“Morris was the single most dedicated novelist I ever encountered,” Richard Elman wrote in his 1998 memoir Namedropping. “He would finish one novel and then start another. He was always at work for six and seven hours every day of the week and could not be disturbed, and when he was not writing, he was reading works of abstruse literature and history and doing research.” When Renek died at the age of 88 in 2013, his New York Times described him as “a critically admired New York novelist who … never achieved the commercial success many thought he deserved.” Yet even the critical admiration for Renek’s work has faded away since his death: a case study in how a decent, hard-working writer can end up forgotten no matter how hard he tries.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Renek served in the Army during World War Two, spent some time working on shrimp boats along the Gulf Coast, and attended the University of Chicago for a few years. When he married his wife Ethel in 1957, their wedding announcement listed his profession as “free-lance writer”: a job he pursued with few interruptions for the next forty-some years.
Ironically for a man who stayed married to the same woman for over fifty years, Renek’s first novel The Big Hello (1961) was a satire about the divorce racket. Ruby, a plumbing contractor wants to divorce his wife so that he can have time to “improve his mind.” Ruby hopes to raise his standing in the world through the force of his mind, but his best friend dismisses this dream: “You couldn’t be big time if you were marching in front of a brass band.” Little guys trying to get noticed became a common theme in Renek’s work. The Chicago Tribune’s reviewer James McCague felt the book had promise but that “a lot of readers may find Morris Renek’s novel outrageously funny. Others are likely to feel, with this reviewer, that it tries just a little too hard.”
Renek tried his hand at salaried work in the mid-1960s. Elman met him around 1962 when, he recalled, Renek was trying to feed and house his wife and two kids on little more than the royalties from the German edition of The Big Hello. He helped Renek by getting him a regular slot in radio station WBAI’s programming as its resident book reviewer and recommended him to the book editors at Nation and The New Republic as well.
A year or so later, Renek joined the staff of a Playboy-wannabe magazine called Cavalier, where he wrote short stories, book reviews, and interviews with writers like Erskine Caldwell. At least one reader loved Renek’s contributions. A Mr. H. Goodwin of Evanston, Illinois, wrote to the editor, “We enjoy your magazine but are especially excited when we can look forward to a copy in which there is an article, interview, or story by that brilliant and talented writer Morris Renek. He has that wonderful ability to say exactly what he means to, using the most precise language. He is terrific! Why can’t you feature him every month?”
Renek’s last try at life as an employee was as a writer for CBS News. He enjoyed the variety of subjects — a celebrity profile in the morning, a breaking disaster in the afternoon — and his work was appreciated by the news program execs, but he felt like a “tool of capitalism.” He later told Elman that “the work was idiotic and the news people all whores and sellouts.”
And so he returned to freelancing and began his next novel Siam Miami (1969), which was published in 1969. Coming out when bestsellers like The Valley of the Dolls had whetted readers’ appetites for sleazy show-biz sagas, Siam Miami, which told about a talented singer’s rocky rise to fame, was Renek’s best shot at commercial success, but his approach was more Marxist than sensationalist. “The performers, who are really folk heroes,” he told one interviewer, “have the name, the game, and the glory. They also have the talent. Yet they’re completely beholden to the power brokers — the agents, the managers, the road men, the bankers — who package them like merchandise.” His aim in writing the book was to use the show business milieu “to reflect our era — the alienation, the detachment, the mechanization — in other words, all the viruses of the age as well as the monumental achievements in terms of technical expertise.”
The book fared better with reviewers than buyers. In the New York Times, John Leonard contrasted Renek’s novel with Rona Jaffe’s competing Hollywood/sex novel The Fame Game: “Mr. Renek is a writer. Miss Jaffe is a confector of popcult conventionals.” Leonard called Siam Miami “comic, profound and elegantly written.” Renek’s New York acquaintance Seymour Krim gushed about the book: “Renek and his book stink with all of the true novelistic genes that I can imagine.” Krim was in awe of Renek’s imagination: “There is a mammoth world in his head which demands that he roll it out with bigness . And what a skull it must be!”
Other reviewers around the country loved the book as well. In the Chicago Tribune, Stewart Ettinger thought that Renek had updated Damon Runyon for the 1970s: “These people tear into life as if it were a blood rare steak. They don’t just exist through the chapters, they plunge through like a 250-pound fullback.” Haskel Frankel in the Saturday Review of Literature praised Renek’s realism: “I certainly do believe that he knows the world of which he writes. The crummy hotels, the shabby clubs — the sweaty, gritty world of all the Siams pushing around the country has the smell of authenticity.” He was less impressed with Renek’s actual writing, however, calling Siam Miami “the longest 448 pages of turgid writing this reviewer has ever put himself through….” Professor John J. Murray was even more damning in Best Sellers: “Renek is not just a duplicator: he’s a xerographer.”
Renek returned to his home territory with his next novel Heck (1970), which told about a nobody from the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn who tries to win his fame and success by robbing a bank. Renek identified an attitude which has sadly become too prevalent in subsequent decades: “When you’re a nobody, violence gives you — at last! a sense of accomplishment.” The book attracted some attention for its depiction of the lustful relationship between Heck and his girlfriend Lola, which culminates in a scene in which the two make love in a brewery vat while on the run from some vengeful mobsters. But its strongest points were Renek’s Zola-like realism in his descriptions of the run-down streets where Heck lives:
In an automobile graveyard the cars were stacked higher than his top-floor window. Stylish high fins of chrome glinted in the sun. A giant crane dawdled ceaselessly over the pile dropping down old and new busted cars. A giant press incessantly crushed the cars. Yet the sky-high mound of wrecked autos never dwindled. The dump was continually being replenished with hulks off the streets and highways. Tow trucks bounced in over the dirt yard with their hamstrung, battered cars and wheeled out again once they were unhooked from their carcass. The racing tow trucks left the impression that the city was a battlefield heaving up the maimed and slaughtered. Luxury cars, bugs, muscles, racers, sports, convertibles, foreigns were skeletons without distinction as they were stripped with torch and hammer. Their guts sprawled out in the sunlit dirt yard. Tires, batteries, plugs, radiators, generators, radios, fans, filters, mufflers, carburetors, exhaust pipes strewn over rust-running bins. At night the yard was blacked out except for a floodlight on the crane hoisting and swooping over the heaping wreckage. The only other light in the neighborhood came from a billboard over a gas station. It advertised the prestige-quality of a new car. The picture suggested the car would make its owner more desirable to attractive women.
As this passage suggests, Renek not only reveled in America’s excess but sometimes indulged in it himself. John Deck, whose short story collection Greased Samba came out about the same time, wrote perceptively that Renek’s “enthusiasm is boundless, his imagination unpredictable and diverting…. My one inevitable reservation has to do with the abundance. Nothing is condensed or held back…. This is all just a matter of proportion; there is a wealth of talent here that is perhaps spent too lavishly. That it is a real and original talent there can be no doubt.”
It’s not surprising, then, that Renek next turned his attention to Las Vegas, America’s capitol of excess. In 1975, Knopf published Renek’s Las Vegas Strip. Renek dedicated the book to his daughter Nava, “who believes her father doesn’t do any work”: “Voila, ma fille! Regarde le cirque humain, le rire et la douleur, et deviens solide et humaine” (Voila, my daughter! Watch the human circus, the laughter and the pain, and become strong and human).
Morris Renek in the mid-1960s.
Renek stuck to the skeleton of the Bugs Siegel story, telling of a mobster and gunman who stumbles into the sleepy Nevada town and pioneers the extravagant and neon-decked casinos that came to symbolize Las Vegas. But he played a Jokers-wild game when it came to his approach: “Jonathan Livingston Siegel, This Ain’t” read the headline of one review.
“There’s enough murder, rape, bribery and criminal conspiracy here to keep a Justice Department task force busy for several years in at least five states,” wrote Webster Schott in the New York Times. Cars burn up with people inside them. Farm girls get clubbed into prostitution. Corrupt builders drown in concrete and feces. The United States is divided like Gaul among crooks.” Yet the spirit of Karl Marx can be sensed underneath Renek’s view of the glitz and mayhem:
To fight for attention against the concentration of slots, keno, faro, open barrooms, craps, roulette, blackjack, the continuous clinking of silver dollars, the chants of the stick men, the paging of absentee celebrities for nonexistent phone calls, plus the staged entertainment, would have been self-defeating. Someone who tried would only be adding himself to the entertainment. Yet coming from a bright sun into an artificial night without clocks was just the right shock. The atmosphere became a recognizable part of life even to those who had never lived it. The play of the crowded casino communicated the way a sea speaks to mystics. An active casino holds out the hum of power, and the invigorating illusion of sharing in that hum.
Renek liked to quote a line from one of Franz Kafka’s letters to describe his fiction: “If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place?” Another clue can be found in his description of Erskine Caldwell’s fiction in the mid-1960s essay about violence in American literature. “Caldwell has a way of depicting an ordinary social scene and filling it with sheer violent madness that harmonizes perfectly with the background comings and goings of daily life. It is not explained by the story, but permeates it.”
Renek’s next novel, Bread and Circus (1987), returned to one of the Ur-stories of American greed and excess, the years of Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall regime in New York City in the 1870s. The novel’s descriptions of poor children catching rats, pit bulldog fights and bare-knuckle boxing were, to some reviewers, “almost too graphic,” and the size and velocity of Renek’s cast left some heads spinning: “So many characters do so much so fast that one is seldom entirely sure of what is going on,” wrote Kathleen Brady in the New York Times.
Renek’s assessment of Tweed was more Puritanical than Marxist, however: “Tweed was a crook of unbelievable magnitude whose reach went through every layer of society: respectable and disreputable, press and church, courts and police, reform and conservative, poor and wealthy. Tweed had mined that richest vein of self-interest above his neighbor’s interest. Men who desired their own security are driven by their greed to make their society insecure.” Renek saw Tweed as just a well-heeled example of the soap-fat man, who plied the streets collecting waste fat and grease from housewives and sold it to soap makers for profit: “Housewives and maids beckoned his shabby figure into dark doorways and service alleys. He emerged bent with buckets of slopping fat, scraping and pouring the fat into his own buckets while keeping up his cry as if the fat were being wrung out of his own hide.
Morris Renek around 2010.
Renek continued to write and to travel around the country giving readings well into his seventies, but Bread and Circus was his last book. “He was respected but not easily published, admired but impoverished,” Richard Elman wrote in Namedropping. To Elman, Renek fell uncomfortably between the two pillars of critical and commercial success: “His works are not sufficiently appreciated; he’s a serious popular novelist who lacks a popular audience.” He died in 2013, collapsing of a heart attack while walking in the Flatiron district in Manhattan. None of his books have been in print this century.
Mentions of Eda Lord are sprinkled in the margins of dozens of biographies of 20th Century writers. She was food writer M. F. K. Fisher’s schoolmate and first love at the Bishop’s School in La Jolla, California in 1924. In 1930, she’s in France, having an affair with Lawrence Clark Powell, one of five he memorialized in his short novel The Blue Train (1977). Two years later, Christopher Isherwood sees her walk into a Berlin nightclub on the arm of Tania Kurella, a German woman who met the Anglo-Irish writer James Stern that evening and later married him.
In 1948, Malcolm Lowry gets drunk at a party at the house outside Paris she shared with her then-lover Joan Black. Her name pops up in accounts of Julia Child, Richard Olney, James Beard, and other culinarily-minded Americans who clustered around Child’s villa, La Pitchoune, outside Cannes. Even in Quicksand (2005), a memoir written by Sybille Bedford, with whom she lived for twenty years, Eda rates less than three pages.
She only emerges from the margins in two places: in her three brief and largely autobiographical novels — Childsplay (1961), A Matter of Choosing (1963), and Extenuating Circumstances (1971); and in Selina Hasting’s just-published biography of her long-time lover and companion, Sybille Bedford: A Life (2020). Through Eda’s first two novels we can follow her story up to her early twenties; Hastings fills in many of the gaps thereafter.
Eda grew up in material, if not psychological, comfort. She was born in 1907 in Durango, Mexico, where her father, Harvey Hurd Lord, a former Olympic athlete, managed a copper mine. In late 1910, her father and mother were forced to flee from Mexico on horseback, taking Eda with them, when miners and peasants turned on the Americans who owned much of the land Durango in one of the early incidents in the Mexican Revolution.
Cover of UK edition of Childsplay
Though Harvey Lord came from a wealthy family, he had an unfortunate knack for investing in unproductive mines. As a result, in her childhood Eda became accustomed to moving from place to place — a pattern revealed in the chapter names in Childsplay: Joplin, Missouri; Neosho; Webb City; Okmulgee, Oklahoma; Embreeville, Tennessee. The one constant was her grandmother’s home in Evanston, Illinois, where she spent most summers. Her mother died of cancer when she was three; her father remarried but Eda was never really accepted by her stepmother, and when Harvey Lord died in 1920, Eda became a ward of her grandmother Eda Hurd Lord.
Eda Hurd Lord was something of a force of nature. Daughter of the abolitionist lawyer and Chicago pioneer Harvey Hurd, she became a real estate developer, building up Evanston, Illinois as one of Chicago’s first suburbs. She was a patron of the arts, purchasing works by Winslow Homer and others and contributing money and paintings to museums. She was not, however, interested in matters of the heart. When Eda’s father died and her future was uncertain, her grandmother put the choice to thirteen-year-old Eda in business-like terms:
She said I had a lot to think about. She wanted me to make a decision, but I must do it slowly and carefully. I should not answer at once; tomorrow would be soon enough. She said she did not want to influence me one way or the other; I should make up my own mind. Did I want to stay on with her and remain a member of my own family? Or did I want to go to Oklahoma and live with my stepmother?
Her grandmother warned Eda, however, that “if I did decide in favor of my stepmother, she could no longer have anything to do with me. She could not.” “My grandmother might be cold,” Eda later wrote, “but at least you knew where you stood with her.”
As the title of Eda’s second novel A Matter of Choosing suggests, her grandmother continued to treat her as an autonomous being rather than a child in her care. Eda Hurd Lord moved from Illinois to California, first Glendale and then La Jolla, for its environment. She gave her granddaughter the choice of attending a public or private school. Eda chose private, entering the Bishop’s School in 1922.
Eda Lord, from the Bishop’s School yearbook, 1924.
Still busy with investments, her grandmother was often away and Eda became accustomed to the company of adults. One, a financier, took her along on trips down to Tijuana. Here she became acquainted with what she called “the idiot world of Prohibition drinking:
… the crazy behavior, the stumbling walk, women in evening dress out cold and carried off on stretchers. No one lifted an eyebrow; the Hamiltons did not even look up. I was learning not to be surprised at anything.
Unfortunately, Eda’s own drinking habits came to be modelled on what she witnessed in Tijuana.
With her talents and precocious sophistication, Eda became the “It” girl of the Bishop’s School. When Mary Frances Kennedy (later M. F. K. Fisher) entered the school in 1924, a year behind, Eda was the vice president of the Junior class, a member of the Debate and Thespian clubs, editor of the literary annual, and a player on the basketball, hockey, and baseball teams. “She could always do anything, anything at school better than we could,” Fisher later wrote; “she was more exciting and brilliant than any student had ever been.” Not surprisingly, Fisher developed an intense schoolgirl crush, an “awkward, bewildered, confused” love for Eda.
Eda then went to Stanford — her grandmother’s decision this time — where she quickly earned a reputation for flouting the rules. On a whim she and a fellow student paid $5 for a ride in an airplane, which resulted in a counseling from the women’s dean. This was just the start. Before the end of her first year, she was put on “social probation” (prohibited from speaking to other students on campus). As a sophomore, she began making outings with male students. One evening, after visiting a speakeasy in San Francisco, the car she was riding in was involved in an accident. Though everyone covered it up, word eventually reached the school administration and she was expelled. “They tell me that you break the laws of our country, as well, that you have taken to drink,” her grandmother confronted Eda upon her return. “Do you enjoy muddling your words?”
Intent on gaining independence from her grandmother, Eda got a job in the advertisement office of a department store in Los Angeles and took an apartment. A middle-aged bootlegger took a fancy to her and soon she was making the rounds with him almost every night. He was proud to be seen with a fresh-faced college girl on his arm. After a few months of this, however, she was ready to move on: “With Pat, I had seen it all; I was familiar with every used car park, gas station, restaurant, street corner. Los Angeles was an uninspired, sprawling, provincial conglomeration.”
She decided to try her luck in New York City. Her grandmother took the news in her usual matter-of-fact fashion: “Experience cannot be passed on to others,” she said. “Each human being has to find out for himself.” Eda was able to find work in New York but soon grew restless again. She met Karl Robinson, a young executive with an American oil company operating in China and the two were wed in early 1930. Soon after the couple arrived in China, however, Eda realized that married life was not for her. She journeyed north to Vladivostok and made her way to Europe via the Trans-Siberian railway.
Eda eventually made it to France, where she met her old classmate Mary Frances Kennedy, now married to Alfred Fisher. She ingratiated herself into the budding gourmet with a ten-pound tin of caviar she’d bought in Moscow. Mary Frances in turn introduced Eda to Lawrence Clark Powell, who was renting a room from them while studying at the University of Dijon. Eda and Powell had a brief affair, little more than a few days together. Powell was infatuated, Eda less so. As he recalls in The Blue Train, she said there was little “an old drunkard like me” could offer:
Besides, you’re my last man. I intend to live with women after this. Anyway, I’ll be dead of lung cancer before I’m forty. Look at my fingers. You’d think I was Chinese. What could I give you? A child? No. The good father took care of that. He told me it was an appendectomy when he destroyed my ability to bear a child. My best gift to you would be my body in alcohol.
In his retrospective account, Powell made Eda older and a redhead to enhance her allure and mystery.
From France, she headed to Berlin, where she began working as a writer. The city’s pre-Nazi Cabaret decadence suited her perfectly. She may have had an affair that led to her having an abortion (Powell suggests this came earlier), but she began sleeping with women and frequenting nightclubs. It was in one of these that Sybille Bedford first met her. Sybille was in the company of Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria, Eda with her lover Tania. Eda later said that Bedford seemed “occupied and preoccupied.” Sybille, on the other hand, claimed that she “mostly sat prim and shocked — reading a review.” The two women went on their separate ways.
They met again briefly at a cocktail party in Paris in early 1939. The web of attractions at this affair was complicated to say the least. Sybille met Allanah Harper, a wealthy and worldly Englishwoman who would become her partner through the war years and later her supporter in many practical matters. Eda was with Joan Black, also a wealthy Englishwoman, with whom she would be involved through the same period. Sybille was interested in Joan and Eda. Though the two couples parted, lines between these four women would cross in numerous ways in the years after the war.
Sybille and Allanah sailed to America shortly after the Germans invaded in May 1940. Eda and Joan Black were trapped in France. Their different fates did much to determine the direction of Sybille’s and Eda’s careers. Eda and Joan made their way to the south of France, then under control of the Vichy government. They struggled with all the challenges of life under occupation — food shortages, fuel shortages, suspicion and harassment — but at least Eda’s status as a neutral foreigner offered some protection until Hitler declared war on the U.S. in December 1941.
The contrast between the account of living under occupation Eda tells in her last novel, Extenuating Circumstances, and the evidence of history is intriguing. In the book, Eda foregoes the first-person narrator of Childsplay and A Matter of Choosing for an impersonal third person. Her lead character, Letty, the widow of a British Army veteran, survives through a combination of ingenuity and good luck. A wealthy American couple leave her with the keys to their villa, which provides Letty with relative comfort and privacy — privacy enough to act as a safe house for escaping Allied airmen on occasion. The story as a whole carries a bit of a Swiss Family Robinson air as Letty and her friends overcome difficulty after difficulty by improvising solutions and outwitting the Vichy police and Gestapo. In the end, after Liberation, one character observes to Letty, “You have come a long way.” “I have,” she replies, “And you won’t catch me looking back.”
Compare this with Hasting’s description:
To those who knew Eda in the post-war period, she appeared a timid, fragile creature, shy and retiring, clearly reluctant to attract attention or to express any opinion that might be considered remotely contentious. In her younger days, however, Eda had presented a very different image, a dark-haired beauty, sociable, intelligent and high-spirited, attractive to both men and men, eager for adventure and determined to make a successful career as a writer.
Elsewhere, she writes that Sybille found Eda “pale and thin, very anxious and shy, clearly traumatised by her wartime experiences.”
What separated Eda from the fictional Letty was the reality of her experiences during the war. She and Joan were ill-prepared to deal with deprivation. Their life in Paris had been one of sleeping late, partying long, and drinking heavily. “We were too hazy with drink to notice a kerb,” Eda later wrote. Though they made their way to the Riviera, they didn’t end up in the comfort of a luxurious villa. Instead, they found a humble country house prone to the worst of the Riviera’s wet grey months: “dampness everywhere, between one’s ribs, dripping from one’s fingers, mud all over the floor. It corrodes one’s very soul.”
And instead of the Famous Five-style adventures of Extenuating Circumstances, Joan and Eda found themselves, in March 1943, interned along with hundreds of English and American women, in Cavaillon, one of the towns “approved” for them to live. As Eda wrote in an unpublished account that Selina Hastings most generously shared with me,
Cavaillon is the mouth of the funnel of the Rhône Valley and, in consequence, is the suction vent of mistrals blowing throughout the south. Wind shakes the ugly raw-blown houses and for weeks on end, wind flings dust everywhere: into eyes, mouths, nerves.
A few days later, however, they were rounded up and loaded onto a train. No one explained what was happening or where they were going.
Women at a Vichy French internment camp.
They ended up being offloaded into a camp on the outskirts of Paris where English and American women from throughout Vichy France, nearly two thousand in all, were being held for transfer to a German Internierunslager. In some ways, Eda felt more at peace there than at any time in the south:
In this prison life I was startled to discover a curious sense of leisured ease. There was no possibility of outdoor exercise: we were not allowed out; not necessity of wangling for food: we were given so much and no more, but, even so, more than we could buy outside. I walked from the dining room back to my bed and lay down with a book, savouring the peace and luxury of it. There was nothing I could do about anything.
… Outside, I could have been shot for no reason. Here I was known, named, numbered, and certainly under someone’s care and responsibility.
After a few weeks of this, however, the internees were told that they were being shipped back to Vichy with instructions to return to their places of enforced residence. Ironically, this news was nearly as bad as being handed over to the Germans. “It was as though a steel band had snapped,” Eda wrote. “The team spirit had been broken. People began grumbling.”
The women were transported back to the south of France to live, effectively, under house arrest. “We were a present from Vichy to the Germans, but they didn’t want us,” as Eda later put it in the words of a minor character in Extenuating Circumstances. The remaining months until the Allied landings in August 1944 were dreary, anxious, and hunger-filled. Eda later said that Joan took to reading cheap English mysteries for their descriptions of food and drink. “Literary bacon and eggs,” however, “are not very sustaining.”
Following Liberation, Eda and Joan made their way back to La Cerisaie, the farmhouse near Giverny that Joan owned. There, the women reconnected with friends from before the war and Joan began drinking great quantities of cheap red wine. For Eda, on the other hand, the one positive outcome of the wartime lockdown was recognizing that she was an alcoholic:
It was then that I had to decide that I must give up all alcohol and completely. Because that was the only real trouble: my liver had long before given up in despair and the alcohol went immediately into my blood stream, poisoning me, puffing me up, giving my mind strange illusions. I did this in as unobtrusive a way as I could, so that even now most people don’t know whether I drink or not.
Eda kept herself sober, as Sybille later put it, “with unrelenting effort — and the crutches of cigarettes and caffeine.” Eda would come to be known among acquaintances for her habit of arriving at parties with a thermos of coffee in hand. It seems as if Sybille saw Eda’s alcoholism as a purely a weakness rather than acknowledging her general success in maintaining sobriety.
Eda continued to write but published little. Malcolm Lowry praised a story she wrote titled “The Pig,” based on her experiences during the Occupation. “As a story perhaps it has, in one way, a kind of intolerance or lack of centre, even when it is being most subtle,” he wrote a friend, but admitted that “perhaps this imbalance is the clue to the author’s talent, or one clue.” He even suggested that Eda might pull together a collection of stories about “the gruesomes & comedies of the occupation.”
It was not until August 1956, after several more encounters, that Sybille and Eda became lovers. The relationship started with crash. Driving south from Paris, they were involved in an automobile accident that left Sybille with a broken hip. They recuperated at La Bastide, a villa in the hills above Cannes that Allanah Harper — a former lover of both women — was restoring with her husband. In many ways, La Bastide became the closest thing to home that Eda was to experience in her adult life.
For much of their time together over the next twenty years, Eda and Sybille lived on the move, never settling anywhere for more than a few months. As Sybille wrote in Quicksand,
… [W]e were living in years’ or half-years’ snatches in rented houses or flats in Dorset, in London, in Portugal, in Essex, then London again, then Italy: the Browning Villa at Asolo, an intolerable mistake with a sudden recourse to where we should have started: the South of France. And there we found the only both loved and permanent home I ever had: a conversioned annex built on Allanah Harper’s property.
This period, however, represented Bedford’s most productive time as a writer, as she published two novels, several collections of reportage, and a two-volume biography of Aldous Huxley. And Eda, who’d never written more than magazines and short stories, finally got down to work on a longer piece. She may have intended to write something about the Occupation: in one of Sybille’s letters, she writes that Eda is working on a piece about Marseilles and that “it is like a door burst open, then freedom and imagination and originality of the writing, filled with joy.”
Cover of US edition of Childsplay
What Eda published in the end, though, was Childsplay, which was essentially her autobiography up to the time of her father’s death in 1920 (though she places the event in 1917). Childsplay was published to good reviews in both the U.S. and England. The New York Times’ reviewer singled out Lord’s spare, elegant prose style. “She writes with great clarity and is able to make each separate scene count for exactly what she intended.”
Monica Furlong, writing in the Guardian gave the book its most enthusiastic review: “Masterpiece, tour de force, work of art — all the silly rave words of reviewers fail one utterly, yet the fact remains that here is a writer who uses language as if it had just been invented, who remembers precisely what it was like to learn to read, to get stuck on a roof and not be able to get down, to mistake a puppet for a real monkey. Miss Lord has no self-pity, no sentimentality, no vulgarity. Her greedy appetite for life takes a well-judged bite at America in the early years of this century….” Furlong later named it as one of the books she’d most enjoyed during the year, saying the book’s “vivid, singing prose” had “haunted me for months.”
Cover of US edition of A Matter of Choosing
Eda followed two years later with A Matter of Choosing, which carried her story forward to her arrival in New York City in her early twenties. Like Childsplay, it was written in a frank, unsentimental first-person voice that was as tough on herself as on those around her. The book displayed a remarkable level of constraint — not reticence, mind, but a maturity that recognizes the danger in making sweeping statements. As one reviewer put it, Lord’s prose was “cool and spare and always beautifully exact both in what it says and what it implies.” Only Anne Kelley though, writing in Chicago Tribune saw through Lord’s reserve to the vulnerable orphan she really was: “The sense of loneliness in the midst of so many people is overwhelming.”
M. F. K. Fisher, who saw Eda in the late 1950s after a break of many years, recognized that time had taken its toll on her. “I know that you are everything I recognized in you so long ago,” she wrote Eda in 1959, “tempered and refined and of course wearied by those processes.” Martha Gellhorn, who was a close friend, cautioned Sybille that “Eda will never decide anything because she cannot, and her motives are not what you think (gratitude, duty, affection) but plain terror.”
It was Sybille, not Eda, who took the lead in things. When Eda returned to the U.S. for the first time in over thirty years in early 1964, it was because Sybille had agreed to report on the trial of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby, for LIFE magazine. While Sybille attended court, Eda went on to California to stay with M. F. K. Fisher, where, as Sybille wrote after they met again in New York City, Eda had “put on some weight, thank God.”
Once back in France, however, Eda found it hard to get back to work on her long-delayed novel about the Occupation. Living with Sybille when she was working on a deadline was “like living with a caged tiger.” Eda had to take on most of the domestic duties. “I’ve been nurse, housekeeper, errand boy,” she complained, along with having to do most of the work in the large garden that Sybille wanted but could not care for. But Eda was also suffering from depression. Sybille wrote a friend that Eda refused to discuss what was going on: “That wretchedness was neither admitted, nor discussed; it was concealed.”
By the summer of 1968, however, Eda was dealing better with depression, thanks in part to effective medication. She returned to her third novel “without great faith but with tenacity and courage,” as Sybille put it. Deep into her research for the Aldous Huxley biography, Sybille traveled to the U.S. with Eda again. The two women spent some time with her aunt Margaret Burnham, the last of Eda’s father’s siblings. Sybille the experience stifling: “the days are spent in maddening slow rounds of trivia.” Aunt Margaret disapproved of Eda’s smoking and made a point to say so frequently. Yet she also insisted that her niece take part her busy social life, which left Eda “shrivelled with boredom” and with no energy to work on her book. The only relief was a visit to M. F. K. Fisher in Napa Valley, although Eda’s frailty worried her old friend: “I feel as if she is nourished on cobwebs,” she wrote afterward.
Cover of U.S. edition of Extenuating Circumstances
Eda finally finished Extenuating Circumstances in October 1970. Sybille’s long-time editor Robert Gottleib was happy to accept the book for Knopf. By now the story had only a loose connection with Eda’s own experiences during the Occupation. Instead of a grim account of survival and deprivation, it had become, as one reviewer put it, “a wry comedy” in which the heroine — seen through the distance of an impersonal narrator — was transformed from “starveling to spiv entrepreneur.” It was as if the only way Eda could put that time down on paper was to step out of the story completely.
Eda grew more and more reluctant to leave the annex of La Bastide that had become their home. She continued to struggle with depression, took no interest in eating — which would have been difficult for Sybille, who always relished good food and wine, of which there was plenty to be had with friends like Julia Child and Richard Olney nearby. Eda was likely dealing with a serious case of agoraphobia. As one can imagine, it was difficult to be around someone with such dark moods — hard to show love, harder to feel it. Reading the account of Sybille and Eda’s relationship in Hastings’ biography, you realize that while we may not have progressed much in the priority we give the treatment of mental illness, we are at least better at recognizing it. Neither woman was well prepared to deal with Eda’s depression.
And Eda’s smoking began to take its toll. She finally gave it up, but the damage had already been done. She was diagnosed with throat cancer. Worse, after suffering a hemorrhage, Eda was told that she needed to undergo a hysterectomy. Already weakened, she had no reserve to draw on for recovery and she died soon after. M. F. K. Fisher later raged at the decision about the operation: “It was cruel to make Eda submit to an obviously useless surgical interference so late in the game. After that biopsy, why not just keep her warm and as comfortable as possible? DAMN.” In the last days, Sybille wondered just what connected her with the woman she’d lived with for two decades: “The difficulty with Eda is that she is so hard to know. I feel that I do not really know her (which makes everything even sadder).”
