreds of newpapers across the US in the 1930s and 1940s. Her aunt, Sara Bard Field, campaigned for women’s suffrage and married Charles Erskine Scott Wood, whose resume included everything from graduating from West Point and fighting Indians in the West to defending Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman in court to painting and writing for socialist magazines. There was never a time when she wasn’t in the midst of talented, opinionated, and famous people. At the age of 14, she wrote in her journal,
Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Thompson, a historian named Mr. Woodward [C. Vann Woodward] and his wfie, the reformed burglar Jack Black, and Mr. and Mrs. E. B. White were here. A very amusing evening, during which Sinclair Lewis rose from the table and carried his plate of roast beef over to the desk where I was eating alone because there wasn’t enough room for me at the big table; he sat down on the floor beside me and fed his roast beef to Tiggy and talked about cats.
Of the same evening, Margaret’s mother wrote in her diary, “Dinner party ruined by lovable but drunk Red Lewis.”
Mary and Lemuel Parton married when they both had established themselves in their careers, and though they were devoted to Margaret, their only child, they were utterly absorbed with each other. “It’s almost as hard for a child to grow up in the presence of an extremely happy marriage as it is to grow up in an unhappy home,” someone who knew her parents later observed to Margaret.
It was also hard from Margaret to establish her own identity when she was surrounded by such accomplished people. After graduating from Swarthmore, she bounced through a series of low-level jobs — writing news items for radio and spending a year as a fact-checker at The New Yorker. Feeling somewhat suffocated working in her parents’ world in New York City, she moved to San Francisco, where for two years she got to experience life as an independent adult. Though she wrote a humorous account of the time in Laughter on the Hill (1945), she admits in Journey that she left some of the more painful aspects out — particularly being abandoned by a man who got her pregnant and having, with almost no money to spare, to locate a doctor willing to give her an abortion.
When her father died in 1943, she returned to New York and worked as a newspaper reporter. Her time in San Francisco earned her an assignment to return there in 1945 to cover the conference leading to the formation of the United Nations. This, in turn, led to an assignment to Japan, the start of nearly seven years spent as a reporter in the Far East and India, where she covered events like the partition and the assassination of Gandhi. She also married Eric Britter, a British correspondent, and gave birth to their son, whom she named Lemuel, after her father.
The marriage was shaky from the start, however, and in September 1952, she took her son and returned to the U.S., moving in with her mother in Palisades, north of New York City. There, she “quickly discovered the facts of life for the single woman in the suburbs: almost total exclusion from the social life of the community.” Slowly, she won some writing jobs, and in 1954, was assigned to cover the first trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard for the murder of his wife. Parton’s coverage stood out and was soon being used by papers throughout the U.S..
This raised her visibility significantly and eventually led to an offer to work as an editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, at the time perhaps the most popular woman’s magazine in America. Having worked for years in the male-dominated field of newspaper reporting, she struggled to conform to the conservative, traditional conventions of the Journal:
From the Goulds came a constant pressure for IDEAS. From Beatrice: “I do hope your suggestions will be COMPELLING!” From Bruce: “We are always in need of good Big Ideas, such as ‘The Ten Richest Women,’ ‘The World’s Most Famous Jewels,’ and ‘The Ten Best-Dressed Women.'” That memo really amused me. Those were Big Ideas?
Though she was able to slip in occasional pieces of serious fiction and reporting, these were rare and hardly what the Journal’s readers wanted. “… [I]n the same issue we ran a superior story by Rebecca West and in the homemaking department an offer of a Bible quilt pattern; there were 3,200 requests for the pattern and one letter commenting on the Rebecca West story.”
In the late 1950s, she ran into an old acquaintance from Japan, former Navy Commander Alfred Hussey, a lawyer who’d served on General MacArthur’s staff and was one of the principal authors of the Japanese constitution, and they married in 1963 after his divorce from his first wife. His health began to fail soon afterward, however, and he died in 1964.
