Short Reviews

Short Notices

Shorter reviews of neglected books.

Central Stores, by Vicki Baum (1940)

“One must never place a loaded gun on the stage if it isn’t going to go off,” Anton Chekhov is said to have told aspiring playwrights. In Central Stores, Vicki Baum’s novel, not one but two pistols are introduced in early chapters. Any reader who’s ever heard about Chekhov’s gun will know to expect something explosive to come: a shooting, a robbery, a suicide, perhaps. By the time Der große Ausverkauf, the German original of Central Stores, was published in 1937, Baum had written 19 books in as many years, a production rate she kept up for another 20 years, amassing nearly 50 novels to her name.

Few writers can be this prolific without resorting to a few formulaic tricks, usually in the way of plots and characters. In Baum’s case, her plots tend to be variations on “Ship of Fools,” a warhorse from the Middle Ages that served many 20th bestselling authors (e.g., Arthur Hailey in Airport) well: put a batch of people with conflicting motives in a confined setting and let the inevitable chain reactions take place. This served her very well with her best-known and most successful novel, Grand Hotel (1929). So well, in fact, that these plots are usually referred to as “Grand Hotel” stories.

But by Central Stores, its limitations were becoming evident. Central Stores is a large Macys-like department store in midtown Manhattan, with twelve floors of everything from fish to furs. In fact, the first character in the book wafts into the china department with the smell of the fish on sale that day in the grocery department.

She was one of those customers who are always on the search for something cheaper. Shop-soiled blouses, leaky coffeepots, discoloured leather bags, clearance sales of imitation silk stockings — that is the sort of thing they go after. They are the wives of underpaid clerks, those worried and fretful women who never get anything which is worth the price they pay for it.

In Baum’s scheme, this woman is a secondary character. Though she will reappear to help frame the story, she is really just a device. Therefore, Baum has no need to tell us any more about her.

We can easily tell Baum’s primary characters. They all have names, ages, hair colors, physical assets or impediments, mannerisms. And like the pistols, if Baum mentions any of these, it’s a given they will serve some function in the course of the book. Mr. Philipp, the house detective, is in his sixties, balding, with a drinking problem and a pistol. Which means, we know, that he’s probably going to mess up and get fired and do something desperate. Lillian Smith, one of the models in the store’s haut couture department, is stunningly beautiful but perhaps a bit too slickly gorgeous and wears too much of a cheap perfume. These, too, will be used. Baum is a most utilitarian writer.

This is not to suggest that Central Stores is not an entertaining book. Although we can see her constructing a house of cards in the first two-thirds of the novel, just how it collapses and where the cards fall still comes as a surprise and the narrative’s momentum builds to the point where we keep turning the pages through the climactic chapters. I figured it would take me 4-5 days to read it; I finished it in two.

Several reviewers commented that Central Stores was perfect material for a film, and as I was reading it, I could picture Van Johnson as Eric, the tall window dresser married to Nina, the pretty young saleslady (Teresa Wright or Donna Reed). James Gleason, of course, has to be Mr. Philipp. Lillian Smith might be harder to cast: she needs a blonde, brassy femme fatale type, but not someone like Lana Turner who would become an A-lister. Lizabeth Scott, perhaps?

Central Stores is a bit of a puzzle in Baum’s oeuvre. When I first read about it, I just assumed that it, like most of Baum’s novels that were translated into English, would have been published and sold well in both the U.S. and England. But, in fact, Central Stores has never been published in America. Even its English publisher, Geoffrey Bles, appears not to have put much of a push behind the book, based on the few and small ads I’ve been able to locate. Was the perception of Baum as a German writer a factor? But she was, in fact, an Austrian Jew whose books were banned by the Nazis. It’s hard to tell now, but from what I can see, Central Stores was a natural for American readers and would have been a guaranteed bestseller. Unfortunately, this means that used copies are much scarcer in the U.S. now. Fortunately, the book is also available for reading on the Internet Archive (link).


This is a contribution to Simon Thomas and Karen Langley’s #1940Club, the latest increment of their twice-yearly call for readers to write about books published in a particular year.

Central Stores, by Vicki Baum
London: Geoffrey Bles, 1940

Mock Autobiographies for April Fools

Long before Clifford Irving concocted his fake autobiography of recluse millionaire Howard Hughes, mock autobiographies have been a popular vehicle for satire — usually of the sort of people who wrote these books, less frequently (viz. Roy Lewis’s The Evolution Man), of the (real, not mock) author’s contemporaries. I’ve written about a number of these over the years, but I had no idea how broad this seemingly narrow sub-genre was until I started compiling this list, which is less comprehensive than I suspected a few days ago. And so, in no particular order, here is a baker’s dozen of autobiographies (and diaries) that are not — Surprise! — by the people they claim to be.

• My Royal Past (1940, revised 1961)
By Baroness von Bülop, nee Princess Theodora Louise Alexina Ludmilla Sophie von Eckermann-Waldstein. Actually by Cecil Beaton.
Perhaps the ultimate proof of the fact that Cecil Beaton felt his position as preferred photographer to the Court of St. James secure was the fact that not once, but twice, he mocked both his subjects and his own staid style of photographing them in this illustrated memoir of a remote offshoot of the tangle of Saxe-Coburg-Hesse-Hohenzollern-Hapsburg-etc. bloodlines that ruled Europe for too bloody long. Beaton himself dressed up as the Baroness, accompanied by such friends as the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, all dressed up in gowns and bemedalled uniforms.
The Baron and Baroness von Büllop on their honeymoon.
Beaton was so sure of himself, in fact, that he provided his own review blurbs before they were written: e.g., “Here, as Lord Beaconsfield said, is a book that no time should be wasted in reading.” Perhaps to capitalize on his renewed fame for his costume designs for the Broadway musical My Fair Lady, My Royal Past was revised and reissued in 1961, including this time a list of errata, such as . And as one accustomed to paying attention to details, Beaton was sure to include a detailed index with such entries as:
Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s entries in the index to My Royal Past.

• Quail in Aspic (1962)
By Count Charles Korsetz. Actually by Cecil Beaton
Beaton had such fun with My Royal Past that he took another shot at the sub-genre the year after its reissue. Quail in Aspic was an “as told to” autobiography of a Hungarian count who had a knack for being on the side of European noble houses moments before their demise. He manages to remake himself as a proper English gentleman, however, complete with a fine country house and a matching set of prejudices.
Elsa Maxwell as Count Charles Korsetz.
This time around, Beaton recruited his long-time friend, the society hostess Elsa Maxwell, to portray the Count in the photographs (by Beaton, of course) that illustrate the book.

 

• Cyril Pure’s Diary (1981)
By Cyril Pure. Actually by Michael Geare.
Cyril Pure is a man after every bookshop owner’s heart. Of malice, that is. Set up in Chipping Toad’s only bookshop, he dives headlong into the bookselling industry. Although it might be more accurate to say that the UK’s bookselling industry dives headlong upon him, rather like a pack of ravenous vultures. One publisher’s rep, having heard the shop has sold one of their books, leaves Cyril with 100 copies of a sure bestseller, Reminiscences of an Old Crocodile Shikari. The Chipping Toad Poetry Society names him its Vice President, in return for which he has the honor of hosting a reading by the famous Cement poet, Bert Stunge, and providing refreshments. Cyril puzzles over the inner meanings of Stunge’s work:

Tring, tring
Shoestring, heating
Bloating, fourteen
Umpteen, thumping…

Geare teamed up with Michael Corby the following year to write another mock diary, this time of the famed Transylvanian count, who, as it turns out, spent quite a lot of time in Victorian England, attending Balliol and Oxford, exchanging ripostes with Oscar Wilde, meeting Sherlock Holmes, and implicating Van Helsing in the Jack the Ripper murders. It’s earnest fun but more earnest than fun, unfortunately.

 

• Lord Bellinger (1911)
By Lord Bellinger. Actually by Harry Graham.
Although just one generation away from trade, Lord Bellinger has easily adapted to the life of the idle nobility, priding himself on being “naturally disinclined to anything approaching effort.” An early attempt at portraying the type of privileged dimwit parodied in Monty Python’s “Upper-Class Twit of the Year” competition and now occupying numerous junior minister positions in the current Conservative government, Harry Graham ultimately missing his mark by favoring kindness over brutality in his approach.
I wrote about Lord Bellinger back in 2013.

 

• Little Me: the intimate memoirs of that great star of stage, screen, and television, Belle Poitrine (1961)
By Belle Poitrine (see above for the rest). Actually by Patrick Dennis.
Dennis, rocketed to fame and fortune with his novel Auntie Mame and its Broadway and film adaptations, may have had most fun with this account of the successes, failures, and romantic entanglements of a grand dame actress a la Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, etc. Dedicated to her four husbands, including the fourth and shortest-lived (literally), Letch Feeley, the former Pomona gas station attendant who had the misfortune to step onto a yacht with his mistress just moments before it quite unexpectedly exploded. Illustrated with photographs by Cris Alexander.

Like Beaton, Dennis enjoyed this form so much that he followed a few years later with First Lady (1964), the memoirs of Martha Dinwiddie Butterfield, whose husband, George Washington Butterfield, occupied the White House for 30 days in 1909 — most of that time drunk or cavorting with his mistress, Gladys Goldfoil, in one of the spare bedrooms.

 

• I Think I Remember (1927)
By Sir Wickham Woolicomb (“ordinary English snob and gentleman”). Actually by Magdalen King Hall
A celebration of a life lived “when gentlemen were gentleman” and before “all this socialism, etc., made everything cheap and nasty.” As with Lord Bellinger, it’s easiest to simply poke fun at the pompous than to turn parody into an authentic comic creation. As The New York Times‘s reviewer put it, “In parodying the pompous tomes of reminiscences that great personages manage to foist on the publishers and public with little difficulty, Miss King-Hall has taken a step downstairs. It is as if James Joyce, after completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had gone ahead to fashion A Portrait of an Old Man with Senile Dementia.”

There must be something about these spoofs that inspires certain authors. Magdalen King-Hall wrote two others: The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765 (1926), which mocked the pretences and rituals of Georgian England and which she admitted she’d only written to escape the boredom of a summer at the English seaside; and Gay Crusaders (1934), the memoir of an English knight in the Third Crusade, an experience enlivened by liberal amounts of booty and made tiresome by the consistent habit of the French to arrival after all the fighting was done.

 

• Water on the Brain (1933)
By Major Arthur Blenkinsop, formerly of the Boundary Commission in Mendacia. Actually by Compton Mackenzie
Mackenzie, who ran a British intelligence and special operations network in Greece during World War One and was involved in everything from the disastrous Gallipoli campaign to an attempted assassination of Prince Phillip’s father, then King of Greece. Somewhat resentful at his lack of recognition from his higher ups, Mackenzie wrote this account of one particularly inept and dull-witted agent recruited into the service of His Majesty’s Director of Extraordinary Intelligence, MQ99(E).

 

• The Way Up (1972)
By Anaxagoras, Duc de Gramont. Actually by Sanche de Gramont (who later changed his name to Ted Morgan).
The Way Up may have been an attempt to cash in on the success of the first of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series, mock memoirs by Harry Flashman, the villain of Thomas Hughes’s earnest Victorian boy’s novel about Rugby, Tom Brown’s School Days. In De Gramont’s case, his villainous hero is a fringe member of the court of King Louis XV, adventurer, soldier of fortune, slave trader, and courtier. Ironically, however, it was Scotsman Fraser who demonstrated a greater talent for panache than his French wannabe competitor. De Gramont/Morgan stuffs almost 500 pages full of plot but failed to come close to the joyous sense of bastardry that makes the Flashman novels so much fun.

 

• The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace (1937)
By Ethel Firebrace. Actually by Gay Taylor and Malachi Whitaker.
The Victorian novelist par excellence, Ethel Firebrace wears out four typewriters churning out over a hundred novels or over five million self-righteous words. By her own account, Ethel is not a prig. It simply happens to be the fact that everyone else is lazy, ill-mannered, and untrustworthy.
And non-garglers. Ethel attributes her success (“or very nearly all of it!”) to her habit of gargling after food. Writers who fail to gargle “spring up like toadstools, live as long, and disappear as ignominiously.” Needless to say, but “there are no garglers among modern poets.”
As I wrote back in 2019, The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace was a jeux d’esprit for lifelong friends Taylor and Whitaker, but on the whole probably more fun for them than us.

 

• The Autobiography of Augustus Carp
By Augustus Carp, Esq. Actually by Henry H. Bashford.
Most of these books are amusing. Some are laugh-out-loud funny. The Autobiography of Augustus Carp is a comic masterpiece. Bashford, a Harley Street physician and amateur writer, grasped something that many of his fellow mock autobiographers failed to: namely, that one cannot spoof half-heartedly. There are moments, for example, when the reader sees the props in a book like The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, sees the scene being staged for a joke at Ethel’s expense. Bashford, on the other hand, understood that Augustus Carp is not only blissfully unaware of his ridiculousness but absolutely convinced of his constant and superior moral rectitude. And so, for example, if he happens to get hammered by imbibing excessively of a drink he’s told is “Portugalade,” he is not just a drunken boor but completely ignorant of the fact that he’s drunk. There’s a certain giddy delight in observing how often Bashford is able to coax Augustus into behaving like an idiot without his gaining the slightest clue to what’s going on.