Sybille survived Eda by almost thirty years. In contrast to Eda’s grim decline, she enjoyed her greatest recognition, earning an OBE in 1981, making the Booker Prize shortlist in 1989 with her novel Jigsaw, wining a Golden PEN award in 1993. After dedicating several of her books from the 1960s to Eda, Sybille finally addressed their relationship, if only briefly, in her 2005 memoir Quicksands. Now, fifteen years after her death, most of Sybille’s books are in print and likely to gain more readers as a result of Hastings’ outstanding biography. Eda Lord, on the other hand, is likely to remain where she is: on the margin of other lives.
My sincere thanks to Selina Hastings for her help with this piece. Her biography, Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life, is available from Penguin/Random House (U.S. and U.K.)
Ad for and Cover of Benjamin DeCassere’s Forty Immortals (1926).
This is a guest article written by the critic and artist Richard Kostelanetz, based on a piece that originally appeared in Rain Taxi #88. His website is at richardkostelanetz.com
Ever since New Association of Sephardi/Mizrahi Artists & Writers International appointed me one of its honorary fellows more than a dozen years ago, I’ve become more curious about Sephardic writers in America, more than once pointing out their omission from the standard anthologies of American-Jewish writing (except, of course, for Emma Lazarus, whose rhymes grace the Statue of Liberty).
Certainly the most substantial of these needlessly forgotten writers has been Benjamin De Casseres. Biographical information about him was spotty when I last wrote about him in 2017. Born in Philadelphia 3 April 1873, he didn’t go to college, instead becoming as a teenager a regular patron at the local Apprentice’s Library, incidentally founded by another Benjamin (surnamed Franklin). Starting as an office boy at the Philadelphia Press, he became at seventeen an editorial writer and theater critic. One source of Jewish genealogy identifies him as a descendent of Baruch Spinoza via the philosopher’s sister Rebecca de Spinoza, who gave birth to an earlier Benjamin DC around 1660. Variously is his surname spelled: DeCasseres, De Casseres, and de Casseres. I prefer Casseres or BdC, alphabetized under C.
An appreciation by his friend the writer and cartoonist Carlo de Fornaro (1871-1949), also Sephardic perhaps (much like my friend Arthur Fornari), places Casseres on the staff of the Sunday edition of El Diario, the Spanish-language newspaper that still exists. He contributed to Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work, which was the most prominent avant-garde magazine in pre-WWI America, and then occasionally to The Smart Set from 1914 to 1922 at least.[1]
BdC published poems and essays in many other smaller literary periodicals. One poem favored by anthologists in his own time was “Moth-Terror,” which is a sterling example of his apocalyptic prosy poetry in the tradition of William Blake (well before Allen Ginsberg):
I have killed the moth flying around my night-light; wingless and dead it lies upon the floor. (O who will kill the great Time-Moth that eats holes in my soul and that burrows in and through my secretest veils!) My will against its will, and no more will it fly at my night-light or be hidden behind the curtains that swing in the winds. (But O who will shatter the Change-Moth that leaves me in rags—tattered old tapestries that swing in the winds that blow out of Chaos!) Night-Moth, Change-Moth, Time-Moth, eaters of dreams and of me!
Doing a Google search, I discovered him remembered for this aphorism: “Progress is nothing but the victory of laughter over dogma,” which is charming but, to my senses, uncharacteristic of a writer otherwise more heavy than light! Other websites have this odd aphorism: “A mouse …running in and out of every hole in the cosmos hunting for the Absolute Cheese.”
Even in his critical reviewing, Casseres had a penchant for hyperbole. “Eugene O’Neill was the first true dramatic genius that America produced. He spun all of his plays out of his own bowels, lifting them up into the light of eternal cosmic and human laws.” Of one O’Neill play, BdC writes: “Marco Millions is the roots of O’Neill become a gorgeous flower. The black in O’Neill’s soul has become gold. Social venom is transmuted into ironic laughter of the mournful gods. Impotent melancholy bursts into the flame of philosophic wisdom, ‘Caliban’ has become ‘Hamlet’; ‘Yank, the Hairy Ape,’ has become ‘Kublai Khan,’ epicurean pessimist.”
About O’Neill himself, Casseres waxes with an abundance of opening appositives:
Beachcomber, adventurer, water-front bum, a “down-and-outer” with sailors and stevedores, a man fired from a hundred jobs, a nervous smash-up that landed him in a sanitarium; a man of melancholic, tragic temperament, having been at Gethsemane and having walked the fiery, alcoholic hells (a more tremendous feat than water-walking), Eugene O’Neill came out of the sanitarium like Lazarus newly risen.
BDC seems to have made literary alliances, first with Stieglitz, who dropped him however, and then with the playwright Eugene O’Neill, who wrote an introduction to Casseres’s book, Anathema! Litanies Of Negation (1925, Gotham Book Mark). BdC also wrote a short polemic about H. L. Mencken and G.B. Shaw that demotes the latter as inferior to the former, who incidentally published BdC in the American Mercury.
Dennis Rickard, a biographer of the American painter Clark Ashton Smith writes that the Providence terror author H.P. Lovecraft in 1925 and 1926 “made several efforts to gain a wider and, perhaps, more sophisticated and appreciative audience for Smith’s paintings. In 1926, he arranged for a sampling of twenty paintings to be shown to the distinguished writer and critic Benjamin de Casseres, in New York, in the hope that he could ‘bring them to the attention of some art authority of adequate standing.’ Apparently, this came to naught, or nearly so. Smith again gained a fervent and lifelong admirer in de Casseres,” Another website credits BDC with coediting the German film Das indische Grabmal (1921) for American audiences as The Mysteries of India(1922).
As unfortunate in his personal life, he spent years winning his last love, who had initially married someone else and moved to California before returning to BdC.[2] He lived in a single room while working odd jobs. On BenjaminDeCasseres.com is miscellaneous information including addresses. From 1933 to his death 7 December 1945, he lived with his wife at 593 Riverside Drive in New York City, which is between 136th and 137th Streets.
Why was he forgotten? His most remarkable work was certainly eccentric, if not unclassifiable. Most of it came from smaller, less visible publishers. His final publisher, Gordon Press, barely distributed its books. As a Jewish writer descending from earlier Sephardic immigration he did not appeal to the later generation of Jewish-American literary publicists, most of whom descended from Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europeans.
Searching for his rather unusual name on the Internet, I suspect he was related to an earlier BdC, Jr. (!), who is identified in The Occident and American Jewish Advocate (June 1848) as trying to establish in Curaçao a Talmud Torah. “He is assisted by the Rev. David Cardozo, minister of the congregation. The plan has been accepted with enthusiasm by the people, and many of the younger members of the congregation have offered their services as teachers. Mr. De Casseres is a merchant, and our correspondent presumes that he must suffer a loss in his business by the time he spends in this benevolent object.”
I also found this passing comment about the later BdC in an inventory of Jack London’s papers at the Huntington Library: “Six letters from Jack to Benjamin De Casseres deal with literary matters, and one especially interesting letter from the just-widowed Charmian to the same addressee, dated November 29, 1916, firmly disputes De Casseres’ apparent assertion that Jack was now ‘star-roving’ after death.” Whazzat? His Wikipedia entry states that, “De Casseres described himself as an individualist anarchist, and as such he was both a strong advocate of capitalism and a frequent critic of socialism.”[3]
Once known as “the greatest unpublished author in America,” Casseres found a patron, described by Fornaro as “a Harvard scholar and efficient businessman Joseph Lawren” to issue his uncommercial unpublished manuscripts, sixteen in sum. Three volumes collecting his shorter works appeared in 1935, perhaps self-published. Reissued as pristine hardbacks by the Gordon Press in 1977, these I own and treasure, even though they lack any prefaces or annotations.
More recently, Kevin I. Slaughter, the proprietor of a Maryland small press wittily named Underground Amusements, has published several BdC volumes, sometimes reprinting earlier books, more often new compilations of fugitive pieces, in handsome perfect-bound editions that are readily available. Slaughter’s website BenjaminDeCasseres.com collects information about BdC as well as numerous pieces of his writing.
Editor’s Notes
Benjamin DeCasseres celebrates the end of Prohibition in 1933.
1 Like Smart Set’s editors H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, DeCasseres was a hard-drinking thinker (or vice versa). When Prohibition took effect in 1920, he tried to be “the last man in the United States to take a drink on the night the Volstead blight came upon the land. But along about 10:30PM, I got so busy tanking up that I forgot about my noble aspiratioin. I must have fainted. All I remember is that my elbow was stiff the next day.”
In 1925, in Mirrors of New York, he looked back fondly on his pre-Prohibition memories. James Traub quotes from this “thoroughly soused memoir” in his book The Devil’s Playground: a Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square: Times Square was “the central depot of a Grand Trunk Line of Booze” that stretched down Broadway, with the bar at the Knickerbocker Hotel as “the headquarters of the 42nd Street Country Club.” On the street outside, he said, “only one phrase could be heard: ‘Let’s have another!'”
DeCasseres vowed to be the first man in America to take a drink after Utah ratified the 18th Amendment, bringing an end to Prohibition. He arranged to have a telegraph terminal installed in a Manhattan bar so he could be informed the instant the ratification vote passed in Salt Lake City. “After it is all over, I shall return to my home and my literary work, ready to die when Satan calls. I shall have filled my immortal soul with ineffable joy.”
Benjamin Casseres and his wife Bio, 1925. Photo by Arnold Genthe.
2 According a newspaper article from 1931, DeCasseres first saw Mary “Bio” Terrill in 1902 in the kitchen of the boarding house where was living. “From that November morning until she left in March 1903, I saw her only four times, each time only briefly. In that time, I never touched her hand. I — reputed to be a brilliant and dynamic talker — was a perfect idiot in her presence.” Mary married and moved with her husband to the West Coast. DeCasseres got her address, though, and for the next 15 years, the two corresponded almost daily. Finally, in 1919, she divorced her husband and married DeCasseres. “In our 11-year marriage,” he told the reporter, “the first 16 years were the hardest.”
3 To call DeCasseres an individualist is to put it mildly. He was extravagantly and irrepressibly individualist. “Every great individualist worthy of the name is a renegade,” he once wrote. In 1932, he announced that he was going to publish a magazine to be called DeCassere’s Magazine, which would be written entirely by him. It would, he declared, “be a magazine of aggressive individualism, because the individual is the unit of all values.” Yet, he promised, the magazine would “have the smack and tang of eternity.” Although Slaughter reprints the pamphlet DeCasseres published as a prelude, the magazine itself never saw the light of day. In his 1936 pamphlet, The Individual Against Moloch, DeCasseres wrote, in words that would have made Ayn Rand proud, “There is no common good except the development of the individual. The state has no other function than to protect its members against invasion and promote the will of the individual so long as that will does not force itself on the will of another individual”
Reviews of Selina Hasting’s new biography of Sybille Bedford, who was born Sybille Aleid Elsa von Schoenebeck in Charlottenburg, Germany and forced to live as an exile starting in the late 1930s due to her support of anti-Nazi causes reminded me of a number of other neglected writers who found themselves exiled not only from their own lands but also from their own languages.
The story of German intellectuals who sought refuge in the United States, particularly those who gathered in Santa Monica around the towering figure of Thomas Mann, is well known. But less remembered today are those who headed to England instead, a number of whom not only chose to settle for good outside their own countries but who adopted English as the language in which they wrote from then on. In an article in the Times Literary Supplement that appeared in 1962, Norman Shrapnel wrote of such writers: “Some have used the language as a honeymoon hotel, some as a gymnasium, some as a concert platform for virtuoso performances, some as an ideas factory. It has accommodated them nearly all, and their tendency has been to amplify, rather than alter, what might by now, if left to itself, have turned into something as stylized as a Pall Mall club or an Indian dance.”
Arthur Koestler, of course, is still recognized and his Darkness at Noon has a solid place in the canon. Here, however, are five others who chose to follow in Joseph Conrad’s footsteps.
• Robert Neumann
Robert Neumann was, like the better-known Stefan Zweig, a Viennese Jew who decided to leave Austria well ahead of the Anschluss. He settled in a village in Kent that he then took as the setting for his novel written in English, Scene in Passing (1942). The novelist J. D. Bereford considered it more successful as prose than fiction: “Dr. Neumann seems more at home with the English language than with the manner of life in an English village.” Neumann went on to write ten more books in English before he moved to Switzerland in 1958.
The Inquest (1944), an inquiry into the last years of a woman of the international set before the war, was his most commercially successful book. Though he never returned to live in Vienna, the city was close to his heart, and his first postwar novel, Children of Vienna (1946) decried the living conditions, particularly of the large number of orphan children, in the ruins left after the initial Soviet takeover of the city, “There are indignation, pity, savage humour, obscenity, irony on irony in this ferocious novel,” wrote one reviewer.
Neumann helped establish Hutchinson International Authors, an imprint of the major publisher, for which he contracted translations of numerous German and Austrian writers in exile, including Arnold Zweig (no relation to Stefan) and Heinrich Mann (Thomas’s older brother). His last work in English, The Plague House Papers (1959), was an unusual and light-hearted autobiography. “He has seemed to have decided to make the book worth his while as a novelist, and has arranged a nice patter of interacting themes,” Muriel Spark wrote in her review for the Spectator.
Born in Hungary, the son of a leader of the Jewish community in Budapest, de Polnay spent most of his life distancing himself from his home and his family. According to the version of the story he tells in The Crack of Dawn: A Childhood Fantasy (1958) and My Road: An Autobiography (1978), his mother was ill, his father an absent and abusive brute, and his primary caregivers were the servants who looked after him and his brother and sisters as they grew up in Switzerland, Italy, and England.
After spending time in Argentina and an unsuccessful attempt at establishing himself as a gambler on the Riviera, de Polnay found himself broke and in Paris and turned to writing to make cash. Though fluent in at least three languages, he opted for English based on its larger market share, and began pumping out novels at the rate of at least one a year beginning in the late 1930s.
In May 1940, however, the German invasion disrupted his comfortable life. Along with the government and many of the upper bourgeosie of Paris, he fled to Bordeaux, but soon returned. It was easier to survive on the cheap in Paris. He lasted for about a year, until he was able to make his way to England via Spain and Gibraltar.
He quickly took himself an English wife and enlisted in the Royal Pioneer Corps. After the war, he took a lease on Boulge Hall, the former home of poet and Rubaiyat translator Edward Fitzgerald. Though he aspired to the life of a country gentleman, he soon found the cost beyond his means, and after his wife died, he spent years as an itinerant, living in France, Spain, and Portugal while tapping out novel after novel that fell somewhere between Balzac’s Comedie Humaine and Simenon’s romans dur.
He remarried, this time to a Spanish woman, and converted to Catholicism. The couple lived for a number of years in seaside towns in Kent but decided they preferred the food and sun of France. By the time he died in 1984, he had written nearly 90 books in English.
• Edith de Born
Edith de Born took perhaps the oddest route to writing in English. Born Edith Ausch, like de Polnay, she came from a Jewish family ennobled in the Austro-Hungarian court. When her father lost his title and most of his fortune after the end of World War One, she married Jacques Bisch, a French financier who’d come to Vienna to liquidate what remained of her family’s estate, and moved to Paris.
Having been taught French and English as a child, she quickly became fluent after stays in Paris and London before the war. Trapped in Paris by the German invasion, the couple became involved in the Resistance. She later said that the work of translating cables to and from London trained her to write in English with nuance and subtlety. When Jacques Bisch became president of the Société Générale Bank in Brussels, they took a palatial apartment on the rue Royale and hosted such English writers as Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford.
Though de Born wrote in English, English characters were exceptionally rare in her books. Instead, she wrote of people she knew: Belgians, Dutch, French, and, in her trilogy of Schloss Felding (1959), The House in Vienna (1959), and The Flat in Paris (1961), Austrians and Austrian expats like herself. Many reviewers praised her elegant, pseudo-Jamesian prose, but novelist Francis King wrote somewhat more precisely that it was “in English that all her seventeen novels have been composed”:
I use the word ‘composed’, rather than ‘written’, advisedly, since, as with Conrad and Nabokov, one receives an impression of infinitely meticulous care in the shaping of every paragraph and even of every sentence. As with them too, one senses a ‘foreigness’, though it is impossible to point to any one passage and declare: ‘No one English could have written that.’ This foreigness is not a matter of vocabulary or syntax — each of these writers has a far more varied vocabulary and far firmer command of syntax than many a native-born novelist — but of rhythm. In the case of Edith de Born, this rhythm seems to be one, not of her native German, but of the French which (so I am told) she speaks with such precision and fluency.
King was dissembling in writing this. As he later disclosed in his autobiography, de Born sent all her manuscripts to the wife of an Anglican vicar in Norfolk, who returned them with meticulous line-by-line copy edits, before she submitted the corrected versions to her English publishers.
• Jerzy Peterkiewicz
When Jerzy Peterkiewicz arrived in England from France in 1940, he knew no English. Yet he enrolled in the University of St Andrews and went on to earn a doctorate in English literature at King’s College London. Soon after, he married Christine Brooke-Rose. Though they later divorced, both explored abstract and experimental themes and styles in their fiction. Peterkiewicz, however, grew somewhat more conventional in the course of his career, with one of his later books, The Third Adam, being a largely nonfictional account of the Mariavites, a Catholic cult based in the Polish town of P?ock whose leader considered himself to be the third Adam — the first two being the original man of Genesis and Jesus.
His first few novels, written in the 1950s, were full of Joycean wordsplices and almost embarrassing onomatopeia. He liked writing, as he wrote of one of his characters, “at his cosmopolitan best, daring every vocabulary to twist his eloquent tongue.” The Quick and the Dead (1961) might better have been titled The Dead and the Slow as it’s the story of a man who only figures out he’s dead halfway through the book. Its subject and style left the Telegraph’s reviewer unsure of what he was dealing with:
If only one knew what Jerzy Peterkiewicz was up to. Or, alternatively, if only one could be sure that what he was up to was elaborately pretentious nonsense. But if it is hard to find the viewpoint that would enable one to read some meaning into his oblique and arbitrary fancies, it is equally hard to belieave that a writer, more a writer working in an adopted language (like another Polish novelist, Mr. Peterkiewicz knew no English until he was grown up), who clothes those fancies in such precise and fastidious words means nothing at all.”
Anthony Burgess, on the other hand, loved it: “Mr. Peterkiewcz is on of our most intelligent and original novelists. There are some excellent things in The Quick and the Dead. Whatever you’re going to call this uncategorisable book, it’s an altogether brilliant performance.”
Stefan Themerson and his wife Franciszka — both artists and experimental film makers — were happy and productive members of the Left Bank avant garde, having settled in Paris after traveling there to meet the Hungarian artist and photographer László Moholy-Nagy. “I just knew I had to be in Paris,” he later said. When the war broke out, he joined a regiment of Poles that fell apart soon after the Blitzkrieg began, and he ended up spending two years in a Red Cross hostel in Vichy France. There, he began writing his first novel Professor Mmaa’s Lecture, an elaborate pastiche of a scientific lecture on the subject of the superiority of insects to human beings. After being smuggled out of France and reunited with his wife in England, Themerson decided to rewrite the book in English.
To say that Stefan Themerson wrote in English, however, is to accept that any one language could contain the energy of his imagination. Here, for example, is just an excerpt of the entry for Chapter Six in the Table of Contents of Professor Mmaa’s Lecture:
Wherein Professor Mmaa’s Lecture May Be Likened to a “Chariot Sailng over a Volcano ”
BATSMAN HITS A GOOSE & LADIES AND GENTLEMENT! IMAGINING THE IMAGINATION PROFESSOR MMAA’Ss ATTEMPT TO ADAPT A VERTICAL POSITION HOW WILL MY OLD MAMMA COME TO BELIEVE IN THE SHALLOWEST BEING, & HOW WILL PROFESSOR SOUL COME TO BELIEVE IN CORPUSCLES? LES MORTELS SONT EGAUX, AND THE TOLERANCE OF FANATICISM LES MORTELS SONT DIFFERANTS, AND THE FANATICISM OF TOLERANCE HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN STOPS LAYING EGGS NONOBODY ON SCIENCE, LANGUAGE, AND POLITICS PANCAKERS & FARCEMEATERS
After the war, the Themersons became cornerstones of the English avant garde — which might be a bit of an non-sequitur, as they never looked for imitators or others to imitate. In 1948, they formed the Gaberbocchus Press, under whose imprint a fair share of their books were published over the course of the next 30 years. Franciszka worked steadily as an illustrator of children’s book, including such collaborations with Stefan as Peddy Bottom (1950), Mr. Rouse Builds His House (1951), and The Table that Ran Away Into the Woods (1963). Franciszka also provided the illustrations for Barbara Wright’s remarkable English translation of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises de Style
Queneau’s fiction is perhaps the closest equivalent to Themerson’s. Both men drafted genres and put them to work for slyly anarchic purposes. In one of Themerson’s last works, The Mystery of the Sardine (1986), he took the international conspiracy thriller a la The Da Vinci Code and turned it into a playful epistemological fantasy. Not everyone appreciated the results. Kirkus Reviews “a stringy mass” of heavy-handed social comedy and compared it to “sour-tasting fudge.” Neville Shack, reviewing it for the TLS, recognized that Themerson was more of a puppetmaster than a master of characterization:
Many of them, weird and wacky, seem to have a flair for bemusement in action and speech. They are figures in a constantly shifting scenario, neither nautralistic nor typical ofmuch beyond themselves. These people who come and go, often in search of clues, serve only the fickle ends of the narrative. They are mannequins, walking constructs in the mode of Peter Greenaway’s cinematic inventions; the tableaux are highly synthetic, despite real settings and occasionally believable situations.
There’s a certain satisfying irony in the fact that more of Themerson’s work is in print now in Polish than in English. Several of his books, including Professor Mmaa’s Lecture, are available on the Internet Archive.
Gerald Wilkinson and his parents, Bombay, India, 1914.
I first came across Peter Greave in a battered Penguin paperback copy of his 1977 memoir, The Seventh Gate, that I’d found at the Montana Valley Book Store, a marvelous storehouse of books in the little town of Alberton, Montana. The Seventh Gate has the grim fascination of a car crash. Born in Bombay in 1910, Greave spent his first years in the comfort of a villa surrounded by a lush garden and cared for by Indian servants. That haven was soon destroyed, however, by his father’s predilections. It wasn’t just that his father (who is unnamed in the book) was a swindler, he was also a chronic exhibitionist. He would ask his wife to play something on the piano to keep her occupied while he strolled out to their porch and exposed himself.
Greave’s childhood was punctuated by abrupt moves as his father fled the police and creditors or pursued ever-riskier ventures. In late 1918, the family sailed from India to New York City on a ship called The City of Lahore to make a fresh start. The voyage was not smooth: the ship was quarantined at Cape Town when influenza broke out among the crew; then the Hindu and Chinese seamen began fighting and one man was thrown overboard. Twice German submarines tried to torpedo her. Then, hours after the family disembarked in New York, the ship caught fire and sank at pierside.
Advertisement for the 1921 Dixie Flyer.
Greave’s father tried to set up an import/export business. It failed. Then he took off for South Africa hoping to sell Afrikaners a new American automobile called the Dixie Flyer. Greave’s mother and the three children were left freezing in a tenement flat in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, the car had a tendency to stop running, usually far from a garage. The father returned and took the family back to India again. This time he started a sporting newspaper; it too proved a failure. Then he set up a lottery scheme that proved another scam. He was convicted of fraud and sent to jail.
Greave’s mother fell ill of cancer. As he writes in The Seventh Gate, the family fell apart “like an old trunk eaten by white ants” — his sister sent to a convent in Calcutta, Greave and his brother to a derelict school in Darjeeling. Desperate for a home, Greave ran away from the school in the spring of 1923. Alone and almost penniless, he traveled eight hundred miles — walking, train-hopping, stowing away on a boat — to a remote town in East Bengal. There he persuaded a kindly woman he barely knew to take him in.
Cover of the Penguin edition of The Seventh Gate.
By the time Greave was a young man, he’d become accustomed to life on the fringes of Anglo-Indian society. With his sketchy education and lack of connections, he took whatever work he could get. He sold gramophones; he sold refrigerators; he sold coloured enlargements of family photos for a firm that rarely delivered them. He spent most of his time reading, going to movies and getting drunk: “I lived like a nomad, moving from one city to another, existing in seedy hotels or in shoddy rooms.” His father reappeared. The two often shared the same rooms and pooled their meagre resources. Then one day in 1938 while shaving, Greave noticed a reddish bump on his forehead. Others appeared on his legs and buttocks. A doctor diagnosed food poisoning: “You’ve been eating some muck from the bazaar.” New symptoms joined the skin lesions — numbness in his right hand, pain and cloudiness in his eyes.
Finally, he went to an Indian hospital in Calcutta, where he was diagnosed with leprosy in August 1939. Hearing this news, Greave “realised instinctively that I had crossed a frontier from which I could never return.” He spent the next seven years in squalid Calcutta flats, living off handouts, an occasional cheque from his father and the kindness of a few Indian friends. With India being torn apart in the conflicts over Partition, his existence grew more and more tenuous until he received a letter from a doctor with the British Empire Leprosy Relief Association. The doctor offered him free treatment at St Giles, England’s last operating leprosy clinic, outside Chelmsford. Greave managed to obtain a berth on the Franconia, a ship carrying British Army troops and their families away from the embattled former colony. The Seventh Gate ends in August 1947 as Greave stands on the deck, his last view of India slipping over the horizon.
The story that followed was told in Greave’s first book, The Second Miracle, published in 1955. His first miracle was making it to St Giles, where through slow and painful drug therapy, his leprosy was cured. The second miracle referred to in the title was his spiritual recovery. Greave wrote in the brutally honest tradition of Rousseau and Stendhal that considered hypocrisy as the greatest of all sins. While he hid away from the world in his room in Calcutta, Greave had come to see his disease as a mark of “the guilt of a thousand generations of twisted minds, and of bodies thirsting for decay.”
The Homes of St. Giles, the last clinic in England for the treatment of leprosy.
The Second Miracle takes the reader not only through the physical ordeal of Greave’s treatment for leprosy but also his realisation that he — not his doctors and not God — was responsible for what he made of his situation. In the end, he went from slinking through his days “sunk in lethargy” to an attitude of joyful penitence — of saying in his prayers, “Thank you — give me more.” This attitude would be crucial to Greave’s acceptance that, despite being cured, his leprosy had left him with such severe damage to his eyes, nerves and muscles that he would remain at St Giles, dependent on its care, for the rest of his life. It fills the two otherwise grim books with vitality, wonder and hope.
Years after I posted pieces about The Seventh Gate and The Second Miracle, I was contacted by Josephine, a woman living in Herefordshire. Josephine had been given Peter Greave’s journals by a friend. Greave had left them to the secretary at St Giles and through various hands they made their way to her. Having been born and raised in India, both Josephine and her husband had a keen interest in materials related to Anglo-Indian society. She also informed me that Peter Greave’s real name was Gerald Carberry, though she had no idea why he’d chosen the pseudonym.
In June 2019, I arranged to visit Josephine and look through the journals. When I arrived, she showed me into her dining room. There on the table sat an old fruit crate filled with what looked like two dozen or more well-used school notebooks. Josephine had marked the dates covered by each — the earliest starting in January 1937, the last in late 1969.
The first entry in Gerald Carberry’s diary, dated 11 January 1937.
Not knowing what I would find, I hadn’t planned how to use the few hours I had. At first, I skipped through entries almost randomly, photographing pages with my phone. In the earliest entry — 11 January 1937 — he was miserable. “Nothing to read, nothing to do, and no money. And a god-damned toothache.” He was rooming with his father — “H,” for Herbert Carberry — who is also broke but working on some suspicious deal: “I’m sick of his strong silent man act.” And he was frustrated with a woman he referred to as “C”: “It’s like her to start her stuff when I’m in a worse corner than usual.” I jumped forward to the 1950s, where he reported his progress in writing The Second Miracle, worried about publishers and critics, exulted when BBC Radio invited him to appear. In the journals from the 1960s, the handwriting grows larger, looser and more difficult to decipher. Fears about losing his sight came to dominate the entries.
Pages from Gerald Carberry’s diary.
I soon began to focus on references to “V.” The initial first appears in the entry of 5 June 1948, the first since his arrival in England nine months earlier. V appeared to a nurse at St Giles. “V was anxious this morning, and behaved with less than her usual sense,” Gerald wrote.
By August, she had left the clinic and he went to see her in London. They saw Oklahoma at the Drury Lane Theatre, sat together in a bar full of visitors to the Olympics and, near midnight, went to V’s room. They “experimented with passion,” but he confessed, “I felt little real desire.” “She sensed it almost immediately and was, I fear, hurt and disappointed.” And yet she begged him, “Can’t we be married?” He quickly gave in. On 9 September 1948, he wrote, “I’ve done it! What the blazes it will lead to I don’t know.” Just a few lines later, he wondered if the marriage can be annulled but feared the resulting publicity “would immediately finish me.” He hadn’t told anyone at St Giles aside from “M,” a fellow patient and confidant.
Armed with the date of the marriage, Josephine and I searched on a genealogical website and confirmed that Gerald Carberry and Violet Wood married in London in September 1948. This fact — indeed Violet’s very existence — was never mentioned in The Second Miracle. It seemed from the diary that Gerald and Violet rarely lived together — there are notes about sharing holiday cottages, but also entries where he fretted about not receiving letters from her.
Then, in an entry dated 26 September 1964, he wrote, “10 months since Vi died.” In the following pages he wrote multiple versions of the days leading up to her death: “And so, when I returned to your room it was all over …”; “It must have been around eleven on the night of 25 October 1963 that I learnt she was going to die”; “She died on the morning of the 5th of December.” It was as if he hoped to appease grief by achieving the most precise record of her death. Yet the sense of loss remained. In one of the last notebooks, from December 1966, one line appears on the inside cover: “My dear Vi, I miss you so very, very much.”
A note from 3 December 1966: “My dear Vi, I miss you so very, very much.”
As I later read through the hundreds of pages I’d photographed, it became clear that Violet was not the only secret Gerald Carberry had kept from the readers of Peter Greave’s books. In trying to reconstruct Gerald’s story through further research, I discovered that Carberry was also a pseudonym. Gerald Carberry had been born Gerald Wilkinson and christened at St Teresa’s Church in Kolkata on the 11th of November 1910. His parents were listed as Herbert Reginald Wilkinson and Katherine Margaret Wilkinson, nee Tighe.
His father had been born in Manchester and enlisted in the 1st (Kings) Dragoon Guards at the age of 16 in 1899. After service in the Boer War and Aden, he made his way to India. When he married Katherine Tighe, whose father had been a police commissioner in Bombay, in 1909, Herbert Wilkinson’s profession was listed as “merchant’s assistant.” The job must have involved some travel, because a few months before Gerald’s birth, Herbert was arrested and fined in Adelaide, Australia for indecent exposure.
Herbert Wilkinson’s arrest for indecent exposure, Adelaide, Australia, 29 June 1910.
Sometime after the family’s return to India in 1922, Herbert Wilkinson changed his name, because the Times of India article about his conviction for “cheating and abetment” identifies him as “Herbert Carberry, alias Wilkinson.” The rest of his family went along and Gerald began Gerald Carberry, the name by which he was known outside of his books.
