The truly awful cover of the US edition of The Halt During the Chase Rosemary Tonks wrote six novels, but in many ways they’re six versions of the same story. Married or not, her lead characters are women, young but not naïve, not sure of what they want but sure of what they don’t, sure that they want a man in their life but not sure which one or how. They’re poised like a driver at a red light in an unfamiliar neighborhood, knowing they’ve got to make a decision: Left? Right? Straight? The only thing that’s clear is that backing up is not an option.
In the case of Sophie in Tonks’s last novel, The Halt During the Chase, as the book opens, she’s left her job as an administrator at a language school in Kensington and is wondering whether she truly loves Philip, the rising star in Treasury. As the book opens, she’s also in the middle of a conversation about school knickers at her mother’s house in Hampstead.
In the book’s opening chapter, there in that Hampstead kitchen, Tonks perfectly captures the way the pendulum swings back and forth between affection and annoyance in an adult daughter’s conversation with her mother. The shared memories then painful, now comic: “The regulation dark blue knickers. And they were knickers too!” The mother’s desire to see the daughter settled, the daughter’s chafing at the spectre of entrapment. And the mother’s long-developed and now deadly skill in wielding the weapons of conversation. Such as that simple and deceptive question: “How’s it going?”
“How’s it going?” So childish, so shrewish, that I had to answer on the same level: “How’s what going?” She would then draw her face into an expression of nauseating complicity, just like a mime who only has one second to portray some human failing and so has to do it with decisive vulgarity. Heaven knows what underworld theatre she got the expression from, but it was invaluable.
Sophie’s mother is also a bottomless well of advice and life lessons, on everything from religion to noses:
A woman’s nose has to be small and neat. But a man is quite different. If a man hasn’t got a good nose, he should sit down and grow himself one, because he’s going to need it!
Backing up is most definitely not an option for Sophie.
The nearly as bad cover of the UK edition of The Halt During the Chase
In fact, after two hours in that kitchen, she feels suffocated. Desperate just to get out the front door and to the freedom that lies outside, even on the sidewalks of Hampstead.
More air! I couldn’t get enough of it — I wanted a cold, flowing river of it past my cheeks. Drink it down, white stuff, and get rid of all the vinegar inside you that makes you trembling and irresolute, afraid that you ‘re not rich enough for your lover, whom you love too much on one level and doubt on another.
Moving foward is the only choice, but how is still in doubt. The obvious answer seems to be marriage with Philip. Brilliant, fit, handsome, and obviously destined for a future KCB, Philip is also the safe choice: “the sort of man with whose life nothing could possibly go wrong; decisions were permanent, and ended at death.” Philip is a precursor of the Tony Blair Labourite: socialist, but not in a sweaty way. His socialism, Sophie thinks, is “so snobbish, so exclusive, so bogus.”
How snobbish, she suddenly realizes, when, lying together in a hotel bed after making love, Philip tells her, “I was going to ask you to come and live with me. But I can’t promise you there won’t be an emotional bust-up in five years’ time. And then you’ll be less well off financially than you are now.”
To Philip, this is both pragmatic and empathetic. What better demonstrates how much he cares for Sophie than his consideration for how hard it will be when he dumps her? To Sophie, this is soul crushing. Trapped beside Philip in that perfectly equipped, airtight hotel room, she feels herself being swallowed whole. Again, she finds herself suffocating. She claws through the heavy curtains, manages to crack up the window, and drinks in the air. “I have never tasted anything like it. Through that gap in the plating of the hotel, I began to carry on my life once again.”
In his perfect dispassionate way, Philip has pushed Sophie out into that intersection, forcing her to make a choice.
Here, however, we find the one thing that distinguishes Sophie from Tonks’s other heroines. She’s begun to realize she’s got a soul. She’s started attend lectures by Mr. Ruback, Hampstead’s resident mystic. She may not fully understand how she will develop her spiritual self, but she knows that it will not be Philip’s way — having all the right opinions, furnishing one’s life with all the right accessories. “Isn’t buying new lampshades a form of slow death?” she wonders.
The Halt During the Chase is not only Rosemary Tonks’ funniest book but it’s also her deepest. Or rather, it’s a book that hovers on the edge of depth. By the time the book was published, Tonks had entered a period of soul-searching that had been triggered by her mother’s death in 1968. As Neil Astley wrote in his Guardian obituary, “Rosemary turned her back on Christianity, and for the next eight years attended spiritualist meetings, consulted mediums and healers, and took instruction from Sufi ‘seekers’ before turning to a Chinese spiritual teacher and an American yoga guru. All these she repudiated in turn.”
One opens the book thinking the chase of the title is the hunt of one sex for another. Sophie does turn from Philip to take some interest in his half-brother Guy, but the real quest is a spiritual one. “They taught you that it was your job to develop yourself, as the primary purpose of life,” she says of Ruback’s lectures: “the chase is inward [Emphasis added].” It clear that this is Sophie’s most likely direction when she exits her intersection.
Though Tonks ultimately returned to Christianity years later, she dismissed her own writing as something as pointless as buying new lampshades. She burned an unpublished novel and if she’d had her way, would have seen to it that every copy of her published books saw the same fate.
If one knows nothing about Rosemary Tonks, The Halt During the Chase is a remarkable work, studded like a bejeweled belt with shrewd and funny observations and perceptive about the quandaries of women looking for ways to make a life not centered on a man and family. But once you know her story, it’s hard to read Halt without sensing the spiritual direction in which she was about to turn, without knowing that she would soon want to destroy the very words we are reading.
The Halt During the Chase, by Rosemary Tonks
London: The Bodley Head, 1972
In 1955, not long after Dave Brubeck became the first postwar jazz musician to make the cover of TIME magazine, Whitney Balliett, The New Yorker’s veteran jazz critic, commented that novels about jazz had become “as indestructible as watercress sandwiches.” The irony of this, he noted, was that jazz, “with its overheated, bleary terminology and ghettoish aspects, is perhaps the hardest of all artforms to penetrate persuasively.”
It didn’t stop a couple generations of novelists from trying. After someone on Twitter asked for recommendations of novels about music and musicians recently, I began to jot down a list of just the ones about jazz and jazz musicians I could think of and was surprised how the list kept growing. Perhaps the best-known of these are one of the earliest, Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn (1938), which has been reissued as an NYRB Classic, and the best selling, Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1949). Algren’s book was more about drug addiction than jazz, and many of those who followed in his footsteps found it as hard not to mix up the two as did an unfortunate number of jazz musicians themselves.
Having played in an amateur big band for years, I’ve long taken an interest in books about jazz, but I won’t deny that the nonfictional ones — particularly coming from the pen of a master like Balliett, Gene Lees, Ted Gioia, or Stanley Crouch — tend, on average, to be far superior to their fictional counterparts. There’s just something about fiction and jazz than often comes out like mustard on chocolate: as great as the two may be on their own, put together they do neither a favor.
Approached as genre novels — which means, I guess, that you can set your critical brow down to middle or lower — however, they can have the same appeal as a whodunnit or western. Those same qualities of atmosphere, clichéd characters, and predictable plots that kill a book’s chance of critical praise can provide such the kind of reliable formula that makes for good escapism. Or, as another reviewer put it, one can become a willing “victim of a sort of déjà vu or déjà lu effect.” Here, then, are a dozen-plus jazz novels to enjoy.
I’d call this a half-way jazz novel. It’s about what happens when an amusement park piano player gets it into his head to start composing music. At first, everyone thinks it’s a joke, but when he meets a violinist with some training in orchestration, he ends up producing an opera titled The Giant Swing, which is set in … an amusement park. It’s halfway jazz because Burnett’s description of his hero’s music is clearly taken from George Gershwin’s “serious” compositions such as “Rhapsody in Blue” and Porgy and Bess — i.e., jazz-inspired but without the improvisational element. The story was later filmed as Dance Band (1941).
This, one of the earliest novels about a jazz musician, might just be the best when it comes to capturing both the business and the art of performing jazz. The story follows Frank and Pete Davis, brothers playing trombone and tenor sax (ala Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey), from the first time they pick up their horns in band class to their commercial and artistic success leading a swing band. The book is full of practical details about working as a musician that suggests that Steig spent a good deal of time listening to veterans of the road.
It’s also probably the first to address what made playing jazz so different from playing any other type of music before it. “Did you ever hear of Joe Venuti?” Frank asks a violinist interested in joining his band.
Well, he’s about the best of the jazz violinists. And by jazz violinist I mean something very different from the fiddlers who play in most dance orchestras. I mean a man who can play hot improvisations, a man who can play inventions extemporaneously in jazz idiom. There aren’t more than six or eight in the whole country who can do it well — probably the whole world. If I wanted a violinist I would try to find such a man. A Joe Venuti.
“But I don’t want a violin!” Frank continues. “The way I’ve worked things out there’s absolutely no place for it” — meaning that Steig also understood something that was beginning to be a major factor in the shift from hot jazz to swing: the importance of orchestration and arrangements.
Send Me Down is likely the most unjustly neglected novel on this list. Despite its — for the time — unusual subject, it was good enough to convince a hard-nosed reviewer like the novelist Kate O’Brien to declare, “There are not at this time of day many novels that can be called original, but Send Me Down is unmistakably one of them.”
The last book in the forgotten magnum opus of this genre, a trilogy called “Three Musicians’ loosely based on the careers of Bix Beiderbecke, Frankie Trumbauer, Eddie Duchin, and other white musicians who got their start in the 1920s’ hot jazz era. The first novel, Tangleweed (1943), followed a musician who got caught in the trap of booze and drugs. The second, The Wild Faun (1945), took the other direction and told about a talented soloist who sold out and became a big star playing non-threatening “sweet” music. Lou Carey, the protagonist of Little Boy Blues sticks with his passion, staying true to jazz, but also proves a first-class heel who cheats on the woman who loves him.
Willis, who was a musician himself, knew the lot of a touring player living out of a suitcase and riding the band bus from one town to another, and the kind of places where they performed:
You can walk tonight into the Union and find that nothing real has ever changed there. You can walk up to the bandstand with its tiny, scarred rail behind which the musicians sit secure, and after you have put your dime in the kitty, you can ask those boys to play a tune for you. They will understand. And one of them will stand up to the microphone while the pianist accompanies him, and in the dim light and the smoke the young man will ask if anyone in the house loves him, for you who had a dime but could not sing it, and everyone will understand. For a moment in the night, everyone will be silent, and each at his table, or in his booth, or with his instep hooked on the railing at the bar, will be asking, too, in his heart and in his own peculiar way, if anyone there loves him—the song said they did and somebody must.
He’s also the only writer on this list who would refer to “a Shangri-la, a never-never land, or more closely a kind of White House … the quarters of the fabulous Local 802 of the union to which they all belonged, the American Federation of Musicians.”
The only title on this list written by a woman. Ewing was a journalist who specialized in profiles of swing band leaders and innovative musicians such as Raymond Scott. This novel, similar to Willis’s followed the career of a trumpet player who gets tangled up in a messy marriage. From the book’s reviews, I regret that Ewing’s publishers didn’t encourage her to write a collection of profiles — ala Balliett and Lees — instead of a novel. This, from The Philadelphia Inquirer, for example:
When the author talks music, she talks first-hand, directly and without self-consciousness. Unhappily, she felt obliged to make a Book out of it, with a well-trammeled grade B plot containing a lady gangster and a lost week-end. The plot thickens but doesn’t jell; the dialogue is delivered on cue; and the music fades far, far away.
Dupree Blues is almost a novelization — except in this case, of a blues song rather than a movie:
Betty told Dupree
She wanted a diamond ring
And Dupree told Betty,
“I’ll give you most anything.”
Now he didn’t want Betty
To know he didn’t have a thing.
He killed that jewelry man,
Gave Betty that diamond ring.
Or as the Hartford Courant’s reviewer summed up this book, “When a man is addicted to liquor and hot music, he will not necessarily get into trouble. But add a beautiful blonde — and he is doomed.” Bonus points for featuring a trombone player, though.
Gilbert specialized in writing middle-brow, mid-best-seller-list novels that focused on particular settings: an architectural firm in Native Stone, Detroit automotives in American Chrome, a fancy Fifth Avenue apartment house in The Beautiful Life. The Hot and the Cool focused on a sextet of jazz musicians and their struggle to break through (perhaps hoping for something along the lines of the Brubeck Quartet’s splash). Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Balliett gave Gilbert credit for accuracy in his descriptions of the practical details of a musician’s life, but when it came to writing about music, he said Gilbert’s prose “reminded me of a man trying to carry on a rapid monologue underwater.”
Think of this as the Atlas Shrugged of jazz novels. Its hero, Virgil Jones, is sort of a cross between Art Tatum and Lennie Tristano — in other words, a piano god but, you know, intellectual? And at the core of his philosophy is … himself. He hands out cards reading “I AM THE LAST INDIVIDUAL IN THE WORLD” (though without an address, but I suppose the last individual in the world wouldn’t need one). This was Whitmore’s one and only novel. He soon found more profitable work as the lead writer for James Garner’s TV western Maverick.
When I wrote about this book back in 2009, I acknowledged that I’d have put it in the Justly Neglected if not for the fact that its lead character is a trombonist. As a wannabe sliphorn wrangler myself, I had to give it some bonus stars. Trombone players need love, too. However, the fact is that any book that takes almost 450 pages to cover two weeks in the life of a big band playing a gig at a Santa Monica amusement park had better justify that demand on its reader’s time by being awesome. And Sideman is not.
What I did appreciate — and what is rare among jazz novels — was Duke’s solid grasp of the difference between musical proficiency and the capacity to improvise. Duke’s hero Bennie Bell packs up his horn in the end because he comes to realize that he might be sharp enough to play the book and write innovative compositions, but he simply doesn’t have the chops to play a half-decent solo. And that — far more often than drugs — is what usually brings a would-be jazz musician’s career to an end.
Twenty-four years after The Great Swing, W. R. Burnett returned to take jazz head-on, though under a pseudonym for contractual reasons. In this case, he tells about the rise and break-up of a jazz trio — guitar, piano, and bass. He skirts around the challenge of trying to describe jazz by having a character intone, “Music is a hard thing to write about. Almost impossible, in fact: it’s just something you listen to — so I won’t bend your ears with too much talk about it.”
The trio’s bass player, Royal Mauch, sounds as if Burnett might have encountered the young Charle Mingus, then just making his name in L.A.:
This Royal — he broke everything up into pieces. The word ‘fracture’ was invented for him. I don’t know anything about Art — with a capital B, standing for Bushwa, to be polite about it, but if Royal had ever decided to paint, he would have painted those cockeyed looking things where the woman has two eyes on one side and looks like she was cut out of a marshmallow with a cleaver.
Baird was a former drummer who led a band called the Jesters of Rhythm that played around Pittsburgh in the 1930s and 1940s. After marrying and quickly fathering five children, however, he took a steadier job as a liquor store clerk and began writing pulp novels at night. This one is set in Pittsburgh and features the tragic romance between a white trumpet player and a Black singer. The result was not only unusual in its interracial theme but admirably concise. As Virginia Dale wrote in the New York Times, “You might think that jazz and love and double crossing, gambling and murder would be enough to crowd hundreds of pages, but here it’s all skimmed over in under 150.”
The only fictional outing of a one-time Broadway producer (the musical “Barnum”), this is easily the most obscure and hard-to-find title on this list. I couldn’t find a single review, aside from a brief synopsis in David Rife’s Jazz Fiction: A History and Comprehensive Reader’s Guide (2007). The New York Times’ only mention was in their “Books Published Today” item for 12 June 1956: “Novel about a musician.” So there you go.
An early offering by Ed McBain under his favorite pseudonym, Second Ending follows the example of The Man with the Golden Arm and focuses on the drugs more than the music. Though the main character is a trumpet man, the horn itself proves to be more important as something to hock than something to play. “A dossier on the disintegration phenomenon of addiction and the clawing torment of those who have been hooked,” according to Kirkus Reviews.
Most people familiar with the 1961 movie Paris Blues probably don’t realize it’s based on a book — or that Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s characters were invented to appeal to white audiences. In the novel, it’s the Sidney Poitier character, sax man Eddie Cook, who’s the protagonist. A long-time expat, Cook finds his reluctance to return to the racism he remembers at home tested when he falls in love with a black American woman visiting France on her summer holiday. Flender himself was a New York-based writer who usually worked on comic material with the likes of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner before the sale of his novel to producer Sam Shaw allowed him to pursue more serious subjects, such as his 1963 account of the evacuation of Danish Jews, Rescue in Denmark.
This first novel won the Avery Hopwood Prize for major fiction in 1957. A clarinet player returns from the Korean War and trades his licorice stick for a bari sax and his adolescent fixation with Dixieland for a fascination with cool jazz. Lea captured the contrast between the jazzman’s passion for music and their passive acceptance of the limbo to which drugs and uncertain income condemns them.