 

• My Hey-Day: The Crackup of the International Set (1940)
By Princess Tulip Murphy. Actually by Virginia Faulkner.
Taken from a series of articles Faulkner wrote for Town and Country in the 1930s, My Hey-Day is a world tour in the company of Tulip Murphy, former good-time girl and widow of “Brick-a-Minute” Murphy, who claimed to be related to ancient Irish royalty in some unspecified way. Unspecified is all right with Tulip, who’se never seen a set she couldn’t force her way into. Whether she’s visiting Scandanavian, the Soviet Union, France, Tibet, or Hollywood, Princess Tulip manages to mock power, wealth, class, culture, sexuality, and, most of all, fashion. No matter how limited her purse, she finds some old thing to throw on:

I was wearing an original Déclassé (salvaged from the wreck of my wardrobe), of spaghetti-colored cambric, handsomely trimmed in gum-drop green duvetyn with shoulder-knots of solid tinsel. My hat was a saucy beret no bigger than an aspirin tablet, which was held to my head by a specially trained family of matching chameleons. My only jewelry, square-cut cultured emerald cufflinks, matched the duvetyn, and I carried a fish-net parasol which also could be used for water-divining.

Princess Tulip noted, with regret, that the onset of World War Two was curtailing the activities of the International Set: “Many of my oldest friends can now count their yachts on the fingers of a single hand.” However, Faulkner carried Tulip through at least a dozen more adventures after My Hey-Day was published, visiting New Orleans, Washington, Mexico, a Western dude ranch, and the wedding of Rita Hayworth and Aly Khan in 1949 and setting at least the American land speed record for gate crashing.

The Paper Dolls, by Laura Beheler (1956)

Cover of the UK hardback edition of The Paper Dolls.

Ida Erickson, the central figure in Laura Beheler’s first novel, The Paper Dolls, is a well-fed, well-housed, well-clothed child. Despite the Depression, both her mother and father have good jobs and can treat her to new dresses, cokes, and store-bought cakes when many of her classmates wear hand-me-downs and go without lunch. Every day, Ida comes home and, the good little girl she is, goes to her room and plays. Which suits her parents, who are usually fighting behind their locked bedroom door. Without her parents, Ida is effectively alone:

Her grandmothers and granddaddies were all dead; they never even knew she got alive. She didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Damned old women sat around her kitchen table and slurped up her cokes. Ida rocked from side to side, tears wetting her arms, rolling down her chin, falling in small droplets onto the grass. Whispering blearily, she moaned. Was there ever anybody in the whole history of the whole world who didn’t have anybody?

Cover of the US hardback edition of The Paper Dolls.

With no real friends, Ida has provided herself with her own friends, the characters she keeps in her Universal Theme and Composition Book (No. S-1055). Sometimes they are just the head and shoulders taken from a Montgomery-Ward catalog; sometimes a full-length figure cut from a copy of The Delineator magazine. Beside each, she notes the name, vital statistics, key facts:

Sands Chutney — 14 years — 5 feet 1 inch tall — 109 pounds — English aristocrat — very rich.
Agnes Eaves — 15 years — 5 feet — 97 pounds — blond hair — very educated.
Dan Davis — 15 years — 5 feet 3 inches — 110 pounds — plays violin — is orphan.

Ida lives in a world so devoid of emotional or social interaction that her paper dolls are not only her source of entertainment and comfort but, as the years go by, more real than the real people in her life. When her father, apparently an inveterate philanderer, leaves to take a job in another city, abandoning Ida and her mother, Ida replaces him with a new doll (Fritz Robinson — 15 years — 5 feet, 2 inches — 120 pounds — shipwreck survivor). When her uncle Johnny, a musician, comes to stay for a while and shows more interest than any adult has before, Ida has a brief reprieve from the relentless dreariness of her non-imaginary like. But when Johnny moves on, Ida replaces him:

The first night he was gone, Ida found herself restless in a sea of aloneness. She got out the Universal notebook, laid out a few characters. For a long time she stared at the line-up, wondering what to do with it. Finally she decided Sands Chutney was named Sandy Chutney, and he played a clarinet.

Asked what she’d done on her summer vacation, Ida has only her paper dolls to fall back on:

“Well uh, I have this friend Sands Chutney who’s from New York. He came to see us, and he brought his girl friend with him. Her name’s Agnes Eaves. Well, he plays a real good clarinet, and she plays piano. And they taught me to play drums and guitar. Sands Chutney owns this httle night club back in Memphis, and that’s where he met Agnes Eaves. Well, they kept begging me to go back with them and play drums and guitar in the band. Two or three times I thought maybe I would, but I decided . . .”

Though Ida finishes school, gets a secretarial job, becomes an adult, the world of her paper dolls remains the focus of her life. Pearl Harbor is attacked and America enters the war. But to Ida, the war “was simply an incontestable fact, not a penetrating experience.”

Until she meets Allan, a Navy ROTC cadet, who quickly falls in love with her. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he falls in love with his impression of Ida. At a superficial level, Ida understands what is expected of a young woman in the social rituals of romance and is capable of playing her part. But at some level, Allan is nothing more to her than a three-dimensional doll, and to him, she is much the same.

When Allan ships off with the Atlantic fleet, Ida moves to New York to wait for him. She dominoes through a series of jobs until she lands one as a day clerk in the Waverly Hotel. Like many of its residents, the Waverly is “a lost and seedy aristocrat.” A bitter 4F Jew named Wally Safferman — well, befriends is too strong a word, so let’s say he attaches himself to Ida. She’s willing to buy drinks and listen, even if she doesn’t really like him much.

The problem with Wally is that he does see Ida for who she is: “‘Ida, you are so …’ He paused, looking for words, then finished, ‘You are so unborn.'” Wally understands the difference between simple innocence and raw naïveté. Ida is still cocooned in the illusions she’s built up around her dolls. “Did you ever go through that stage where you watched with horror while your childhood dream world collapsed?” he asks her in astonishment.

Unfortunately, before Wally can burst Ida’s bubble, Allan writes to say that he’s returning. He has a job lined up in Topeka, Kansas and expects Ida to report for duty:

I’m the man in this outfit. Therefore, where my job is simply has to be the place we go. This whole thing has been crazy long enough, and I’m tired of it. So here it is straight and simple: will you come to Topeka and marry me?

Will she, readers? Well, let’s just say that it comes down to a choice between Allan in Topeka and Sands Chutney in a dark Manhattan bar.

Some reviewers found The Paper Dolls too close to a case study to be fully successful as a novel, but Laura Beheler offers a convincing case for fantasy as a survival mechanism that gets a person through a lot of bleak days. Few readers will reach the end, however, without seeing its long-term limitations. Which is why the other things reviewers called The Paper Dolls was a horror story. If it is a horror story, it is entirely because we cannot help but empathize with Ida, the lost little girl.

Laura Beheler, from the dust jacket of The Paper Dolls.

Laura Beheler was no Ida Erickson. Raised in Fort Worth, she served in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in World War Two, worked as a reporter for the Associated Press and a copywriter for Neiman-Marcus, took up fencing and became a regional champion. In the late 1940s, she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she became a junior high school teacher and wrote three published novels starting with The Paper Dolls. She never married, remained in Santa Fe until her death in 2008 at the age of 87, and presumably never kept a notebook full of paper dolls.

The Paper Dolls, by Laura Beheler
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1956

Marie Beginning, by Alfred Grossman (1964)

Cover of first Us edition of Marie Beginning by Alfred Grossman

This is a guest post by the novelist Rob Palk.

Some books are neglected in their old age, others — a majority — are neglected from birth. Alfred Grossman, the author of Marie Beginning (1964), was both neglected and known for it, a painful combination. Newspapers profiled his neglect in pieces that failed to avert it. Anthony Burgess, recognising another flinty show-off, gave his endorsement. It made no difference. Grossman released four novels that received good reviews and were ignored by the reading public. His efforts after the fourth were ignored by publishers too.

From the Chicago Tribune, 2 June 1968.

Marie begins in the world of The Apartment, the American office in its imperial phase. Two frazzled male office wiseacres drink their coffees and swap dialogue. Our heroine, a gamine young woman from Brooklyn, arrives to ask for a secretarial job. Her interviewer, Lydia, has very large breasts. (It was 1964. If a male writer thought up some breasts he was going to tell you about them.) So far, so Mad Men. Only something odd is afoot; the two guys in the office are discussing puritanism and the Conquistadores, and Marie bombards her interviewer with vaguely blackmailing questions about the aforementioned breasts and is rewarded for this with a job. (Yes, breasts, yes, I know. Again, it was 1964 and Lydia’s breasts are pretty much a character in this book.)

Then there’s the style. We are barely allowed inside the character’s heads; instead their inner lives spume out of them in florid ejaculations. They don’t so much converse as perform dialogue at one another, in a sort of gnomic screwball-ese of Grossman’s own invention. Scenes blur into each other in the space of a sentence. Marie herself might seem a familiar figure, the plucky street urchin who rises to the top through street smarts. Except there’s something chilling, something eldritch, about her, possessed, as she is, of both amoral cunning and a mysterious innocence. She is the teenage girl as avenging angel, or Martian, and her ambitions are set on more than just a job.

One senses that Grossman fell a bit in love with his creation, in a sweetly Platonic way. (“You don’t want to screw me and you know it. You and me,” she tells an office confidante, “I was a grown-up daughter — you could have fun with just walking on the edge of sex, playing with it, making jokes.” That sort of Platonic.) Aside from an early incident where she goads a blameless colleague into a botched suicide attempt for no reason except curiosity, her Machiavellianism is usually aimed at deserving targets. As Grossman gets fonder of her, or perhaps more annoyed at how America treated its children, Marie aims beyond humbling a few workplace chauvinists and takes on the country itself, embarking on an epic Kulturkampf against just about everything her creator must have loathed about his nation.

By a chain of implausiblebut enjoyable occurrences, Marie maneuvers her way into wedlock with her boss, Alexander Forbes. As well as being a minor plutocrat, Forbes is a predatory sadist and pervert and very American sort of fascist. We never fear for Marie in his clutches, which perhaps reduces the tension, but we do get to see our youthful protagonist turn her wits against the whole of the US right, in both its bow tied pseudo-aesthete patrician and gun-toting thick-as-pigshit forms. The creepy milieu of American reaction, its paranoid and prurient obsessions with racial and sexual hygiene, are expertly evoked. (Biographical detail: before turning to novels, Grossman edited one of the many CIA funded journals of the era, something he evidently had mixed feelings about.)

I will spoil things for no one by revealing Marie triumphs over her grim spouse and survives to fight further battles in a follow-up [The Do-Gooders (1968)] I’m now keen to read. This sequel, though, was to be Grossman’s last novel. He had no readership and it’s hard to say why. Perhaps he was that bit too clear-sighted, lacking the streak of post-Beat sentimentality of his black-comedy confreres Heller and Southern. The rest of his life was spent ignored except for occasional magazine pieces questioning why this talented author had had so little success. Twelve years after Marie Beginning was published, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He spent his last days alone, unable to physically write, but still recording novels onto a tape recorder that he knew would never be played.

Rob Palk is the author of Animal Lovers (Sandstone Press). He tweets at @robpalkwriter.

Marie Beginning, by Alfred Grossman
New York: Doubleday, 1964

The Hospital, by Kenneth Fearing (1939)

Cover of the first US edition of The Hospital by Kenneth Fearing

Though it takes place within the space of just an hour or two, a lot happens in Kenneth Fearing’s first novel, The Hospital. A suicide, a disfigurement, an act of vandalism and a power outage, an old man’s death and a young woman’s reprieve from tuberculosis. But even more happens off-camera, so to speak.

Although Fearing’s Hudson General Hospital is an enormous Manhattan hospital with hundreds of patients and thousands of staff members, in his hands it’s just a microcosm in a world churning with events. A dramatic rescue at sea. A contest between rival gangs over who controls the dockworkers’ union. The collapse of a a giant company. An illicit affair. An attempt to unionize the hospital workers.

But these things are only mentioned in passing, a sentence or two, and with little in the way of context or explanation. Over the course of the book, for example, we learn that Steve Sullivan, a first mate, was responsible for a rescue at sea that was later resented by his ship’s owner, leaving him without a birth. We only get bits of this story — from Sullivan, from his mother, from his wife as she waits to be operated on for breast cancer, from the woman he’s in love with — and never all the details.

In part this is because Fearing is an impressionist, not realist. He works in quick strokes, not painstaking reproduction. But also because The Hospital is a mosaic composed of what dozens of characters think, feel, and see. This was the technique Fearing used in all his novels.

The table of contents of a Fearing novel is a list of names: each chapter a moment or two as seen by that character within the book’s overall short duration. Some are major characters, such as Doctor Cavanagh, the surgeon who removes the tumor from the breast of Freya, Steve Sullivan’s wife — a surgeon who’s racking up more than his share of operating room deaths. Some, like Tom Pharney, an electrician, walk on, utter a few lines, and exit, never to be seen again. In The Hospital, Fearing even includes a few faceless extras in his cast: the crew of a city tugboat, the attendant at a police switchboard:

Bong-bong, bong-bong-bong, bong-bong.

Every fire alarm in the city sounds up here, and it’s always going.

“Give me a description of the men. Yeah, describe them. Did they have a car? What kind of a car? Were they tall or short? Which way they went after they held you up?”

Bong-bong, bong-bong-bong, bong-bong.

“Police Headquarters.”

Bong-bong, bong-bong-bong, bong-bong. On the box in front of me, Precinct 19 shows a green light Take it.

“Headquarters.”

“Narcotics Bureau.”

Put the call through. There is the yellow light of an outside wire. Take it.

“Police Headquarters.”

The approach is remarkably effective at conveying a sense of the swirling currents of activity that go on in a complex institution such as a major hospital. It’s an approach that many a film director has followed when trying to tell the story of a big event, such as the Normandy invasion in The Longest Day. It also reinforces the sense that the institution is large and the people small. At the scale of a whole novel, it’s a bit like looking down on a busy city street from a window on the 25th floor.

It also may have enabled Fearing to play to his strengths. No character’s chapter runs more than a few pages, some just a few paragraphs. This saves him the task of any real character development. His people are more cogs in his narrative machine than the actual engine of the narrative. Though Fearing gives us a salad full of bits of their stories, his story isn’t really about any of them. It’s about Hudson General Hospital as a artefact of modern society. Again, to use a film analogy, we could consider The Hospital for the Best Editing award, but none of its cast would get nominated for an acting award.