Greave had also taken liberties with some of his characters. In The Seventh Gate Greave wrote of his sexual relationship with a woman he called Sharon. Sharon was clearly the “C” of Gerald’s diary: “C and I spent hours together yesterday;” “With C all afternoon.” He was deeply affected by her: “Another of C’s moods worked off on me;” “Struck cold by something C said.” According to the book, Sharon married, left India in 1946 and was killed in a traffic accident soon after arriving in England.
In the diary, however, C remained alive and part of Gerald’s life into the early 1960s—despite his marriage to Violet. He wrote of meeting her. In 1951, he quoted from one of her letters: “For God’s sake, come to me Gerald; come to me before I lose my sanity.” From some of the clues in the diary, I was able to identify “C” as Catherine Rowland-Jones. Born in Bombay in 1914, she married Owain Rowland-Jones, a ship’s captain, and left India for England not long before Gerald’s own departure. Living in Kensington after coming to England, it would have been easy for her to meet with Gerald, who appears to have come to the city often by train from Chelmsford.
An excerpt from the diary entry for the meeting with “Mac”, November 1966
After Vi’s death, yet another woman appears in the diary: Mac. In a long entry from November 1966, he wrote of meeting her at the Liverpool Street station in London, after which they spent a long afternoon in the bar of the Great Eastern Hotel. “For the first hour her behaviour was relatively subdued, but as one double vodka after another disappeared her voice and her spirits rose disquietingly.” She plied Gerald with drinks, insisted he kiss her, implored, “Will you marry me?” She may have been another nurse from St Giles, as she speaks of her impending departure for “that big hospital in Barnsley” (Yorkshire). He referred to her apprehensively as “Mac the Knife.”
By this point, however, sight was his biggest concern. From the early 1940s, the effect of leprosy on his sight had been a constant worry. “I just don’t know what to do with these bloody eyes”; “Eyes killing me again”; “I feel blindness hovering over me.” At times, he couldn’t focus or bear bright lights. In the 1960s, there were repeated visits to the Royal Free Hospital for operations. Each time he wondered whether he would wake up from the anesthesia and find himself blind. In the next entry after his meeting with Mac, he writes, “The world becomes increasingly foggy and indistinct. All I see is seen darkly even at noon when the sun shines brightly.”
The last entry in Gerald Carberry’s handwriting, 30 December 1966
His ability to see became intertwined with his will to live. “Long ago I made up my mind that when it came to this, I’d say, OK, enough,” he wrote in late November 1966. “But already I may have lost the power to act, to conclude the final chapter.” The last entry in his hand is dated 30 December 1966: “Almost certainly my last entry. No sight left — can’t read, can’t write. At last I’m ready to say — I don’t want to live anymore.”
After this, the remaining pages are blank. The next journal opens in early 1967. The handwriting is new, a precise secretarial copperplate: Gerald’s dictation, taken down by the secretary at St Giles. Occasional passages are written in Pittman shorthand: other secrets to be revealed, perhaps.
I wonder how many people under the age of 40 understand the point of this question. If you’re under 40, by the time you learned to read, Rod McKuen had already begun to fade from the scene. He was no longer a regular on television variety shows — in part because television variety shows had themselves faded from the scene by the end of the Seventies. He was still performing live, but much of his audience were people who’d been going to his shows for years. After pumping out a steady stream of books of poetry and lyrics for over two decades, his output — having made him the biggest selling poet in the world for much of that time — fizzled out. After Intervals and Valentines in 1986, there would only be two more books, published in the early 2000s.
But there was a time — from 1967 to around the mid-1970s — when you couldn’t walk into a bookstore or record store or turn on a TV or radio without bumping into Rod McKuen. If he wasn’t as big as the Beatles, he was as big as Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass or Jacqueline Susann and certainly more prolific.
That was when, as a profile that appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle in 2002 put it, “every enlightened suburban split-level home had its share of Rod McKuen.” “His mellow poetry was on the end table (Listen to the Warm), his lovestruck music and spoken-word recordings were on the hi-fi and his kindly face was on the set, on The Tonight Show and Dinah Shore’s variety hour.” (In our house, it was The Sea, one of his collaborations with Anita Kerr.) In Frank Sinatra’s long career, Rod McKuen was the only songwriter he ever devoted an entire album to. Guys bought his books to show their girlfriends how sensitive they were and women bought them for their boyfriends to show them what sensitive was. “The cult of Rod McKuen grows by leaps and bounds,” proclaimed a 1967 profile in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
The same year, The Chicago Tribune’s entertainment editor gushed, “Rod McKuen is great, great, absolutely great! His is a poet, and he sings and reads practically nothing but his own songs and poems. Doesn’t sound like a night club act? Well, he doesn’t just read and sing them — he lives them and makes you breathe and feel them. He drags you through the gamut of emotions, putting a lump in your throat one minute and making you chortle the next.”1
Bear in mind: this was a guy who wrote poetry and then read it in a quiet, gravelly voice (he used to joke that “It sounds like I gargle with Dutch Cleanser” and rock critic Greil Marcus once said it had “the force of a squirrel’s”) over a soft musical accompaniment. That was it. He didn’t dance and you couldn’t dance to him. He didn’t act, or at least hadn’t acted since his last B-movie in early 1960s. He didn’t tell jokes, or at least not many and not well enough. He wasn’t a sex symbol: although there were plenty of women (and undoubtedly some men) who fell in love with him, he made it clear he was a loner. And yet, he’s the only poet with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And yet, as late as 1974, he was being billed as “the greatest entertainer in the world!”2
Ad for Rod McKuen’s 1974 appearance at the Troubadour in Santa Monica
He did, however, infuriate many people who took poetry seriously. The English poet David Harsent described McKuen’s poetry variously as “scraps of maudlin meditation masquerading as emotion deeply felt,” “ersatz anguish, carefully sifted to pablum for easy consumption,” and “lumpish impressions of places and people, flashes of cheap surrealism and clumsy gropings at the numinous.” “No one has done more to degrade language and human sensibility,” D. Keith Mano wrote at the end of a full-page skewering in the National Review.
Josh Greenfeld, writing in Mademoiselle, lumped McKuen with Kahlil Gibran and the now-forgotten Walter Benton as “the Marshmallow Poets.” “The main thing I have against McKuen is his oversimplification of everything,” Greenfeld says. “I mean, if your pussy cat comes home, your life problems aren’t solved. And the words, the phrases McKuen uses! They all lack that precise particularization that is poetry.” Professor Robert W. Hill of Clemson University argued that McKuen “touched the anti-intellectual, the escapist, the superficial, the blindly sentimental capacities of the American public.” McKuen’s books, he wrote, belonged in “the lachrymose quagmire of the KMart poetry section.”
This was similar to the view expressed by Margot Hentoff in The New York Review of Books in its one and only review of his poetry: “McKuen is so devitalized a singer, so bad a poet, so without wit or tune—as well as so out of touch with the contemporary pop sensibility—that one can only consider his monumental nationwide popularity as a kind of counter-counter-cultural phenomenon.” Karl Shapiro said it was irrelevant to speak of McKuen as a poet. Shapiro conflated McKuen with Bob Dylan into a creation he called Dylan MacGoon. Asked about his creative regime, Shapiro wrote, “MacGoon tried to answer as best he could (language is not his strong point).” One reviewer refused to do anything more than include the title of McKuen’s latest in a round-up of recent poetry books. Reviewing McKuen, he complained, was “a bit like using a jack-hammer to clear cobwebs.”
This attitude was a dramatic contrast to the gushing admiration with which Margaret MacDonald, a reporter for the Oakland Times reviewed McKuen’s first book of poetry And Autumn Came in 1954. She praised the book’s “powerful impact of sincere emotions, expressed in clear language with original figures of speech and a sensitive approach.” “Like all true poetry,” she felt, it could “stand the test of re-reading” and was “one which all who really love poetry will keep in an easily accessible place for frequent perusal.”
There was a long gap between that review and the next. As Barry Alfonso writes in his fine biography of McKuen, A Voice of the Warm, McKuen self-published his next collection, Stanyan Street & Other Sorrow, and sold it at his concerts and other appearances while his long-time partner, Edward Habib, drove up and down California, placing it with bookstores. “I’d go through the telephone book and get addresses of bookstores,” Habib told Alfonso. “I’d go to the stores and say, ‘Can you handle five books? If they don’t sell by next week I’ll come and pick them up.’” In a matter of a year or so, this approach stacked up over sales of over 50,000 copies.
It was McKuen’s lyrics that sold the books — lyrics he wrote first for Glenn Yarbrough, one of the most successful of the school of well-scrubbed folksingers so popular in the early 1960s, and later for himself after signing with RCA. McKuen was a prolific lyricist, heavily influenced by Jacques Brel, whom he came to know during a spell in France and with whom he collaborated, performing some of Brel’s songs and writing others than Brel performed in translation. Indeed, the label chansonnier was perhaps more appropriate for McKuen than poet. And his performances drew inspiration from Brel, as McKuen usually sat on a stool on a bare stage, dressed in turtleneck sweater, jeans, and sneakers, and sang/spoke his songs.
In 1966, RCA released a Yarbrough album titled The Lonely Things: The Love Songs of Rod McKuen. The next year, having signed with RCA as well, McKuen recorded Listen to the Warm, which was also the title of his third book. Having heard about the grassroots success of Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows, Bennett Cerf of Random House had approached him to join its list and the two men agreed to an initial release of 30,000 copies of Listen to the Warm.
Gene Shalit broke the news in the Los Angeles Times, commenting, “Insiders versed [funny, Gene] in publishing history can’t remember another volume of poems by a national unknown which got such a send-off.” McKuen cagily negotiated a partnership arrangement that allowed him to continue publishing the books with his own Stanyan Press imprint, which gave him the advantage of Random House’s nationwide marketing while preserving the independence to put out other titles (which ultimately included God’s Greatest Hits, a collection of Bible quotes illustrated by the folk artist Sister Gertrude Morgan).
Listen to the Warm was as much a phenomenon of 1967 as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonelyhearts Club Band. The book sold over one million copies in hardback within a year of its publication. Although the record’s success was less spectacular, it became the first of nine albums McKuen placed in Billboard’s Top 200 charts over the next four years.
Both the book and the record opened with a poem that became a favorite for many McKuen fans. “A Cat Named Sloopy” remembered a cat McKuen had owned when he was living in New York City in the early 1960s.
For a while the only earth that Sloopy knew was in her sandbox. Two rooms on Fifty-fifth Street were her domain.
In the poem, Sloopy wait while the poet goes off in search of love, or at least one-night stands, until one day when he runs away.
Looking back perhaps she’s been the only human thing that ever gave back love to me. prologue
Some of its fame could be attributed to association (or confusion) with a popular tune from two years before, “Hang On, Sloopy” by the McCoys. But it was a heartstring-tugger sure-fired to bring out the hankies. I suspect more than a few of his fans wanted to take Rod home like a stray kitten.
After years of hanging around the margins, McKuen quickly found himself in the warm embrace of the book, record, television, and stage business. He did hundreds of live shows each year, dozens of television appearances, and continued to release new books of poetry and new records at a steady rate. Ads for his books and LPs ran in mainstream magazines like the Saturday Review of Literature, Playboy, Life, and Time. In a 1980 book titled Shrinklits: Seventy of the World’s Towering Classics Cut Down to Size, Maurice Sagoff parodied Listen to the Warm:
Are you sentimental? Dote on plastic charm? Rod’s massage is gentle, Does no lasting harm:
No deep thoughts to rile you, Blandness to beguile you, Pare your toenails while you Listen to the smarm.
McKuen’s only record to break into Billboard’s Top 100, however, came years before Listen to the Warm. It was a novelty tune titled “Oliver Twist” that mocked the rage launched by Chubby Checker’s hit, “Let’s Do the Twist.” He later blamed his scratchy voice on too many nights of trying to sing the tune at bowling alley lounges.
An ad for a 1961 McKuen appearance performing his hit, “Oliver Twist”
“Oliver Twist” was only one of the many milestones along McKuen’s career path to bestselling poet (or chansonnier). After dropping out of high school, he started working as a disc jockey for an Oakland, California radio station. Within a year, he had attracted the attention of Bay Area entertainment columnist Dwight Newton, who included him among his “1952 Prospects”: “A young man with much promise. Writes interesting, colorful scripts for his disc jockey show. Good individual voice.” After a spell in the Army, he returned to the Bay Area, took an apartment on Stanyan Street in San Francisco, and began appearing as a singer in nightclubs such as the Purple Onion.
He also dipped his toe in the water of Hollywood, picking up a few parts but eventually earning lobby card billing, if only as a supporting player, on such movies as Rock, Pretty Baby. One of McKuen’s friends later joked that, “If Rod weren’t a poet, he’d make a tremendous marketing analyst,” and the proof can be found early on. In 1956, the United Press syndicate ran a feature titled, “Rod McKuen Has Too Many Talents.” “McKuen is a young man in a very pleasant quandary,” wrote the anonymous author — most likely a press agent paid by McKuen. “He does so many things well that he has trouble sometimes deciding which talent to emphasize.”
The article also reported that McKuen had “appeared in five Japanese films” while serving with the Army. This was just one of many accomplishments that McKuen would claim over the years. Others included singing with Lionel Hampton’s band, writing a column for the San Francisco Examiner, and performing for a state dinner at the Kennedy White House. He told one interviewer, “I write novels under other names. I wrote a medical book. I’ve had a couple of books of history that have done very well. I’m in the middle of doing a history now that will be about 12 or 13 volumes by the time it’s finished.” He also claimed that every day he ate one meal, read two books, wrote ten poems, and worked 16 hours straight.
Three and a half years of research has led me to believe that Rod told many white lies and some real whoppers about his life and career. A constant need to legitimize himself and prove his worth drove him to exaggerate his actual accomplishments, which were truly formidable. His deceptions were mostly benign; he probably came to believe many of them were true. In the end, they invoke more sympathy than outrage. No amount of recognition could still the nagging inner voice that he just wasn’t quite good enough.
Even after achieving commercial success as America’s chansonnier, culminating in his first appearance at Carnegie Hall in 1969 (which was recorded and released as an album), McKuen continued to pad his resume. Perhaps his most dubious claim was of having taught himself musical composition. As early as the late 1950s, when he recorded several albums that would today be labeled “beatnik jazz,” he was taking credit for not only the lyrics but the music to his chansons. In 1960, he collaborated with veteran studio arranger Dick Jacobs on an instrumental album titled Written in the Stars, also known as The Zodiac Suite, with each track based on a different astrological sign. McKuen was listed as composer, but this needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
There was a lot of musical ghosting going on in the 1950s and 1960s. As is almost common knowledge today, most of the music heard on recordings by the Beach Boys, the Monkees, and other LA-based pop groups was actually played by a handful of ace session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew. TV comedian Jackie Gleason claimed arranger credits on several dozen easy listening albums that were the work of trumpeter Bobby Hackett working at union scale.
McKuen acknowledged some of his collaborators, such as Stan Freeman, another veteran faceless studio musician, but in reality Freeman probably did most of the work. As Michael Feinstein told Barry Alfonso, Freeman recalled that McKuen would say something like, “I want to write a concerto for oboe and this and that instrument” and then hum a couple of melodies that Freeman would then work into a completed piece. And Freeman was certainly not McKuen’s only “collaborator”: others included John Scott Trotter, Vince Guaraldi, and Arthur Greenslade.
McKuen’s musical credits began to pile up quickly in the late 1960s. He was credited with a number of soundtracks, most notably for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Song in 1969 and which became a #1 pop hit for the English singer Oliver. His “classical” compositions began to compete with, and eventually overtake, his chanson albums. He took to listing them along with the titles of his books on the frontispiece.
Rod McKuen’s credits, from Intervals (1980)
As Alfonso writes, McKuen’s compositions “sound like an amalgam of Aaron Copland–like Western elements, stage musical melodies, and film soundtrack excerpts” — in other words, the sort of pleasant but somehow generic stuff often sold as library music. He gave Newsday reporter Leslie Hanscom a recording of his opera The Black Eagle when she interviewed him in 1979. “On later sampling,” she wrote, it turned out to be a work of truly masterful monotony with a plot and theme that might have made Jonathan Livingston Eagle a more appropriate title.” Hanscom found that McKuen “projects a sense of self that could dwarf Wagner.” That might have been an understatement: in 1983, he told Bill Thomas of the Baltimore Sun that he’d rewritten Wagner’s entire Ring cycle and reduced it down to 5½ minutes. Though McKuen often award-dropped the fact that one of his pieces was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music for 1974,3 for his composition The City: A Suite for Narrator & Orchestra, the other fact that composers such as Patric Standford openly admitted to ghostwriting for him tends to diminish just how impressive that accomplishment sounds.
The more one looks into the details of McKuen’s life and work, the more McKuen comes off as a Jack of all trades and master of none. His poetry and lyrics, in particular, were written at a furious rate. He published nearly 30 collections of poems, the vast majority new, in the space of 20 years. By the end of 1968, three of the alone had sold over one million copies. By 1972, it was 12 books and over 4 million copies; by 1974, 15 and 9 million; by 1979, 24 and 16 million. McKuen’s modesty about the success of his poetry tended to ring false. “I’ve sold five million books of poetry since 1967,” he told one interviewer, “but who’s counting?” Or, on another occasion, “I didn’t even know I was a millionaire until I read about it in the newspapers.”4
The enormous popularity of McKuen’s poetry could be one of the reasons so many critics attacked it. As critic Gary Morris has written, “There aren’t many art forms where commercial success is relentlessly equated with aesthetic worth.” The National Lampoon made an obvious joke of it in their McKuen parody: “The lone$ome choo choo of my mind/i$ warm like drippy treacle/on the wind$wept beach.” Even the New York Times felt free to publish their own parody: “I met your press kit first/Box of mimeographed attributes and achievements.”
A few tried to look beyond the sales figures. Robert Kirsch, the LA Times book editor, declared in late 1968, “I don’t believe that Rod McKuen can be ignored as a poet simply because he is the best-selling troubadour in America today.” But even Kirsch found it hard to be unqualified in his praise. Although he found that McKuen “more than occasionally … is capable of rendering awareness into perceptions of small but haunting truths,” he also acknowledged that “He is less effective on the printed page than on his records, where, assisted by music and the nuance of the spoken voice, he evokes recognition and fantasy.” Too many of McKuen’s poems — such as “Manhattan Beach,” from Lonesome Cities — read less like poetry and more like, well, notes:
I’ve taken a house at Manhattan Beach working the summer into a book.
Eddie came last weekend and brought two girls and some books. The girls were pretty but the books stayed longer and now they menace me stacked up on the floor staring back in unread smugness.
Otherwise I’ve had no visitors.
In a survey of American poetry of the 1960s written a few years later, Louis Simpson quoted from Listen to the Warm:
But yesterday you touched me and we drove to the toll beach and ran in the sand. Sorry no one could see how beautifully happy we were.
“Well, what’s wrong with it?” Simpson asked. “It’s simple, it makes lots of people happy. Only an effete intellectual snob would find fault with it…. The world is like a sand-pile with lots of nice gooey wet blobs to play with. It’s a soda pop, a weenie-roast, a sticky, marshmallow kiss.” McKuen’s world, he wrote, “is the province of Youth.” But Simpson warned that, “Youth sooner or later will want to have poetry. Not this slop.”
McKuen claimed he started writing poetry because he couldn’t find ones he liked. “I wanted to say something different or write about what everyone else was saying but say it in a different way.” But in truth, what tends to distinguish McKuen’s language from that of other poets is its lack of individuality. His poetry, like his music, is not so much different as generic.
“Forever is not far enough/to throw a smile/that never was” McKuen writes in one of his later collections, The Sound of Solitude. Which seems at first glance like a koan, something a guru or Yoda might say. Except … look closer, read it over a few times, and you realize it’s nothing. We know what each word means, but put together it’s nonsense. Everywhere is close enough/to lose a memory/you never had. Would you buy a book filled of 80 pages with that?
Saturday Night Live used to run a cartoon feature about two superheroes known as the Ambiguously Gay Duo. McKuen might be crowned the Ambiguously Poetic Poet. “I’m not a poet, I’m a stringer of words,” he sometimes demurred. Yet when the Los Angeles Times invited McKuen to submit a short reflection “On What Poets Are … and Aren’t,” he wrote with patent self-importance, “A poet is a keeper of the language.” The job of the poet was to “shed light on the darkness.” A poet “must repair but never rape the words that form his native tongue,” adding rather disingenuously, “nor should he be an advertisement for himself.” The LA Times piece sparked some sharp reactions. One reader wrote in to say that “Having McKuen comment on the nature of poetry is somewhat akin to having a kindergarten fingerpainter comment on the art of Picasso.”
McKuen often resorted to a rhetorical trick when asked to defend his poetry:
Actually, I really don’t think it’s fair to criticize poetry. A novel, sure. But not poetry. See a poet is his poem. He lives his poem. So if you just give a poem a quick reading and call it something like sappy, then you’re really calling the poet sappy. It just isn’t fair. Not really.
Attack my poems and you attack me, McKuen was saying — a cheap way of warding off any interviewer with good manners. “I lived that poem,” he liked to declare. “I defy you to catch me and say that I wrote about the experience badly. How do you know what the experience was? You didn’t live it!” Some who profiled McKuen pointed out, however, his penchant for assuming a martyr-like pose. Like the old joke, he seemed to say, “I’ve suffered for my art. Now, you can suffer, too!”
Rod McKuen signing books at a Phoenix mall, 1977.
Another tactic was to compare his fame to that of his critics. “Name one critic who’s downed me,” he challenged Bill Thomas, “and ask five total strangers if they know who he is. I bet none do. Then ask them if they’ve heard of me. They may have a good opinion or a bad opinion — but they sure as hell know who I am.”
On other occasions, McKuen would defend his poetry by trotting out its achievements. “I mean — if I wasn’t a damn good poet,” he told Rick Soll from The Chicago Tribune in 1975, “why would I be in the Oxford Book of Verse, why would I be in all the famous quotation books, why would my poems be used in hundreds of college courses?”
The trouble is: none of that was true. There is no Oxford Book of Verse. There are Oxford books of English Verse and American Verse and Comic Verse, and McKuen is in none of them. I also checked more than a dozen different quotation books published between 1968 and 1978, and the only one I found McKuen’s name in was What They Said in 1971: the Yearbook of Spoken Opinion. McKuen’s quote is worth repeating in the context of this discussion, however:
Critics attack my poetry because it’s understandable. I always think everything should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. A while ago it was announced that I would come out with a paperback of new poetry. I got bad reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Book World and a rave from Coronet, and I still have not written one word of the book.
Which, of course, was also untrue.
As for his poetry being used in hundreds of college courses, this was also improbable. A few, such as Brian Curtis in a 1972 article in The English Journal, the journal of the National Council of Teachers of English titled, “The Necessity of the ‘Rod McKuens'”, argued for McKuen as, if you will, a gateway drug for serious poetry. However, this argument tended to produce the response reported by Ross Talarico in his book Spreading the Word: Poetry and the Survival of Community in America: “As a matter of fact, I brought sneers to the faces of poets and critics when, during a couple of panel discussions over the past few years, I’ve made the observation that if poetry survives at all in America, perhaps more credit will go to Rod McKuen than to any of a few high-powered poetry critics.”
And both Curtis and Talarico were careful to point out that while McKuen’s poetry had utility, it lacked quality:
Do I say these things because I am a fan of Rod McKuen’s? No, not really. I’d be the first to say his poetry is filled with overused, often trite phrases, sentimentalism, predictability, and a naive, terribly romantic view of the world. [Talarico]
I do not suggest that “trash” compose the curriculum, although it fits the nation’s bias and fills drugstore shelves. We all leave our McKuens behind, and, if lucky, we suffer “growth.” [Curtis]
Part of the problem was McKuen’s own understanding of poetry. “The problem is that a lot of people who write poetry think the more obscure they can be, the more intelligent their poetry is,” he once told an interviewer. “To me, intelligence and obscurity never went together.” He sometimes compared his poetry to that of Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams, but mostly in self-defense: “Their poetry was very uncomplicated, very straightforward.” “I write in the language of my day and try to make it effortless for the reader,” he said on another occasion, which only supports Dick Cavett’s quip that McKuen was “the most understood poet in America.”
Now, there’s nothing at all wrong with poems written in simple, uncomplicated language that reads effortlessly. Millions of American schoolchildren have had their first exposure to modernist poetry through Williams’s red wheelbarrow:
so much depends upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens
But I think it’s illuminating to compare McKuen’s simplicity with that of another poet known for creating poetry from simple, clear words: Mary Oliver. For the same of illustration, let’s look at how they each treat the subject of dogs. Here are two selections from McKuen:
From Caught in the Quiet (1970): My dog likes oranges but he’ll eat apples too. Like me, he goes where the smiles go and I’d as soon lie down with sleeping bears as track the does by moonlight
Don’t trouble me with your conventions, mine would bore you too.
Straight lines are sometimes difficult to walk and good for little more than proving we’re sober on the highway.
I’ve never heard the singing of the loon but I’m told he sings as pretty as the nightingale.
My dog likes oranges but he’ll eat apples too.
And from Listen to the Warm: See the dog he doesn’t move—a voyeur. Never mind. What we’ve done is beautiful. For gods and animals to see, for us to stand aside in awe and look ourselves up and down.
And Mary Oliver:
From Devotions Now through the white orchard my little dog romps, breaking the new snow with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited, hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins until the white snow is written upon in large, exuberant letters, a long sentence, expressing the pleasures of the body in this world.
Oh, I could not have said it better myself.
Neither poet tells us much about the dog they’re writing about. In both McKuen poems, however, the dog is merely an object. It, like the “gods and animals,” is there merely to be a silent witness. In Oliver’s poem, on the other hand, the dog’s the star. We’re sure that McKuen has seen dogs; but we know that Oliver has owned dogs and has watched them delight in hopping about in drifts of new snow. And while McKuen’s dogs are there to gaze upon his sensitive pensiveness in wonder, Oliver is the one observing and taking joy from her dog’s exuberance.
In his later years, McKuen was candid about his less-than-ideal childhood. He was born in a Salvation Army hospital, his father having vanished soon after sleeping with his mother, who was working as a taxi dancer. He was sexually abused by an aunt and uncle, physically abused by his stepfather, and probably both as a teenager at the Nevada School of Industry. He dropped out of school and went on the road at a young age and spent time as an in-house male prostitute at logging camps in the Pacific Northwest. A background of this sort of abuse is now known to be associated with an “impaired capacity to develop proper definitions of the self,” as the psychologists Bessel van der Kolk and Rita Fisler have written.
One suspects, therefore, that part of what was missing from McKuen’s poetry was himself. For all the supposed confessional honesty of his poetry, McKuen concealed and distorted much about himself, including his sexuality. Ambiguity was not a trick he used to avoid being pinned down: it was at the heart of his being. He was careful, for example, not to openly declare himself as gay. Though he lived with Edward Habib for decades, he always referred to Habib as “my brother.” After the success of Listen to the Warm, McKuen would refer to having a son and daughter he’d fathered during a stay in France in the early 1960s, but as Alfonso writes:
There is no information that confirms Rod McKuen ever had children. To the author’s knowledge, no one else has ever mentioned meeting or communicating with them. At least four of his closest friends either doubt or flat-out deny that Jean-Marc and Marie-France ever existed. After Rod’s death, no son or daughter came forward to claim anything from his estate.
Yet clues slip out here and there in his poetry, if only unconsciously. In “A Cat Named Sloopy,” for example, he writes:
I never told her but in my mind I was a midnight cowboy even then. Riding my imaginary horse down Forty-second Street, going off with strangers to live an hour-long cowboy’s life, but always coming home to Sloopy, who loved me best…
While “midnight cowboy” might have been an obscure reference when Listen to the Warm was published, it became impossible to miss after the release of the Oscar-winning film two years later. And some of the lines in the title poem are positively creepy: “Follow women after dark/they can only yell for help or whisper yes”; “I’m grateful then for your upbringing/it led you like an arrow here uncomplicated and mine.”
Though many of McKuen’s poems are about love, they are almost never a celebration of love or the loved. Instead, McKuen most often looks at love in the rearview mirror. Even when he’s in a relationship, he’s thinking about its end, as in the lyric of one of his most popular songs, “If you go away”: “If you go away/as I know you will….” One woman who posted about Listen to the Warm on Goodreads wrote tellingly, “My husband gave me [McKuen’s] three small poetry books, early in our marriage. I think I probably related some of his feelings in poems. Now I just see a man having affairs with various women, and then breaking up with them.” In fact, the one constant in McKuen’s views on love is himself: “If I’m still alone by now it’s by design/I only own myself, but all of me is mine.”
His political views were as ambiguous as his sexuality. Though hundreds of thousands of young people bought his books, he was never comfortable being associated with hippies, Flower Power, or other aspects of the youth movement. “Flower power is fine but what they really need is shower power,” he used to joke, and he had little patience for hippies: “I got my success on my own terms, worked for it, suffered for it. Hippies are fine, but I like to be clean myself,” he told the New York Times in 1969. In one of McKuen’s earliest profiles, Joyce Haber of the Los Angeles Times wrote that his careful choice of material and his own presentation made him “a hip square or a square hip, depending on which way you look at it.” Flower children may have bought his books, but they didn’t go to his concerts. One account of a McKuen performance described his audience as “white, female, middle class, scrubbed and respectable.” “I’m an entertainer,” he would say, “and that’s what I want to be. People don’t want to keep getting hit in the head with social commentary all the time.”
When the Saturday Review invited McKuen to review a collection of Mao Tse-tung’s poems, he made sure to stipulate that “Being neither far right, left, nor extreme middle (though having antagonized in my brief span each faction in turn), I am more concerned with poetry than with politics.” Even McKuen’s religious views were elusive. He told one interviewer that he’d been “a Roman Catholic, an Episcopalian, a Methodist, a Mormon, and a Quaker” and that he was planning to give Judaism and Greek Orthodoxy a try.
In some ways, it was as if McKuen was trying to be both the most famous poet in the world and invisible. When his book The Power Bright and Shining: Images of My Country was published in 1976 to coincide with the Bicentennial, he claimed that he had started out wanting to write “a kind of Studs Terkel book” featuring the words of working men and women.5 “Unfortunately — or fortunately, I suppose — it’s not easy for me to be invisible….”
It’s the ambiguity of McKuen’s identity that ultimately undermines his poetry. One reviewer on Goodreads wrote, “These poems are like the antithesis of Bukowski.” Well, exactly. Like him or not, Charles Bukowski was unapologetically himself. Rod McKuen, on the other hand, seems never to have been entirely satisfied with whatever self he devised.
And that lack of a strong sense of self may have been the secret to both his commercial success and his artistic failure. There was just enough content in McKuen’s poems to give his readers the sensation of reading poetry without any of the individuality or obscurity that make good poems both challenging and memorable. McKuen dedicated Come to Me in Silence by saying, “This book is for nobody/everybody.” “I think he should make up his mind,” quipped the Daily Mail’s book editor, Peter Lewis.