This was screenwriter Kanin’s first novel, and it shows. Switching back and forth between present and flashbacks, it follows three musicians from their start as a Dixieland combo through changing styles and ensembles, to their ultimate fortunes and misfortunes. Although Kanin went on to write a number of bestsellers, the best parts of this book are those about the music itself, infused with Kanin’s thirty years of listening as an avid fan.
Russell made his mark in jazz history as the owner of Hollywood’s Tempo Music Shop, one of the best places to find jazz recordings in L.A. after the war and as the founder of Dial Records, for which Charlie Parker recorded a hugely influential set of tracks after being released from the Camarillo State Mental Hospital. Red Travers, the trumpet player in The Sound, is largely based on Parker. Those familiar with Parker’s life can identify the real-life counterparts to most of the book’s characters and Ross later reused much of the material in his Parker biography Bird Lives!.
Simmons won a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for his first novel, Corner Boy, in 1957, but he struggled to get his second book written and then published. Unlike most of the books on this list, it not only features a black protagonist but burns with the anger of a Black writer poised at the birth of the Civil Rights movement. For Simmons, jazz is more than just music: “Jazz is the story of the Black men being messed around so bad by the white man that if he could he’d lay down and die from the blues but his soul won’t let him do it.”
Man Walking on Eggshells and Corner Boy were forgotten for over thirty years until Norton brought them back in the late 1990s as part of a short-lived series of “Old School Books” by neglected Black writers. Although Amazon says it still has copies on stock, it’s probably time for Norton (or someone else) to consider another revival.
Asher, the house piano player at San Francisco’s famous Hungry i nightclub, based this comic novel about a New England Conservatory-trained pianist who moves to the Bay Area and takes a job playing at a strip club very loosely on his own experiences. Asher followed this up with The Electric Cotillion (1970), which took a similar character in a similar situation forward a few years, with the initial excitement and novelty of the San Francisco scene having been replaced with the drag of endless nights playing “Happy Birthday” and “Hava Nagila” at union minimum rates, until an 18-year-old high school dropout arrives to shake things up. Light on the jazz content, both novels are mainly of interest today as snapshots of SF’s swinging Sixties culture. Asher did, however, earn a permanent place in anyone’s jazz library b co-writing Hampton Hawes’ autobiography Raise Up Off of Me.
I wrote about this, Lees’ first novel, back in 2010. The book focuses on Jack Royal, a kid from Chicago who evolves from student of classical piano to jazz musician to jazz singer to pop star to star of baguette Westerns and adventure movies. My assessment: “Lees himself later told an interviewer that he hated the book. Perhaps the kindest thing one can says about it is that it provides convincing evidence that Lees made the right decision when he abandoned fiction and concentrated instead on writing about what he knew and loved best: jazz, pop, and the remarkable musicians who play it.”
Gig is about a gig. One night’s work for Roy Ambrose, a lounge pianist at the Seacliff, a fashionable joint in San Francisco known for its scenic views and society clientele. Of all the books on this list, it’s probably the most accurate in its depiction of the life of a working musician as seen through his own eyes. Roy has to deal with drunks, snobs, boors, groupies, clumsy waiters, and a rude owner, but takes it all with the perspective of someone who’ll deal with all of it all over again the next weekend:
I do not program people’s lives. I’m only a piano player. I long ago decided public arguments are silly, and I don’t participate. They solve nothing. No one’s opinions are changed. People argue because they’re good at it. I’ve learned I’m a flop at it. So I keep out of them and keep my distance from those who indulge in argument.
Roy is a true cool blue kind of cat:
Why continue this conspiracy of performers to keep the audience in its place? It’s the very thing that drives musicians to drink, to drugs, to insanity, this egomaniac reluctance to let someone else’s noises mix with their own. Why not let everybody into the act?
“As long,” he hastens to add, “as I continue to be in charge.”
I should mention that several fine novels in this genre from the 1960s have been reissued and are now available in print or eBook editions, including John Clellon Holmes’s The Horn, John Williams’s Night Song and Clifford’s Blues, and Mary Weik’s The Jazz Man, a children’s book.
Loneliest Girl in the World was the first novel in history about losing something in your computer. Which was a neat trick given that personal computers wouldn’t even have a name, let alone be commonplace, for another thirty-some years.
The computer in this case isn’t really a computer. Rather, it’s a large audio recording, transcription, and storage device using stainless steel wire as its medium, combined with some kind of indexed reference system controlled by a dial. It’s intended to store everything from business meetings, musical performances, and radio shows to novelties called “audiobooks.” He envisions it as part of a continental network,
… offering instantaneous information to anyone, on any subject, but also a general repository for all the data a businessman might need in the daily conduct of his affairs. His correspondence, his estimates, inventories, invoices, receipts, bills paid and due, all memoranda, everything he now committed to paper and placed in his cumbersome and bulky individual files, not recoverable a good part of the time, could go on deposit with us, on tape or wire, quickly available at all times.
Its inventor, Adrian Vaughn, keeps his most advanced model in his Manhattan penthouse apartment, having recently devised a voice-activated mechanism and some kind of processor that allows recordings to be requested and played on demand. Known as “Mikki,” this system becomes the focus of intrigue after Vaughn and his son Oliver fall to their deaths through an accident involving keys and an open penthouse window.
“The Loneliest Girl in the World” is the name the tabloids give Vaughn’s daughter Ellen when she inherits the penthouse apartment. Despite her apparent wealth, her situation is closer to that of Prometheus, staked to a mountain peak so birds of prey can attack and eat his liver. When she returns after the funeral, in fact, she finds two men in Mikki’s room. “We think there’s a recording of an oral agreement your father made between Vaughn Electronics and another company about an exchange of rights for mass production and sale,” they tell her.
What they don’t say is that other things are hidden there, too, such as the disposition of most of Adrian Vaughn’s fortune. To avoid going bankrupt and being tossed onto the street, Ellen must find answers: “There is a secret here somewhere in this storehouse of living sound, this pool of memory.” The problem is that the system contains over 463,000 hours of recordings or enough to take 50 years to work through. And, as she quickly figures out, with her father, brother, and others using Mikki, the chances of something being misfiled increase dramatically: “Between the lot of us, everyone using the collection for a different purpose, anything not in the right place can be written off as lost forever.”
Anyone who shares a home computer is familiar with this.
Fearing was neither Luddite nor doomster when it came to technology. He’s not particularly interested in the implications of a system like Mikki. As he once admitted, movie scenes “depicting a hell of a lot of fantastic machinery as built and operated by the science of the future, laboratory thunderbolts leaping from a positive steel electrode to a negative Wassermann have always found me a ready sucker.” He’s impressed by Mikki’s inherent superiority to the fallible humans it serves:
I never forget. Unlike you, I have no limit of life, my memory is total and accurate, this thread of thought never wanders with the weakness of age, and I am always able to receive the new and strange, nor am I intrusive, stubborn. I do not evade issues, or lie. I do not know how to lie.
But if Loneliest Girl in the World isn’t science fiction, neither is it much in the way of suspense. In Fearing’s previous novel and the one for which he’s remembered, The Big Clock, the tension increases with each page as time and space run out for its hero, a man falsely accused of murder. Here, however, as Ralph Partridge aptly put it in his New Statesman review, Fearing “duly keeps the reader gasping for the first half of the book … and then — after halfway, the excitement fizzles out, the forceful characters go dim, the machine obligingly croaks out the most boring possible answers to the questions, and the book drops from listless fingers.” “A crushing disappointment,” Partridge concluded, adding, “You have been warned.”
The Sound of Murder, Mercury Mystery No. 173 (1953).
Even John Brooks, The New York Times’ reviewer, was pressed to have many good things to say about Loneliest Girl after warming up his enthusiasm for its predecessor. Brooks praised the book’s “readability, humor, sound characterization and firm but understated dramatic significance,” whatever that last phrase means. The book was reissued in magazine form as The Sound of Murder in the Mercury Mystery series two years later, but it’s been forgotten ever since. And, aside from its value as footnote material, it probably deserves this fate.
Loneliest Girl in the World, by Kenneth Fearing
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951
If you’re a theater lover like me, All Star Cast is the next best thing to the thrill of seeing a live performance. That’s because it’s about a live theater performance as experienced by both actors and audience.
Its premise is simple: a young theater critic, David Winters, arrives at the Empress Theatre in a taxi with a fellow critic, O’Hara. They’re there to attend the premier of a new play, The Ace of Wands, by the veteran playwright William Renishaw. And over the course of the next 270-some pages, Naomi Royde-Smith takes us through that experience.
We watch the audience dribble in, take their seats, converse with each other, anticipating the curtain’s rise. We follow the action on stage through three acts, hear the dialogue, watch the actors come and go, observe the sets and the use of props, feel the tension grow as it comes to seem as if the wrong person is going to be sent up for murder, sense the tragic relief as the right person arrives at the decision to admit guilt. And then, after the cast takes their bows, we join the slow stream climbing the stairs to the lobby, sharing reflections on the performance.
Fin.
When All Star Cast was first published, more than a few reviewers expressed surprise that no one had ever come up with the idea before. It’s not the same thing as reading a script. Royde-Smith includes all, or virtually all, the dialogue, but instead of stage instructions to the director and cast, she describes the action as seen by the audience — in particularly, by David Winters, who, though new to the job of critic, is an experienced and keen-eyed theater-goer.
An action, for example, as simple as a character picking up a small table lamp and placing it near another character is more than it seems:
“Queer bit of business with the lamp,” whispered the little man, as Rawlinson left the stage, “I wonder what it has been done for.”
“I wonder,” murmured David, not attempting to express his own recognition of the change in lighting effected by this simple and obvious gesture. The pillar of white light between the still unclosed doors in the centre of the background now showed faint and grey like the plinth of some vague funereal monument. The light from the shaded lamp on the ground made a round pool on the rug by the chesterfield, and threw a diffused circular glow upwards, changing the shadows of the room.
Is this something in the script or something the director has added? Something incidental or intentional?
Well of course, in a good performance, as this one seems to be, nothing is incidental, and a few pages later, we see that the lamp allows the murderer — and the audience — to see a crucial prop: a tarot card, the Ace of Wands. The Ace of Wands shows a hand holding a staff emerging from a cloud. Right-side up, it signals promise, a new opportunity; reversed, it warns of misfortune to come. Which way the card is read, and when and to whom the card appears, becomes instrumental to the plot twists that follow the murder in Act One.
We, like the audience, are surprised that the victim is the difficult Russian wife, played by Vera Paley, “famous for wearing to-day what every fashionable woman would be trying to wear next week.” It is she who enjoys the play’s star entrance:
Critics had been known to complain that, whether she played Rosalind or the Second Mrs. Tanqueray, she was never anyone but Vera Paley; but the salvo of applause with which she was greeted from the stalls as well as from the more discriminating parts of the house showed that she held a wide public under some kind of spell. She paused, holding the door open with her left hand, outstretched at full arm’s length behind her, so that the player with whom she was talking as she entered was hidden from the audience. Without bowing or losing her pose, she smiled as the applause increased in volume. She let the play cease while she, as Vera Paley, took her reception.
Within the next twenty minutes, she will be lying dead on stage, an antique Indian dagger through her heart.
“But darling,” David overhears a woman saying as the audience files toward the bar at the interval,
“Vera Paley can’t be killed in the first scene of Act I. She’s the leading lady.”
“Oh! So you think she’ll recover — or come back as a ghost and haunt them all?”
“Recover — ofcourse. Vera’d never do any highbrow spookery stuff. She’ll be ill in the most marvellous négligé — and then there’ll be a perfectly terrific love scene…”
Instead, as David learns from another critic at the next interval, Vera Paley is paying a favor to the producer and will be gone by the end of the first week to start rehearsals for a showpiece of her own.
This is just what makes All Star Cast so fun. You get to experience not just the play but all the trappings and all the threads that come together to weave a unique evening at the theater.
Ernest Milton and Naomi Royde-Smith.
Naomi Royde-Smith knew her subject from all angles. She’d been a theater critic herself through much of the 1920s and had written several plays that were produced in London’s West End. Her husband, Ernest Milton, was an actor, a stalwart of the Old Vic’s company for over twenty years. And, as she conveys so effectively in her account of The Ace of Wands’s opening night, she understood just how complex were the sensations and interactions of a night at the theater:
It was difficult enough to form an opinion on a play, seen for the first time, that would not cry to be revised or restated when once you saw your own words in print. You could go back, re-read, check, verify when reviewing a book: but a play acted itself without repeating any passage, noteworthy or obscure, and while it told its tale, demanded attention on three counts. Its appeal was too complicated. You were bound to miss some point, while under the impression made by another, in a scene which you had to see, to watch and to hear in one and the same unrelenting minute. You had to pass judgment on playwright, players, scenic artist and producer at one sitting, while their combined work was set in movement before your eyes and made its continuous appeal to your ears as well.
“How flat and stale these journalistic phrases were in comparison with the state of mind in which the play had actually left him!” David Winters despairs. And it’s a tribute to Naomi Royde-Smith’s skill that All Star Cast succeeds so well in putting us into that state of mind — and longing for the chance to return to a theater ourselves.
All Star Cast is fairly rare, but luckily it’s available online from the Internet Archive: Link.
All Star Cast, by Naomi Royde-Smith
London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1936
Never assign a young man to review an old woman’s book. If only the book editor of the New York Times had heeded this advice when he assigned James Childs to review Isabel Bolton’s novel The Whirligig of Time. At the time the book was published, Bolton was 87, Childs at least 50 years younger. He had little patience for Bolton’s subtle and deliberate approach: “[T]here is so much treacle running throughout these pages”; “[W]hat should be a novel of some realism is transmogrified into a fantasy of life without logic or meaning, and held together only by a Victorian prissiness”; Bolton “creates characters who possess much sap and little dimension” and “resolves the plot in such a fashion as to lead the reader to suspect that the author herself was beginning to tire of the whole project.”
Childs’s review torpedoed the good ship Whirligig. The book received few other reviews and quickly disappeared. When Bolton died a few years later at the age of 92, none of her books were in print. In the late 1990s, the Steerforth Press (and Virago in the UK) reissued her first three novels — Do I Wake or Sleep, The Christmas Tree, and Many Mansions (which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1952) — as New York Mosaic, with an introduction by Doris Grumbach (who was herself 80 at the time). Grumbach opened with an adage that could serve as this site’s motto: “It is one of the accepted truths of the publishing world that many good books appear, are critically praised but attract few readers, fall between the cracks of their time, and are never heard of again.” Grumbach quoted Tobias Schneebaum, a friend in Bolton’s later years: she was “imperious, sharp-tongued, demanding, witty, often a delightful conversationalist, and always difficult.”
Bolton’s style is often compared to Henry James. Her sentences are often long and complex, probing their subjects from multiple angles. Though she was 40 years James’s junior, their worlds were not so far apart. They both lived among the wealthy and worldly, where appearances mattered and yet could be so deceptive to the untrained eye. Manners and words were the basic tools of its defense, and in experienced hands could also be used for surgically precise and deadly offense.
The Whirligig of Time is an artefact from this world. Its two primary characters, Blanche Willoughby and David Hare, were raised in it and now, meeting again in their eighties after decades of separation, are its survivors, adrift in the Atomic age. They met as children in another century and another New York, a New York where their parents and grandparents lived in elegant brownstones and maintained private parks to keep out the riffraff and the Irish.
It was in one of these parks that the principal cast of The Whirligig of Time comes together for the first time. Blanche and her sister Lily, orphans, meet David as he plays under the watch of his mother Laura. “Willoughby, Willoughby,” Laura muses when the two girls are introduced. “I think you’re David’s second or third or fourth cousin, several times removed perhaps.”
They also meet Olivia Wildering, a girl of precocious self-confidence who, in the course of that afternoon, faces down a bull. The bull, left to graze in a corner of the park by one of its subscribers (again, it was a different New York), gets a notion to charge the children at play, only to be stopped by the force of Olivia’s outrage at his sheer presumption. The children, and David most of all, leave the scene in awe of Olivia’s willpower.
But the brief rush of Mr. Pickering’s bull is the only action in this book. Everything else happens indirectly and on the margins. In fact, most of the book takes place in flashbacks over the course of the two days before David and Blanche finally meet again. David arrives at Blanche’s doorstep on page 187; the book ends four pages later.
But these are two people with a rich past in common:
The past engulfed them — vibrations of the nerves connecting memory with memory, instantaneous transport from childhood to youth to maturity; they seemed to be moving together from place to place, from scene to scene, from year to year. Places, rooms wherein momentous conversations had been exchanged, faces of the dead reanimated by thoughts of them, moments, the appearance and disappearance of familiar presences, sounds, fragrances.