Of Fearing’s fiction, The Big Clock consistently gets the lion’s share of the attention and critical praise, but having read most of them now, I think there is much of a muchness about all of them. For what it is, it’s a very well done muchness, and I full expect to go on and read his remaining novels. They race with the manic energy of Fearing’s best known poem, “St. Agnes’ Eve,” with its shoot-out between the police and gunman Louie Glatz:

And rat-a-tat-tat
Rat-a-tat-tat
Muttered the gat
Of Louie the rat,
While the officers of the law went Blam! Blam!-blam!

The Hospital, by Kenneth Fearing
New York: Random House, 1939

Cloudy Trophies, by Anne Goodwin Winslow (1946)

Anne Goodwin Winslow was born during Reconstruction and died not long after the launch of the first ICBMs. She was 71 when her first novel, Cloudy Trophies, was published. To say, therefore, that this is a novel enriched by a lifetime’s worth of living is an understatement.

But then, if there is anything that characterizes Winslow’s work, it is understatement. She came of age when daughters of good families, particularly in the South, were raised in a manner not that different from that experienced by Jane Austen’s heroines. There was no formal schooling and social graces and embroidery were considered as or more important skills for young women to develop than literacy. From the shelter of her family’s estate, Anne Goodwin entered into marriage with a promising West Point graduate (first in his class), Lieutenant Eben Winslow, descendant of a Winslow who arrived in America on the Mayflower. With him she spent twenty-five years as an Army wife, mastering the art of surviving a series of posts almost airless in their social rigidity.

By the time she took up writing, however, first a little poetry and later a memoir (The Dwelling, and finally fiction, that world had largely been destroyed in two wars, revolutions, and a depression. More to the point, the intricate Victorian prose styles of Henry James and George Eliot had been given way to a variety of modernist styles, from the lean words of Hemingway to the visceral complexities of Joyce and Woolf.

What this meant for Winslow is that her sensibilities had not changed — but her sentences had. Where James might have used a paragraph or page to dissect the nuances of a character’s entrance into a room, Winslow chose to confine herself to a sentence or just a careful choice of adjective or verb. Or simply to leave it to the reader to discern the significance of a gesture or a statement from its context. She had, after all, spent decades in social circles where what was not said often spoke louder than conversations that had the substance of a butterfly’s flutter.

The events of Cloudy Trophies include a child’s death — possibly a murder — and a mother’s death — likely a suicide. Neither is taken head-on, though. On the other hand, they also aren’t tip-toed around. Instead, there is at most a stroke or two of the pen … and the assumed intelligence of the reader. Winslow writes like a classical Japanese painter paints, with light strokes instead of layers of colors. And for this reason, her fiction can given a reader the impression that nothing happens.

When Orville Prescott reviewed Cloudy Trophies for The New York Times, he wrote that Winslow “Promises much, but produces little. The beauty and the wisdom and the wit it offers would have been ever so much more effective if condensed into a short story or elaborated in an essay.” The charge is not entirely unfair: Cloudy Trophies is much more about what doesn’t happen than what does.

Richard Steele is a Senator from the South. Carolina? Georgia? Alabama? We don’t know and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it’s a wounded land, where “often they would pass a place where the house had burned down, only the tall brick chimneys left standing.” The Senator’s time at home at the manor of a former plantation is consumed by trying to sustain a fragile network of sharecropped farms and an estate falling into increasing disrepair.

His wife, Laura, is considered an elegant jewel of Washington society. This is Washington society at the height of its elaborateness. Is this the 1880s, the 1900s? We’re never told, but when she and the Senator are in town, in their house facing Lafayette Square and a short walk from the White House, her mind is consumed with “calling, or staying where they could be called on, when the proper days rolled round.” And with “the Cabinet and the Supreme Court and Congress and their own days — the Senate — and the Legations,” almost every day is a proper day.

Laura is stifled by the vacuity of Washington society, compared to what she sees as the authencity of life in the country. “She still found herself saying, ‘Isn’t it a pretty day?’ to people who had evidently not noticed whether it was or not.” By contrast, “In the country the weather was more important than almost anything else.” To Laura, “Not mentioning the weather seemed a loss somehow. It was like not noticing the moon.”

Laura and Richard have lost a child, their only child, a son, Rickie, drowned in a pond near the manor. She suspects it may have been an act of vengeance by a disgruntled sharecropper. Richard, however, dismisses this as unlikely, irrational, and most important, a failure to move on. Unlike Laura, he craves his time in Washington. The demands of his job and the superficiality of Washington society offer him ways to escape from his pain.

One could read Cloudy Trophies and see it as a quadrille, an elegant dance in which the characters come together and part, never touching more than fingertips, following precise and predetermined steps, and conclude, with Orville Prescott, that it’s a short story padded out to 230-some pages.

But that would be mistaking the brush strokes for the picture. This is a story about how the death of a child can destroy a mother and father, can leave them shattered, fragments of themselves, struggling to find ways to survive. But it’s not Anne Goodwin Winslow’s way to jab her finger at the heart of her story and shout, “This is what it’s about!” Despite her relatively unadorned prose, hers is still a Jamesian sensibility. She aspires to be a person on whom nothing is lost, and she expects the same of her readers.

Cloudy Trophies is the third of Winslow’s novels I’ve read, and while her inexperience with the form shows in some aspects of the book’s construction, I remain in deep admiration for the assurance of her artistry and her respect for the intelligence of her readers. Hers is the kind of quiet art that is perhaps the easiest of all to become overlooked and forgotten.

Cloudy Trophies, by Anne Goodwin Winslow
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1946

The Fly, by Richard Chopping (1965)

Cover to the first edition of The Fly by Richard Chopping

I often stumble across a particularly intriguing forgotten book while on the trail of a different one. Recently, I was looking for information about a novel by Henri-François Rey called The Mechanical Pianos when I came across this blurb from Arthur Calder-Marshall in a Secker & Warburg ad in the Guardian: “The most interesting failure I have read for years.”

From the Secker & Warburg ad in The Guardian, 29 January 1965.

For anyone who loves odd books, a phrase like “the most interesting failure” will set off alarms. I abandoned The Mechanical Pianos (pardon, Henri-François) and went in search of Mr. Chopping’s The Fly. The reviews I found made it clear that this was not just an interesting failure but a book with a uniquely off-putting power for many critics:

E. D. O’Brien, The Illustrated London News
“prurient, scatological, corrupt and sickening.”
B. S. Johnson, The Spectator
“much gratuitous nastiness conveyed by means of an overwritter, convoluted progression of cliches…. Quite revoltingly self-indulgent and pointless.”

Seymour Simckes, The New York Times
“progresses toward a total sullying of life, toward the harshest realities of grotesque death and grotesque madness.”
Adrian Mitchell, New Statesman
“This spleeny story of office life is dominated by snot, shit, semen, and pus. Why should anyone bother to write about the interesting, fairly virgin, subject of people who pick their noses and eat the pickings if all he can say about it is an implied ‘ugh’?”
Iain Hamilton, The Daily Telegraph
“His sardonic descriptions are informed by a disgust so acute that it might even be called exultant.”
Sunday Times
“Rarely have the filthy, petty particularities of loneliness — the Camembert among the hairbrushes, the menace of a tattered usherette — been give such a thorough going-over.”

“The Camembert among the hairbrushes”? Exultant disgust? This was clearly a book worth investigating.

The first few dozen pages of The Fly feature some of the most compelling writing I’ve come across in a long time. “The perpetual silent witness of the events in this unpleasant narrative,” Chopping informs us, is a fly. A common house fly. But a fly with “nacreous glistening body,” “vicious soft proboscis,” two “many faceted globes” to observe its world. And not a mere observer but a “servant of the Eumenides,” “the miniature personification of evil, neat, fast, deadly.”

US paperback edition of The Fly by Richard Chopping

Mr. Chopping may not know his flies like an entomologist, but he clearly does exult in his descriptions. But this is just the first page. Turn it, and we and the fly are transported outside, to a gutter wet with drizzle, in which, “breaking the surface, lies a used condom.”

At least one reviewer pulled the red cord at this point.

He may not, therefore, have witnessed what happens on the third page. A young girl reaches into the gutter with a twig and produces the condom for her brother’s inspection: “‘Ere, Leslie, look at this!”

To call Jennifer –the girl — and Leslie street urchins would be to sully the fine name of street urchins. These are two of the dirtiest, nastiest, most malignant children in fiction. But they are paragons compared, in Chopping’s eyes, to what’s in the push-chair Jennifer is dragging along with her other hand:

Half lying, half sitting it gazes fixedly out at the world through still eyes, squinting and protuberant. It has been so battered into obedience by Jennifer that it knows better than to utter a sound. Its bloated appearance and its immobility are further accentuated by the lower half of its body being encased in faded blue woollen rompers, bulbously overstuffed with nappies. Its arms stick out straight in front of it as if they were articulated together on a wire through the upper part of its doll’s body. The hands are swollen, mottled blue and scarlet from bad circulation. Its head is concealed in, and its face framed by, a soiled white pixie cap. From this push-chair there arises a soursweet odour of stale urine and old milk. This object is called Brenda — Leslie and Jennifer’s baby sister.

“This object” — clearly Chopping is not a man with the milk of human kindness running through his veins. But he does not single out children with his animus: he is an equal opportunity misanthrope.

Jennifer, Leslie, and Brenda play in the street outside the Office. Although Chopping doesn’t identify where his novel is set, but it could be any overcrowded, squalid grey industrial English city of its time. The purpose of the Office is never mentioned, and it doesn’t matter. It’s a place full of desks and telephones, typewriters and file cabinets, ashtrays and pale-faced mediocre clerks, secretaries, and managers, all of them grey, miserable, and frustrated.

Mr. Gender most of all: “In adolescence, he was already a grey man in embryo.” Poor Mr. Gender does get his share of abuse from his creator. His encroaching baldness is examined under the fly’s microscope: “It saw damp thinning strands of hair, carefully trained across a putty-coloured skull; oiled fronds of seaweed across a dead fish’s belly.” His grossest behaviors are put on display for our revulsion: “going back to a childhood habit, he was feeding himself with the pickings from his nose with the eager rapacity of a hungry fanatic.”

Chopping has turned the tables on the reader, in other words. It is his fly who is the noble creature, the diligent agent taking note, acting on behalf of the gods. It is his people who are held up for our repulsion. There is not a line in these pages that does not make the reader want to take a shower and give himself a vigorous scrub down.

And yet, and yet.

Within a few dozen more pages, we discover the truth in Arthur Calder-Marshall’s words. For those willing to follow Richard Chopping into this cesspool he has created, The Fly is a journey filmed in Technicolor and Cinemascope. But as a novel, it ultimately fails in design and structure.

Balzac understood something that Chopping doesn’t: if you’re going to write about nasty people, it’s the nastiest ones who have to be the stars. By far the nastiest piece of work in the Office is the cleaning (there’s an irony!) lady, Mrs. Macklin. Her superpower is spotting everyone else’s vulnerabilities, which she then probes with her rustiest, filthiest instruments. And she’s not above shoving a corpse into the building furnace to avoid awkward questions. While Chopping may have prided himself on his choice of the fly as his witness, this book would have been much more effective seen through Mrs. Macklin’s hatefilled eyes.

Structurally, The Fly is several chapters too long. We follow everyone in the Office for an annual outing to the zoo. Chopping takes us home with several of the Office’s employees, as if test-driving them as protagonists, ultimately choosing to build his climax around Mr. O’Flattery, an anxious clerk whose only distinguishable feature is his being Irish, who works himself into a breakdown not so much by Mrs. Macklin’s machinations as by the anticipation of them — and even this process is drawn out too long. Chopping’s exultant disgust loses its joyous intensity, turning into tedium and, finally, weariness.

The Fly was Richard Chopping’s first novel. Trained as an artist, Chopping was best known for his trompe-l’œil covers for the original UK hardback editions of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Several years later, Chopping published a second novel, The Ring, about a gay man who finds himself consumed in London’s rough trade world. This was a world Chopping knew intimately, so I am interested to see if the subject tapped into his design aesthetic better than did the grey workers in The Fly‘s Office.

The Fly, by Richard Chopping
London: Secker & Warburg, 1965

Breathe Upon These Slain by Evelyn Scott (1934)

Cover of the first US edition of Breathe Upon These Slain.

I had the chance to speak recently with David Madden, whose anthology Rediscoveries was a primary inspiration that launched my quest to seek out neglected books and authors decades ago. We talked about the fact that I completed an MA program in biograpy and creative nonfiction at the University of East Anglia a few years ago, which led, inevitably, to mention of W. G. Sebald and, in particular, his masterpiece The Rings of Saturn. And this, in turn, led to his suggestion that I read Evelyn Scott’s Breathe Upon These Slain (1934).

In October 1932, the American novelist Evelyn Scott and her second husband, the English short story writer John Metcalfe, having grown sick of life in London, moved to Lowestoft on the coast of East Anglia and rented a cottage from a spinster named Miss Henderson. As they settled into the cottage for the winter, Scott began to wonder about the family whose pictures hung in every room. Some of the pictures were prints of such once-popular subjects as the death of Cock Robin or the ride of the Bengal Lancers.

But there were several family photographs — one in the east bedroom of four little girls, all dressed alike, from sometime in the previous century; one in the west bedroom of just three girls — older, in their teens. And her novelist’s imagination began to work.

I am not here to write stories, but to rest, and my knowledge of Suffolk is small — my knowledge of these people, nothing! — yet I feel queerly urged to give the four little girls their names.

“The four sisters shall be called: Cora, Ethel, Tilly and Margaret,” she decides. And with little more than observations of places and people around Lowestoft, a bit of history, and her powers of empathy, Scott created a story of their lives. The story of the Courtneys.