Around the same time, her mother began suffering from dementia, and though Margaret tried for months to care for her at home, she eventually had to put her into the first of a series of nursing homes. She then spent her days sorting through over fifty years of her parent’s papers and belongings, getting their house ready for sale, and visiting her mother: “the hours with her were agonizing and my heart broke with pity each time I saw her, particularly at the contrast with the self-assured, dynamic woman who emerged each day from the diary pages I was reading.” She also cared for her neighbor, Muriel Snow, widow of the writer Edgar Snow, in the terminal stage of cancer, holding Muriel’s hand as she screamed, “Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Help Me Die!”
The one bright spot in this time was her son, Lemuel, who emerged from a long period of adolescent isolation and depression and was building a circle of friends and a reputation as a tennis instructor. She was particularly vulnerable, therefore, when Lem suddenly fell ill. After he was hospitalized, a doctor came to tell her that Lem was suffering from an aggressive form of leukemia. “‘How long?’ I managed to ask. ‘Around four weeks,’ he said.”
Left alone after Lem’s death, she often considered suicide. “Some nights, alone and swept by storms of grief, I would stare at Lem’s .22, and twice I loaded it and held the muzzle in my mouth. Several times I poured sleeping pills into my hand and waited to find out what I would decide.” In the end, she simply carried on and found some sense of peace: “I no longer worry about being hopelessly out of step with current intellectual and literary movements, and simply accept myself as someone who is absorbed in unfashionable thoughts about love, truth, and the continuity of time.”
Margaret Parton continued to work after publishing Journey Through a Lighted Room, writing for Woman’s Day and other magazines, preparing a biography of her mother, and organizing the collection of papers now held by the University of Oregon Library. She helped establish the historical committee for her community of Palisades. She died in 1981.
Had The Mere Living not been largely forgotten by now, it would undoubtedly be saddled with an unshakeable and unfavorable comparison to Virginia Wolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. For both are circadian novels (taking place within the space of a single day) set in London and both really heavily on the use of a stream of consciousness narrative told through multiple characters. The Mere Living was the first novel by B. (for Betty) Bergson Spiro, who would publish the rest of her books under her married name, Betty Miller.
Two of Miller’s later novels are now in print: Farewell, Leicester Square (1941) has been reissued by Persephone Books and On the Side of the Angels (1945) by Capuchin Classics. The Mere Living, on the other hand, disappeared soon after publication and there are currently just two copies available for purchase.
One clue to the nature of The Mere Living can be found in the author’s maiden name, for she was a close relative of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who was best known at the time for his theory of time. Bergson argued that there were essentially two different times: clock time, the regular, rhythmic, linearly progressing dimension measured by the clock; and time as experienced by individuals, which in our perceptions can speed up or slow down based on factors that may have nothing to do with the ticking of the clock.
The Mere Living is, in one way, an illustration of Bergson’s theory, as the author takes through one day in four progressive stages — Breakfast Time; Lunch Time; Tea Time; and Dinner Time — but at widely different paces as experienced by the four members of the Sullivan family: Henry, the husband and father; Mary, the wife and mother; Nancy, the daughter (19); and Paul, the son (17). So, as an example, as Henry, Paul, and Nancy rush out and into the whirl of the morning rush hour at the end of the Breakfast Time section, Mary feels “an air of release, of pleasure in her solitude,” and quietly tends to the bulbs in her window pots.
Spiro was, without a doubt, aware of and perhaps somewhat inspired by Mrs. Dalloway, but it would be both unfair and not particularly illuminating to compare the two books. For Spiro’s title reveals her major theme, which I’d argue is not only the experience of time framed in the space of a day but also time framed in the space of a life(time). All four Sullivans wake up and go to sleep in the same house and the same beds. One can safely assume that much of their next day will be very much like this one — full of rituals, tasks, chores, and obligations.
On the other hand, in each of their days is a sign of a profound change to come, all of them changes that will put their lives on a different course. Paul becomes aware of his infatuation with a fellow student, Richard, the first sense that this is where his need for physical and emotional connection will take him. Nancy meets Oliver, the married man she has been seeing, in his apartment, his wife being out of town, and realizes she is ready to sleep with him. Henry, having gone into an import/export business with a somewhat mysterious man with Continental connections, begins to understand that he is probably being swindled. And most omninously, Mary’s physician connects her sharp, intermittent attacks of pain and anxiety to a lump in her breast.