Blanche and David may be survivors, but neither is unscarred. Blanche fell under the spell of David’s beautiful mother Laura and came to act as sort of an emotional nursemaid after she realizes — as, apparently, no one else in their circle does — that Laura has refused the great love of her life. Laura meets a passionate and handsome Frenchman when married, a mother, and bound tight by conventions. She tells the man their love must remain unrequited. David, in turn, becomes bound to Olivia, drawn like a magnet by the force of her personality. The two marry in a “wedding of the season” and head off to begin their marital bliss.
At which point David quickly realizes “the sad fact that he had married an incorrigible bore.” To Olivia, David is merely an appendage. A necessary appendage in the eyes of their society, but one of little intrinsic value. He annoyingly insists on taking her around Europe to look at works of art he loves and which she finds, without exception, in bad taste. As their honeymoon continues, David finds himself having “to endure her conversation as one might listen to the ceaseless buzzing of a fly on a faultless summer afternoon.” She, in turn, longs to return to New York so she can organize the affairs that will keep her at the center of society’s attention.
Their marriage falls into a uncomfortable sort of limbo. And then David finds himself in a situation much like that his mother: madly in love with someone not his spouse. In his case, however, he does the disrespectable thing:
To remember his madness was in a measure now to recover it again. Helen Brooks — his need to see her, to talk with her, had devoured him. He had been quite ready to shatter his domestic life, to forfeit all responsibility for his child, to deal his mother the severest sorrow of her life, to ruin his position in society, to throw all chances for a reputable career to the winds on the dubious chance of winning her love.
Bolton shared Henry James’s view that there are no happy endings in this life. The shared memories that bring Blanche and David together after decades are not fond. The world they had known as children was “so safe and so parochial.” Their early adult lives, however, were marked by disappointments and failures, and as they grew older, they saw themselves “in an age that we had made and were unprepared to meet.” And looking ahead, the sense that they were moving, with the rest of the world, “toward some immense, annihilating, and unimaginable catastrophe.”
Bolton does not view the world of her youth nostalgically: both Blanche and David recall its pains, slights, and injustices. But neither does she shy away from the flaws of the New York of glass, steel, and Civil Defense shelters. As Tess Lewis wrote in Hudson Review, “She wrote novels of manners when the manners she had known had already disintegrated. Her characters, adrift in an uncertain world, know better than to glorify the past, but cannot help longing for the lost security of their often unhappy childhoods.” The Whirligig of Time is an elegaic novel of quiet, delicate, and deeply moving power. But it’s not a young man’s novel.
Bolton herself was a Blanche Willoughby with no David to share her sadness. Bolton was a pseudonym that Mary Britton Miller chose after her first novel In the Days of Thy Youth (1943) failed to sell or gain critical attention. Born an identical twin into the family of a prosperous New York lawyer, she and her four siblings were orphaned when both her parents died of pneumonia when she was four. Ten years later, she watched her twin sister Grace drown as they swam together in Long Island Sound. Her elder brother committed suicide in 1916. By the time Bolton achieved some success as a novelist with Do I Wake or Sleep, she was the only surviving member of her family. Having never married, she had lost all her friends from youth by the time she undertook to write The Whirligig of Time. By then, she had learned things about disappointment and endurance that were still in her New York Times reviewer’s future.
The Whirlgig of Time, by Isabel Bolton (pseudonym of Mary Britton Miller)
New York: Crown Publishers, 1971
Berlin, 1932. Ernst von Ufermann, a banker, is at Tempelhof Airport, about to board a plane to Frankfurt in a last-ditch attempt to bail out his failing firm. A man bumps into him, then disappears into the crowd. When von Ufermann reaches his gate, he finds his ticket, his passport, his wallet are gone.
At that point, most people would contact the police, try to arrange for replacements, contact the bank in Frankfurt. But von Ufermann surrenders to fate. “Oh, well! I don’t suppose old Hebenwerth would have given in anyway!” he shrugs, and hails a cab to take him back into the city. The theft has presented him with an opportunity to step away from the pressures of money, work, family, social status, the chaotic German economy. A hiatus, a moment of suspension:
Ufermann was almost ashamed of himself, but he could not help it. He was actually delighted at not having flown to Frankfurt. Slowly he paced a few steps. Now he had plenty of time at his disposal, the whole morning belonged to him and not to the business. No matter how many people rang him at the office, sorry he wasn’t there, he was away. No need to inquire about Irmgard’s health or dictate any letters, nor would he see the gloomy face of old Boss, who knew everything, who knew things that only a confidential clerk could know and could be trusted to keep his mouth shut. No need to consider when and where to tell Gierke to pick him up. He was simply going for a walk, just like anybody else. The sun shone, it was actually bright and warm.
And then the plane von Ufermann was supposed to be on crashes.
In No Right to Live, the novelist offers her protagonist a chance to escape from his life. A bit like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, Ernst von Ufermann gets a chance to see what the world looks like without him. For his widow and business partner, the cloud has a silver lining: a life insurance policy worth millions of marks, enough to bail out the firm and leave the grieving wife even wealthier than before.
With only the spare change in his pockets, however, von Ufermann soon finds himself grappling with the practical matter of survival. His mistress, a small-time actress, put him up for a night or two, then introduces him to a petty criminal who arranges for von Ufermann to travel to Vienna, complete with a borrowed passport and a new identity of Edgar von Schmitt, to deliver a mysterious packet to contacts there.
In Vienna, “Herr von Schmitt” finds he’s moved from relying on the goodwill of crooks to navigating the complex loyalties of a group of young National Socialist fanatics:
“Death to the Jews.” He was no Jew, he wasn’t even interested, he had never bothered about such things. Death! An ugly word. Death. Perhaps it really did mean something to him. In the street they were now singing Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles. Did that concern him? Death, death.
He also realizes that every day he continues to allow the lie of Ernst von Ufermann’s death to play out he implicates himself ever more deeply in a case of insurance fraud. What he’d imagined at first as a momentary break from the demands of his life proves to be a descent into an ever more powerful vortex of chaos. And when he does eventually manages to make his way back to Berlin, he learns that, unlike George Bailey, everyone seems quite a bit happier without him.
His only respite are the moments when he can become completely anonymous:
Who was the man in the leather jacket leaning against the dirty corridor-window with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth? Did no one know him? No, no one knew him. He gazed out at the black fields, the black woods flying past in the white and wintry air. The roofs of humble cottages stood out black and the pine-trees, stark and bare, were black too. The sound of voices came from the compartment. They scarcely noticed when he left the hot, stifling atmosphere in which they sat. They showed no surprise at his not taking off his shoes at night or propping himself up against his neighbour and snoring with half open mouth as they did. They never thought of saying “sorry” or “excuse me.” It was more by luck than anything else that they did not drop their greasy sandwich-paper on his lap. No, no one knew him.
No Right to Live illustrates the problem with the fantasy of escaping from a life you find unbearable. First, there’s no guarantee that the new life you devise is any better than the first one. And second, if you do then try to step back into the life you left behind, it’s like trying to eat off a plate that’s been shattered and pieced back together. These stories never end well.
Wishart advertisement for No Right to Live
When it was published by Wishart in England in 1934, No Right to Live was almost guaranteed to be forgotten. Wishart’s ad claimed the book had been banned by the Nazis, but in reality, the German and Austrian publishers knew well enough not to bother even trying to get it passed the Party censors. Even Wishart was concerned not to aggravate the German authorities and their sympathizers in England by pressing the book’s anti-Nazi content too far and chose not only to delete certain passages from Gwenda David’s translations but to insert a few things of their own.
Even without comparing No Right to Live with its original German text, it’s not hard to see that something was lost, if not in translation, then at least in publication. There are several points at which the narrative jerks forward somewhat unexpectedly, almost as if pages are missing. It’s not surprising, then, that there were almost no reviews of No Right to Live in the English press.
By the time No Right to Live appeared, its author had herself escaped from her old life and taken on an assumed name. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna in 1895, Maria Lazar grew up among the elite of Austrian culture alongside Robert Musil and Stefan Zweig. Oskar Kokoschka painted her posed with a parrot in his 1916 Dame mit Papagei. Thomas Mann dismissed her first novel Die Vergiftung (The Poisoning) for its Penetranter Weibsgeruch (“penetrating woman smell”).
In 1923, Lazar married a Swedish journalist, Friedrich Strindberg, which gave her Swedish citizenship and the means to later flee her native country safely. The couple separated and in 1933, living in Berlin and uncomfortable with the prospect of living under Hitler’s regime, she accepted an invitation from the Danish novelist Karin Michaëlis to spend the summer at her home on the island of Thurø, where they were soon joined by Bertolt Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel. Lazar never returned to Austria.
She adopted the pseudonym of Esther Grenen, which she thought sounded more Nordic, and Lazar and her daughter Judith later moved to Stockholm in 1939. She died there in 1948, having committed suicide after being diagnosed with a terminal case of cancer.
German and Dutch editions: Leben Verboten! from Das Vergessene Buch and Leven Verboden! from Van Maaskunt Haun
The original German text of the novel did not appear until 2020. A young Austrian and fan of neglected books, Albert C. Eibl, had published Lazar’s first and last novels, Die Vergiftung and Die Eingeborenen von Maria Blut (The Natives of Maria Blood) through his one-man publishing house Das Vergessene Buch (The Forgotten Book). He was able to obtain Lazar’s typescript from the estate of Lazar’s daughter Judith and published the book, accompanied by a commentary by Prof. Johann Sonnleitner of the University of Vienna, in March 2020.
It is amazing with what clairvoyance and sharpness Maria Lazar describes the rise of National Socialism at the beginning of the thirties. The novel moves on rapidly, sometimes even has comical sides and is still oppressive in the description of the inhuman, ideologically cruel underpinned plans of National Socialism. One follows this — officially dead — Ernst von Ufermann through the days and weeks, as the political climate heats up threateningly. The book, which is a crime story, a psychological study and a political thriller at the same time, plays with the literary means of confusion, double life and more or less big rip-offs and impresses with quick scene changes and striking dialogues across all levels.
According to WorldCat.org, there are just nine copies of No Right to Live available in libraries worldwide. I obtained a PDF of the book courtesy of Meta Gemert, a Dutch writer, translator, and publisher, who will be releasing a Dutch edition, Leven Verboden! based on the original German manuscript from her Van Maaskant Haun Publishers in October 2021. Meta tells me that she’s trying to convince NYRB Classics to contract a new English translation of Leben Verboten!. If she does, it would follow the path of Gabrielle Tergit’s Effingers, which was a best-seller when it was reissued in Germany, in Dutch by Van Maaskant Haun as De Effingers in March 2020, and is rumored to be slated for publication by NYRB Classics in 2023. In the meantime, however, if you’re interested in reading No Right to Live in PDF, despite its shortcomings, drop me an email at [email protected].
No Right to Live, by Esther Grenen (pseudonym of Maria Lazar)
London: Wishart & Co., 1934
This is a story about two novels. When Mary Lee Settle published Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday in 1964, she wasn’t happy with the reviews or how her publisher handled the book. Settle saw the book as part — the conclusion, in fact — of a larger series she’d begun with O Beulah Land (1956) and Know Nothing (1960), which ultimately became known as the “Beulah Land Quintet.”
Her plan was to trace the story of a family not unlike her own and those she grew up with: landed white people in West Virginia who could trace their lines from religious and political dissidents who left England for America in the 1600s, through the pioneers who drove their wagons into the hills of Appalachia and what would become West Virginia, who fought (on both sides) in the Civil War, who started the coal mines and fought in the battles between the miners and the owners (again, on both sides) in the early 20th century, and who saw the introduction of strip mining.
In 1964, an outside might have thought that this was a story that ended on a high note, at least for the owners and their descendents. Strip mining was pulling coal from the earth faster than any lot of troublesome miners could and the money that came in could be spent at exclusive country clubs, resorts like The Greenbrier, and shopping trips to New York and Europe.
Mary Lee Settle, circa 1960.
But Mary Lee Settle was no outsider, and she must have had the sense that there was going to be a price to pay for raping this land. She picked up on clues that are sprinkled throughout Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday. And so, almost twenty years later, after writing the beginning of the story (Prisons (1973)) and the penultimate chapter (The Scapegoat (1980), about the violence between the miners and the owners around 1912), she returned to update her ending with The Killing Ground (1982).
Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday appears relatively intact as the middle section (“Before the Revolution, 1960”) of The Killing Ground, which begins in 1978 and ends two years later. So, it can be read as a work in progress or a fragment. Personally, I think neither of those interpretations is correct. Fight Night and The Killing Ground tell fundamentally different stories. The Killing Ground is truly the culmination of the Beulah Land quintet, which is a larger story, a story about people and generations and their land. Fight Night, on the other hand, is a snapshot in time, a story about individuals, set over the course of little more than a weekend. And as a result, I think, a better and tighter book.
The book opens with a late night drunken phone call from Johnny McKarkle, the wealthy but aimless son of a family with coal money, to his sister Hannah in New York City. Johnny is in a phone booth in Canona, their home town in West Virginia. It’s Saturday night, “the night for a man to fight free to the surface of his life, not caring how he did it or how much hate he dragged up and let fly.” Johnny wants to confide in Hannah about his problems — marriage, meaningless job, unlistening parents — and to coax Hannah down to cut loose with him. The next call Hannah gets, a few hours later, brings the news that Johnny is dying, his head having been bashed in while he was sobering up in the town’s drunk tank.
Johnny is clearly painted as a tragic figure and Hannah isn’t much better off. But at least she’s had the sense to leave town, and when she gets off her flight from New York the next morning, her senses are alert for the signs of getting pulled back. Friends stop by her parents’ place — “set sentinel on the hill above Canona” — to express concern on their way home from church, but she knows they’re just looking for fuel for the gossip mill:
They would take whatever words I stammered out, piece an “inside” story together, their unkissed mouths breathing the smell of cigarettes and coffee into their telephones, making little secretive sounds to each other. I remembered how small termite mandibles were, and how, if you lean close and pinpoint attention, you can hear them, how their combined tenacity can crush a building. These women were moving close to trouble, chewing at it because they had, that week, none of their own to feed the others with.
These are the three best-written sentences I’ve come across in a long time. Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday is full of them. There are dry pages and a few ill-crafted passages in this book, but it’s worth reading just for sentences that cut to the bone like a switchblade in the hands of a killer with a swift and sure mastery of her weapon. Hannah on her father, a man who’s spent his adult life in the shadow of a domineering wife: “How could I ‘go easy’ with my father — a man whom I had never seen separately, as you see, in a split second of love or even horror, in all my life? Christ, I knew a two-day lover better than I knew my father.” On her mother, putting herself together after the shock of learning of Johnny’s death: “She began to take her own shape, hiding the woman again behind the lady.” Or Johnny’s relationship with Hannah: “Usually he loved me as you live in spite of.” Or the atmosphere of the Greenbrier (called Egeria Springs in the book): “Egeria’s smell, from the gate on into the rooms, a smell compounded of expensive secluded mountain air, hand-ironed linen, polish, huge, glossy, well-fed plants, and thick notepaper, I recognized later wherever I smelled it, and it brought me back to Egeria Springs. It was the clean, crisp new smell of protected American money.”
At times, Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday made me wonder if Balzac had been reincarnated as a woman from Charleston, West Virginia, for Settle deals with the relationship between families and money in a way few American writers — and even fewer of Settle’s generation — equalled. What she knew better than any of her characters was that families and money are always moving together in one of two directions, up or down. There is no stasis.
Johnny’s head is bashed in by one of his distant cousins, a hard scrabble farmer still trying to hold on to a poor patch of hill farm. Jake Catlett is from the unlucky line that got stuck with the rocky hillsides when the McKarkles got the rich bottom land along the river. A few decades of coal-mining wages wasn’t even to prevent the Catletts’ slow slide into deeper and deeper poverty.
But neither are the McKarkles secure in their grand house above Canona. Coal mining is starting its decline. Owners who failed to make the switch to strip-mining have already seen their fortunes evaporate:
Money disaster had a phrase: You ran through with every last thing. I could see people fleeing down River Street, running through it, shoveling money, until they threw the last thing, the last dollar, and having at last committed the unpardonable sin, they were stripped as if they had shed their clothes, left naked, turned away from, cut from the minds, except in moral stories or in late-night memories.
In the case of the McKarkles, this disaster is lurking somewhere in the future. Having lost his illusions during the war, Johnny — the heir to the McKarkle fortune, such as it is — has done nothing to avert this: “Without land to till or people to care for, Johnny had been caught in a parody where the land had shrunk to a genteel suburban house he wasn’t even needed to work for.” And with his death, that fate becomes certain.
The coming money disaster is paralleled by the disaster becoming evident in the toll that coal has taken on the landscape. That awareness is just setting in: “The river was too dirty with chemical and coal waste for many fish to survive in it. But they kept on trying.” As Settle sees it, however, in a perspective that at the time was just beginning to be expressed, the land was going to be the ultimate victim:
We had cut down its trees, and the water had poured down its naked gulleys and swept itself clean. We had stabbed too hard, and in those places it had shrunk back baring its rock teeth. Arrogance and lack of care toward its riches had grown into arrogance and lack of care for each other. The crash of the grabber at the coal face had exploited, grabbed, as we had grabbed. We had left a residue of carelessness, and the hatred that grew in it had made a fist.