“If there’s a message in my work,” McKuen would often tell interviewers, “it’s about man’s inability to communicate.” Which cannot but remind one of Tom Lehrer’s joke: “If a person feels he can’t communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it.” Even McKuen occasionally allowed readers to see the emptiness at the center of his poetry. As he wrote in “October 3,” from In Someone’s Shadow:
If you had listened hard enough you might have heard what I meant to say. Nothing.
I was going to end this piece here, dagger neatly inserted into the poet’s corpse. But I realized this would leave an incomplete picture of McKuen’s work. One of my favorite adages is that if a pile of horseshit is big enough, there might be a pony in there. I went through more than a dozen of McKuen’s books across his career as part of my research. And yes, there are a LOT of poems about beaches and sunsets and loneliness, but there are also oddities.
Fans of pop music have long known that some of the most interesting tunes in an artist’s repertoire are the stray tracks thrown in to pad out one side of an LP, songs where the constraints of what should or shouldn’t go into a hit were tossed aside and caution shelved in favor of unfiltered creation. Sometimes, the result is awful; and sometimes the result is — well, if not genius, at least intriguing.
And the same is true of McKuen’s oeuvre. It may be that McKuen sheltered a big hole of hurt at the center of his being. And while a big hole of hurt may be a handicap as a poet, it can often be a source of great energy for a satirist. Listen to the Warm, for example, which is easy to dismiss entirely from its drippy dedication alone — “For E.: If you cry when we leave Paris/I’ll buy you a teddy bear all soft and gold” — includes a poem with the title “First and Last Visit to an Annex in Burbank.” “Time was you couldn’t see the Forest Lawn for the trees.” Forest Lawn, just to fill in possible gaps in cultural history, is a huge cemetery in Glendale, California where hundreds of celebrities from L. Frank Baum to Elizabeth Taylor are buried. It’s also one of the inspirations for Whispering Glades in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One And because it’s the cemetery that set the standard for the grandiose American style, it’s also largely swathes of headstone-dotted grass.
The fact that I had to explain McKuen’s joke drained what meager comic value it may retain, but it serves to illustrate the vein of ironic observation that runs quietly underneath much of the teddy bear dreck of his poetry. One of the best examples is his 1959 album Beatsville. It was marketed to tap into the Beatnik craze, the fascination with beret-wearing, goatee-bearded, finger-poppin’, jazz-loving coffee house-haunting poets and musicians who ranged from serious (Allen Ginsburg) to silly (Maynard G. Krebs). Its cover shows an angst-ridden McKuen brooding over a glass of cheap wine as he sits next to a wild abstract painting with a mysterious and beautiful woman and would lead the buyer to believe this is a sincere sample of Beat art.
Instead, it’s a pastiche. Though he’d spent plenty of nights strumming his guitar and singing folk songs and published his own book of poetry, McKuen wasn’t buying the shtick. On Beatsville, he mocked the beats as poseurs — such as “Raffia the poet, who is not only an angry young man but a dirty old man as well” — and riffed on their lingo (“I was mixed up with this Gemini cat who, well, she didn’t like to be liked, like”). As Alfonso puts it, McKuen “came across more as an observer (or infiltrator)” than a card-carrying Beat. He went on to demonstrate his disdain for the Beats even more obviously in the single “The Beat Generation” he released with Bob McFadden soon after: “Some people say I’m lazy/They say that I’m a wreck/But that stuff doesn’t faze me/I get unemployment checks.”
He went through years, or volumes, rather, without indulging his appetite for caustic commentary, but sometimes it came out despite himself. One of the tracks on his first album with Anita Kerr, The Sea, included a short number titled “Body Surfing with the Jet Set” that was full of parodies of surfer talk along the lines of Beatsville: “Madame Marie Ouspenskaya went through her whole life never learning to surf/But she sure had some bitchin’ garlic leis.” Years later, in his collection Beyond the Boardwalk, he reused that title for something whose humor is almost too black to bear:
My father’s uncle’s brother married his cousin. Twice he beat her up and twice the police came and twice they carried her away. Does that make her his cousin twice removed? Surf’s up.
I keep a loaded pistol just beneath my bed, it’s nice to have a gun that works in case I lose my head. Hang ten.
Edward Habib and Rod McKuen at McKuen’s Hollywood mansion.
In his later books, the sunshine fades and more often gives way to unvarnished sarcasm. The Beautiful Strangers (1980) includes a multi-part poem titled “A Field Guide to Cruising” that is nothing less than a summation of decades of cruising experience — by both McKuen and his “brother” Edward:
Do not dress up or down but as you would for an occasion. With some luck and some premeditation it will be one.
Avoid church socials or the Bake-off. Those who gather at such gatherings have paired off long ago. They are in the middle of what they perceive as the act of living life, who are we to interrupt them?
In its way, this is every bit as uncomfortable as anything in Bukowski. If nothing else, McKuen here ventures into territory few other American poets (well, perhaps aside from William Dickey in The Rainbow Grocery). In the same book, “Designer Genes” veers into Ogden Nash territory with its perhaps too-ephemeral satire on a 1980s fad:
With laissez-faire each derriere with nom or nom de plume is held in place with little space to wiggle or sha-boom.
In one of his last books, Intervals (1986), McKuen not only displays a more good-natured sort of humor but also includes his most extensive use of social observation in a long poem titled, “Is There Life After Tower Records?” The poem, dedicated to Tower Records founder Russ Solomon, will tug at the nostalgia strings of anyone who spent a long night browsing through the aisles of this legendary West Coast record store.6 (And for those under 40, I won’t try to explain what a record store was except to say that it was the social and cultural heart of many towns in America.)
See them move between the aisles, pathways so narrow that passing past another is bold adventure, thrilling drawing-in of breath and stomach. And in between the aisles, the islands back to back that hide the million dreams inside bright jackets, well-turned sleeves plastic fused so fast it must be cut apart to reach the shiny metal hopes, the deep dark vinyl of delight whose inner grooves can only be decoded by the diamond needle, narrow beam of laser light.
This is just the kind of ecstasy you would experience flipping through the shrink-wrapped albums that filled Tower Records’ trays.
Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard in L.A.
Occasionally, just occasionally, McKuen shared moments too candid to be faked. Nothing like the trinkets about sun and sand and cats that cluttered many of his pages, with details that quickly burrow themselves uncomfortably into the reader’s mind:
One day coming home I saw a farmer pissing by the road. His balls hung down below his hand and looked so heavy that I began to run for no apparent reason. I didn’t stop until I reached the safety of my room.
Home again, I pulled the shade and got down from the bureau my Sunday School coloring book. Having chewed my brown Crayola just the day before, I had no choice but to color Jesus Christ’s hair yellow.
Ten pages before this in And to Each Season …, McKuen tells a ridiculous and unbelievable story about a friendship he made with a mountain lion he spotted in the woods behind his family’s house when they lived in rural Washington state. A few pages on, we’re back in the land of sun and lovers left behind.
Had McKuen held himself to the same standard of intimacy displayed in poems like this, he might truly have earned a place in one of the Oxford books of verse. And his poems might still be taught today.
But perhaps poet is not really the right label for Rod McKuen. Remember what he often said: “I’m an entertainer,” he would say, “and that’s what I want to be.” Perhaps we should heed Maya Angelou’s advice and believe him.
Reviewing that 1974 performance at the Troubadour in Santa Monica, Dennis Hunt of the L.A. Times wrote, “His performance was awash with flagrant melodrama. He used a lot of old, obvious tricks to put his songs across. On his closing number, ‘Seasons in the Sun,’ he was even gesticulating in the flamboyant manner of Al Jolson.”
There was a time when Al Jolson was considered the greatest entertainer in America. Today, it’s hard for anyone to see Jolson’s blackfaced rendition of “Mammy” in the original The Jazz Singer and cringe. As it might be hard for anyone to listen to one of Rod McKuen’s albums or read one of his books now and wonder how they managed to sell in astronomical numbers. Perhaps entertainment is not quite so timeless as poetry.
My thanks to Barry Alfonso for suggesting I take a look at Rod McKuen’s increasingly — if somewhat justly — neglected poetry.
1 The Tribune article also mentioned that the same bill featured a ventriloquist, Aaron Williams, “and his dusky friend, Freddy.”
2 The ad for McKuen’s appearance at the Troubadour credits the “greatest entertainer in the world” quote to The Times, London. I searched through the archives of The Times and failed to find any such statement. Indeed, the only time The Times saw fit to give McKuen more than advertising space, it was a brief entry in the “Times Diary” for 20 February 1969 about an appearance he made at the Odeon cinema on Leicester Square reading the lyrics to his title song for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Perhaps this, like many other things, was just something he made up.
3 One of McKuen’s favorite claims was that of having been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music in 1974. This intrigued me so much that I contacted both the Pulitzer committee and the Pulitzer archives at Columbia to confirm it. What they both stated was that prior to 1980, when the Pulitzer Prize adopted its current nomenclature of winners, finalists, and entrants, the submission process for the Music prize was essentially open. All entrants were considered “nominees” and all nominees (there were 40 in 1974) received a certificate. It is quite possible that McKuen or someone working for him submitted the nomination. That didn’t keep him from frequently mentioning the nomination for years thereafter.
4 After reading dozens of McKuen’s newspaper interviews, I strongly suspect the piece he was referring to was … an interview with Rod McKuen.
5 McKuen said he’d spent months traveling around the country as research. “I took a lot of odd jobs” taxi driver, hot dog seller, ice cream seller, mine worker, garbage man. “I was found out in Florida and it got on the front page of the Miami Herald that I was a Miami garbage collector for a week.” In fact, no such story appeared. Instead, on December 18, 1974, a story appeared on page 2 of the Herald that reported that “Millionaire poet Rod McKuen worked in Miami as a garbageman sometime in the last three months as research for a new book.” He said it was the toughest job he’d ever done. “I was aching everywhere. I don’t know what they put in those cans. It must be cement bricks.” The story also added bartender and soda jerk to the list of his odd jobs. The source for the story? Rod McKuen.
6 I’m told that people shopped at Tower Records during daylight hours, but I have no personal experience of this and have to discount it as myth.
Dust jacket for 1935 edition of Waiting for Nothing by Tom Kromer.
A few days ago, the Glasgow-based independent publisher the Common Breath released their first reissue title, bringing the Great Depression classic of homelessness, Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing, back to print for the first time since 1986. Though it’s mostly been out of print since its first publication in 1935, Waiting for Nothing was been quietly influencing generations of writers from Hubert Selby to Breece D’J Pancake to James Kelman with its hard-nosed prose, impressionistic narrative, and grim, survivalist outlook.
But who was Tom Kromer? Facts about him are scarce to start with and he didn’t help much when he was asked to contribute an autobiographical note for the British edition of Waiting for Nothing:
I am twenty-eight years old, and was born and attended school in Huntington, W. Va. My people were working people. My father started to work in a coal-mine when he was eight years old. Later, he became a glass blower, and unable to afford medical treatment, died of cancer at the age of forty-four. There were five children and I was the oldest. My mother took my father’s place in the factory. My father’s father was crushed to death in a coal-mine. My father never hoped for anything better in this life than a job, and never worried about anything else but losing it. My mother never wanted anything else than that the kids get an education so that they wouldn’t have to worry about the factory closing down.
Owens Glass Factory #2, Huntington, West Virginia.
Kromer glosses over the specific. He was born in Huntington in October 1906, the son of Michael Albert Kromer, who’d emigrated from Russia in 1891 to join his father at a coal mine in Pennsylvania, and Grace Thornburg, a West Virginia native. Bert Kromer spent most of his working life in one of the big glass and bottle factories in northern West Virginia. The Kromers lived in several different towns while Tom was growing up, but settled in Huntington, where his father went to work at the Owens Glass Factory. In the 1920 census, Bert Kromer’s occupation was listed as glass-blower. Coming after years of working in coal mines as a boy, it was a job that likely contributed to his early death from lung cancer.
Kromer mentioned having three years of college but didn’t identify the school as Marshall University there in Huntington (later portrayed in the movie We Are Marshall). He wrote, “I taught for two years in mountain schools in West Virginia,” but didn’t say that he’d left when two of his favorite professors were fired after they protested the school’s banning of Mencken’s American Mercury magazine for its printing an article about a Missouri prostitute nicknamed “Hatrack.” Nor that he took the schoolteaching job to support his family after his father’s death in 1926.
Kromer returned to Marshall in the fall of 1928 and got his first taste of life “on the fritz,” as he put it, on an assignment for the Huntington Herald-Dispatch soon after. As an experiment, the paper sent him out, dressed in shabby clothes, onto the streets of Huntington to beg for change. “Pity the Poor Panhandler; $2 An Hour is All He Gets,” read the resulting article. It may have given Kromer a false sense of the ease with which one could live life on the bum: in hindsight, $2 an hour would seem a a fortune in the eyes of the narrator of Waiting for Nothing.
A month or so later, Kromer ran out of money to keep attending Marshall and decided to head to Kansas in search of farm work. He would spent most of the next five years on the road. As he wrote in his autobiographical note,
My intentions were to hitch-hike, and after hiking all day without a lift, a freight train pulled to a stop Beside the road. I crawled into a hox car. i never again voluntarily took up the responsibilities of hitch-hiking, but I always aligned my interests with the interests of the railroad companies. They generally got me where I wanted to go, which was never more definite than “east” or “west.”
The big Kansas farmers had already mechanized their operations, so there was no work to be had. “I got my first taste of men trying to buck a machine,” he later wrote. Kromer headed home after five months with little money and many hungry days. But things were just as bad in Huntington and he soon headed out again.
Waiting for Nothing is a lightly-fictionalized distillation of Kromer’s years as a hobo. He claimed that, “Parts of the book were scrawled on Bull Durham papers in box cars, margins of religious tracts in a hundred missions, jails, one prison, railroad sand-houses, flop-houses, and on a few memorable occasions actually pecked out with my two index fingers on an honest-to-God typewriter.” In fact, most of it was probably written in a notebook in the relative comfort of Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps in California between mid-1933 and mid-1934.
The Oro Plata, Murphy’s Camp, California (1934), by Marcy Woods.
At one of these camps near Murphy’s Camp in the Sierra Nevadas, he met the painter Marcy Woods. Kromer complained to Woods that he’d sent his manuscript, then titled “Three Hots and a Flop”, to several publishers with no luck. Woods’ wife Hazel was acquainted with the muckracking journalist Lincoln Steffens, who’d retired near the Woods’ home in Carmel, California, and offered to send the book to Steffens. Steffens returned the book after a few days with an enthusiastic note: “This story, this portrait of a ‘stiff’ is important. I sat up late nights reading it and I knew I was getting something I had never ‘got’ before: realism to the nth degree.” Encouraged by this response, Kromer sent the book to John Steinbeck’s first publisher, Covici-Friede. They rejected it.
Kromer wrote to Steffens again, asking for advice on hiring a literary agent. Steffens recommended Maxim Lieber, then the champion of many of the most promising radical writers in America: Erskine Caldwell, Katherine Anne Porter, Josephine Herbst, Albert Maltz, Albert Halper, James T. Farrell, Nathanael West, and Langston Hughes. Lieber submitted the book to Alfred A. Knopf, who’d begun to publish such writers in the hard-boiled style as Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain. Knopf quickly bought the book and included it on their Spring 1935 list as “Title not announced.” Knopf did not care for “Three Hots and a Flop.”
By then, Kromer had left the CCC and taken a job at the Harvard Book Store in Stockton. One of the biggest risks of life on the road — along with getting beaten up by railroad bulls and falling off a train — was tuberculosis, and Kromer’s health could no longer stand up to the physical demands of the CCC work. The book store hosted a signing for Kromer when Waiting for Nothing came out in early 1935.
Harvard Book Store ad for Waiting for Nothing.
Waiting for Nothing came out at a busy time for the book reviewing business. It was competing with the likes of Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, Faulkner’s Pylon, Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat, Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart, and Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet. And it wasn’t the first novel about life “on the fritz.” Edward Newhouse’s You Can’t Sleep Here, which was based on Newhouse’s experience of unemployment and homelessness in New York City, came out the year before and a few months later, Edward Anderson’sHungry Men was instantly compared with Waiting for Nothing.
Yet Waiting for Nothing still stood out from its competition. It’s easy to imagine Kromer’s fingers flying on a typewriter’s keys: his prose has the same striking staccato pace:
It is night. I am walking along this dark street, when my foot hits a stick. I reach down and pick it up. I finger it. It is a good stick, a heavy stick. One sock from it would lay a man out. It wouldn’t kill him, but it would lay him out. I plan. Hit him where the crease is in his hat, hard, I tell myself, but not too hard. I do not want his head to hit the concrete. It might kill him. I do not want to kill him. I will catch him as he falls. I can frisk him in a minute. I will pull him over in the shadows and walk off. I will not run. I will walk.
Many, including Kromer, spotted the influence of Hemingway, especially his first short story collection In Our Time. But it’s also very close to this sample from a young hobo’s diary, quoted in a 1934 book titled Boy and Girl Tramps of America, a factual account by Thomas Minehan published in 1934:
Sept. 11. Villa Grove. Rode with truck. Good town. Raining when I hit first house. Woman gave me three eggs, two big pieces of meat. Cream and corn flakes, cookies, jell and all the coffee I want. Ask lots of questions. Man in house, too. He gives me a dime when I go. Made thirty cents hitting stem. A junction. Took train. Friendly. Good for supper and that’s all.
Sept. 12. Shelbyville. Cop picked me up. Sent to jail, had to work two hours for dinner and supper. Stayed in jail all night. Six guys of us. N. G. Got out before breakfast. Walked with Shorty to Baxter. Small burg. N. G. Rode with farmer to Clarksburg. N. G. Got handout from farm girl, bacon and bread. Me and Shorty came back to ask for drink of water and she says, “Sic ’em,” to big gray dog. Dog jumped at Shorty, but Shorty socks it. I gets a club. Dog chases us a mile until we get to gravel and a lot of bricks. Boy did we give it to him then.
One critic later groused that “the ‘Tom Kromer’ of the book is a craftily simple version of the Tom Kromer who wrote it: the former doesn’t know where is next meal is coming from, but the latter knew to tell it like A Farewell to Arms.” And while it’s true that Kromer was better educated than the average hobo, his experience and hardened attitudes rang true to the life Minehan encountered when he accompanied one of his subjects through a week on the skids:
Large sewer rats scurry across the floor, rustling the newspapers, foraging in the filth. Drunks stagger in, miss the top step in the darkness, and stumble to the bottom. They call and curse at each other, fight, vomit, urinate in the darkness. Some groan. Many hiccup. One sings a ribald ballad, tuneless and wheezy. And by my side a sixteen-year-old boy coughs, continually, without waking. Deep and chesty is the cough. Between coughs, I can hear his labored breathing. A rattle comes from his throat. The rattle becomes deeper, more difficult. Breath wheezes, a pause. And cough, cough, cough, until the tubes are clear, and the boy can breathe again.
For Kromer, rats carried a special terror:
I listen to these rats that rustle across the floor. I pull this sack off my face and strain my eyes through the blackness. I am afraid of rats. Once in a jungle I awoke with two on my face. Since then I dream of rats that are as big as cats, who sit on my face and gnaw at my nose and eyes. I cannot see them. It is too dark. I cannot lie here and wait with my heart thumping against my ribs like this. I cannot lie here and listen to them patter across the floor, and me not able to see them.
It’s hard to believe that Orwell hadn’t taken some of his inspiration for Winston Smith’s fear of rats in 1984 from Waiting for Nothing.
A few months after the US publication, Constable published Waiting for Nothing in England. Theodore Dreiser was enlisted to write an introduction, which was enthusiastic, if in Dreiser’s uniquely ham-fisted and occasionally incoherent way. In the 1986 University of Georgia edition of Waiting for Nothing, which also includes most of Kromer’s other writings, Arthur D. Casciato wrote, “In the entire introduction, only Dreiser’s first two sentences really make sense: ‘This book needs no introduction or foreword,’ he writes. ‘It is its own introduction or foreword.’ Dreiser probably should have left it at that.”
The English edition was, however, missing an entire chapter. In Chapter 4 in the original, the narrator meets and goes home with a homosexual known as “Mrs. Carter” simply to get a warm meal. Once at Mrs. Carter’s, he faces the facts of his situation:
I will have to go to bed some time. This queer will stay awake until I do go to bed. What the hell? A guy has got to eat, and what is more, he has got to flop.
“Sure,” I say, “I am ready for the hay.”
You can always depend on a stiff having to pay for what he gets. I pull off my clothes and crawl into bed.
Given the laws in England at the time, however, Constable was in a quandary. “An experienced member of the book trade had sent us a warning,” they wrote in an insert that took the place of Chapter 4, “and we must decide whether, under existing conditions in this country, a true incident which could be publicly described in America was one which might not be publicly described in England.” It might not, Constable decided.
We have cut out Chapter IV entirely — cut it out with reluctance and with shame, merely consoling ourselves with the thought that fortunately the continuity of the book is in no way affected. Were we wrong to cut it out? No one can possibly say. Would we have been guilty of corrupting youth had we left it in? Once again, no one — in advance — has the smallest idea. That is how things are in England these days; and that is why Waiting for Nothing appears in England in an emasculated form.
On the strength of his five years on the road and the reviews of Waiting for Nothing, Kromer felt he’d earned the right to sit in judgment of those who would write about the hobo life. His contempt for Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men when he reviewed the book for The New Masses is unmuted:
You will see no Jesus Christ looks in the eyes of Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men, no soup-lines that stretch for a block and never start moving, no derelicts dying of malnutrition on top of lice-filled three-decker bunks while the mission sign outside flashes “Jesus Saves” on and of? in the dark. In a word, you find no Hungry Men. When one of Mr. Anderson’s puppets gets a gnawing in the pit of his guts, he takes him up to a back door or a restaurant and feeds him. When his hero is mooning on the waterfront over a respectable two-bit whore that he is in love with, you will never guess what happens — the Communist in the book hands him fifty bucks and says here take this dough, I’ll not be needing it and make a home for the gal.
“Perhaps Mr. Anderson has never seen a bunch of desperately hungry men,” Kromer speculated.
Soon after Waiting for Nothing, however, Kromer found that even the book store work was too much for him. He headed again back to West Virginia, where one of his classmates from Marshall, Thomas Donnelly, convinced him to come to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Donnelly was taking a teaching post at the University of New Mexico starting that fall, working for their former Marshall professor Arthur S. White. His two Marshall acquaintances arranged a scholarship for Kromer to study journalism. In the report of literary conference in July 1936, Kromer was identified as “a health seeker and student living in Albuquerque.” Not long after he started classes, he began coughing up blood and was admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital for treatment.
At St. Joseph’s Hospital, Kromer met Jeannette (Janet) Smith, a Vassar graduate who was being treated for rheumatic heart disease. Janet had been working in New Mexico for the Federal Writers Project and teaching at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school near Santa Fe. The two decided to get married, but postponed the wedding until Kromer was discharged from the Sunnyside Sanitorium where he’d been transferred. Janet got a job writing for the Albuquerque Tribune and Kromer sent off reviews for The New Masses and articles for The Pacific Weekly, a liberal magazine recently started by Steffens and his wife, Ella Winters. He applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship but was turned down. He also began work on a new novel titled Michael Kohler based on his grandfather’s life as a coal miner.
And that was essentially the end of Tom Kromer’s career as a writer. Janet and Tom Kromer married in December 1936. His last article, “A Glass Worker Dies,” based on his father’s death, appeared in The Pacific Weekly the same month. Tom never finished Michael Kohler.
The Kromer House, 1968. Photo by Harvey Hoshour.
In 1937, the Kromers bought a lot in Alameda, on the north side of Albuquerque, where they constructed an adobe house still known as “the Kromer House.” Janet became the editor of the Tribune’s Women’s Page and supported the couple until her death from lung cancer in 1960. According to at least one account, by the late 1940s, tuberculosis and alcohol abuse had turned Tom into a recluse. After the war, Janet established a chatty weekly advertising paper known as Janet Kromer’s Shopping Notes and there is a chance that Tom contributed some of its material. He was, in any case, the named party when an upset local Albuquerque TV personality sued Janet’s Shopping Notes for libel over a suggestion that she was pregnant and taking a beauty course when she was neither.
By the time the suit was dismissed by the New Mexico Supreme Court in 1964, Tom Kromer had left the state. He sold the Kromer House to Harvey Hoshour, an architect, who later reported that the place had fallen into serious disrepair. Hoshour and his wife restored the house and it’s now listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Kromer moved back to Huntington and took a room in the same house on 4th Street he’d left in 1929. He lived there, cared for by his sisters Emogene and Katherine, until he died in 1969. He was buried in a family plot alongside his parents.
I came across Andrew Graham — Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Graham, to give him his proper title — through his story collection Mostly Nasty (1961). I bought the book purely for its intriguing cover and lovely design, the pages filled with ornate and startling illustrations by Leonard Huskinson. Mostly Nasty reads a bit like a collection of after dinner tales told over a brandy in the comfortable leather chairs of a fine old London club — if the club included men like Roald Dahl or John Collier among its members. For there are streaks of Dahl’s delight in the absurdity of death and Collier’s spirit of jolly misanthropy. There are many deaths in its pages and most are fraught with ridiculousness.
On the other hand, Graham’s stories are told from the perspective of a man poised a rung or two above Dahl or Collier on the social ladder. He is not just familiar with fine country houses but able to spot the details that set a better one apart: “A particularly good set of busts of emperors looked down at us from the tops of the bookcases; firelight from a wood fire twinkled in the silver of the tea-tray; there was hot toast and farm butter and home-made black cherry jam; and a slight smell of vellum, Turkish tobacco and late roses.”
This is from “Dear George,” the story of a painfully well-mannered bachelor uncle who becomes the target of a thoroughly unpleasant nephew’s domestic terrorism. As George and the narrator settle down in the lounge for a bit of tea after their dusty journey, little Cedric launches his first raid: “He wore a Red Indian head-dress, he left the door open, he caught his foot in the wire of a standard lamp and brought it crashing to the ground, and, catching George (ever a slow-mover) unawares, seized hold of both ends of his moustache.” Too kind to heed the narrator’s advice “to give the child a sharp biff on the behind,” he suffers silently as Cedric attempts to extract every hair of George’s moustache by its root. “He must have suffered agony,” the narrator reflects. Little Cedric gets his comeuppance in the end, though, in a shocking if satisfyingly permanent way.
Cedric attacks George. Illustration by Leonard Huskinson from Mostly Nasty by Andrew Graham
Graham’s elevated position has its disadvantages, though. His sense of fitness restrains him from taking quite the same evil relish in awful outcomes as a Dahl or Collier. This is not black humor but rather an elegantly muted shade of grey. Writing after two world wars — the latter in which Graham fought as a tank commander — where Britain took more than its fair share of losses, he is fully aware that social changes are afoot, but not yet decided whether he agrees with them:
Nowadays one is so accustomed to old ladies of eighty who do their own housework, bumble about the neighbourhood in Morris 10s, and spend the evening of life baby-sitting, that it was a rare pleasure, like sampling a wine of ancient vintage, to shake the be-ringed hand of this splendid old number, complete with curly fringe of false hair (weren’t they called “transformations”?), lace, altar-frontal held up round the neck by whalebone, locket on black watered-silk ribbon, and lace cuffs: complete, in fact, with all those trimmings which come in so handy if you happen to have a lady’s maid, but which only confuse the issue if you’re doing the washing-up
In structure, Graham’s stories betray a strong grounding in the kind of set-up/punchline structure first mastered by Edgar Allan Poe and then used for the next 100 years by writers like O. Henry and Frank Stockton. If you’re looking for that twist designed to provoke a burst of laughter or gasp of disbelief, read the first paragraph or two then skip to the last.
But what really matters here is the teller, not the tale. Graham is a man of the world, but not a man full of himself. Stick with him for the details, not the drama. If Graham’s mostly nasty tales seem to have had their cutting edges dulled a bit, it’s all in the interest of good taste. “Assuming one’s critical faculties were just a teeny-weeny bit numbed by a glass or two of really good wine,” one reviewer wrote, “these stories would be quite enjoyable.”
Graham would have been your man if really good wine was what you were looking for. He’d not only savored his fair share of the stuff in post-war military liaison posts, he spent much of the 1960s as the Times own wine correspondent — back in the days when the only wines considered worth drinking came from France bearing an appellation d’origine contrôlée. He got his start as a scribbler with a short memoir of his tour as the British Military Attaché in Saigon from 1952 to 1954 titled Interval in Indo-China (1956). The Telegraph’s reviewer praised Graham for his “light, conversational style that is often very amusing,” but I suspect his urbane and ironic account of his experiences now seems a bit ill-timed given what came after.
His skills as a raconteur, however, made him an exemplary clubman. I haven’t been able to track down a list of his memberships, but according to knowledgeable sources, it was the Conservative Club at 74 Saint James’s Street that inspired his next book, The Club (1957). Although written as a novel with a thin plot centered on the attempt of a nouveau riche manufacturer to gain access to the True Blue Club’s auspices ranks, The Club was closer to an anthropological study than a work of fiction. That is, if the anthropologist took a wicked delight in reporting the worst of his subject’s manners and customs.
Reviewers with some experience of club life took particular pleasure in reading the book. John Betjeman wrote that, “What makes this book so very well worth reading is its author’s accurate knowledge of elderly men and how much more maliciously they gossip about one another than women.” Alan Ross in the TLS found it “full of the most delicately observed character studies, of bores, complainers, retired soldiers, country gentlemen, business magnates, upstart peers, and the hereditary rich.”
One reviewer called it “a plum-cake of a book,” but praised Graham for his restraint: “Yet the joke is not overdone.” And indeed, some thought Graham’s instinct not too cut too deeply laudable. “There have been other books about the malice of men but few which so well describe their pathos,” Betjeman wrote, and Maurice Richardson considered that Graham had hit “the correct note of poignancy, so integral a part of club atmosphere which can turn the most divergent types of human frailty into desirable members of society.”
Graham returned to Southeast Asia for his second novel, A Foreign Affair (1958). Set on a fictional island split between two states in uneasy and impermanent truce — the revolutionary Cheo Republic in the north and Westward-leaning but charmingly corrupt kingdom of Parasang in the south (reminder you of any place?) — A Foreign Affair is a comedy soaked in a genial sort of Foreign Office snobbery. Coups, crises, and conflicts may come and go, but the first priority of the British Ambassador is not to allow matters to upset the peace of a predictable daily routine.
When a crisis does arise, however, the Westerners are prepared to respond: “The Englishwomen of Alassar, with their unrivalled knowledge of auxiliary services in time of war, set about imparting their skills in First Aid, Fire Watching, Ambulance-driving and the making of hot sweet tea, to their Eastern sisters.” The wife of the French ambassador offers her own form of aid: instruction “in that essential weapon in the armoury of modern French healing, the hypodermic syringe.” For the most part, however, life in Parasang is one of late mornings, sleepy afternoons, and long evening cocktail hours. The primary duties of the Parasang Army are ceremonial:
For this they had left their humble homes in the ricefields; for this they had learnt to bear without blubbing the acute pain of wearing army boots and the relatively minor discomfort and airlessness of battledress; for this they had endured long hot afternoons on the barrack square, being screamed at by bull-chested sergeant majors, while their less patriotic brothers dozed till the evening shadows fell; for this they had sloped, ordered, presented, shouldered and trailed their arms, hitting the great unwieldy rifles till, if necessary, their hands bled. This, they felt — one glance of royal recognition — this was It.