By sending her characters out into a busy London day, Spiro is provided with numerous opportunities to show the varieties of time that can be experienced in modern life, such as the hurry-up-and-wait world of the subway:
Along the passage. Hurry, hurry. Quick pattering of many feet. But the train had already gone. Too late. It had gone. Low vacant tunnel. Too late. Aimlessly, they walk up and down, their steps sounding in the shallow silence. In the self-conscious silence. Up and down. Or stare at the advertisements on the in-curling walls. Seen ’em before, anyway. Up and down. Damn the train, was it never coming?
Or the new time-refuges of the cafe, the pub, and the cinema: “But here, for three hours, is a new time, self-sufficient, unrelated: the march of actual time artificially broken, and synthetically replaced, dream-potent.”
Miller took her title from a line from Browning’s “Saul”: “How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ/All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!” And The Mere Living vibrates with energy generated from a world filled with other people. For Miller, the “blooming, buzzing confusion” that William James called the infant’s impression of the world is part and parcel of modern life for old as well as young. Not that this energy is all positive and productive. On the dust jacket of the U.S. edition of The Mere Living, Miller described her own challenges in writing the book:
Virginia Woolf has said that it is impossible to write without “a room of one’s own.” The Mere Living was written, for the most part, in a corner of the sitting room, with the wireless giving forth its eloquence, and my father, mother, sister and two brothers all tirelessly discussing their particular interests in life at the moment.
Considering that Bergson Spiro was just 22 when she published The Mere Living, she displays, in her treatment of Mary’s examination by her physician, remarkable insight to the perspectives of much more mature women and men. She also demonstrates a clear understanding of the common practice of doctors benignly deceiving their patients:
“Well, Mrs. Sullivan, it’s more or less as I thought. There’s nothing serious to worry about.” Deliberately, he spoke the words: and waited for the change of expression that he knew, the upward, dawning smile, eager, humble, grateful, released. It was one of his hardest moments. The penalty he had to bear, the physician’s, the priest’s, for assuming the responsibility created by that necessity for mother-trust which persists in all grown-up children who fear the dark … his duty being, as he had come to see it, to keep the frightened and ignorant man-child or woman-child from that elemental fear, his duty being to reassure, to inspire comfort and confidence as well as physical relief, for as long a period as possible in these children who came to him with awed confidence in his silent knowledge, in the shining toys, the knives, the lancets, the colored drugs, the mysterious paraphernalia …
When Mary is reunited with her family in the last section, Dinner Time, she draws some comfort from the knowledge that, whatever happens, her children will carry on a part of her: “They glance at me with the living flame of their eyes. To me they owe that flame.” Though family can seem a straitjacket to the two young people eager to break away and discover their own lives, it is also one of their time refuges, like the cafe or cinema: “At nightfall, they returned, acquiescent, to the household of common existence, mutually dependent, interrelated; resigning, in the common purpose that held them about this table, the divergent demands of each separate-striving personality.”
And after the evening time with the family, each person heads to the last essential refuge of sleep. For Mr. Sullivan, it frees him from the deepening fear that he is about to be ruined:
Gradually, sleep-warmth lapped, vague and mollifying and blind. It deprived him increasingly of knowledge of his own body.
Dying away into an easeful warmth of non-being…. He no longer felt his hands. Soft drunken pillow.
Body was darkening and darkening, all knowledge of himself was going, he was escaping at last….
One reviewer attributed the success of The Mere Living to “the extraordinary keenness of its author’s sense-perceptions and her impulsive (but often effective) tyranny over words.” The passage above, with the repetition of warmth, of knowledge, the repetition of short drumming phrases, the synesthesia of “drunken pillow,” all work to achieve a convincing sense of falling asleep. The book is full of such deft descriptions. If there are occasional moments of awkward characterization, these are quickly left behind in the tremendous current of time that runs throughout The Mere Living. When I finished Robert Hillyer’s perfect novel, My Heart for Hostage, I was a bit afraid that it would be hard to find something to maintain its high standard. In its own unique way, The Mere Living certainly does.
The Mere Living, by B. Bergson Spiro (Betty Miller) London: Victor Gollancz, 1933 New York: Frederick Stokes, 1933
I feel a little trepidation in writing about My Heart for Hostage. It may be the closest thing to a perfect book that I’ve come across in nearly 13 years of working on this site. It’s so good that early in reading it, I felt a frisson of fear that Robert Hillyer would not be able to sustain its quality, that the style, the story, or the narrative voice would give way and leave me frustrated and disappointed. Instead, I feel it’s I who will end up letting this book down.