When Settle returned to Canona and fit the small story of Johnny McKarkle into the fabric of the “Beulah Land” series when she incorporated Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday into The Killing Ground, the consequences of coal mining on both land and people had become clear. The two books, however, take very different views on their subject. In The Killing Ground, we see the decline of Canona and the McKarkles as if through a telescope, in the larger context of history. In Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday, we see in small dimensions: one weekend, one family, one death. The larger context of history is only the background to Hannah McKarkle’s close observation. And when the writer is a cold-blooded and skilled knife fighter like Settle, used to feeling her victim’s breath as the blade goes in, the larger context of history doesn’t stand a chance.
Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday, by Mary Lee Settle
New York: The Viking Press, 1964
When you reach the end of Mundome, you may think you’ve misunderstood it completely and need to go back and read it again. That’s not only the sign of a great book about insanity but exactly what A. G. Mojtabai had in mind.
Mundome is about Richard, a sane, sober, faithful brother, and Meg, his sister trapped in some form of madness that leaves her in a near-catatonic state. Released after twelve years in an institution, Meg is now living with Richard. Each day, he struggles to pull Meg out of her fugue. He sits her at their dinner table despite the fact that her hands are bunched into fists so tightly that she cannot even hold a fork, let alone bring it to her mouth. He tries to engage her in conversation about the events of his day even though she stares ahead blankly. He sits Meg in their living room as if the two of them were an ordinary couple reading quietly after dinner, though they’re clearly not:
That evening Meg sat in the green armchair, the lamplight flaking round her shoulders. On her lap I placed the latest copy of Life magazine, open. On the page facing the story of interest was a luscious lobster dinner, a mayonnaise advertisement, complete with potato salad and pickle. Meg stared at the ad with some fixity, pursing her lips and raising the page closer to her eyes. Then she began to help herself, diving into the salad, tearing it to bits and stuffing her mouth with it. Clacking, chewing, coughing and spitting followed. I forced my hand into her mouth and cleared it, then ripped the magazine from her hands.
To distract himself from Meg’s stony isolation, Richard takes up writing, but he never gets past the beginning of stories that seem really to be about himself: “I am living at the bottom of a well. It is really very comfortable here and I see no point in moving.”
His job is another daily battle with insanity. Richard is an archivist at a city library. The library itself is stuck in limbo:
The acquisitions department continues to select books, to fill in the myriad order blanks, white, pink, green and yellow, to make out the invoices; they are as busy as spiders spinning, but the orders are never sent, the invoices are only filed away.
“This place is a warehouse, cold storage,” one of Richard’s colleagues tells him. “No action, nothing moves. It’s dead. Unreal.” Patrons die as they sit looking emptily at books and are only discovered at closing time. Answering reference desk requests, Richard finds himself going down endless threads of cross-references:
… see Marianna, an Idyll. Formed by an English Hand.
Marianna: see An English Hand.
An English Hand: see An Hue and Cry after the Funda mental Rights and Duties of Englishmen.
An Hue and Cry: see Hymn to Wealth, a Satyr.
Hymn to Wealth: see….
He chronicles the histories of the librarians before him who sat at the desk he now occupies: “Ada Nog. December 1958-May 1959…. After an uneventful day at work, Miss Nog put on her wrap, said goodnight, went home and put her head in the oven. No explanation offered or sought.”
Yet despite this atmosphere of ennui, the library staff is taut with anxiety at the rumor of a visit from an efficiency expert, a ruthless streamliner who will cut through their ranks like a man with a scythe.
All this is driving Richard to his own form of breakdown. One night, as he looks at himself in the mirror, he makes hopeless attempts to restore his connection with his emotions: “I spent the better part of an hour making faces at myself, practicing love, hatred, anger, fear, envy, lust, grief, feeling none of them but giving a careful rendition just the same.” Meg’s psychiatrist becomes concerned with Richard’s mental state, hints at the possible need for hospitalization.
All along, your heart goes out to Richard. He’s a decent, serious individual fighting to overcome powerful forces of madness and chaos.
Or is he?
As one account of Mundome puts it, “The novel has two settings — inner and outer — which fuse at the end, and only one main character, or perhaps two main characters who fuse at the end.” Are Richard and Meg, in fact, two sides of the same person? Mojtabai later said that she meant all along to leave the reader in doubt, yet until the last few pages, we accept the explanation that most fits with our sense of what’s normal. Her design becomes more obvious when we know how Mojtabai approached writing her novels: “I work backwards from the ending,” she told an interviewer. “I usually begin with a haunting final image — a recognition scene — and proceed by unpacking the implications of that image as I go.”
Mojtabai came up with her title by fusing together two words from a Latin saying: In hoc mundo me extra me nihil agere posse, which she translated as “In this world I can affect nothing outside myself.” As she notes in an introductory comment, “Mundome is a deliberately ungrammatical construction, a forced juxtaposition of words that cannot fuse without some connective of action or relation.” Which is not unlike what she does with Richard and Meg, two characters who appear polar opposites until Mojtabai forces us to see the possibility that they might actually be the same person.
The Washington Post’s reviewer Jonathan Yardley, who called Mundome one of the best novels of 1974, described the book as “an intelligent whodunit,” but admitted that was a misleading label: “One is left in the end not with the answer to whodunit, but with a complex of questions that linger in the mind.” Even if some reviewers were irritated at the book’s lingering ambiguity, most saw Mundome as an exceptionally well-constructed and written first novel. Margaret Atwood called it “an extraordinarily pure novel, pure as the contained landscapes inside glass paperweights in which the snow falls endlessly on minute figures, preserved from dust and decay by the absence of air.” Time’s reviewer said the book “erupts with dramatic clues that flare backward and forward through the narrative like thin, ignited trains of gunpowder,” and the Antioch Review called it “The most remarkable first novel published in America during the past several years.” (Mojtabai was, for the record, an Antioch alumna.)
A. G. Mojtabai, 1976.
Mojtabai drew inspiration for the novel from two sources. While an undergraduate at Antioch, she worked one summer as an intern at the Chestnut Lodge Sanatarium in Rockville, Maryland. There, she dealt with a woman diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia who’d been a patient at the clinic for over twelve years. Mojtabai found her sense of the woman transformed over the weeks of dealing with her. Shocked by her condition, she then began to think her more sane than the clinic’s staff, capable of moments of striking clarity. But later, Mojtabai came to distrust her own impressions. “Again and again,” she later wrote, “I had to confront the fact that my attempt to understand her condition was a devious way of probing my own condition. When I left the job, I was in a very shaky state and my patient was no better.”
Mojtabai was also a veteran of the strange world of a large metropolitan library. After her divorce from an Iranian man she met at Antioch, she returned with her daughter to New York City, where she taught at Hunter College before taking a job as a librarian at Columbia, where she earned her MLS in library science in 1970. She was working at the library of the City College of New York when she wrote Mundome, her first novel. As she told UC Irvine professor Dr. Carol Booth Olson, Mojtabai based her descriptions of Richard’s library and its patrons on her observation of the daily activities of the main branch of the New York Public Library.
A. G. (for Ann Grace) Mojtabai went on to write eight more novels after Mundome. Her most recent, Thirst was published by Slant Books in February 2021. It draws upon material from both her 1994 novel Called Out, about a Catholic priest dealing with the aftermath of an airliner crash outside a small West Texas town, and Soon, a collection of sketches based on Mojtabai’s own work in a hospice.
Mundome is available on the Internet Archive: Link.
Mundome, by A. G. Mojtabai
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974
The exploits of George Manolescu, “King of Thieves,” from the Pittsburgh Press, 20 September 1905
Ever since Daniel Defoe published his novel Colonel Jack (1722), readers have been fascinated by the lives of career criminals. Although, as Defoe spells out in his lengthy original title of the book, his hero “was made Colonel of a Regiment” and resolved “to dye a General,” the core of Jack’s story was the “Six and Twenty Years” he spent as a thief.
Short, surprisingly readable, unapologetic, plain language life story of a burglar. It’s surprising to see that people were actually able to write in fairly modern American English in 1837. Mainly a series of stories recounting various crimes and time in prison. Unfortunately, he died about 2/3 of the way through the story, so the end of the book is written in the 3rd person by the warden. According to Wikipedia, and probably more interesting than any content in the book, is this factoid: “The book is most often associated with the copy in the collection of the Boston Athenaeum. This copy was bound in the author’s own skin, tradition holding that Allen requested that a copy of his confession be bound in his skin and given to John A. Fenno, who had earlier resisted Allen’s attempt to rob him.”
An early edition of The Autobiography of a Thief, by Charles Reade
The Autobiography of a Thief has been a perennially popular title, used, by my count, at least six times since Defoe. Charles Reade, who once competed with Dickens in terms of popularity with Victorian readers, took it for a short novel: The Autobiography of a Thief (1857). Reade, who was an advocate of social reform throughout his life, was careful to correct his narrator’s commentary. When the narrator writes that he “took with me three pounds ten shillings” from an Edinburgh baker after finding the work there too hard, Reade footnotes,
“Took with me.” No such thing. “Stole” is the word that represents the transactions. Always be precise. Never tamper with words; call a spade a spade and a picklock a picklock; that is the first step towards digging instead of thieving.
Cover of Jottings from Jail by Rev. J. W. Horsley.
A more authentic autobiography of a thief can be found in the opening chapter of Jottings from Jail; Notes and Papers on Prison Matters, by the Reverend J. W. Horsley (1887). Horsley, who served as chaplain at Clerkenwell Prison, collected oral histories and letters from inmates he came to know there. Horsley carefully annotated these accounts to help his readers decipher the criminal argot, such as in this inventory of the clients of a pub in Shoreditch popular with the East End’s underworld:
The following people used to go in there — toy-getters (watch-stealers), magsmen (confidence- trick men), men at the mace (sham loan offices), broads- men (card-sharpers), peter-claimers (box-stealers), busters and screwsmen (burglars), snide-pitchers (utterers of false coin), men at the duff (passing false jewellery), welshers (turf-swindlers), and skittle-sharps. Being with this nice mob (gang) you may be sure what I learned.
W. L. Hanchant later reprinted this autobiography in his 1928 book, The Newgate Garland; or, Flowers of Hemp, which collected poems, songs, and letters from London’s most notorious prison.
Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief by Hutchins Hapgood
In 1903, journalist Hutchins Hapgood collected the oral history of a New York City pickpocket and petty thief in The Autobiography of a Thief. Many were sceptical of whether Hapgood’s thief was real or imaginary. He was probably a little of both. But the book was rich in details of how small-time crooks of the Bowery operated. Here, for example, is how “molly-buzzing” — stealing women’s pocket-books — worked:
We worked mainly on street cars at the Ferry, and the amount of “technique” required for robbing women was very slight. Two or three of us generally went together. One acted as the “dip,” or ” pick,” and the other two as “stalls.” The duty of the “stalls” was to distract the attention of the “sucker” or victim, or otherwise to hide the operations of the “dip”. One stall would get directly in front of the woman to be robbed, the other directly behind her. If she were in such a position in the crowd as to render it hard for the “dip,” or “wire “to make a “touch,” one of the stalls might bump against her, and beg her pardon, while the dip made away with her “leather,” or pocket-book.
Although it was never published in English, the autobiography of a thief who styled himself as royalty in the criminal world appeared in Berlin two years after Hapgood’s book. George Manolescu’s Ein Fürst der Diebe. After leaving his native Romania, Manolescu quickly developed a taste for high-end burglary and specialized in robbing jewellers and jewel owners, particularly from their suites in the finer hotels of the Riviera, Baden-Baden, and other stylish watering holes. Manolescu’s book is said to have inspired Thomas Mann’s unfinished masterpiece Confessions of Felix Krull.
Cover of I was a Bandit, the 1930 Crime Club edition of Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook.
Two decades later, another international thief, Eddie Guerin, recounted his adventures in his 1928 book Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook. Tony Baer describes it as follows:
Amazingly well told autobiography of a career criminal who specialized in bank robberies.
Eddie grew up in Chicago in the 1860’s to the 1880’s. He published the book in 1928 at age 67, motivated in part by a desire to counteract his portrayal by his former flame in her book published slightly earlier: Chicago May, Her Story, by the Queen of Crooks.
There’s plenty of adventure, including blowing the safe of the American Express building in Paris, only to be double crossed, caught and sent to Devil’s Island in French Guyana to serve a life sentence. He later escaped and returned to the States, Canada and on to London where he continued a life of crime, narrowly escaping assassination by Chicago May and her new boyfriend.
What I dug most, however, was Guerin’s ‘underworld vernacular’ (his phrase—not mine—tho I suppose I’ll steal it now from this long dead thief).
The prose is precise, hardboiled, and terse. Just how I like it. He does not tell you. He shows you. With efficiency and enough flair to entertain without being at all showy or pretentious.
What I am now quite perplexed about now is whether the hardboiled school of writing was really drawn from Hammett and Hemingway, as we were always led to believe—or whether it was more some part of the zeitgeist. There appears to have been an underworld vernacular shared by cops and robbers and hoboes and day laborers alike. A dirty realism that people spoke around that time that finally made it pen to paper in the late 20’s.
Highly recommended. A real joy to read.
Cover of Stealing Through Life by Ernest Booth
Around the same time, Alfred A. Knopf published two closely-related criminal memoirs. Grimhaven, by Robert Joyce Tasker (1928), is an account of a convicted burglar’s time at San Quentin Prison. Tasker took up writing while in prison and eventually sold a number of articles about his experiences to Mencken’s American Mercury. While at San Quentin, Tasker met another inmate, Ernest Booth, a veteran thief in for a failed bank robbery. Booth decided to try his hand at writing as well. As Tasker recounts in Grimhaven, the two men decided to avoid competing with each other:
In the end we drew up an oral compact that I would write only of prisons, and he would write only of criminals not yet in prison. We talked of the various things my experiences had taught me and decided that he should write the story of a bank-robbery, giving it every detail, with every emotion recorded.
Booth’s own book Stealing Through Life appeared less than a year after Tasker’s. With a record far longer than Tasker’s, Booth took a rather Nietzschean view of the criminal class:
There are those of us — thieves and poets — who are born intact. Complete. The stern realities of life are inverted and become only so many evidences of unreality. Within our selves we have a complete world of our imagination…. Within this realm of our own possession we retreat when confronted with things that do not fit into our preconceived scheme of things-as-they-should-be.
“We are the odd ones. The criminals, the geniuses, the builders of Utopias,” he boasted.
Cover of Angels in Undress, the US edition of Low Company by Mark Benney
In 1936, three-time convicted burglar Henry DeGras published his account of growing up in the London underworld of prostitutes and “wide boys,” Low Company: The Evolution of a Burglar, under the pseudonym of Mark Benney. Released in the U.S. a year later under the odd title Angels in Undress, the book received wildly enthusiastic reviews, including from such notoriously tough critics as Rebecca West and George Orwell. Although his publisher Peter Davies touted Benney as “the man who committed a hundred burglaries,” Benney’s crimes had been mostly minor felonies. His last conviction was for skipping out on installment payments for a phonograph. Benney went on to write several novels about the world he’d grown up in, most notably The Big Wheel, discussed here recently.
Cover of Hustler! The Autobiography of a Thief by Henry Williamson.
In 1965, R. Lincoln Keiser edited the memoir of a petty thief, Henry Williamson, Hustler! The Autobiography of a Thief. A case worker for Cook County, Keiser got to know Williamson, a recent parolee from the Illinois State Penetentiary, and taped over a hundred hours on interviews which he condensed into this book. Although its cover appealed to a general audience, Keiser’s account was more sociological in nature and included commentary from Dr. Paul Bohannon, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University.
Cover of Killer: A Journal of Murder, by Thomas E. Gaddis and James O. Long.
In 1970, Thomas E. Gaddis, best known for The Birdman of Alcatraz, his 1955 story of prisoner and amateur ornithologist Robert Stroud, collaborated with James O. Long and in compiling the recollections of a truly nasty piece of work, the serial killer Carl Panzram. Robberies were the least of his crimes, but there were plenty of them. As Tony Baer describes it,
Prior to his execution in 1930, Panzram and his death row guard became friends, and Panzram made a parting gift of a short autobiography, first published in 1970 as Killer: A Journal of Murder by Thomas Gaddis, who fills in gaps in the narrative with chapters written in the 3rd person.
The first-person confessions from Panzram to be the most compelling bits of writing. He is completely unapologetic, yet recognizes his own monstrosity. He is not trying to leverage the confession for profit, titillation nor commutation. He recognizes that publication will come after death, and thus seems pretty liberated to simply tell his tale in simple unadorned prose.
