Short Reviews

Short Notices

Shorter reviews of neglected books.

The Wreck Out on the Highway: Novels and Auto Accidents

The wreckage of James Dean's Porsche, September 30, 1955
The wreckage of James Dean’s Porsche, near Cholame, California, September 30, 1955

It only takes a second. One moment, everything’s fine; the next, everything’s shattered. A friend of mine said her father once told her, handing over the keys to the family car, “When you get behind that wheel, you’ve put your finger on the trigger of a loaded gun.” For decades, “Road injury” has, according to the World Health Organization, been one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide. As irrational as America’s obsession with gun ownership is, the fact remains that most of us don’t own one and gun violence affects far fewer of our lives than death and injury from automobile accidents.

It’s the dramatic potential — and here the meaning of potential in mechanics is also relevant — in an automobile accident that has tended more than a few novelists to use it as a catalyst or centerpiece. It’s probably no coincidental that most of these novels appeared between the late 1940s and mid-1960s: these were the years when American cars were big, fast, and almost completely lacking in any safety measures aside from the driver’s attention and skill. Freeways hadn’t yet overtaken two-lane blacktop highways as the primary conduit for travel of any distance, and any kid with memories from those days will be able to recall wincing as soon as their dad started to move out to pass some truck or car driving too slow for his taste.

Covers of The Descent by Fritz Peters

One of the first of these novels was Fritz Peter’s The Descent (1952). Peters spent his teenage years living in the loose community of followers around the mystic George Gurdjieff, arriving not long after Gurdjieff suffered a near-fatal car accident outside Paris and often wheeling him around the grounds in those first months — one of the memories recounted in his Boyhood with Gurdjieff (1964). It’s not surprising, then, that his experiences with Gurdjieff and the philosopher’s interest in man’s ability to control his destiny led him to use a multi-car accident on a mountain highway in New Mexico as an instrument for illustrating how its outcome might or might not be affected by the actions or thoughts of its victims. Peters captured the disruptive effects of an accident:

Reality, the fundamental, basic reality of life, had been imposed upon everyone involved in the accident for at least a short time. The dreams, illusions and enchantments, the superficial aims and purposed, desires and wishes, of the victims and the spectators were stripped away by the shock, leaving only the human essentials. The veneer of civilization that passes for human dignity had — for a time — ceased to exist.

Peters takes a Ship of Fools/Grand Hotel approach, leading up to the event through the eyes of a dozen or more of the people involved — victims as well as those who have to clean up the mess. For some, the accident quickly becomes a faint memory or statistic, but for those responsible and injured — physically or emotionally — their lives “continue to reverberate to the consequences.”

Covers of The Accomplices by Georges Simenon

Joseph Lambert, the rich businessman who kills a busload of school children when he’s focusing on the hand up his mistress’s skirt than the one of the wheel of his Citroen in Georges Simenon’s The Accomplices (1955), has his own sense of predestination in the first moments after the impact:

It was brutal, instantaneous. And yet he was neither surprised nor resentful, as if he had always been expecting it. He realized in a flash, as soon as the horn started screaming behind him, that the catastrophe was inevitable and that it was his fault.

As Simenon was often wont to do, he takes morbid pleasure in compounding the sins involved in his hero’s downfall. Not just a hit-and-run accident, but adultery, corruption, cover-up, collusion, and good old-fashioned hypocrisy. The sinister possibilities of the situation, in the hands of a master of human fallibility, make The Accomplices one of Simenon’s all-time best romans dur.

Covers of Juice by Stephen Becker

In Juice (1958), on the other hand, Stephen Becker’s focus is less on the psyche and more on the system. When Joe Harrison, heading home after three martinis and feeling no pain, runs down and kills a pedestrian on his way home, the system of business and justice in Southern California kicks in. The head of a chain of newspapers and television stations, Joe is in too prominent a position for those with a stake in his reputation to sit idle. The chairman of his board steps in, hires an expensive Hollywood lawyer, and mounts a campaign of public and private persuasion — the “juice” of the title — to swing a verdict of innocence. Becker caves in to his sense of justice in the end, which prevents Juice from being quite as juicy as it could have been.

Covers of Be Silent Love by Fan Nichols

Fan Nichols is an unjustly neglected woman “hard case” novelist who had a unique take on a hit-and-run story in Be Silent Love (1960) (also known by its unsubtle pulp paperback title The Girl in the Death Seat). Here, the focus is on the passenger, not the driver or the victim. Riding alongside her married boyfriend on the way to their weekend hideaway along the Hudson, Kay Hubbard begins to realize that adultery isn’t the worst thing he’s capable of after he clips a teenager and decides to drive away, hoping that no one has seen the accident. For a while, she plays along — it was her car, after all — but gradually understands the inevitable domino effect of compounded lies.

Ironically, though, Nichol’s most convincing character is the boyfriend, David Drake, a mass market paperback version of Richard Yates’ Frank Wheeler from Revolutionary Road. On the one hand, he’s full of his own superiority, smugly satisfied that he has managed both to wed a Congressman’s daughter and to bed a gorgeous redheaded girlfriend. On the other, no matter how high up the ladder he might rise, he can never stop looking down in fear:

Everybody was jealous of his success and he had to fight for what he wanted; he had always had to fight everybody, the ones trying to pull him down, step on him, knife him, crush him, all the bottom dogs of the world after him, snapping at his heels to stop him from climbing a ladder they could never, never climb.

Unfortunately, to resolve the predicament she’s created, Nichols has to turn Drake into a psychokilling machine and plausibility flies out the door by the third or fourth murder-to-cover-up-the previous-murder. Well, at least the pages fly by.

Covers of Accident by Elizabeth Janeway

In Elizabeth Janeway’s The Accident (1964), the young spoiled son of a wealthy importer runs into a tree at 97 miles per hour. He walks away with a few scratches; his college friend in the passenger seat is disabled for life. The accident sparks a previously faint sense of conscience in the young man. His family, on the other hand, responds in a variety of unhelpful ways: denial (his mother); corruption (his father); abandonment (his father again). Janeway introduces the wreck into their lives like a tiny drop of acid on a set of poorly-finished welds, and soon the connections are all coming apart: the center cannot hold when there’s nothing there in the first place. The New York Times gave the book to Frederick C. Crews, hot off his moralistic bestseller, The Pooh Perplex, and his verdict was predictably castigating. He called The Accident a “very adult soap opera” and found it typical of the genre of soft-hearted liberal literature whose “distinctive aspect … is its morbid sympathy for human weakness; any weakness will do.” Janeway, whose Powers of the Weak cries out to be rediscovered as a guide to help us rebalance the allocation of power and navigate out of the mess America’s in, was anything but soft-hearted, but Crews wasn’t the first or last man with an agenda to employ something a woman had written as a soapbox to hector from.

Covers of The Pursuit of Happiness by Thomas Rogers

Though published just four years after The Accident, Thomas Rogers’ The Pursuit of Happiness (1968) in some ways seems the more dated book. There are more than a few parallels between the two novels. In both, the driver at fault is a college student and son of a wealthy family. Janeway’s Steven Benedict destroys the life of his friend; Rogers’ William Popper kills a black woman on the streets of Chicago while’s chatting away with his girlfriend. Both men take responsibility, if not immediately — Popper going to jail for manslaughter, though he eventually decides to escape to Mexico. Both families respond in a variety of ways — protective, abetive, supportive.

But The Pursuit of Happiness is very much a novel of its particular time: 1968. William Popper’s classmates would be marching against Mayor Richard Daley’s police a few months later and the living rooms of his parents and aunts and uncles would be filled with images of dead soldiers in Vietnam and race riots in Watts and Detroit. Rogers took his epigraph from the Nichomachean Ethics: “There is a general assumption that the manner of a man’s life is a clue to what he on reflection regards as the good — in other words, happiness.”

This book came out around the time that you could buy a poster with Charles Schultz’s Peanuts character Linus and the slogan, “Happiness is a Warm Blanket.” And that, in the end, appears to have been William Popper’s own definition. The book is unquestionably well-written, well-constructed. It’s a classic of a certain spare, dispassionate style of fiction. Marian Engel found it “a novel remarkably free of cant,” wrote that the book “gains its stature from its honesty, its truth to patterns of speech and feeling, its accurate and free rendering of the conundrums of human relationships”: “There is no clumsy exposition; there are no purple passages; nothing is particularly quotable.”

And this, I’d argue, is what ultimately undermines the book. William Popper is the epitome of the well-bred, well-educated, well-fed white American who wishes everyone well as long as there isn’t too much discomfort involved for himself. His answer to the American dream is to escape America — which leads me to agree with The New Statesman’s reviewer, Vernon Scannell: “Well, that’s all very fine, I suppose, if you are living on unearned income with a smashing bird in sunny Mexico, but it doesn’t help those millions doing time in the big gaol of the USA.” If the USA is something of a car wreck itself right now, running away from the scene might be an easy answer, but it’s probably not the right one.

This Little Hand, by Pamela Kellino (1941)

Cover of first UK edition of This Little Hand by Pamela Kellino

Should Pamela Kellino have written this book? Set in the East End of London and narrated by the pretty but not very bright daughter of a cleaning woman and a fairly useless former soldier, it’s a grim but vivid story of the bad things desperate people can do. The sins and crimes committed range from petty theft to grand larceny, from white lies to false accusations, from prostitution to illegal abortion, from hot- to cold-blooded murder. A book with few nice things and no nice people, This Little Hand is a long way from your typical middlebrown English novel of its time.

Young Flo lives with her parents, sister and orphaned cousin Ol in what they consider a rather plush flat: two rooms and a kitchen. “We didn’t have any water and you had to go down to the end of the street to get any. It was about five blocks down — they had a lavatory there too. It was a wonderful building.” Ma does the morning cleaning at Greenaway’s, the local department store specializing in cheap and shoddy goods. Flo gets a job wrapping packages at Greenaway’s, and the store serves as the object and instrument of much that happens from then on. As with Raskolnikov’s old pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment, when you’re dirt poor, the most miserable enterprise can seem like Fort Knox.

One night, looking for a back-alley abortion for a friend, Flo meets Karam, an Anglo-Indian whose operations aren’t limited to helping out desperate young women. Flo is immediately attracted. “He was the last thing in the world I would have expected. He was so beautiful that tears had come in my eyes. He was an Indian, but lovely, lovely, like nothing I’d ever seen before.” Struck by Karam’s good looks, confidence, and smooth manners, Flo allows herself to be seduced and then drawn into his other shadowy affairs. From there, the story quickly swirls itself down into a vortex of corruption and violence that ends with Flo holding a knife to Karam’s neck.

This Little Hand could be seen as the distaff counterpart to Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, with Kellino’s Flo and Karam as parallels to Greene’s Rose and Pinkie. In both stories, an innocent — perhaps not truly good, but at least not overtly bad — is pulled over to the dark side by the strength of one truly corrupted and evil.

And yet I knew too much about Pamela Kellino to be fully drawn into This Little Hand. At the time she wrote it, Kellino was roughly the same age as Flo, but at that point their similarities end.
Kellino was born into wealth and comfort. Her father, Isidore Ostrer, was a banker who became own of the moguls of British film when he took over as president of the Gaumont British Picture Corporation in the 1920s. By the age of 24, his daughter Pamela had married twice: first the cinematographer Roy Kellino and then the actor James Mason. She’d also starred in a number of stage and radio productions as well as in a couple of films. Although she wrote two further books as Pamela Kellino and continued to use that name in films until the mid-1950s, she was known as Pamela Mason for most of her career (despite her contentious divorce from Mason in 1962).

Pamela Kellino and James Mason, 1940
Pamela Kellino and James Mason in The Bystander and The Tatler, 1940

So Pamela Kellino and Flo, the narrator of This Little Hand, lived at near-opposite ends of the social and economic spectrum in England. When Flo was being packed off to reform school, Kellino was being photographed for The Tatler and Bystander society pages. Which raises the question: should This Little Hand be criticized in the same way that Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt was?