My Heart for Hostage is the story of a romance doomed from the start — but not for the reason you might think at first. Edward Reynolds, freshly discharged from the U.S. Army after time in combat on the Western Front and afterward as a courier for the U.S. delegation at the Peace Conference, meets Germaine, a beautiful 19 year-old girl from Nantes enjoying her first freedom in Paris. Strongly attracted to each other from the start, they are soon sleeping together in what both take at first as nothing but a fling. Edward, son of a fine New England family, talks of marriage but Germaine brushes him off.
They encounter a variety of early American expats, including a dowager still carrying a torch for Edward’s father and a flamboyant painter proud of his notoriety as a décadent. They escape to Brittany, where they spent an idyllic few late summer weeks swimming and sailing off a small fishing village, and Germaine finally admits she could marry Edward. When the first storm of autumn arrives, they return to Paris to plan for their marriage and the trip back to Edward’s home in the U.S..
In Paris, however, single incident sparks Edward’s simmering sense of jealousy, and it all blows up. Edward is hospitalized, and when he recovers, he travels to Nantes to locate Germaine. He finds her about to wed an older man to whom she had been promised by her parents years before, and he quickly flees, taking the first passage to the U.S. he can book. There, on board, he meets a fellow ex-officer who reveals a few facts that transform his entire understanding of Germaine — indeed, that reveal to Edward how little he understands people at all.
My Heart for Hostage could be written off as just another American in Paris story, but everything about this book takes it to a level that puts everything else in this genre in the shade (with perhaps the exception of Henry James’ The Ambassadors, a peak I haven’t attempted myself). From his social status, upbringing, education, and experience, Hillyer was already encountering France with considerable sophistication, but what’s refreshing here is his insistence on bringing things back to an immediate and personal level:
The trouble was, he said, that people in America who pose generally had some goal in view; they wanted to impress some advantageous person to get on in the world. Whereas in France, people just posed for the fun of it.
No, she decided, people in France who posed also had some goal in view; but the goal was just to show off. You see, the French wanted to puff themselves up in their own eyes by making other people notice them, even if they had to behave very queerly like the silly artists on the Boulevard St. Michel. Americans wanted to overreach other people. If a Frenchman were posing, he’d look seriously in a mirror to see if he were acting the part properly; an American would wink at his reflection to show he was not fooling himself at any rate. Sometimes Americans seemed to her much more mature than the French. But in love they are very banal. “Take, for example, yourself, Edouard. You never believe at the right time and you always doubt at the wrong time. Isn’t that true?”
Edward had been thinking that she knew altogether too much about Americans in love. “I don’t know,” he said, and suddenly buried his face in his hands.
“But you do know,” she persisted, “because you never really trust me. You will never believe if we live together in joy until our death. That doubt will poison whatever you think of me — oh, even at our best times together — and it will bite, drop by drop, like acid into you, into your deep nature, until all you will have to say to me will be Bonjour, cherie, and Cherie, dors bien.”
Robert Hillyer 1942Just how much of My Heart for Hostage is autobiographical is hard to tell. Like Edward Reynolds, Robert Hillyer served in the U.S. Army during World War One and remained on active duty after the war, working like Edward as a courier for the Peace Conference. Like his more famous Harvard classmates e.e. cummings, John Dos Passos, and Malcolm Cowley, he came to France first as a volunteer ambulance driver, and became, like Edward, fluent in French. And like Edward, he returned to the U.S. in late 1919. Edward’s story ends on board the freighter taking him home; Hillyer became a professor of English at Harvard. Best known as a poet, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1934 for his Collected Verse.