The writing is lean and uses common no frills language. He does terrible things out of misanthropy and greed. But basically just feels like he’s “paying it forward” on the ill treatment he’s received from others.
Panzram was a textbook example of recidivism: “What time I haven’t been in jail I have been either getting out or getting in again,” he wrote. His coldly amoral voice is chilling:
In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all these things I am not the least bit sorry. I have no conscience so that does not worry me. I don’t believe in man, God nor Devil. I hate the whole damned human race including myself.
Cover of The Thief, the Autobiography of Professional Thief Wayne Burk.
The Thief: the Autobiography of Wayne Burk, Professional Thief (1971), an as-told-to book written by Los Angeles Times reporter Ted Thackrey, Jr., is perhaps the most insufferably self-satisfied of all these accounts. Burk claimed to have stolen over $15 million, though that number is hard to believe after I located a few stories of Burk’s exploits, such as his 1948 stick-up of the bar at the Hotel Il Trovatore in Bakersfield, California, where he made off with a whopping $185. Burk’s moral calculus is notable for its relativity:
Nobody in this world can ever say they starved because of anything I ever did. I don’t rob poor people; they ain’t got enough money to make it worth the trouble. I never screwed around with the stock market; there ain’t no one in this world can say I make their father jump out of a window because of something I pulled with a stock to make myself richer while everyone else in the country loses. I never made a motorcar that was so cheap and crappy that it got the people who drove it killed. I never put out a medicine that crippled people or gave them cancer, and I sure never shot some poor guy just because I didn’t happen to like his looks. If I put anybody out, I had a good reason — money!
Which sounds a little like the man who boasts that he’s screwed a lot of women but never messed around with anyone’s daughter.
Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief by Andrew Keith Munro
Alexander Keith Munro’s The Autobiography of a Thief (1972) proved to have been a work in progress. Less than three years after writing, “I had a tremendous amount of excitement out of being a burglar,” Munro apparently found the call of adventure irresistable and was sent up for stealing £23,000 in valuables from the country home of Sir Kenneth Clark, the art historian and broadcaster.
Excitement seems to be a common theme in these autobiographies. In The Boxman: A Professional Thief’s Journey (1972), Professor William J. Chambliss’s case study of a career burglar, Harry King shares the profound observation that, “It’s exciting and I really believe that it’s the excitement that makes it appealing.”
Cover of Where the Money Was by Willie Sutton with Edward Linn
The most purely entertaining of all these memoirs is the legendary bank robber Willie Sutton’s Where the Money Was (1976), which he wrote with Edward Linn after his release from Attica State Prison in 1969. Like Munro and Harry King, Sutton found the thrill of planning and committing robberies more addictive than their rewards:
Why did I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life. I enjoyed everything about it so much that one or two weeks later I’d be out looking for the next job. But to me the money was the chips, that’s all.
As imaginative as some thieves may be, they continue to stick to traditions when it comes to titles. When Bruce Reynolds, the mastermind behind the 1972 Great Train Robbery came to tell his story, he called it — you guessed it — The Autobiography of a Thief (1985)
Feature on Shirley Schoonover from the Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, New York, 1 August 1971.
“Are you a lesbian?” a man asks the narrator of Shirley Schoonover’s novel Sam’s Song.
“No,” she replies. “But I’ve been called a unicorn. A zebra. I have a cousin who is an onion.”
Whatever Sam is, the only thing that’s certain is that’s she’s not happy with it. “I don’t quite know who I am,” she thinks. “Even after thirty years of living with me, I don’t feel familiar with myself.”
Everything about Sam’s Song is wildly out of place. Sam, the thirty-something mother of three who’s separated and in the final stage of divorcing her husband, in her own skin. “I find myself to be a bitch. But in a world of bitches, I don’t want to hand on to my children the ugliness that is in me.” She’s out of place in her community. Having chosen — unfathomably in the eyes of most of the people she knows — to leave her children in her husband’s custody, she’s the woman that other women talk about at cocktail parties.
Yet she’s unwilling to let her soon-to-be ex’s new girlfriend get ideas: “I’ll kill you, you bitch, before you’ll mother my children.” Restless and horny, she picks up men in bars knowing they have no interest in staying with her: “I can make love. Fuck, if you will. But, my God, I have the secret knowledge that I have been fucked with shit.” When they ask her name, she answers, “I am no-name.” She even dresses up as a man and goes to bars where gay men hang out. “I smell cocks and peacocks, cut booze, and brothers lusting for their brother’s cocks.” She drinks — hard. “You use up Scotch like other people use water,” observes Martha, Sam’s last remaining friend.
They fucked her up, her mum and dad. She’s Sam, not Samantha, because they wanted a boy, not a girl. “Girls are no good on a farm,” her father said. She admires men for their ability to take what they want, material or sexual. That same selfishness is one of the few things she’s sure of about herself. “Yes, I am selfish,” she admits to her son one afternoon as they swim together. “Fuck you,” he replies.
That stops me. I tread water again, looking at him. He stays out of my reach; I read his eyes. He knows I can feel his anger. At this moment he feels hate. He hates me because I left them with their father. No, just because I left them.
Which reminded me of something Nora Ephron once wrote: “You give kids a choice — your mother in the next room on the verge of suicide versus your mother in Hawaii in ecstasy, they’d choose suicide in the next room.” Yet as confused and unhappy as Sam may be, she’s clear-sighted when it comes to the potentially toxic effect she could have on her kids if left responsible for their day-to-day care.
Not that Sam is in ecstasy, let alone in Hawaii. Nor does she expect her life to be turned around by the freedom of the single life. “Living alone, unloving, I will shrivel and dry into an ancient sterile turd,” she thinks.
As these quotes suggest, Sam’s Song is a long way from the safe, nice housewives of 1960s sitcoms. When she wrote the book, Shirley Schoonover was herself the mother of three, living in Lincoln, Nebraska and in the process of divorcing her husband. That didn’t mean that the book was autobiographical, though. “I didn’t go to bed with any sailors, I didn’t pick men up off the street, I didn’t have a homosexual lover,” she later said. “But the anger was real,” she warned. And so was her frankness. “We Finns are very blunt,” she told an interviewer. “We come out and say, no tact whatsoever, what we have to say. I guess a lot of people don’t understand that.”
Schoonover and her husband met in Iowa, where she had studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first novel Mountain of Winter (1965), about a young Finnish-American girl growing up rural Minnesota, was closer to autobiography. Born Iliana Waisanen, she was given the name Shirley by her mother, who loved Shirley Temple and who wanted her daughter to seem “more American.” Schoonover hated the name.
Mountain of Winter was generally well-received. Bernard Bergonzi wrote that “its humanity, its breadth of feeling, and range and exactness of observation of men and nature, place it well above the ordinary run of first novels (or second or third novels, come to that).” The book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and folks in Lincoln were so proud of her accomplishment that the manager of her local IGA grocery store even cleared space on an endcap for a display and hosted an autograph party.
She joked that a few of the customers, as they picked up a copy along with five or six cans of Campbell’s soup, that the book might be “dirty.” “Well, it was very frank,” she later said, “but not nearly as potent as Sam’s Song .”
Headline from the Lincoln Journal Star review of Sam’s Song, 2 March 1969.
When Sam’s Song came out, however, it was another story. “Sam’s Four-Letter-Word Symphony” proclaimed the headline of the Lincoln Journal Star review. “If it had not been assigned to me for review, I would not have read past the first 15 pages.” The reviewer — a man — judged that Sam “is as abnormal as any woman could be” and that her language “is worse than any attributed to the wharves of Liverpool.” He did, however, admit that the book might be useful for students of vocabulary: “If there is a four-letter word used to describe sex in its most perverted form, it can be found in this book.”
Coward-McCann’s dust jacket blurb didn’t help. It promised that the book featured “sexy sex, sick sex, homosexual sex, racial sex, even religious sex.” The Journal Star’s reviewer wrote that Sam’s Song “ranks with the stuff that is sold under the counter in shops which deal with pornographic works.” Most Lincoln bookshops preferred not to stock the book at all, on or under the counter.
Martin Levin, then one of the New York Times’ lead reviewers, argued that those who wrote off Sam’s Song as pornography were missing the point: “When is a dirty book not a dirty book? When it is a cri de coeur, in which whatever detritus there is exists as part of the structure of personality.” Contrary to the Lincoln Journal Star’s reviewer, he considered Sam “a thoroughly homogenized mixture of ambiguous urges, detoured maternal feelings, sharply bitter humor, and ethnic (Finnish) traces.” It seems that the bigger the city, the better the chances of Sam’s Song getting a favorable review. When the novel came out in paperback in early 1970s, the Chicago Tribune’s book editor observed cynically, “It is one of the most revealing books ever written about a woman. Which is probably why the hardcover edition vanished without a trace.”
If anyone picked up Sam’s Song in search of a thrill, they were bound to be disappointed. Sam is certainly profane, but it’s not pornographic. Sam does not “discover” herself through her sexual liberation. Sex is more like booze, a source of temporary relief from pain. Sam’s Song is more a four-letter-word rap than symphony: Sam’s profanity is visceral, a sign of the pain, anger, and unrest always simmering, always on the brink of boiling over. It may be the rawest book written by a woman in the 1960s.
By the time the book was published, Schoonover was ready to leave Lincoln. “I literally felt like a zebra in a herd of horses,” she later said. When her divorce from her first husband, Leroi Schoonover, was finalized, she headed to New York, where she joined the faculty at the University of Rochester. She took revenge on Lincoln with a “Letter from Nebraska” that was published in the New York Times after she’d moved to Rochester. “If you don’t love Willa Cather’s work you are not included in the literary life of the university.” Sam’s Song is nothing like My Antonia: it’s closer to Last Exit to Brooklyn.
When it came to Nebraska as a whole, Schoonover concluded that, “As far as I can tell, there is no literary life in Nebraska.” “You ask if writers talk to each other,” she wrote her imaginary correspondent. Since Karl Shapiro, who’d been the editor of the university’s long-running literary quarterly Prairie Schooner had left Lincoln in the mid-1960s, she replied, “I’ve been talking to myself; and you know that can become agonizingly lonely. That’s Nebraska. Beautiful but killingly lonely for the writer.”
After a few years at Rochester, Schoonover moved to Missouri, where she taught at Webster University in St. Louis. While there, she published her last novel, Winter Dream (1979) a folk tale set in Finland in the 15th century. “I wrote it for the child in me,” she told a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. “I wanted to write something people could enjoy and whose characters they could love.” Schoonover moved to Teaneck, New Jersey in her later years to live near her son Noel. She died in 2004.
Sam’s Song, by Shirley Schoonover
New York: Coward-McCann, 1969
“Before the all-out bombings of Berlin began in November 1943, there were six houses on the Hofmann’s street,” Joel Sayre writes. “Now, in July 1945, there were, by official reckoning, one and a half, of which the house that Lilo lived in was reckoned as one.” Though it looked like an intact house from the street, its roof had been destroyed by an RAF incendiary bomb in early 1944 and the attic floor served in place — except when it rained hard or long.
The House Without a Roof is a story of how ordinary people survive under desperate conditions. But unlike other books about the early years of Germany’s recovery from the war, such as James Stern’s The Hidden Damage (1947) and The Smoking Mountain (1951), this book is as much about survival under the Nazis as it is about survival after their downfall.
That the Hofmanns made it through the rise of the Nazis and the war with their home and selves relatively intact was due to a combination of luck and wit. Hedi, the wife, was the daughter of a Jewish soldier killed on the Western Front in World War One, which made her, under the Nuremberg Laws, a Mischling — half Jew, half Aryan, and thus prohibited from numerous rights. Neither Hedi nor Fritz supported Hitler’s policies, but they soon found it necessary to avoid being singled out for retribution.
In turn, Lilo, their daughter, learned to blend in. One day, Lilo came home, upset that the grace she’d become used to saying at lunch had changed. Instead of the traditional,
Come, Lord Jesus,
Be our guest,
Let these gifts
To us be blessed.
The pupils were instructed to say,
Fold your hands
And bow your head,
To Adolph Hitler pray;
For he gives our daily bread,
And all our wants he doth allay.
Lilo asks to be moved to a different school, but Hedi knows that under the Nazi’s scheme for standardizing the Nazification of German institutions , the Gleichschaltung, every kindergartener would now be saying this prayer. So, Lilo simply has to accept and go along. “Remember that it’s very, very dangerous to say that you don’t like Hitler, so you mustn’t ever tell our secret to anybody, ever, ever.” Just keep reminding yourself, Hedi tells her daughter, “Das Wunder ist ein Schwindel” (This miracle is a fraud).
Luck often brings the Hofmanns under its umbrella. One of tenants in their apartment house is a sculptor whose heroic busts are favorites among the Nazi elite and the other residents enjoy the protection accorded him. One day, a nurse in a neighboring apartment takes Lilo to visit the hospital where she works, where she meets Frau Ley, wife of ReichsleiterRobert Ley, one of the highest ranking members of the Nazi party. The Reichsleiter arrives, clearly drunk, and becomes enraged when he spots a crucifix on the wall. He rips it down and begins smashing the fixtures. Lilo is quietly escorted out and told the matter is not to be spoken of.
Berlin in early 1946.
Their greatest ordeal, however, comes when Fritz Hofmann, a strong, tall, and Nordically handsome man with a university degree, is invited to become a member of the SS, the most elite — and most extreme — element of Nazi Party. The idea sickens Fritz, but he recognizes this is an offer he cannot refuse. After considering the limited options before him, Fritz and Hedi — with the help of a friendly doctor — contrive a solution: Fritz will go mad. He benefits from having seen how his own father behaved (and was treated) when he went insane years before.
In the longest section of the book, Sayre recounts the extraordinary lengths and intricate maneuvers involved in convincing the doctors and SS officers that Fritz is, indeed, insane while avoiding becoming a victim of the state’s mental health system. The key to Fritz’s performance is his taking a pro-Nazi position more extreme and passionate than even the most fervent follower. He takes to drawing his visions of the ultimate triumph of the cause:
His masterpiece was an SS Armageddon on top of a mountain in the Urals, under a lowering sky. The central figures were Himmler — winged, of course — and Jesus Christ shaking hands…. About the two central figures stood a hierarchy of Heydrich, Kaltenbrunner, Sepp Dietrich, the Waffen-SS general, the smiling Standartenführer who had offered Hofmann the commission, and many others. Here and there, a wounded SS angel heiled Himmler and Jesus from the ground.
One comes away in awe of Fritz Hofmann’s ingenuity and stamina.
The Hofmanns also survived the almost constant Allied bombing that Berlin endured from 1943 on. Lacking a robust and deeply-buried subway system like London and Moscow, Berlin had few good options for sheltering its residents. The choices were hunkering down in a trench or huddling in a crowded basement with neighbors. The government began providing free postcards for contacting friends and relatives:
We are living
We have had deaths
We have been [half]/[considerably]/[totally] bombed out
These statements were thought to be sufficient to cover all situations.
The House Without a Roof is a remarkably light and sane account of a dark and crazy time, which is a tribute to the character of both the Hofmanns and Joel Sayre. Though none of his work is in print today, Sayre was considered one of the very best of The New Yorker’s exceptional team of reporters. As editor William Shawn later wrote of Sayre, “he had a strong individual style, his writing had humor, warmth, deep feeling for people, and great vitality.” My copy of The House Without a Roof came from the collection of James and Tania Stern and bears the following inscription from Joel Sayre:
To Jimmy Stern and his delightful missus whose first name, heard in a moment of booze, unfortunately escapes me. In sincere admiration.
The House Without a Roof, by Joel Sayre
New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948
If Maurice Sachs deserves to be remembered today, it’s almost entirely for his effusive memoir, Witches’ Sabbath, reissued last year by Spurl Editions. As I wrote at the time of its republication, Witches’ Sabbath is not only a classic autobiography but an essential reference for anyone interested in French art and literature between the world wars: “Sachs knew everyone who was anyone in the world of French literature between the two world wars. Knew everyone, slept with many, stole from a few.”
Sachs’ first book, The Decade of Illusion, published in the U.S. almost two decades before it appeared (posthumously) in France. Sachs wrote the book during his stay of roughly two years, probably to cash in on his brief celebrity as a traveling lecturer. He’d come to New York City in 1931 at the invitation of his friend Lucien Demotte, who hired Sachs to run a Manhattan art gallery filled with French art. Unfortunately, the art market had dried up as a result of the stock market crash and the two men soon parted ways.
Notice for a talk by Maurice Sachs on Proust on New York radio station WRNY.
Ever the opportunist, Sachs reinvented himself as an expert on French culture and soon began appearing as a lecturer at lady’s clubs and art societies and on radio. Despite being homosexual, he married a socialite and aspiring writer named Gwladys Matthews. Within months, Sachs had deserted Gwladys for a handsome young man, while the couple were together, Sachs wrote, and Gwladys translated, this breakneck run through the cast of players in French culture and society of the 1920s.