And, considering that the Army was not normally called upon to do much else throughout the year, they were not far wrong in their belief.
Graham clearly drew upon his time as a military attaché in Vietnam for the material in A Foreign Affair, but he showed himself more than willing to make a joke at his own expense. Reporting the responses around the world to one of Parasang’s occasional coups, he notes that, “One enterprising London bookseller arranged a window display of an ill-informed and now out-of-date little book called Interval in Parasang, written some years before by a junior officer with literary ambitions who had served at Alassar under the Mandate.
Graham’s next book, Love for a King (1959), is a lightweight bit of royalist nostalgia set in the early 20th century somewhere along the Adriatic in the kingdom of Quarankol. The love referred to in the title is not romantic but patriotic. Though the King of Quarankol is aging, ill, and somewhat fuzzy-minded, the people know he has only the best intentions. Unlike the Parasangians in A Foreign Affair, the people of Quarankol long for a peaceful transition of power, even if the choice of successors offers slim pickings. Graham tells a good-hearted but forgettable little fairy tale, and the most noteworthy aspect of the book may be the chapter heading illustrations by William McLaren.
Illustration by William McLaren, from Love for a King by Andrew Graham
Graham took a break from fiction in the early 1960s, probably due to elbow strain incurred through his work on the wine circuit for the Times. He knew he had a sweet deal, however, and seems not to have indulged in unnecessary flourishes of wine snobbery. Bevis Hillier, John Betjeman’s authorized biographer and an expert on English ceramics, for example, recalled sitting next to Graham at a fancy lunch and asking his opinion of the host’s choices in wines:
“You’re meant to know something about pottery and porcelain, aren’t you?” Graham replied. “How would you like it, if every lunch you went to, you were asked to turn the soup-plate upside down and pronounce on the quality of the ware? Well, that’s the sort of thing that happens to me with wine. So I’m having beer instead.”
Having poked fun at the ways of London clubs and the Foreign Office, it was only natural that Graham would turn in his next books to a subject he knew best: the Army. He made an exception, however, and took time to write a straightforward history of the regiment he served with through most of the War. Sharpshooters at War (1965) was an account of the wartime exploits of the 3rd, the 4th and the 3rd/4th County of London Yeomanry (the 3rd and the 4th were combined into the 3rd/4th after D-Day — who says the military can’t be efficient?).
He then spun the table and in The Regiment (1967), Graham told the story of an earnest young historian’s struggle to extract a serious history from the records of a thoroughly dishonorable unit, Queen Adelaide’s Imperial Heavy Infantry. Vernon Scannell, who’d served as an enlisted man at El Alamein and spent much of his war years as a prisoner in military jails for desertion, didn’t think much of the book: “Most of the members of the regiment have comic names, long and difficult if they are officers, but Meagre and Lumber if they are Other Ranks. There are some jokes about bed-wetting, boils on the bottom, and homosexuality.” Simon Raven, on the other hand, who’d resigned his commission for “conduct unbecoming”, however, enjoyed the richness of Graham’s insider knowledge, offering as an illustration his translation of one particularly dusty dispatch:
The Original Z Coy [Company], till recently out of luck, has made a successful foray on a hide-out in its area and captured several suspected terrorists. Well done, Z Coy; keep it up. But all work and no play makes Jack a dull soldier, so we are happy to say that they are showing their usual resource in finding off-duty recreations. A party from the Coy recently came down to the Battalion HQ on a short visit for administrative purposes, and impressed all by their cheeriness.
Translated into plain English Z Coy, after months of incompetence, accidentally picked up two drunk natives in a ditch. Both were subsequently released, as being entirely harmless, by a contemptuous Inspector of Police. Meanwhile, native women were enticed into the Coy camp on numerous occasions and gave 37 soldiers clap. There were sent down to be treated by the MO at Battalion HQ and were delighted to get shot of their tedious duties.
Graham had such a good time with the book that he persuaded Leo Cooper, whose imprint published a long series of histories known as the Famous Regiments, to allow him to write a pastiche of the genre, The Queen’s Malabars (1970), subtitled “A Not-So-Famous Regiment.” The Queen’s Malabars were, if possible, even more disreputable than Queen Adelaide’s Heavy Infantry, having spent much of their time being shuttled off to places where they could be kept at a safe distance from anything remotely resembling armed conflict.
Graham’s books are all out of print now, but The Club, The Regiment, and The Queen’s Malabars get passed around among small circles of admiring readers. None of his books will go down in literary history, but he can always be relied upon for a good yarn and a good laugh — especially if accompanied by a good stiff drink within easy reach. And I have to admire the good nature of any author who would allow his illustrator to place his head on a plate as in this Leonard Huskinson illustration from Mostly Nasty.
Andrew Graham’s head on a plate. Endispiece illustration by Leonard Huskinson, from Mostly Nasty.
John Timbs, watercolor by Thomas John Gullick (1855), from the National Portrait Gallery
If I live to be 100, I vow to spend at least one of my remaining years compiling a “Best Of” compilation from the God-knows-how-many compilations assembled by John Timbs, perhaps the greatest of all compilers. We’ve all heard of Dickens and the many lesser ranks of Victorian writers who industriously cranked out three-volume novels at rates that competed with the fearsome cotton mills of the North, but poor John Timbs was forgotten not long after his body was placed in a pauper’s grave.
Timbs worked to improve people like himself. His father was a warehouseman who managed to pull together enough money to send his son to New Marlows, a school run by Rev. Joseph Hamilton and his brother Jeremiah Hamilton. There, he discovered his talent and put it to quick use, writing by hand a school newspaper that was passed among his classmates. He was then apprenticed to a chemist and printer in Dorking, where he met Sir Richard Phillips. Phillips had just published his little travel guide Morning’s Walk from London to Kew.
In the preface to that book, Phillips apologized for writing a guide to such a mundane journey, “which thousands can daily examine after him,” and for relying solely on the evidence of his own senses and deductions of reason.” Because of this, he wrote, “He therefore entertains very serious doubts whether his work will be acceptable to those LEARNED PROFESSORS in Universities” or “STATESMEN who consider the will of princes as standards of wisdom” or “ECONOMISTS who do not consider individual happiness to be the primary object of their calculations” or a dozen other types such as TOPOGRAPHERS, BIBLIOMANIACS, and LEARNED PHILOLOGISTS. Instead, he wrote for “AMATEURS of general Literature,” those “free and honest searchers after MORAL, POLITICAL, and NATURAL TRUTH.”
This was a man after Timbs’s heart and mind. Phillips encouraged the young man to contribute to his Monthly Magazine. Perhaps inspired by Phillips’ book, Timbs soon wrote his first book, A Picturesque Promenade round Dorking, in Surrey in 1823. Timbs then moved to London to work for Phillips and started reading voraciously. He quickly produced Laconics, the first of what would become a lifetime’s production of books in which he compiled, accumulated, integrated, and occasionally distilled what he’d read.
Timbs spent the best part of a busy life, scissors in hand, making ‘snippets.’ Such of these as could not be used up in The Mirror were carefully stores, and when later on he became sub-editor of the Illustrated London News and editor of the Year-Book of Facts, he profited by his opportunities to add largely to his collection. By-and-bay he classified his materials, and discovered that, by aid of a paste brush and a few strokes of the pen, he could instruct a lazy public respecting Things not generally known, explain Popular Errors, and provide Something for Everybody, and that he had, moreover, amassed a perfect store of Curiosities of science, history, and other subjects of general interest, wherein people partial to snippets might positively revel.
There was no love lost between Vizetelly and Timbs, whom he called “quintessentially a scissors and paste man” — which was at least better than his assessment of Timbs’ predecessor, Thomas Byerley: “a crapulent hack.” Vizetelly wrote that “the tinted tip of Timbs’s nose suggested that The Mirror editor was not averse to what is called the cheerful glass, and yet he developed into a singularly sour and cantankerous individual” and accused him of being a vicious gossip who “seemed to take especial delight in repeating all the spiteful tales he could pick up” — to which the reader is tempted to mutter, “Et tu, Brute?”
One wonders where Timbs found the time to indulge in gossip. He never married, socialized little, and seems to have spent most of his hours bent over his desk with stacks of books at his elbows. In a study of early Victorian editors that F. David Roberts published in the Victorian Periodicals Newsletter in 1971, he wrote that these men were marked by certain common characteristics: “One obvious one was that they could write. Most not only could write but had a passion to publish.” Of the 165 men covered in Roberts’s study, they averaged 9 books each (“considerably about the going average for academics today). Yet for Roberts, these men “were pikers compared to Mr. John Timbs,” whom he credited with 150 volumes.
Advertisement for John Timbs’s Knowledge for the People
His Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry (originally written by future Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald) gives a flavor of the range of Timbs’s production:
They include, on subjects of domestic interest, Family Manual (1831), Domestic Life in England (1835), and Pleasant Half-Hours for the Family Circle (1872), and, on scientific subjects, Popular Zoology (1834), Stories of Inventors and Discoverers (1859), Curiosities of Science (1860), and Wonderful Inventions: from the Mariner’s Compass to the Electric Telegraph Cable (1867). He also wrote on artistic and cultural matters works such as Painting Popularly Explained (jointly with Thomas John Gulick) (1859) and Manual for Art Students and Visitors to the Exhibitions (1862). Through his connection with The Harlequin he has been identified as the likely compiler (under the pseudonym Horace Foote) of the Companion to the Theatre and Manual of British Drama (1829), which contains much valuable information on London theatres of the period. On contemporary city life his works included Curiosities of London (1855), Club Life of London with Anecdotes (1865), Romance of London: Strange Stories, Scenes, and Persons (1865), and London and Westminster, City and Suburb (1867). He also published on subjects of biographical and historical interest, including Schooldays of Eminent Men (1858), Columbus (1863), Curiosities of History (1859), Anecdote Biography (1859–60), Anecdote Lives of Wits and Humourists (1862), Ancestral Stories and Traditions of Great Families (1869), and Abbeys, Castles and Ancient Halls of England and Wales (1869). He also edited Manuals of Utility (1847), the Percy Anecdotes (1869–70), and Pepys’s Memoirs (1871).
Not surprisingly, with such an output, quality often suffered. “Mr. Timbs has an inexhaustible supply of quaint stories,” one reviewer wrote, “but his critical judgment is not quite as good as his industry is formidable.” John Bull’s reviewer was critical of Timbs’ multi-volume Anecdote Biography, observing that “Biography is something more than a collection of anecdotes.” Timbs’s portraits, he found were “lifeless; they are models, not men”: “He has dressed up a variety of figures which would make the fortune of Madame Tussaud in a week.” A Spectator reviewer, a little more charitably, acknowledged that “His books are of a kind to which it is easier for a reader than a reviewer to do justice.” Many of his books were reprinted in America, where reviewers focused on the positives. A North American Review assessment of School Days of Eminent Men is typical, saying the book could be “commended as a handy manual, containing a great deal of curious information, told in a playful, conversational style.”
Indiscriminate accumulations of anecdotes and trivia can often contain gems among all the junk, and the chief reason to remember the work of John Timbs today are the nuggets you can usually find within a dozen or so pages of any of his books. Long before anyone came up with the idea of bathroom books, a Spectator reviewer identified the peculiar merit of Timbs’s books: “His readers, if they do not gain instruction, will be amused, provided that they are satisfied with a few pages at a time. Such a collection of wit and humour can only be digested at intervals.” Here is a tiny sample of the things you can learn from a few minutes spent — wherever you happen to choose — with John Timbs:
The Fitzwalters had, however, a stranger privilege than even this: they had the privilege of drowning traitors in the Thames. The “patient” was made fast to a pillar at Wood Wharf, and left there for the tide to flow twice over, and ebb twice from him, while the crowd looked on, and enjoyed the barbarous spectacle.
Peter the Great was a gourmand of the first magnitude. While in England, on his return from a visit to Portsmouth, the Czar and his party, twenty-one in number, stopped at Godalming, where they ate: at breakfast, half a sheep, a quarter of lamb, ten pullets, twelve chickens, seven dozen of eggs, and salad in proportion, and drank three quarts of brandy, and six quarts of mulled wine; at dinner, live ribs of beef, weight three stone; one sheep, fifty-six pounds; three quarters of lamb, a shoulder and loin of veal boiled, eight pullets, eight rabbits, two dozen and a half of sack, and one dozen of claret. This bill of fare is preserved in Ballard’s Collection, in the Bodleian Library, at Oxford.
The bone of the Lion’s fore-leg is of remarkable hardness, from its containing a greater quantity of phosphate of lime that is found in ordinary bones, so that it may resist the powerful contraction of the muscles. The texture of this bone is so compact that the substance will strike fire with steel. He has little sense of taste, his lingual or tongue-nerve not being larger than that of a middle-sized dog.
In the winter of 1835, Mr. W. H. White ascertained the temperature in the City to be 3 degrees higher than three miles south of London Bridge; and after the gas had been lighted in the City four or five hours the temperature increased full 3 degrees, thus making 6 degrees difference in the three miles.
When the Archduke of Spain was obliged to land at Weymouth, he was brought to the Sheriff of Dorset, and lived at Woolverton House. The Sheriff, not being able to speak in any language but “Dorset,” found it difficult to converse with the Archduke, and bethought him of a young kinsman, named Russell, who had been a factor in Spain, and sent for him. The young man made himself so agreeable to the Archduke that ho brought him to London, where the King took a fancy to him, and in time he became Duke of Bedford, and was the founder of the House of Russell.
In 1865, there died in Paris the dwarf Richebourg, who was an historical personage. Richebourg, who was only 60 centimètres high, was in his sixteenth year placed in the household of the Duchess of Orleans (the mother of King Louis-Philippe). He was often made useful for the transmission of dispatches. He was dressed up as a baby, and important State papers placed in his clothes, and thus he was able to effect a communication between Paris and the émigrés, which could hardly have taken place by any other means. The most suspicious of sans culottes never took it into his head to stop a nurse with a baby in her arms.
Timbs was given a pension as one of the “Poor Brethren” of the Charterhouse in 1871, but for some reason he resigned his place and died in poverty at 28 Canonbury Place, London, on 4 March 1875. “He died in harness,” reported The Times, “almost with his pen in his hand, after a life of more than 70 years, and a literary career extended over more than half a century.” The Times faintly praised his special talent: “Though not gifted with any great original powers he was one of the most industrious of men, and there was scarcely a magazine of the last quarter of a centure to which he was not at least an occasional contributor.” In reviewing Timbs’s English Eccentrics not long after his death, the Spectator noted somewhat wistfully, “This is, we suppose, the last work of an indefatigable compiler, who had a talent for finding odd things hidden away in odd corners, and presenting them for the amusement of readers.”
“Listen to me! Somebody please listen!” cries Henry Preston Standish, the hero of Herbert Clyde Lewis’s 1937 novel, Gentleman Overboard, as he struggles to stay afloat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, exhausted and past hope of rescue. “But of course nobody was there to listen,” Lewis wrote, “and Standish considered the lack of an audience the meanest trick of all.” Lewis died of a heart attack at the age of 41, broke, out of work and alone in the middle of New York City, a victim of Hollywood blacklisting, his three novels long out of print: a writer who’d lost his audience. No one came to rescue him. As long as a writer’s words are preserved, though, there is a chance of his work being rescued. In the case of Gentleman Overboard, it took over seventy years for someone to spot the book, lost in the ocean of forgotten books, and the rescuers came from three different continents. Lewis’s story of one man dying alone and forgotten is now being read by thousands who find it speaks to a sense of “shared loneliness.”
Born in Brooklyn in 1909, Lewis was the second son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His mother Clara came to the U.S. with her family in 1887 at the age of two. His father Hyman arrived a year later at the age of thirteen, apprenticed to work for his older brother Samuel as a tailor. By the time Herbert was born, the Lewises were living in the Brownsville neighborhood around Tompkins and Lafayette Avenues. The area was then the heart of the largest Jewish community outside Europe, the first stop for tens of thousands of like Lewis’s parents, immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe. Between 1890 and 1915, the number of Jews living in New York City jumped from under 100,000 to nearly one million. The name Lewis was Anglicized from Luria and Hyman and Clara helped ease their sons’ integration into American life by giving them solidly Anglo-Saxon names: Alfred Joseph, Herbert Clyde and Benjamin George.
For Herbert Clyde Lewis, Brownsville was the quintessential American melting pot — at least in hindsight. In 1943, he wrote an article titled “Back Home” for The Los Angeles Times about visiting his boyhood streets for the first time in twenty years. “As I walked slowly around the block and let the memories flood back,” he wrote, “it seemed to me that my old neighborhood was a miracle—the greatest miracle that had ever visited the earth. Here, for the first time, people came from all the corners of Europe, the Near East and China — and lived side by side in close quarters and did not cut each other’s throats.” There was something in the air, he believed, “that made us feel maybe the other fellow’s beliefs and background were all right too.”
However rosy Lewis’s memories of his boyhood in Brownsville may have been, he left home early and quickly established what became a lifelong pattern of short stays and frequent moves. He quit high school at the age of sixteen, worked a variety of jobs with local newspapers, briefly attended both New York University and the College of the City of New York (finding “neither institution suited him”), then spent the winter of 1929-1930 in Paris. He returned to America in March 1930, took a job as a sports reporter in Newark, New Jersey, then moved nearly halfway across the world to Shanghai, China. He spent the next two years there working as a reporter for The China Press and The Shanghai Evening Post.
Herbert Clyde Lewis in his early 20s, courtesy of Michael Lewis
Living in China may have satisfied his appetite for travel at first. In early 1933, Lewis returned to New York, took a job with The New York World Telegram, switched to The New York Journal American, got married, and rented an apartment in Manhattan — one of the few times he kept the same address for longer than a year. His time in China provided the material for his first ventures into fiction, which were short but action-packed. “Tibetan Image,” for example, tells of fortune hunters forced to abandon a million dollars’ worth of silver fox pelts in the Gobi Desert when they are attacked by a pack of man-eating dogs. It appeared in Argosy magazine in November 1935 and was followed by others full of stereotypes of enigmatic, slightly sinister Chinese. He also tried to his hand at writing for the stage, collaborating with a former reporter, Louis Weitzenkorn, on “Name Your Poison.” In the play, a group of petty crooks take out a life insurance policy on a homeless derelict and then attempt — unsuccessfully — to kill him through a series of “accidents.” The show opened for a pre-Broadway run in late January 1936 and closed after six performances. The play needed “repairs” was the only explanation offered by its producer, who let his option lapse a few months later.
Although Lewis claimed he was happy with his job at the Journal American, a certain discontent with comfortable situations seems to have been part of his nature. As he later told Newsweek magazine, the idea for his first novel, Gentleman Overboard, came to him as he stood on the roof on his apartment in Greenwich Village one evening in late 1936. Lewis looked down on the street below and considered what would happen if he fell: “How would a man bridge that dizzy mental gap between the security under his feet and that world ‘down there’?” He decided to write a story to find out. To emphasize that mental gap, he chose as the subject of his experiment not an itinerant reporter like himself but with a man whose very being embodies security.
Henry Preston Standish, the gentleman of Gentleman Overboard, is as solidly fixed to the bedrock of the American establishment as a man could be. His family name evokes the English man of arms who sailed with the first Pilgrims on the Mayflower, the subject of “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem memorized by generations of schoolchildren. Graduate of Yale, partner in a Wall Street investment bank, member of the Finance Club, Athletic Club and Weebonnick Golf Club, owner of a comfortable apartment on the Upper West Side, faithful husband and loving father of two, Standish is the definition of a solid citizen. “He drank moderately, smoked moderately, and made love moderately; in fact, Standish was one of the world’s most boring men.” When Standish contemplates the prospect of a world without him, he thinks with regret that “New York City would be dotted with spaces that could never be filled by anyone but the real Henry Preston Standish.”
And yet, like Lewis, Standish feels an irresistible urge to leave and find something that was missing at home. In Standish’s case, the impulse hits him out of nowhere. One day, sitting in his office, he “suddenly found himself assailed by a vague unrest.” He feels compelled to get up, leave his office, and take a walk along the Manhattan waterfront in Battery Park. As he looks out at the water, “Forces beyond his control grasped him and shook him by the shoulders, whispering between clenched teeth: ‘You must go away from here; you must go away!’”
Standish does not understand this impulse. “There was no sane reason why he must go away; everything was in its proper place in his life.” At the same time, his instincts tell him “that he never would be able to breathe freely again unless he went far away.” Standish wasn’t the first character in American literature to feel this urge to escape. Fifty years before Gentleman Overboard, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn lit out for the Indian Territory “because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it.” Perhaps what Lewis called “security” was just another name for Huck Finn’s “sivilization.”
But when Standish sees the last sight of New York slip over the horizon as he sails away on a cruise through the Panama Canal to California, he feels as if “all his weariness, all his doubts and fears, vanished magically into the sea.” In California, the sense of relief continues. Standish discovers “a certain zest to things now that he had not experienced back home before; all his sensations were intensified.” He decides to keep going, to take another cruise, this time to Honolulu. “Why, Henry?” his wife begs when Standish calls to break the news. “I don’t know,” he replies. Even after he reaches Hawaii, he delays his return, exchanging his ticket back to San Francisco for a berth on the Arabella, a freighter taking a leisurely three-week voyage from Honolulu to Panama.
Lewis then sets his experiment in motion. Early one morning, while most on the ship are asleep and Panama still at least ten days away, Standish slips on a spot of grease while strolling on deck and falls overboard. Lewis has put his subject about as far away from the security of a comfortable life in New York City as one can get — two thousand miles from Panama, three thousand miles from Hawaii, along an infrequently-traveled route. Even here, though, conventions manage to reach out and control Standish. After he surfaces, when there is still a chance of his being heard by someone on the Arabella, he finds himself “doomed by his breeding”: “The Standishes were not shouters; three generations of gentlemen had changed the trumpet in the early Standish larynx to a dulcet violoncello.” Standish hesitates to cry out and the Arabella steams away, its crew and other passengers oblivious to his plight. Another twelve hours pass before his absence is confirmed—and, in a cruel irony foreshadowing Lewis’s own death, some onboard conclude that Standish’s accident was, in fact, suicide.
With cool precision, Lewis peels back the layers of “sivilization” as the hours pass and his subject tries to stay afloat, waiting to be rescued. Standish kicks off his shoes, then bit by bit removes his clothes, until he is naked, his eyes and lips scorched by the sun. At first, he feels embarrassed at making the Arabella turn around and rescue him; then pride in his “tremendous adventure” of staying alive until his rescue; and finally, when he realizes there is no hope, of regret. “And with each thought a pang came to his heart that had shattered, a pang of regret that he could not go on like other men having new extraordinary experiences day after day.” Extraordinary experiences like his heart “having gone on beating thirty-five years without once stopping”; like never having gone hungry; like having been given everything he had ever desired. In the end, “there is one desire that will not be satisfied”: to live.
When Lewis finished writing Gentleman Overboard, his own situation was precarious. He’d been living beyond his means, borrowing money and falling months behind in his rent. Just weeks before Viking published Gentleman in May 1937, Lewis declared bankruptcy with debts of $3,100—over a year’s income for a newspaperman—and “no assets, except possible royalties” from the book. It would not be the last time that Lewis would find himself flat broke. Reviews of Gentleman Overboard began appearing soon after—the first on May 23 in The New York Times, the same paper in which his bankruptcy notice had appeared. Reviewer Charles Poore called the book “entertaining” and “a flight of fancy,” but sensed Lewis’s underlying design: “Standish seems to be undergoing an experiment rather than an experience.”
The book’s brevity seems to have led many reviewers to consider it insubstantial. “It is a good enough book of its kind, but it is one of those stories that might have been a masterpiece and is by no means one,” William Rose Benet wrote in The Saturday Review. Only Arnold Palmer, reviewing the British edition published by Victor Gollancz in the magazine Britannia and Eve, saw the book’s length as a virtue: “He has told, with unusual skill and intensity, a story which ninety-nine writers in a hundred would have ruined by expanding into a full-length novel or compressing to the requirements of a magazine editor.” Evelyn Waugh on the other hand, writing in Time and Tide, thought it wasn’t short enough: “In spite of its brevity it is too long; a Frenchman could have told the story in 50 pages.” Viking issued a second printing; Gollancz did not.
Hollywood came to Lewis’s rescue. In August 1937, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Metro Goldwyn Mayer had signed Lewis as a “term writer” — a staff writer with a contract for a term, usually six months at the then-lucrative salary of $250 a week. Lewis, his wife Gita and their infant son Michael headed for California, arriving in early September “in our original protoplasmic state,” as he wrote his brother Ben (on MGM stationery). By Christmas, Lewis could report that he was busy working on a remake of the silent movie Tell It to the Marines and expected to “be here for a long time.”
He was still struggling to pay off his debts, though. He wrote Ben that people were “pressing me for debts and making my life miserable by threatening to sue me and attach my salary.” “All the other writers live in big houses and entertain,” he complained, “and we live in a shack.” MGM shelved the remake of Tell It to the Marines and Lewis’s contract was not extended. He was able to get a job with RKO, collaborating with Ian Hunter on a pair of B-movie musicals starring the boy tenor Bobby Breen, Fisherman’s Wharf and Escape to Paradise, both released in 1939 and both forgettable. By the end of that year, Lewis quit RKO and moved back to New York City with a job offer from the J. Walter Thompson advertisement agency and the manuscript of a second novel in hand.
Lewis’s anti-war sentiments had been stirred by the outbreak of war in Europe. In Spring Offensive, Peter Winston, a young American out of work, unhappy in love and at odds with the isolationist mood in America, concludes “There was no place for him in his own country” and travels to England to enlist in the British Army. When he completes his training and deploys to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force, however, he finds there is nothing to do in the months of stalemate known as the Phony War. He decides to make a small protest by sneaking into the no-man’s land between the Maginot and Siegfried lines and planting a packet of sweet pea seeds. As Winston crouches there planting his seeds in the early hours one morning, however, the Phony War comes to an abrupt and violent end. He finds himself stranded between the two sides, unarmed and with little chance of survival. Like Standish in his last moments, Winston loses all hope: “There was no one who wanted him anywhere.” A shell strikes and Winston is obliterated.
Lewis’s timing could not have been worse. Spring Offensive was published in late April 1940. Two weeks later, German panzers began rolling into Belgium, France and the Netherlands. By the end of June, France had capitulated. “For its own sake, this slender novel should have made its appearance well before the beginning of the actual Spring Offensive,” concluded The Saturday Review. Ralph Ellison predicted in his New Masses review, “little will be said of it these days in the capitalist press.” He was right: the book sank without a trace.
Lewis still had hopes for his career as a novelist, though. Convinced that his handicap had been trying to write while holding down a full-time job, he took his family, now including a baby girl, Jane, to quiet Provincetown, Massachusetts. There he wrote his third novel. Focused on the residents of a rooming house in Greenwich Village on Christmas Eve, Season’s Greetings is a love-hate letter to New York City. Lewis allowed himself a much richer prose style; the book is filled with vivid descriptions:
Slowly the noises of the city came to life, autos shifting gears, horns honking, doors slamming shut, trains rumbling underground, machines chugging and whirling, feet tramping, babies wailing, children shouting, peddlers calling their wares. Slowly the smells of the city came to life, coffee brewing, bacon frying, garbage stewing, chemicals churling in cauldrons.
Despite the vitality of Lewis’s writing, though, his subject once again was grim: “the problem of loneliness in a city of eight million people.” One of the residents is a German refugee without a single friend or acquaintance in his new country. Another is an embittered alcoholic, a third an old woman who has outlived her family. Although some of the residents do come together to create, for a few hours, a sort of community, Lewis refuses a happy ending for all. As his neighbours gather for an impromptu Christmas party, Mr. Kittredge, who began the day convinced “there was no purpose in living any longer,” finds that nothing in the course of the day has changed his mind. He quietly slips out to Washington Park with a rifle and commits suicide—alone and unseen: “Around the whole windswept park, in all the apartment houses and brownstone mansions and college buildings, not a single window opened and not a single person looked out.” Less than ten years later Lewis himself died alone and unseen in the Hotel Earle across the street.
Published in September 1941, Season’s Greetings received favourable but not glowing reviews. The New York Times’ reviewer called it “a story that pulses with feeling for the complex and comprehensive personality of New York.” The American Mercury did not care for Lewis’s change of style: “Overwritten in spots, it belabors its point, yet it holds the reader’s interest.” Once again, Lewis was a victim of bad timing. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, fewer Americans were in the mood to buy books about Christmas. The short biographical sketch on the back of Season’s Greetings mentioned that the author and his family had returned to New York and promised that “This time Mr. Lewis expects to stay home for good.” But it didn’t work out that way.
After working for The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter for about a year, Lewis tried again to make it on his own as a writer—without much luck. As Los Angeles Times’ film industry reporter Fred Beck later told the story, by late 1942, Lewis “was a small, sad man, shivering on the streets of New York.” A short story Lewis had written, “Two-Faced Quilligan,” had been rejected by 33 magazines and he worried that his family “would have salami for Christmas dinner.” As Beck put it, “Herbie wished somebody he knew would come along so he could borrow a buck.” Instead, Lewis came home to find an acceptance letter from Story magazine and a check for $50—enough for a generous Christmas and a month or two more. Soon after, Variety reported that 20th Century Fox had bought the movie rights for the story and hired Lewis as a writer for $500 a week. Lewis and family returned to Los Angeles.
Despite the turnaround in his financial situation, Lewis was never content in Hollywood. “Life is rather dull here,” he wrote his brother Ben in July. “It’s completely unreal going to the studio every day and writing scripts about make-believe people while the real people are cutting each other’s throats with gusto everywhere.” In November, he complained, “I look around me and see the things that success buys out here, and I don’t like any of them. Swimming pools get full of dead flies and uninvited guests. Big houses get full of live flies and uninvited guests.” Lewis wrote that he had decided to take a job offer with radio comedian Fred Allen and move the family back to New York. Fred Beck made the news public in The Los Angeles Times with a sly aside: “Fred Allen has a new writer, brand new, and I’m just wondering if everybody is now going to be happy now that they’ve got what they wanted.”
The answer was no. Lewis expected to replace several writers who were going to be drafted. They weren’t. After eight weeks with Allen’s show, Lewis decided “I was tired of taking money under false pretenses” and returned to Hollywood. Lewis continued with 20th Century Fox, which released the movie version of Lewis’s story, Don Juan Quilligan, in June 1945. As little as he cared for the work, Lewis desperately needed the studio’s money. In early 1945, he complained to Ben that “the Internal Revenue Bureau has attached my salary to make me pay off an old tax debt to Uncle Sam, which cuts down my fun, finances and practically eliminates (for the next few months) all the plans we had to send you our wedding gift.”