Hillyer wrote My Heart for Hostage, the second of his two novels, at a distance of over twenty years from his time in Paris and in the midst of another World War. From its dust jacket illustration, one can imagine that My Heart for Hostage was being aimed by Random House for a sentimental, mainly female audience, but in reality, this is a book that would have appealed to G.I.s if they’d made it past the title page. Hillyer’s soldiers carry some scars with them they little understand and can’t control. They find relief in sex and drink, and feel a distance between themselves and the folks back home they can’t quite express. And they have a sense that the only true relationships have to be founded on trust — which, unfortunately, their experiences have shown to be something not given lightly. But I suspect that few G.I.s ever got their hands on My Heart for Hostage, and so it soon slipped into obscurity: too late for the veterans of WWI, too early for the veterans of WWII. I hope it will not take another war for it to be rediscovered.
I’ve covered plenty of books well-deserving of rediscovery on this site. But if it’s not going too far out onto a limb, I have to say that My Heart for Hostage is perhaps the closest thing to a neglected masterpiece I’ve come across. I cannot recommend it too highly. There are less than a dozen copies available for sale at the moment: Grab a copy now!
My Heart for Hostage, by Robert Hillyer New York: Random House, 1942
Ethel Firebrace In The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, Malachi Whitaker and Gay Taylor offered the world a feminine match for H. H. Bashford’s really good man, Augustus Carp, Esq. Lost now to literary history, Ethel Firebrace was prolific novelist of the early 20th century, churning out dozens and dozens of works such as Clothed in White Samite, Ecstacy’s Debit, His for an Hour, and the thrilling wartime romance, An Airman for Averil. Firebrace followed in the footsteps of such industrious Victorian women writers as Margaret Oliphant and Eliza Lynn Linton. In fact, I half suspect that Whitaker and Taylor, who probably met at one of Charles Lahr’s literary evenings in London in the late 1920s, had skimmed Linton’s My Literary Life, which is one of the snippiest memoirs ever published.
I must caution, however, that unlike Augustus Carp, whose righteousness in all things stems from his utter blindness to the world around him, Ethel Firebrace maintains her moral superiority from her firm understanding that she is simply better than everyone else. It is not selfishness that prevents her from helping others but simply “a nature too finely tuned.” Unfortunately, though her family early recognized that little Ethel was too busy “thinking of higher things,” they failed to spare her “the sight of their toil-worn hands, dust-laden hair, and brows which bore the wrinkled imprint of perpetual household budgeting.” Consequently, “being a very sensitive child, this left a deeper mark upon me than they realised.”
Indeed, for Ethel, the world is divided between the sensitive and the insensitive — there being far too few of the former and far, far too many of the latter. When she marries and gives birth, she vows “at whatever cost, never to let this event repeat itself during my married life” and finds it difficult to forgive her daughter “the eternity of torture she had caused me.” How was it that women before her were able to bear so many children? “Cast-iron insensitiveness,” of course.
Fortunately for the reading public, however, Ethel found the inner strength to steel herself against her baby’s cries of hunger and other ill-considered attempts to distract her and focus on her great gift: writing. Starting with Jessica’s Secret, she works diligently at the coalface, wearing out four typewriters along the way, generating, by her own count, over five million words. By the time she begins her autobiography, she can state with confidence that “I do not think there can be many, well versed in book-lore, who are unacquainted with at least one of the works of Ethel Firebrace.” I feel some shame in admitting that until I read this book, I was one of the unenlightened minority.
For her many gifts to literature, she has received countless in return from her admirers, including “a leopard-skin rug, a transparent nightdress, twenty pounds of quince jelly, what turned out to be a very sick monkey, a fountain-pen, and a set of alleged performing fleas.” Beside the talents that God bestowed upon her, she attributes her success (“or very nearly all of it!”) to her habit of gargling after food. She suggests that the literary world can be divided infallibly between the garglers and the non-garglers. The non-garglers such as Mr. Aldous Huxley are destined to “spring up like toadstools, live as long, and disappear as ignominiously.” Needless to say, but “there are no garglers among modern poets.”
Cresset Press advertisement for The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace
The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace is easily one of the rarest books I’ve featured on this site. There are just two copies available for sale — one for $600+ and one for almost $900. I was able to read it thanks to my British Library and a quick stop through London last month. It was hard to keep quiet at some points while reading it: while not quite as fine-tuned as Augustus Carp, Esq., The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace absolutely deserves rediscovery as a perfect little comic gem. In a fictional heaven somewhere, Ethel Firebrace and Augustus Carp, Esq. live together in sympathy, both confident in their superiority of character and intellect if slightly disappointed that the rest of existence will never fully appreciate their brilliance. Such is the cross the truly great must bear.