As one reviewer put it, Decade is a “kaleidoscopic parade, staged in the smart salons, attics, theatres, studios and by-ways of France (mostly Paris), which includes in its dramatis personae practically every well known painter, composer, musician, poet, politician, dressmaker, critic, author, book seller, art dealer, and publisher who has gravitated to Paris in the last ten years or so.” And as such, it’s probably still of some interest to scholars of the period. Sachs’ Who’s Who is a good starting point: in the space of barely 250 pages, he manages to squeeze in enough names to fill 11 double-spaced pages in the index, for a rough total of 700 people.
But this is cultural history People magazine style. It’s full of gossipy tidbits and asides: the young pianist Arthur Rubinstein, “So strong, so powerful, he was like a bull on hind legs: when he took a woman’s hand, one imagined the rape of Europa.” Henri Matisse, the movie fan: “He goes each evening, no matter what the film. What appears on the screen does not interest him; he closes his eyes and listens to the murmurs of the neighboring crowd.” André Derain “loves auto racing” and collects landscape paintings by Corot. Maurice Utrillo was a drunk.
As anyone who’s watched an hour of any American newschannel knows, the chief qualification of any successful commentator is a ready supply of opinions, well-informed or not. Maurice Sachs would have been a superstar in this world, for he tosses off judgments as other writers use punctuation. “In all American universities,” he intones, “one worries first about the moral reasons of written works — which certainly would be the last consideration of a young Frenchman.” Good taste makes for bad paintings: “Nothing is more deplorable than a delicious arrangement.” French cinema lags far behind that of America because French film-makers lack “the American mind, less lively, more deliberate and analytical, like the German” — a statement I can’t imagine any film historian agreeing with.
Though several reviewers praised Sachs’ “amazingly superficial chit-chat style,” the fact is that he managed to write a book-length work by filling large gaps between his chit-chat with windy pontifications. But perhaps this was not entirely inappropriate for someone who at one point took vows and began to train as a priest (a gig he soon lost after a wealthy woman complained about the Sachs’ interest in her teenage son).
In some ways, more interesting that the book itself is what came along with the copy I purchased. As the bookplate shows, it came from the library of the heiress and art enthusiast Adeline Lobdell Pynchon. Sachs first met her soon after his arrival in New York City, when she was still married to Henry Atwater. By the time the book was published, she’d moved back to her hometown of Chicago and married Harold Pynchon, a wealthy businessman.
Included in the book was a letter Sachs wrote her in November 1931 — shortly before her marriage to Pynchon — asking whether “there would be any possibility” for him to deliver lectures in Chicago similar to those he was in the process of giving in New York. He needed the work: “The Art season has started rather badly and since you ask me, I confess that I have not so much hopes for sales this year.” “But nevertheless, who knows?” he concluded optimistically.
Letter from Maurice Sachs to Adeline Atwater, November 17, 1931.
His call for help was heeded … eventually. In March 1933, the Chicago Tribune reported on a “delightful lecture” that Sachs gave to the Arts Club on “The Decade of Illusion.” Sachs was hosted, according to the article, by “Mrs. Harold Pynchon” and accompanied by Henry Wibbels, “a young painter from California who is with him here at the Ambassador East.”
It was Wibbels for whom Sachs had left his wife, and the two men sailed for France a few weeks after their stop in Chicago. They remained together for nearly four years — some of the worst in Sachs’s life, when he fell prey to alcohol and drugs. In the end, they parted. As Sachs later wrote, “Life played tricks on us because we were trying to play one on it. We had to separate before we were entirely annihilated, Henry by dependence, I by drunkenness and lying.” Adeline Lobdell Atwater Pynchon, on the other hand, remained a fixture of Chicago society and an active patron of the arts until her death in 1975.
The Decade of Illusion: Paris 1918-1928, by Maurice Sachs
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933
For a place deep in the heart of Central Asia, Khiva got a lot of traffic from English visitors in the 19th Century. In 1875, Captain Frederick Burnaby braved crossing the lines of a Russo-Turcoman to journey to the city, returning in triumph to tell the story in his best-seller, A Ride to Khiva. In 1899, Robert L. Jefferson, author of Roughing It in Siberia, repeated the feat (“as a sportsman”) and wrote about it in his imaginatively titled A New Ride to Khiva.
Between them, however, came the most daring traveler of all, F. C. Burnand (later Sir Francis), then editor of Punch. As he explained in his definitively titled THE Ride to Khiva, unlike Burnaby, he proposed to travel both to and from Khiva. And to travel not with Burnaby’s spartan 85-pound backpack but with saddlebags loaded with provisions and cooking utensils, a semi-grand piano fitted up with a comfortable bedroom, a store of American beef, and a cellaret full of beer and champagne (Pommery and Greno très sec). And finally, to stay in constant contact with his editors back in London, his own private wire (which at various times in the book is a telegraph, a means of escape, and former soldier named Wire).
Of course, all this kit costs a fortune. Luckily, Burnand manages to assemble a list of subscribers from those interested in his going — those interested in his not coming back.
The list of subscribers to Burnand’s expedition to Khiva.
“A. S. S.” on the list is, no doubt, Burnand’s poke at one of his perennial antagonists, the novelist Albert Smith, author of The Adventures of Mr. Ledbury and his friend Jack Johnson (1866), of whom the playright Douglas Jerrold once said, “When he signs his initials he only tells two-thirds of the truth.”
Scaring off the wolves (in sheep’s clothing) with a portrait of Gladstone.
Traveling through the backlands of Russia brings its fair share of hazards. Burnand is chased by wolves, attacked by Tartars, thrown in jail more than once. He even spends a night in a pig stye — but comes away with a piglet who proves an invaluable ally. He teaches the Pig alphabet as well as to play numerous card games … perhaps too well:
This evening played two games of Double Dummy with the Pig. He won the last rubber. If he repeats this, I shall watch his play closely. The Sleigh-driver backed the Pig. I begin to suspect collusion.
Though the Pig goes on to rescue Burnand from several near-death experiences, the air of suspicion is never entirely lifted. “There is a twinkle in his eye that I don’t half like,” Burnand confides to his journal. Still, the Pig compares favorably to the mouse he befriends while on one of his stays in Russian jails: “An apt pupil, but possessing neither the solidity nor the gravity of the Pig.”
Despite bragging early on that he’d found a more direct route to Khiva than Burnaby followed, Burnand’s journal suggests otherwise. He reports crossing the river Oxus on page 26, but over the course of the following weeks, manages to cross it at least 20 times more. At least he thinks it’s the Oxus. “I suppose,” he confesses, “judging by the position of the stars, as I’ve lost my maps.” He accidentally wanders into Persia at one point, forcing him to backtrack for hundreds of miles.
Burnand’s map of his ride to Khiva.
As the map he provides in the book clearly shows, Burnand’s ride to Khiva ultimately involved more digress than progress. If, that is, he ever actually made the trip. The editors close the account with a suspicious note that Burnand reported that, “Khiva is a very charming place, and, from his description, not totally unlike Margate.” Burnand was a long-time resident of Ramsgate and perhaps Margate seemed journey enough for the busy editor.
THE Ride to Khiva originally appeared as a serial in Punch. There appear to be just three used copies available for sale, but fortunately you can find it in electronic formats for free on the Internet Archive.
The Ride to Khiva, by F. C. Burnand
London: Bradbury, Agnew & Co., 1877
Serendipity continues to be one of my best guides to neglected books. While access to libraries and bookstores is restricted due to the pandemic, I’ve been turning to strolls through the Internet Archive as an alternative. I’ll either use the text search feature to see what titles pop up in response to a phrase like “he hailed a cab” or “she sipped her cocktail” or do a search using one of the metadata fields. Catch a Brass Canary came up when I went looking to see what books were published by J. B. Lippincott between 1950 and 1980.
Something about the dustjacket illustration and its description of the story, set in an aging upper West Side branch of the New York Public Library, made me want to keep reading. Catch a Brass Canary was Donna Hill’s first novel and I soon saw that neither her prose style nor her characterizations were of particular note. But Hill, who’d earned a Masters in library science from Columbia and spent eight years working for the NYPL before moving to Hunter College, knew her subject, the day-to-day running of a library and the variety of personalities among its patrons and staff, and the story doesn’t lack for authenticity.
The branch in Catch a Brass Canary is aging and changing along with its neighborhood:
… when the neighborhood had been prosperous not long ago, the branch had served genteel readers of Thackeray, Browning and Scott. Now it was hard-working and practical. Along with Dante, Shakespeare, and the Greek philosophers, it offered books on child rearing, home economics and other skills to help with daily life and stacks of mysteries and Westerns for escape from it.
Having grown up as a regular denizen of the Seattle Public Library — both its fine Carnegie-era Greenlake branch and the Central library in the days when the chairs in the ground floor fiction section were usually filled by dozing homeless men — I felt some pangs of nostalgia to read of a card catalog, load slips, and newspapers on wooden rods.
Hill’s fictional formula is pretty simple: take an unstable mix of people and insert a catalyst. In this case, the catalyst is Miguel, a Puerto Rican teenager looking to earn some money and put himself on the right track after a taste of gang membership and an unhappy stay in juvenile detention. Some of the staff welcome Miguel as new blood, a fresh connection with the community. Some see him with the same narrowed eyes as the Jets saw the Sharks in West Side Story. Like old Mrs. Ethelbald: “Completely unreliable. I knew it the minute I laid eyes on him. He’s one of those hoodlums, horsehide jacket and all the rest of it….”
If this were all there was to Catch a Brass Canary, it would simply be a predictable novel on the borderline between young adult and adult fiction. What spices things up in the insertion of a second disruptor: a mad patron with a mission. Rupert, a disturbed young man, is surreptitiously trying to excise racism from the library shelves.
When he first surfaces, it’s in search of an old children’s book “Epaminondas?” he asks the Reference librarian. “Theban general,” the librarian snaps. “I mean the little Negro boy, you know, who steps in pies,” Rupert replies, referring to Epaminondas and His Auntie, by Sara Cone Bryant and Inez Hogan.
I was interested to follow Hill’s handling of Rupert and his quest. On the surface, he is the sole of liberal compassion. “How beautiful they are, the heterogeneous children of this neighborhood,” he says to the librarian:
“Dark and fair, Asiatic, Puerto Rican, Negro. Did you ever watch them in the children’s room? How well they’ve started out in life together; no racial malice, no envy, no fear. They’re charming, I allow, but they spread evil attitudes like a disease. Among the children it’s most insidious, you know. Especially in a neighborhood like this.”
Having grown up in the South, Rupert stings from the memory of his family being ostracized and driven from their town after his father invited a black man to have dinner at their home. Now, having dropped out of college, he is squatting in a basement and trolling the shelves of the public library to find, borrow, and cut out the offending pages from books he considers racist.
He sees himself as a modern-day knight and peoples his world with medieval characters: “… that sturdy little abbess who works by the window, that young squire who shelves books with such verve, always smiling.” They are all fine-featured, chivalrous, and pure as in a romance. His is a mission to cleanse the world. “I’m devoting my life to racial empathy, to justice for the racially oppressed,” he asserts.
Rupert defends his actions by quoting Milton (“he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself”) — implying, by corollary, that he is justified in destroying bad books. And he demonstrates commitment to his principles when he rescues Miguel from a savage beating by members of his former gang.
But Miguel himself responds to Rupert’s argument by referring something he’s learned from working at the library: “All points of view should be in libraries for people to learn about and choose. Nobody should decide for other people what to read and think.” (Miguel refers to Article II of the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights: “Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”)
In a way, Hill was anticipating later debates about how libraries should deal with materials that are clearly offensive to some or all patrons. In the article about Epaminondas and His Auntie linked to above, David Pilgrim, the curator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University, writes “In January 1971 the City Council of San Jose, California voted to remove Epaminondas and His Auntie from general circulation in the city’s libraries and to place the book on reserve.” A few months later, however, the Council reconsidered and removed restrictions on the book. Pilgrim argues that there is value in “having racially offensive objects in the public so the objects can be used as tools to facilitate healthy, sometimes painful, dialogue.”
If Hill’s narrative construction is somewhat obvious, her sincerity in trying to tell her story honestly and in fairness to all her characters is genuine and gives Catch a Brass Canary the kind of simple decency that readers find in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Donna Hill, from the dustjacket of Catch a Brass Canary
After Catch a Brass Canary Donna Hill set adult fiction aside for over 20 years. She wrote a manual on managing visual materials in libraries titled The Picture File that was updated in the 1970s, and then a doorstopper biography of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, in 1978. She retired from Hunter College in 1984, wrote several children’s books and young adult novels, then produced Murder Uptown (1992), a mystery set at a women’s college in Manhattan (roman-à-clef?).
Catch a Brass Canary, by Donna Hill
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1965
Ramón J. Sender’s 1949 novel The King and the Queen (El rey y la reina) demonstrates great big subjects are sometimes best dealt with through very small situations. In this case, Sender condenses the Spanish Civil War into a battle of wills between the Duchess of Arlanza and Rómulo, her gardener.
One day in 1936, shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, Rómulo is enlisted, in the butler’s momentary absence, to take a message to the Duchess. A woman whose very being is imbued with entitlement, the Duchess is in the daily habit of swimming nude in her palace’s indoor pool. The Duchess’s maid stops him outside the entrance to the pool, then goes inside to warn her. Dismissively, the Duchess tells her to bring him in.
“My Lady, it’s a man,” the maid cautions.
“Rómulo a man?” the Duchess replies. She listens to the message while slowing swimming on her back in front of him. A peasant from Andalusia, Rómulo has been subservient all his life. Working in the garden of a large palace in Madrid has only introduced certain nuances to that attitude.
But this brief incident plays on his mind in the days afterward. He comes to understand the Duchess’s response as more than just the treatment of an subordinate by a superior. “Rómulo a man?” questions his very existence as anything but a mindless, soulless beast of burden.
Soon, however, the Duke is called away to lead his troops in support of Franco and the Nationalists. He is captured by the Republicans, who also commandeer the palace as a barracks and training center. The Duchess is assumed to have escaped, but Rómulo discovers her hiding in a remote part of the palace accessible through a passageway known by few of the servants.
Seeing his duty as that of protecting the Duchess, Rómulo gradually recognizes that the balance of power has shifted. With just a word to one of the Republican officers quartered in the palace, he could send her to prison, perhaps even the firing squad. But the Duchess’s sense of superiority is too strong to give in to what might only be a temporary inconvenience. Thus, Sender plays out the bloody conflict between the Nationalists and the Republicans in the cat-and-mouse game between the noble captive and her humble — but increasingly cunning — servant.
The King and the Queen is short — just over 200 pages — tight, and strong as a sinew. Written while Sender was living in the United States after the fall of the Republic in 1939, it reduces the atmosphere and complexities of the Spanish Civil War to their essences, resulting in a story that could well be read as a fable or surrealist tale, something along the lines of Julien Gracq’s The Opposing Shore or Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe.
Sender began writing in this vein with The Sphere (1947) (La esfera), which starts as the tale of a refugee from the Spanish Civil War — not unlike Sender’s — and evolves into an Animal Farm-like story of fascism played on the small set of a passenger ship on its way to an unspecified destination. This abstraction actually makes The King and the Queen less an artifact of the Civil War and more a lasting story about the tensions between the weak and the powerful — the same topic that Elizabeth Janeway dealt with so well in her Powers of the Weak.
The King and the Queen, by Ramón J. Sender (English translation not attributed)
London: Grey Walls Press, 1949
“After all, he’s not a young man,” Dorothy Rutherford’s mother advises her. Dorothy, in her early thirties, working as a bank clerk and living with her parents, has the limited options available to many lower-middle-class women one hundred years ago. She can continue at the bank, after which, as her mother tells her, “You’ll have to live out your old age in one room on a tiny pension.”
Or she can marry. Unfortunately, at her age, handsome or even passable eligible suitors are no longer looking her way. Her one offer comes from Frank Chappie, a red-faced, twice-widowed retired furniture store owner. His merits, as Mrs. Rutherford assess them, come down to two: “He must be seventy, if he’s a day — you’ve only got to look at his neck. Well — mind you, one would never wish anything to happen to anybody — but it’s obvious he can’t last very long.” And once he’s gone, “You’ll be rich — and free.”
And so, Dorothy agrees. And soon learns that “can’t last very long” is, in fact, insufferably long. Mr. Chappie (never Frank) is demanding. “Girlie!” he calls to his wife whenever she’s out of sight for more than a minute. He is tight-fisted. And he is ardent. Turpin captures the horror of the old man’s kiss:
“My darling,” he murmured, folding her soft form in his bony arms and pressing his hard, thin lips against her full, naïve ones. He kissed insatiably as if he were trying to drain the fountain of youth and beauty. Then from between his lips she sensed the stealthy advance of a little serpent that was trying to insinuate itself into the privacy of her mouth.