Herbert Clyde Lewis (lower left), Dalton Trumbo (rear center), and other reporters in the South Pacific, June 1945
Lewis’s only break from the studio grind came in May 1945 when he, Dalton Trumbo, and four other writers were sent on a six-week tour of combat areas in the Southwest Pacific at the invitation of General Henry “Hap” Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps. “I’m really seeing the war on this 16,000-mile junket,” he wrote from Guam on June 16, 1945: “the planes, the fleet, the infantry, almost everything else.”
The war ended just two months after Lewis’s return from the trip. He sold more stories: “D-Day in Las Vegas” to RKO and “The Fifth Avenue Story,” which Lewis co-wrote with Frederick Stephani, to Liberty Films. Filmed as It Happened on Fifth Avenue, the story earned Academy Award nominations for the two writers in 1947. But by then Lewis’s life had begun to fall apart. He was drinking heavily and taking barbiturates to help him sleep. His son Michael remembers seeing his father “naked and completely comatose, in a chair” around this time. “My mother told me it was alcohol and seconal.” Gita Lewis had begun to work for studios as a writer herself. As Michael recalls, “my & my sister’s real parents” during this time were the full-time maids his parents hired. The couple separated in 1947.
Lewis’s professional life was also coming apart. In January 1947, he became a member of the editorial staff of The Screen Writer, the magazine of the Screen Writers Guild. Unfortunately, the Guild was about to become the focus of Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiries into possible Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. Working in support of the U. S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the F.B.I. interviewed dozens of witnesses and collected thousands of documents related to liberal political activities in Hollywood. An F. B. I. informant identified Lewis as a member of the American Communist Party.
Whether the allegation was true or not, Lewis had taken up with the losing side. He joined over 100 writers, actors, directors, and musicians signing a full-page advertisement protesting the House committee’s hearings — which only added to suspicions about his politics. A month later, Dalton Trumbo and nine other members of the Screen Writers Guild were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the committee. A group of the most powerful studio executives met in New York in December and issued a statement vowing, “We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the Government of the United States.” The practice of blacklisting had begun. “The swimming pools are drying up all over Hollywood. I do not think I shall see them filled in my generation,” Lewis remarked to a reporter, jokingly. But he did not take the experience so lightly. He suffered a nervous breakdown in mid-1948 and was unable to work for a year.
In September 1949, he returned to New York City for what would be the last time — alone. His wife Gita chose to stay in Hollywood. He took a job as rewrite man for The New York Mirror. “I’ve enjoyed myself thoroughly and straightened myself out completely,” he wrote Ben from New York in October 1949, adding that he’d sold several of his stories to provide an allowance for Gita and the children. Michael Lewis recalls that “the four of us tried living together again as a family” in New York around Christmas 1949, but the marriage may have reached a breaking point. Gita took Michael and Jane back to Hollywood and moved in with Tanya Tuttle, wife of blacklisted director Frank Tuttle, who had gone to France in search of work.
In April 1950, Lewis filed for bankruptcy, citing over $26,000 in debts and unpaid income taxes. He moved into a room at the Hotel Earle in Greenwich Village. Although once considered among the best residential hotels in the city, in 1950, the Earle was, in the words of the poet Dylan Thomas, who stayed there around the same time as Lewis, “a pigsty.” Lewis moved from the Mirror to Time magazine, but he was still broke. He apologized to Ben for not being able to help pay their father’s bills from a prostate operation.
In late September, he left Time—whether voluntarily or not is unclear. Three weeks later, he was found dead in his hotel room. Although his death certificate stated the cause was heart attack, some of his acquaintances believed Lewis had committed suicide — which, Dalton Trumbo wrote his wife, was “sad, but no more than to have been expected.” “The only food on which a drowning man could subsist was the hope of being rescued,” Lewis wrote in Gentleman Overboard. Perhaps he had lost hope of being rescued himself.
He passed on to his widow only the prospect of future sales of his writing — of which there were few. In December 1950, one of his early stories, “Surprise for the Boys,” was adapted for the CBS television series Danger. A few years later, a producer bought the rights to Lewis’s story “The Bride Wore Pajamas,” but the film was never made. Finally, in 1959, Gita, now remarried, sold his unfinished novel, The Silver Dark, to Pyramid Books, a paperback publisher. Despite a cover plug by novelist Budd Schulberg proclaiming it “A genuinely original and compelling novel,” the book was never reviewed and never reissued. According to WorldCat.org, just two copies remain in libraries.
The Silver Dark might have marked the end of Lewis’s story. His work was ignored in studies of American novels. His film credits alone kept his name alive in occasional reference books. His daughter Jane died in 1985 from complications related to diabetes; his brothers both died in the late 1990s and his widow Gita in 2001. Only Michael, with a handful of his father’s letters and one lone page from his journal, remained to remember Lewis.
In the spring 2009, I came across a review of Gentleman Overboard while browsing through the archives of Time magazine. “What would it feel like to fall off a ship in mid-Pacific?” the reviewer asked. “With as much calm authority as though he had fallen overboard himself, Herbert Clyde Lewis tells just what it feels like.” Having established this website three years earlier, I was looking for long-forgotten books with unique qualities and Gentleman Overboard sounded like a perfect candidate. I located a copy, read it and posted a short enthusiastic review. Without having seen the Newsweek article describing Lewis’s original idea, I referred to the book as an experiment:
What matters is not whether it succeeds or fails but simply seeing what happens. Lewis puts his subject into the experiment and observes. This novel holds his notes. Few scientists could have recorded the results with such an elegant and light touch. It’s been said that a true artist knows when to stop … and does. By this criterion alone, Herbert Clyde Lewis proves himself a true artist with Gentleman Overboard.
A few months later, I received an email from Diego D’Onofrio, an editor with La Bestia Equilatera, a small Spanish-language publisher in Buenos Aires. “I would like to ask you,” he wrote: “Which neglected book do you recommend me to publish?” Not familiar with La Bestia’s audience, I was reluctant to offer many suggestions, but replied, “If I had to pick one off the top of my head that is very accessible to a wide range of readers, I guess I’d pick Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis. It should be relatively easy to translate and has a strong narrative line that should grab most readers very quickly.” Diego thanked me and said he’d order a copy.
Diego and his editor-in-chief Luis Chittaroni loved the book and in May 2010, they contracted for a translation and scheduled the book for publication. The Spanish title would be El caballero que cayó al mar (The Gentleman Who Fell into the Sea). The challenge of publishing a neglected book in another language is considerable, D’Onofrio later wrote. “Because nobody knows the author, not least the book, which is also not known in his native language … the only tool you have to sell the book is that it must be extraordinary in itself.”
By this standard, El caballero que cayó al mar performed exceptionally well. Its early reviews were consistently enthusiastic: “Simple y magistral. Sólo eso. Sencillamente eso,” Alejandro Frías proclaimed in El Sol de Mendoza: “Simple and masterful. Only that. Simply that.” Another reviewer called it “una perlita”: “a little pearl.” The book continued to win critical acclaim as its readership spread beyond Argentina. In August 2018, one of Spain’s leading critics, Ignacio Echevarría, praised the book in his monthly column for El Cultural and in September 2019, a feature on CNN Chile recommended it: “Con magistral sencillez, Herbert Clyde Lewis lleva el relato a una dimensión filosófica.” (“With masterful simplicity, Herbert Clyde Lewis takes the story to a philosophical dimension”). Eight years after the first publication of El caballero que cayó al mar, D’Onofrio reported, “It is the book with the most unanimous praise from our entire publishing house, which now has more than 90 books.”
Even as the Spanish translation was underway, Luis Chittaroni began to share PDF copies of the original Viking edition with acquaintances in the Argentinian literary community. The novelist Pablo Katchadjian in turn recommended the book to his friend Uriel Kon, an Argentina-born Jew living in Jerusalem and then starting up his own small press, Zikit Books. Looking for English-language novels that could be easily translated and published in Hebrew, Kon found the book matched his criteria perfectly: “Clear, elegant prose; a compelling, existential story; a book you can sit down and read in a night.” He arranged for a Hebrew translation and Zikit published האדוּ שבפל לים (roughly, The Nobleman Fell into the Sea) in June 2013.
The book struck a chord among Israeli readers. A feature review in Ha’aretz, one of Israel’s most widely read newspapers, called it “A miniature masterpiece that emerged from oblivion.” Zikit printed 1,00 copies — a number Kon considered “somewhat optimistic” at the time. That edition sold out in under two months and Zikit went on to sell over 7,000 copies. “There are around three to four thousand serious literary readers in Israel,” Kon estimated. “By that standard, this was a huge best-seller — a cult classic.” Standish’s predicament — lost and forgotten in a great ocean — Kon believes, “Resonated with many Israeli intellectuals who felt themselves isolated—not only as Jews surrounded by the Arab world but also unheard in a society dominated by conservative forces.”
In September 2019, Auteursdomein, a small Dutch press based in Amsterdam, published the English-language text of Gentleman Overboard under the simplified title, Overboard. This edition was sponsored by Dutch novelist Pauline van de Ven, who had come across Gentleman in a box of old books and ashtrays left by a distant uncle. As she writes in her foreword, “I read it without interruption from cover to cover and was impressed by the austere language, the strong images and the universal scope of the haunting story.” For van de Ven, the book’s power lies in its appeal to a paradoxical sense of “shared loneliness.” It belongs, she believes, in “same gallery of honor” as Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a another short novel about a prosperous businessman facing his imminent death: “It’s an existentialist masterpiece.”
Despite its rescue by publishers on three different continents, however, Gentleman Overboard remains out of print in the United States. Just three copies of the 1937 Viking edition are available for sale. The book’s success with readers in Argentina, Chile, Spain, Israel, and the Netherlands suggests the time is ripe for its reissue in its native country. There is still a chance for a new generation of American readers to discover Herbert Clyde Lewis’s “little pearl.” All it will take is the right person to listen.
My sincere thanks to Michael Lewis for allowing me to quote from his father’s letters and his own emails.
“But when I open the door I find someone has moved my chair.” Some hold that a proper short story should start midstream. Joan Jukes’ 1935 story, “On the Floor,” takes this advice to the extreme. Where are we? What was happening before he/she opened the door? Who is this narrator? The reader can only continue and hope the clues will be forthcoming.
Where are we? Within the first few sentences, we find out. As the title says, on the floor. Collapsed on the floor: “I am sitting on my right foot and it hurts. I must ease it, push it away, push hard! So! Now I am comfortable.”
How did we get here? Answered in the second paragraph: “Five minutes ago I set out from the study to fetch a letter from the dining-room….”
And the parenthetical comment that ends this sentence reveals not only who’s speaking but what is exceptional about her: “… (not in a spirit of pride or arrogance, for I never walk like that, but none the less hoping for the best. A letter is so easy to carry I can slip it in my shoulder straps or down my neck).” She is on the floor because “someone had moved the chair I steady up on three feet to the right, so it all came to nothing.”
That is pretty much all the action there is in “On the Floor”: a young woman who has severe difficulties in walking goes into the dining-room, slips when she reaches for a chair to steady herself on, falls to the floor, and lies there, helpless, until someone will come along and find her. Time now “will crawl past while I am sitting uncomfortably and impatiently on the floor.”
“On the Floor” is the earliest example of a disabled person as narrator I know of in English fiction, although I won’t claim to have any authority on this point. Her disability appears to have developed slowly but progressively. She remembers taking part in a dance performance as a child — although her mother stopped her just before going on stage: “‘You would keep the others back, dear,’ she said gently.” Until she was about twenty, though, “I was more or less like anybody else. I lived an ordinary life Nothing much happened to me. I was insignificant and commonplace, and just such another as the duller among my neighbours.”
Now, however, things are altogether different. “Everyone notices me. I am a sensation. In any assembly or any house I am the most important person, just as Dr Johnson was, and no one grudges me my pride of place.” Which also means that any mishap involving her is not a mishap but a catastrophe: “On an occasion like this I have sometimes tried to sing out for help in an unmistakably jaunty tone of voice to let everyone know at once that I am happy and carefree, I haven’t lost an eye or broken a leg, but this attempt has never been successful, because through closed doors my gay halloo seems to pierce like a shriek of agony. The long-dreaded has happened, they think, their worst fears are realized, and the helter-skelter is wilder than ever.”
“I am an invalid. I can’t walk. I have no other characteristics.” This label affixed, she loses all other aspects of identity: “That little invalid, you must have noticed her going past in her chair” “‘Oh, yes, I’ve often wondered who she was.” Even people who hated or disliked her in the past are free to ignore her now: “My enemies, base deserters, have left me in the lurch.”
“On the Floor” is such an honest, funny, and wise account of life with a disability that I have to wonder why it’s not better known, not widely anthologized. It was first published in New Stories, a short-lived magazine edited by Edward J. O’Brien, who founded the “Best Short Stories” annual anthologies of British and American stories, and O’Brien republished it in the 1935 edition (available on the Internet Archive: Link). It appeared again in 1938 in Penguin’s second volume of Selected Modern Short Stories.
That was the end of the story of this story until now. If Joan Jukes was the author’s real name, she appears never to have published again. From a cursory search of British genealogical sources, there doesn’t appear to have been a Joan Jukes who would have been within a realistic age range to be the author. And if “Joan Jukes” was a pseudonym, no one has come forward to match it with its rightful owner. Neither O’Brien nor Alan Steele, the editor of the Penguin collection, provided any biographical details.
So there the trail ends, and until someone can shed more light on it, the mystery of Joan Jukes remains unsolved. In the meantime, however, I enthusiastically invite you to enjoy this superb piece of writing. I have extracted the story from the 500+ pages of O’Brien’s anthology to make it easy:
From London Magazine, Oct/Nov 1974, Vol. 14 No. 4, a remembrance of Inez Holden, author of There’s No Story There, reviewed here in August:
Inez Holden died on 30 May this year. She had been unwell for some little time, but her death was unexpectedly sudden. I never had what might be called a day-to-day friendship with her, but, on and off, we knew each other for a long time. In spite of that, if asked conversationally what she was like, I could not attempt to do so by saying: “She was a little like so-and-so.” Inez was not really at all like any other woman I have ever met. One side of her always contradicted the other. In a strange way it was herself, rather than her books, that marked her out. Her novels, like her talk, full of wit and original ideas, never quite came off. They lacked construction. She was author of Sweet Charlatan, Born Old: Died Young, To the Boating, The Adults, and some others. She also wrote short stories, and documentary pieces. Some of the stories were transposed into C. K. Ogden’s Basic English in a volume called Death in High Society [online at Ogden’s Basic English].
I think it must have been as far back as 1927 that Evelyn Waugh, after a visit to Duckworth’s (the publishing firm where I then worked), suggested we should lunch together at The Gargoyle, a club he had recently joined. I had never been there. It had not been going for more than a year or two, and was in principle a night-club, though one of a very respectable order; frequented to some extent by the intelligentsia, even if Constant Lambert complained that the dance-floor on Saturday nights was crowded with “the two hundred nastiest people in Chiswick.” Waugh and I came on Inez Holden on the way there, or, more probably, found her already lingering at The Gargoyle. I had heard Waugh speak of her before, without myself forming a very clear picture. A clear picture, as I have said, was not at all easy to form. Even now I feel some diffidence in presenting this scrap of reminiscence, because there is so much about Inez that I have never known.
The three of us lunched together under the large picture by Matisse that hung in the dining-room, and gave the club a certain distinction. I think almost certainly Waugh, with his usual generosity, paid for Inez’s luncheon, although this was far from one of his affluent periods. Afterwards I was put up for the club, of which I remained a member for some years. It would have been logical for Waugh to put me up, Inez to second me, but I have an idea the process was vice versa. If so, I can find no reason for this, especially as she had never before set eyes on me. At that time Inez was very pretty. Those who knew her only after some glandular condition had sadly altered her appearance could not guess her earlier “consumptive charm.” (to quote Constant Lambert again), a then fashionable type of beauty, which — as it turned out quite unjustifiably since her health was not failing — led to Inez being known in some circles (the Sitwells and Willie Walton, I suspect) as “Gallopers.”
With regard to solidly ascertainable fact, books of reference show Beatrice Inez Lisett Holden as born 21 November 1903 (a fairly typical Scorpio, it might be judged) into the younger branch of a landowning Derbyshire family. Her father had been for a few years in the Indian cavalry; her mother (nee Paget) was reputed to have had some fame as an Edwardian beauty. Inez’s own references to her family background consistently suggested early unhappiness; domestic shadows fell from wholesale neglect, and regrettable behaviour on the part of both parents. Her political opinions reflected a sharp reaction (shown even in the early novels) against the hardness and selfishness of Edwardian smart life. At the same time, Inez herself never lost all trace of this Edwardian stigmata, revealed not so much in her outward appearance (which could be dishevelled), as in the way she regarded certain things….
Her first novel, Sweet Charlatan, was published by Duckworth’s. Inez was not introduced there by myself — nor, I think, Waugh — in fact, I felt professional reservations about the book’s chances…. Inez turned the heat on Thomas Balston, the moving spirit in Duckworth’s, and he accepted Sweet Charlatan, not a very good novel, for publication. Balston, a bachelor in his late forties, authority on Staffordshire figures and the paintings of John Martin, was not at all used to young ladies of the Inez type. He fell. I don’t think it would be going to far to say that for a short time she made hay of him.
During the immediate years before World War II, Inez had a flat in Albany Street, just around the corner from where my wife and I lived. We used to see a certain amount of her. This was the period of her practical interest in politics, stimulated probably in the first instance by the Spanish Civil War. At this time she would talk a lot about Peter Spencer (by then Viscount Churchill; like Evan Tredegar twice married in face of contrary tastes, but, in contrast, an impoverished viscount, rather than a rich one), and I remember Inez describing a Trafalgar Square meeting, where, she and Lord Churchill both on the rostrum, Left Wing sympathizers threw half-a-crowns on to the platform. “They’d have been quite easy to keep,” Inez said.
… During the war, she worked in a factory (operating the house-cinema, I believe), and I don’t think it was until the war that she became friends with George Orwell…. It was also during the war that Inez became friends with H. G. Wells. Wells lent her the garage flat in the mews at the end of the garden of his Regent’s Park house. There Inez lived for eighteen months. When visiting her Orwell me Wells, of whose writings he was a great admirer. Indeed my own rather reluctant readings of several Wells novels are entirely owed to Orwell pressure. For some reason, in spite of this liking for his books, Orwell irritated the writer himself; provoking Wells’s immortal comment, already on record: “Read my early works, you shit.”
After the war Inez lived for years in a flat in George Street, off Baker Street…. A compulsive newspaper reader and TV viewer, she would become obsessed by subjects the papers were running — say, sex-change or computer dating — and talk of these without cease throughout a whole luncheon or dinner…. Later Inez left George Street, moved to Lower Belgrave Street, where she would sometimes be seen about in the neighbourhood dressed in stray adjuncts of military uniform. One recalls that Miss Virginia Jenkinson was reported in the Double Daily Despatch gossip column as having a “penchant for wearing fancy dress in the day-time.” I last heard from Inez a couple of years ago. She wrote: “My own memory, I think, is phenomenal — really like the horse Clever Hans. Do you know about him? He could answer almost any question but he did have to tap it out with his hoof.”
Eleanor Saltzman, 1936In and among all the dispiriting and infuriating news we’ve been exposed to lately, several efforts to recognize the work of some women writers have provided some refreshing and inspiring relief. Last week, the Paris Review debuted a new monthly feature, Feminize Your Canon, written by Emma Garman, which will explore “the lives of underrated and underread female authors.” The Guardian added to its long-running “Top 10” feature a list of the “Top 10 Lost Women’s Classics.” And the ground-breaking Virago Press celebrated its 45th anniversary, having recently reissued Anna Segher’s 1942 novel, The Seventh Cross.
I quibble though, in seeing any of the books and writers discussed in the above items as truly lost. Underread, underappreciated, underrepresented in the canon? Yes, absolutely. But lost? If it takes just a click or two to order a new, in print copy of her books from Amazon or Waterstones or take your pick, then she’s certainly not lost.
Take, by contrast, the example of Eleanor Saltzman. She published two well-reviewed novels of life in rural Iowa–one of them earning a Kirkus Reviews starred review–as well as a dozen or so short stories and poems before she died suddenly at the age of 41 in 1946. A few paragraphs in Clarence Andrews’ 1972 A Literary History of Iowa appear to be the only record of her work since then. The only copy of her first novel, Ever Tomorrow (1936), sells for $188. I could find no copies of her second novel, Stuart’s Hill (1945), outside Worldcat.org. This is what lost looks like.
Born in Mount Ayr, Iowa in 1904, she was afflicted with infantile paralysis at the age of nine. Despite this, she attended Drake University, graduating with a bachelor’s in 1928, and went on to take a master’s from the University of Iowa a year later. She remained there as an editorial assistant of the school’s Classical Journal. Later, she worked on the staff of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, where she wrote a number of papers, as well as didactic short stories, on the subject of child rearing. Starting around 1930, she also began publishing short stories and poems in magazines such as Prairie Schooner, The Midland, The Cornhill Magazine, and American Prefaces.
Ever Tomorrow, published in 1936, was set in the area around Mount Ayr and told the story of Iowa farmer Joe Mueller, tracing his family’s decades of back-breaking work back to his parents and grandparents and forward into his hopes and expectations for his children and grandchildren. Its first section, “Genesis,” opens with Joe’s grandfather hauling the lumber for the farm house from a nearby sawmill, then, chapter by chapter, follows Joe through various ages from five to thirty-three. Though he dreams of leaving for Chicago like his brother Pete, Joe remains as the breadwinner and foundation of his family.
In the second section, “Exodus,” Joe moves his family into town as his children enter high school and talk about moving on. “I haven’t got anything against the farm,” Joe’s son Carl tells him. “Only I don’t want to get myself stuck off down here in the sticks and never get out. You don’t go anywhere on a farm. I want to go places and do something else besides plow corn.”Then, in “Return,” Joe moves back to the farm, seeing it less as a burden and more as the place where his roots originate. Finally, in “Tomorrow,” Saltzman hints at a tension between the solidity of the farm and the more sophisticated and perhaps less trustworthy worlds of the town and the big city.
As one reviewer put it, “There are no scenes of violent drama in Ever Tomorrow. There are no villains. The presentation of human desires, tragedies, and fulfillments, however, is poignant throughout.” Not everyone was quite so generous, though. Writing in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Roland White classed it as “softened realism”: “Softened realism is earnestly concerned with being faithful to reality, but it differs from common realism in not believing it necessary to go into all the physical details of life…. Softened realism prefers to deal chiefly with spiritual character, although always in relation to fairly commonplace reality. Its details are often disagreeable, but seldom nasty.” On the other hand, White assessed it “a work of honest craftmanship…. Its language is simple and clear, brightened by a gift for phrasing about characters.” Kirkus Reviews gave it a starred review, stating pointedly,
We are pulling this out of the run of the mill novels because we feel it should not be sidetracked as “another novel of the soil.” As a first novel, it deserves high praise; as a vigorous, simple poignant bit of Americana, it stands up against such novels as Time Out of Hind, As The Earth Turns, State Fair, etc. As Iowa background, with no sentimental trimmings for the back to the land cult, none the less the story unfolds as a saga of one man’s love of his land, a love not consciously inborn, but growing out of toil and pain and sacrifice.
Saltzman Hotel and Mineral Baths, where Eleanor Saltzman spent her last years
In 1941, as her paralysis became more severe, Saltzman moved to Benton Harbor, Michigan where she stayed at the Saltzman Hotel, a therapeutic clinic run by her cousin, Dr. W. E. Saltzman, taking mineral bath treatments, managing the hotel’s accounts, and writing short pieces for the daily menus. She continued to write, however, and her second novel, Stuart’s Hill was serialized in Household magazine and later published by Bernard Ackerman, a small New York press.
Stuart’s Hill was certainly closer to White’s “softened realism.” Centered around the building of a chapel for a small farm community, it was something of a parable, in which sin (adultery) undermines the spiritual unity of the people and leads to the chapel being sold off for use as a barn. Reviewers saw in it similar qualities as Ever Tomorrow: “a simple story well told in a style of sustained beauty;” “a book of rare quality, a book that comes with a quiet grace in this day of tumult;” “written with almost biblical simplicity.” This is not to suggest, however, that Saltzman’s viewpoint was simplistic: the collapse of the community is due as much to the uncompromising scruples of the elders as to the actual act of sin. John T. Frederick called Stuart’s Hill a “fine example of a writer’s recognition and realization of a significant theme in Iowa rural life … of a country church and … its slow disuse, its decay, and its final destruction.”
Saltzman died unexpectedly in early January 1946 while staying at the hotel. An unpublished novel, Carpthorne, was found among her papers and is included in the collection of her papers at the University of Iowa library. Several months after her death, William Rose Benet wrote in The Saturday Review:
Have been grieved to hear that one of my contributors, who had been afflicted from childhood with infantile paralysis, died recently in a sanitarium in Benton Harbor, Michigan. This was Eleanor Saltzman, who still managed to get through high school and enter Duke University, where she was graduated with honors and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She obtained her M.A. at the University of Iowa, majoring in Greek. She worked in the Greek department and in child welfare for ten years. She also devoted much time to writing, and had two novels published, Ever Tomorrow (Coward-McCann, 1936) and Stuart’s Hill (Bernard Ackerman, 1945). In November I published in this department a poem of hers which I still regard highly, a poem about immortality.
In her memory I now print the following little poem, sent me by her sister. It was, I understand, written about eight years ago. Obviously, Eleanor Saltzman was one of the elect of this earth, a person acquainted with great pain but with clear, unfaltering courage. It is good to know of lives such as hers.
Requiem
It is not death When we lie down and close our eyes Because they see no more. Serenity can touch us then, And mold us into peace, and quietude.
Unity it is, of myriad atom dust Released again to live again– Tree and rain and Stardust infinite. Death found us earlier. The stone we could not turn. The grass sun-slain in June, Our child who was not, Our love, stillborn.
Saltzman’s last publication was the following poem, published posthumously in the Summer 1947 issue of Prairie Schooner. Knowing her thirty-plus year struggle with polio, its message is clearly as much one of physical as of romantic longing:
Release
And if I never move again, I can lie still and think, and where my thoughts Will go there is a quiet coral sky Behind the leafing trees astir as stirs My quickened breath, and I shall walk my road As far as the farthest hill, and I shall wait For you until the newborn moon is set. You will come. My lips say you will come.
I shall rise as soon as dawn begins, And I shall run, fleet as the lifting mist And joyous in the strength our hearts have found, Until I reach the deep blue morning lake, Knowing you are with me, palm in palm. Clothes abandoned on the naked sands, Gasping I shall plunge in the water’s cold And rising, plunge again, and I shall swim Into the blue horizon, I shall swim To the very end of time which has no end. I can. I know I can. My arms are strong. My body new alive, and you are near.
And if I never never move again, I can lie still and think …
Perhaps someone will now find the time to track down Eleanor Saltzman’s books and help retrieve her from the realm of writers who are truly lost.
W. R. Rodgers at the BBC“In Ireland why a man becomes a poet is a question not to be asked,” writes Darcy O’Brien in W. R. Rodgers (1970), his fine memoir of the poet from the Bucknell University Press Irish Writers Series. Yet unlike the typical Irish poet, Rodgers did not really discover the poetry in himself until he was nearing the age of thirty and busy with his life as a Presbyterian minister in Loughgall, a town outside Belfast in County Armagh in Northern Ireland. Born, raised, and educated in Belfast, Rodgers was familiar with the sectarian conflicts that simmered and surged throughout his lifetime. “Everything in Belfast had two sides,” he wrote in his 1955 radio piece, “The Return Room”: “Even the walls of Belfast took sides.” “In Belfast,” O’Brien quotes Churchill, “they do everything but eat the bodies.”
Rodgers had been inspired when, in his late twenties, he began to read the work of contemporary poets such as W. H. Auden. And in his early poems one can detect certain threads in subject and diction that could be traced back to Auden:
Escape (1940)
The roads of Europe are running away from the war, Running fast over the mined bridge and past the men Waiting there, with watch, ready to maim and arrest them, And strong overhead the long snorings of the planes’ tracks Are stretching like rafters from end to end of their power. Turn back, you who want to escape or want to forget The ruin of all your regards. You will be more free At the thoughtless centre of slaughter than you would be Standing chained to the telephone-end while the world cracks.
Rodgers’ world was not one that celebrated poetry, however. As he once wrote in an unsigned article in the Belfast magazine, The Bell, “[The Ulsterman] would like to have eloquence. But he suspects and hates eloquence that has no bone of logic in it. It seems to him glib, spineless, and insincere.” After he published his first collection, Awake! and Other Poems (1941), Rodgers’ father cautioned him, “I wouldn’t tell anybody. They’ll think you are wasting your time.”
Rodgers had a clear-eyed understanding of his position in the community, which he never fully settled into. As he wrote in a late unpublished essay quoted in O’Brien’s book,
A rural community is a close and intricate wickerwork of human relationships and functions. Each person born into it, or brought into it, is given a pertinent role to fill and is always identified with this role. The role I was called to fill was that of parson and, being young, I found it a formidable one. Old men, full of worldly experience, farmers who never hesitated to advise me on practical matters, would at once defer to me, as sons to a father, when it came to other-worldly matters and spiritual crises. Not that they were impressed by my personal authority; authority for them resided in the role and office which I happened to occupy … I realised that I, as an individual, did not matter, and this in a way was a relief to me as well as an instruction. I do not know how one would carry the problems of a community if one were only oneself. The danger, of course–and this goes for all men who fill a public role and wear a public mask, parson or politician–the danger is that a man may end by confusing the office with himself. If this happens he becomes simply a mask, an empty shell, a private bore in public and a public bore in private.
The pull of poetry was difficult for Rodgers to resist. Unhappy in the constraints of his position in the conservative Protestant community of Loughgall and caught in a difficult marriage to a woman doctor who struggled with schizophrenia, he reached out by letters to other writers in Ireland and England and took long trips to Dublin that were escapes into the world of literature and long conversations over Guinness and whiskey. When his friend and fellow poet Louis MacNeice helped arrange a job with the BBC, Rodgers resigned from his ministry and moved to England.
At the BBC, he worked on a series of portraits of Irish writers, using a sound mosaic technique that was pioneering at the time but is now a staple of many radio documentaries. These were later collected and published after his death in Irish Literary Portraits (1973). Rodgers found his niche among the hard-drinking and ever-talking community of writers such as Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan. As O’Brien writes, “Rodgers’s drinking was an extraordinary thing to behold. He was never ostentatious about it. He drank as he did everything else, quietly and sacramentally, glass upon glass in steady unmeasured procession, his talk dilating along with his arteries and filling the room like the smoke from his pipe.” He established a place among his peers so successfully that in 1951, after the death of George Bernard Shaw, they elected him to the empty seat in the Irish Academy of Letters.