The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, written anonymously by Gay Taylor and Malachi Whitaker London: The Cresset Press, 1937
Cover of ‘Emir’ with photo of Rosemary Tonks by June Johnston
Rosemary Tonks’ first two novels, Emir and Opium Fogs were published within weeks of each other and TLS and other papers reviewed them together, so it’s hard to be sure which one was written first. But my bet is on Emir. If Opium Fogs is never less than eccentric, it is at least a finished work. Emir is just eccentric.
Having now had my hands on all of the six novels that Tonks published between 1963 and 1972, I can say that the ploy of Emir is, in rough terms, the plot of every one of Tonks’ novels: a young woman of definite opinions but indefinite sense of self is pursued by varied men of varied ages, is intrigued by one or more of them, and ends up with none. As Neil Astley makes clear in his introduction to his superb 2014 reissue of Tonks’ poems, Bedouin of the London Evening, Tonks’ heroines mirror many aspects of their creator’s own life and character.
Her father died of blackwater fever in Africa before she was born; she and her mother moved 14 times during the war; she spent years semi-abandoned in boarding schools; she married and moved to India and then Pakistan with him, suffering typhoid fever in in the first and polio in the second; lived briefly in Paris; and returned to live as something of a reluctant member of the arts-and-literature scene in London. Her poetry and then her novels attracted some attention in the 1960s, but she seems never to have been fully comfortable with her work or life during this period. Her mother’s death led to a spiritual crisis, and she went through a series of conversions before ending up, increasingly ill and reclusive, by the seaside in Bournemouth. Rediscovered in a 2009 BBC Radio 4 documentary [Can anyone provide a recording of it?], she died in 2014 just months before Astley’s Bloodaxe Books published her work for the first time in over 40 years.
In Emir, Tonks’ young woman, Houda Lawrence, is already suffering from the romantic equivalent of Groucho Marx’s quip that “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member”: “Even supposing she had been able to find someone of her own age who was attractive to her, she would at once have begun to watch him for the first mistake.” Though an aspiring poet who walks the streets of London, green notebook in hand, she finds herself “deaf to the joys of professional Bohemia: which is certain death.” And she is still struggling to get out from underneath the influence of a mother who wants her to surrender to her proper role as wife and helpmeet.
Her taste in men leads her to dance around the edges of an affair with Eugene, a man of “rioutous European pedigree” and impeccable taste in clothes. “An older woman encountering his glance — it was like being stared at by a violet — might have summed him up: ‘Untrustworthy to a degree. But worth it.'” Of his parentage, Tonks writes only that “there was a suggestion of a child being carried in and out of opera boxes.” Tonks is by far at her best in artful character assassination: “However long he waited, Eugene always managed to appear to be dismissing a waiter when she arrived.”
Her dialogue, however, makes one long for the gritty realism of Les Liaisons dangereuses:
“A poet must be one of civilization’s failures. You forget; it’s the mongrel who gets kicked.”
“I cannot harm you; because you are completely vulnerable. But if the way up a publisher’s staircarpet led over my heart, you would not hesitate to tread it.”
“My God. What a low estimate you have of my ambitions. The staircarpet of a great poet is the only walk I could take after the arrogance of the pavement.”
I haven’t made a definitive study of the subject, but I’ll go out on a limb here and postulate that no one not looking at a staircarpet ever used the word “staircarpet” in a conversation. Twice.
I confess to having spent more for a copy of Emir than for any book I’ve ever owned. It was the only copy I’ve seen come up for sale in the last couple of years. And I will offer as a service to other readers the assurance that this is a book you need not covet, particularly when the superior Opium Fogs is available free on the Internet Archive (link). As Charles puts it in his Sonofabook review, Tonks spends far too much time in the book “trying to score points in the parlour game of cleverness.”
I’ve been interested in reading No Goodness in the Worm ever since I read A Prison, A Paradise, the memoir in which Gay Taylor, writing under the pseudonym of Loran Hurnscot (compiled from what she saw as her two worst sins, sloth and rancour), recalled her obsession and affair with A. E. Coppard and the decades-long process of moving beyond it. Unfortunately, the book very rare and priced accordingly (the cheaper of the two copies currently available goes for $400). However, I stumbled across a copy for the relatively low price of about $100 last month and sprung for it.
