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Long Reviews

The editor’s own in-depth reviews, excerpts, and background information on selected neglected books. This section is the centerpiece of this site.

As It Was in the Beginning, by G. E. Trevelyan (1934)

Cover of "As It Was in the Beginning"

The anonymous TLS reviewer described G. E. Trevelyan’s third novel, As It Was in the Beginning (1934) as “almost unreadable in its intensity.” Thumbing through the book after getting it in the mail last month, I could see that was an apt assessment, and somewhat dreaded the level of attention I would have to devote to it.

Thank God for airplanes. I have by now developed a reliable regime in which I strap myself into the seat and strap myself into a book and fairly successfully tune out the rest of the world for however long the flight takes. And so I took As It Was in the Beginning with me on a short work trip to Turkey this week. It proved a wise decision, particularly when we sat on the tarmac in Istanbul for several hours waiting for some mechanical work.

As It Was in the Beginning takes place entirely in the mind of Millicent — Lady Chesborough, widow of Lord Harold — as she lies in a nursing home bed in the last days before her death from the effects of a stroke. Childless, her only visitor is one of her late husband’s nieces. Nurses come in and go out, always adjusting her sheets, lifting her numb left arm as they do. Her thoughts dwell on Phil, the young man she took as a lover, who left her not long before.

This is a tour-de-force of stream of consciousness writing and construction. As Millicent lies in bed flowing in and out of consciousness, she revisits repeatedly certain moments from her life, rerunning these memories as one sometimes does in the same way as a bit of song gets caught in the head. The servant coming to her in the garden of the house at Chesborough, which she had turned into a rehabilitation hospital for wounded soldiers, with a small orange envelope bearing the message that Harold had been killed on the Western Front. Her sense of dread at that sight, combined with her fear that the young man she was tending to would sense her distress. Phil’s approaching her in the lounge of the hotel in Brighton where they met: if there hadn’t been that shelf under the table that forced her to turn herself sideways, facing the entrance, would they not have met?

At the same time, though, Trevelyan gradually and almost imperceptibly steps Millicent back through her life. She traces her affair with Phil from his leaving in anger over her refusal to purchase a new automobile to their road trips in his first one, their nights out in London as she scanned the faces in clubs and restaurants, wondering who took her for an old fool, to their first meeting there in Brighton. And though her longing for Phil and her self-recriminations — both for losing him and giving in to his dubious romancing — remain constants in her thoughts, we see her in the first years as a widow, in the claustrophobic world of Chesborough, where “I always felt I was something very small cowering inside a figure labelled The Squire’s Wife.” She leaves for London, where she can enjoy the freedom of anonymity:

It was like a tonic, sometimes, to stroll along the High Street in the sunshine and hardly be glanced at. And in a ‘bus one person is very much like another. I remember being grateful, even, to a ‘bus conductor, when he punched a ticket and pushed it at me, looking the other way. Just the right amount of notice. One must have a ticket: one exists. But not expected to be anything.

This view of life as older woman in London contrasts with that of the spinster in her first novel, Appius and Virginia: “Each year a little older, a little stouter or a little thinner, a little less quickly off the ‘bus … and the half compassionate, half contemptuous had of the conductor, grimy and none too gentle, as she clambers down the swaying steps on to the sliding pavement.”

But unlike Virginia Hutton, who sought ferociously to imprint her will upon another being, Millicent struggles throughout her life for a sense of identity. Much of the time, she feels herself “there, but not in the body: watching it from the outside and feeling responsible for it, without having it firmly in hand. Having to creep back in to pull the strings.” Looking at herself in a mirror as a newlywed, she thinks, “I’m much too small for this huge room…. Harold ought to have married somebody imposing.”

The one place she feels most at peace is in a London cinema, where she can be lose all sense of herself:

People aren’t people, they haven’t any faces. And all quite quiet, looking at the screen. They’ve left their anxieties outside in the street, in that big, glaring porch with the big posters. They’ve chained them up. Anxieties, waiting and hissing outside.

So many people. That’s why they come here you know. In here they needn’t be people. It’s dark in here, it’s dark in my room, I like my room. And I’m not separate. I don’t think I am, I’m part of the darkness, and the people who aren’t people. All part of the darkness.

I’m like anyone else. All alike and nothing, staring at the screen.

Some reasons why Millicent has such a fragile sense of self become clear as we go back into her youth and childhood. The only child of a country doctor, her main playmates are Dick and Hilda, children of the local Lord, who make it clear her invitations are at their bidding. Her first brush at romance ends before it even begins, with the young man barely aware of her presence. Her parents have little time to spend with her. Her tutor, Miss Cresset, has little patience for her needs: “Tell me a story.” “You’re old enough to tell them to yourself.” Only her Nanny, open and affectionate, notices the strange absence in Millicent’s life:

“It’s nice when there’s nobody here.”

“Why, there never is anybody here, is there? You’re a funny little thing. Don’t you want to have other little girls and boys to play with?”

“There’s only Dick and Hilda.”

“Well, don’t you want to have them?”

“No.”