In the letter that 142 American writers sent to Oprah Winfrey calling for her to pull American Dirt from her book club, they argued that Cummins’ novel was not “imagined well nor responsibly, nor has it been effectively researched. The book is widely and strongly believed to be exploitative, oversimplified, and ill-informed….” They acknowledged that “Many of us are also fiction writers, and we believe in the right to write outside of our own experiences: writing fiction is essentially impossible to do without imagining people who are not ourselves.” So their reservations about American Dirt were, in effect, about degrees. One has to assume that they wouldn’t have objected if the book had been imagined well and responsibly and effectively researched.

I’m at an even farther remove from Flo and her world as depicted in This Little Hand than was Pamela Kellino, so I’m not in a strong position to be passing judgment. But I could not shake a certain skepticism about the book when reading it, in a way that I never once considered when reading G. E. Trevelyan’s story of a London bag lady, William’s Wife (for the sake of comparison). Trevelyan immersed herself in the sensibility of Jane, her bag lady. Jane’s paranoia and extreme avarice becomes the reader’s. In the case of Flo, however, I had more the sensation of watching rather than experiencing — rather like looking at an animal through the bars of a zoo cage. Perhaps Pamela Kellino could have gone on to write better, more convincing accounts of the lives of people far from her experience had she been willing to commit as completely and intensively as G. E. Trevelyan did. But there is throughout This Little Hand an air of dilletantism that the stench of sweat and dirt from Flo’s East End never quite overcomes.

Other Reviews

• Times Literary Supplement

This Little Hand is the story of a young girl brought up in hideous slum conditions and of her introduction into the London underworld. Although it may seem a little too meaty towards the close, the reader is left with an impression of sober imaginative truth, of genuine power also, possibly as yet immature, to convey such truth.

• Edwin Muir, The Listener

[T]he book … is written with an astonishing passion and directness that burns up the squalor. Flo herself is an originally conceived character, a baffling but quite natural mixture of innocence and toughness, only seventeen when she stands her trial… [I]t is quite without the mechanical quality which goes with that kind of writing. It is the work of a sensitive writer whose mind is possessed by the extremes of human misery. As a mere story it is sometimes magnificent.

• Britannia and Eve

When I first met Pamela Kellino, the daughter of a film magnate, she was starring in her first film and was officially listed as a starlet. What she had learned since those days seems to be a lot about a very grim type of life, a London girl who goes to live with an Indian ‘doctor’ who performs illegal operations.

• Vernon Fane, The Sphere

It is all very tough and sordid, yet at the same time it has a warm and human quality, and it is Miss Kellino’s achievement that she never yields an inch in her sympathy for her tragic little heroine. There is a good deal of power in this book, and some signs that when certain immaturities can be overcome the author may have a long way to go on the literary road.

• A. P. West, The New Statesman

One has a feeling that this promising first novel is a failure because the author is writing about a world in which she has no first-hand experience: one recognises vestiges of a number of cases which were reported in newspapers in the narrative, one detects patches of guesswork. If Miss Kellino abandons the practice of dealing in second-hand experience she should become an interesting writer.

• Kate O’Brien, The Spectator

The merits of the book are its simplicity, its truth of dialogue and physical detail, its hurrying sense of life, and its clean, unshrinking characterisations. Its especial merit is in the central character of Flo, who all the way down to disaster never puts a foot wrong — that is to say, never blenches before herself, and never, in the thick of her temptations and sins, really loses love of life, or her curious, much-battered sense of moral obligation to it.

This Little Hand, by Pamela Kellino
London: Robert Hale Limited, 1941

The Penalty of Exile, by Edith de Born (1964)

Cover of The Penalty of Exile by Edith de Born

The Penalty of Exile demonstrates that although Edith de Born had a reputation for writing books that, in Peter Ackroyd’s words, “one can recommend to one’s grandmother,” she didn’t always stick to grandmotherly topics. Within the first 30 pages of the book, we find that its focus is a 14-year-old child prostitute whose mother — also a prostitute — has been stabbed to death. In an interview she gave about a year after publishing The Penalty of Exile, de Born expressed tremendous admiration for Nabokov’s Lolita, calling it one of the finest novels of the century and also characterising it as a love story. Knowing this, I found it hard not to read de Born’s novel as her own attempt to deal with the taboo subject of pedophilia.

Unfortunately, her sensibilities led her to take an indirect approach, telling the story of young Helga Vankammen primarily as seen by the two adults who become personally involved in her case after her mother’s murder. The first is Edgar Kermans, a wealthy Belgian businessman who encounters Helga on the streets around the Gare du Midi in Brussels. Helga is crouched on the sidewalk, gently caring for a ragged mutt of a dog. Struck by Helga’s beauty, despite her tattered clothes and dirty face, Kermans ends up buying the dog and getting some food for the girl.

He leaves her his business card, which is how he’s then contacted by the police after Helga’s mother is murdered. Kermans’ motivations are never quite clear. They seem to be part Good Samaritan, part infatuation, and part a belief that money can solve all problems. De Born sums up an entire slice of bourgeois society in her characterization of Kermans and his kind: “The distinctive trait they possessed in common was the firm belief that the only sure and efficient method of protection for themselves and their families against all potential risks and dangers was the acquisition and preservation of wealth.” (For more, viz. Capital by Thomas Piketty).

The other is Wilhelmina van Hemmen, a Dutch sociologist from a noble family, who takes Helga to live at her kasteel in the Netherlands and undertakes her rehabilitation. An erect, elegant, and iron-willed woman, Madame van Hemmen provides a safe and sheltered environment in which she begins to teach Helga about manners, culture, and trust. A bit like de Born herself, her attempts to work with Helga are awkward and unfamiliar. But de Born is at least capable of recognizing the limitations inherent in this kind of situation. Helga says to Wilhelmina at one point,

“You don’t really know whatmy life was. There’s no chance at all of my ever being happy like you say — through love.”

The last word was pronounced with an effort.

“You’re wrong, dear. I do know what your life was like and I know, and you do, that now it lies behind you. It is definitely past and over.”

Helga shook her head.

“You’ve never been in the middle of it. You’ve only seen it from above.”

Wilhelmina was at a loss to reply. It was a shaming truth that she had seen only from “above” the poverty, stupidity, vice and crime, protected as she was by money and her name; she was totally unaware of her innocence and goodness, an even greater protection than her position.

De Born’s story of Helga’s rescue and redemption is never fully convincing. Like Kermans and Madame van Hemmen, she recognizes the pain and violence that lies at the core of Helga’s experience but is at a loss for how to deal with it except through politeness and a diffident kind of empathy. The ingenue Helga grows up into a stunning beauty who becomes a top model in Paris, but she never sees that success as anything more than a matter of economics: “Once I was treated as a thing, and I’m still a thing, though a different kind put to a different use. Now I am a point of intersection for all sorts of commercial interests: textiles, dress-making, cosmetics, jewelry. I often represent a huge fortune; I never represent myself.”

To give de Born and Helga’s rescuers credit, kindness, comfort, and empathy can go a long way as substitutes for understanding. If The Penalty of Exile never descends into the belly of its beast, de Born once again proves a keen observer, particularly of the better sort of European — even if she does allow herself a very Belgian dig at the Netherlands, whose “insipid, badly-cooked food bore little resemblance to the cuisine on the other side of the border.”

The Penalty of Exile, by Edith de Born
London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1964

Spillville, by Patrica Hampl (1987)

Cover of Spillville by Patricia Hampl

Reading Spillville is a pleasant way to take a trip while cooped up in lockdown. It’s short, like the trip Patricia Hampl and artist Steven Sorman took in the summer of 1986, driving down from Minneapolis to Spillville, Iowa, where the composer Antonin Dvorák spent a summer with his family in 1893.

Back in 1893, Spillville was an enclave of Bohemia in northeast Iowa. “These people came to this place about forty years ago, mostly from the neighborhood of Písek, Tábor,” Dvorák wrote a friend in Prague. “All the poorest of the poor. And after great hardships and struggle, they are very well off here.” By the time Dvorák came to visit, the Czech emigrants had erected a fine church, St. Wenceslas’, and boasted a post office, park, and a ring of prosperous farms surrounding the town — although the Dvoráks still had to come by carriage from the nearest train station in Calmar.

View of Spillville, Iowa in 1905
View of Spillville, Iowa in 1905

Dvorák had been coaxed to Spillville by his secretary, Josef Kovarík, whose parents had settled there. He liked that Spillville wasn’t on the railroad: less noise to block out the birdsongs. The morning after the Dvorák arrived, Kova?ík’s mother spotted the composer walking around at 5 o’clock in the morning. Was anything wrong, she asked? No, he replied. It was just that for the first time in eight months since coming to America, he could hear the birds. Dvorák’s job as director of the National Conservatory of Music required him to take an apartment in Manhattan, where the noise of horse traffic, steam trains, ships, and crowds was a constant annoyance.

As Hampl rides in the backseat with Sorman’s daughter, she realizes how she’s shut herself off to the landscape. “Story is impatient with description, and therefore with landscape’s passive willingness to be framed into a picture.” “But now, passing through this spring farmland,” she observes, “the love of place creates a desire to pause for description.” Part of that, I think, is because the landscape around Spillville is rich but not overwhelming. I grew up in Seattle, where on any clear day you can look south as see Mt. Rainier looming massive and blueish-white. It is so much bigger than anything man will ever build, always reminding you that you are puny and short-lived.

Spillville, on the other hand, has under 400 inhabitants today and wasn’t bigger than that by more than a few dozen in 1893. Dvorák could easily walk from one end of town and back after breakfast, before settling down to compose. Although some claim he wrote his best-known symphony, No. 9, From the New World, in Spillville, that work was finished before he left New York. He did, however, write his popular melody “Humoresque,” a piano quintet (Opus 97), and his String Quartet No. 12, the American. He translated the song of the scarlet tanager he heard there into the scherzo of the quartet.

Hampl doesn’t try to analyze Dvorák’s work or extract more than is obvious from his experiences there. Though not a musician herself, she remembers from her piano lessons with Sister Mary Louis an essential lesson that any good musician has to learn:

“Count first, dear,” she urged. “Then work on feeling.”

Feeling was fine, feeling was indispensable — she granted that. Nothing wrong with feeling. But — this was her point — I had feeling. No need to work further on feeling.

Besides, she would say gently. always a reluctant corrector, there was no work to feeling. And music was work.

Not much beyond the compositions, long walks, and quiet evenings in the summer heat happened during Dvorák’s stay. There might have been some gossip about his oldest daughter Otýlie and one of the Indian men in town, but it died out once they left in September. Not much happens during Hampl and Sorman’s visit, either. They walk through St. Wenceslas, sit in the park with the Dvorák memorial, and tour the one showcase in town, the Bily Clocks museum, which occupies the first floor of the house the Dvoráks rented. The museum is filled with the elaborate wooden clock cases hand-carved by the bachelor brothers Frank and Joseph Bily over six decades. Then, like the Dvoráks , they head back up the highway to Calmar and home.

Barely 100 pages, Spillville is a pleasant trip to a small river town and the quiet that descends when the sound of the highway traffic falls away and there are just the crickets, the birds, and people softly talking.

Spillville, by Patricia Hampl
Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1987

The Least of These, by Celia Dale (1943)

Cover of first US edition of The Least of These by Celia Dale

Celia Dale is best known as an accomplished crime writer, winning, in fact, the Crime Writers’ Association Best Short Story of the Year award one year — but that’s a bit of a limiting label, similar to calling Georges Simenon an accomplished crime writer even if he’d never written a single Inspector Maigret policier. The police usually play a minor supporting role in the dozen or so “crime” novels she wrote from 1950 on. Instead, she focuses on what Eileen Dewhurst called the “atmosphere of understated menace pervading superficially normal lives.” In her last novel, Sheep’s Clothing (1988), for example, two women posing as social workers trick the old and slow out of their mattress-hidden fortunes — a story closer in mood to Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori than to something by P. D. James. She was at her best in noting what one reviewer called, “the minutely observed details of lower middle class life.”

These minutely observed details are at the heart of her first novel, The Least of These, which follows one lower middle class London family, the Sharps, through their experience of the Blitz. The widowed Mrs. Sharp would be certain to put the stress in that phrase on middle rather than lower. When they begin making their evening journey to sleep in their local Underground station, she notes that”there were not very many of the Sharp’s kind down there with them.” But she distrusts the Edwardian Baroque construction of their terrace house and loses what little faith she had in garden Anderson shelters after a near-hit almost kills a neighboring family.