Not the story. Although she speculates that the Miss Henderson who collects the rent and occasionally checks in corresponds to one of the girls in the photographs, Scott wasn’t concerned with the facts. The term was decades from being coined, but what Scott decided to create was what we would now call a metafiction (or meta-nonfiction?). She never hides herself from the reader, nor does she ever pretend that the stories she tells about the family aren’t inventions.

Evelyn Scott, around the time of Breathe Upon These Slain. [Marks on the original.]

The absence of the youngest of the four girls from the photograph of the three older girls Scott explains through the story of Tilly. One drizzly autumn day when the coastal town is socked in with one of those grey mists that rise off the Broads and cut to the bone with a chill more penetrating than much colder winter frosts, Mrs. Courtney, a fastidious but impatient woman, sends Tilly outside to gain herself a bit of piece. Just seven or eight, Tilly obliges and heads out to the seaside strand, where she walks up and down for hours until soaked to the skin and near hypothermia. And promptly contracts pneumonia and dies.

This is just the first tragedy to befall the Courtneys. Ethel and Cora marry — Ethel to Patrick, a naval officer whose infatuation with her she never quite believes, Cora to a Harley Street surgeon. A brother, Bertram — another invention of Scott’s taken from a single photograph of a young man, a proud sahib someplace in India — is attached to the Indian Civil Service but finds he lacks the stiffness of upper lip it requires. Mrs. Courtney never sees how her fastidiousness in morals as much as manners drives her daughters off, Mr. Courtney — the owner of a fish packing company — never recognizes the unbridgeable gap that exists between himself and the shopkeepers and fishermen he lifts a pint with at the New Crown.

What blows the Courtneys to smithereens, though, is the First World War. Ethel’s husband’s ship is sunk by a German torpedo when cruising in waters that were considered submarine-free. Bertram, returned from India, is mowed down in one of the many pointless assaults during the Battle of the Somme. Devastated with grief over his son’s death and brutally isolated when he realizes that no one in the town can see beyond his status as “Courtney of Courtney’s Fish” to empathize with him, Philip Courtney takes his life. And Mrs. Courtney and Margaret — Meg, the spinster — are forced to sell their grand four-story house on the Strand and retreat to the cottage now occupied by Scott and Metcalfe. Yet even as try to build up a new world around this cottage, what comes back to haunt them is not Patrick or Bertram or Philip but little Tilly, who comes to seem a sacrifice offered up to the gods of Victorian conventions.

And Miss Henderson, who comes by bicycle to collect the monthly rent, is she Meg? No, Scott admits:

There has never been a Meg. And sometimes it seems as if there were, for each, only the idea lodged in a brain we term “actual” — the idea which can draw even modest men to murder and call themselves just!

While there is a certain daring in Scott’s willingness not just to acknowledge the artificiality of her invented lives but to insert her own presence in the Lowestoft cottage as a reminder that we should not fully suspend our disbelief, there is also a cost. Readers will admire Author Scott’s ingenuity in projecting her photographs into life-sized semblances, but they will not agree that she has made these foreigners completely lifelike. Breathe Upon These Slain is a longish book — just a hair under 400 pages — and many of those pages are devoted to reflections on these character Scott has created as constructs rather than people.

Yes, all fictional characters are constructs. But the reason we love fiction and its characters is that in the hands of a good storyteller, we willingly take the leap of faith and believe in their existence, at least within the framework of the novel. As Time’s reviewer wrote, “Readers will admire Author Scott’s ingenuity in projecting her photographs into life-sized semblances, but they will not agree that she has made these foreigners completely lifelike.”

Breathe Upon These Slain could easily be compared to Virginia Woolf’s The Years, which came out just a few years before and which follows another family, the Pargiters, through a similar span of time. But what separates The Years from Breathe Upon These Slain is that whatever ideas Woolf was attempting to demonstrate are always subordinate to her story and its characters, making her work a masterpiece where Scott’s is only an experiment. A remarkable experiment, and one that is often fascinating in its perspective and details. And while certainly one worth further study as a milestone in the development of metafiction and creative nonfiction, it too often lacks the breath of life it needs to rise to the level of a major work. Breathe Upon These Slain, Scott’s title commands. Yet, in the end, one has to conclude that it’s Scott who has slain the Courtneys.

Breathe Upon These Slain, by Evelyn Scott
New York: Smith & Haas, 1934
London: Lovat Dickson, 1934

The Skin of Dreams (Loin de Rueil), by Raymond Queneau (1948)

Cover of the 1948 New Directions edition of The Skin of Dreams.

Jacques l’Aumône and Walter Mitty are twin sons of different mothers. Both men escape from what they consider dull lives by fantasizing themselves in extraordinary situations. Their two creators, however, took very different approaches to their subjects. Thurber mined Mitty’s situation for its comic power, the absurdity of the contrast between the milk toasty Mitty (whose wife literally feeds him milk toast) and the dangerous adventures he imagines himself in.

Queneau, on the other hand, attempted to integrate James Joyce, surrealists like Andre Breton and Boris Vian, and French and American pulp fiction into the world of his hero. When we first meet Jacques l’Aumône (l’aumône being French for alms or charity), he’s the teenaged son of a hosery manufacturer living in Rueil, a suburb of Paris that must be associated with shrunken lives and stifling boredom (the original French title was Loin de Rueil or Far from Rueil. Watching a western with one of his friends, Jacques — called Jackie by his parents — does more than become involved with the film. He transmogrifies into the film:

Jacques and Lucas held on to their seats with two hands as if they were on that mount they saw there before them, inverse and planimetrical. Thus they are shown the mane of the soliped and the breeches of the booted one, and then they are shown the pistols in the belt of the breeches-wearer, and after that they arc shown the powerfully circular thorax of the bearer of fire-arms, and finally they are shown the mug of the guy, a dashing buck, a burly fellow for whom men’s lives were of no more account than a louse’s, and Jackie is in nowise astonished to recognize in him Jacques l’Aumone.

A founding father of the Oulipo movement, Queneau once described himself as a rat who constructed mazes from which he planned to escape — which is an apt way of summarizing what he does for Jacques l’Aumône in The Skin of Dreams.

But anyone who’s read a bit of Queneau knows that what sets him apart from the surrealists and other Oulipians is his simple humanity. So, Jacques doesn’t just indulge in escapism. He also projects himself into other lives — walks a mile in other men’s shoes, as the saying goes. When he encounters the husband of his building’s concierge, for example, a man who’s down on his luck and somewhat out of his head with illness, the same transformation that put him in the saddle up on screen in the cinema takes place:

He then perceived with a fresh eye the whole course of his life, behind him: his happy childhood, his mad ambitions, his bitter disappointments, his career as a bureaucrat, his expulsion for negligence, his marriage to a bag, and finally, after many increasingly unbrilliant trades, that of janitor, an old canker putting an end to this sad life, ugh! alas! To complete the resemblance he shook his hands like old dead leaves that a gentle rainy November wind does not yet wish to tear from the tree that bears them. Jacques found pleasure in this situation, after all perhaps he himself would never attain a joy comparable to that which he bad in his role of a decayed Cerberus endlessly stuttering those words “Things riding high, my way, really riding high”, all the more so since the other, contemplating himself in this human mirror, smiled widely and began shaking even more violently, as if insisting on the profound meaning of his inconsistent babbling.

Joan Miró poster for the original French edition of Loin de Rueil.

Queneau was inspired by Joyce’s manipulation of words, both the simple collages like snotgreen sea and wavewhite wedded words in Ulysses to the splicings and graftings of Finegans Wake (schutschum and tragoady). Which makes him a challenge for any translator. H. J. Kaplan, a novelist himself (and later press secretary for the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace talks with the Vietnamese), fares well if perhaps a bit stiffly with Queneau’s wordplay. But even the most ham-fisted translator can’t interfere too badly when working with a writer so obviously enjoying his wordplay:

He was examining little bits of doryphoras through the microscope, for the problem was to increase the efficiency of the Baponot Doryphovore [a pesticide manufactured by Jacques’ employer], the insufficiency of which in the business of doryphorotrucidation was beginning to be known among all the farmers of the region.

An anastrepha doryphoros, by the way, is a fruit fly, but mouche des fruits is far too mundane for Queneau’s purposes.

Jacques’ talent for assimilating into the things he sees evolves to such a degree that eventually, it takes over Queneau’s book itself. Near the end, an American movie comes to Rueil’s local cinema. It stars James Charity (see above) and turns out to be both the actor’s autobiography and the synthesis of all of Jacques’ past fantasies:

He is seen to appear now as an explorer, now as an inventor, now as a boxer, now as a thief. He makes an excursion to the land of the Borgeiros, particularly wild Indians. At San Culebra del Porco he meets a young actress, Lulu L’Aumone. Both will go to Hollywood to get a look at what can be done there. And very quickly comes success, glory, triumph. James ends by marrying Lulu L’Aumone and while he kisses her on the mouth he signs (with his free hand) a royal contract for his polyglot talking picture The Skin of Dreams.

Queneau was a mathematician by training, and it’s likely that he studied differential geometry, which is one of the more mind-warping fields of math, since it deals with how spaces of X dimensions are mapped into spaces of Y dimensions — or, if you will, how one reality transforms into another. The Skin of Dreams is something of an experiment in differential geometry in fiction. And having studied differential geometry myself, I promise you: reading The Skin of Dreams is not only a realistic simulation of that particular form of mathematics, but a lot more fun.

The Skin of Dreams, by Raymond Queneau, translated by H. J. Kaplan
New York: New Directions, 1948

The Zemganno Brothers, by Edmond de Goncourt (1878)

The Zemganno Brothers by Edmond de Goncourt

The Zemganno Brothers is Edmond de Goncourt’s love letter to his dead brother and collaborator, Jules. Together, the two had written six novels, several plays, and even more works of history and criticism, in addition to keeping a journal that is considered the most candid (and savage) account of mid-19th century Parisian life and society. Jules died from the effects of syphillis at the age of 39. Edmond carried on as a writer but never considered his own work anything but second-best to what he’d accomplished with Jules.

In 1876, over six years after Jules’ death, Edmond confided to his journal, “I want to depict two acrobats, two brothers who love each other has my brother and I have loved each other.” His idea was that these brothers would not only work together as he did with Jules, but literally support each other: “Their spines are, so to speak, common property” and they would strive to develop their strengths and skills to the point that they could perform feats previously considered impossible.

Edmond visited the Cirque Olympique in Paris while writing the book, and was particularly taken by the act of the Hanlon-Lees, whose blend of tumbling, juggling, and knockabout clowning the French called entortillage. The Zemganno brothers achieve acrobatic feats to rival those of the Hanlon-Lees, but instead of juggling, they incorporate the playing of violins (which was probably easier to describe than it would have been to perform).

The Zemganno brothers mirror the de Goncourts: Gianni, the elder, is able and temperate; Nello, the younger, is more talented and hot-headed. But they commit to their partnership and a vision of becoming legendary performers when still young, and work their way up, from a humble circus traveling around France by wagon and cart, to an initial attempt to join a grand circus in Paris and then, when that fails, to London, where they spend years studying the English form of highly physical clowning and tumbling. Finally, having worked on a series of tricks in secret, they return and are quickly taken into the troupe of the Deux-Cirques, the premier indoor circus in Paris.

Their act is a combination of comedy, melodrama, and physical magic. At its climax, Gianni appears to humiliate Nello, who falls to the ground and lays there prostrate. Then, suddenly, he is transformed:

His muscles worked in a way beyond their normal powers and danger-point, his loins became hollows, his shoulder blades jutted fantastically, and his spine took on an unaccustomed curve, archied like the crop of a wading bird strayed from another planet. His muscles were one mass of quick, tiny ripples, like those seen beneath the flaccid skin of a snake. All that the audience could see now was a creature flying without wings, a crawling, unearthly, demon-haunting quality of movement associated with beasts of ill-omen and horrible fables. But at last the demon was driven out of the sprite’s bosom.

Despite their successful, however, outside the ring, they lead “a quiet, orderly, intimate, sober and chaste life.” Their focus, their passion is to push the limits of their bodies and continue to master ever-more-difficult stunts.

When an American trick rider, la Tompkins, joins the circus, however, the bond between Gianni and Nello strains. Not so much out of romance as the realization that la Tompkins’ act is of a level of polish and mastery that puts theirs to shame. And this drives Nello in particular to attempt riskier leaps. Anyone who’s seen a circus movie knows where this leads.

The Zemganno Brothers is that rarity, a 19th century novel that is neither novella nor three-volume behemoth. Under 200 pages in its excellent English translation by Lester Clark and Iris Allan, it’s as lean and swift as the Zemganno brothers themselves. While certainly not a masterpiece, it’s a memorable story and a moving tribute from one brother to another.

The Zemganno Brothers, by Edmond de Goncourt, translated by Lester Clark and Iris Allan
London: Alvin Redman, 1957

The Twelve Days of Christmas, by Venetia Murray (1968)

The Twelve Days of Christmas by Venetia Murray

Venetia Murray’s novel The Twelve Days of Christmas (1968) has a reputation for being a cult novel, though I suspect that’s largely due to a certain passage that’s been quoted several times in potpourri books by Jilly Cooper and others. It comes from a scene in which two lovers are laying in bed in a discreet Paris hotel after making love. “I need some new pants,” the woman tells the man, which leads him to do a quick bit of the kind of mental calculus that’s one price of carrying on an affair:

After all, having committed himself to all this expenditure, he might as well get the best of it. And pants cost less than some things. But he was not looking forward to the moment when they would walk together down the Faubourg St Honoré. A happy thought occurred to him. Tomorrow was Sunday and the shops in the Rue St Honoré would be closed both on Sunday and Monday. This Sarah had forgotten. He realized this meant that he would have to keep her in bed for most of today.