I think it helps to read No Goodness in the Worm having A Prison, A Paradise in mind, because it reveals the extent to which Taylor was able to achieve a perspective on her experience through fiction that took her a much longer time to gain for herself in real life.
The story at the heart of both books starts with the marriage of Harold (Hal) Midgley Taylor and Ethelwynne (Gay) Stewart McDowall in 1920. “Both of us got a bad bargain,” Gay Taylor later wrote in A Prison, A Paradise. She hated housework, cooking, and most of the conventional “wifely duties.” He suffered from tuberculosis and a penchant for business ventures he had no ability to run. Their wedding night was a disaster. “Hell, the first night, is what a woman never forgives,” she later wrote. He went off to his mother’s house. She returned to the flat she shared with her friends Bee Blackburn and Pran Pyper.
Yet a few months later, all four decided to move to a village in Berkshire and founded, using Hal Taylor’s remaining savings, the Golden Cockerel Press with the questionable business model of publishing books of poetry and short stories “that could not expect to command great popularity or wide sales.” Combined with Hal Taylor’s ill health and the utter lack of experience on the part of all four, the press quickly headed for failure.
At the same time, the marriage was headed for failure as well. Taylor later summed up her husband’s attitude as, “Since happiness is not for me, it’s unbearable to me that anyone should have it.” Fortunately for the press but not the marriage, in stepped A. E. Coppard, a man of considerable charm and practical skills. He managed the press well enough to keep it alive until qualified hands came to the rescue. And he seduced Taylor.
For Taylor, it was a head-over-heels passion, one that consumed her body and soul and overruled any concerns about propriety. She and Coppard escaped to live in a little love nest some miles from the press. While caring for her husband as an ailing and frustrated man, she had no patience for his self-pity and half-hearted attempts to control her. She described his appeal as: “For heaven’s sake go back to being unhappy, and that will give me peace.” Unfortunately, Coppard proved a mixed blessing himself. “He goes itching after almost every woman he sees — he’s a miniature Frank Harris,” an acquaintance later told her.
In real life, Hal Taylor found escape from his misery by dying in March 1925. Taylor went on and off with Coppard for longer, until finally abandoning him after several years and several short-lived reconciliations. When she wrote No Goodness in the Worm, therefore, she had just a few years’ distance from the experience, and it’s easy for anyone who knows something of the story to find the parallels between the fiction and its source. Valentine in the novel is Gay; Humphrey, the husband, is Hal; Coppard is Francis Merryweather, although his skill is furniture making rather than writing; and Sikey and Jane are Taylor’s friends Bee and Pran. (Taylor came up with different names for all of them in A Prison, A Paradise as well.) Taylor changed a number of the practical aspects of the story: Humphrey’s only illness is emotional; the foursome and Francis/Coppard aren’t engaged in any business together, thriving or not.
Husband and wife are still miserable, though. “It’s an odd thing to find out that you’re married to your worst enemy,” Valentine tells her Sikey early in the book. The marriage “had never been a properly adult relation, a mature interchange between man and woman;” instead, she describes it as “a mutual propping association.” And when the impish and charming Francis comes into her life, “a golden haze” comes over Valentine’s “mental landscape,” and “some dimly prophetic part of her mind recognized that it would not life, nor Francis Merryweather be perceived as other human beings perceived him, until the whole drama of their relationship was nearing its close.” Humphrey’s response is only slightly less dysfunctional than Hal Taylor’s: “You’re free to have your little affairs; I’m not a slave-owner. But I won’t be let down in front of everybody and I won’t allow you to let me down.”
The outcome of this affair is, of course, predictable, foretold by the old verse apochryphally credited to William James:
Hogamus Higamus Men are Polygamous Higamus Hogamus Women Monogamous
Valentine wants Francis, Francis only, Francis wholly, and Francis wants … oh, what’s this? This looks fun. “To anyone with a spark of sense, life is simply the opportunity for exquisite sensation,” he tells Valentine. Such is not the foundation of a stable or lost-lasting relationship. In the end, Valentine suffers intensely, suffers to the point of attempting suicide. Though she survives, she sees her future as one of long, slow, difficult recovery. And Francis gets married, has more affairs, sells lots of custom-made furniture, and disappears off into a golden haze.