The Least of These is really less a novel than a fictionalized account of life for ordinary Londoners during the Blitz. In early September, the first raids are more novelty than threat. “That Man’s here again,” a nightclub emcee announces as the sirens sound and the audience chuckles. Queenie, the middle daughter, rides along with a boyfriend, taking part in a Sunday caravan to see the damage from an early raid. “Slowly, foot by foot, the cars crawled nearer, and in every vehicle faces gaped at this inconceivable, this fantastic thing — a London shop, wrecked by a bomb. A bomb!”

As the raids continue, the disruptions they cause increase. “Travelling was queer, too, since the raids had started: you never knew where you would find yourself.” Buses are forced to detour through hitherto undisturbed neighborhoods, much to their consternation. “You would look out suddenly and find the bus lumbering diffidently down an avenue of villas, all shocked and shut away behind their outraged railings. Blocks begin to be pocked by ruins left by direct hits. The survivors “lowered their blinds and turned their eyes away, denying the unseemly.” Gaps appear in the assembly lines in factories. “Some of the workpeople were dead, some were in hospital; a few had packed it up and gone to relatives in the country.” Windows are boarded up. Tea is given up when a bomb strikes a water main. Still, they carry on as they can — “you cannot live without wages.”

But then a bomb hits the house next door to Mrs. Sharp’s eldest daughter Effie, her husband and children. “And in the timeless nightmare of a second, the Davises and Effie heard the bones of their house groaning and crunching above them … grinding and crumbling and sifting and interlocking” until the sounds fall away and dust falls like silent snow. As so Mrs. Sharp decides they’re best off spending their nights in the Underground.

Latecomers, the Sharps find “no corners vacant, no merciful angled wall against which to build, sured that your back is guarded and unspied upon;” “All the angles and crannies were taken, old women sat there in stockinged feet, men lounged with newspapers, babies slept.” I’m no Blitz scholar, but The Least of These struck me as perhaps the most vivid account of what it’s like to shelter night after night on the platforms and stairways of an Underground station. As many of us are learning in this pandemic, people can adapt remarkably quickly to radical changes in circumstances if it means survival. Indeed, the abnormal soon becomes normal through habit:

On the Sunday some of the families left their children down there all day to make sure of keeping their places at night. The platforms and corridors filled up earlier than before, and there were more people, squashing tight together along the walls, voluable and busy and determined to live at least this night in safety. Children squalled and ran under the yellow light, like waxen animated dolls; old men, grey and threadbare as their clothes, hunched themselves between raucous mothers wearing pinafores beneath their shabby overcoats. Youths in jackets as loud as their laughter, slick as their slick hair, thrust and lounged about the corridors; the girls giggled together, prinking their Woolworth jewellry above their tight trousers. For as night followed night a sort of uniform had been evolved among the glamour girls of the tube stations — the full battlement of war-paint, jewellry, high heels, curled coiffures, all bravely worn and yielding not a fraction to the exigencies of death and its avoidance; and with it all, trousers, the sole acknowledgment of war’s existence.

People sheltering in the Elephant and Castle Underground station during the Blitz
People sheltering in the Elephant and Castle Underground station during the Blitz

Some take advantages of the changes. One of the Sharp girls, Reenie, gets involved with a gang that stops lorries along deserted roads and steals cigarettes and other rationed items. Prostitutes find it easier to set up trade in the remnants of ruined houses. Soon, “everything, everyone” is different. Queenie finds she “could hardly remember what their lives were like before the raids started. Cinemas, clothes, dances, fun, the scores of people bound up in that existence who had vanished utterly.” She imagines that even the German aircrews flying overhead each night growing bored with the routine, happy to head home “over the Channel, eating sandwiches, emptying their flasks of coffee, while down below the brittle crust of London is broken in a new place….”

The Least of These suffers some of the typical faults of a first novel. The narrative arc is a flat straight line running from early September 1940 to some months later with barely a diversion. We start with the Sharps and we follow along with them through a relentless chronology to an ending in which Dale, according to one reviewer, J. C. Trewin, “outdoes Elizabethan tragedy in a last paragraph which disposes of the entire dramatis personae in less than a dozen lines.”

But Dale was already demonstrating her remarkable talent for observation — for observing the fine telling details of individuals, their dress, manners, and thoughts; and for observing people in numbers, their simplicity and stupidity. She almost certainly spent just as many nights on the cold, crowded platform of a tube station, huddled close to hundreds of strangers, hearing the coughs, whispers, and snores, smelling the urine from the little boys whose tired mothers usher them to the edge of the platform (“‘At’s what it’s for, ain’t it?”), trying to shut out the glare of the lights overhead. And she knew the Sharps, or people like them, their fears and ambitions and favorite comforts. It’s this knowledge that makes The Least of These such a compelling book. It takes a crisis such as we’re experiencing now to remind us how universal some isolated and specific stories can be.

The Least of These, by Celia Dale
London: Hurst & Blackett Ltd., 1943
New York: Macmillan & Company, 1944

State of Possession, by Edith de Born (1963)

Cover of first UK edition of State of Possession

State of Possession represents Edith de Born at mid-career. Her first novel, Gaëtan, was published in 1950; her last (of 18), The Negligent Daughter, in 1978. And yet, having read all three books, I have to say that de Born seems to have reached a high level of maturity with her very first book and maintained it with remarkable consistency throughout. One of her strongest advocates, the novelist and critic Francis King, once called Edith de Born “a literary sport.” But if she is a sport, it would be more appropriate to compare her with Roger Federer or Cal Ripken: she never played to the point of burn-out, always held something back for the next contest. If you’re looking for flash and high drama, keep looking: you won’t find them here.

The story in State of Possession is really the least important aspect of the book. Elisabeth Vandernoot, a Flemish nurse, is contacted by a lawyer. Another Belgian woman, now married to an Englishman and living in London, believes that Lionel, Elisabeth’s son, is actually the child she lost in the chaos of the evacuation from the German invasion of May 1940. Elisabeth is compelled to prove that she did, in fact, give birth to Lionel.

One might think this is a simple matter of producing a birth certificate. But birth certificates are comparatively recent innovations. In many countries and for many years, there were no birth certificates; instead, the parents reported the birth to local town hall or mairie, where it was recorded in a register, often days later. That’s not really the issue in this case, however. Here, neither party can produce definitive evidence — and in Elisabeth’s case, it’s for reasons that are best left to be discovered by reading the book.

A single mother and never married, Elisabeth works as a masseuse. She prefers to call herself an aesthetician because of the seamy connotations of the word masseuse. De Born illustrates the problems Elisabeth faced when she first set up practice:

One man had strutted in and looked her up and down, his face clearly proclaiming that she was not to his taste. “Are you the only woman working here?” he had inquired. “Yes, Monsieur.” For a moment he had hesitated; then, with a shrug, pushing back the hat he had not removed, “O.K. A massage,” unbuttoning his greatcoat. As he began to fumble with more buttons, she had quickly asked, “Have you a doctor’s recommendation” “A what — ?”

Now she attends patiently exclusively in their homes. They are all several cuts above her own station: a retired ambassador; a Vicomtesse. They respect her professionalism and discretion — but they also see her as a non-entity, “describing their ailments at the greatest possible length as though the fact of lying naked before her compelled them to go further and turn themselves inside out.” On the other hand seeing them intimately, in their lavish houses and apartments, she in turn is provided with “a glimpse of worlds beyond her reach, with the result that she felt suspended in mid-air, with no solid ground left under her feet.”

Elisabeth has aspirations for her son Lionel. Having lost its colony, Belgium no longer has the Congo to serve as “a springboard for the lower classes.” The only options for Lionel hinge upon his exam results: with honors, he might get a lifelong government job; otherwise, he will have to go elsewhere — to South America or Africa — and work his way up through some multinational firm. Yet without property of her own — aside from Lionel himself — Elisabeth is also looked down upon by the Peeters, the brusque Flemish family she rents her flat from. One of the pleasures of this book is de Born’s deft and subtle depiction of the intricate dances of social positioning that go on in a small and crowded country like Belgium.

State of Possession is set in Brussels, where de Born and her husband lived for over forty years after the end of World War Two. De Born was a perfect example of the kind of meta-European one finds in Brussels, where the European Commission, NATO, SWIFT, EUROCONTROL and other international organizations bring together people with strongly cosmopolitan sensibilities. Born in Vienna, which she left after the Anschluss, de Born moved to Paris, where she married Jacques Bisch, a French banker and worked with him in the Resistance during the war.

One of her jobs in the Resistance was translating messages to and from British intelligence services, and she credited that experience with teaching her how to write clearly and precisely in English while still managing to preserve essential nuances that didn’t have simple equivalents in the vocabulary and syntax of the other language. She learned well, as many critics like King noted that, “as with Conrad and Nabokov, one receives an impression of infinitely meticulous care in the shaping of every paragraph and even of every sentence.” King wrote,”It is in English that all her seventeen novels have been composed. I use the word ‘composed,’ rather than ‘written,’ advisedly, since, as with Conrad and Nabokov, one receives an impression of infinitely meticulous care in the shaping of every paragraph and even of every sentence.”

Many of the Brussels-based institutions operate on the basis of consensus, where different positions and interests have to be balanced and integrated through a careful, time-consuming and often frustrating process of negotiation. This fosters environments where extremes are actively discouraged and moderation is considered an essential quality for both success and survival. What matters most is not the outcome of any one deal but preserving the ability to make another deal tomorrow. The same spirit can be found in de Born’s work. Her books never find easy answers to the questions they raise. They also display an acute sense of history. As Francis King wrote of another de Born novel, State of Possession “gives the impression of the pasts of its characters receding in a long perspective.”

Despite the comparisons to Conrad and Nabokov, however, Edith de Born’s closest equivalent is probably a native English writer: Anita Brookner. Like Brookner, de Born wrote slight novels that seem to have the substance of tissue paper yet managed to cut like razors. Brookner herself tended to ward of the association. In 2007, she told The Spectator she had been rereading de Born, whom she considered “a completely forgotten precursor, both in style and subject matter” not of herself but of Sybille Bedford. “Of cosmopolitan background — her books are set in Austria, France and Belgium — she demonstrates an intriguing combination of rootlessness and good manners.” Brookner added dismissively, “These novels are long out of print and perhaps need not be revived.” In her 1987 Paris Review interview, however, Brookner said she very much enjoyed de Born, finding her “much more stoical and less sentimental than English writers.”

All of Edith de Born’s novels have been out of print for over forty years, but many of them can be purchased from used book shops for under $15. I note, though, that prices on Amazon are creeping into the stratosphere, so try searching on AddAll.com instead.

State of Possession, by Edith de Born
London: Chapman & Hall Ltd., 1963

Angels in Ealing, by Eileen Winncroft (1939)

Title page of Angels in Ealing by Eileen Winncroft

After enjoying the headlong narrative sprint that is Eileen Winncroft’s first novel, Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! (1938), I took advantage of a recent visit to the British Library to scan the first few chapters of her second (and last), Angels in Ealing. I enjoyed reading them on the train home so much that I went ahead and purchased the one and only copy I could find for sale.

Winncroft — Henrietta Pryke Franckeiss Macloughlin in real life or Martha Blount in the pages of The Daily Express — must have gained tremendous self-confidence from her first foray into fiction, for in Angels in Ealing her omniscience doesn’t even draw the line at wandering through the mind of God himself (or the Most Beautiful One or the Holy One as he (it?) is referred to here). What sets this plot in motion is the Holy One’s exasperation at one particular resident of Ealing, Mr. Plantagent Jones. “I have been watching him for nearly forty-five years. And during that time he has never really tried once to behave properly,” he complains. “It has got to stop.” So, he dispatches the Archangel Michael to attend to it.

Jones — Plaggy to his wife and friends — is speeding down the Great West Road with his “under-nourished, under-exercised but very optimistic” nineteen-year-old new secretary, Vera, sitting next to him, on their way back from an afternoon drive in Surrey. Working with little more than the Holy One’s typically vague commission, Michael, at a loss what to do, sends down a great bolt of light into their path. In the resulting crash, Vera’s head is sheared off but Plaggy survives. Vera finds herself floating above the damage but soon loses interest: “she found she could move herself up and down as though in flight, and so she moved off in search of amusement.” Plaggy, however, is pulled from the wreck and soon finds himself on trial for manslaughter. When he pleads that he was only reacting to “the mighty finger of God” reaching down from the heavens, he is ruled insane and sent off to an asylum.

Relying on an act of God to kick off a story is always risky. In the real world, acts of God — or force majeure to use the contractual term — are often followed up by a great deal of cleaning up and fixing up: not exactly the sort of thing that allows a story to arc toward a climax. In the case of Angels in Ealing, the problem is compounded by the fact that the leading characters, Plaggy and his faithful wife Nellie, are so utterly conventional. Plaggy, the author notes, supports his wife “because everyone did support their wives unless they were cads. And he deceived her because he had no one else to deceive except himself, and being English deceit of some kind was essential to keep up appearances.” Though he goes off his head with a divine vision and Nellie soon finds herself in demand in high society as a fortune-teller, unusual spices rarely make up for bland base ingredients. Even Plaggy’s escape from the asylum is possibly the least exciting in all of fiction: after helping to open the front gate one day, he simply walks out and keeps going.

To liven things up, Winncroft introduces a counterplot involving something she had firsthand experience with: a Fleet Street reporter. In this case, it’s a very good-looking young man with a very well-respected family name — Prosper Haines, only son of a milk millionaire. Unfortunately, Prosper fails to make up through enthusiasm what he lacks in basic intelligence. His chief assets, in the eyes of his editors, are “his name and his connections and very often his photograph.” Without resort to divine intervention, the author puts him in the wrong corner of a love triangle, torn between the good-hearted but middle-class Joy and the empty-hearted but ever-to-stylish Julia. Winncroft devotes several chapters to the machinations among this trio, but clever asides aside, she manages to make them even less interesting than Plaggy and Nellie.

Ironically, it’s the eternally nineteen-year-old Vera who ends up experiencing the only substantial character development in the book. She devotes years to floating through most the the great homes of England, finding the inhabitants full of themselves but the interiors rich in thoughts and dreams: “Thoughts that had sunk deep into walls and dreams so strong and tenacious that they hung like a mist in the corners.” Finally, she looks in on her own family and decides to intervene. Although she manages to rescue her sister from the “horror and greed” of her parents, Vera discovers limits to her heavenly powers. She manages to coax a few neighbors over to have tea with her mother and make sure “that her father fell on something fairly soft when he did fall on his way home from the pub,” she is at a loss with her brother Henry:

He was so frightened of everything that she just couldn’t get hold of him at all. He was frightened of living and frightened of dying. Frightened of holding a job and frightened of losing it. Frightened of drinking too much and frightened of drinking too little and being thought a fool by someone else. Frightened of knowing nothing and far more frightened of finding out something. Just an ordinary normal half well-, half ill-, and half-developed young man, but with all the cunning of his kind to avoid knowing it.

This passage suggests where Winncroft’s real growth as a writer lay between Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! and Angels in Ealing. Gone is the relentless string of “And…. And…. And…” sentences. Where she uses repetition, she uses it sparingly and with good effect. And there are more than a few surgically-precise cuts into the hearts, minds and pretensions of English society of the late 1930s.

Eileen Winncroft
Eileen Winncroft, AKA Martha Blount, AKA Henrietta Pryke Franckeiss Macloughlin, 1938

Sadly, Angels in Ealing marks the end of Eileen Winncroft’s career in fiction. One can’t blame her for the unlucky timing of the novel’s publication. The war hadn’t gone on long enough in November 1939 for readers to have a healthy appetite for escape. Angels in Ealing did get a second printing, but soon disappeared from the shelves for good — and if WorldCat.org is accurate, there are fewer than a dozen copies of the book now to be found in libraries worldwide. A sad fate for a writer whose work is highly readable and certainly not lacking in satiric insights — or ambition.

Other Opinions

• Kate O’Brien, The Spectator, 5 January 1940

Angels in Ealing is another book which ought to entertain a good many people, if they can put up with, or skip, certain unlucky whimsicalities about God and the angels and their direction of suburban destinies. Leaving Heaven right out of it, Miss Winncroft had a good idea, and could have made it just as lightly entertaining, and kept in all her best jokes — some of which are better than you expect. But even as it stands this is an odd, lively little story of strange events in the lives of a middle-aged couple in Ealing.

• Frank Swinnerton, The Observer, 3 December 1939

Angels in Ealing is both more serious and more flippant. Those not offended by its arch glimpses of Heaven will find that in spite of poor invention and occasional descent into girlishness the tale has a sort of quicksilver charm…. Miss Winncroft has much talent, many scathing perceptions, and often a beautifully light touch. When she gives her mind to invention she will write a good novel.

• J.S. The Times, 24 November 1939

Angels in Ealing is a slighter and more fantastic work than Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent, and one is inclined to support that this was the earlier piece. Yet a straggling plot and artificial premises cannot conceal the original twists of this author’s mind…. Her comments on her people are often shrewd; her invention runs to a scene in which a Continental dictator has his fortune told; and her inconsequences have at least the merit of keeping the reader awake. What makes Miss Winncroft particularly engaging, however is the fact that she is never self-important.

• R. D. Charques, The Times Literary Supplement, 2 December 1939

A previous novel by Miss Winncroft was welcomed as a shrewdly entertaining piece of work. It is difficult to know what to say of this present venture save that it is a tangle of apparent inconsequence. Evidently humourous in intention, its occasional jocosities have a disarming flatness, while the element of fantasy signifies everything or nothing. Frankly this seems a rhymeless and reasonless essay in fiction.

• Time and Tide, December 1939

Miss Winncroft’s unusual novel can be read as an inconsequent gay review not pretending to rhyme or reason, or as an unorthodox morality play covering with a sparkling cloak of wit and satire a severe criticism of man’s selfishness and self-importance. In either case it makes an excellent entertainment of real originality.

• James Agate, Daily Express, 25 November 1939

This is as trenchant and witty as the first…. This is a brilliant novel which says more in half a page than most best-sellers say in 300.

Angels in Ealing, by Eileen Winncroft
London: Constable & Company Ltd., 1939

My Hey-Day: Or, the Crack-up of the International Set, by Princess Tulip Murphy as told to Virginia Faulkner (1940)

Cover of My Hey-Day by Princess Tulip Murphy as told to Virginia Faulkner

In a just world, Princess Tulip Murphy would have a place in America’s honorary royalty alongside Emperor Norton, King Kong, and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. In the course of the fifteen years or so when her updates, as faithfully reported by Virginia Faulkner, appeared regularly in Town & Country magazine, Princess Murphy was America’s leading royal. She boasted genuine red-white-and-blue blood: her grandmother was “the first white woman to be called ‘Madam’ west of Rock Island, Illinois” and her husband, “Brick-a-minute” Murphy, reveals in the heat of a barroom brawl that he is descended from a long line of Irish kings. In true American do-it-yourself fashion, Princess Tulip assembles these ingredients into an invitation into the finest circles of international society.

At first, she does resort to a little blackmail ease her way in. A month or two working as a chambermaid in an exclusive Riviera hotel and some spying into the diaries and doings of the various millionaires and noblemen and -women staying there, a few suggestions about the potential damage of a tip or two to the gossip sheets, and soon she has a string of invitations to the finest watering holes in Europe. “Before the afternoon was over, they understood that my friendship was indispensable and my social position was assured.”

From here, we travel along through My Hey-Day on Princess Tulip’s seemingly neverending round-the-world tour: from Scandanavia to India via Russia; from Egypt to Hollywood; from the 1939 World’s Fair to the supposed site of the Garden of Eden in Iraq. All along the way, we meet a hodge-podge of personalities:

… an unfrocked monk from Athos; a Rumanian gun-runner; a stranded Anazc ventriloquist; a Macedonian pimp; a honey-bee salesman from Hymettis; Raymond Duncan; a two-headed brown-and-white goat; and twenty-seven Levantine streetwalkers — to say nothing of a wandering band of Russian wolf-boys….

We also meet such nobility as Lady Crystal Scum, the Bedad of Nawab, Lord Beastie of Kelp, Grand Duke Slavko (the Nero of the Neva and author of What to Do Till the Dictator Comes), and the ex-King of Jugo-ourway.

Princess Tulip Murphy
Princess Tulip Murphy, shown signing her contract for My Hey-Day

If the changing scenery and cast are not enough, we can also enjoy Princess Tulip’s ever-evolving wardrobe:

I was wearing a taffeta middy bloud with a halter of passementerie; an accordion-pleated backless sarong; stout, hand-twisted fondant-colored ski shoes (ideal for dry weather); and a jaunty parka made of the skins of dozens and dozens of elves from the Irish Free State.

In circles where quick-wittedness was considered a prime virtue, Virginia Faulkner had one of the fastest tongues in the business. Gossip columnists like Walter Winchell and Sidney Skolsky often reported one of her sarcastic quips. On an over-exposed actress: “She had established herself in the public eye, ear and hair.” On a particularly ghastly Hollywood actress’s palace: “The decoration was not so much period as exclamation point.” She delighted in the public’s appetite for dished dirt and was not averse to inventing some of her own to keep things lively. Of a scandal involving an actress on Broadway, she remarked: “There have been conflicting stories — all mine.”

Faulkner was often in demand to supply rapid-fire comic dialogue for Broadway shows, radio, and the movies, but at times her tastes went beyond the conventional limits. It’s unlikely that Winchell or anyone else would have quoted Princess Tulip’s report from Russia:

I want to go on record that no matter what you hear about Russia their beauty parlors are most economical. You can get a shampoo, wave, massage, facial, manicure, and abortion all for about seven rubles ha’penny.

In his 1962 book, The Image, the historian Daniel Boorstin defined a celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.” In My Hey-Day, however, Faulkner/Tulip portray a world in which everyone sought to make their knownness ever more splendid in its isolation. “If you don’t already know who someone is, why on earth would you want to meet him?” Princess Tulip asks. “I have never been introduced to most of my intimate friends.” She admires the standards of Baroness Burper, who never consented to set foot in an establishment which did not boast at least one heated moat.

Even Princess Tulip could not be unaware of the great events unfolding outside the heated moats of high society. She acknowledges at several points what she refers to as “the unpleasantness” which was making travel in Europe ever more difficult. In keeping with the American pioneer spirit, however, she devised ways to accommodate the new circumstances — wearing, for example, a specially-designed frock which, “with a little manipulation can be converted into an air-raid shelt, with room for one other, or a good book and three square meals, if you are the cool, practical type.” War and the rumors of war were driving the International Set to taken extreme measures: “Many of my oldest friends can now count their yachts on the fingers of one hand.” Others are closing their apartments as … gasp! … “moving into their homes!”

My Hey-Day was published in 1940 and you might think the fall of France would have brought Princess Tulip’s adventures to an end. There remain, however, uncollected and out of print, a further half-dozen or so of the princess’s stories that Faulkner published in Town & Country over the course of the war and after. This material is crying out to be assembled with My Hey-Day into the complete memoirs of Princess Tulip. It would be a work that deserves a place on the shelf next to Augustus Carp, Esq., The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, and Lord Bellinger: An Autobiography.

My Hey-Day: Or, the Crack-up of the International Set, by Princess Tulip Murphy as told to Virginia Faulkner
New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1940

Drives My Green Age, by Josephine Carson (1957)

Cover of 1957 edition of Drives My Green Age

Once in a while, you luck across a book where something as simple and unique as the narrator’s voice hooks you from the start. This was my experience with Josephine Carson’s Drives My Green Age. Twelve year old Chris, an orphan living with her Aunt Merle and Uncle Ed in Morning Springs, Kansas somewhere in the early years of the Depression, has an eye and a voice that reminded me of Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. I didn’t really have the time this week to read something discretionary in the midst of all my assigned texts, but by page four, I knew I was going to have to surrender a good chunk of my day to this book. It was this description of Merle and Ed, sitting on their front porch on a late summer evening: “They spoke dryly and softly once or twice like the sleepless in their beds at night.”

Chris has been living with Merle and Ed for years. Her father died when she was five, “leaving nothing behind worth knowing.” Her mother, who Merle described as an aristocrat with long fingers and pale cheeks, had died in childbirth. It’s a story Merle often retells, but for Chris, “It had lost one fine layer after another in my slowly billowing life until it was now the kind of story that did not speak of my mother or of me, but only of its teller.”

Drives My Green Age is about a year in Chris’ life, a year bookended by the arrival and departure of Miss Evelyn Bryan, the new schoolteacher in Morning Springs. Miss Bryan is the most glamorous thing ever to happen to the town: well-dressed, well-travelled and well-off enough to drive her own shiny new Packard. “I think she’s going to be beautiful. You know, kind of dressed up and swanky,” Chris tells a friend. Aunt Merle pulls off a coup by winning Miss Bryan as a boarder before the woman even arrives in town, though it means relocating her own bedroom and forcing Uncle Ed — old, heavy, and in poor health — to face the nightly ordeal of climbing upstairs. Chris despairs of the consequences: “Do not kill me for a season of fame, for a Packard car parked in the front of the house, for a celebrated guest,” she imagines Ed thinking. But “Uncle Ed, I remember, was as silent as the ground.”

When Miss Bryan finally arrives and Chris gets to know her — “in small bearable parcels, a bit each day until my eyes grew bolder” — she discovers the new teacher has an almost animal-like disinterest in her pupils:

I said in my other voice:

Now I look into your eyes.

And I looked into her eyes. I had seen them before on harmless little snakes, those eyes which were faintly pushed from behind and which extended far out to the sides of her face. They were large and not more than half open, and they moved slothfully, staring most of the time. I had wanted them to be flower eyes or wasp eyes, but they were inactive and did not even bother to look away from me.

The only real interest Miss Bryan shows is, ironically, animal-like: specifically, in the nightly company of a handsome young farmer named Lou Frizzell. Chris spies Lou slipping through the window to Miss Bryan’s bedroom. While Miss Bryan continues to allow the local bank manager to pay court and take her to town celebrations, she welcomes Lou’s night-time visits on a regular basis. Chris’ idealistic sensibilities are shocked, particularly when Aunt Merle fails to take any notice of the scandal brewing in her own house. Drives My Green Age is a coming of age novel, a book about the complexities one begins to see in the passage from childhood to what Aunt Merle calls “addylescence,” but it’s satisfyingly subtle in the lessons that come from a year living in the same house with Miss Bryan. In a way, what Chris learns is to hold a bit of the same disinterest for herself. When, come summer, Miss Bryan takes off in her Packard, Chris thinks, “Who cares?”:

And nothing answered me. There was the last of her, skimming off the edge of my sight, off the edge of our world. She was gone, utterly gone.

“She is gone,” I said, aloud again.

Josephine Carson in 1957
Josephine Carson in 1957

Josephine Carson was thirty-eight when she published Drives My Green Age. Born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she’d seen her family’s fortune lost in the Wall Street crash, seen her parents lose themselves in alcoholism, lived in New York and L.A., and held a dozen different jobs when her mother came to her and said, “I know you’ve been trying to write. I can’t afford to help you here, but if we went to Mexico for a year, I could support
you.” As Carson later recalled:

[I]t was wonderful! My mother had just come out of her alcoholism. We had been in Mexico almost a year when we got word that my father had died. We returned to the States. My father left me an income. That was when I was not only able to stop being employed for a while, but able to begin taking myself seriously as an independent adult and pursue life more on my own terms. I bought a house and that gave me a tremendous sense of being grown up. The income my father left me gave me time to write. I was in my early thirties by then.

Carson went on to write two more novels, a collection of short stories, and a collection of oral histories, Silent voices: the Southern Negro woman today (1969). She also taught writing at Bennington, San Francisco State, and UC Berkeley. She died in 2002 at the age of 83.

It’s clear from Drives My Green Age that Carson had been observing and recording long before she started writing. Even though this was her first novel, it’s full of observations, stored up over many years, of how people talk and act and react. And how they sit on porches — like Uncle Ed, “huge and cool and wanting nothing in the world.”

Drives My Green Age is available on the Open Library: Link.

Drives My Green Age, by Josephine Carson
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957

Drives My Green Age

Friends and Romans, by Virginia Faulkner (1934)

When Virginia Faulkner published her first novel, Friends and Romans, she was 21 and managed to sound like 41. Or 37, to be more precise. Faulkner narrates this wise-cracking romance through the voice of Marie Manfred, just past 37 and taking a hiatus from her busy career as the world’s greatest concert pianist. To get away from the world, her manager finds a villa in the Alban Hills outside of Rome. She is also trying to get away from the publicity generated by a tell-all biography, Gaudy Calliope, written by a former lover. The Romans she encounters are all confused by the book’s title: they all associate it with the muse of poetry, when it’s actually a jab at her piano-playing style, suggesting it’s akin to a bunch of steam-powered locomotive whistles.

Virginia Faulkner, 1935
Of course, in declaring, like Garbo, that she wants to “be alone,” Marie is inviting half the civilized world to descend upon her. First to arrive is her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Hamilton Cotter Frewitt, wife — or shall we say, soon-to-be ex-wife — of the British military attaché. She brings in tow her current lover, Count Gustaf (Tavo) von Keinlohe, a garden variety fortune-hunting gigolo and, as it turns out, also a former lover of Marie’s. The international set of 1934 ( whose crack-up Faulkner would later recount, through the memoirs of her comic creation, Princess Tulip Murphy, in a little comic masterpiece from 1940 titled My Hey-Day), it turns out, is a close, and often tight, little community.

Lunch with another acquaintance, the Principessa Colosini, leads to an introduction to the Principessa’s younger brother, the dashing and devastatingly handsome Don Ricardo dei Retti. Sparks fly. Animal magnetism takes its effect. He whisks Marie off to a quiet dinner in his discreet seaside villa. Unfortunately, on her way back, Marie discovers that Don Ricardo is more than vaguely connected with Mussolini: he is, in fact, on the hit list of the still-active Fascist resistance movement. They would, so to speak, like to put him at #1 with a bullet.

Danger, however, only adds to Don Ricardo’s allure. A week or two of entanglements, interrupted by periodic calls to vague affairs of government (eventually explained when it’s revealed that Don Ricardo is, in fact, Mussolini’s chief of intelligence), ensues. Marie is convinced that this is the man worth abandoning her career for. Only to run into the very chauvinistic side of Italian raffinatezza: as … come se dice? … a woman with una storia, Marie would be perfect as a mistress. As a wife … eh, non così tanto. As Marie tells herself early in the book, “Most men regard women as the hunter regards the game — precious and exciting during the chase, but after the kill one begins to look for blemishes in the pelt.”

Less than a year after publishing Friends and Romans, Faulkner followed with a second novel, The Barbarians (1935) — but a comparison of the two books suggests that Barbarians was probably the first to be written. There are numerous references to “the Barbarians” — a loose-knit collection of artists and musicians in Paris — throughout Friends and Romans and Marie and Tavo are prominent characters in the book. I shall have to read and report back soon.

At the time she wrote the two books, the sum total of Faulkner’s international experience was a year at Miss Moxley’s finishing school in Rome and a bit of time in London, Paris, and the Riviera after that. Yet she managed to come off as sophisticated and worldly wise as one of the queens of the international set, Daisy Fellowes (and a far better writer). No wonder she was soon writing for America’s poshest magazine, Town and Country, and trading quips at the Algonquin Round Table not long after. A rival to Dorothy Parker, she left her mark on Broadway and in Hollywood as well, but unlike Parker, she pulled herself out of a downward spiral somewhere in the early 1950s and returned home to Lincoln, Nebraska, where she became a key member of the staff of Prairie Schooner and the University of Nebraska Press. She died in September 1980 while watching Monday Night Football. Definitely a life overdue for recognition.

Friends and Romans, by Virginia Faulkner
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1934

Ninety Double Martinis, by Thomas Hinde (1963)

Cover of first edition of Ninety Double Martinis by Thomas Hinde. Cover Design by Victor Reinganum
Cover of first edition of Ninety Double Martinis by Thomas Hinde. Cover Design by Victor Reinganum

Ninety Double Martinis may be the best J. G. Ballard book that Ballard never wrote. It’s full of wonderfully Ballardian details: the regular noise and lights of airline flights taking off and landing nearby; a motorway jammed with commute traffic at all hours, drivers staring ahead with deadened expressions, as if in trances; a brightly-lit shopping center where cashiers wait but shoppers who aren’t there; anonymous men of violent intent lurking in shadows. The road accident on the motorway that never seems to be cleared away could come from Crash. The block of flats in High Rise could be just a little past the shopping center. A sense of nightmarish, random threats pervades its pages.

Thomas Hinde is likely the least known well-regarded novelist of the Amis/Sillitoe/Murdoch generation. He wrote 15 novels, most of them critically praised, but somehow never managed to get the same level of recognition as his contemporaries. Valancourt Books brought two of Hinde’s novels — Mr Nicholas, his first, from 1952, and The Day the Call Came from 1964 — back to print in recent years, but most of his books never saw second printings, let alone reissues. In terms of academic attention, his work at best gets “honorable mention”-type consideration, which usually indicates that the researcher thought it was worth mention but not actually worth reading. Even for myself, though I’ve owned a copy of Hinde’s “British academic in America” novel, High (1969) since the late 1970s, I haven’t yet read it. Though I could probably rattle off a half-dozen of Hinde’s titles, it was a genuine surprise when I saw the title of Ninety Double Martinis on the spine of a red-backed book next to the seven or eight Hinde titles in the UEA library recently. For the title alone I felt I had to read the book.

For the first twenty or so pages, Ninety Double Martinis seems to be about Mullin, a miserable teacher in a dreary New Town school who rents a room from a nasty landlady and has a crush on the cute young school secretary. Aircraft headed for exotic destinations pass over every few minutes, rattling the dishes — “another ninety double martinis,” Mullin thinks when he hears them. Mullin is one of what Isabel Quigley called Hinde’s usual antiheroes: “limp, lost, but basically sympathetic, tormented by loneliness, jealousy, and a feeling of pointlessness….”

Then, in the middle of a rainy Saturday night, Jill, the secretary, knocks on Mullin’s door. “You must come,” she tells him. Throwing on a coat, he follows, and from then on, we follow the pair through an increasingly irrational and violent landscape. They drink coffees in a brightly-lit cafe and watch as seven or eight attack dogs, “with long Alsatian jaws” trot by, followed by “uniformed figures, with low caps and dark faces.” They run to evade these men, but then the explosion comes — or, not so much an explosion as “a bright, hot breath.” They take a pram from a department store display and load it up with food and other supplies, as if they were going to hole up somewhere for weeks. Then they’re running through an enormous office, empty in the afterhours:

He imagined how strange it would seem to the men who came here in the day time. Their papers deranged, blood on their swivel chairs. They’d talk about it all day. They’d go home and tell their wives. They’d look forward all day to telling them, and their wives, watching television, would wish they’d do it more quickly so that they could concentrate on what was real and moving in the eye of the boy. And they’d notice the way their wives weren’t really listening…

On they flee, into a bowling alley where a loudspeaker blares, “Ticket number six seven three report to the control room,” and the apparently casual bowlers suddenly rally, as if by command, and begin pursuing Jill and Mullin. They escape by crawling through the machinery at the end of a lane and find themselves in a vast multi-story machine room overseen by a man in a white coat who watches one particular dial with rapt attention. More strange rooms and unaccountable threats follow until they are thrown into a pitch-black cell. There, lying on her mackintosh laid out on a cold stone floor, they make love — which is probably the most unbelievable incident in the whole book but which I will forever cherish for what is easily the most English line of dialogue ever written: “‘I’ve loved you for months,’ he said. ‘Ever since mark reading last Michaelmas half term.'”

Reviewing the book for The Listener, Jocelyn Brooke described Ninety Double Martinis as “by Kafka out of Sapper,” and that’s a pretty accurate way to describe the book’s strange mix of absurdist malevolence and slam-bam action. I was reminded a bit of G. W. Stonier’s The Memoirs of a Ghost, which I wrote about back in October: both books clearly take place in an alternate, slightly hallunicinatory parallel universe, where things appear normal yet nothing makes sense. Unlike Stonier’s nightmare, however, Hinde’s never gives the reader a chance to stop and take stock: violence and death are always pressing in, forcing things forward. I got the sense that had Hinde set his mind to write a James Bond-like thriller, it would have been a crackerjack one.

And in some ways, he might have been better off to write a more conventional thriller, because I got the feeling that having tossed him characters into an absurdist nightmare, he was at something of a loss for how to bring their story to a close. The easiest answer, of course, is to kill everyone off. The second easiest is to pull a Bobby Ewing and have Mullins wake up muttering something about a terrible nightmare. Hinde did a little of both and not enough of either: the last 5-10 pages are the weakest when they needed to be the strongest to bring off the tour de force effect successfully. But for the first 120-plus pages, it’s the next best thing to a good J. G. Ballard book. I’m pretty sure that I was the first person to crack open the UEA’s copy of Ninety Double Martinis since whoever inserted the magnetic anti-theft strip back in the 1980s and probably the first person to actually read the book, which is a sad statement. Ninety Double Martinis might be a bit imperfect, but it sure was fast and furious.

Ninety Double Martinis, by Thomas Hinde
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1963

Venus on Wheels, by Maurice Dekobra (1930) — For #1930Club

Cover of first US edition of Venus on Wheels by Maurice Dekobra

I decided to abuse the #1930club, this round of the semi-annual reading club organized by Kaggsy and Simon Thomas’, as an excuse to read something by Maurice Dekobra.

Dekobra was hugely successful — successful not just in his native France but among readers all over the world. He came up with his pen-name after seeing a snake-charmer’s act and he was something of a snake-charmer himself. His material was exotic, risky (or risqué and often both), quick-paced, and rarely more than an evening or two’s read. In a way, he made the same kind of appeal to wannabe sophisticates as Esquire later in the 1930s and Playboy in 1960s. You can see how Dekobra himself played this charade in his preface to the English edition of Venus on Wheels:

A philosopher once said, “The world is a great book, and one has merely read the first page when one has only lived in one’s native town.” I would add when one has only loved women of one nation.

“How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?” asked a popular Tin Pan Alley song from World War One. For some ex-doughboys, I suspect the answer was, “Keep feeding them Maurice Dekobra.”

Cover of US paperback reissue of Venus on Wheels by Maurice Dekobra

Many of Dekobra’s books take place in the mysterious East — India or China; the rest in Paris or on the Riviera. All of them involve sex. Or rather, broad, obvious, and leering hints at sex. Everyone keeps their clothes on. But Dekobra does not deny the existence of lust, infidelity, and prostitution — hell, he hammers away at the fact with Stakhanovite zeal. He knew the material would appeal to American readers in particular: “Americans are enchanted here in Paris to find no detectives in the hall, asking haughtily, ‘Is the lady with you your wife?'” he once told an interviewer.

The most admired figure in the book, Monsieur Maline, the grand old man, is respected not for his age and wisdom but for the 88 conquests he has detailed in his little green notebook: “To deceive one’s wife, well anybody can do that. To deceive her so that she has not the slightest suspicion, that is better. But to deceive her fifty-three times without her knowing, that is indeed high art. The work of a virtuoso … the Paganini of the Quai de Passy.” Dekobra has read just enough Freud to believe that sublimation is worse than its cure: “A little five to seven o’clock every now and then has its good points,” one his characters offers in the way of homeopathic advice.

Dekobra’s prostitutes do not have hearts of gold. They would, however, like to have pockets of gold. He spends a fair amount of space in Venus on Wheels defending the professionalism of his pros. What they do, one explains, takes skill:

“It is not enough to be just pretty. It is necessary to know your job.”

“How? Explain yourself, Pauloche. I am interested.”

“You’ve got to have the flair, the tact. You must know what men like. For example, if you are accosted by a sentimental man, puffed up with illusions, first drop a discreet tear, a mother in hospital, a consumptive little sister. Play the ‘Clair de lune’ of Werther until the fellow forks out for a nicely enamelled bedroom suite or pays your rent a month in advance. If, on the other hand, he is a degenerate who is looking for sensations, trot out the drugs. A pinch of cerebos sniffed gently up the nose, or a little Vittel syringed into the thigh. Then the fellow between a couple of pipes of opium (a little Virginia tobacco mixed with apricot jam) will write you a cheque and give you a pearl necklace, gurgling that life is a dream. That’s the way to succeed in business!”

Review of "Venus on Wheels" from Arts and Decoration magazine
Review of “Venus on Wheels” from Arts and Decoration magazine
To crank out books at Dekobra’s rate usually involves frequent recourse to some formula or other. In the case of Venus on Wheels, the formula is the three-act play — more specifically, the three-act structure of a farce by another French bard of infidelity, Georges Feydeau. Act One is set in the wee hours in a Paris bar run by Père Cassis, “an optimist with ogee-shaped [Viz. ogee on Wikipedia, for those like me who need to look it up.–Ed.] shoulders,” who “carries upon his epigastrum, in the shape of various trinkets, evidences of his peccadilloes which we does not expiate because the myrmidons of the Law have enrolled his as an informer.” I haven’t found the text of the French original, La Vénus à roulettes, to tell if the over-the-top lexicography is the fault of Dekobra or his English translator, Metcalfe Wood. There are a fair number of these “aren’t we clever?” wordplays in the book, such as when one of the prostitutes claims one of her competitors “dagged me with a pin.” That one I think we can safely dag on Metcalfe Wood.

A fair cross-section of the demi-monde, including some demimondaines, are wrapping up their nights when in walk two proper society ladies. We soon learn that one of them, Madame Lorande, has decided to carry out a social experiment. She wants to adopt another sort of lady and see if she can turn her into the legal type of working girl. To house her, feed her, re-clothe her, and train her in all the basic secretarial skills. Dutch readers would have been saved the trouble of reading most of the book from its translated title, Als Venus wordt een typiste (trans.: If Venus became a typist). Père Cassis quips, “Here, Madame, folks don’t generally come to lift women up — but rather to pick them up.” Still, one of the girls in the bar, Palouche (not, Dekobra tells us, one “who dispenses sensual pleasure like a Chicago pork-packing machine”), finds the idea interesting. Coming off a rough and unprofitable night, she agrees to the deal. End of Act One.

In Act Two, set in the respectable home of Madame Maline (Madame Lorande’s mother), characters wander in and out of the room where Palouche sits practicing typing. By the end of the act, at least three assignations involving at least four different married people have been arranged. And in Act Three, set in the flat shared by Palouche and her friend Lily, there’s as much coming and going as in Grand Central Station, but in the end I’m not sure anybody actually hootchied or cooed. There was, however, so much eyebrow-arching going on that Maurice Dekobra’s poor forehead must have been exhausted by the time he finished the book.

I’m sure that every other book written about for #1930club is far more substantive, far worthier, far less telling of its reader’s character flaws than Venus on Wheels. I betcha I had the most fun, though.

Santé!

Venus on Wheels is available free on the Internet Archive — but it’s a horrid scan, I’m afraid.

Venus on Wheels, by Maurice Dekobra
London: T. Werner Laurie Ltd., 1930

Fame, by May Sinclair (1930) – From #1930Club

Cover design of Fame, by May Sinclair, Number 13 in the Woburn Books series
Cover design of Fame, by May Sinclair, Number 13 in the Woburn Books series

As a change of pace, I thought I would join Kaggsy and Simon Thomas’ semiannual reading club, this time focused on the books of 1930 (#1930club).

To make things simple, I headed to The Times Literary Supplement archive and simply looked for the first work of fiction reviewed in the first issue of 1930. There, in the first column of page 10, under the title, “Woburn Books Again,” we find a list of titles starting with Fame by May Sinclair. As the review notes, Sinclair’s subject is “the literary fame of Liston Chamberlin, who ‘died for love of his own immortality.'” Having recently started a dissertation on the life of the forgotten novelist G. E. Trevelyan, I thought Fame seemed the perfect book for the occasion.

"Woburn Books Again," from the TLS January 2, 1930.
“Woburn Books Again,” from the TLS January 2, 1930.

It was a bit of a cheat, however. Fame is all of 40 pages long, really a long short story rather than a novel. Woburn Books was a series of books published by the London firm of Elkins Mathews and Marrot in 1928 and 1929 (meaning it was also a cheat, having only been reviewed and not published in 1930: I promise to stay after school and write another piece to make up for these sins). As John Krygier on Ohio Wesleyan University writes on his excellent website, A Series of Series, Woburn Books were perhaps cynically aimed at suckers. Advertisements for the series, which ran to a total of 18 books, use a tried-and-true baiting technique:

We are at once pleased and sorry to say that our WOBURN BOOKS are all out of print or greatly oversubscribed; so, if you covet one of these charming and inexpensive limited editions as a Christmas Gift, you will be wise to apply early to your Bookseller.

Which if literally true, of course, would have meant there was no point in applying to any bookseller. But what worked for Tom Sawyer and fence-painting seems to have worked for Woburn Books. Compared to most limited-run (530 copies, 500 of them for sale) books from 90 years ago, they’re still relatively easy to find and inexpensive. The list of Woburn Book authors included some still recognized names (G.K. Chesterton, D. H. Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson, Robert Graves, and Algernon Blackwood) and a few largely-forgotten ones (R. H. Mottram, Martin Armstrong, Stella Benson, Joseph Hergesheimer). In its review of the first set of Woburn Books, however, TLS made its opinion of the whole venture clear: “Here are three short stories, perhaps designed for invalids, since they are so light to hold and so clearly printed, besides having nothing to distress or agitate the mind in any of them.”

Fame is an entertaining story about a diligent biographer in quest of a subject who’s been equally diligent in trying to shape his reputation for posterity. If fame means posthumous celebrity, Sinclair’s narrator writes, “I’ve only known one man who really cared about it.” That man was Liston Chamberlin:

His passion was corroding in its very cleanness. It bit into him like pure acid and consumed him. You may say he died for love of his own immortality.

Yes. Immortality is a large order. And you can reckon the chances at a million to one against it. You and I and the rest of us have got our celebrity here and now, and we wouldn’t barter our solid chunk for such a ghost of an off-chance. He wouldn’t have sacrificed that millionth chance of his for anything you could offer him here and now.

Chamberlin is a rough-hewn novelist (“brutal before brutality became the fashion”) who, on his deathbed, asks Walter Furnival to write his biography. Furnival was a faithful and admiring friend, so Chamberlin probably assumed he would produce a suitably rose-hued portrait. Instead, Furnival is a bloodhound who follows every lead, who haunts for week and week places where Chamberlin lived, interviewing anyone and everyone he might have come in contact with. And whose radar sweeps relentlessly for sign of the biographer’s most prized target: letters. He keeps searching for bundles of letters from Chamberlin, becoming especially alert when he uncovers a failed romance in the writer’s past.

Ironically, the letters that play the biggest role — not just in the story but in shaping posterity’s view of Chamberlin — aren’t his letters. They are letters sent him by a woman who supported him emotionally and financially, who ruined her eyesight transcribing his sparrow-scratch handwriting, and who never lost hope that he would eventually return her love in kind. Fame offers useful proof that history does have its own way of bring the true shits in the world to some sort of justice.

Sinclair included Fame in her 1930 story collection Tales Told by Simpson and told at least one acquaintance she considered it her favorite story.

Fame (Woburn Book #13), by May Sinclair
London: Elkin Mathews & Marrot, 1929

The Memoirs of a Ghost, by G. W. Stonier (1947)

Cover of first UK edition of Memoirs of a Ghost by G. W. Stonier

One of the pleasures of being back in college after almost forty years is having access to a good university library. I first developed my love of neglected books from wandering through the stacks of Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington in Seattle, not looking for anything in particular, pulling down whatever seemed interesting. As I wrote in a piece for The Reader back in 2007, “It was as if I’d been stuck in prison for years and one someone had tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, ‘Look: the gates are open.'”

So I am back now to this long-lost habit. It’s a smaller library now, not quite so rich in its holdings, and clearly struggling as the digital divide saws its way through institutions such as this. But a sprinkling of orphans can still be found among the authorised editions and critical companions. One of the first to catch my eye was the elegant spine and lovely title of The Shadow Across the Page by G. W. Stonier — both title and author new to me. It was the book next to it I took home that day, however: The Memoirs of a Ghost.

“It seems a long while ago,” the book opens. “When the bombs came — a stick of them — there wasn’t much one could do.” This caught my interest immediately because I am now working on a dissertation about the utterly forgotten novelist, G. E. (Gertrude Eileen) Trevelyan, who herself became a victim of the Blitz when her flat in Kensington was hit in late 1940. Like Stonier’s narrator, she became a ghost — but has had no one to tell her story.

Despite its title, The Memoirs of a Ghost is not really a ghost story — though Stonier did write a few of those in his time. In his Guide to Supernatural Fiction, E. F. Bleiler found the book “unclear in intention. It is possible that the author is simply discussing problems of readjustment during and after the war.” I think Mark Valentine got it right in his Wormwoodiana article on the book: “Stonier’s book belongs in the sphere of modernist literature. The restless, allusive, splintered response to the city has qualities in common with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, for example, or Rhapsody on a Windy Night, with its nocturnal exploration of memory “through the spaces of the dark.”

In reality, The Memoirs of a Ghost is far more frightening than any ghost story I’ve ever read. This is scary at a visceral, existential level. This is about the horror of spending an eternity with yourself.

At first, death is unexpected but not quite unwelcome. There’s a certain novelty to the experience: “Death, death no doubt came quickly, crashing, crashing in an instant. Then again, with a flickering consciousness, as of tides that whip and recede, I rose to the outlines of darkness.” After crawling out from under the rubble, standing for a few moments watching the ruins alongside the firemen, then running to hide in the shadows of a nearby church as he realizes they cannot see him, he discovers he’s come into possession of a new talent: he can fly. He floats up above the city, seeing all its aspects of life, observing now with his invisible camera eye.

Soon, novelty is replaced by disorientation. People come and go, scenes come and go, one slipping into the other with no coherent relationship. It’s very much like a dream — but a relentless, unending dream. Writing dreams is not easy. The lack of coherence can leave reader and writer with the same sense of disorientation as Stonier’s narrator experiences: the sense of being adrift in a sea (or soup) of words. It’s a sense Stonier doesn’t always successfully avoid. There are moments when I found myself thinking, “But you could have written a dozen different things here and it wouldn’t have mattered — I’d still feel adrift.”

Whether by design or accident, however, a shape does emerge from these mists. The narrator finds himself going back to the moment of his death, searching for clues:

Again I am carrying the tea-tray across the room, the bomb is coming nearer, but this time with such a leisurely sweep and beauty that I have time to take note of every article on the tray, to observe the Eastern fowl, a sort of pheasant, on the saucer, to notice the little belch of steam which my movement across the room and abrupt halt have jerked out of the spout. The milk bottle has a chip at the base — if I’m not careful it will tip over…. I am not I, the room isn’t quite real, the bomb wailing melodiously in descent will never strike…. I don’t know whether I’m dreaming or not. Perhaps this is reality and all the rest invention. I don’t know…. Misere!

No matter how hard he tries to make sense of what has happened, it’s like working with dry sand. Nothing retains any form. Nothing lasts from one moment to the next:

Even as it was, my elaborate reconstructions of the daytime unravelled, crumbled away at night in terrors that reduced everything to a rubble of crushed identities, chaotic fragments, which in the morning might take hours to reinstate. The struggle between chaos and order — all chaos, any order — was unremitting

“I must try to define my predicament,” he tells himself. But eternity is just too big to fathom: it “staggers the mind so that one can’t take it in.” “Habit,” he concludes at one point, restricts “imagination to the experience of a lifetime.”

Stonier’s hell isn’t other people: it’s ourselves and nobody but ourselves.

What a bloody grim prospect.

Memoirs of a Ghost, by G. W. Stonier
London: Grey Walls Press, Ltd., 1947

On Wooden Wings, by Rosemary Tonks (1948)

Title page from On Wooden Wings by Rosemary Tonks (1948)
Title page from On Wooden Wings by Rosemary Tonks (1948)

Out of a perhaps questionable quest for completeness, I have been working my way Rosemary Tonks’ oeuvre. Tonks was perhaps one of the better-known of “forgotten” writers — “The Poet Who Vanished,” as a 2009 BBC Radio 4 documentary was titled. As John Hartley Williams wrote in a 1996 piece for The Poetry Review, “She wasn’t just a poet of the sixties — she was a true poet of any era.” According to Williams, Tonks “sent us strange messages from them, alive, fresh and surprising today.”

Fortunately, thanks to the efforts of Neil Astley, Tonks’ cousins and Bloodaxe Books, Tonks’ collected poetry — as well as a selection of her prose — was published shortly after her death in 2014 as Bedouin of the London Evening and is easily available. It’s also one of the rare cases where full advantage of e-publishing possibilities was taken, as the e-versions of the book include quite a number of audio recordings, including an interview from 1963. And having read all but Tonks’ last novel, The Halt During the Chase (1972), I would argue her poetry is far better than her prose.

The flying weather vane, from On Wooden Wings by Rosemary TonksBut I’m not one to give up for purely aesthetic reasons. And so I sought out not only Tonks’ rare adult novels but also her ultra-rare children’s books: On Wooden Wings (1948) and Wild Sea Goose (1951). There are, as far as I can determine, about a dozen copies of either book available worldwide. There are three copies of On Wooden Wings currently for sale, one of Wild Sea Goose. So order your copy now.

I took advantage of my British Library card and scanned in reading copies of both books on a recent visit to London (the same trip that netted me my scan of Kathleen Sully’s Not Tonight). Tonks was just 20 when On Wooden Wings was published, but she’d already had one of her stories, “Miss Bushman-Caldicott” — “the story of a very nice cow” — read on BBC’s Children’s Hour. All the same, On Wooden Wings is best classified as juvenilia.

Black Smith from On Wooden Wings, by Rosemary Tonks
Black Smith
The story is simple: a boy named Webster wanders out of his London house, meets some characters, has some adventures, and comes home. Think of it as Webster Meisters Wanderwoche. Except there is a considerable portion of fantasy certain to appeal to a young reader: a talking dog and talking cat; a good-natured tramp capable of devising whatever gadget the situation requires; and a wooden weather vane that transports Webster off to a magical land. To provide the necessary measure of suspense, there is a villain, one Black Smith, who happens to be a most dastardly blacksmith:

“Are you making shoes? or straightening them?” asked Webster.

Black Smith threw back his head and gave a guffaw of mirthless laughter.

“I’m making them crooked boy, crooked — twisted — and bent about!”

“Whatever for?”

“So that every horse that wears one of my shoes will hobble and fall, and every cart made with one of my wheels will run unevenly, always … ALWAYS!”

Knowing Tonks’ story and her adult work, one cannot read On Wooden Wings without looking for clues. In this case, one needn’t be overly Freudian to find them. Every one of Tonks’ novels features some irregular band of characters that provides, however haphazardly, a substitute for one’s own absent or unreliable family, and so does this one. Webster’s own family takes no notice of his departure. His new friends, on the other hand — every one of them an outcast — travel many miles to find him when the weather vane flies off with him, the tramp, and the dog.

And there are a few moments when we can see the wise-cracking Tonks of the novels — who could, at times, veer too far off course “trying to score points in the parlour game of cleverness,” as a blogger cleverer than I put it. One of Webster’s outcasts is Sebastian, a diminutive fellow who’s been rejected as a waiter. His worst sin, it turns out, was his failure to maintain the proper façade:

“I would write out the menus in English instead of in French, and of course everybody could read them!”

“But aren’t you supposed to read the menu?” asked Webster very surprised.

“Of course not. People can order anything they like, but when it comes to serving, we give them what we like. That is why all menus are in French, then nobody knows what they are getting.”

Still, I’m not sure these rare bits make the book as a whole worth reading, unless, as I say, you are a Tonks completist. If, however, you are one of that tiny band, please let me know. Cross your heart and swear to die you only talk like a digital pirate and I will be happy to pass along my amateurishly scanned PDF of the book.

On Wooden Wings, by Rosemary Tonks
London: John Murray, 1948

Not Tonight, by Kathleen Sully (1966)

Cover of 'Not Tonight' by Kathleen SullyNot Tonight brings me to the end of my journey through the oeuvre of the forgotten English novelist Kathleen Sully. After 16 other Sullys, most of its ingredients are familiar: a village on the southern coast of England; a woman of uncertain middle age; a robust young mother with an assortment of children by an assortment of fathers; various local characters with either low habits and good characters or high standards and petty ways.

Not Tonight was her twelfth book to be published in the space of eleven years, and it displays more than a few signs of creative fatigue. It’s more like a dinner thrown together on a weeknight from leftovers than a fully-conceived work. There’s as much running around, jumping in and out of bed, and mistaken appearances as a Feydeau farce without the discipline of a dramatic formula. Sully tosses in a fillip of incest to try to spice things up:

Inside the kitchen, large and untidy but surprisingly clean, Nadine pointed to the eldest child and said, “Terry’s his kid.”

“Oh,” said Hazel, innocently, “so he’s your brother?”

“Kind of — we both have the same father.”

“Terry had another mother?”

“I’m his mother,” said Nadine, pleased to get the worst news off her chest.

Sully’s earth-mother character, Nadine, has a heart big enough to embrace all souls and all sins, as long as they’re procreative. She introduces Hazel — the woman of uncertain middle age — to her live-in lover, Paddy:

“Well,” said Hazel, trying to shrug the whole thing off, “I suppose that one of these fine days, I shall be invited to a wedding?”

Nadine shook her head a trifle sadly.

“Or does he object to the children?”

“No, he likes the kids but his wife….”

Hazel stared — mouth open.

“They’re both religious,” said Nadine as if that explained all.

Unfortunately, too little of Nadine’s life-affirming energy conveys back to her creator, and we are left with a mishmash that fills without providing much in the way of nourishment. From what I’ve learned of Kathleen Sully’s life, it could well be that this book was posted off by a writer eager for another check to a publisher eager for something to print. It’s a slipshod, forgettable work. Its one saving grace is the fact that you’d be hard-pressed to find another English novel by a woman published in 1966 that came from as far out on the fringes of society.

Not Tonight, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1966

Gaëtan, or The Stock-Taking, by Edith de Born (1950)

“Gaëtan consists of a 100-page discussion between the wife and the mistress of a Frenchman who has been killed in a car accident,” wrote Julian Symons in his terse review of Edith de Born’s first novel. It’s an accurate description, but also a spoiler, for through much of the book, we only know we are eavesdropping on a conversation between Irina, Gaëtan’s Russian-born second wife, and Marie, his Swiss cousin. Gaëtan, a Frenchman of some high social standing — a brave officer in the First World War, a successful manufacturer, a covert agent of the Resistance in the Second — is gone now just a few months, and Irina has come to Marie’s villa outside Geneva to recuperate. From the very beginning, we know that there will be little relaxation during this visit, the two women’s first meeting.

As Irina takes her seat across from Marie by the fireplace, she takes in — and condemns — the decor. “The worst were the pictures. Boring landscapes, mountains and mountain lakes, displayed a depressing lack of personalisty and meagre craftsmanship in pretentious gilt frames.” She feels herself “caught in an unnatural and translucid atmosphere through which no sound could pierce.” But neither woman is on safe ground: “They took each other’s measure, appraised their mutual impressions, and both were disappointed.”

And indeed, what follows is a pause in limbo before the final judgments are passed. Over the course of the evening, their polite dialogue provides a poor disguise for what is really an interrogation. Mostly it is Marie doing the questioning. She is clearly offended that her fine well-born cousin married this short, plump Russian émigré, even if her family stood in the nobility before the Revolution. Marie notes that Irina still speaks with an accent, and “She doesn’t look youn either.” But Irina slips in a few pointed inquiries of her own, and she makes no apologies for being willing to humble herself to survive as an otherwise penniless refugee in Paris.

Irina has spent decades toiling in the backrooms of some of the most exclusive couturiers, and she has learned to appreciate both the skill involved in creating high fashion and the sweat:

I longed to be able to get away from the atmosphere of women dressing and undressing. At times the smell of their skin, their sweat, their scent, seemed to cling to me; I couldn’t get rid of it, I was nauseated by it, it stayed in my nostrils. Day in day out I watched them pitifully cheating their own selves. I heard them deliberately deny their most obvious imperfections. I saw them go through agonies of hidden pain in their desperate fight against ugliness or age. I listened to them, endeavouring to believe in the miracle expected from the new frock. That daily routine, perpetually repeated, had begun to get me down. Oh, that monstrous procession of wretched women!

Marie, on the other hand, has spent the same decades living in peace and comfort in her solid, dull villa on the slopes above Lake Geneva. She has servants to clean, feed, and care for her and money to pay for their service. Yet, as the stock-taking continues into the night, she begins to reveal the pain she has long kept hidden under the smooth surface of her own life. “Don’t try to tell me how happy, full, rich, and so on, the life of a single, independent woman can be. It is a tune I know by heart. I used to sing it to myself at first. Later I only sang it to other people.”

Part of a Chapman and Hall advertisement in the Times Literary Supplement from 1950
One contemporary reviewer wrote that Gaëtan is, “Good as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough.” I have to disagree. I think Gaëtan goes as far as it needs — and stops. In the end, it becomes clear that neither woman finds the need to pass judgment on the other. The real stock-taking is of the places into which men have put women. “All women form one chain-gang,” Marie tells Irina. “You cannot be in the company of a man, even though only on rare occasions, without incurring obligations.”

Edith de Born was the pen-name of Edith Bisch, who by the time that Gaëtan was published was living with her husband, Jacques Bisch, a French banker, in Brussels. Born Edith Ausch in Vienna in 1901, she had grown up in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, an experience she wrote about in a number of her novels, including a trilogy that traced her own journey: Schloss Felding (titled Felding Castle in the US) (1959); The House in Vienna (1959); and The Flat in Paris (1960). She is recorded as having played some role in the French Resistance during the Second World War, and she and her husband hosted Evelyn Waugh in their flat just around the corner from the royal palace in Brussels. I haven’t yet been able to learn why she chose to write in English or even why she began writing fiction after the war, but she went on to publish at least fifteen novels — all sadly now out of print — before her death in 1987.

Gaëtan, or The Stock-Taking, by Edith de Born
London: Chapman & Hall, 1950

Businessmen as Lovers, by Rosemary Tonks (1969)

Cover of "Businessmen as Lovers"

Businessmen as Lovers was Rosemary Tonks’ fourth novel and, to be honest, the first in which she seems to relax and not be relentlessly straining to be clever. It’s her only novel not set in London: the whole story takes place on a train through France and an island off Italy, and perhaps the setting meant that it wasn’t only Tonks’ characters who were taking a bit of a holiday.

As with all of Tonks’ novels, the story is all about the game of love in various guises, but in this case, she introduces a new variation hinted at in her title. Of all the match-ups Tonks choreographs in her book, the most earnest is that between a British venture capitalist and a mysterious and handsome Iranian tycoon. At first, it’s the Iranian who seems constantly to be crossing paths with the Englishman, much to the latter’s consternation. But when he learns the Iranian’s identity, suddenly the tables are turned and he sets off in desperate pursuit. An observer explains the contest to Mimi, the narrator:

“There’ll be a terrific struggle in which each tries to put the other in the wrong. Then they’ll rest. And start all over again.”

“Who will win?”

“Chamoun. He’s got the Rolls.”

“I’m not so sure. Caroline says Killi says you’ve got to whack them over the head with a penis.”

“A Rolls is a penis.”

Of historical note, this may be the first appearance of the concept of the penis car in English literature.

Tonks also provides perhaps the first portrait of the businessman as diva. Killi, the international wheeler-dealer married to Caroline, Mimi’s best friend, descends upon his vacationing family by helicopter and spends his first day pouting over the failure of everyone to react to his arrival with wild joy.

And to round off these moods at such times he fails to communicate his arrangements or his preferences but expects you to know his mind since he knows it so well himself. He sits there in silence and gives the impression of being buried in sand. Or he uses mysterious phrases which have Caroline bewildered, such as “I leave people to draw their own conclusions,” or “You made it perfectly plain” about the way she greeted someone on the beach, probably a deck-chair boy to whom apparently she was able to indicated in a split second a great chunk of information unfavourable to Killi.

Since reading Tonks’ first and largely unsuccessful novel, Emir, I’ve had the sense that what she was trying to do was to recreate Così fan tutte in a 1960s British setting, and Businessmen as Lovers is no different. Although there’s not much infidelity going on here, there are plenty of pairings beyond Killi and his Iranian businessman. There’s a fine comic villian in the person of Dr. Purzelbaum, who uses mineral baths and massages as if he were trying to extract secrets from captured spies. There’s the charmingly eccentric host, Sir Rupert Monkhouse, who’s absent-mindedly allowing himself to be seduced by one of Tonks’ ambiguously European characters, Mrs. Voss, known to one and all as “The Prostitutess.”

But though she may have aimed for Mozart, what she hit was something closer to Wodehouse. Aside from its Italy setting, the goings-on in Businessmen as Lovers could just as easily be taking place just down the road from Blandings Castle. It’s really just a bit of holiday silliness. And for once, Tonks’ alter ego and narrator is not the most confused and unhappy person in the cast. Instead, she is blissfully in love with Beetle, a quiet Englishman happy with her company in the bedroom and out. Perhaps Tonks was giving herself, as well as her characters, a break.

Businessmen as Lovers, by Rosemary Tonks
London: The Bodley Head, Ltd., 1969

The Rabbit’s Umbrella, by George Plimpton (1955)

Cover of the first US edition of The Roabbit's Umbrella

The rabbit with the umbrella in George Plimpton’s children’s book, The Rabbit’s Umbrella, is every bit as real as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny: that he might exist matters more than that he actually does. In this case, the rabbit, plus three robbers, shouting parrots, and a giant dog named Lump serve as bait to entice a boy to listen to Plimpton’s story, which is essentially a shaggy dog tale. To give him credit, though, there really is a shaggy dog in this tale:

Mr. Montague brings Lump home
Mr. Montague brings Lump home

The Rabbit’s Umbrella takes place in the town of Adams. And where is Adams? Well, “It’s simple enough to get to Adams once you find the station from which the train leaves.” The main industry of Adams is thimble-making, as is obvious from the sign at the edge of town.

Welcome to Adams
Welcome to Adams

Mr. Montague, who owns the thimble factory, wants only to make his wife and son happy, which is why he buys Lump the dog. He brings Lump home on the town’s one electric streetcar, which is the thing dearest to the heart of Doctor Trimble, the town’s world-traveled scientific expert (Expert in what? Never mind.).

Doctor Trimble
Doctor Trimble

The three robbers — Pease, Punch, and Mr. Bouncely — have one gun among them and plan to use it to steal great fortunes, starting with Mr. Montague’s.

The Three Robbers
The Three Robbers

Unfortunately, they haven’t quite got a clue just how to go about being robbers, so when they do manage to break into Mr. Montague’s house, the only thing they make off with is Lump. This leads to a high-speed chase by Doctor Trimble, Mr. Montague, and the town cop on the electric streetcar — which is probably the last thing you’d want to chase a gang of robbers in (Never mind again). But all ends happily, though the rabbit with the umbrella never does appear.

The rabbit with the umbrella
The rabbit with the umbrella

Still, the boy demands at the end of the book, “I want to know about the rabbit with the umbrella.” And so Plimpton explains:

You want to know about the rabbit with the umbrella. Doctor Trimble would be the one to explain it to you. He has not only seen the rabbits but also chipmunks with parasols and sun helmets and squirrels with small pianos in their houses, and he has seen the mice skate on the frozen lakes in winter. He has seen so many umbrella-carrying rabbits that if he were writing this epilogue it would be as long as the book itself. He told me once he had seen a whole field full of rabbits opening and shutting their umbrellas after a summer rainstorm, the drops shaken off sparkling like diamonds in the new sun. I have never seen one myself, though I think I saw one smelling a petunia when I was a boy your age, playing in my great-grandfather’s garden. But Doctor Trimble tells me the reason dogs roll their tongues out and laugh is that they recall suddenly how funny a rabbit looks, leaping through a hedgerow with an open umbrella bouncing above him.

… Life is full of mysteries, and it’s nice to have a mystery that is a rabbit with an umbrella.

Which is as good an explanation as anyone really needs.

George Plimpton wrote this book, inspired by The Twenty-One Balloons, the Newbery Medal-winning book by William Pène du Bois, then working as the art director for the The Paris Review. Plimpton’s amiably absurd narrative notwithstanding, it’s Pène du Bois’ illustrations that are really the star of the book. Plimpton imagined it as a bedtime story he might tell Lucas Matthiessen, the son of his The Paris Review co-founder Peter Matthiessen — although the Matthiessens had returned to the U.S. by the time the book was published.

After the book was accepted fr publication by Viking, Plimpton wrote his parents, forwarding the latest copy of The Paris Review and apologizing for the angry tone of its stories. “The contents, you’ll be glad to hear, are hardly reflections of my own character, which remains merry enough and full of hope and enthusiasm,” he assured them. He also predicted that, successful or not, The Rabbit’s Umbrella would not be considered “the product of a tormented mind.”

The Rabbit’s Umbrella is available in electronic formats on the Open Library: Link.

The Rabbit’s Umbrella, by George Plimpton
New York City: The Viking Press, 1955

The Bloater, by Rosemary Tonks (1968)

Cover of the first UK edition of The Bloater

The bloater of Rosemary Tonks’ title is an opera singer, and The Bloater itself is a bit like Così fan tutte updated for the Swinging Sixties. Min, married to George, who seems to have a bird on the side, is being pursued by the Bloater (he never gets a real name), while she contemplates if she wants Billy the musicologist as a friend or lover. Claudi, another one of Tonks’ older men of ambiguous European origin, flits in and out to offer advice and moral support in the role of Don Alfonso.

Meanwhile, her friend and co-worker Jenny wonders whether to sleep with the guitar player with the soulful eyes or the poet with the long brown hair. And in between we have sessions in the studio where Min, Jenny, and that clod Fred are setting a poem about Orestes to electronic music. So it’s all very hip, cool, and sophisticated — and yet nothing more than a bit of kissing actually goes on.

Tonks seems to have learned to tone down her wisecrackery from the relentless pace of her first novels Emir and Opium Fogs. As a narrator, Min is every bit as wise in her cracks as Tonks’ earlier authorial personae, but this time Tonks is in far better control:

Brahms is good for exercising, if you’re not in love; if you are in love of course, you will simply swoon off after the first knees bend. Beethoven has too many ups and downs, the music gets awkward and thrilling, and you strain your back and make grandiose plans which waste your brain for several hours afterwards.

Reviewing The Bloater in the TLS, Sarah Curtis showed how Tonks wrapped things up as neatly as the ending of a Mozart opera: “It all works out happily, with the unsuitable suitor rejected, husband fobbed off with a convenient lover, and even a little reference to ‘the moral dimension,’ so that the reader is not too outraged by all this mini-skirted flippancy.”

Yes, it’s lightweight. In the Birmingham Daily Post, Michael Billington called it “a slight, amusing, unpretentious book that passes an hour or two quite painlessly.” But there are times when we all need a bit of elegant comic relief. As Dominic Le Foe put it in the Illustrated London News: “If they still make hammocks, and if they still grow trees from which to suspend one, and if the sun ever shines again — given all those circumstances, with an optional cooling drink to hand, then The Bloater will pass a pleasant hour or two.”

You’ll have to rely on Interlibrary Loan to get a copy of The Bloater: there are no copies available for sale at the moment. Fortunately, there are almost 60 copies held in libraries worldwide, so all you need is a library card and a little patience.

The Bloater, by Rosemary Tonks
London: The Bodley Head, 1968