Sarah is Sarah Yeates, in line to become Lady Yeates whenever her grandfather the Earl dies. The man is Simon Burford, a married publisher who’s told him wife that he’s attending a French publishing conference in Lyons. Which is just the sort of thing that French publishers organize … five days before Christmas.

But amorous complexities and moral quandries are the warps and woofs of Venetia Murray’s fictional fabric in The Twelve Days of Christmas. Sarah is divorced from her third husband and has had so many affairs that during her Paris getaway she has to stay two steps ahead of herself to avoid leading her current lover into someplace she’s been with one of the others. For Paris and London are small towns when it comes to people of their class and amatory habits:

There had been a memorable occasion in some restaurant in the King’s Road, where too many people who had crossed currents in their lives too often, had all run into each other having dinner at separate tables. Henry’s ex-wife had been there; she had been with a man with whom Suzy had once had an affair. Catharine had been there with someone she should not have been there with, since she was supposed to be a respectable married woman even if her husband was once again away. Some irrelevant Italian girl was there.

With so many matchings and mismatchings going on, some irrelevant man or woman is bound to find themselves the leftover in such scenes. When Simon flies off to Paris — sorry, Lyons — Catharine, his wife (second marriage for each) heads off to a psychedelic party at the Ritz and winds up falling for Mark, a novelist and leftover man. The party is being thrown by Catharine’s ambiguously trans(Atlantic) friend Elizabeth, who’s wealthy enough to persuade the management of the Ritz to look past the stoned half-naked bodies that litter the floor of her suite at the end of the party.

The Twelve Days of Christmas is certainly an artifact of the Swinging Sixties, but the irony is that the lion’s share of the licentiousness is in the hands of the monied/salaried/mortgaged thirty-somethings. Perhaps this is because the book is very much a roman à clef. According to Murray’s obituary in the Guardian, it was “a thinly disguised and pungent portrait of young, spoilt marrieds playing around in London in the early 1960s.”

Venetia Murray in the mid-1960s.

At the time Murray wrote the book, she was between her second and third marriages and was part of a social set whose interconnections — marital, sexual, familial, and professional — were easily as intricate as any in the novel. The granddaughter of the renowned classicist and humanist Gilbert Murray and daughter of the journalist and politician Basil Murray (rumored to be the model of Evelyn Waugh’s character Basil Seal), Venetia Murray had been among the more privileged child evacuees of Blitz, spending most of the war living with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and his wife in Washington, D.C. and attending the exclusive Potomac School for girls.

When she was 18, she stayed with the novelist Nancy Mitford in Paris so she could attend a gala ball. Mitford wrote of Venetia to Waugh:

I’ve got a Beauty of 18 coming tomorrow which is a lovely treat, she came with her mother to buy a ball dress, which she has duly done, & I’ve persuaded the mother to leave her with me for a few days. She is called Venetia Murray, daughter of my dear old drunken cousin the late Basil M & she is an old fashioned Beauty, that is to say rather large & in a perpetual state of puppy like ecstasy which I find very attractive — like a puppy which wags itself rather than its tail.

Murray attributes to her character Sarah an incident that took place during her stay with Mitford:

Once upon a time when Sarah had been very young and in Paris she had been allowed, though only sixteen, to go to a ball with some young people. But she had been told to be back by twelve. She had been staying with her god-mother, a witty and well-known novelist but not a connoisseur of the behaviour of young girls. Sarah arriving back from the ball at five — in face she had only been having fun, not doing anything that in those days people like her god-mother would have called “wrong” — had run across the large courtyard in her ball gown, aware of how late she was. Her god-mother had been waiting up, worried that Sarah, in her charge, might have done something “wrong.” Her god-mother had said, “What is the use of running the last hundred yards when you are five hours late?”

I suspect that anyone familiar with the goings-on of London literati in the 1950s and 1960s could find many other examples of Murray’s appropriation of real-life characters and situations. Simon and Catherine rent a bedroom in their North London house to Suzy, an arrangement that sounds similar to the one Murray and Sally Newton, daughter of the actor Robert Newton, had in the house owned by poet and cricket writer Alan Ross. An annotated edition of The Twelve Days of Christmas would, in fact, likely be a valuable piece of social and literary history. As a work of fiction, however, it’s amusing but superficial — in its way as dated as a Regency romance (Murray later became a historian of the Regency) — and not a 1960s counterpart to Waugh’s early novels about the Bright Young Things of 1920s London.

The Twelve Days of Christmas, by Venetia Murray
London: Collins, 1968

The Death of a Nobody, by Jules Romains (1911)

Cover of the Signet Classics edition of The Death of a Nobody.

The Death of a Nobody was Jules Romains’ attempt to answer to an apparently simple question: when does a person die? Jacques Godard is a retired and widowed railway engineer who lives quietly in a little apartment in Paris. He visits his wife’s grave each week, occasionally joins his old colleagues at the bar, and otherwise mostly keeps to himself. Not long after climbs the stairs to the top of the Pantheon to look out over Paris — something he’d never done — he feels a sharp pain in his back, and after a few days of weakness and discomfort, he experiences something quite new and strange: “Something which was in him, which had served no purpose but to hold his life together, something contractive, elastic, formative a sort of mainspring suddenly let go, relaxed, expanded, and with a shiver of released vibrations lost itself m space.” And just as he realizes what is happening, he dies.

Yet Romains proceeds to argue that this was only his physical death. For a little while later, his apartment building’s porter finds the body and has to make the initial arrangements — sending a telegram to Godard’s aged parents in the Auvergne, informing the medical officer at the maison communale, telling the other residents. All of which bring Godard to mind for dozens of people, either as a memory or as an image of the person he may have been.

And later still, when Godard’s father has made the wearying overnight journey to Paris and the small crowd gathers to accompany his casket to the ceremony, he comes to life again in their thoughts:

No one could tell exactly how much of Godard s spirit had been saved by this close-packed gathering. When a servant-girl carelessly breaks a full bottle which she is carrying her hands come together quickly as if trying to catch the spurting wine, and a moment after nothing is left but a few reddish traces m the folds of her palms and a smell as of vomit. The sudden huddhng together of human beings was just like this; they were like fingers curling up to catch the essence escaping from the broken flesh. But they were not sure of having caught anything; and when the coffin was in position and the hearse lurched forward, the people walking in the procession felt an obscure sense of disillusionment.

Bit by bit, those thoughts of Jacques Godard evaporate. His mother dies, then his father, then there is no one who remembers him as a child. And soon the only person to think of him is the young man who took that telegram to his parents — and for him, Godard is nothing more than the idea of a person who was once alive. Yet this is still enough to make him wonder, “What will be left of the thing that I am?”

Recently, in rereading Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage as part of a reading group we’re running this year, I came across the following line: “No man, or woman, can ever engage the whole of my interest who believes, as you believe … that my one driving-force, the sole and shapely end of my existence is the formation within myself of another human being….” Richardson’s protagonist, Miriam Henderson, is arguing with her would-be lover, Hypo Wilson (a fictional counterpart for H. G. Wells), who maintains that a woman’s primary obligation is to have children — indeed, that she cannot become a mature writer until she has had a child.

Except, I misread the key phrase as “the … end of my existence is the formation of myself within another human being….” And ever since then, I’ve wondered if that might, in fact, be as valid a premise as anything else one might come up with. Jules Romains, at least, would agree.

The Death of a Nobody, by Jules Romains, translated by Desmond MacCarthy and Sydney Waterlow
London: Howard Latimer Limited, 1914

Mort de quelqu’un

The Day’s End, by Pamela Bright (1959)

Cover of the first U.K. edition of The Day’s End.

My friend Robert Nedelkoff recommended this book to me after stumbling across a reference in a 1980 collection of Ronald Firbank’s prose titled Firbank: Memoirs and Critiques edited by Mervyn Horder. In Horder’s preface, he dismisses the notion of dramatic death scenes, writing, “We are assured by a competent technical observer of the subject that people tend to meet the moment of their death in the same manner as they live — the self effacing quietly in their sleep, the egocentric giving the maximum trouble to all concerned, the theatrical speechifying away con brio, the athletic with one foot out of bed, and so on.”

Horder’s competent technical observer, we learn from a footnote, was Pamela Bright, whose The Day’s End he describes as “a neglected book of 1956” — which of course caused Robert to reach for the Neglected Books phone. It sounded like the real deal, and I was delighted to find it awaiting patiently on the Internet Archive (link).

The Day’s End is a study in how we die. Set on the cancer ward of an unnamed women’s hospital on the western edge of London, the book takes us through two days on the ward as seen by its head nurse (Bright, though she never identifies herself in the book). There are old women and young, some there just for an exam or two, others doomed to spend their last days within its walls. Bright confirms Horder’s paraphrase above, but more from the perspective of a nurse:

The ways people die are as varied as the pictures on the wall ofa gallery, and each death remembered for a different reason: one for its setting; one for its atmosphere and whether there was summer in it or frost, or darkness and an oxygen cylinder; one for its human characters, for its peace, for its distress, and whether it was in the order of things or sudden in its unexpectedness.

At the time Bright wrote the book, she had been a practicing nurse for over 18 years. Earning her cap just after the outbreak of World War One, she served in military hospitals in Palestine and, after the D-Day invasion, trailing the British Army through northern Europe. The latter experience she described in her first book, Life in Our Hands (1955), and there are flashbacks to her time in Palestine throughout The Day’s End.

Also throughout the book are mentions of the stress of being responsible for a ward full of patients and a team of nurses and orderlies that almost seem like Bright’s reminders to herself: “it demanded constant wariness, the habit of keen observation, the noting of others’ moods and tempers, the habit of explaining, and the ability to learn the knack of not always depending on the advice or backing of others, but of believing in one’s own judgment and ability.” As she rides the bus home after her shift, her thoughts scroll through the patients — who’s improved, who’s failing, who may need to be shifted to one of the side rooms where a patient nearing death can have some hours of privacy and peace — and which nurses need to be encouraged or restrained the next day. She acknowledges, though, that she gains a form of comfort from that stress: “Although theoretically I abhor the business of being busy and in a hurry, yet I must confess that often it is in that condition I find myself happiest — it is a drug, and one can forget.”

Caring for a terminally ill patient proves among the most demanding of a nurse’s duties because it represents, in effect, a failure. So, on top of the inbred discretion of the English middle class there is a reluctance to draw attention to the obvious: “However acute a patient’s illness, we never admitted the signs of impending death.” Some of this reluctance stems from the difficulty of admitting how much about death remains unknown to medical professionals, but some also results from having seen the process repeated hundreds of times. “A dying man rarely looks death in the face,” Bright reports, “and who are we to tell him the truth? Why should he not go on building castles in the air when to some extent he has been doing it all his life?”

What makes The Day’s End memorable, however, are not such generalizations but Bright’s portraits of her patients. Mario, the dashingly handsome Italian soldier in her hospital in Palestine, who insisted on wearing a pink hairnet each night to keep his long, oiled black hair from getting mussed — until the night when he no longer called for it and Bright knew he would not last until morning. Or the lonely woman whose sad tale takes less than a sentence: “Miss Smart, for instance, who had had not a single friend and who couldn’t be forgotten when she died, for no one remembered her while she was alive….” And especially Mrs. Ferrett, possessed of a malevolent intensity worthy of a character in Balzac:

Her face seemed crudely sculptured, following the curves of a gargoyle on some cathedral front; and as one invariably gazes with delight upon such goblins and the workman’s freedom of expression, so one had to smile at Mrs. Ferrett. When she sat in bed she was coiled up in the smallest possible space, her chin almost resting on her knees, her hands close to her sides, like a child in embryo: when she was on her feet she moved softly and half inclined sideways like a crab: when her sharp eyes glistened, she pierced the ward from end to end and gleamed upon her neighbours, nurses, visitors, indeed everything. Mumbling, or munching peppermints; crabbed and cranky, she would gaze upwards at the plain corners and downwards at the dust, and in silent glee hug to herself some fearful secret.

She occupied the first place among the simplest. But she occupied it with such force, daring and calm that none of us would have thought of taking it away from her. This selfish, wicked woman bewitched even the people least susceptible to such influence: us nurses and the doctors.

Bright chronicled her career in a total of five books: Breakfast at Night (1956), about her training at an Edinburgh hospital; Life in Our Hands about her service in Europe during the war; The Day’s End, which found her in mid-career; A Poor Man’s Riches (1966), about her experiences caring for Palestinian refugees in the early 1960s; and Hospital at Night (1971), a fictionalized account based on her time as chief nurse of a busy metropolitan hospital. After retiring from service, she wrote a biography of her ancestor, Dr. Richard Bright, a pioneering surgeon who first described the ailment of the kidneys that now bears his name. She died in 2012 at the age of 98.

The Day’s End, by Pamela Bright
London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1959

All the Brave Promises, by Mary Lee Settle (1966)

cover of US edition of All the Brave Promises by Mary Lee Settle (1966)

When Studs Terkel titled his 1984 oral history of the American experience in World War Two The Good War, he meant it ironically. Terkel’s book is full of accounts of G. I.s and civilians who could still, decades afterward, think of themselves as casualties. Thanks, however, to Tom Brokaw’s hagiographic 1998 bestseller The Greatest Generation, however, the honeyed glow that Terkel refused to give his portrait of the war is now once again well-established and part of the current dementia among some Americans for a history that’s all nice, clean, and guilt-free.

If you count yourself among these folks, Mary Lee Settle’s 1966 memoir of her time in the Royal Air Force, All the Brave Promises, is not for you. Indeed, Settle opens the book with a salvo designed to eradicate any inclination a reader might have of looking on that time nostalgically:

We are accused of being nostalgic. We have been. What we have remembered are events. The Second World War was, for most of us, a state, a state of war, not an event. It was a permeation, a deadening, a waiting, hard to recall. What we have told about is the terrifying relief of battle or the sweet, false relief of leave.