Ironically, the most interesting relationships in the book are not between men and women but between Valentine and her friends. As the TLS reviewer put it, “The talk of the three young women together is crisp and amusing and natural, whatever the crisis they are facing.” Sikey is an independent-minded social scientist who treats going to bed with men as one step above laboratory experiments. Jane is more grounded, yet she also rejects convention, marrying a dying man to give his young daughter a step-mother and home.
Valentine’s real tragedy, it seems to me, is that she allows herself to forget how much she has going for herself compared to men. Indeed, it’s hard not to find some pretty powerful parallels to the state of women and men today:
It was a commonplace between them that since the war men had become almost unendurable; they were spoilt, bored, irresponsible; virtue had gone out of them…. [T]he twentieth century or war (they were never sure which) had given them a world of half-men to grow up among, half-men who mechanically aped emotions, or who, unable to bring contentment to one woman, would appease their own impotence or vanity by sniffing around among half a dozen or more, or who clung to breasts and skirts in the prolonged infantility of grown men unable to face the world that they had made.
It’s not surprising that some contemporary reviewers (see Frances Lamont Robbins below) took exception to this viewpoint. Despite the emergence of a whole generation of remarkable women writers and artists after the First World War, not everyone was prepared to see the sexual tables turn so completely. What is surprising is how many reviewers accepted and welcomed this perspective. Gay Taylor clearly revealed a need to reconsider the balance of power between men and women, and it’s sad that so little has changed in the 80 years since No Goodness in the Worm was written.
Other Reviews
Frances Lamont Robbins, in The Outlook, January 21, 1931
Things must be looking black for the men in England. There feminism is an anti-male movement. (Here it is only indirectly so.) If English feminism has a literature, this novel must represent its lowest point; for it is one of the rankest pieces of nonsense that this patient reviewer ever read. Such incredible, such dreadful men; indeed there is no goodness in these worms! And, by natural sequence, such incredible, dreadful women, too…. The writer of this novel has considerable feeling for rich words, and some narrative skill. But we do not think she meant her novel to be funny–unless she is a man.
Bernadine J. Scherman, in The Saturday Review of Literature, February 21, 1931
It is a great satisfaction–after reading the dozens of contrived and artificial novels that are dumped on the public every month—to come across at last a novel that reveals a soul. The author of No Goodness in the Worm may have had no such lofty purpose, but unconsciously or otherwise, she has achieved it…. Though the author never states a thesis, and writes her novel only as a personal story, still the impression remains that this is indeed the state of mind of most thinking English women of thirty or so.
After all the proportion of women to men in England before the war was about three t« one, and since then of course far greater. Women have had to become economically independent, and to this end, better educated and far more emancipated from families and tradition than before; while the flower of their own generation of men has been killed off. It is an abnormal state of affairs apparently affecting many of the younger English writers, and certainly admirably reflected in this first novel of Miss Taylor.
Guy Holt, in The Bookman, February 1931
… [I]n far too many years of haphazard reading I have not previously encountered just the point of view which Miss Taylor so ably expresses. I have read books written in bitterness against man; I have read books which were the product of defiance, or contempt, or pathological frigidity, but this springs from none of these. It is simply the work of one who, through her. characters, views man dispassionately and finds him, on the whole, dispensable. And that, I take it, is score one for the novel of 1931.
Marjorie Grant Cook, in The Times Literary Supplement, July 3, 1930
A sensitive and comely piece of work. No Goodness in the Worm is a first novel of exciting quality: one of those uncommon books whose first page is a good through which the reader enters a little world of other people’s lives and is lost for the time to his own….
When it comes to love scenes this writer thinks sometimes, unconsciously, in the phrases of Lawrence. For the rest she very definitely writes her own book, and the justice and wit of her expressions are constantly stimulating…. The talk of the three young women together is crisp and amusing and natural, whatever the crisis they are facing. A book that grows in strength as it nears its end makes a second novel by the same hand something to look forward to.
No Goodness in the Worm, by Gay Taylor London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1930 New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930