Though he generally avoided verse, a strong touch of the lyric shines throughout Rodgers’ poetry. It’s a shame that no recordings of his reading are available online, because one can well imagine how fine his words would sound, as in this opening from “The Net”:
Quick, woman, in your net Catch the silver I fling! O I am deep in your debt, Draw tight, skin-tight, the string, And rake the silver in. No fisher ever yet Drew such a cunning ring.
And he could create images as deft and elegant as a piece by Mozart:
The Fountains
Suddenly all the fountains in the park Opened smoothly their umbrellas of water, Yet there was none but me to miss or mark Their peacock show, and so I moved away Uneasily, like one who at a play Finds himself all along, and will not stay.
Though he never returned to live in Ireland, its memories and spirit never left him. And he maintained a strong sense of connection to the church even after leaving it. He wrote a sequence of poems based on the last days of Jesus, Resurrection, which includes the following:
It is always the women who are the Watchers And keepers of life: they guard our exits And our entrances. They are both tomb and womb, End and beginning. Bitterly they bring forth And bitterly take back the light they gave. The last to leave and still the first to come, They circle us like sleep or like the grave. Earth is their element, and it it lies The seed and silence of the lighted skies, The seasons with their fall and slow uprise, Man with his sight and militant surmise. It is always the women who are the Watchers And Wakeners.
Rodgers was never a prolific poet, and he struggled increasingly with writer’s block as he entered his fifties. In his introduction to Collected Poems (1971), available on the Open Library (link), Dan Davin recalls how Rodgers promised for years to provide a poem, to be titled “Epilogue,” for a collection Davin was editing:
Indeed I have been working at the Epilogue…. But I have been frustrated, distracted, tormented and halted by trouble with landlord and solicitors–and the domestic reverberations of it….
Later
Working on it both excites and depresses me, and I realize that to write about it is like opening an old wound, which is Ireland.
Later
I have not ignored or neglected the Epilogue. I’m writing some good stuff for it, only it takes a lot of architecting…. An incidental, but exacting, bother is that once I get into the Epilogue it starts other hares in my mind and I tend to fly off in pursuit of them and have to remind myself that I haven’t the time and that they’ll run another day.
Still later
I feel like a robin that has got mixed up in a badminton match.
In the end, “Epilogue” was never completed. Davin included the fragments he was able to assemble from Rodgers’ papers as an appendix to Collected Poems. In them, Rodgers offers perhaps a clue to his reticence:
Patient in graveyards, used to thinking long And walking short, remembering what My careful father told me–“If ever, son, You have to go anywhere and have to Run, never go! It’s unlucky.”
Rodger was saved briefly from his predicament when he was offered a temporary position on the faculty of Pitzer College in Claremont, California. There, he relied on recordings of his BBC shows to fill up most of his lectures on Irish writers, enjoyed the California sun, and despised the produce, which he considered “flavorless.” During his second year at Pitzer, he was told that his contract would not be renewed, and while on a trip to England that year, he fell ill and operated on to remove a cancerous tumor from his bowels. When he was well enough to return to California, he was able to get another position at nearby Cal Poly Pomona. In the fall of 1968, however, he found himself unable to eat and he was hospitalized again.
As a part-time employee with no health insurance, he was admitted to the Los Angeles County General Hospital. “He would not, of course, have been in such a place had he been in England or in Northern Ireland, nor even in the Republic of Ireland,” O’Brien writes in his memoir. “He had to be in America to end his life in a ward crowded with the oppressed: blacks, Mexican-Americans, and W. R. Rodgers. … [B]eing the man he was, he would sooner have died among wretches than rich men.” At his funeral service in Claremont, one of his colleagues at Pitzer, Bert Meyers, read a poem in tribute:
I know a candle of a man whose voice, meandering in a flame, could make the shadows on the wall listen to what he said.
He’s done. You’d need a broom to arouse him now. All things burn, writhe, shrink, dissolve, or drift away. Some men are words that warm a room.
In March of 1969, Rodger’s family and a few of his friends returned with his body to Loughgall, where his body was interred in the graveyard of Cloveneden Church.
If poetry didn’t have a bad rap in the eyes of American readers and publishers, the poems of Kenneth Fearing would never go out of print. They’d be shelved alongside the crime novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and read just as often. One of his novels–The Big Clock (1946)–has attained that status. It’s both an NYRB Classic (2006) and included in the Library of America Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s. And another of his novels, less noir than surrealist, Clark Gifford’s Body, is also available as an NYRB Classic.
Not that they’re out of print at the moment. Thanks to the Library of America’s American Poets Project, a fine collection edited by poet and biographer Robert Polito has been available, if somewhat sporadically, since 2004. In fact, you can grab a copy for half price ($10) now, which is partly why I’m deviating today from my usual practice of sticking to books that are out of print: Kenneth Fearing: Selected Poems.
If you’re cheap like me, you can also find a number of Fearing’s poetry collections online at the Internet Archive and the Open Library: Poems (1936), with an introduction by the also-sporadically-out-of-print Edward Dahlberg; Afternoon of a Pawnbroker (1943) (which is probably my favorite title of a book of poems); New and Selected Poems (1956), the last collection published before his death; and even the Library of America collection, Selected Poems (2004). The only complete collection, however, Complete Poems (1994), from the Phoenix Living Poet Series, is scarce and goes for over $40 a copy. His other collections, for those interested, are generally available used for less than the Complete Poems: Angel Arms (1929); Dead Reckoning (1938), Collected Poems of Kenneth Fearing (1940); and Stranger at Coney Island (1948).
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, outside Chicago, Fearing moved to New York City in 1924 and survived by working as a writer and reporter for any place that could pay his rent. His first attempts at fiction were knock-off stories for pulp magazines with names like Paris Nights and Snappy. He also got involved with radical organizations and often wrote movie and book reviews for New Masses. Between 1938 and 1943 he published a book a year. By the end of the 1930s, he’d worked his way into the mainstream of magazine work, spending time on the staff of both Newsweek and Time. The latter furnished much of his inspiration for The Big Clock, which is about the conspiracies and corruptions spun out by an ambitious publisher who might be mistaken for Time’s Henry Luce.
Something about the guy sparked the interest of other writers. At least three different novelists incorporated him into their novels: W. L. Rivers in Death of a Young Man (1927); Margery Latimer for This is My Body (1930); and Albert Halper for Union Square (1933). And in 1935, Joseph Mitchell, still working for the New York World-Telegraph, profiled him in a piece titled, “‘Drunken Poet’ of Greenwich Village is Not the Most Respected of Singers.”
The fact that Fearing was already known as the “Drunken Poet” at the age of 33, with just two books to his name, gives you a clue to one of the reasons his work fell into neglect. Like Delmore Schwartz and too many other fine writers of that hard-drinking time, Fearing tossed his life and talents on the pyre of alcohol, which happily consumed them and went on looking for victims. In his remarkable book, American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (which features Fearing on its cover), Alan Wald writes of Fearing: “… his sensational alcohol addition was evident from his college days, records in memoirs and the diary entries of his friends over forty years, a prevailing feature of autobiographical characters in his novels, and confirmed by his autopsy.” The one time he hit the jackpot in a big way, making the equivalent of half a million dollars in today’s terms for the film rights to The Big Clock, he quickly blew it on booze and bad business deals. As Nicholas Christopher writes in his introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of The Big Clock, “Eventually he became a fall-down drunk who suffered frequent blackouts and for long stretches might not bathes, wash his hair, brush his teeth, or change his clothes.” When he was dying of lung cancer and melanoma in a hotel room in New York City, he tried to dull the pain with cough syrup laced with codeine, the favorite over the counter narcotic of its day.
This kind of destruction not only takes its toll on the artist but on his family, friends, and fans. People find it easier to tune out than to hang in, particularly when the creative work dwindles and gets replaced by inertia or mania. It’s hard to look past the ranting tone of Fearing’s introduction to New and Selected Poems, titled “Reading, Writing, and the Rackets”:
The revolution that calls itself the Investigation had its rise in the theaters of communication, and now regularly parades its images across them, reiterates its gospel from them, daily and hourly marches through the corridors of every office, files into the livingroom of every home….
The only acts the Investigation does not perform in public are those intimate financial transactions by which each great and little Investigator reaps the just reward due his superior insight, virtue, and the grave responsibility of exercising so much power. There, the reticence is rarely broken, and then only in moments of awkward, but human, misunderstanding. Yet that reserve may stem logically enough from a cardinal tenet in the gospel advanced by every tribunal of the Investigation: The need for secrecy is great, and growing.
Today, however, it’s possible to read this and not necessarily pass it off as ravings. As Polito has noted, Fearing’s work in many ways anticipates the work of Gaddis, Pynchon, and De Lillo in its depiction of “the systems of corporate life, offices, business, technology, work, money, and desire.” In a Poetry in America interview with Polito on YouTube, Elisa New says that Fearing captured “the moment when Americans realized they lived inside of systems, and that makes Fearing the perfect poet. What’s terrible in a way, what’s existentially terrible, as well as being hungry and in fear of losing your house, is that you don’t control your life–the banks do.” Which is another reason why it’s worth taking a look again at Fearing.
But the primary reason to take a look at Fearing’s poetry is that it is like almost no other American poetry I know (not that I am an expert). Fearing’s poetry drew its inspiration not from Keats, Whitman, or Eliot but from talkies, radio, tabloids, comic strips, and street talk. Take what is perhaps his most famous poem, “St. Agnes’ Eve,” from Angel Arms:
The dramatis personae include a fly-specked Monday evening, A cigar store with stagnant windows, Two crooked streets, Six policemen and Louie Glatz. Bass drums mumble and mutter an ominous portent As Louie Glatz holds up the cigar store and backs out with $14.92. Officer Dolan noticed something suspicious, it is supposed, And ordered him to halt, But dangerous, handsome, cross-eye’d Louie the rat Spoke with his gat, Rat-a-tat-tat— Rat-a-tat-tat And Dolan was buried as quickly as possible. But Louie didn’t give a good god damn, He ran like a crazy shadow on a shadowy street With five policemen off that beat Hot on his trail, going Blam! Blam!-blam!
It’s hard not to imagine Edward G. Robinson or James Cagney reading that. Just the titles of Fearing’s poems make me want to read them: “Jack Knuckles Falters But Reads Own Statement at His Execution While Wardens Watch”; “Lunch with the Sole Survivor”; “Agent No. 174 Resigns”; “Payday in the Morgue”; “Cracked Record Blues”; “Travelogue in a Shooting-Gallery”; “A Dollar’s Worth of Blood, Please”; “Love, 20¢ the First Quarter Mile”; “Confession Overhead in a Subway”; “The Juke-Box Spoke and the Juke-Box Said.” Open any of Fearing’s books of poetry and you are instantly carried back to a street in mid-century Manhattan, usually in the wee hours of the morning:
4 A. M.
It is early evening, still, in Honolulu, and in London, now, it must be well past dawn; But here, in the Riviera Cafe, on a street that has been lost and forgotten very long ago, as the clock moves steadily toward closing time, The spark of life is very low, if it burns at all—
And here we are, four lost and forgotten customers in this place that surely will never again be found, Sitting, at ten-foot intervals, along this lost and forgotten bar, (Wishing the space were further still, for we are still too close for comfort) Knowing that the bartender, and the elk’s head, and the picture of some forgotten champion (All gazing at something of interest beyond us and behind us, but very far away) Must somehow be aware of us, too, as we stare at the cold interior of our lives, reflected in the mirror beneath and in back of them—
Hear how lonely the radio is, as its voice talks on, and on, unanswered; Notice how futile is the nickel dropped in the juke-box by a customer, How its music proves again that one’s life is either too humdrum or too exciting, too empty or too full, too this, too that; Only the cat that has been sleeping in the window, now yawning and strecthing and trotting to the kitchen to sleep again— Only this living toy knows what we feel, knows what we are, really knows what we only think we know.
And soon, too soon, it will be closing time, and the door will be locked; Leaving each of us will be alone, then, with something too ravaging for a name (Our golden, glorious futures, perhaps)—
Lock the door now and put out the lights, before some terrible stranger enters and gives, to each of us, a a question that must be answered with the truth—
They say the Matterhorn at dawn, and the Northern Lights of the Arctic, are things that should be seen; They say, they say — in time, you will hear them say anything, and everything. What would the elk’s head, or the remote bartender say, if they could speak? The booth where last night’s love affair began, the spot where last year’s homicide occurred, are empty now, and still.
(No wonder that “4 A. M.” is often reprinted below a reproduction of Edward Hopper’s iconographic painting, Nighthawks.)
Fearing’s America has not an ounce of nostalgia in it. It’s a world of sleepless nights, hangovers, relentless capitalism at times indistinguishable from crime, and an unending sense of dread:
First you bite your fingernails. And then you comb your hair again. And then you wait. And wait. (They say, you know, that first you lie. And then you steal, they say. And then, they say, you kill.) from American Rhapsody (4)
And, in response, his Americans turn to their drugs of choice:
A La Carte Some take to liquor, some turn to prayer, Many prefer to dance, others to gamble, and a few resort to gas or the gun. (Some are lucky, and some are not.)
Name your choice, any selection from one to twenty-five: Music from Harlem? A Viennese waltz on the slot- machine phonograph at Jack’s Bard and Grill? Or a Brahm’s Concerto over WXV? (Many like it wild, others sweet.)
Champagne for supper, murder for breakfast, romance for lunch and terror for tea, This is not the first time, nor will it be the last time the world has gone to hell. (Some can take it, and some cannot.)
Though Fearing’s work suffered in his last years, and no new poems were published after the handful that close New and Selected Poems, his anxiety burned brightly to the end. The last poem in that book, “Family Album (4),” subtitled “The Investigators” radiates with suspicion and the sense of a lost self:
Close your eyes tight, turn around three times, reach and pour and stir, (It says in the rules, one wish per man) Whatever it is, this is bound to be something final and big, Open the valve, who’s got a match?—
HOW DO YOU, WHEN DO YOU, WHERE DO YOU WHAT? WHO DO YOU WHO, WHO DO YOU WHO, WHO DO YOU WHO?
Kenneth Fearing died in Lennox Hill Hospital in Manhattan in 1961. He was 58. Another exhibit in the case for William Carlos Williams’ argument that the pure products of America go crazy (using the Merriam Webster definition (“full of cracks or flaws”)).
“The Poet Abroad in Her Kingdom, the Earth: She Prescribes an Oligarchy of Poets and Painters to Organise the World”
In the April 27, 1946 edition of Picture Post, a U. K. version of Life, an unusual three-page story was devoted to a poet who, even then, was two decades past her brief and limited fame. Anna Wickham struggled throughout her life against the control that men–first her father, then her husband, and finally, the male power structure of her time. Though she wrote quickly and spontaneously (her poems bear the marks far more of improvisation than careful craft) and managed to write hundreds of poems and publish three books (The Contemplative Quarry (1915); The Man With A Hammer (1916); and The Little Old House (1921)) while raising four boys and keeping house, she resented that expectations about how her time and energy should be spent and implicit contest between the domestic and the creative life.
There is no doubt that her poetry might have been more highly regarded now had she put more energy into her writing and less into her fights with the world, but then she wouldn’t have been the woman she was. In this article, Lionel Birch refers to her as a “Great She,” and she once snapped at a man threatening to eject her from an art auction, “You’d better retract, my good man. I may be a minor poet, but I’m a major woman.” One of her most stalwart supporters, Louis Untermeyer, who included some of her poems in most of his anthologies, called her “a magnificent gypsy of a woman, who always entered a room as if she had just stamped across the moors.” Rayner Heppenstall wrote that Wickham was “reputed to bite people’s heads off and try to pull other women’s breasts off.” Even the tough-minded George Orwell, a neighbor in the 1930s, considered her “ferocious looking.” As she grew older, she became known as something of a character in Hampstead, where she ran a rough-and-tumble rooming house. She wrote more intermittently after 1930 and published less, but still did occasional readings (at which she was known to make such candid asides as, “Rubbish, but there it is.” And she tenaciously stuck to her opinions, rights, and routines throughout the war, even as houses a few feet from hers were destroyed in the Blitz, earning the respect of her neighbors and a certain local celebrity that was celebrated in the Picture Post photo essay.
In an autobiographical piece reprinted in The Writings of Anna Wickham: Free Woman and Poet (edited by R. D. Smith, Olivia Manning’s husband), Wickham once wrote, “I feel that women of my kind are a profound mistake. There have been few women poets of distinction, and, if we count only the suicides of Sappho, Lawrence Hope and Charlotte Mew, their despair rate has been very high.” Almost exactly a year after the Picture Post piece appeared, her youngest son, George, found her hanging in the kitchen in which she is shown sitting below. She was 63.
And so, to mark the end of two years devoted to the neglected works of women writers, I take the liberty to reprint the text and photos from the Picture Post article, remarkable for its time in its open-hearted recognition of Wickham’s struggles with her world.
Anna Wickham: Poetess and Landlady
Celebrated in America, appreciated in France–Anna Wickham, mistress of words that sing and words that devastate, is still without full honour in her own country.
In the living-room of Anna Wickham’s house in Hampstead hangs one of those landlady’s notices which look so familiar. But this is how it reads: “Tour bourgeoise. Anna Wickham’s Stabling for Poets, Artists, and their Executives. Creative mood respected. Meals at all hours.”
“Creative mood respected.” That is important to Anna Wickham, and you can see why, when you read a verse of one of her own poems, called, “Dedication to a Cook”:
If any ask why there’s no great She-Poet, Let him come live with me, and he will know it. If I’d indite an ode or mend a sonnet, I must go choose a dish or tie a bonnet….
“She Scrutinises Her 62nd Spring”Anna Wickham herself is a Great She, and she is a poet of a flavour which you won’t find anywere else. She wrote that verse more than twenty years ago, when she was in the process of bringing up a family, looking after her husband, running a home, and generally having her creative moods disrespected by the tyranny of the kitchen range, and the dictatorship of the darning needle.
She was born in Wimbledon in 1884, went to Australia when she was six, came back to Paris to study singing with Jean De Reszke, when she was 21, got married shortly afterwards, abandoned her singing career, started writing poetry, and came slap up against the creative total-woman’s conflict between the demands of the Dream and the demands of the Race. There then pursued her a period of frenzied sweeping-up, in her successive Hampstead homes, until her sons at last grew up and went afield.
At that point she was once more in a position to respect her own creative moods–even though it meant that the dishes were left unwashed and stockings undarned. Today, her house remains a memorial of those bud-bursting years when the rabid itch to get lyrics down on to paper would never let her alone,a nd neither would the kitchen range.
For the house–the house in these pictures–was the battlefield on which her dreams fought a war of movement against her domesticity; and there the pots and pans still hang around in gangs, at teh scene of their crime.
“The Poet in Her Kitchen, Where Soufflés Fight with Sonnets”
The poet in her kitchen, where soufflés fight against sonnets for her time and exclusive attention. Anna Wickham, one of England’s rarest, but least-publicised, lyric poets, in the nerve-centre of her Hampstead home. Many of the most fruitful hours of her life have been spent just like this: waiting for the kettle to boil, waiting for a dish to cook, waiting for the unborn poem to start knocking–and hoping they aren’t all going to start happening at once. The prevailing problem, to find time for dreams as well as for domesticity.
“She Eats Her Elevenses on the Kerb”
But as soon as Anna Wickham steps outside her front door, it is a different matter. When you see her walking down the Parliament Hill, with her big Indian shopping basket clanging against her knee like a great bamboo bell, you know that there is at least one free, sovereign, woman abroad on the earth. Free to do what? Free to spend time, or to use time, or to pass time. Free to walk or stop walking. Free to break her quarter-mile journey to the shops half-way, sit down on the kerb and eat a bun. Free to proceed, with or without broomstick, on the pond, or to declaim an old poem to a child operating against the tiddlers. Free, in fact, to deal with the dream when it arrives. Free to do any of the things which may lead to the making of a new poem.
“She Investigates the Mythology of a Kite”
People stare? Of course, people stare. The huge face, corrugated by the astringency of wisdom, the goblin eyes, and the laugh of a naughty little girl–these rightly rattle the giblets of the rolled-umbrella-man in the pub. the gawper in the street, the wondering child on the Heath.
In Hampstead one is used to Free Austrians and Free Hungarians. But it is not every day that you can see a Free Elizabethan reciting a barbed lyric to herself in the middle of East Heath Road. Anna Wickham declares that she does not write poetry: she exudes it. She does not speak of writing to, for, or about, people she meets. She talks of writing it “from” them. “I imagined that poem from So-and-So,” she says.
She has written poems passionate and poems compassionate, Mistress-poetry and Mother-poetry. And, in her conversation, she is master-mistress of the phrase-that-goes-home–either the phrase that kindles, or the phrase that trounes, or the phrase that heals.
One poem explains the ruthlessness:
If I had peace to sit and sing, Then I could make a lovely thing; But I am stung by goads and whips, So I build songs like iron ships. Let it be something for my song If it is sometimes swift and strong.
“She Returns to the Tree About Which She Wrote Her Loveliest Song”Lastly, and because it is a question which is central to her poetry, let’s take the complaint of the Powdered and Pomaded Ones: “But why doesn’t she smarten herself up?” Let Anna Wickham, in an hitherto unpublished poem, answer:
I plant my hope, On my Irish view of water And my Italian attitude to soap. I am my father’s daughter. I bathe by spells, At holy works, And wash them with the Turks. Them without sin, I disregard my skin, And thus I know Old Stratfrd-atte-Bow, The sweats and smuts and anguish of my Loard, All saints, and sluts, before the Water Board. Young Fancy came to wreck, From too much washing of the Heron’s neck.
You tell me that shows that the woman has no standards? I tell you her standards are something more than steeple-high. Listen to this:
God, thou great symmetry, Who put a biting lust in me From whence my sorrows spring, For all the frittered days That I have spent in shapeless ways, Give me one perfect things.
And that poem constitutes one out of about 200 similar reasons why I count Anna Wickham as a blessing, and why I would have you meet her.
Written by Lionel Birch. Published in Picture Post, April 27, 1946
Ida Maria Luise Sophie Frederica Gustave, daughter of Carl Friedrich Graf (Count) von Hahn, married her wealthy and elderly cousin Friedrich Wilhelm Adolph Graf von Hahn, and thus became Ida Maria Luise Sophie Frederica Gustave, Gräfin (Countess) von Hahn-Hahn, giving all of us the pleasure of a small chuckle. The marriage was unhappy and they divorced less than three years later. She took it in mind to be a writer and proceeded to produce several books of poetry and then a string of novels “depicting, in a very aristocratical manner, the manners of high life in Germany,” according to Sarah Josepha Hale’s Woman’s Record.
And she took it in mind to become a traveller. According to Hale’s account of her life, Countess Hahn-Hahn went to Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Spain, France, Sweden, England, Central Europe, Turkey, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt over the course of roughly ten years, after which she retired to a convent to meditate, pray, and write devout books.
The only point in mentioning her here is that her collections of letters from her trips to France, Spain and the Near East were considered exceptional by the reviewers of their English translations. Of course, exceptional is a double-edged adjective: “The merits and demerits of her writing are so interwoven that it is hard to pronounce upon them without being unjust to the one or far too lenient to the other,” wrote one. Yet, “In liveliness of observation, readiness of idea, and spirited ease of expression, she is unsurpassed by any lady writer we know,” wrote another. Male readers seem to have delighted in her frank opinions, which she felt free to express with vehemence even though it seems pretty clear that she expected her correspondents to hang on to her letters so she could publish them after returning from her journeys. Her writings were held to have “an air which is not ill-described by the term insolent. Saucy is hardly strong enough. Exceedingly saucy women, however, when they happen to be pretty, witty, and well-informed, are often agreeable companions, and almost always pleasant correspondents.”
The countess was certainly capable of painting a pleasant word picture when offered the right scene. Here, for example, is life on the streets of Pesth (the eastern side of Budapest):
People do not merely walk—they sit, work, sleep, eat, and drink in the street. Almost every third house is a coffee house, with a broad verandah, around which are ranged sophas and blooming oleanders. Incredible quantities of fruit, grapes, plums, particularly melons, and heaps of water-melons, are offered for sale. Unemployed labourers lie, like lazzaroni, on the thresholds of their doors or on their wheelbarrows, enjoying the siesta. Women sit before the doors, chatting together and suckling their infants. The dark eyes, the loud, deep voices, here and there the piercing eyes, are all southern.
Here she offers us the streets in Constantinople in all their anarchic glory:
If none but dogs were the inhabitants of Constantinople, you would find it sufficiently difficult to make your way through a city where heaps of dirt, rubbish, and refuse of every credible and incredible composition, obstruct you at every step, and especially barricade the corners of the streets. But dogs are not the only dwellers. Take care of yourself — here comes a train of horses, laden on each side with skins of oil — all oil without as well as within. And, oh ! take care again, for behind are a whole troop of asses, carrying tiles and planks, and all kinds of building materials. Now give way to the right for those men with baskets of coals upon their heads, and give way, too, to the left for those other men — four, six, eight at a time, staggering along with such a load of merchandise, that the pole, thick as your arm, to which it is suspended, bends beneath the weight. Meanwhile, don’t lose your head with the braying of the asses, the yelling of the dogs, the cries of the porters, or the calls of the sweetmeat and chestnut venders, but follow your dragoman, who, accustomed to all this turmoil, flies before you with winged steps, and either disappears in the crowd or vanishes round a corner.
At length you reach a cemetery. We all know how deeply the Turks respect the graves of the dead — how they visit them and never permit them to be disturbed, as we do in Europe, after any number of years. In the abstract this is very grand, and when we imagine to ourselves a beautiful cypress grove with tall white monumental stones, and green grass beneath, it presents a stately and solemn picture. Now contemplate it in the reality. The monuments are overthrown, dilapidated, or awry — several roughly paved streets intersect the space — here sheep are feeding — there donkeys are waiting — here geese are cackling — there cocks are crowing — in one part of the ground linen is drying — in another carpenters are planing — from one corner a troop of camels defile — from another a funeral procession approaches — children are playing — dogs rolling — every kind of the most unconcerned business going on.
She was vocal in her dislike for the manners of a minor member of the Ottoman nobility who travelled on the same ship with her to Constantinople: “If you had anything in your hand that attracted the pasha’s notice, an operaglass, for instance, or a telescope, he beckoned to one of his slaves, and the slave instantly took the opera-glass, or whatever it might be, out of the hand of the owner, and delivered it to his master. He examined it, tried it, and when he was tired of it, he gave it back to the slave and the latter to the owner. Some chose to consider this behaviour simple, childlike, engaging; for my part, I could only think it rude….”
Nothing so attracted her disdain, however, as the French. Her beloved papa fought alongside von Blücher at Waterloo, and she never forgave his people for raising up the upstart from Corsica. “I shall now go to France, Heaven knows what the consequence may be, for I hate France! I hate the spirit of vanity, fanfaronade, insolence and superficialness; in short, I hate the national character of the French. It is unmitigated barbarism.”
Needless to say, her letters from France are less saucy than venomous.
My horizon has been widened in the last few months thanks to Jane Gleeson-White’s Australian Classics: 50 Great Writers and Their Celebrated Works (2011), which introduced me to the wealth of interesting Australian writers beyond the ones I’d been aware of (Stead, Patrick White, Miles Franklin). Easy the most intriguing book discussed by Gleeson-White is Eve Langley’s 1942 novel, The Pea Pickers, which she describes as “a raucous romp through the Victorian countryside in praise of Australia, and a voyage through the passions of a young woman with the soul of a poet determined to live by her own elusive law.” Novelist Georgia Blain proclaims it “a wonderful book, absurd, hilariously funny, messy, anarchic; the kind of book that so rarely gets published.”
Yet Gleeson-White’s biographical sketch of Eve Langley was even more intriguing. She wrote the novel while pregnant with her third child, entered it into a competition for unpublished works by Australian and New Zealand writers and won, but was committed to a psychiatric hospital before the book was published. Released seven years later, she took to wearing men’s clothes and had her name changed legally to Oscar Wilde. She spent her last years in conditions no better than a bag lady and was found dead in her shack in 1974. A little more digging turned up a 1989 biography, The Importance of Being Eve Langley, by Joy L. Thwaite. Drawn heavily from Langley’s own diaries and letters, it looked like an interesting read, and I sent off for a copy from a dealer in Australia.
In some ways, I found The Importance of Being Eve Langley even more remarkable than The Pea Pickers — even though the novel is utterly unlike any book written by a woman I’ve ever read. Langley seems never to have stopped writing, even when she was confined in the mental hospital. As Thwaite puts it, both of Langley’s two published books were taken from the “diaries, letters, poems, and jottings from her interminable stock of scribblings,” and this output flowed on to at least ten other unpublished books. Yet, as Thwaite observes early on, “It is never wise to trust absolutely in Langley’s voice.” Whether or not she was mentally ill, Langley was certainly prone to wild flights of imagination and appears to have had a relatively loose understanding of what other people would consider normal behavior.
Langley was born in at a cattle station in New South Wales in 1904. Her father was an itinerant farm worker who died when Eve was still a girl, and her mother raised Eve and her sister June while managing a small hotel in Crossover, a small town in Victoria. Although Eve’s education was incomplete, she was, as her biography Joy L. Thwaite, puts it, “a precocious and omniverous reader, a weaver of tales, a haunter of libraries.” By the time she was 20, one of her favorite amusements was to imagine herself the incarnation of some great writer she had been reading, such as John Keats or Francois Rabelais. Eve herself only half-jokingly referred to her reading as a medical treatment: “My early arnicas of Mathew Arnold, small balsams of Wide, Rabelaisian cauterizers, Shavian foments and Shakespearean liniments.”
She had also formed an extravagant passion for Gippsland, the rural area of Victoria where her mother had been raised, and in 1924, she convinced her sister June to head out with her for Gippsland in hopes of getting work picking peas. “Now that we’re going to Gippsland, we said, we must put off our feminine names for ever,” declares the narrator in The Pea Pickers. And, as in the book, Eve and June dressed up in men’s overalls and took to calling themselves “Steve” and “Blue.”
Eve and Jane Langley in their pea-picker guises as Steve and BlueOver the next four years, Steve and Blue made annual trips to Gippsland during the growing season, traveling from farm to farm, living in tents and earning poverty wages hoeing and picking crops. For Langley, the experience seems to have been more like a personal transformation than a youthful adventure. “At some part of the journey, my hereditary Gippsland mind awoke. It was a totally different apparatus to my Dandenongian mind,” she would later write in The Pea Pickers (Dandenong being the fictional stand-in for Crossover).
Eve tried to make a go as a farmer herself, but was too likely to become diverted by her reading and writing to keep a successful crop going. In 1932, she moved to Auckland, New Zealand, where June and her mother had settled. She began getting poems published in literary magazines, but also had a disastrous affair with an Italian car salesman that resulted Eve becoming pregnant and giving the child up for adoption.
Several years later, she became infatuated with an artist named Hilary Clark. Clark was eleven years younger than her and more interested in men than women, but the two ended up marrying and Eve had three children by him over the next four years. (Their names were Bisi Arilev, Langley Rhaviley and Karl Marx.) They were separated and she was keeping the first two children in squalid conditions and pregnant with the third when she began writing The Pea Pickers. She typed it on cheap paper a friend had given her and couldn’t afford to buy a new ribbon when the text began to be illegible. Nevertheless, she finished the book and mailed it off to Sydney as an entry for the S. H. Prior Memorial Prize competition.