These were not the causes of a psychic shock from which a generation of people are only now beginning to emerge. For every ‘historic’ event, there were thousands of unknown, plodding people, caught up in a deadening authority, learning to survive by keeping quiet, by ‘getting by,’ by existing in secret, underground; conscripted, shunted, numbered. It took so many of them, so many of their gray days and their uprooted lives. It taught them evasive ways to survive. These ways, dangerous to the community and to the spirit, have been a part of the peace.

“It taught them evasive ways to survive” is not how Tom Brokaw wanted us to look on the experience of American veterans of World War Two. But it’s the sort of bracingly brutal respect for honesty that makes Mary Lee Settle’s writing seem at times like a slap across the face. Not an insulting slap — a “Wake Up!” slap.

Settle came to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, the women’s arm and second-class component of the Royal Air Force by a circuitous route. After marrying an Englishman named Rodney Weathersbee in 1939, she followed him to Canada when he joined the RAF and was sent there for training and delivered their son Christopher while still there as a military wife. The marriage soon fell apart, though, and she headed back to West Virginia, where her parents took over the care of Christopher while Settle headed to Washington, D.C. to get involved in war work.

During that period before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it wasn’t easy for an American woman to get into the British forces. She started by applying at the British Embassy in Washington, where she was aided by the young Roald Dahl and the playright and World War One veteran flyer Ben Travers. Then it was a matter of getting to England, which she finally did in October 1942, along with a boatfull of Roayl Navy and RAF trainees.

Through Weatherbee and her embassy friends, a posh welcome was arranged and Settle spent a week enjoying the finest comforts wartime London could offer. But then she reported for duty and the fun part came to an end.

Her first day as a WAAF was a foretaste of what much of the next 13 months would be like. With her foreign accent, refined looks, and High Street clothes, Settle was quickly labelled an outsider by her fellow enlistees, most of whom came from poor families in the East End. They stuck together like a chorus, commenting savagely on the faults of their superiors and anyone else who wasn’t “their type.” For Settle, “It was the first glimpse of the stratification, almost Chinese in its complication and formality, which covered everything from a hairdo to a state of health to sugar in tea and by which each Englishman holds himself apart, himself his castle, from his fellows.” Although she did manage to establish a few weak friendships during her time, Settle son grew accustomed to her permanent position in the eyes of the other WAAFs as an undesirable and untrusted alien.

The year or so Settle spent in the WAAFs included some of the grimmest days of the war. This was the long, slow, unthrilling buildup to D-Day and beyond. Settle was assigned to RAF Hullavington, the Empire Central Flying School, where much of the RAF’s basic flight training took place, There, she was assigned as a radio operator, spending hours each day in the darkened control room and trying to communicate with pilots over weak and heavily jammed signals. It was like staring into a solid fog hoping to make out the faintest shapes, and it eventually led to aural hallucinations that nearly drove her mad.

cover of UK edition of All the Brave Promises by Mary Lee Settle (1966)

The food was bad, the showers cold, the barracks largely unheated, and the days full of damp, grey, chilly English weather. The WAAFs were at the bottom of the station’s pecking order, lower even than the kitchen staff, some of who were prisoners of war. To make matters worse, any possibility for camraderie was undermined by the fact that WAAFs were assigned to positions individually, rather than as a formation. As Settle puts it,

It showed even in the language — one was ‘attached’ to a station, each new place approached without knowing a soul, so that to be posted off your station was a thing to be feared and in it was a vague sense of punishment. Such isolation among the vast majority of the ground crews bred an unseen poisoned miasma, secret beneath the structure as sex was secret to authority.

Her work and the living conditions proved exhausting, relentless, and utterly thankless. Any sense of contributing to a greater cause was life. On the other hand, as she realized one afternoon off as she cycled through some nearby villages, being treated like a cog in the war machine brought a novel, if odd, sense of freedom:

[For] the first time I sensed an irresponsibility, an ease of letting go. My uniform was issue, my bicycle was issue. I was utterly without worry about where my food was coming from. So long as I did what I was told, kept silence and remained acquiescent, I had freedom from decision, freedom from want, freedom from anxiety for survival. That, too, seemed out of my hands—the deci- sion of an abstract, an order from “above.” For a few minutes the rose hedges swept past me; I felt an almost mystic contentment. Then, even in the sun, cold fright caught me and I pedaled faster, as if I could ride away from the space of that feeling. I had experienced the final negative freedom, that of the slave.

There’s another one of those Settle slaps: “the negative freedom … of the slave.”

After a particularly long and demanding shift, Settle collapsed and was diagnosed as severely underweight and malnourished. She was sent to London to recouperate and quickly realized that her talents and temperament were better suited for work with the U.S. Office of War Information. The OWI arranged for her separation from the WAAF and her induction — as a major, though without uniform — into the U.S. Army.

The framing facts of Settle’s story — her marriage, her son, her escape into the OWI — are missing from All the Brave Promises. It took her much longer to provide these facts, in her unfinished memoir Learning to Fly, which was published shortly after her death in 2005. All the Brave Promises is not, however, a book that depends on external context to succeed. Her aim, as she later wrote, was simply to document how thousands of young English women were used by their country and to counter what she called “the official peacetime bravery … the self-congratulation of it, its terrible mistakes.” “It was such a tiny arrow thrown,” she acknowledged, “But it was all I could do.”

With an aim as keen as Mary Lee Settle’s however, even tiny arrows can be deadly. If you should ever find yourself giving into notions of the romance of war, I recommend All the Brave Promises as an antidote.

All the Brave Promises: Memories of Aircraft Woman 2nd Class 2146391, by Mary Lee Settle
New YorK: Delacorte Press, 1966
London: Heinemann, 1966

A Check List of Good Books from 1931

“A Check List of Good Books” from Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1931

I’ve long wondered about one of the longest modernist novels ever written, Evelyn Scott’s A Calendar of Sin (1931), an epic of the Reconstruction and after that took two volumes to encompass its over 1300 pages. When I stumbled across a copy with the original dust jackets at a reasonable price recently, I grabbed it. But I have yet to read it, so this is not about A Calendar of Sin.

On the back of the book, however, as was often the practice of publishers in those days, there appears “A Check List of Good Books,” which lists thirty titles then available from Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith. Cape & Smith was a brief and unsuccessful joint venture between the veteran British publisher Herbert Jonathan Cape and the American Harrison Smith. Established in 1928, the partnership lasted just three years. Smith left to form his own house and Robert Ballou, the former literary editor of the Chicago Daily News, who’d been the treasurer, took over and the firm reformed as Jonathan Cape and Robert Ballou. This incarnation was even briefer, closing its books in 1933.

The Cape & Smith check list, however, is an interesting mix of classics and the now-forgotten. The books by William Faulkner, Sigmund Freud, Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence, and Evelyn Waugh have remained in print and are well-established as 20th century classics. Several others (Maurice Hindus’s two books, Louis Fischer’s study of Soviet foreign policy, Charles Yale Harrison’s biography of Clarence Darrow) are too contemporary not to have been superseded by other studies. But let’s take a quick look at a few of the less well-known titles. A number of these have been reissued from time to time — Plagued by the Nightingale, for example, was a Virago Modern Classic. But these are the sort of almost-classics that never quite manage to stay in print without the support a champion or two.

• A World Can End, by Irina Skariatina
A candid, if at times disingenuous, account of the Russian revolution as seen by a member of the aristocracy. In his review for The Spectator, Graham Greene wrote:

“Here is death as we might ourselves experience it, not death in the desert or the jungle, but death in the drawing-room, the bullet that smashes the familiar picture…. The sufferings of her family, of her deaf old father, the General, who could not be stopped from criticizing the Revolution at the top of his voice until at last he was struck down in a street brawl, of the old Princess, her mother, married to an Estonian gardener that she might be allowed a passport to leave Russia, then dying when she crossed the frontier, are described with a freedom from prejudice, even with some sympathy for the Revolution, which makes her story the more terrible. If this is the best that can be said, one wonders at the worst.

Skariatina was able to leave the Soviet Union and come to New York, where she married an American, Victor Blakeslee, an experience she wrote about in a sequel, A World Begins. Shortly afterward, she and Blakeslee visited Russia and she published an account of their trip with the somewhat boasting title of First to Go Back.
Skariatina’s memoir was based on her diary, which gives the book an immediacy — but also a certain amount of undiguised naïveté, as in this entry from early 1917:

On my way home this afternoon, just as I left the hospital, I saw a wretched little dog perishing of cold and hunger. Its bones were sticking out in the most ghastly way and as for its eyes — the anguish in them cannot be described! Right next to where the little thing lay was a grocery store — so I dashed into it, bought an enormous sausage and was just about to feed the beastie, when all of a sudden passers-by, of the kind one sees in the hospital district, began to stop and stare and grumble out loud: “Look at her feeding a dog, when Christians are hungry nowadays. Ugh, those idle rich!” … Nothing like it ever happened to me before. It proves that there is a feeling of hostility among the poor that is ready to crop up at the slightest pretext.

• Juan in America, by Eric Linklater
Juan in America tells the story of Scotsman Juan — the name is meant to evoke Byron’s Don Juan, though it’s a loose connection at best — and his adventures in 1920s America. As the summarized it, Juan encounters “gangsters bootleggers, wenches, bean-wagon proprietors, Carolina negroes and Hollywood deities. He runs rum from Windsor to Detroit, rides a mule for twenty-four hours down a flood-swollen river, invades a beer baron’s Everglade retreat and seduces his daughter, and accompanies these adventures with a running fire of commend and ribald laughter.”
Linklater wrote the book after spending two years in America, so it’s filled with dry British satire of American customs and manners. The book is often cited as an example of a modern picaresque novel, and it stands (or falls) on the strength of its episodes rather than its narrative arc. Juan in America has been a perennial favorite of reissuers, coming out several times as a Penguin Modern Classic and within the last twenty years as a Capuchin Classic. At the moment, it’s available as an eBook from Bloomsbury in the U.S., but not in England.
Illustration from Mad Man's Drum by Lynd Ward
Illustration from Mad Man’s Drum by Lynd Ward.
• Mad Man’s Drum and Gods’ Man, by Lynd Ward
Two wordless novels, in which the story is told through a series of full-page woodcuts. The form was pioneered by the Belgian artist Frans Masereel, and these, Ward’s first two attempts, are far more interesting as art than literature. Both suffer from excessive abstraction, with every character treated as symbol rather than individual. Susan Sontag considered God’s Man so awkward that she listed in her Camp canon in her milestone essay, “Notes on Camp.”
By far Ward’s best graphic novel was his last, Vertigo (1937). In his introduction to the two-volume Library of America edition collecting all seven of Ward’s novels, Art Spiegelman writes of it,

“Genuinely novelistic in scope, it is a difficult work that grapples with perilously difficult times. As emblematic as Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, as ambitiously experimental as Dos Passos’s U. S. A/ trilogy, as apocalyptic as Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, it is a key work of Depression-era literature, and useful in understanding what is being down to us right now.”

If you are interested in sampling Ward’s novels but reluctant to go for the magnum opus, budget versions of God’s Man, Mad Man’s Drum, and Vertigo are available from Dover Books.

• The Wave, by Evelyn Scott
When The Wave was published in 1929, Carl Van Doren called it “the greatest novel on the American Civil War.” At the time, with five novels to her credit, Scott was considered one of the premier American modernists. In fact, publishers Cape & Smith touted a novel by another of their Southern-born writers by saying, “The Sound and the Fury should put William Faulkner in the company of Evelyn Scott.”

In his 1950 study The American Historical Novel, Ernest Leisy wrote that The Wave “marked a new advance in the technique of historical fiction, and in an article from 1964, Robert Welker asserted that the book should be seen as “the standard measure against which novels dealing with the war were tested, and perhaps more than any one book, it is responsible for opening up the materials of the Civil War to fiction. It is unique in American fiction.”
Peggy Bach, whose advocacy of the novel, along with that of her frequent collaborator David Madden, wrote of The Wave in a 1985 article in Southern Literary Journal,

Scott’s style is elaborate; her sentence structure is complex and often convoluted. Her characters, even when they are the great men about whom much Civil War fiction is written, exhibit particular human behavior in a particular situation. Upon the firm foundation of her intellect, her interests in various groups of people — Negroes, Jews, poor whites, politicians, military leaders — her strong compassion for the plight of women in the South, and her knowledge of history, Scott formed a novel unusual in content, character, tone, and structure.

Bach and Madden were responsible for the Louisiana State University Press reissuing the book in 1996 as part of the “Voices of the South” series. Since then, however, the book has, like much of Evelyn Scott’s work, fallen out of print again.

• Gallows’ Orchard, by Claire Spencer
Claire Spencer, the author of Gallows’ Orchard was, conveniently, Harrison Smith’s wife. Still, that doesn’t account entirely for the hyperbolic reception her debut novel received. As Harvard Crimson’s reviewer gushed, it “has everything and is everything necessary to make it an extraordinary good novel.” Amy Loveman, the Saturday Review’scritic, tried to chalk it up to that old stereotype, the natural born writer:

Every now and again there appears an author who is a novelist not by power of will, but as naturally as the bird is master of flight. Miss Spencer is of that happy company who write with so direct a vision as to seem to be improvising as they proceed. Her book has that appearance f unpremeditation which is the triumph of art. It has an urgency and immediacy of emotion that are the very accent of life, a sequence of happening as seemingly inevitable as the inescapable encounters of actual existence. Her narrative is electric with feel-ings -— quick with a passionate responsiveness to the beauty of nature, the pathos of dumb beasts, the calamities and complexities of the human heart.

Gallows’ Orchard tells the story of a Scottish girl who becomes pregnant by one man and marries another to save her name. When the truth finally comes out, her village takes its revenge in a manner, well, befitting Thomas Hardy … or Shirley Jackson.
Spencer later divorced Smith and married Mabel Dodge Luhan’s son John Evans. The poet Robinson Jeffers, with whom they stayed after Spencer obtained her divorce in Reno, wrote a friend, “You never saw a pair of such handsome creatures — in a strange unusual way & so different.” they lived in Luhan’s compound in Taos until they sold it in the late 1960s and moved to Maine. Claire Spencer Evans died in 1987 at the age of 91.
Gallows’ Orchard is available on HathiTrust (to those who have access).