And even earlier: “Nanny, why am I inside this?” “Inside what?” “Arms and legs and things. Why am I inside it? It’s nasty.” And on to her earliest sensations: “And want and full and nothing, and want and warm and nothing. And want and want and want and want. Alone and alone and alone.” Her only sense of security comes at the very beginning: “Back, back: sheltering darkness and safe, yielding warmth…. Strong, perpetual beat of the dark.”

I found Trevelyan’s handling of the final rush back through infancy, through birth, back to the womb surprisingly moving. She manages to convey quite effectively how enormous and intimidating the world can seem to a little thing, particularly without a strong maternal presence, without any base from which to look out at the world. As Millicent nears her birth, she also nears her death and her thoughts reach out in desperation for her lost lover, Phil. You know exactly where this story is going, yet Trevelyan makes it intense and unfamiliar.

One could see As It Was in the Beginning as something of a set piece, the kind of assignment a writer might give herself to test and hone her skills. But this is far more than that. Trevelyan builds a powerful sense of a woman whose life was a constant struggle to reassure herself of her own identity — a struggle she often lost. Considering that she did it within the narrow confines of a single room in a nursing home and in the span of perhaps a week or less, it’s a bravura performance. Having read five of Trevelyan’s novel now, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that she was the only English woman writer of her generation to pick up Virginia Woolf’s baton and run with it. And sadly, due to injuries suffered in a Blitz raid on London, she died barely a month before Woolf at the early age of 37 and was quickly and utterly forgotten. The time for her rightful recognition is long overdue.

Reviews

• Times Literary Supplement, 24 May 1934

Once again Miss Trevelyan has used her gifts of psychological insight and imagination to produce, in As It Was in the Beginning, a work of striking talent. And once again, as in Appius and Virginia and Hot House, she has written a book which is almost unreadable in its intensity, but which compels one to go on reading in spite of almost physical discomfort, by the admiration one feels for the author’s ingenuity and her uncanny insight into human beings….

Miss Trevelyan has here chosen a more everyday type of character than she did in the other two, but even so she has not yet produced anything universal: the agonies, the twists, the cravings of futile and hapless people still obsess her; she has a genius for suffering and such power in describing it that the reader feels worn out after a few chapters. Should Miss Trevelyan ever write of beauty and kindliness, using for purposes of stimulation the powers which she now employs to sear and suffocate her readers, it is hard to set limits to what she might achieve.

• Vernon Fane, “The Book World,” The Sphere, 2 June 1934

“Technically interesting” is the description of Miss G. E. Trevelyan’s As It Was in the Beginning (Seeker. 7s. 6d.). Life is laid bare by comments and reveries and the sustained delusions which precede death.” There is a dearth of verbs an abundance of full stops a fumbling at word patterns. Technical fiddlesticks Miss Trevelyan is suffering from an overdose of Gertrude Stein.

• Sheffield Independent, 21 May 1934

As her previous novels (Appius and Virginia and Hot House) showed, Miss G. E. Trevelyan cannot be classed as a conventional novelist, but the strange technique she has used in her latest book, As It Was in the Beginning, though extremely interesting, proves rather irritating. The book is a mass of comments by a woman of fifty who is dying in a nursing home. These comments, reveries and delusions cover her whole life, gradually working back to her birth.

• Aberdeen Press and Journal, 30 May 1934

To translate into unemotional print the disjointed memories of a nursing home patient re-living the past before “death’s kiss” is a technical feat of daring, for another’s experiences presented in this form can be so easily boring. The fact that Miss Trevelyan succeeds. remarkably well in sustaining interest is at once a tribute to her skill and the pathos of her tale, the tale of a woman grown too old for love, her passion for a, man younger than herself, desperate, vain resistance of the attacks of old age, and the shock of his ultimate desertion. Here is all the tragedy of ari ageing woman unwilling to give up what she never had in youth. Memories, memories, an unhappy marriage, a boy and girl fruitless friendship, childhood (particular effective word-building) birth, and birth and death unite — “light and blinding space, blank and boundless and without shadow: stark unending light.”

• The Tatler, 13 June 1934

… if you are fond of pointing out to people in distress that we all must like of the beds of our own making, then Miss G. E. Trevelyan’s new novel, As It Was in the Beginning, is not for you. You will find in her a ruthless destroyer of that optimism which, in reality, is either a desire to be left emotionally undisturbed, or a pretty shelving of all life’s ugliness and pain on God’s understanding of what is best for us after all…. Not a pleasant story, nor a happy one.

• Northern Whig and Belfast Post, 21 July 1934

The cleverness of it is indisputable, it is also effective in passages, yet one cannot agree that this method has perceptible advantages over that adhered to by most of the writers of fiction.

As It Was in the Beginning, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: Martin Secker, 1934

William’s Wife, by G. E. Trevelyan (1938)

Cover of first UK edition of "william's Wife"
William’s Wife is the natural history of a bag lady. Starting from the day of Jane Atkins’s wedding to grocer William Chirp, a widower in his late fifties, G. E. Trevelyan takes us step by step through her metamorphosis from an ordinary young woman in service (a good position, more of a lady’s companion) to a queer figure haunting the streets of London, bag in arm, scavenging for food and firewood.