At Sydney publishers Angus and Robertson, a very large package containing a manuscript by “Gippsland Overlander” (the competition required all entries be submitted under pseudonyms) arrived in June 1940. As Jacqueline Kent writes in her biography of one of A&R’s most influential editors, Beatrice Davis: Backroom Girl of Modern Literature, “It was an editor’s nightmare — typed in single space on flimsy pink paper with a faded ribbon, words drifting off the edge of the page….”
Yet the readers quickly recognized that this was a novel of unique energy, language, and imagery. Langley’s descriptions of the Gippsland countryside, the sunrises and sunsets, the smells on the breeze were of exceptional intensity. At the same time, the headstrong personalities of Steve and Blue, never quite blending with those of the other farm workers, made for some wonderful absurd human comedy — as in this scene, when Steve and Macca, the man for whom she’s formed an overwhelming passion, go to bed for the first time.
We tiptoed into the hut and lay decorously on the bed. Excited by the events of the night, I tossed beside him and could not sleep. I wished to talk of verse and cry out passages of the Aeneid all night. He began to breathe with a monotonous regularity, slowly and evenly, opposing my short passionate breath. His calm animal sound maddened me, at last. I could not bear it. I appeared to be breathing my life away, two to his one. Then he snored faintly. Enough! I struck him sharply.
“Go home! I cannot sleep. If you won’t talk to me of the Aeneid, go home!”
Sitting up on the straw mattress, his figure black against the wirenetting window and the bilious clayey light of the moon, he said cruelly, “Steve, you’re a little cow!”
“Then, O, to be in India where they worship them,” said I. “There I could eat milk tins in the very streets, and wear a hat on my horns and who would dare to cry me nay?”
“I’m going home. It must be nearly daybreak.”
Not all the judges were as impressed, however, and in the end, the prize for 1940 was split three ways between The Pea Pickers, Kylie Tennant’s novel, The Battlers, and a biography of an early governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie: His Life, Adventures and Times, by M. H. Ellis. Angus and Robertson took the rights to publish Langley’s novel, but a great deal of editing was required to get the material into publishable shape. They also sold the U. S. rights to by Dutton, which didn’t publish it until 1945, as Not Yet the Moon.
Before the book was released in Australia, however, Angus and Robertson received a letter from the Public Trustee Office in Auckland, stating that Eve Langley, a “married woman, a mentally defective person” had been committed to the Auckland Mental Hospital by her husband. Both Langley and her husband appear to have had extreme paranoid reactions to the possibility of Japanese attack on New Zealand and took their children out on a small sailboat they owned, looking for places their might hide. During one stormy night, Langley spilled boiling water on at least one of the children and all three were taken into custody by a nurse who knew the family. Her husband became concerned about her stability, particularly because he was expected to be called up for service, and he arranged for her to be committed for observation. Langley would spend the next seven years in the hospital, and during that time, A&R heard nothing from her.
Then, in 1950, June 1950, she was released in custody of her sister June, who secured her a position in the book binding shop of the Auckland Public Library. A&R editor Davis wrote expressing her happiness at receiving the news and inquired if Langley had been able to do any writing during her confinement. A year later, Langley replied that her new book, White Topee, was progressing well, and she sent it to the publisher in 1953.
In her report on the book, A&R editor Nan McDonald wrote, “This novel, pruned and condensed, would certainly be worth publishing. It is written with Eve Langley’s characteristic brilliance and originality and no one else could have written it. But I am afraid that no amount of editing will be able to make it as good as The Pea Pickers.” White Topee (I link here to AddAll.com, since the only copy currently on Amazon goes for over $3,500!) was eventually published in 1954.
It did not repeat the success of The Pea Pickers. Reviews were few and unenthusiastic: “Not so much a novel as a marvelous oddity,” wrote one reviewer. Like The Pea Pickers, it drew heavily on the Gippsland experience and on all the materials Langley had written about it over the years. Even before White Topee was published, however, Langley sent A&R another manuscript, Wild Australia.
This time, the A&R editors found it hard to be be charitable. One called the book “dazzlingly irrational.” “Many pages were devoted to Eve’s account, as Oscar Wilde, of a trip she and her lover Lord Alfred Douglas made to Cairo so that Eve/Oscar could be operated on to become female.” When Nan McDonald wrote to say that A&R would be returning the manuscript, Eve wrote back in panic, “Nan McDonald, DEAR Nan McDonald I AM OSCAR WILDE AND YOU’RE KILLING ME… And I hate being Oscar Wilde because NO ONE WANTS OSCAR WILDE… Dear Nan, please reconsider your most awful decision and don’t send that book. O I know what death is now….”
Nevertheless, she proceeded to send yet another manuscript, Bancroft House, to A&R and a year later, another titled Somewhere East of Suez. She continued to believe that her work was something the publisher would be thrilled to receive. It was clear from her correspondence, however, that Eve was spiraling out of control:
I am just going to pack up the latest book “Last, Loneliest, Loveliest,” and send it over to you. It’s all about my life over on the North Shore in Auckland and full of rich warm glowing material from a journal kept in those days of marriage to an artist husband and a batch of children as well…. you will get “The Land of the Long White Cloud” soon. Then comes “Demeter of Dublin Street”, followed by “The Colossus of Rhodes Street”, then “The Old Mill”…. then after this one comes “Remote, Apart” to be followed by “Portrait of the Artist at Chelsea” and then “The Saunterers” and “Beautiful Isles of the Sea” and lastly “Apollyon Regius”…. Two books come in between, introducing to you “The Land of the Long White Cloud” and these are “The Nimrod Type” and “The Australian” … so that’s eight to come, no nine with “Golden Wattle Warriors”, no eleven with “The Nimrod Type” and “The Australian”.
“This is IMPOSSIBLE,” one A&R reader wrote. Nan McDonald quipped in one report that “seven full-length works are too much Eve Langley for anyone to take in a few months without indigestion.” Beatrice Davis tried, however, to let Langley down gently, writing, “Heaven knows when we shall be able to publish all these so attractively titled novels.”
In 1960, Eve moved back to Australia. She bought a house — barely more than a shack — near Katoomba, a town in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. Langley referred to it as “Iona Lympus,” and began planning a trip to Greece, where she hoped to commune with the spirits of Homer and other ancient Greeks. By now, she had taken to wearing men’s clothes all the time. One of her closest acquaintances and most loyal supporters during this time, Hal Porter describes a typical Langley outfit:
… dressed in a navy-blue chalk-stripe double=breasted suit a la [Australian prime minister Robert] Menzies, and what I call a publican’s cardigan, one of those maroon and fawn things, and a tie with stripes across it. She had quite small feet in boots, they must have been schoolboy’s shoes she bought. Over this she had flung a very long fur coat, ankle-sweeping, quite an opulent one, made of black cat or some strange material. And topping all this, a white topee.
Davis helped Eve apply for a pension as an invalid, which provided pretty much the only income she had. She had a few poems published, but, as Thwaite puts it, “was living for the most part on fish and chips, cakes, muscatel and Penfolds wine.” In September 1965, Angus and Robertson received a letter from the Australian ambassador to Greece reporting that Langley had been found penniless in Athens and inquiring if she had any means of support. Eve had convinced herself that she could work picking grapes for a Greek winery and somehow managed to pay for a berth on a freighter to Athens. She enjoyed the trip tremendously, but was also, based on her journals from the time, hallucinating wildly, seeing a various times Nazi warships and ancient Greek and Egyptian vessels out in the sea around her. She lost most of her luggage after disembarking in Piraeus, and within a few weeks was surviving by scavenging food from back alleys.
Davis and other friends managed to collect and send her several hundred pounds, but the embassy put her on a plane back to Sydney in December. Back home, she continued to decline into fantasies. She thought she could transform her shack into a Greek temple. She was convinced that German soldiers were moving through the woods around her. She treated her colds and aches with home-made remedies involving treacle, kerosene and eucalyptus bark. Yet she managed to arrange a trip to New Zealand to visit her daughter in 1968, although her eccentricities soon pushed filial piety past the breaking point. An old friend who saw her during the visit recalled her “as someone living quite outside reality.”
When Eve returned to her house in Katoomba, it had been ransacked, though little of value had been taken. Eve was convinced an elderly neighbor was the culprit, however, and she smashed the woman’s door with a golf club. She began to carry on conversations with an imaginary companion named “Albi.” She collected little dolls, dressed them up, and sent photographs of them to her daughter. And the whole time she continued to record everything meticulously in her diary — which is how we know so much about her last years.
In 1974, a social worker was sent to check on Langley after a neighbor noticed that her mailbox was filling up. She found Langley’s body on the floor of her shack, beginning to decompose, her face partly gnawed by rats. The coroner estimated her time of death as a month earlier. Among her papers was found a notebook whose last entry was dated a few months before her death:
Dear god of the planet Mars, how we wonder how you are!
Your dear girl weeps but I feel sleepy and soon will sleep.
Steve Langley, Igh, Infelia Dido, of thought
The Importance of Being Eve Langley came out fifteen years after Eve’s death, but it seems to have been a little ahead of its time and has never been reissued. However, as acceptance of cross-dressing, transgender, and “fluidly gendered” people has grown, interest in Eve’s life and work has begun to grown. The Pea Pickers is now well-established as an Australian classic, even making it to #5 on a list of candidates for the Great Australian Novel. And several plays have been written to celebrate her unique life and character. Margi Brown Ash, an Australian therapist and actress, has performed a one-woman show, “Eve,” in several countries. Ash refers to Eve as “the character I keep returning to again and again … for she is the voice of the invisible female artist of the Australian landscape.”
The Pea Pickers, by Eve Langley Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1942
The Importance of Being Eve Langley, by Joy L. Thwaite Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1989
Portraits of Carobeth Laird from a 1975 Parade Magazine profile “Never before have I heard of an exiting new literary talent bursting forth at the age of 80. But here, I am convinced, we have one,” Tom Wolfe in Harper’s Bookletter in 1975. He was remarking upon the publication of Carobeth Laird’s first book, a memoir of her marriage to anthropologist John Peabody Harrington, Encounter with an Angry God, by the small, volunteer-run Malki Museum Press.
Chances are slim that Wolfe would have learned of the book had not two writers, Harry Lawton and Anne Jennings, associated with the museum, sent copies of it to some of their contacts in New York publishing circles. Lawton and Jennings knew a remarkable piece of writing when they saw it. Encounter is a frank, self-deprecating, and eloquent account, written from a distance of fifty years, of how Laird met, married, worked with, and, ultimately, divorced Harrington, a pioneering linguist and anthropologist who was singularly driven to pursue his researches at the cost of everything else, including his wife’s health. Thanks to their efforts, the book gained reviews in a number of major papers, including The Washington Post, in which Larry McMurtry positively gushed: “… if it were fiction, it would be a great, if not the greatest, American novel.” The small press’s initial edition of 2,000 copies sold out quickly, another run of 5,000 was released, and the book was picked up for release as a mass market paperback by Ballantine Books.
Yet Encounter is a classic case of a book being so entwined with an author that the two cannot be judged separately. Carobeth Tucker was already an exceptional young woman when she enrolled in Harrington’s introductory class on linguistics at the San Diego Normal School in 1915. Born in Texas, she had traveled with her family to Mexico in 1913, met and fell in love with a married man, and became pregnant with his child. She moved with her parents to San Diego and together, they raised Carobeth’s child. Unable to gain admission to a college, given her situation, she undertook self-study instead, demonstrating a real aptitude for learning languages. When the opportunity to study linguistics at the Normal School came up, she jumped at it.
Her first thought upon seeing Harrington enter the classroom on the first day was that he looked “like an angry god.” Although he hated teaching and his manner was abrupt and awkward, “his magnificent head and face” stirred her imagination, and Harrington soon learned that she, in turn, was extremely alert and grasped both the principles and details of linguistics with ease. She started staying after class to help him grade papers and they discussed poetry, evolution, and his dreams of field research. In a matter of weeks, Harrington was speaking “as if it were completely settled that he and I should spend our lives together,” although she was already noticing that “at other times all his planning left me out completely.” He later tried to explain his fluctuating manner by saying that he was worried she was a Jew.
He was also tactless and intellectually arrogant, wore clothes that were threadbare and needed a wash, shoveled his food in with a spoon, and talked with his mouth full. Her parents weren’t particularly impressed when they met him, but they considered him somewhat prestigious, given his degrees and faculty position, and already thought Carobeth “desparately self-willed.” They merely went along with her wishes when she followed Harrington up to Los Angeles and joined him on a field trip researching Indian languages in the Santa Ynez Valley. Though he virtually ignored her aside from relying on her command of Spanish and typing skills as research tools. They fought. And, after a few months in the field, they got married.
Early in the book, Laird acknowledges that what Harrington needed was “a wise, firm and sympathetic guide, not a youthful slave and disciple.” From what she describes, slave was her primary role in their time together. Harrington was not only utterly focused on research work he saw as a race against time, given that the California Indian populations had been so decimated and many of the surviving native speakers of Indian languages were aging and ill, but he also had a deep streak of paranoia. Despite the fact that they worked together day in and day out, and he could see the sacrifices to personal concerns she was making on his behalf, he would take off at times without a word and tried to keep some of his field notes in code to avoid her reading them. Although a diagnosis from a distance of a century is risky, I strongly suspect that Harrington was suffering from Asperger’s syndrome.
When Carobeth became pregnant, Harrington’s received the new with irritation, concerned mainly about the disruption it would bring to their work. At one point, when Carobeth was eight months pregnant, he left her alone in a rude mountain cabin with barely any food, and she slept each night with an axe beside her bed. He packed her off to San Diego to have the baby, a girl, and counted on her returning as soon as the infant could be left to be raised by her parents. (Which brings up one of the disconcerting aspects of Encounter. Laird would ultimately have seven children by three different men, but the two daughters she had at the time of this book go virtually unmentioned aside from when they are waving goodbye to her from a train window.)
Although Harrington essentially neglected his wife, he did respect her intelligence and skill in field work, and when an opportunity arose to document the language of the Chemehuevi Indians, he sent her alone to Parker, Arizona, to begin work on a study he would ultimately take over. She quickly developed a friendship with her guide there, a soft-spoken blacksmith, “built like a buffalo,” named George Laird: “From the moment of our meeting, there was a rapport between us which went much deeper than a shared interest in words and myth, though at first it could only be expressed in such sharing.”
George Laird was twice her age, living with another woman, and barely educated. But she soon found herself weaving “amorous fantasies about him.” Harrington was so impressed by the quality and detail of the notes his wife was sending on the Chemehuevis that he asked her to bring George to meet with him in Santa Fe, where he was now teaching. At one point in the visit, Harrington tossed a book to his wife for her to read. It struck her in the stomach:
Both men leaped to their feet. Both exclaimed with a single voice.
George said, “Did it hurt you?”
Harrington said, “Did it hurt the book?”
When Harrington was assigned to the Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington, he insisted on bringing both Carobeth and George along Over the course of the following winter, with George sleeping on a cot in the couple’s kitchen, the two men worked on Harrington’s notes on the Chemehuevi and Carobeth and George fell in love. By the spring on 1920, she decided to leave Harrington, and she and George drove back to San Diego in an old Chevrolet.
Her parents didn’t think much of Carobeth’s new lover and insisted he find a room in a hotel to stay in. George took a job as a ditch-digger and slowly began working his way into her mother’s good graces. After a year, her father agreed to pay for a divorce lawyer, and, despite many delays and a last minute attempt by Harrington, the divorce was finalized in 1922. Her parents asked Carobeth and George to wait a year to get married, but helped them look for and buy a small farm in Poway, a town outside San Diego. The couple finally married in August 1923. She was 28. He was 52. They were to be married for 17 years, until George died in 1940.
Much of the power of Encounter with an Angry God as a story comes from the contrast between the edgy, tense relationship between Carobeth and Harrington and the gentle and patient love she shared with George Laird. If she was able to take a more balanced view of Harrington, recognizing her own faults as well as his, it is surely due in part to the influence of George, who appears, in her affectionate portrait, to have been a man of remarkable strength and forbearance.
In 1969, Carobeth was living with Georgia, the oldest of the children she had with George, when she was contacted by researchers looking to pick up the threads of the research on the Chemehuevi they found in the huge archive of field notes (over a million pages, by one account) left by Harrington. What they discovered was that what complete work there was in the archive was probably done by Carobeth. And, more amazingly, they learned that throughout the time she and George had been together, she had been documenting the Chemehuevi language and myths.
The Malki Museum Press contracted with her to publish The Chemehuevis, a summation of her research. When Harry Lawton, on the board of the press, learned of Carobeth’s story, he encouraged her to write her own autobiography. As a memorial to Carobeth put it, “The rush of memories came in flood, so much so that she completed almost a chapter a week,” and the book was finished in a little over three months. Anne Jennings sent a copy of the galley proofs to her acquaintance, Tom Wolfe, and Wolfe offered to contribute a blurb for the back cover. “Carobeth Laird’s story of how she married the Genius Anthropologist and left him for one of the natives he was studying manages to be at once tender and ruthless — ruthlessly funny — and to offer and amazing slice of American life.”
Malki published The Chemehuevis not long after Encounter with an Angry God. The subject and the more scholarly approach of the book meant that it was unlikely to have the same popular success, but in its field it was immediately recognized as a classic work. In a memoriam written after her death in 1983, Lowell John Bean, professor of anthropology at California State University, Hayward, paid tribute to her accomplishments as an anthropologist:
The Chemehuevis is an important book not only because of its enormous amount of ethnographic detail, but because that detail is so well analyzed. Laird implicitly understood what anthropologists today call a systems approach. She saw how each aspect of the culture was systemically related to other aspects of culture. The book is not a laundry list or simple description, it is an analysis of culture. This is particularly clear in her use of mythic materials where she draws out the sociological, economic, psychological, and philosophical implications of the myths for everyday Chemehuevi life.
Carobeth had little chance to enjoy the fruits of her recognition. A little while before the publication of Encounter, she suffered a severe inflammation of her gallbladder while living with one of her grandsons in a trailer near Lake Havasu. She was hospitalized and soon operated on, but being dirt poor and with none of her children in a position to help, she was sent to a fairly spartan nursing home. There, she found that most of her fellow residents were suffering from some form of dementia, and that the staff simply assumed that she had to be, too. It took a considerable effort, culminating in a ruse by several of her friends to rescue “Professor Laird” from the home.
She was taken in by two of her old neighbors from Poway, who gave her a safe place to recuperate. So angered and frustrated was she by her experience in the nursing home that she immediately began writing an account. “It was neither the best nor the worst of nursing homes,” she wrote “It wasn’t horrible, just dehumanizing.” Although she finished the book quickly, it took months to find a publisher, as none of the major firms wanted to deal with a book about aging. She finally signed a contract with a tiny firm, Chandler & Sharp, out of Novato, California, and Limbo: A Memoir about Life in a Nursing Home by a Survivor was published in 1979. Once again, a small press was no impediment to her publicity, and stories about Carobeth were run in dozens of newspapers, include a two-page profile spread in the popular Sunday supplement, Parade Magazine.
Her health began to fail soon after this, and she died in 1983. Her last book, which collected the many Chemehuevi myths she had been told by George Laird, Mirror and Pattern: George Laird’s World of Chemehuevi Mythology, was published posthumously by the Malki Museum Press. The University of New Mexico Press reissued Encounter in paperback in 1993, but it’s been out of print since then.
Isa Glenn, 1925A few months ago, I was contacted by Professor Veronica Makowsky of the University of Connecticut, who is researching the life and work of Isa Glenn, a forgotten woman writer of the 1920s and 1930s whose novel Transport I reviewed here some years ago. Dr. Makowsky is something of an expert on neglected women writers, having published biographies of Caroline Gordon and Susan Glaspell and, just out, The Fiction of Valerie Martin: An Introduction, about the work of a contemporary American writer whose work has been underestimated. She is the author of numerous articles on F. Scott Fitzgerald, American women writers, and southern writers, and has served in editorial and directorial positions over the course of her career.
Isa Glenn is a writer I’ve been interested in for years. The daughter of an Atlanta mayor, she grew up in the highest circles of Southern society and studied art in Paris under her cousin, James McNeill Whistler. In 1903, she married S.J. Bayard Schindel, an Army captain who had taken part in the battle of San Juan Hill, in a ceremony that took place in a mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York City and was reported in all the New York papers. Over the next two decades, until Schindel died in 1921, she moved with him as he served in Army posts in the U.S., Panama, and the Philippines.
After her husband’s death, Isa Glenn and her son, John Bayard Schindel, settled in New York City and she became involved in the city’s literary and social circles. She also began writing fiction, and published her first novel, Heat, which was set in the Philippines, in 1926. She published a total of seven novels over the space of nine years, and then, it appears, stopped abruptly and never published again. She died in 1951 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery with her husband.
I was excited to see Dr. Makowsky’s interest in Isa Glenn’s work and took the opportunity to ask if she’d be willing to do an interview by email, to which she agreed graciously. Given her credentials and that fact that she is perhaps the only academic to take a serious look at Glenn’s work in many years, she is in a unique position to offer a perspective on its qualities and on Glenn’s place in American literature.
How did you become interested in Isa Glenn’s life and work?
Throughout my career, I have been interested in American women writers who were well known and esteemed in their day, but were erased from the literary canon over the first half or so of the twentieth century. My first book, a biography of the Southern novelist Caroline Gordon (1895-1981), was set in motion because one day, while I was a graduate student at Princeton, I noticed that many boxes were being delivered to the library archives where I was doing some research. When I asked about them, I was told that they were Caroline Gordon’s; she was the wife of Allen Tate, and, oh, also a writer.
My second book on the Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright and fiction writer Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was provoked by the constant coupling of her name with that of Eugene O’Neill as a founder of the Provincetown Players; when I began with the most cursory research, I was struck by her many accomplishments and her vast renown during her lifetime. The book I published this year concerns the works of contemporary American novelist Valerie Martin (1948–); I couldn’t figure out how and why a writer of such amazing talent and imagination, who won the UK’s Orange Prize, was so little known in her own country.
My interest in Isa Glenn was sparked by a brief biographical sketch of her on page 254 in George Hutchinson’s biography of the Harlem Renaissance novelist Nella Larsen (In Search of Nella Larsen, Harvard UP, 2006). Hutchinson writes of her novels: “Remarkable as they are in their expert dissections of race, gender, class, and sexuality, they have so far been completely lost to literary history” (254). Like that of Gordon, Glaspell, and Martin, Glenn’s work was well-recognized for its topicality and literary techniques during her lifetime, but was “disappeared” in the mid-twentieth-century in favor of male writers when male scholars were deciding who should be studied in colleges and whose work should be included in the literary canon or “canonized.”
Having read a number of her books, would you consider her justly neglected or deserving of rediscovery by today’s readers?
Glenn’s work is richly deserving of rediscovery by today’s readers for a number of reasons. First, as a literary scholar, I want to point out her excellence in various literary techniques, such as structure, patterns of imagery, and characterization, but, above all, point of view; she is technically a fine writer. Secondly, her work has remarkable range: the American South, South America, ships at sea, the New York literary scene, Washington DC, army outposts, the Philippines, and the Far East. Thirdly, she addresses topics that are timeless yet timely in her day and in ours, particularly power relationships based on race, gender, and class, mother-and-daughter and mother-and-son relationships, the burden of the past opposed by the tyranny of trendiness, “helpful” Americans abroad making a mess of their lives and those they are supposedly assisting, the judgmental, clannish, and exclusionary aspects of human nature, the monumentalizing of a social value until it becomes an oppressive weight rather than an aspiration for growth, and many others. She is writing about specific times and places, but her novels remain uncannily relevant today.
Glenn was something of a Southern belle, being the daughter of a one-time mayor of Atlanta and the wife of an Army general. Why do you think she ended up writing novels that were satirical about the culture she grew up in?
I can only answer with speculation based on her fiction and some published interviews since I have not been able to find more than a few of her letters nor a diary or journal. The small collection of her papers in Yale’s Beinecke Library is a good source for her published work, but reveals little about her as a person.
From her fiction, I would speculate that she observed that various cultures, for all their good points, tended to fossilize and become absurd and constricting as they failed to adapt to changing times. She examines many such cultures in her works, to cite a few examples from her novels: Southern culture in Southern Charm (1928) and A Short History of Julia (1930); army culture in Heat (1926, her first published novel) and Transport (1929); white colonial culture in Heat, Little Pitchers (1927), and Mr. Darlington’s Dangerous Age (1933); trendy literary New Yorkers in the late 1920s and early 1930s in East of Eden (1932); or the claustrophobic culture of Washington DC’s old families in The Little Candle’s Beam (1935, her last published novel).
Although these works can be considered somewhat satirical, there is also a respect for the strength of the perpetuators of these fossilized cultures who are often formidable older women such as the title character’s mother A Short History of Julia; the central consciousness and mother of two daughters in Southern Charm; the “Old New York” mother-in-law of the woman torn to death between marriage and her writing in East of Eden; and the lioness-like mother and leader of the Washington “cave dwellers” in The Little Candle’s Beam. I believe these ideas about calcified cultures may have been developed through her interest her interest in George Gurdjieff’s philosophy of attaining a higher consciousness and full human potential, which she pursued through her acquaintance and correspondence with Gurdjieff’s expounder, A. R. Orage (1873-1934) from the late 1920s through the early 1930s, another intriguing aspect of Glenn’s writing and life that calls for more information and reflection.
A number of her novels are set in the Philippines and Far East, where she lived for some years while her husband was in the Army. How would you describe her view of relationships between Filipinos and the Westerners?
In her depictions of such relationships in Heat and Mr. Darlington’s Dangerous Age, Glenn was ahead of her time and yet not what we today would see as completely “politically correct,” so we need to assess her work in the context of her day, unblinded by our “presentism.” She skewered the devastating effects of American colonization on the local culture and the local environment as she characterized the arrogance and blindness of the colonizers. At the same time, perhaps because she was often conveying the sentiments of her white American characters, she often portrayed Filipinos, Malays, Chinese, and other “Orientals” as both strange and menacing. Her novels give her more balanced portraits, but many of her short stories (published in prominent and popular magazines of her day) seem to cater to prevailing titillating stereotypes of inscrutably treacherous “Orientals.”
I asked Dr. Makowsky a number of other questions about Glenn’s work and career, but she confessed to having run into one of the challenges in researching the work of a long-forgotten writer, which is the lack of reliable sources and large holes in the remaining documentation.
These are excellent questions, but, as of yet, I have not located materials that will satisfactorily answer them. This points to a major difficulty in reviving interest in Glenn’s work, a sort of vicious circle in that we lack the information about her that would help revive interest in her work and her work is out-of-print so it is difficult to revive interest in her as a literary figure.
What we know of her biography suggests a woman with a playful, witty character which led her to a number of remarkable and fascinating experiences: Southern belle; student in the atelier of her cousin painter James McNeill Whistler; army wife all over the globe, particularly in the Philippines in a time of rebellion against the colonizers; single (widowed) mother of a son; her self-reinvention as an author when she was well into middle age (her forties and fifties) including becoming a prominent part of the 1920s literary scene in New York. All these aspects are beguiling lines of inquiry whose results would greatly lead to a revival of interest in her work, but I currently lack the kind of detailed information about the author’s life and views that can be found in correspondence by, with, and about her; family documents and memorabilia; a diary or journal if she kept any; and various other personal effects and documents; as well as memories, oral or written, of those who knew her.
I have been piecing together what I can from public records (birth, marriage, and death certificates, census records), ships’ passenger lists, papers largely relating to her publications at Yale’s Beinecke library (including notes toward a novel, According to MacTavish, which, as far as I know, may never have been completed or published), mentions in newspapers in literary sections and in gossip or society columns, army records, and published interviews with her. Everything that I find suggests a fascinating woman with a fascinating life that requires more facts and, especially, more of her own voice speaking about her experiences.
Her son, John Bayard Schindel, published his own novel, Golden Pilgrimage, which was based on his childhood experiences on Army posts, and then never published again. Can you tell us what happened to him after that?
Isa Glenn’s son, John Bayard Schindel, known as “Bayard,” is a captivating character in his own right as well as the catalyst for some of his mother’s work. He was born on November 4, 1907 when Isa Glenn Schindel was probably thirty-three years old (she gave various dates of birth that made her younger and younger as was not unusual for women of her era). His childhood was the peripatetic one of the army brat due to his father’s steady advance in the army’s hierarchy; Bayard recounts and rejects these experiences in his novel Golden Pilgrimage (1929), published when he was only about twenty-one.
His father, Isa Glenn’s husband, died in 1921 when Bayard was about thirteen; the topic of a son’s need for a father and the widowed mother’s feelings of inadequacy are topics that Glenn explores in Little Pitchers and The Little Candle’s Beam. He shared his mother’s interest in George Gurdjieff’s philosophy of self-development as expounded by A.R. Orage (1873-1934) with whom both took classes in New York. According to Yale’s Beinecke Library’s website on the Schindel papers (Isa Glenn and Bayard’s), Bayard “studied for a time at Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in France.”
On August 25, 1943, Bayard married Charlotte Marie Cline in St. Margaret’s Church, Washington DC; he was a Captain in the Army; she was an Ensign in USNR. They had three sons. According to Charlotte’s obituaries, they lived in occupied Japan, and bases in Alaska, Virginia, Maryland, and finally Newport News where he died in 1980; his death certificate lists his occupation as civil servant. More information about his life and experiences, particularly in his own words, would be of great interest, not only for his mother’s life and work, but illuminating his own intriguing and accomplished character.
If you had the chance to pick one of her books for republication now, which one would it be?
This is a difficult question to answer because no one novel exemplifies the range of her themes. Heat, her first novel, is written with the great verve that its title epitomizes, but while quite compelling, it is not as mature in theme and technique as some of her later works. For colonization and imperialism, I prefer Mr. Darlington’s Dangerous Age, which is her revision (in a way that presages postmodernism) of Henry James’s The Ambassadors, set in the Far East instead of Paris; this novel is marked by Glenn’s inimitable use of point of view, characterization, and imagery. Of the “southern” works, I like best A Short History of Julia for its remarkably evocative setting and characterization, but also for Glenn’s astute rendition of relationships between black female servants and their white female employers.
Rodgers had a clear-eyed understanding of his position in the community, which he never fully settled into. As he wrote in a late unpublished essay quoted in O’Brien’s book,
The fact that Fearing was already known as the “Drunken Poet” at the age of 33, with just two books to his name, gives you a clue to one of the reasons his work fell into neglect. Like Delmore Schwartz and too many other fine writers of that hard-drinking time, Fearing tossed his life and talents on the pyre of alcohol, which happily consumed them and went on looking for victims. In his remarkable book, 
In the April 27, 1946 edition of Picture Post, a U. K. version of Life, an unusual three-page story was devoted to a poet who, even then, was two decades past her brief and limited fame. 