• Brother and Sister, by Leonhard Frank
Leonhard Frank gained international acclaim for his first novel Carl and Anna, and American reviewers seemed inclined on the strength of that to give this account of a brother and sister who accidentally fall in love and marry (the old trick of long separation and a broken family). The New York Times thought that “so great is Frank’s art in portraying the love that is theirs [Constantine and Lydia, the two sibling/spouses], that one understand and sympathizes. One can no more censure them for what has happened than one can upbraid a mountain torrent for going out of its course and inundating ground that had hitherto slumbered in peaceful repose.”
But British critics were less enthusiastic. The historian E. H. Carr wrote in The Spectator, “If his intention was to write a modern realistic novel on these themes, he has stopped half-way in the attempt. He ostentatiously flouts realism by a Shakespearean use of the long arm of coincidence; and he adopts, both for narrative and for dialogue, a purely poetical style which sometimes achieves beauty and occasionally, at any rate in translation, descends from the sublime to the ridiculous…. The result is a powerful and striking book which will be widely read and discussed; but Herr Frank has not solved, has not even really faced, the problems which he raises.

• Bystander and The Magnet, by Maxim Gorki [Gorky]
I must confess that these two titles were unfamiliar to me. But they’re also just the tip of the iceberg, or, more accurately, the first half of The Life of Klim Samgin, a tetralogy that Wikipedia describes as “Gorky’s most ambitious work, intended to depict ‘all the classes, all the trends, all the tendencies, all the hell-like commotion of the last century, and all the storms of the 20th century.'” Bystander and The Magnet were followed, in English translations, by Other Fires in 1933 and Specter in 1938. The first two volumes in English were published by Cape & Smith; the second two by Appleton-Century. None of them has ever been reissued in English.
Among English-language readers, Maxim Gorki’s reputation has fallen dramatically since these books were published. Once considered the moral pillar of Russian literature after Tolstoy, Gorki had a problematic relationship with Lenin and even more so with Stalin, and his collaboration in the white-washing of the disastrous Belomor Canal, a pointless project to which thousands of Gulag prisoners were sacrificed has tended to outweigh his literary accomplishments since his death.
This is a work of massive scale. The four books add up to over 2,700 pages. If you really wanted to read them, you’d have to be prepared to shell out over $500. While there are plenty of copies of Bystander available for under $20, there is just one copy of Other Fires currently listed for sale, and it goes for over $400.
Whether it would be worth the effort in terms of reading satisfaction is another question. There was no difference of opinion among reviewers on one point: these are wordy novels. Gerald Gould, who reviewed Bystander for the Observer, was not a fan:

At first sight, one might merely wonder why this enormous book is not more enormous. Since the conversations seem endless, why not make them literally endless, especially as they all agree in finding nothing to agree about? But an artist of Gorki’s stature is entitled to his method, even when it involves tedium: and his book must be read for the impression of muddle it conveys. This, after all, is but the first volume of a trilogy: between the dissolution of this, and the Revolution that is coming, there may be an intention of violent contrast. Certainly the theory, so far, appears to be: “Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat.” The subject is the Russian Intelligentsia as it lived and talked — O how it talked! — between the assassination of Alexander II and the coronation of Nicholas II. The intelligentsia is unintelligent. Vagueness, vanity, morbidity, self-consciousness, lack of Ideals, a soft snow-drift of purposeless arguments and feckless delays, a sniffing at revolution — such is the picture: the few people who do anything quickly pass out of it: the hero goes on wondering about himself.

E. H. Carr put it more succinctly in reviewing The Magnet for the Spectator: “Gorki wields an amazingly fluent pen, but ‘the art to blot’ is one which he forgot at an early age.”

On the other hand, those who loved 19th Century Russian novels found much to love in this one. In the Saturday Review, Alexander Kaun wrote that Bystander was not a historical novel but an immediate novel:

…we watch the bewildering Russian panorama, not in its cosy remoteness, but as a disconcerting immediacy. We miss the comfort of a historical novel, in which everything has been made clear and definite by the obliging author. Rather do we share the discomfort of contemporary Russians who lived in the chaos of an unduly protracted period of storm and stress. We speed headlong from the spectacular ‘Seventies, reverberating with terroristic explosions and culminating in the assassination of Alexander II, through the arid ‘Eighties, drabbish with pseudo-Tolstoyan passivitv and Chekhovian whimpering, and into the mad ‘Nineties, when a hothouse industrialization was foisted upon a rustic, famished country in which erstwhile peasants, stolid and pious, turned overight into militant proletarians, when the intelligentsia tried to digest a chop-suey of Marx-Nietzsche-Ibsen-Wilde-Verlaine-PIekhanov-Lenin-Mikhailovsky-Chernov.

Kaun was willing to excuse much in consideration of the energy in Gorki’s narrative: “A tremendous canvas of Russian life unfolds before our eyes, dizzying in its colorfulness and multiplicitv of action and movement…. Perhaps he uses his faculty a bit extravagantly; the abundance of faces and objects may tax our receptivity. But then, we recall the dimensions of the canvas, its Homeric proportions.”

One wonders whether anyone will want to take on a new English translation (no one had good things to say about the first one). Is the work worth it? Or is The Life of Klim Samgin as justly forgotten now as the thick historical novels of Gorki’s contemporary Dmitry Merezhkovsky (who?).

• Plagued by the Nightingale, by Kay Boyle
This was Boyle’s first novel, written in part in anguish at her treatment by the Breton parents of her first husband, Richard Brault. Though mostly written between 1923 and 1927, it was not published until 1931, at which point she confessed to a friend, “I wrote [it] so many years ago that I feel it has nothing to do with me now.” In her review of the book, along with Wedding Day, Boyle’s first collection of stories, Katherine Anne Porter wrote,

The whole manner of the telling is superb: there are long passages of prose which crackle and snap with electric energy, episodes in which inner drama and outward events occur against scenes bright with the vividness of things seen by the immediate eye: the bathing party on the beach, the fire in the village, the delicious all-day excursion to Castle Island, the scene in the market when Bridget and Nicholas quarrel, the death of Charlotte, the funeral. Nothing is misplaced or exaggerated, and the masterful use of symbol and allegory clarify and motivate the mam great theme beneath the apparent one: the losing battle of youth and strength against the resistless army of age and death. This concept is implicit in the story itself, and it runs like music between the lines. The book is a magnificent performance; and as the short stories left the impression of reservoirs of power hardly tapped, so this novel, complete as it is, seems only a beginning.

After being out of print for decades, it was reissued in 1966 to launch the Crosscurrents/Modern Fiction series of neglected books from the Southern Illinois Press. In his introduction to that edition, Harry T. Moore wrote,

The novel that emerged is a variant on the Henry James theme of the clash between Americans and Europeans— and it may be asked, Who since James has handled this theme more skilfully? Indeed it can safely be said that Kay Boyle in her first novel portrayed a French provincial family far more convincingly than any other American writer, in her story of the American girl Bridget who has married a Breton and at- tempts to live with his fiercely clannisH family that dominates a village.

I Want, by Nell Dunn and Adrian Henri (1972)

I Want by Adrian Henri and Nell Dunn

I Want is a lovely collaboration between the Liverpool poet Adrian Henri and the novelist/playwright Nell Dunn about the forty-some year affair. Upper-class Dolly Argyll and Albert Hodgkin, a Merseyside lad taking a first step up the social ladder by attending a red-brick university, meet through friends, or friends of friends, in the 1930s. She is attracted by Albert’s raw “authenticity” and he by her passion and perfection, and soon they have their first tryst in the shade of the great forest on her family’s estate — a tryst whose secrecy and subterfuge comes to symbolize their relationship.

We know from the outset that their paths will soon diverge. The story is told through a series of letters, Albert’s written by Henri and Dolly’s by Dunn, and in the first Albert complains about being frustrated and exhausted from taking care of his second wife, who is now bedridden. Dolly is living comfortably in what we can guess is a quaint but well-furnished country cottage.

They have kept up a correspondence over the years, though Albert has had to hide Dolly’s letters from both wives. And, we learn, they have met from time to time, usually in some modest seaside hotel outside Liverpool, for an afternoon. For Albert, these are escapes. Having taken his degree, he ended his climb up the ladder one rung up by joining the engineering staff at the same factory where his father worked, a post he remains in for the next thirty-five years. Although happily married to his first wife, Albert knows his occasional rendezvous with Dolly are his only chance to leave the life he has signed onto.

Dolly’s motivations for continuing their relationship aren’t as clear. She doesn’t see Albert as her one great love. But it’s clear that she’s also not comfortable with surrendering completely to a way of life that’s so thoroughly bound up with appearances, customs, and property. As their correspondence develops, Albert becomes less lover and more confidante.

Henri and Dunn do a marvelous job of portraying a lifelong, if melancholy, relationship. But there is more going on her. For while Albert and Dolly do more than “stay in touch” through the years, there are suggestions that theirs is a relationship built on illusions. Dolly sends Albert and his first wife an expensive basket of good from Fortnum and Mason, not realizing that it raises questions he will struggle to answer or that they have little interest in champagne and pâté. He wonders if he hasn’t simply used Dolly as an outlet for sympathy and sex. They meet for the last time at the funeral for Albert’s second wife, Joan. Surrounded by family and friends, Albert can barely acknowledge the strange woman among the mourners.

Adrian Henri and Nell Dunn
Adrian Henri and Nell Dunn around the time they wrote I Want.

One wonders if Albert and Dolly were alter egos for Henri and Dunn. Henri was stubbornly and proudly bound to his Liverpool working class roots, while Dunn, daughter of a baronet, granddaughter of an earl, has been strongly associated with working class situations and characters, despite her upbringing. In their collaboration, they managed in barely 100 pages to create a picture of a relationship with enough shades and suggestions to fill a much longer novel.

I Want, by Adrian Henri and Nell Dunn
London: Jonathan Cape, 1972.

I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye, by Madeleine Masson (1978)

I don’t remember how many years ago I bought this book, but it sat on the shelf long enough to have escaped my notice until I took it down to kill a few minutes while waiting for my wife to get ready to go out. One of the downsides to reading and writing about books all the time is that one loses touch of that magical experience of opening a book and commencing to read without any prior knowledge to cloud one’s judgment.

If I ever knew much about I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye, I’d forgotten it long ago. I suspect it was nothing more than the loveliness of the title that made me buy it in the first place. So I was naively putting myself in Madeleine Masson’s hands, knowing that I would be setting it down in a few minutes, perhaps not to pick it up again for a matter of years, if ever.

“It was a beautiful day in June 1940” opens the first chapter, “Paris — June 1940.” Of course, we know enough history to realize that a beautiful day in Paris in June 1940 is not going to end beautifully. Masson’s lover arrives to persuade her to leave for Switzerland with him. As a Jew, she understands the risks she faces. “They say that the Germans will be entering Paris at any moment,” her anti-Semitic landlady announces with undisguised delight. Masson chooses not to go to Switzerland but carries on packing up, prepared to join the flood of refugees leaving the city for … well, any place else.

We understand by the end of Chapter One that Masson’s title is a lie, which gives everything that follows a certain poignancy, rather like that one feels in watching the silly bourgeosie in Jean Renoir’s masterpiece La règle du jeu. And Masson herself could easily have been one of the characters in Renoir’s film. Raised in South Africa by a French father and Austrian mother, she came to Paris in 1934 with her mother, who was hoping to establish her own salon and effectively separate from her dull diamond broker husband (if not from his money).

For Masson, however, Paris is a different kind of escape — from her mother, in fact. She quickly finds herself a job as secretary to a wealthy American dowager and a room of her own in a pension, and begins to assimilate into a peculiar cross-section of Parisian society. At the high end, she meets the idle rich and idle not-so-rich (the latter often of noble descent) through her enployer and mother. At the low end, she meets people like Madame Tricon, the patronne of her pension:

She told me that she was one of the first women in Paris to have eyelashes made from the hairs of her current lover’s legs. “Imagine, ma petite,” she said, batting two black centipedes at me, “Imagine to yourself the voluptuousness of giving him Japanese kisses with his own hairs.

At one of employer’s soirees, Masson meets Baron Renaud Marie de la Minaudière, who plies her with food and drink and by the end of the evening declares himself desperately in love. She takes quick stock of his character: “lazy, amoral, deeply religious, sentimental, and selfish.” Nonetheless, when he proposes, she accepts.

Then she discovers that she is the third player in a duet. The Baron is in thrall with the Marquise de Rastignac, a fifty-ish noblewoman his mother enlisted to introduce her son into the mysteries of sex. Some twenty years later, the two are still carrying on their affair, aided in part by the fact that the Marquise is footing much of the bill for the Baron’s playboy lifestyle. Masson’s account of the Baron and the Marquise is just one of the nuggets of la vie Parisienne pluperfect that are studded throughout this book:

The Marquise’s finest hour, L’heure bleue, was her hour of triumph. From 5 to 7 p.m. was visiting time for French lovers; and in love nests all over the country, and in Paris particularly, men were taking down their trousers and heading for the Louis XVI style bed where lay la petite amie in a frilly négligée. Tearing off this garment was part of the ploy. I could never visualise the Baron’s Laure frivolling naked on what the Baron called with some respect the battlefield. For this lady, who to me resembled a Roman matron, had amisleading air of impenetrable virtue. Her clothes appeard welded to her massive frame, and her large handbags and tiny feet were as much a legend in Paris as was her vanished beauty.

Not long after Masson and the Baron are married, the Marquise pays a visit and informs the new bride that “Renaud is my life and I don’t propose giving him up.” Masson’s job is to produce an heir and interfere as little as possible in the status quo ante matrimonium.