Like any prisoner confined against her will, Dorothy seeks relief in fantasy. In desperation, she latches onto Tommy, a driving instructor and cheap version of Ronald Colman. Lessons with Tommy provide Dorothy’s one furlough from Mr. Chappie’s funerary passion. Working on commission, Tommy is happy to encourage Dorothy’s demand for more and more frequent sessions behind the wheel, even if at the price of an older woman’s unwonted advances. He has “a predator’s streak of cruelty. He liked to keep his victims, conquests, until, as he expressed it, they almost cut their throats themselves.” Among other things, “This saved recriminations.”
With Dorothy’s ever more frantic longings for Tommy, Tommy’s ever mor cautious manouevering to thwart them without losing a client, and Mr. Chappie’s increasing suspicions and unrelenting desire for proof of her affection, the situation spirals upwards. In a French or Italian opera, this would all culminate in a great coloratura aria. In this tight-laced English novel, nary an antimacassar is disturbed. Instead, all the dramatic tension resolves quietly, efficiently, and without the slightest risk of embarrassment in the eyes of the neighbors.
Though Behind the Net Curtains is set in the 1930s, it could just as well — and often seems to be — set during the Edwardian era, or even — aside from the crucial role automobile driving lessons play in the plot — in the late 19th century. As seen in The Laughing Cavalier, Allan Turpin wrote in the 1960s and 1970s novels set in the 1920s and 1930s that rang with the features and attitudes of the decade before his birth — demonstrating, perhaps, the truth of V. S. Pritchett’s observation of “how long the shadow of Victorianism was, how long it takes for a century to die.”
Turpin might well be considered a male counterpart of Ivy Compton-Burnett (if somewhat less prolific), writing over and over tight-knit family dramas that — no matter when written — always seem to take place in some ambiguous period between the 1880s and the death of King Edward VII. And like Compton-Burnett, the pleasure of Turpin’s small dioramas is his cold-blooded and sharp eye for hypocrisy in all its subtle manifestations. You don’t care to know any of his characters, but you enjoy watching them set to their paces.
Behind the Net Curtains, by Allan Turpin
London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976
The Glasgow-based independent publisher the Common Breath recently reissued the Great Depression classic of homelessness, Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing, and the initial response of readers has been quite enthusiastic. I think a lot of today’s readers may not have been aware before now that there was a wealth of good writers beyond John Steinbeck who dealt with the impact of an economic and social catastrophe that reached as far back as the mid-1920s. So, I wanted to take this opportunity to mention some of the other remarkable books written in the 1920s and 1930s that focused specifically on life “on the bum”: the experience of the homeless, unemployed, and often desperate men and women who drifted about America in search of something to hope for.
The grandfather of all American hobo books is probably Ralph Keeler’s Vagabond Adventures (1870), which I wrote about in one of my earliest posts back in 2006. Keeler got around by steamboat instead of railroad, but his life of wandering and casual labor set the pattern that thousands would follow. Vagabond Adventures is so old that it predates the word hobo, which seems to have sprung up in the 1890s and which, according to etymologist Anatoly Liberman, has an uncertain origin. By the 1893 edition of the Funk & Wagnall dictionary, however, the establishment had already passed its judgment on the hobo: “An idle, shiftless wandering workman, ranking scarcely above the tramp.” Tramp, in fact, was the label preferred by poetic types, starting with W. H. Davies’sThe Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) and continuing through Harry Kemp’sTramping on Life: An Autobiographical Narrative (1922). Kemp’s book, however, also marked the end of the romantic notions about life on the bum.
Jim Tully was probably the first to celebrate the hobo-cum-hobo life, though by the time he published this autobiography, he’d been off the road for over a decade. Still, he worked hard to cultivate his image as a bruiser and built upon it through a series of novels about boxing, carnies and circus performers, thiefs, and prostitutes. A lot of the tough-guy literature of the 1930s drew its inspiration from Tully.
Jack Black spent most of his life on the wrong side of the law. The novelist and historian R. L. Duffus claims that Black was credited with over half the robberies that took place in the first year after San Francisco was hit by the 1906 earthquake. In between stick-up jobs and break-ins, however, Black preferred to travel like other hobos, at the railroad’s expense. Though he doesn’t actually use the word hobo in the book, there are plenty of stories about swinging into empty freight cars and run-ins with railroad bulls. It’s likely that Black decided to write his autobiography after seeing the success of Jim Tully’s, but Black has inspired his own followers, including William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, and Black is sometimes described as “the original beatnik” (a word that’s probably just as archaic as hobo by now).
There are several different reissues of You Can’t Win available now, including a Kindle edition and an audiobook.
Bottom Dogs, Dahlberg’s first novel and largely autobiographical novel was written in Brussels but centers on the year or so that he spent bumming around the West after he was discharged from the Army. Dahlberg’s alter ego, Lorry, is what country songwriters call a ramblin’ man: “He didn’t care if he never saw any grub, he wanted his freedom, he wanted to knock about, hit the road whenever he felt like it, bum around the country.” And he arrives in a new town in typical hobo fashion:
… [H]e looked down; the train was rattling away at forty anyway; he wasn’t sure; but he knew he couldn’t jump. He’d have to wait till they got outside the yards of Ogden, Utah. He’d have to lay low, too, when he got in; he might get picked up in the streets. He wasn’t quite sure what he would do yet. Pulling into the yards outside of Ogden, Lorry jumped, hitting the coal cinders. He went down solid, bleeding at the hands and knees, and limped out of the railroad yards, stumbling toward the Lincoln Highway. He trudged along, half-heartedly hailing passing autos; he was too dirty; his shoes half off him; cinders in his ears; soot through his hair; no one would stop for him; they might think he was a stick-up.
Dahlberg was the first to test the appetite of critics and readers for a fictional equivalent of Tully and Black’s memoirs. Despite a foreword by D. H. Lwawrence, Bottom Dogs got a less than stellar reception. For Saturday Review, it seemed “to represent the vanishing point, the reductio ad absurdum of the naturalistic ‘low life’ novel,” that it amounted to ‘sub-animal reaction reported by sub-animal itself.’ “We doubt if the book helps one to understand any considerable or significant part of anything,” its reviewer sniffed.
Bottom Dogs is out of print now, but copies of the collection of Dahlberg’s first three novels that was published by Crowell back in 1976 can be picked up cheaply on Amazon and elsewhere.
More cultural artifact than story, The Hobo’s Hornbook reprints dozens of hobo rhymes and songs, including classics such as “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.” George Milburn, then a budding young folklorist, collected them from a variety of sources, including interviews with hobos in towns around the Midwest. “The idea that hoboes, as a class, were imbued with the spirit of the medieval troubadours first occurred to me in 1926 when I was living on the outskirts of Chicago’s hobohemia,” Milburn wrote in the introduction. “A short distance away was Washington Square, known to staid Southsiders and suburbanites as ‘Nut Square’ and to hoboes the nation over as ‘Bughouse Square.’ In that oasis speech is free and the hoboes make the most of it. There it was that I found my first hobo elocutionists….”
In You Can’t Sleep Here, Newhouse’s first novel, the hobo life is not a matter of personal choice but economic necessity. In the novel, a newspaper reporter loses his job and quickly drops through what little social support net existing in those early Depression days — getting evicted from his apartment, sleeping in flophouses and park benches, standing in soup kitchen lines, and finally sharing a crate in a Hooverville. The novel reflects the energetic radicalism with which Newhouse and many others responded to the economic devastation that followed the Stock Market crash. As one reviewer wrote, “Starvation has a remarkable effect on the intellect; the latter becomes susceptible to ideas to which, in the pride of its security, it had been stubbornly closed.”
Despite its somewhat childish title and a certain simple-worded prose style, this is a serious anthropo-/socio-logical study of the tens of thousands of young people made homeless, destitute, and itinerant by the Depression. Minehan spent several summers riding the rails and collecting observations and interviews in places like Chicago’s Bughouse Square. The New York Times’ reviewer was grateful for Minehan’s factual approach: “Congratulations are due to Thomas Minehan that he did not attempt to make literature out of the material he has put into this book. The stark, brutal, vivid, uncompromising realities of life he has set down in it are more important for his purposes, and for any use that could be made of them, than any literary product into which they could have been transformed.”
Algren’s first novel, it drew upon his experiences in Texas, where he lived for a year or so after graduating from college. While there, he became so destitute that he stole a typewriter and landed in jail for a spell. The book sold poorly when first published and Algren preferred to draw attention to A Walk on the Wild Side, the 1956 novel into which he worked a number of elements from the earlier work. Of Someboy, Algren later wrote, “This is an uneven novel written by an uneven man in the most uneven of American times.
Still, it’s full of details that demonstrate that Algren was no dilettante when it came to his time on the bum. He records verses like those found in Milburn’s collection:
The roundhouse in Cheyenne is filled every night
With loafers and bummers of most every plight ;
On their backs is no clothes, in their pockets no bills.
Each day they keep comingfrom the dreary black hills.
He also recounts the tales that hobos tell each other about railroad bulls and sheriffs to avoid — like Seth Healey in Greenville, Mississippi:
He’ll be walking the tops and be dressed like a ’bo, so you’ll never know by his looks he’s a bull. But he’ll have a gun on his hip and a hoselength in his hand, and two deputies coming down both the sides ; your best bet then is to stay right still. You can’t get away and he’ll pot you if you try. So give him what you got and God help you if you’re broke. When he lifts up that hose-line just cover up your eyes and don’t try any backfightin’ when it comes down — sww-ish. God help you if you run and God help you if you fight; God help you if you’re broke and God help you if you’re black.
In this, Anderson’s first novel, an unemployed musician travels around America as a hobo until he stops in Chicago and forms a band with other homeless musicians. They get arrested after a fight breaks out when they refuse to play the Communist anthem, the “International.” Anderson was skeptical of the likelihood that the Depression would lead to revolution: “”Every idle man becomes economic-minded. He starts wanting to know why this man has a chauffeured Packard and he can’t get his three dollar shoes half-soled? But the American isn’t going to turn socialist or communist. At least not in this generation.”
This may accounted, in part, for Tom Kromer’s disdain when he reviewed Hungry Men for The New Masses. Kromer found it paled beside his own novel: “You will see no Jesus Christ looks in the eyes of Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men, no soup-lines that stretch for a block and never start moving, no derelicts dying of malnutrition on top of lice-filled three-decker bunks while the mission sign outside flashes ‘Jesus Saves’ on and off in the dark. In a word, you find no Hungry Men.”
The University of Oklahoma Press reissued Hungry Men in the early 1990s, but it’s out of print now. A Kindle version, however, is available from Amazon. Anderson’s second novel Thieves Like Us, which was filmed by Robert Altman in the 1970s, has been included in the Library of America’s volume Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s.
This is a picaresque novel by the long-forgotten novelist Louis Paul. Though the story centers on the travels of two ex-doughboys after World War One, Paul incorporated elements from the life of his better-known friend, John Steinbeck. It’s perhaps less of a hobo book than a book of many unsuccessful attempts to be hobos. The lead, one Resin Scaeterbun, accompanied by his Army buddy Copril Ootz, wind back and forth across the States in search of idleness.
As Paul told an interviewer, “They want to become bums, to give their whole souls to the art of bumming. But they find themselves circumvented and defeated on every hand.” But, he complained, “In a competitive economy, it is very hard to avoid work.” Instead, Resin finds himself at various times a bootlegger, fight promoter, poet, reporter, pornographer, and screenwriter, ending up in the thoroughly disgraced profession of bookseller. One reviewer wrote that Paul “writes as Rube Goldberg draws cartoons, with a delicious sense of the ridiculous.”
The Hiding Place opens with Hans Frick putting on his Nazi party uniform, preparing his breakfast, and taking a tray with meals down to the two RAF airmen imprisoned in his cellar. While they eat, he tells them a story about a British bomber shot down outside Karlsruhe. The crew, having been rescued after parachuting into the Rhine, were summarily shot by the local Gauleiter. He then heads upstairs, changes out of his uniform and into a suit, and bicycles in to work.
“The date was June the twelfth, nineteen fifty-two.”
Well into the 1950s, the Soviet Union was returning its last surviving German prisoners from World War Two. For several decades after 1945, stories would appear from time to time of Japanese soldiers who emerged from the jungles of Pacific islands after hiding out for years, unaware the war had ended. But in The Hiding Place, Robert Shaw imagines the plight of two British airmen held in isolation, ignorant of the outside world aside from the stories of victories on the Russian front, amazing new German weapons, and the continuing futile attempts by Allied bombers to attack Germany.
This is not, however, an alternate history like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Instead, it’s a tightly-focused study of the psychology of prisoners and their jailer that anticipates by over a decade the phenomenon known as Stockholm syndrome. Connolly and Wilson, having bailed out when their Lancaster bomber was hit on a raid over Bonn, are taken prisoner by Frick, a civil defense auxiliary. To keep them from being lynched by an angry mob, he ushers them to his nearby house and locks them in the bomb shelter that’s been built in his basement. Thanks to his late mother’s fears about being buried alive, the shelter is extremely strong and completely soundproofed.
As the first hours pass, however, he realizes the quandary he’s in: he cannot take the men to the Gestapo without questions about the delay; neither can he set them free. He soon decides the only solution is to keep them prisoner in his house. And so he enters upon a fiction that, once started, he can’t figure out how to end.
Shaw manages with remarkable success in convincing the reader that Frick could continue to convince his prisoners that his fiction is their reality. In part he does this by careful attention to the necessary practical details, but more is the result of his understanding of how prolonged captivity, particularly in relative comfort compared to what the typical Allied POW in Germany could expect, erodes the will to resist.
The monotony of their existence also saps their initiative. After an argument over Connolly’s latest idea for overtaking Frick and escaping, the two men stop suddenly:
After a moment, Connolly and Wilson felt the whole of the previous conversation had been incomprehensible: neither of them could remember what had been said; surely they had said it before; it seemed to bear no relation to anything whatsoever; and in what order had the sentences fallen? They didn’t know if it was exactly similar to hundreds of other conversations, or significant in some tiny detail, some fresh twist. Connolly swayed again. He felt so weak this morning. Wilson felt as if he had been improvising the same tune at a piano for years, and now, asked to play the original, had forgotten what it was. What had they been talking about?
Wilson endures their confinement better than Connolly. A lawyer in civilian life, he early on convinced Frick to supply pencil and paper so he could practice translating remembered English texts into German. When his memory ran out, his imagination took over. Gradually, Connolly becomes “aware how much Wilson was changing — how much he was beginning to enjoy writing — how much there seemed for him to do.”
Eventually — and quite by accident — Wilson and Connolly do escape, and in some ways what happens next forms the most interesting part of the book. Interesting because the reader wonders where Shaw will take the story. After all, the men think the war is still going on, that they are in the midst of enemy territory. So, even after getting away from Frick, Frick’s fiction remains with them: they are, indeed, actively resisting being set straight.
Frick also struggles to adapt to his new reality after the escape, for he has become as emotionally dependent upon them as they have been physically dependent upon him. Despite the inhumanity of Frick’s actions, Shaw makes him seem sympathetic in the end. The Hiding Place manages to be both thrilling and tender and — despite the very specific conditions upon which the story is premised — also somewhat timeless. It could almost as easily have been set during the American Civil War or on another planet as science fiction.
The Hiding Place was twiced staged as a television play: once in the U.K. with Shaw himself, along with Sean Connery, as the airmen, and once in the U.S. with James Mason as Frick and Richard Basehart and Trevor Howard as Wilson and Connolly. Unfortunately, neither one of the productions received positive reviews. Then in 1965, Gottfried Reinhardt, son of the legendary theater director Max Reinhardt, decided to turn it into a comedy, Situation Hopeless … but Not Serious with Alec Guinness as the jailer and Mike Connors and Robert Redford as the airmen, now Americans. One IMDB reviewer wrote that the movie “was sheer torture to watch”; another, that it was “the strangest Alec Guinness film out there.”
The Hiding Place was Robert Shaw’s first novel. And though he’s now primarily remembered as an actor, he wrote a total of five novels between 1958 and 1969. His second, The Sun Doctor (1961), won the Hawthornden Prize and is becoming rather rare and expensive. The Flag, is something of a realistic parable, perhaps along the lines of William Golding’s The Spire. The Man in the Glass Booth (1967), inspired by the Adolf Eichmann trial, was adapted with considerably more critical successful both for the stage and film. A Card from Morocco (1969), about two British expats on the prowl in Spain, bears traces of Anthony Burgess in its corrupted sense of humor. All, sadly, are long out of print.
The Hiding Place, by Robert Shaw
London: Chatto & Windus, 1959
This ought to be one of the rediscovered classics of this pandemic. Like Fernand Gérard Doucin, the narrator of Jean Dutourd’s novel Five A. M., many of us have found ourselves wide awake in the early hours of the morning, staring at the ceiling, our mind wandering along the edge of an abyss of despair:
Catastrophe: not the least little bit of sleep between my eyelids! My mind is as clear as at noonday. The room has grown considerably lighter, too. I can hear the muted ticking of the alarm clock hidden in the closet. Panic! I am filled with panic.