In Jane’s case, the process is triggered by William’s tight-lipped parsimonious complacency and intolerance, but eventually becomes self-propelled. It all starts with a broken window cord: “‘The window cord’s gone, upstairs,’ she told William, watching him chip warily at the gaping mutton leg. ‘Eh? Ah?'” A week later, she raises the subject again:

“How about that window cord,” she said in a low, Sunday voice, straight forward into her collar. “Did you tell someone about it?”

“Cord? Eh?” He shut the gate behind them and they went on around the drive, still talking in low voices in case one of the neighbours should hear, or someone in the road.

“Yes,” she said. “What I told you. It’s gone in the lower sash.”

“Don’t want to open the lower sash.” He fitted his key in the door. “That don’t matter.”

Then there is the matter of her clothes. Two years after the wedding, Jane gingerly suggests that the few dresses that made up her trousseau are growing shabby:

And he wasn’t even looking round. Pointing with his pipe. “Waste not, want not.”

“I know, William, but it’s the best part of two years and….”

“Save something for a rainy day.”

He drew at his pipe for some minutes, then he looked round at her. “My poor wife….” He cleared his throat. “My first wife didn’t go spending on new gowns, not once in ten, no, fifteen years.” He put the pipe in his mouth and turned back to the fire.

Jane does have some small sum of her own, some twenty pounds saved from her wages. But this money now belongs to William, of course. Makes no difference to him: it’s all wastage.

And so Jane begins a slow, quiet campaign of guerrilla warfare, saving a few pennies from her weekly grocery allowance. It must be a small amount, for William carefully totals the bills. And then what she does accumulate must be spent with even greater care, as he would notice anything new. She resorts to having near-copies made of her old dresses.

Then William announces one day that he’s sold the shop and retiring. Now it is not just the money given for groceries that Jane has to safeguard, but her time as well. Each Tuesday, William stands at the door as she returns, questioning any deviation from her normal forty-five minutes. And once a day at four, if it’s not too wet, he goes out for a walk: “If she slipped upstairs at once she had half an hour for certain, if it didn’t come to rain, to do any little thing she wanted: to sew a bit of new frilling on a collar without him asking what she was doing, or turn out a drawer, or just stand, drumming on the window, and look out at the road….

It was the only bit of pleasure she got.

Even the outbreak of the Great War doesn’t alter William’s steadfast routine or his selfishness. Jane takes up knitting for the soldiers, which gives her the gift of an extra hour out of the house each week, but finds it hard to convince William to send a parcel to his son-in-law serving at the front:

“Socks, eh?” And then he began to chuckle. “He doesn’t want any socks. What does he want with socks? Socks? He’d smoke them!” He burst into a loud chuckle, knocking his pipe on the bar of the grate.

Smoke-them. Hu. Hu. Smoke-them.

Then one day, William catches a cold and within weeks is gone. And now we notice how much of him has infiltrated Jane’s thinking:

She saw Mrs. Peat out and shut the door after her and put up the chain. And that was the last, she hoped. Didn’t want any more coming round to help, poking their noses in, for that was all it meant. Minnie Hallett would have come there to sleep fast enough for the asking, and she wasn’t the only one either. Sooner be without: doing nothing but make work and there was enough to do as it was. Some might like it, but she didn’t. At a time like that you wanted to be quiet to yourself. Whoever would have thought.

Left with an annuity of two hundred pounds, Jane is free to buy new furniture for the house, to have someone in for repairs, to buy some new clothes. Instead, she decides the best way to be quiet to herself is to sell the house and move to something smaller and newer in a different town, closer to London. And to rent: “It made you shudder to think your money might be tied up in property like that, and no way to get at it.”

But she finds it harder to get rid of William’s old Victorian furniture. It seems such a shame: “good solid furniture that had years of wear in it yet, and twice the quality of what you could buy new: nasty rubbishy stuff, a lot of it, painted up to sell, and no wear or value in it.” And her new neighbors too forward, the new town less attractive than it seemed at first. She moves. And moves again. And again.

Each move takes her to a smaller space, but Jane just stacks up her furniture. Finally, she is living in a dank basement on a busy street, a place of too little account for anyone to notice. Which is fine with her: fewer eyes spying in and coveting her things. But even this is not enough, so she buys a large black shopping bag and begins to fill it with her best gloves and newest pair of stockings. Plus her umbrella and good scarf. And the spoons and forks. And the sack with her important papers. Can’t afford to have someone breaking in and taking them.

And she sets out each day to spot the very cheapest produce and meat. Shocked when she first comes across a stall selling odd bits of meat as cat food, she finds herself wandering in. “Not that that didn’t look good enough very often, as if anyone could have eaten it.” When a potato rolls off a greengrocer’s cart and lands at her feet, she picks up. “Waste not, want not, as my poor husband used to say.”

We experience the entirety of William’s Wife through Jane’s eyes, so we are slow to recognize her metamorphosis into a suspicious, miserly, and tight-lipped old woman until the process is irreversible. The ability of Oxford-educated Trevelyan to slip inside the mind, culture, and language of a woman of a different age and class is remarkable and utterly convincing. As with Theme with Variations, I found it as riveting as watching a car crash — or, in this case, a human crash. When I set the book down, I felt as if all the air has been sucked from my lungs. William’s Wife is a chapter of the human comedy that would have made Balzac proud.

William’s Wife, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1938

Quiet Street, by Michael Ossorgin [Mikhail Osorgin] (1930)

Cover of first US edition of "Quiet Street"
I’ve been saving Mikhail Osorgin’s novel, Quiet Street, for a quiet break. There is something about a good, thick Russian book — things like Anna Karenina, Life and Fate, or Konstantin Paustovsky’s autobiography — that demand you set aside distractions and carve out hours to let it take over your life, and I could tell that Quiet Street was one of these. Full of characters, full of emotions, full of life, abuzz with bullets as well as bees.

Quiet Street is the story of the Russian Revolution as told through the flotsam that was swept up in its currents. No one in this book is in charge. Even the opportunistic ex-soldier who works his way up to a position of influence with the Bolsheviks ultimately finds himself merely a tool, valued only for his skill and efficiency in shooting the victims sent to him in the basement of the Lubyanka by those signing the letters.

We all know this story. Anyone who is good, innocent, or just plain unlucky will end up dead, broken, scarred, in prison, or exiled. Such knowledge is enough to put some readers off even reading a Russian book. Titles like Life and Fate appear to promise great, grey monoliths of suffering, appealing only to masochists. I confess to feeling some dread at picking up Quiet Street, but only because I knew it would involve getting to know and care about characters and then watch them suffer and be abused.

Like Stolnikov, the handsome young university student who rushes to enlist in the first patriotic frenzy after the outbreak of war in 1914. A good officer, considerate of his men, he steps out of a dugout and is blasted by a stray artillery shell that strikes his trench. His arms and limbs are amputated at a field station, he is evacuated to a Moscow hospital where he soon becomes universally referred to as “The Trunk.” The staff trains him to carry out a few trivial tasks with the aid of a stick held in his mouth. “The doctors said: ‘A miracle. Just look at him. There’s nature for you!'”

For Osorgin, though, nature is a force more powerful and elusive than any man-made constructs encountered in this book. The comings and goings of the swallows, the nightly journeys of the mice living under the floorboards of the house on Sivtsev Vrazhek in Moscow that provides the epicenter of Quiet Street are just as important as those of any of its human inhabitants. “It’s possible that the world of humans, with all its happenings and all its personal joys and sorrows, is overestimated, and that it all leads to very little in reality,” Stolnikov cautions a young woman who visits him.

Man’s small place in the world is a central theme in Quiet Street. As the Bolsheviks spar with the White Russians and others, Osorgin recognizes the real victor: “In the summer of 1919 Moscow was conquered by rats.” The rats harbor lice, and the lice introduces typhus, and soon characters are being comandeered into burial brigades at mass graves outside Moscow. The owner of the house in Sivtsev Vrazhek, an ornithologist, gives the swallows and other small birds he studies a greater place in his scheme of things:

“It is all the same to the swallows what people are quarreling about, who is fighting against whom and who comes out on top. One to-day, another to-morrow, and so all over again…. Now the swallows have laws of their own,a nd their laws are eternal. And these laws are of much greater importance than any of our making. We still know very little about them; so much yet remains to be discovered.”

Of all nature’s forces, none is greater than death. Osorgin’s death is not blind but subtle in its logic, capable of patience and restraint when required. As the ornithologist’s wife lays in her deathbed,

Death stood at the bedside and listened to the old lady’s moan, then withdrew to a corner. It had been keeping watch for over a month at the bedside of Tanyusha’s grandmother, shielding her from all the attractions of life and preparing her for admission into the void. When the night nurse fell asleep Death would hand the old lady her drink, cover her up with the blanket and wink at her fondly. And, not recognizing Death, the old lady would say to it in her weak little voice, “Thank you, dear one; thank you so much!”

And when the old lady went to sleep Death would yield to an impulse to play impish tricks: fling off the blanket, pinch the old lady in her side and stop up her mouth with the palm of its bony hand to impeded her breathing. And it would laugh quietly, chuckling and displaying its black teeth.

Death is everywhere in the book, in the form of old age, war, revolution, famine, disease, and the arbitrary exercise of power. Yet some of Osorgin’s characters manage to maintain a remarkable obliviousness to its presence:

It needed the deeply ingrained mentality of the civilian and the profound ignorance of the research student to enable Vassya to go on standing there quite calmly, without even noticing the bullets whizzing past. Nobody stopped him; and it did not enter his head that he was being shot at from the whole length of the street.

The one fate Osorgin spared his characters was exile. That he saved for himself. The gist of his story can be found in Lesley Chamberlain’s book, Lenin’s Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia. Cosmopolitan (he worked as a correspondent in Italy for years), progressive (he converted to Judaism when he married his second wife, Rachel, daughter of the Zionist Ahad Ha’am, more interested in art and nature than politics, Osorgin was just the sort of minor member of the intelligentsia Lenin found most irritating.

Ignored in the chaos following the October Revolution, Osorgin then found refuge in running a cooperative used bookstore with Nikolai Berdyaev and like-minded intellectuals. The bookstore provided both practical and moral support to its community, offering much-needed cash for their books and a refuge of rationality in the midst of the madness swirling outside. The ornithologist takes advantages of such a bookstore to get money for food and wood in the winter of 1920. Soon, however, Lenin found time to return to his favorite irritants. Osorgin was arrested and found himself in the same Lubyanka basement his characters refer to as “The Ship of Death.” He was exiled rather than shot, ending up in Kazan before being returned to Moscow for medical reasons. Within weeks of his return, his name appeared on a list of 160-some intellectuals that was presented for Lenin’s approval, and loaded on a steamer headed for Germany and permanent exile. He and his wife eventually settled outside Paris, publishing two novels that were translated into English, Quiet Street and My Sister’s Story (1931), before his death in 1942.

Chamberlain writes that Quiet Street is undermined by Osorgin’s nostalgia for pre-Revolutionary Russia, but I think this is a misreading. I doubt that Osorgin considered any particular regime superior to another. For him, all man’s constructions were like the house on Sivtsev Vrashek, more vulnerable to destruction by rust, worms, mold, and weather than by war or conspiracy. Osorgin was greatly influenced by the writings of the Stoics, particularly the Meditations , and it’s hard to believe that in writing Quiet Street he didn’t keep in mind Marcus Aurelius’s injunction: “Soon you will have forgotten the world, and soon the world will have forgotten you.”

Quiet Street, by Michael Ossorgin [Mikhail Osorgin]
New York: The Dial Press, 1930

Ragged Regiment, by George Marion (1981)

Cover of UK paperback edition of Ragged Regiment
Since the Fifties, there have been plenty of junk or ‘Pulp’ novels depicting the Second World War from American and, to a lesser degree, British & Australian authors. (Yes, even Australia had pulp war novelists. Owen Gibson was one writer who, during the Fifties, churned out about 25 slim novels about Aussies in WW2. Totally forgotten now, his books are so rare that even the National Library doesn’t have copies of all of them).

Written purely for entertainment value with no literary pretensions whatsoever, these novels were easily digestible, usually churned out by hacks and often adhered to a routine recipe. That meant loads of action, rendered in a blunt, easily digestible manner along with a compulsory lurid sex scene or two. For the American types, the characters usually comprised the stock GI squad encountered in many a novel or Hollywood film- the wise-cracking New Yorker, the rich kid from Boston with a chip on his shoulder, the tall Texan farm-boy, the loud-talking Italian, the brooding Native American who grew up on a reservation etc.

The majority did not survive past their first print-run. Amidst the mediocrity, an occasional better example would emerge, usually when a writer tried just that little bit harder or dared to stray from the standard rules of the genre. One which stayed in my memory when I read it when I was at high school in the early 80s was The Glory Jumpers (1961) by Delano Stagg which stood out from fellow Pulp novels by the author’s attempt to realistically depict combat rather than the blood-and-guts battle-porn that lesser writers indulged in. I recently tracked down a copy and re-read it. Despite my advanced age, I was still impressed with it. It is certainly no great work of literature but it has the flavour of realism and after doing a little research on the net, I discovered that Delano Stagg was a pseudonym of two authors who actually served in WW2. The book features a similar scenario to Spielberg’s movie “Saving Private Ryan”: an outnumbered group of Americans has to defend a Norman village from an overwhelming force of Germans. Yet, despite the blood-and-thunder of the film, I found Stagg’s novel more convincing and more believable in its portrayal of battle. In the latter, not every G..I is an expert marksman, there is no hand-to-hand fighting (in modern warfare, enemy soldiers seldom get that close) and most casualties are caused by artillery.

Inspired by my re-discovery of Stagg’s little novel, I dug out another forgotten war novel from my youth: Ragged Regiment (1981) by George Marion. I first read this when I was 17, only six years after this novel was published. My original copy was lost so when I say “dug out,” I meant hunting down another paperback copy on eBay. I wish I could explain my fascination with obscure war fiction and why it has grown in the past ten years. Perhaps I like the idea that at least some-one is reading the labours of some long-forgotten author. Or maybe its resentment that some real gems of the genre have been allowed to lie neglected in dusty obscurity while a few famous (and in my opinion, over-rated) examples like All Quiet on the Western Front have never been out of print.

George Marion Cole (1927-2008) was an engineer and lawyer who lived most of his life in Seattle. Drafted into the US army in 1945, he arrived in Europe after VE Day and he spent a period in post-war Germany as a soldier in the Allied forces of occupation. During this time, he learnt to speak fluent German and developed an enthusiasm for the art and literature of that nation. Marion was also a keen writer and he wrote five manuscripts but only one — Ragged Regiment — was published.

Let’s get one thing clear. Ragged Regiment is not a great novel. In a literary sense, the writing is competent but routine. But to be fair to the author, I doubt Marion intended it to be. There is nothing pretentious or even ambitious about this novel. The only literary reference is the title: the phrase “Ragged Regiment” appears in Shakespeare via the character Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1. Having been published in 1981, Marion’s novel appeared long after the classic Pulp era of the 40s and 50s. Indeed, the late author might have been offended by my suggestion that his book has any link to that genre at all. But in my opinion, it bears similarities through its straightforward, unpretentious style and the ease of its consumption by the reader. However, Marion’s novel retains an interest for me because of its down-to-earth naturalism. That is the point at which this novel parts company with most Pulp war novels, through its focus on the everyday mundane life of a frontline soldier.

When one thinks about most of the popular portrayals of WW2, be it HBO’s Band of Brothers or screen games like Call of Duty, the focus has been on the men at the sharpest tip of the sharp end. Any and every battle is furious, relentless, bloody and vital. Everybody fights hard and many do not survive.

What makes Ragged Regiment stand out from this crowd is that it takes the opposite approach. The characters in the novel are rear echelon US army engineers who have spent the latter half of 1944 pulling non-combat duty in France, repairing roads and building bridges behind the lines. The central character, PFC Stan Nilson, has had a soft existence, running a PX store at a rear-line base. At the beginning of the Ardennes Offensive (the so-called “Battle of the Bulge“) in the freezing cold of December 1944, the regiment’s sheltered life comes to an abrupt end when they are sent into the lines to serve as riflemen.

Had this been a standard war novel of the Pulp era, or if it was the scenario of a more recent war movie, the regiment would end up fighting some epic, costly battle, having to defend a vital position such as a bridge or crossroads, which would escalate into a bloody finale. Alas, any reader expecting such from this novel is going to be disappointed. The engineers are assigned a sector to hold but it is on the fringes of the main battle. There is no grand attack by the enemy, no massed armour, no hordes of German infantry. This is a quieter sector that appears frozen by stalemate. The Germans do not launch major assaults; instead they probe the US lines, sending out patrols or occasional raiding parties. Deaths do occur — quite frequently but in a random fashion: a mortar round or sniper shot, a case of frost-bite, an accident, a friendly-fire incident. The engineers have no idea of what is happening in other sectors and simply have to do their best to survive and to hold the line.

What I like about this novel is its unstated quality which greatly enhances its’ realism. Instead of epic battles, we get to see the mundane concerns of the frontline soldier, where the cold, damp and lack of sleep are as dangerous enemies as the Germans. The novel devotes a lot of space to the simple problems a soldier encounters everyday- how to stay warm, how to keep your feet dry, how to rig up adequate communications, how to rotate shifts in the lines so everyone gets an equal chance at sleep. The novel shows vividly how fatigue can wear down a soldier’s reserves of strength as much as actual combat. One exhausted soldier, ordered to pull a second shift in the lines before he has had any rest, draws his rifle at his hated platoon sergeant and is barely restrained in time by some of his buddies.

Close encounters with the enemy are rare. Stan Nilson only has one such meeting and he kills his opponent in a very un-heroic, un-Hollywood fashion, shooting the German in the back. Even that is a Pyrrhic victory as the German has already killed two of Nilson’s friends beforehand. After that incident:

For the next three nights Stan went about his duties in a state of mental and physical numbness. He thought about Andy and the young German whose body he had riddled with half a drum of slugs. The images in his mind were at times clear and vivid, at other moments distant and misty. But always they were there. He shunned conversation and avoided company. It irritated him to see a hint of laughter or pleasure in the other men. Somehow it reminded him of what he was not and never again could be.

The severe stress of existing in a war zone is portrayed well but the novel also highlights the vital relief a soldier can derive from even a simple pleasure, like finally getting some hot water to shave in:

Stan knelt down beside the helmet, grabbed what was left of his bar of soap and began lathering his face. His concentration on the excruciating sense of pleasure flowing into his skin from the hot water was total and absolute. If he ever saw a bathtub again, he would soak in it forever.

Despite its lack of any artistic merit, the low-key restraint of this war novel marks it out as unusual, making a refreshing alternative to the more bombastic depictions of warfare that we normally receive.

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

Ragged Regiment, by George Marion
New York: Tower Books
London: Star Books

Carrington: A Novel of the West, by Michael Straight (1960)

Cover of "Carrington" by Michael Straight

For an obscure novelist, Michael Whitney Straight (1916- 2004) had an extraordinary life and career. A member of a distinguished family, his maternal grandfather was William C. Whitney, Secretary of the US Navy in the late 1800s, his mother was Dorothy Whitney, the famous philanthropist and his father William (who died of Spanish Flu in 1918 when Michael was only two) was a noted investment banker. Michael’s brother Whitney was a Grand Prix driver and one of the few American pilots to fly in the Battle of Britain and his sister Beatrice was an Oscar-winning actress.

Michael studied at Cambridge University, England during the mid-1930s and while there, he joined the Communist Party, became an associate of the “Cambridge Five” ring of British spies, was recruited into the KGB as an agent. Straight, despite his surname, was a bisexual and while at Cambridge, he had a brief love affair with English undergraduate Anthony Blunt who spied for the Soviets for many years and who later became custodian of the Royal Family’s art collection.

In 1937, Straight returned to the US and got a job in the Department of the Interior and even served as President Roosevelt’s speech-writer. During this period, he secretly had regular meetings with a Soviet agent. In the Second World War, Straight served as a B-17 pilot and after the war, he took over as publisher of New Republic magazine. In 1963, while applying for a public service job in Washington DC, Straight confessed about his Communist past and his Cambridge connections- revelations that would indirectly lead to the exposure of Blunt (although that man wasn’t publicly unveiled as a spy until 1979). Straight was married three times and fathered eight children. Even in his choice of wives, he seemed able to make connections- his second wife Nina was the half-sister of Gore Vidal and stepsister of Jackie Onassis.

Somehow during all this, Straight found time to embark on a career as a novelist after he left his job at the New Republic in the late Fifties. This proved to be perhaps less fruitful than Straight hoped as his output was limited to only three novels, a small handful of non-fiction works and a two-volume memoir (one part of which was published posthumously). Regarding his novels, his third one, Happy and Hopeless (1979) was a romance set in the White House during the Kennedy Presidency, a book that Straight had to self-publish. The other two were, perhaps surprisingly, both historical novels, both set in the Old West during the Plains Wars between the US Army and the Native Americans, Carrington (1960) and A Very Small Remnant (1963).

Carrington is set in Wyoming in the winter of 1866 during the early years of the Plains Wars. The title character is a true-life person, Lt Colonel Henry B. Carrington who commanded Fort Phil Kearny during the war against Red Cloud of the Sioux Nation. Growing tensions and a series of clashes led to the infamous Fetterman Massacre on December 21, 1866 in which over eighty US soldiers were lured, four miles from the Fort, into an ambush by over 1,500 Sioux and the entire force, including its commander, Captain William J. Fetterman, was wiped out. Carrington was blamed for the disaster, largely due to his unpopularity with many of his men and the perceived timidity and reluctance that he displayed during his leadership at the Fort. A later court of inquiry cleared him but his reputation and his army career was in ruins.

The most striking thing about this novel is that, considering the time it was written (1960) and the colourful life of its author, its style is curiously old-fashioned. Straight remains highly respectful of the historical realities of the era in which the book is set. Many historical novels and films often reflect more about the times in which they were written or made than how much they reveal about the times in which they attempt to portray. Film Westerns like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and Little Big Man (1970) arguably tell us more about the cultural and political upheavals of the Sixties than they do about the actual West. And Michael Blake’s 1988 novel Dances With Wolves is more a reflection on late 20th century New Age’s embrace of Native American mysticism than a convincing portrayal of the Frontier Wars.

The novel portrays Carrington in a sympathetic light but not idealised nor in total favourable terms. The officer that emerges here is initially a quietly confident man but soon revealed to be strickened with in-securities and a high-strung sensitivity to criticism. It reminded me of the central character in James Salter’s 1956 novel The Hunters, now recognised as a minor classic and possibly the only novel of any literary merit to emerge from the Korean War. In Salter’s book, the leading character is a pilot who arrives at his Air-Force unit in Korea determined to make his mark. But his own inner vulnerabilities, combined with poor luck and his own in-ability to assert his place among others, prevent him from achieving the success he desires. As well as his own private demons, he has to contend with a living one, in the form of an arrogant, brash younger pilot who rapidly gains the popularity, tally of MiGs and favour with senior officers that the eludes the former.

In Straight’s novel, Colonel Carrington is an idealist, favourably disposed to the Indians. The novel illustrates his thoughts as he lies awake just before dawn:

The Indians, passing under the window. That broken-down chieftain, slumped like a sack of meal over his broken-down pony. A beggar in the land of his fathers. And we in the army are substantially to blame. What a succession of men we sent to meet with them, to make peace! Grattan, that Irish bully out of West Point, who touched off the raids by his brutality. Chivington, who butchered Black Kettle’s band, men, women, and children, in the name of the Almighty. And last year those two incompetents Connor and Cole, marching up the Powder River without a moment of study or preparation, and crawling back, defeated and half dead.

Carrington is confident he can bring about a successful and enduring peace treaty with the Sioux. Again the reader hears his inner thoughts, ‘I shall meet all the Chiefs at Laramie; meet them in a spirit of charity and godd-will; understanding in place of arrogance, resolution in place of bluster; they will respond. No more the wrathful shock of iron arms.’

Within the first handful of pages, the reader learns that not only is the Colonel a staunch idealist with a firm self-belief, he is also insufferably vain. ‘The West is no place for glory hunters. Magnanimity is needed there; and tact; skill in engineering; administrative ability; a knowledge of resources; yes, and a sense of history in representing the President before the Indian nations. All qualities that I bring to the command; there isn’t an officer in the regular Army as well qualified as I am to carry the flag into Indian country.’

The flowery workings of Carrington’s inner musings are soon brought down a peg or two once he arrives at Fort Kearny. The novel depicts the subsequent chain of events from a number of other character’s perspectives, including junior officers, NCOs, privates and officer’s wives (the latter also living at the Fort). Carrington’s confident demeanour slowly but steadily peels away as the novel progresses. His self-belief is fragile and is whittled away by the grumblings of his subordinates who prefer to hate the Indians and who long to fight them. Carrington wants to succeed, he wants to make a lasting peace with the Sioux. But he cannot cope with the unexpected, cannot adapt to unforeseen obstacles.

The succession of meetings with Chiefs of the Sioux, and later their rivals, the Cheyenne, produce no worthwhile gains. Discipline and morale at the Fort goes on the decline, while the rank-and-file’s hatred of the Indians steadily grows, threatening to explode. In one scene, an meagre Thanksgiving dinner is interrupted by the mental collapse of the Carrington family’s African-American servant Dennis:

In the kitchen, the banging grew louder and louder until it sounded as though the stove would break apart. ‘Not so loud, Dennis!’ they called, and when he kept on they peered through the kitchen door. The old man was kneeling by the stove and battering it with his head.

Carrington has the desire to control the events unfolding around him, but not the strength. The Colonel wants to control the river but is instead carried along by its currents. Like the pilot in The Hunters, Carrington ultimately has to face up to a more dynamic rival, in the form of newly arrived Captain Fetterman. The latter is younger, stronger, more determined, more flamboyant, a man who dominates whichever room he enters, an Alpha male that easily undermines Carrington’s unsteady authority. Fetterman soon gains the men’s respect and popularity while Carrington looks more isolated and out of his depth with each passing day. And Fetterman is spoiling for a fight:

Fetterman looked across the valley. He asked: ‘What lies beyond that ridge?’

‘Indians! Two thousand warriors, waiting for you!’

‘Please God,’ Fetterman said, ‘they won’t have to wait long!’

As I already mentioned, this novel’s style borrows from Westerns of the 1920s and 30s, with traits of ‘Hard-Boiled’ crime fiction thrown in. The dialogue between characters tends to be sparse and blunt in a modern-style. Yet in other parts of the novel, the windy inner-musings of some of the characters read like literature of the 19th century.

The fore-mentioned Fetterman Massacre is not depicted in the novel, the reader is instead shown its aftermath when Carrington leads a party to cautiously investigate what happened to Fetterman’s command.

An outcropping of grey boulders marked the northern end of the slope. Ten Indian ponies were sprawled around it; the snow was stained with the blood of scores of braves. There, Carrington judged, the infantry had paused- only to retreat again as the cavalry swept past. But four old soldiers who knew the folly of retreat and the two frontiersmen had settled among the boulders and fought on.

Against such fighters the Sioux had taken no chances upon any encounter in the world to come. The first of the frontiersmen lay over a rock, his eyes beside him, the second was pierced by a hundred arrows. Griffin’s tendons were sliced. Cullinane had no hands or feet. O’Gara’s chest had been ripped open and his heart taken; he stared past the Colonel with a wry smile.

Carrington was unable to stop Fetterman’s foolhardy rush into the ambush. Positioned at the edge of the battle, Carrington is frozen with in-decision. He could muse on his future remembrance in the annals of history, but Carrington could not think nor act on his feet in the harsh, fast-moving present.

The Native Americans, when they fight, fight back hard and without mercy. Yet the author, like the central character, is respectful to them. Sadly, the depiction of the Sioux and Cheyenne Chiefs at the various peace-talks is the least convincing aspect of the novel. Straight’s attempts at the Native’s dialogue reads like the standard mode of Indian Chief speech from any Western of the 40s or 50s. ‘White man speaks with forked tongue’ was about the only stock phrase missing.

Straight’s skills as a novelist were limited. In technical terms, there is nothing innovative about this novel. Indeed, for a novel written at the beginning of the Sixties, it is curiously derivative of the forms and recipes set by Westerns of prior decades. However it is an interesting portrait of a man clearly out of his depth, a self-glorifying idealist who planned for greatness but his own ego prevented his feet from being on the ground long enough to understand and adapt to the realities of what lay in front of him.

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

Carrington, by Michael Straight
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966

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

Cover of Two Thousand Million Man-Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Last Blue Sea, by David Forrest (1959)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What shall I call you?” I asked.

“What did you call Mrs. Everett?”

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

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

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

“It give me a pain.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canaille, by Kathleen Sully (1956)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canaille, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1956

Canaille

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To My Daughter on Her Birthday

To my Daughter on her Birthday

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

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

Happy birthday, Alice. Love, Dad.

The Man Next Door, by Emanuel Litvinoff (1968)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fractured Smile, by Kathleen Sully (1965)

Cover of The Fractured Smile by Kathleen Sully

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover of "The Way Out of Berkeley Square"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You should have forced my hand.”

“Easier said than done.”

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

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

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

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

Cover of Julia: A portrait of Julia Strachey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Animal Hotel, by Jean Garrigue (1966)

Cover of "The Animal Hotel"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Flagellants, by Carlene Hatcher Polite (1967)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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