This is also the view of the Baron’s family, who don’t bother to hide the contempt they feel towards a pretender with three strikes against her: a Jewess, a foreigner, and a commoner. They refuse to even acknowledge her existence. The shock of her rejection on all fronts causes Masson, now pregnant with the Baron’s child, to miscarry. And this, ironically, then enables Masson to get the marriage annulled through some intricate maneuvers through the Byzantine processes of the French bureaucracy and the Catholic Church.

Madeleine Masson, 1942
Madeleine Masson in 1942.

For proper Parisians, there is no difference between an annulée and a divorcée. Official recognition as a wanton woman, however, frees Masson to explore less-sanctioned aspects of Parisian society. She takes a series of lovers, some who fall for her, others whom she falls for, none of them remotely suitable. Early on, she is aided and abetted by Lucy de Polnay (sister of the author Peter de Polnay, whom Neglected Books fans may recall). Lucy instructs her in the fine art of judging a lover, dismissing one for having what she called “the postman’s knock method”: “three sharp rat-a-tats, put it in the letter box, and away.”

Masson also comes to know — intimately or briefly — many of the celebrities of Paris of the 1930s: Colette, Nathalie Barney, Anaïs Nin, Suzy Solidor, Marie Laurencin. So, if you’re not satisfied with savoring Masson’s delicious tales, you can also feast upon pages rich with vintage Parisian gossip, including their “curious sexual appetites and habits.” (Masson could never share Count Serge Cheremeteff’s “passion for the whip and the rod,” for example.)

And, as we know from the start, there is the tragic goodbye to all that, as Masson tries to find a way out of France with thousands of other refugees. The streets of cities like Tours and Bourdeaux “black with people, like flies on a wound.” Just what happens to her in the end, however, is unclear. In the book, she writes that she managed to book a passage to South Africa from Marseilles. Her Wikipedia page, on the other hand, suggests that she stayed and became involved with the Resistance. After the war, however, it’s clear that she married again (a Royal Navy captain), had a son, to whom the book is dedicated, settled in England, and became a biographer and playwright. She died in 2007 at the age of 95.

I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye is as insubstantial as an éclair — and every bit as irresistible.

I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye, by Madeleine Masson
London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978

The Cosmopolitan Girl, by Rosalyn Drexler (1974)

Cover of the first US edition of The Cosmopolitan Girl

“Pablo has confessed his love for me. I was stunned.”

We are, too, when we learn, a few lines further down the first page of Rosalyn Drexler’s third novel The Cosmopolitan Girl, that Pablo is a dog. The narrator, Helen, lives in the Hotel Buckminster in Manhattan. The hotel has a strict no-pets policy, but Helen has trained Pablo to walk on his hind legs and dresses him up in a man’s suit, wig, and hat. Pablo is “an intelligent dog, well coordinated and faithful” — which goes without saying, Helen reminds us.

He can also carry on a conversation and enjoys having Helen read to him from the newspaper. They share their most intimate thoughts and dreams. “I dreamt I was lying in the courtyard dead,” Pablo confides after a troubling night sleep. Helen promises to ask her mother what the dream means.

Helen’s mother is a psychic who changes her lovers more often than her sheets. Helen’s father is a fabulously wealthy herbalist. Neither parent is particularly concerned that their daughter is in love with a dog. It’s good to know she’s got a steady relationship.

It’s not without its difficulties, though. Helen notices that the roll of stamps is growing smaller and smaller and discovers that Pablo has been sending obscene letters to sex magazines. Also, her mother’s latest lover, Albert, is taking an interest in Helen. He tries to seduce her one night, but she finds the fact that he’s disguised himself as Gertrude Stein disconcerting. “I did not want to discover that yes, Gertrude did have a penis.” Well, who would?

Helen often gets her advice about romance from Cosmospolitan magazine. Cosmo tells her that “Anything goes” is the motto of her time: “Whether your ‘thing’ turns out to be of redeeming social importance is not crucial; it’s the passion with which you defend you view that’s important.” And so, she decides to sleep with Pablo.

The sex is not bad, but not great. Pablo’s nails leave deep scratches on Helen’s back and he seems unconcerned whether she enjoys it. Things grow even more complicated when Helen finds that an old man in the hotel is stalking her. When she visits his room to warn him off, the man introduces Helen to “your twin sister” — a life-size rag doll he’s dressed and made up to look exactly like her.

Rosalyn Drexler
Rosalyn Drexler, from the dust jacket of The Cosmopolitan Girl.

It should be apparent by this point that Rosalyn Drexler was not looking to Zola for inspiration. Any pretence of realism is abandoned in the first paragraph of The Cosmopolitan Girl. Nor is this an example of magical realism in the fashion of Garcia Marquez and his Latin American colleagues. The clue to her approach can be found in two of the writers quoted on the back of the book’s dust jacket: Stanley Elkin and Donald Barthelme.

Elkin, Barthelme, and Kurt Vonnegut were the most critically and popularly successful American fabulists of the 1970s. For Barthelme in particularly, the aim of a piece of writing was more to achieve some formalistic coherence than to be realistic. No one thinks that the children in Barthelme’s The Dead Father are really dragging the giant corpse of their father across the landscape, but from a symbolic standpoint it’s an amazingly effective parable for the emotional burden that parents can leave behind.

By this standard, how does The Cosmopolitan Girl measure up? Well, one thing that Elkin, Barthelme, and Vonnegut all had going for them was a brilliant gift for comedy. I suspect that many people who read Barthelme’s stories in The New Yorker enjoyed his extravagantly absurdist humor without noticing the serious messages underneath the jokes.

And Drexler certainly holds her own in this regard. She takes full advantage of the playfulness that characterizes so much of American experimentalist fiction of this period. There are newspaper articles, letters, advertisements, dialogues from radio shows, to do lists, and a dozen other types of material included alongside passages of conventional narrative.

The Cosmopolitan Girl has 145 chapters in its 192 pages, but you can’t really say they’re squeezed into the book because some of them are just a sentence or two long. Take this example, when Helen is trying to write an article about incest for Cosmo:

103
Article going well. Already have four typewritten pages.

104
Article going well. Already have three typewritten pages.

105
Article may not be written. Should be able to begin on the fifteenth page, as one begins on the top floor of the Guggenheim to see the show. It’s too exhausting to begin on page one. It’s never any good. Has anything ever been written backward?

106
.reverof em evarc mih ekam dluohs amleS hserf fo etsat teews eht, ffo repparw ym sleep luaP nehw, nehT. wollamarc a ekil nat ni depparw nruter ll’I.

What, then, about Drexler’s underlying message? I’m tempted to reread The Dead Father now because I suspect there is more of a connection between it and The Cosmopolitan Girl than Barthelme’s blurb on the back. The Cosmopolitan Girl came out in 1974, The Dead Father a year later. Both deal with the complexities of the relationship between parents and children, particularly after the parents are gone.

And Drexler is also examining the nature of marriage and romantic relationships. It may be absurd that Helen finds happiness, at least for a while, with Pablo as a partner, but it’s really no more absurd that the notion that the stereotypical heterosexual American couple like Ward and June Cleaver were the ideal to which everyone should aspire. The Cosmopolitan Girl is not just a product of American experimentalism in fiction but of the wave of feminism and sexual liberation that was shaking up the country. (It’s telling that Gloria Steinem is one of the back-cover blurbers. It’s sad, however, that her quote appears second down the page after Norman Mailer’s).

The Cosmopolitan Girl is no more than a night or two’s read, and well worth looking for as both a very funny book and an illuminating artifact of its time.

The Cosmopolitan Girl, by Rosalyn Drexler
New York: M. Evans & Company, 1974

City of Women, by Nancy Morgan (1952)

Cover of City of Women by Nancy Morgan

“A hundred women came to paradise and a hundred angels fell” reads the tagline on the cover of the Red Seal/Gold Medal paperback original edition of Nancy Morgan’s 1952 novel City of Women. It was an obvious attempt to repeat the success of Gold Medal’s edition of Tereska Torres’s Women’s Barracks, a memoir of life among the women of the Free Free forces in London, down to its cover by Barye Phillips, the same artist, showing women in much the same variety of déshabillé.

Beneath the surface, however, the two books had little in common aside from the fact that both were clearly based on lived experience. In Morgan’s case, however, the experience was that of living in the large complex erected near Pearl Harbor to house the hundreds of civilian workers brought to Oahu after the declaration of war.

Lynn and her husband Mack have come from Kentucky on a ship full of troops and civilian workers. The idea of taking war work in Hawaii was entirely hers. Mack, we soon discover, is a small-minded, embittered man who should never have left home, let alone gotten married. Had Mack ever been happy? Lynn wonders soon after they move into a bleak, nearly unfurnished apartment in the married quarters. “Perhaps he had been before he married her. He had told her so many times that he was.” Mack is utterly out of place in Hawaii: “He hated it, the sun hurt his eyes, and he was affronted by the sensual warmth.”

Lynn, on the other hand, quickly comes to love her new situation. She’s good at her job, desired by the thousands of single men on the island, even desired as a friend by the women she’s become acquainted with on the ship.

Though Lynn decides to move into the single women’s quarters after Mack throws her clothes out the window in a jealous fit, it takes Morgan another two hundred pages to make their break permanent. For her part, the process is made easier by meeting a handsome, understanding lieutenant, though this only provokes Mack further into his fortress of surliness. She starts to receive anonymous letters: “Watch your step. We know what you’re doing and what will happen to you if you don’t stop seeing that lieutenant. You’re a filthy whore and we find ways to get rid of women like you.” “We” is clearly Mack and his buddy Toby, who probably resent most of all not having a nice basement to chain Lynn up in.

Much of the book is taken up with the other dramas that arise among Lynn’s barrack-mates, most of which we can predict. An unwanted pregnancy, a romance with a married officer, and a case or two of island fever. There is also the somewhat more “scandalous” element of a happily predatory lesbian, but Morgan is too unsure of, if not uncomfortable with, same-sex relations that it’s not much more than a novelty item. Neither does she treat her exotic setting as much more than a backdrop. Nancy Morgan may have been writing from firsthand knowledge of what it was like to be a civilian worker living in Hawaii during the war, but for all she makes of it, City of Women comes off as no more interesting than a week or two’s worth of General Hospital.

City of Women, by Nancy Morgan
New York: Red Seal Books/Gold Medal Books (Fawcett Publications), 1952

Personal File, by G. O. Jones (1962)

Cover of the first edition of Personal File

If the term had existed in 1962, critics would have labelled Personal File a “mid-life crisis” novel. It is certainly a novel of middles. George Park is middle-class, midway through life’s journey, midway through his career, midway in the ranks of the civil service.

As the book opens, he is about to face an Establishment Panel, which is a euphemism for a promotion panel. He realizes that this could be, effectively, his last such panel:

Everyone knows that this is the promotion which matters. If you stop here beyond … say, about forty-two, you probably stop here indefinitely. If you make it, then in ten or twenty years you might even take home a medal. If I don’t get it this time I probably won’t get another Panel for about three years. Then I’ll be forty-two. The odds against will be longer then.

George does not do well. To forget his failure, he leaves work early and goes to the movies. There, he becomes infatuated with one of the ice cream girls and, rashly, decides to ask her out, in what has to be one of the worst sales jobs in the history of romance:

It’s not that I am interested in you. You represent everything I have not got: youth, love, warmth, happiness. Of course, I have no excuse for not having them. I have children — nice ones — and a wife. But my life is empty, dry. I might be a vegetable, or an electronic computer.

“I like to hear you talk,” the girl replies, and she agrees to meet him for a drink.

Looking at this description, George’s affair with Lily, the ice cream girl, seems completely unbelievable, but in the book it comes across as only somewhat unbelievable. George is fascinated by her beauty, her casualness, her working-class life; Lily is amused by his awkwardness, touched by his tenderness, and glad of something to lift her out of her boredom. Never for a moment do we or they think of this as anything permanent.

Jones contrasts George’s situation with those of his colleague Peter — recognized by all as the more competitive — and of the Junior Minister they both work for, a rising star from their own year at Oxford. All three men are at crucial points in their careers. The poses of their college days are “now hardened into attitudes; it was no longer a game.” The Junior Minister’s success is tempered by the miserableness of his marriage. And Peter is obsessed with fears that he is just one mistake from seeing his promise transformed into disgrace.

George’s pessimism deepens when he considers the example of his own father, whose “life had not been as he had expected”:

He had won none even of the modest prizes which had seemed within his reach, had inspired no special affection among his colleagues. Even his family had comforted him only moderately…. He now slept a good deal during the day, did nothing by which one day could be distnguished from another, had no plans for the future.

In the hands of a writer willing to inflict real pain upon his characters — someone like Richard Yates, who never hesitated to peel away that last layer of self-respect — Personal File could have been a truly powerful novel. But there’s a certain reluctance to deal with serious levels of discomfort that dulls the book’s impact.

When you learn a bit about G. O. Jones, you get the impression that he was neither invested enough in the book nor sufficiently misanthropic to sacrifice his characters. Gwyn Owain Jones was something of a Renaissance man. A pioneer of low temperature physics, head of his department at Queen Mary College, who left science at the age of 50 to become director of the National Museum of Wales. He was an admirable administrator, a manager who brought out the best in his people, a leader who sought to improve the institutions he ran. An amateur musician, he also managed to write Personal File and several other novels in the course of his very busy life.

Anyone who’s worked a large bureaucracy, and particularly civil service, will recognize the world and characters of Personal File, even though sixty years have passed since its publication. This does not, however, mean that it’s anything but a respectably well-crafted piece of middlebrow male fiction. For me, it was far more interesting than something of similar caliber involving espionage or adventure, but no more than a satisfying evening’s read.

Personal File, by G. O. Jones
London: Faber and Faber, 1962