Like Doucin, we find our thoughts “revolving in [our] lucid brain like those acrobats known as riders of death, spinning on their motorcycles round and round the inside of a huge drum.” And like Doucin, we drag ourselves into the waking world “haunted by the thought of not having had enough sleep.”
In 1956 (or 1955, when Five A. M. first appeared in French as Doucin, the global spectre was not disease but the atomic bomb. Comparing his trivial accomplishments with those of Homer and Shakespeare, Doucin reflects, “Besides, the atom bomb may destroy everything in fifty years’ (or fifty minutes’) time. In which case, farewell Homer, good-by Shakespeare, good night Balzac, adieu Doucin (Fernand and Gerard).” Born a few years after Doucin was having these thoughts, I can still remember how, as a child, upon awakening to the flash of lightning outside my bedroom window as a kid, my first thought was that a nuclear war had begun.
But in Doucin’s case, it is less global destruction than the minutiae of his own life that fill his thoughts. A thirty-year-old bank clerk, bachelor and largely lapsed Catholic, he worries about money, his weight, about his smoking, about his baldness. While the last of these could be seen as mere vanity, Dutourd recognizes something I’ve been saying ever since I went bald myself — namely, that being bald requires one to stare death in the face each morning.
Perhaps as a symptom of his profession, Doucin is a calculator. “How many people in the world care about me, alive or dead? How long will they talk about me after my death?” he wonders. Not many of them will be women. As a lover, Doucin is more hunter than collector. Even as he feels his attraction to a new mistress, his thoughts race ahead to the moment when he will grow bored and have to break with her.
Smoking is easier to quantify. “How many cigarettes have I smoked in sixteen years?” he wonders. “Possibly 150,000.” Of these, nothing remains — except, of course, the collective damage they’ve done — are still doing — to his body. Unlike the narrator in Italo Svevo’sZeno’s Conscience, however, his last cigarette is nowhere in sight: “I can’t stop,” he despairs. “As night closes in, as the lights come on, my frantic need to smoke grows more intense.”
As a realistic description of insomnia, Five A. M. is a success. But it fails, in the end, as a piece of literature. Doucin is too much of an empty shell — or rather, the emotion at the core of his being is one unlikely to compel much sympathy from the reader: boredom. “I am convinced that I know the world inside out. Everything bores me. I know everything in advance. Love, war, the passions, money, all disgust me like a sauce gone bad.”
Even though the word love appears three times more often in the text than boredom and its variations, the spirit that fills the pages of Five A. M. is paralysis. “A man who loves boredom,” Doucin reflects, prefers it “to diversions, pleasures, happiness, everything.” He will refuse to go to a cafe, refuse to call his friends, refuse to move: “He will stay at home for weeks on end, sprawling on a sofa, all alone with boredom.” As Time magazine’s critic responded callously, “Author Dutourd writes as dry ice feels, but his chilling message is only half true. A man’s lifetime is invariably more than the sum of what he thinks and feels in the small, black hour of the hoo-ha’s.”
Jean Dutourd, 1956
Perhaps Five A. M. was only a therapeutic exercise. “I used to wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning filled with morbid thoughts,” he later claimed, “and said to myself that the best way to fix that was to write a book. I wrote it with the utmost pleasure, in just a couple of months, and have slept soundly since.” Even so, French critics thought well enough of Doucin to nominate Dutourd for the Prix Goncourt (he lost to the now-forgotten novelist Roger Ikor’s novel Les eaux mêlées, later published in English as The Sons of Avrom).
At the time he wrote Five A. M., Dutourd was undergoing an ideological sea change. Having been an active member of the Resistance — narrowly escaping execution after being captured by the Gestapo in 1944 — by the mid-1950s, he had forcefully declared himself as a Gaullist, writing an enthusiastic review of de Gaulle’s memoirs and writing The Taxis of the Marne, which was partly a memoir of his wartime experiences and mostly a brooding reflection on the state of France as he saw it.
It’s not a pretty read in light of today’s world. “In 1935, with her institutions, her cabinet ministers, her soldiers, her severe court of justice, her sparkling navy, her strict prefects, her Pacific empire, her cruel colonists, and her State patriotism, France was a lion,” he declares. To protest against this state, even at the smallest scale, he argued, “was noble and courageous.” “But the France of 1956 is a weak and divided country,” he continued. “The anticonformists are donkeys kicking a dying lion.” His preference to the campaigns of the left, was patriotism. And “By patriotism,” he wrote, “I mean active, intolerant, cruel and effective patriotism.” Orville Prescott, The New York Times’ usually conservative book editor found The Taxis of the Marne “crammed with fine, mouth-filling denunciation, drenched with eloquent cries of lamentation and despair.” And the equally conservative Paul Johnson noted ironically, “Dutourd remarks, correctly, that too many Frenchmen regard their memories as rights; but his whole book is a convincing demonstration that he himself shares the fallacy.”
Dutourd’s shift continued over the course of the next decade until, by the late 1960s, he showed himself sympathetic to royalism in his novel Pluche, or the Love of Art (1967). Eventually, he grew so identified with the establishment in France that he became a target of radical leftists. In the early hours of Bastille Day in 1978, Dutourd’s apartment on Avenue Kleber in Paris was wrecked by a bomb planted by a so-called “Franco-Arab refusal section” that wanted “to destroy the lair of the provocateur Jean Dutourd, a man of the pen at the service of the Jewish press.”
Dutourd was by then writing a column for the evening newspaper France Soir in which he often mocked the pretensions of the left. His cynicism, particularly of leftists still taking favorable positions toward the Soviet Union, would prove prescient. As he wrote just a few days before the bombing, “In a few years’ time, the proletarians and intellectuals will perceive that the fatherland of socialism is nothing other than a military empire.”
Five A. M., by Jean Dutourd
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956
Lionel and Diana Trilling in the 1940s Diana Trilling started writing weekly book reviews for The Nation magazine in early 1942 and kept at it for most of the next seven years. Collected in her 1978 book, Reviewing the Forties, her reviews offer a fascinating glimpse into the state of English-language fiction at mid-century.
She came to the job in part through the reputation of her husband Lionel Trilling, but she came well-prepared, having been Lionel’s copy writer for over a decade. As Paul Fussell wrote in his preface to this collection, “as a critic, Diana Trilling has range; she is not satisfied to leave literature sitting there uninterpreted in its fullest psychological, social, and political meaning, for she perceives that “literature is no mere decoration of life but an index of the health or sickness of society.”
Books, for Diana, were either decent or indecent, vulgar or civilized, responsible or irresponsible. Forget the hundreds of skewered writers who have gone down into oblivion; routinely, she also took apart the likes of John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Evelyn Waugh, Arthur Koestler. Reviewing Truman Capote’s debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, in 1948, she wrote: “I find myself deeply antipathetic to the whole artistic-moral purpose of Mr. Capote’s novel…. I would freely trade 80 percent of his technical virtuosity for 20 percent more value in the uses to which it is put.”
As Tobi Haslett wrote in The New Yorker, also reviewing Robins’ book, Diana Trilling’s “gimlet-eyed assurance that has not always aged well.” Trilling was already developing a reputation for being, as Marjorie Perloff put it, “a difficult, at times unpleasant woman — self-absorbed, arrogant, catty and competitive — who managed, sooner or later, to alienate just about everyone she knew.” Not that she couldn’t be entertaining when she had her knives out. I love this assessment of that domesticated English favorite, Angela Thirkell:
Advertised as a pleasant bundle of froth, Angela Thirkell is in fact quite a grim little person. For all her gentle voice, she is one of the great haters on the contemporary fictional scene. She hates sex, the movies, and the lower classes, except an occasional half-wit mechanic. The cousin of Rudyard Kipling, she hates “natives” and foreigners; she hates servants, except the governess who can frighten the grown son of a peer by asking him if his hands are clean.
Trilling’s standing as a critic has fallen considerably since her death. She is dismissed for having slammed the likes of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jean Stafford, Saul Bellow, and Christopher Isherwood, while praising a few number of now-forgotten novelists.
It’s this point, however, that interested me in Reviewing the Forties. While many seem to think that Trilling’s criticism of books now considered classics such as 1984 imply that she was also dead wrong about the writers she liked, I’ve read enough to know that forgotten-ness is never a reliable indication of whether a book is worth reading. Here, then, is a sample of some of the now-neglected books that Trilling gave her thumbs-up to:
… written when Miss Athas was only twenty-two, her first published work, is strikingly talented. It is also an admirable attempt to put sensibility at the service of growth rather than of self-pitying retreat.
There is much fantasy in our literature of sensibility but it is predominantly narcissistic, unable to move beyond the range of the writer’s self-love. The fantasy in Miss Athas’s novel is almost frighteningly unhampered. On the one hand, Miss Athas can generate large dramatic conflict out of something as seemingly trivial as the murder of a pet canary. On the other hand, she can match Faulkner in the imagination of aberrant behavior. Her story is set in Maine and even her descriptions of landscape and weather are free and bold. It is only in her statement of the source of Eliza Wall’s sexual fears that Miss Athas works by rote, looking to the textbook.
A social-work novel, despite the fact that it is unsparing in its criticism of that profession, Lilly Crackell is the most estimable novel I have read this week. A story of America’s lower depths, Lilly Crackell traces the career of a young girl raised in the squalor that is so apt to fringe American prosperity. When we first meet Lilly it is 1918; Lilly is a lovable child of fourteen, about to become the mother of an illegitimate baby. Twenty-four years later Lilly is the mother of six children and still the victim of almost unbelievable misery and privation.
Mrs. Slade … writes barely and factually with none of the “literary” overtones that make poverty good reading: it is unlikely that Lilly Crackell will have a fraction of the popular appeal of The Grapes of Wrath. But the book is no less courageous: it takes courage to make explicit the meaning of the war for people who have never had a chance to be anything but a drain on society.
Mrs. Morris has published a volume of short stories but I am unacquainted with the earlier work. Her novel is set in Sweden where she was bom, and has two heroines, the sisters Anna and Jezza, who tell their firstperson stories in alternating chapters. Both girls are excruciatingly precious, and precious to themselves; self-love seems to be a concomitant of sensibility in women writers, and Mrs. Morris is one of those oh-the-aching-wonder-of-it-all literary women for whom a snowflake or a sausage is equally an occasion for ecstasy. Yet whatever my dislike of so much quiver, I have to admit Mrs. Morris’s talent. Cumulatively, her sensibility loses some of its exacerbation and even begins to take effect; after the first hundred pages I found myself acutely aware of the charm of her village in northern Sweden, almost as nostalgic for it as if I had myself known it. And it is certainly no denigration of Mrs. Morris’s gifts to say that she frequently invites comparison with better writers than herself: for example, her gallery of decayed gentlewomen — Anna and Jezza’s aunts — is suggestive of Chekhov, and the spiritual stature which she can give to the life of privacy suggests Isak Dinesen.
[It] wears no air of importance, is entirely understandable and even lively, it must be singled out from the run of current fiction: these are rare, if relative, virtues. It is some time since I have read a novel whose author comes through his book so attractively. Even where Mr. Newhouse’s manner is less than striking and his characters less dimensional than is their human privilege, we see the former fault as a defect of modesty, the latter as a defect of kindliness.
Like most good South American fiction, The Horse and His Shadow is a revolutionary novel but unlike the revolutionary fiction of our own country, it is subtle, fluid, deeply concerned with the drama of human relationships. The action moves between the estancia of Nico Azara, outside Montevideo, and the community of Polish refugees and poor natives who live on the fringes of Nico’s lands. On the estancia itself there is every shade of political opinion. In addition to the peons at the one extreme, and the arrogant Nico at the other, there is Adelita, Nico’s wife, an aristocrat of decent liberal opinions; there is Bica, her servant and illegitimate half-sister, who lives in lonely severity among the men ranchers; there is Marcelo, Nico’s brother, sought by the government for his part in smuggling refugees into Uruguay. Mr. Amorim doesn’t measure either the decency and courage or the weakness of these people by the famihar yardstick of their social-political views….
Even the poor people in Mr. Amorim’s novel, the gauchos and the struggling refugees, are shown naked of grandeur in an amazing scene in which two of their number steal the services of Don Juan for a broken-down mare. What Mr. Amorim is saying is what is too seldom said in fiction these days, that it is by both the new and the old, by the mixture of good and evil, by the progressive and the retarding, that society must advance, and he says it in the only way fruitful for the novelist, through drama and even melodrama.
[T]he surprise literary package of the season, the most thoughtful and talented novel I have read this year. Mr. Wolfert is correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance, a Pulitzer prize-winner in reporting, and author of The Battle of the Solomons but he turns out to be that rare creature, a newspaperman with a notable gift for creative writing. Tucker’s People is an outstanding novel, the simple statement of whose theme—the numbers racket in Harlem—gives no hint of its emotional and intellectual scope. Tucker’s People is a study in gangsterism; its characters are racketeers, politicians, hangers-on, police, and their families. But this is no Damon Runyonesque novel of the underworld; Mr. Wolfert talks out of his head, not out of the corner of his mouth. He views gangsterism as an aspect of our whole predatory economic structure and at least by implication his novel is as much a novel of legitimate American business as it is of racketeering.
In the sense that Mr. Wolfert is attacking the entire system of capitalism, he has of course written a “radical” novel, but it is in the sense that his method is the method neither of pamphleteering nor of rabble-rousing but the method of anatomizing society by anatomizing people that his novel is truly radical.
…although not so direct in its romantic appeal as Kabloona, the same writer’s account of his stay among the Esquimos, is still one of the notable books of recent years, shining out of the mist of most current writing with the full light of M. de Poncins’s remarkable personality. To read the books of M. de Poncins is to be unusually aware of their author: he seems at once very worldly and very internalized, monastically intense in spirit. One has the impression of an intelligence peculiarly of the French aristocratic tradition, and indeed Home Is the Hunter is a reconstruction — or a commemoration — of the almost feudal background against which, we can guess, M. de Poncins was himself bred. It is published as fiction but it is not strictly a novel. Rather, it is both elegiac poetry and penetrating sociological research into a culture which was already vanishing glory when the author was a small child before the first war.
The writer Trilling singled out for her greatest praise was a favorite of neglected book fans: Isabel Bolton. Of Bolton’s debut novel, Do I Wake or Sleep, she wrote:
Isabel Bolton’s Do I Wake or Sleep is quite the best novel that has come my way in the four years I have been reviewing new fiction for this magazine. Small, anonymous in the welter of current books, it might very well have escaped my notice had Edmund Wilson not called attention to it in the New Yorker: the possibility of such an oversight will now become my reviewer’s nightmare. Mr. Wilson’s high praise prepared me, however, only for a work of exceptional talent. It did not prepare me — nothing but reading the book could — for the extraordinary process of revelation that Miss Bolton’s novel turned out to be.
Opening as a minor work of poetic sensibility, the kind of writing which Miss Bolton herself goes on to describe as achieved with the nerves rather than with the deeper centers, Do I Wake or Sleep gradually deepens to become a work of compelling insight; then the story progresses a bit farther, and the intelligence that one has hitherto noted simply as a restraining force upon poetic excess slowly proclaims its dominion over the novel’s whole conception; finally one confronts the real shape and intellectual strength of the book, and recognizes the source of and response to a major fictional experience.
I have no idea who Miss Bolton is: the jacket of the novel is provocatively uninformative. Whoever she is, she is the most important new novelist in the English language to appear in years. Whatever her literary apprenticeship, her book—it is a long novelette, really, rather than a novel—is the achievement of a fully matured artist.
When Bolton’s second novel, The Christmas Tree, came out three years later, Trilling proclaimed that Bolton had established herself “as the best woman writer of fiction in this country today”:
Miss Bolton works like a mosaic-maker, piecing together bits of scenes and persons—but it is a full panorama and a full cast, though given us in such tiny fragments—until finally, in unbelievably small compass, the whole pattern and intention are laid out before us. By what miracle of selection and organization she catches in 212 pages all we need to know of four generations of her Danforths, a story which in the hands of any other writer would have been a giant tome, is a not-to-be-fathomed secret of her craft. She could not have done it, one is sure, had she used a different narrative manner. The reader may be too conscious of, even irritated by, her long Proustian sentences but they admirably connect past and present, and permit Miss Bolton to recollect, create, and comment upon, all at the same time and with greatest economy.
by Patrick Bennett (1988), however, Anderson spent two years “in the twilight world of vagabonds, riding the side-door Pullmans across the nation — San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, Boston. Now and then he turned to riding his thumb along the highways, although he felt that hitchhiking was ‘like sticking your tail out and every time somebody passes they kick it.'”
, she wrote:
, came out three years later, Trilling proclaimed that Bolton had established herself “as the best woman writer of fiction in this country today”: