Short Reviews

Short Notices

Shorter reviews of neglected books.

The Well-Meaning Young Man, by Luise and Magdalen King-Hall (1930)

I decided to read The Well Meaning Young Man after stumbling across this passage:

Horatio Swann, the famous portrait painter, was at his wit’s end. Harry Ames, the well-known scene designer, was at his wit’s end. The Russian chauffeur, Boris, was lying upstairs under a neat check bedspread, in a bedroom of the inn, suffering from an overdose of cocaine. The only person who was enjoying himself was Gene Tunney the panther who, attached to the kitchen table by a stout chain, was guzzling his luncheon out of a wash-hand-basin. In the entrance hall of the inn, the Princess Vanda Fiorivanti stormed to and fro. Her tall, snake-like figure clad in a pair of seagreen pyjamas and a fur coat, quivered with rage. Her enormous, distraught yellow eyes, ringed with black lashes, appeared to swamp her emaciated white face. Her hair was like a crazy scarlet chrysanthemum and matched her scarlet mouth. Her general appearance at the moment closely resembled that of a vampire who had been carelessly buried without a stake in her heart, dug up again after some centuries, and was now giving vent to her feelings.

I am a sucker for over-the-top farces about the goings-on of silly rich people (viz. Five Days, The Ritz Carltons, Heart in a Hurricane, et al.), so this was enough to get me started.

The hero of The Well Meaning Young Man is not himself rich but he comes from a comfortable family. The younger son of Anglo-Irish gentry, Dan Cavanagh is already a failure. His father and mother (“a fine stand-up lump of a woman”) have shipped him off to join a family business in Sicily, thinking he had “a way with him” that “might be invaluable in charming intractable foreigners.” At the time he stumbles across the Princess and her entourage, however, he is trying to make his way there by foot, having squandered most of his travel budget with an old school chum in London. Dan is not the sharpest knife in the drawer: “He had not yet learnt to read except in the literal sense of the word,” and the authors esteem his handwriting “about one degree of culture superior to that of his valiant twelfth century ancestors, who came over to Ireland with Strongbow, and when occasion demanded, signed their names with an X.”

With her chauffeur incapacitated, the Princess hires Dan as a replacement, and he soon finds himself behind the wheel of a massive Pannonia-Svitza estate car, racing through the Black Forest towards Schloss Erlenburg, where American producer-tycoon Rex Guggenheim awaits the star of his new spectacle, “The Legend of St. Dorothea and the Heavenly Roses.” Unfortunately, by enlisting Dan, she also manages to hijack the narrative for the remainder of the book. What starts as a good-natured Bildungsroman with above-average comic writing swerves onto a side road and becomes mired in a seemingly endless opera buffa with all the fun and spontaneity as a Soviet rhythmic gymnastics demonstration. By the time poor Dan is spit out on the far side of the Alps, the comic spirit has been beaten out of us.

While The Well Meaning Young Man got waylaid with a narrative flat tire, I’m willing to give Magdalen King-Hall’s earlier solo attempt, with the intriguing title I Think I Remember, Being the Random Recollections of Sir Wickham Woolicomb, An Ordinary English Snob and Gentleman. I’m also a sucker for comic autobiographies of English snobs (viz. Lord Bellinger and the classic Augustus Carp, Esq.).

The Well Meaning Young Man is available on the Internet Archive (link).

The Well-Meaning Young Man, by Luise [Louise] and Magdalen King-Hall
New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1930

Opium Fogs, by Rosemary Tonks (1963)

Cover of "Opium Fogs" by Rosemary TonksThough Rosemary Tonks’ Emir includes Opium Fogs in its “by the same author” list and not vice-versa, it’s a safe bet that Opium Fogs was written second. On all counts — particularly form, style, and characterization — it’s the more successful book. What’s more, throughout the book there are signs of material from Emir being reused, reworked, and improved.

Emir’s character Toby Garnett, for example, a bookstore clerk “too intelligent to be out of work and too intelligent to work” is resurrected in the form of Gerard Plowman (a librarian this time), the lovesick protagonist of Opium Fogs. Tonks shifts gender, telling most of the story from Gerard’s perspective and giving secondary focus to Gabriella, the object of his infatuation. She also steps up her geometry, incorporating two romantic triangles that intersect with Gabriella and the unlikely figure of Dr. Bodo Swingler, another character of ambiguously European origin.

Tonks is far more successful in the playing the parlour game of cleverness than she was in Emir. The text fairly crackles with apt lines: Gerard is a man “for whom everyday life is the equivalent of sewing mailbags in prison.” Another character is “celebrated as an international nobody.” A group of undertakers looks “as if they read nothing but obituary notices, and dined exclusively on bread and water and soapflakes.” A man’s conversation “was as stimulating as being told the plot of a play by someone who hasn’t seen it.” And it’s full of helpful advice: “If you are out to borrow money or ask a favour, nothing puts your victim on guard more rapidly than laughing at his jokes and generally making yourself agreeable.” “There is no better entertainment, when you’re stone cold and bored to death, than watching someone park a motor-car. The effect is therapeutic, wonderfully reviving.”

Opium Fogs is also fascinating to read if you know something of Tonks’ story. Like Tonks, Gabriella “married and left England a moody little beauty of twenty-two;” she also spent “eighteen months in India, ten of them paralysed.” In Tonks’ case, her bout with polio left her with limited use of her right hand. When Gabriella walks, “one saw that she went slowly as though one leg was very tired.” Though Gerard fervently seeks to rekindle their romance, Gabriella has moved on from his adolescent notions of love and happiness: “For women like Gabriella it is quite simply the
second-rateness of adultery that makes it so difficult to swallow.” Still in recovery from her illness, she wants simply “… to live with the minimum of difficulty. Don’t you understand? I need a roof overhead, three meals a day, the company of people who mean nothing to me, and permission to be tired and ugly for days on end.”

On the other hand, Gerard embodies the spirit of the flâneur that one finds throughout Tonks’ poetry. In her poem, “The Flâneur and the Apocalypse,” she wrote,

For his inebriated tread, the whole of Europe
With its great streets full of air and shade,
Its students and cocottes,
And traffic, roughly caked with blood,
Is not enough.
The whole of Europe put to sleep
By music, coal-fires, snow, and café life,
And suffocated by hot fogs and poppies,
And rocked by lovers, like a chest of breath,
Is not, for the flâneur, drug strong enough.

The emotion that shines brightest throughout Opium Fogs is Tonks/Gerard’s love-hate relationship with the city of London. The book is full of passages that aspire to the energy of the “Michaelmas term lately over” opening of Bleak House:

The Metropolis was clad in mildew, alive with glittering ooze and great fever clouds.

It was the funeral couch of a buried Pharaoh who has been wrapped up like a black-shirted vegetable in mouldy linens, crepes, plasters and aprons, steeped in the preserving vinegar of ancient curses. And loaded with the cookery of dark cosmetics, surrealist lavas, enamels, and armoury as fragile as the metal blisters on the sides of roasted fish.

People shook hands as though they had them buried up to the shoulder in earth.

The air was foul as in a gambling den, where everything is greasy to the touch.

One heard the railways shaking their chains.

But not so far away the sky opened for an instant over the Thames, to dry streets of shiny platters where the rank mane of Neptune lay overnight.

An interesting black day began.

The “opium fogs” of the title captures both the atmosphere and addictive nature of London life. “After this city which is so dirty, so impossibly difficult to live in,” Tonks writes, “you could never bring yourself to respect another which made living easy.” In fact, it’s a shame that Lauren Elkins missed the opportunity to include Rosemary Tonks and Opium Fogs in her recent book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. Tonks’ authorial voice embodies “the ability to wander detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of society” that Wikipedia offers as the essence of the flâneur. And it would serve as a perfect dessert to follow an entrée of such heavy London seriousness as Doris Lessing’s novel from the year before, The Golden Notebook.

Opium Fogs is available in electronic formats on the Internet Archive (link).

Opium Fogs, by Rosemary Tonks
London: Putnam, 1963

Letters Home, arranged and edited by Mina Curtiss (1944)

Writing Home, a drawing by Pfc. John Fabian, USMC, from "Marines at War: Sketches and Paintings by Marines" (1943)
Writing Home, a drawing by Pfc. John Fabian, USMC, from “Marines at War: Sketches and Paintings by Marines” (1943)

Cover of Letters Home, edited by Mina CurtissI knew Mina Curtiss’s name as the collector and editor of the letters of Marcel Proust. Curtiss wrote of her experiences in tracking down Proust’s letters in her 1978 memoir, Other People’s Letters (which is, unfortunately, out of print again). But I was surprised to learn that during World War Two, she collected letters written by America G.I.s stationed all over the world and from all walks of life in the 1944 book, Letters Home.

I found the following review, by journalist and historian Gerald W. Johnson, in a small stack of brown and brittle old copies of the New York Herald Tribune weekly book review section that I bought from a dingy antique store in San Antonio back when we lived there. The review not only makes the book sound well worth rediscovering but itself captures some of things lost from that time (“It is my firm conviction that the boys were lying, but they lied like gentlemen, adding honor to the race”–a sentence no one could write today, for good and bad reasons).

The War — by the Boys Who Are Fighting It
by Gerald W. Johnson, New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, June 11, 1944, p.1.

An intelligent woman, an associate professor of English in Smith College, has selected out of some thousands about a hundred letters from forty-odd men in the fighting services, including the merchant marine, and presents them in a book as a picture of war from the enlisted man’s standpoint.

Incidentally, she presents a problem that floors the reviewer. It is a good book, yes. But what kind of a book? The answer is, every kind—and how are you to describe every kind of book in a single review? In some cases, several letters from one man are reproduced; but no man is given more than twenty-five pages. The result is that style, content, point of view, everything changes with each new section.” There are intensely religious sections and bawdy sections, sentimental sections and cynical sections, tender and tough; polished and semi-literate, comic and tragic. One vast field of literature, however, is missing altogether. There isn’t a phony section in the book. These men were writing, not for publication, but for the information of the people at home, and not many men write pretentiously to the crowd at home.

Not that the book is altogether a truthful record. Take, for example, the letters written to a certain Mrs. Roark, of Grover, N. C., by her six sons in the services. Every man of them swore up and down that he was in fine health and spirits with not a care in the world and Mom must stop worrying (the one who was in the Philippines died in a Japanese prison camp). It is my firm conviction that the boys were lying, but they lied like gentlemen, adding honor to the race.

It is evident, too, that the writers are more discreet than exact when they touch upon two subjects—the horrors of the battlefield and the recreations of the man-at-arms in his infrequent hours of ease. But who would have it otherwise? The people at home do not, and cannot, know at the same time either the comradeship or the fierce stimulation of an active campaign. Yet without these the perspective on both recreations and horrors must be all wrong.

The letters are all from the ranks. Letters from officers were excluded as reflecting too much the sophisticated point of view; the exceptions are a few airmen, a parachute trooper, an ensign or two and a lieutenant of ordnance, and each of these was chosen for a highly individual point of view.

I said there is not a phony letter in the collection, yet there is one composed entirely of the most stilted, threadbare clichés from all the Fourth of July orations ever made. Furthermore, it came from this country and was written by a woman to her husband. He was an oiler in the merchant marine and he had been on one of the early runs to Murmansk, before protection was well organized. That convoy lost nine out of eighteen ships. New he was off again, and his wife wrote him as if she were addressing a large and unintelligent audience. But before you finish that discharge of bombast you discover the truth–the woman was sick with fear, but she had been told she must write cheerful letters and she was going to be cheerful if it killed her. When you see that, it transmutes all the tinsel into gold.

How it feels to drive a tank for the first time; what one does standing watch on the bridge of a destroyer; how the “grease monkeys” (ground crew) sweat it out when their pilot comes back an hour late; how the Australian women stride; how it felt to be torpedoed off Algiers; how sorry the men in Italy are for those on Guadalcanal; what the soldiers think of strikers—all these are here and they are of the substance of war as it is.

The book is full of stunning remarks: “I have been in Jerusalem and was at the place where Christ was born. . .. I sure do wish I was in North Carolina where I was born.” “Heaven help them [the Japs] when all our forces are concentrated in the Pacific. They are going to need all His help and a hell of a lot more, too!” “I’m a Roosevelt man but sometimes I wonder why.” “Freedom? Maybe it’s more than freedom. I think it is for the fulfillment of all the dreams and sacrifices that we, the people make.”

If you are interested in a picture of the war as a whole, done with literary skill, by all means stick to the books of war correspondents, who are professional writers, much better at the trade than these men. But if your wish is to see the thing as it is, to comprehend the attitudes of the men who are fighting it, this will do more for you than the most brilliant productions of the professionals.

In Other People’s Letters, Curtiss recalled how Letters Home came to be:

The letters of Iowa soldiers [published in a daily column in the Des Moines Register and Tribune] stimulated me to make an anthology of enlisted men’s letters from all over the United States. (Officer’s letters predominated in similar anthologies.) I wrote a letter to two hundred and fifty newspapers asking them to publish a request to families of servicemen to send me their letters. Most of the city papers, as well as many small-town and village weeklies, cooperated. Within weeks I was swamped with contributions. In cartons, in outsized envelopes, in show boxes, or just in paper parcels came more hundreds of letters than even I with my obsessive curiosity could digest. But after I sampled one or two out of every batch it became clear that a collection of single letters would not reproduce or re-create the impact of my Iowa experience. I therefore chose thirty-six series of letters written from a man’s first day in the service to his latest and sometimes his last. Sixteen states and almost every branch of the armed services were represented.

Letters Home was published on D-Day and had a very good notice on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune Sunday book section. But the book failed to attract many readers, although excrepts from it continue to be published in textbooks and anthologies. Obviously my great interest in letters intended for someone is not widely shared. Even I, when the selection was finally made, felt smothered by other people’s letters and thought that never again would I want to read any that weren’t written to me.

Only three years later, Curtiss was in Paris hunting down Proust’s unpublished letters.

Letters Home, arranged and edited by Mina Curtiss
Boston: Little, Brown, 1944

Undercurrent, by Barbara Jefferis (1953)

Cover of US edition of Undercurrent
When Miss Doxy, the spinster at center of Barbara Jefferis’ novel Undercurrent, sits down to breakfast in her boarding house dining room, she notices a strange man sitting at a table near the door. “They have so much,” she thinks. “So much money, so much power, so many people. They can change their man three times a day if it suits them.” As she travels by train to work this morning, she sees the man on the platform of a station along the way: “Clever to use a car and pick up the train two stations ahead of where she had caught it.”

She is being followed, of course. The reason is clear: her work involves the care of important documents, highly sensitive material related to a secret project underway at Duncan & Son, a consulting engineering firm. The consulting part is just a shell designed to hide the real work going on in the laboratory. Something of profound importance, more important than the atomic bomb itself.

Miss Doxy spends much of her time in reflection, remembering her happy times with her beloved Papa and her misery suffering the unjust torments of her hated mother. Papa was a talented and charming man, misunderstood by his wife. Only Miss Doxy — Blossom — understands and comforts him. He needs a lot of comforting, usually in the mornings after he goes off for one of his long nightly walks.

Through her reflections and her interactions with people at work, Jefferis gradually and deftly reveals Miss Doxy as profoundly disturbed — a functional but deeply traumatized schizophrenic. While showing us the world through her strident and conspiracy-filled eyes, Jefferis also gives us glimpses of the mundane realities of which her grasp is quickly slipping.

Undercurrent is a lean, efficient novel, a tight and satisfying entertainment — barely 150 pages, and hardly a word out of place from start to finish. This may be explained by the fact that Jefferis wrote the book — her first — in the space of three weeks to compete for a prize offered by the Sydney Morning Herald for the best unpublished novel. She shared the award but was unable to find an Australian publisher interested in the book. So she contacted publishers in the U.K. and U.S. and sold the book to J.M. Dent in London and William Sloane Associates in New York. Dent published the book with its original title, Contango Day, which is a term used on the London and Sydney stock exchanges for second day before payment of a contango debt — a debt incurred from paying a higher futures price for a commodity than it ends up selling at (its spot price) — is due. As much as the title might offer an analogy for Miss Doxy’s situation, I’d have to say Sloane made the right choice in changing.

Undercurrent, by Barbara Jefferis
New York: William Sloane Associates, 1953
As Contango Day
London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1953

Theme with Variations, by G. E. Trevelyan (1938)

Cover of first UK edition of Theme with Variations
“Samuel Smith was the best part of thirty before anyone told him he was a wage-slave.” With opening sentence of Theme with Variations, G. E. Trevelyan tells her readers they’re not in typical British women’s middlebrow territory anymore. This is not a book about tea parties or sitting rooms: this is book simmering with anger about how society entraps its people. If Helen Ashton hadn’t taken the title with her own novel a year before, Trevelyan might well have called it People in Cages, for she presents us with three specimens, each trapped in its own cage. The bars are made of economic circumstances, class prejudices, social mores, fear, and, yes, simple bad luck, but they rule out any possibility of escape and freedom as effectively as those made of steel.

Samuel Smith is a working man, working since the age of eleven, and happy to have a secure place as a mover with a London haulage company. Married to a good woman, he’s content with his lot, happy to enjoy a pint at weekend with the lads down at the Green Anchor. When he ruptures himself lifting a marble table, however, his lot becomes frighteningly precarious, all too dependent on his employer’s good will and solvency. His age and injury keep him out of the Great War, but as times get hard in the late Twenties, his situation grows more tenuous. And then he finds that his old circle of chums is becoming transformed into a group of resentful and desperate men prepared to take violent measures to express their anger with poverty and unemployment.

Frances Jones is a fairly dim eighteen year-old girl who agrees to marry an older dentist, a man named Garstin, who takes a shine for her. Garstin sets her up in a new house in a new development on the outskirts of London, so new that there isn’t even a paved road in front, and leaves her there, isolated and alone. Having got the wooing and romancing part over, his demands on her are few: have dinner ready, keep the house clean, be pretty and silent on rare social occasions. Frances, on the other hand, has few emotional or practical resources to bring to her cause, and so she sits, day after day, having little to do other than phone for groceries and read movie magazines and romance novels. “I’m going to get out and do something,” she tells herself. “Somethink oughter be done.” Instead, the years roll by, Garstin grows even less interested in her, and she begins to suffer what we would now recognize as agoraphobia.

Perhaps saddest of Trevelyan’s three trapped specimens is Evie Robinson, a bright girl held back by her family’s mutual enabling society. Evie’s younger sister, Maisie, suffers from some unnamed disability — something physical but also somewhat mental — that draws in all the family’s energies. Evie’s mother hovers at the edge of breakdown over Maisie’s daily crises. The mother’s dramas send father running to the solitude of his den. And they both look to Evie to take over the burden of caring for and amusing Maisie:

“Must give a had with your sister, you know …”

“Can’t run about like the rest of you children and all that …”

“Your mother gets done-up …”

“Up to all of us to lend a hand.”

He bent down to light a match at the dining-room fire and stood up again to draw on his pipe.

“That’s right, be a good girl. Don’t forget to shut the door behind you.”

Unlike Frances, however, Evie has the spunk to plan her escape: “Tell you what I’m going to do, soon’s I’m old enough I’m going to go away and do something. I’m going to have a job, like Lillian Smith’s sister.”

And she does, through a series of decisions beginning years ahead of reaching the age of employment, tricking her distracted parents into agreeing to her taking a secretarial track at school, working hard to reach the head of her class, gaining a spot as an office girl in a local business, cramming for the civil service exam. Her dream inspires her through the most difficult times:

Another eighteen months at home. But it wasn’t too long, after all, to revise her matric subjects, and then do the new ones after she got Muriel’s books in July. Because there was hardly any time to work at home now. Maisie was learning to walk with crutches. Round and round the room with Evie. And then she got tired and started to cry and had to be tucked up and read to. She was fifteen now, she oughtn’t to cry, it was just stupid, but what could you expect with everyone treating her like a kid. And of course her being so small and having a lisp made you feel she was younger than she was. And Mummy going on like that, as if she were a kid of ten. “Poor wee pet, Evie will play a game with Maisie. Evie will work the magic lantern so that Maisie’s only got to lie still and look. Does it give my little girlie a headache? Then Evie will read her a nice story, to make it go away. Oh, for goodness sake, Evie, you’ve always got something else to do when you’re wanted.”

But it was only eighteen months, only fifteen months, only a year. — And then I’m going to get out, out, I’m going to get out!

We can’t help but root for her to succeed. But the best bars are always the invisible ones. For all her practical preparations, Evie has failed to consider that the only way to emotionally escape from her family is to reject them completely. These are not people to made do with an occasional visit or postcard.

Theme with Variations has the narrative power of a vortex. Trevelyan draws us deeper and deeper into each character’s thoughts, showing how little things — a book thrown across a room, an item in the newspaper, one pint too many — can have the effect of cutting us off from options, from the sense of having control over our own lines, until all the escape routes seem to be cut off forever. I started reading it after dinner on Friday, stayed up till 2 A.M., and finished it by noon Saturday, and was haunted by its claustrophobic atmosphere for days after.

I have to link to WorldCat.org for Theme with Variations because there are literally no copies of this book currently for sale. I’m afraid I bought the last one, and there appear to be only six library copies worldwide. And so it may be destined to remain utterly unknown and neglected, like virtually all of G. E. Trevelyan’s work. But I won’t give up yet: look for posts on three more Trevelyan novels in the coming weeks.

Theme with Variations, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1938

A Family Failure, by Renate Rasp (1970)

Cover of Kuno, the son in Renate Rasp’s novel, A Family Failure, wishes he could be as lucky as Gregor Samsa. When Gregor was transformed into a monstrous cockroach, at least his family had the decency to reject him. Kuno’s family — specifically his stepfather (who prefers to be referred to as “Uncle Felix”) — wants to keep him AND turn him into a monster. It is Uncle’s plan to transform Kuno into a tree.

“Needless to say everyone can choose the way he wants to live. Man is born free,” Uncle tells Kuno. At that moment, Kuno was free to learn how to grasp things with tongs because Uncle Felix has cut his hands off. This is in preparation for his arms being shaped into branches.

This distresses Kuno’s mother, who invited Mr. Pettkola, the artificial limb manufacturer’s agent, to the house to discuss providing Kuno with artificial hands. But Kuno is too smart to let his mother off that easily. Better that she continue to watch “the sight of my tongs, the swellings of my stumps.”

Uncle Felix’s plan is meticulous, full of intermediate steps, requiring years to be carried out. “We’ll have to change your diet. No meat, no sausages, no butter. Your mother knows it. Only vegetable fats, a lot of vegetables and water, above all water, more and more water.” Uncle knows just how to manipulate the boy’s emotions: “If this littel sacrifice is too much for you say so at once, then I’ll know where I stand, and we can spare ourselves a lot of trouble before we even start.” Becoming a tree is a matter of family pride. Uncle Felix certainly isn’t undertaking all this trouble for himself. This is a joint endeavor. “You do understand,” he tells Kuno, “that there must be no disagreements between us all, not now.”

One day, Uncle rousts Kuno early. Standing him in the kitchen, he carefully wraps the boy’s legs in wire to hold them together. He wraps bandages over the eyes until no light penetrates. “Six months from now, and you’ll be able to stand the sun without any bandages. Hours of it. You won’t be able to see any more.” He fills the boy’s ears with wax. Kuno is ready to begin practicing being a tree.

As grim as the slow, calculating mutilation of Kuno is to read, one cannot help be aware that, writing in the late 1960s, as a prosperous West Germany was leaving its Nazi past behind, Renate Rasp’s story was not realism but satire of the most savage order. The older generation destroying its young by forcing them into an absurdly unnatural mold. The mother as representative of the accommodators: “She wants to exonerate uncle. He has done what he could, like a father.” If there has been a failure, it is Kuno’s, in failing to shape himself to Uncle’s ideals. These were painful themes from the country’s recent past.

The German title of A Family Failure was Ein ungeratener Sohn, which roughly translates to “An unruly son.” At no point in this book does anyone — not neighbors, not passing acquaintances, not men from the shops — question what Uncle is doing. True, his methods might be a little severe, but then it’s clear that Kuno is not always trying his hardest.

The satire of A Family Failure/Ein ungeratener Sohn may have been too much at the time for readers to take, but the book remains just as neglected in Germany as with English readers. It begs to be rediscovered, for it’s one of the most powerful and unforgettable parables of the dangers of an older generation taking too much control in shaping the destiny of a younger one.

A Family Failure, by Renate Rasp, translated from the German by Eva Figes
New York: The Orion Press, 1970

Island in Moonlight, by Kathleen Sully (1970)

Cover of With this, I reach the end of this year’s longest exploration, that into the oeuvre of the utterly forgotten novelist, Kathleen Sully. There is one more of her 17 novels I haven’t read, but the one copy of Not Tonight that was available five months ago has since been snatched up. You have to check WorldCat.org to find a library copy. Mind you, that goes for Island in Moonlight, too.

Island in Moonlight takes Sully further afield than any of her other books. In this case, to a nameless island one presumes is in Greece but which bears only slight resemblance to any actual location. The island was once visited in his youth by Alex Mundle, a successful British businessman. Recently blinded by some unspecified accident (yes, there is no shortage of backstory ellipsis), Mundle has decided to return to the island, which he remembers as some sort of idyllic oasis, and retire from life.

Pell, his chauffeur, who accompanies Mundle to the island, sees it differently:

The place did not look prosperous. It rather reminded me of a middle-west ghost town, and as wind-blown. The faces which peered at us out of the darkness were ghostlike, too — white, dark-eyed and swathed with black shawls.

Arriving in the off-season, they find the only place still serving food is a fly-blown cafe by the harbor front known as Hot Dog Joe’s (a name I’m sure never occurred to any Greek restaurateur). Blind and unable to speak the local language (also unspecified), Mundle still manages to locate a caretaker, a penniless British writer, rents a cold, bare house in the village, and settles down. He spends most of his time teaching himself to play the accordion, but his money quickly earns him some kind of status as the local big man.

His money soon attracts the same kind of attention as a fresh piece of meat on a hot day, and Mundle’s idyll turns pear-shaped. A trio of sharks by the names of Dickie, Mame, and Beth swoops in and performs an efficient scavenging job, leaving Mundle near-broke and homeless. In the end, he is the town joke, earning a few coins playing at Hot Dog Joe’s each night.

I could go into more details. Sully tosses in characters and narrative threads until the book begins to resemble a pile of pick-up sticks. It would take more effort to pull the important ones than is worth the bother. I wish I could say that this, Sully’s penultimate novel, shows her nearing the end of her writing career on an upswing, but I honestly found it something of an aimless mess.

While the story in Dear Wolf, reviewed recently, was frivolous, it at least had some aspirations to form. One reviewer compared Sully to a Sunday painter, and on this particular Sunday, she seems to have been in quite a rush, dabbing her colors onto her canvas without much consideration of proportion or design. I’m not sure what the moral is here: pride goeth before the fall? But I will say that her ability to propel a narrative forward was demonstrated once again. I wasn’t sure where the story was going, but it sure hurtled forward at a mean clip.

I am still intrigued to know more of Sully’s story. What got her started writing — and what led her to stop? What were her influences, or was she entirely self-taught? Where did her polymorphous perspectives on sexuality, the world of the spirit, and social structures come from? What did she think of her early critical success and her slow fade from notice, even as she continued to publish? If anyone can offer a clue to any of this, please contact me.

Island in Moonlight, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1970

Dear Wolf, by Kathleen Sully (1967)

Cover of
Nob Caldar, the wolf in Kathleen Sully’s Dear Wolf, could be the hero of a 1950s R&B song — the Dominoes’s “Sixty Minute Man” or anything by Bo Diddley (“A young girl’s wish and an old woman’s dream”). He’s the local lovin’ man, who manages to bed at least a dozen different women in the course of the novel’s 2-3 week span.

It ain’t because of his good looks. He’s hairy, pot-bellied, hovering around forty, rarely wearing clean clothes, and never with more than a pound or two to his name. He lives out beyond the town in a caravan so filthy that even his most ardent lover wouldn’t come near it. He’s not the slightest bit interested in settling down (“Women, they’re all the same: they want to own you lock, stock and barrel”). And he has to send off postal orders each week to support the three children he’s had by different women.

Nob — yep, it’s that obvious — is the satyr as comic relief. Half the time he gets a woman in bed, he ends up scurrying out the window and scrambling to find his pants in the dark. He gets chased by dog, man, and angry mob. He’s sent running out of the village, half-naked and wearing a chastity belt the blacksmith has constructed to keep his amorous inclinations in check. Yet somehow he keeps finding a soft spot in the next woman’s heart.

Dear Wolf is by far the least substantial of Kathleen Sully’s novels, a bit of farce that takes about an hour and a half to read and sticks with you about as long after. Not one worth looking for.

Dear Wolf, by Kathleen Sully

London: Peter Davies, 1967

Heart in a Hurricane, by Charles G. Shaw (1927)

Cover of Heart in a Hurricane
Charles G. Shaw’s 1927 novel Heart in a Hurricane has a great deal in common with Fillmore Hyde’s The Ritz Carltons from the same year. They’re both grounded in comic stereotypes of the idle rich — specifically, the idle rich of Manhattan in the midst of the Roaring Twenties. Almost every character wears a top hat, white tie, and tails, or plus-fours, or an evening gown. If anyone appears in tweed, you can bet they’re not quite our type, no matter what their other qualities might be. The Ritz Carltons features illustrations by Rea Irvin, inventor of the New Yorker’s signature character, Eustace Tilley; Heart in a Hurricane features illustrations by Ralph Barton, whose work graced New Yorker covers nearly as often as Irvin’s and Peter Arno’s in the Twenties.

Rupert and DorisAnd both books are less novels than strings of episodes that don’t so much conclude as stop. In the case of Heart in a Hurricane, the episodes revolve around the unsuccessful romantic encounters of an idle rich young man named Rupert Twombley. We first spot Rupert alone in his box at the Opera, munching away at a bag of peanuts while listening to Siegfried and watching the crowd:

To Rupert’s immediate left sat the Q. Maynard-Lents, an over-ripe couple who had with them Creighton Bloat, 3rd. and his very latest bride, Juliette Goslyn — looking like nothing so much as an advertisement for listerine, one of the Archer boys, and Ulysses W. Schmonk — lord of linoleum; while just beyond, in the Paisley’s box, borrowed by the Leslie Dennings, were, in addition to the latter, little Estelle Tennis and four odd bachelors who at once recalled the Elm City Quartet. Further along was Mrs. de Haven Shattuck, commonly known as “Duckie,” having as guests the Rill twins (who had not merely fallen asleep but were snoring sonorously), as well as a cousin from Bernardsville who had been stone deaf for the last seven years…. Also present were the Beverley Something Joneses, just back from Jekyll Island, the Tackwit girls and two adolescent bond salesmen, the Willie Clayducks with H. I. H. Prince Nuga (who understood not a word of English), old Mrs. Bass, still wondering whether she would every marry off her unfortunate duaghter — Fern, Aggie Larchmont, as gorgeous as an Arabian night and twice as unreal, the Julian Gorlocks, Otto Kahn bowing in every direction, Cyril Hatch, the de Rinkleys, and Fuzzy Dilworth, who was said to possess the most beautiful toes on Long Island.

If you get a chuckle from this sort of thing, rest assured — it’s a feature of every chapter.

It’s no wonder that Shaw’s good friend F. Scott Fitzgerald offered some gentle criticism of the book:

My reason for the long delay is the unusual one. That, owing to a review I’d read, I didn’t approach “Heart in a Hurricane” with high expectations. I’m happy to say that I was absolutely wrong. It is a damn good piece of humorous writing from end to end — much better than anything of its sort I’ve read in years. The character is quite clear — clearest, if I may say so, when his tastes are least exhaustively cataloged…. I wish you’d try something with a plot, or an interrelation between two or more characters, running through the whole book. Episodes held together an “idea,” in its fragilest sense, don’t give the opportunity for workmanship or for really effective effects. I take the liberty of saying this because there is so much talent and humor and discernment in the book as a whole. [The full letter is available on Slate.]

Heart in a Hurricane was Charles G. Shaw’s first and last novel. After it, Shaw returned to his first profession, art, where he achieved success as an abstract painter, designer, and sculptor. One of his rare attempts as authorship after Heart in a Hurricane was the innovative children’s book, It Looked Like Spilt Milk (1947). His 1937 painting, Wrigley, now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, shows that Andy Warhol was not the first to see the artistic possibilities in commercial packaging. Shaw died in 1974.

Wrigleys, by Charles G. Shaw, 1937
Wrigleys, by Charles G. Shaw (1937)

The Ritz Carltons, by Fillmore Hyde (1927)

Cover of The Ritz CarltonsRemember when it was still possible to make fun of rich people? Like Thurston Howell III and his wife, Lovey, on Gilligan’s Island? Or the silly, spoiled heiresses in High Society and My Man Godfrey? Well, if you’re nostalgic for a time when the idle rich were valid objects of ridicule instead of reality TV stars, The Ritz Carltons was written for you.

For Fillmore Hyde, the more money a family has, the more it must struggle with the slightest of problems. Which limousine to take? Will the first chauffeur be available to drive us to Long Island (because really the second one wouldn’t do)? Or what to do on your summer vacation:

The problem of where to go for the summer is a grave one to people of wealth and social prominence. The majority of mankind may take it lightly, but the rich cannot; from somewhere they must find strength to solve the perplexing question; and they do — noblesse oblige.

The Ritz Carltons, of course, faced it squarely.

Labelled as a novel, The Ritz Carltons is nothing more than a series of sketches. Actually, it could have worked well as the basis of a sitcom, especially back in the early days of TV when they had fifteen-minute shows — because there isn’t more than fifteen minutes of material in any of the chapters. And its humor has just that reliable formulaic ring you could count on from sitcoms.

In this case, the formula depends on a catalyst and predictable reagent. The reagent is Mrs. Ritz Carlton, whose response to the slightest hint of stress is complete physical collapse. As in the episode in which their daughter, Ritza announces her engagement to Parker House, just graduating from Harvard. The happy parents rush to Cambridge to witness their son-in-law-to-be’s commencement.

“Why isn’t he dressed like the rest?” asked Ritz, noticing that the ornament of Parker’s gown was of a different color from that of the others.

Ritza didn’t know.

The Fates were soon to make it plain. A speech was made, and the new graduates were asked to come forward to receive their diplomas. Parker House was the first in line — and the fateful words, Summa cum Laude, came down the wind from the dais.

“Good God!” exclaimed Ritz as the truth swept over him. “The fellow’s a grind!”

On his left, Mrs. Carlton collapsed silently into the arms of the secretary.

And each episode ends with the doctor rushing in from stage left to aid the prostrate woman.

The Prostrate Mrs. Carlton
The Prostrate Mrs. Carlton

Come to think of it, The Ritz Carltons has a pretty strong misogynistic streak in it, too.

Well, you don’t look to a formulaic sitcom for subtlety — just a few cheap laughs. To help forget the fact that the rich today are not sources of comic relief but soulless blood-sucking vampires.

The Ritz Carltons, by Fillmore Hyde with illustrations by Rea Irvin
New York: Macy-Masius, 1927

Shade of Eden, by Kathleen Sully (1960)

Cover of Shade of Eden by Kathleen Sully

I wrote in my post on Kathleen Sully’s Canaille that she was an unstudied novelist — sometimes clumsy in her prose and style but also free of many of the conventions of more mainstream writers. In Shade of Eden, she amply demonstrates that one set of conventions she felt free to ignore was that of sexuality. Without using any of the terms, she introduces homosexuality, lesbianism, even polyamory into her story — and shows no concern with any of it. If any moral principle applies for Sully, it is simply that love is better expressed than frustrated.

To demonstrate, she plays out a set of variations on this theme. There are Bette and Eddie, married some years and with a young son, Sandy, who have reached the stage where each realizes the other is not the perfect match. There are the Patchetts, married longer and irrevocably entrenched in mutual contempt. There is Cliff, brought into the situation by Eddie in hopes of putting Bette’s fidelity to the test. There is Patsy, an old friend of Jean Patchett’s who proves to be carrying a torch for her. And there is Miss Hinks, one of Patsy’s co-workers at the local department store, for whom any opportunities for love have passed by.

These characters she weaves in and out as if performing a series of chemical experiments: how will she react with him (or her)? Some reactions are almost lethal. Others fizzle without effect. And some produce surprising results. Bette, Eddie, Cliff, and Sandy prove a better combination than any other set of twos or threes:

They existed in unity. Their blood — each felt its pulsing — seemed to flow round their circle, into and out of each, one stream through four hearts; their thoughts were all the same colour and texture; their spirit was one. Four souls had found a rent in the fabric around Eden and had crept in past the bearer of the flaming sword.

“Or had the bearer looked the other way?” This is the real world, after all, and specifically England in the 1950s. This delicate construction must collapse, of course, and not all the pieces will get picked up. Finding and expressing love does not guarantee lasting results. It’s just as likely to turn out like that stuff you squirt into a flat tire to get to the nearest gas station.

Shade of Eden proves once again that if Kathleen Sully has been forgotten by English literary history, it may well have been because she was something that English literature hadn’t seen for centuries: a naïf. Wikipedia states that “naïve art does not necessarily evince a distinct cultural context or tradition. Naïve art is recognized, and often imitated, for its childlike simplicity and frankness.” Although this was written about visual art, it may offer the best way of understanding Kathleen Sully’s remarkable oeuvre.

Shade of Eden, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1960

Appius and Virginia, by G. E. Trevelyan (1933)

Cover of Appius and VirginiaI’ll admit that I bought G. E. Trevelyan’s novel, Appius and Virginia, on the briefest of descriptions: “A story of a spinster who raises an ape in isolation in hopes of turning him into a man.” It seemed to promise another His Monkey Wife, John Collier’s sublime account of … well, as the title says. And, indeed, one of the consistent criticisms made of Appius and Virginia is that it’s not another His Monkey Wife.

Once I began reading, however, several things became clear. First, this is a riveting story. Taking in a few pages before turning over for the night, I ended up staying up for fifty pages and finished the book the next day. As Leonora Eyles wrote when she reviewed the book for the TLS on its first publication, “There are times when it is painful to go on reading, but impossible to shirk it….” Second, if there is anything comedic about Appius and Virginia, it’s only in the sense that Balzac used the term “comedy.”

There is nothing farcical here. Instead, this is the tragedy of two souls utterly incapable of understanding each other. Virginia Hutton, a single woman deep into spinsterhood, decides to undertake an experiment. She purchases an infant orangutan she christens Appius and raises him in complete isolation, treating him in every way as if he was a human child: “If it succeeded she would indeed have achieved something. She would have created a human being out of purely animal material, have forced evolution to cover in a few years stages which unaided it would have taken aeons to pass….”

The price of failure, however, is absolute: “… if this experiment failed her existence would no longer be justified in her own sight.” The alternative to throwing herself completely into the experiment is continuing to living in her single woman’s club in Earl’s Court, “Each year a little older, a little stouter or a little thinner, a little less quickly off the bus”: “an existence subdued and rounded and worn smooth by the little comforts and habits of her warm nonentity.”

And so as the book opens, we find Virginia sitting in the nursery of the cottage to which she has taken Appius, watching him sleep in the crib. Each time he attempts to burrow into his blanket, she commands, “Head out!” Night after night, through relentless repetition, she will teach Appius to sleep like a human. This is the sum of her technique. Caring for Appius, keeping the house, tending to the yard and garden, avoiding in every way possible not only any contact between Appius and any other ape but also any disclosure of the experiment to any other human being.

Gradually — very gradually — her efforts produce some effects. She gets Appius to say her name: “Ma-ma.” She manages to train him to feed himself with a spoon. Through years of daily training, she teaches him to read.

Or so she assumes. In fact, Appius merely learns to recognize the pictures in the lesson book and to produce the sounds he has come to know that “Ma-ma” will make as Virginia reads and repeats the text to him. Nearly none it reflects the cognition she thinks is going on. Instead, Trevelyan shows how very different is Appius’s understanding of his world compared to Virginia’s. One night, he watches a thunderstorm from his nursery window:

Blackness. Big moving things. Big still things. Big black things. Stillness, whiteness, dazzle.

White lights shooting: bright blades cleaving the black branches. Big silent things swaying and shiverying. Big moving things rotating: bending, sinking, swaying, crouching under the light.

Dazzle, giddiness. Blackness, brightness. Round and round, down and down.

In the first few years, Virginia seems impervious to the effects of her constant physical and mental toil: “The constant excitement, the unrelaxed tension, the unwavering hope, intermittently fed by minute signs, that before long he would communicate with and understand her, these not only sustained her through each day; she flourished upon them.” Appius, on the other hand, does not understand the pictures, does not understand the meaning of the sounds he has learned to make, does not understand the sounds that “Ma-ma” makes. “What was she saying now? He’d better repeat it, or she’d shake him, and then he’d be jerked right up into the nursery so suddenly that he wouldn’t be able to get back again for a long time.”

Appius’ progress slows, of course, and the years of constant work wear Virginia down. The kitchen grows black with filth, dust accumulates everywhere, the garden goes to weed. Virginia spends hours reading to Appius and the ape is happy to sit, comfortable and half asleep, in her arms, one hand on hers. “They had discovered the perfect relationship,” Virginia thinks. “Darling child, you can’t know how lonely mama was before she had you.” But of course, Appius truly can’t know how lonely mama was. Neither can Virginia understand that Appius has learned nothing more than to reproduce desired actions and sounds.

One could read Appius and Virginia as an allegory for marriage or the relationships between men and women in general. Indeed, one could argue that Trevelyan demonstrates that understanding may be secondary or even completely dispensable in a relationship. In reality, the only thing Appius and Virginia share is coexistence. In Virginia’s case, though, this is preferable to the invisible nonexistence of an aging single woman in the city. Which is why Appius and Virginia may be one of the most powerful stories about loneliness ever written.

Appius and Virginia, by G. E. Trevelyan
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1933

Passage from the Red Sea, by Zofia Romanowicz (1962)

Zofia and Kazimierz Romanowicz in front of the Galerie Lambert in 1962, from the Archiwum Emigracji, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka, Toru?, Poland
Zofia and Kazimierz Romanowicz in front of the Galerie Lambert in 1962

This post belongs in an as-yet uncreated category called “Scarcer than Hens’ Teeth.”

According to AddAll.com, there are exactly two copies of Passage Through the Red Sea available for sale, the cheapest starting at over $700. If you can read French, you can find more copies, including one autographed by the author, for $15-25. For those with access to a university library, WorldCat.org reports several dozen copies available in the U.S. and elsewhere, including one at the high school library in Chinook, Montana, in case you’re passing through there.

So I will not claim to have read this book, but I think it’s worthwhile on occasion to bring a little attention to truly, madly, deeply neglected books while there’s still a chance.

Zofia Romanowiczowa, to use her proper Polish surname, the author of Passage Through the Red Sea, was seventeen when the Germans invaded her country. Arrested by the Gestapo in early 1941 for aiding the resistance movement, she spent most of the rest of the war in a series of prisons and concentration camps, ending in the Flossenbürg subcamp of Neu-Rohlau in Bohemia. She and a friend escaped during an evacuation march and she was eventually able to make contact with the Red Cross and be taken into the American Zone.

She settled in Paris, where she met and married Kazimierz Romanowicz, owner of a bookstore and publishing company, Libella, serving the expatriate audience. The two became leaders in the Polish cultural community, founding the Galerie Lambert, an exhibition and performance space. She continued to write, eventually publishing a dozen novels, of which Passage Through the Red Sea is the only one to have been translated into English.

The English translation, by Virgilia Peterson (whose bilious memoir, A Matter of Life and Death, I discussed here back in 2007), was published as a Kurt and Helen Wolff book by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1962. It recently relatively few reviews (the New York Times passed it up) and soon disappeared. But here are a couple of the reviews that did appear:

• Kirkus Reviews:

It would be quite just to call this odd, repellent little book a strangely powerful novel. The narrator (we are not told her name or anything else which is not absolutely necessary) spent her adolescence in a concentration camp. While there she was kept alive, and also permanently crippled emotionally, by her love for and dependence upon an older girl named Lucile, who was married to Paul, who died in another camp. The narrator loved and still loves Paul, too, in much the same tortured, adolescent way. After their liberation, after Lucile has abandoned her, the narrator takes a rather crass (her opinion of him) lover named Philippe. When the book opens, years later, Lucile is coming halfway around the world in answer to the narrator’s desperate letters. Lucile, the narrator’s “”salvation””, is quickly attracted by Philippe, her “”doom””. When the narrator murders them both it is “”so that she (Lucile) would cease not being Lucile.”” It is a very sick and often moving portrait of a warped soul whose only reality lies in the dead dreams of a childhood ruined by war. The main fault to find is technical: the book is all self-analysis and private symbolism, repetitious to the point of fetishism: the tense drama of the actual events is present by implication only. But after all, that is precisely the narrator’s tragic condition.

• The New Yorker:

A strange, sorrowing short novel that deals with the reunion of two women — the nameless narrator and Lucile, who is somewhat older — some years after their release from a Nazi concentration camp. The narrator discovers that Lucile, whose help she needs and has always needed, has become an empty, posturing copy of her former self, and for a horrifying reason: in prison, the narrator, through her own dependence and frailty, has permanently drained Lucile, leaving only a husk. This nightmarish plot is accentuated by an oblique, dreamlike narrative (there is almost no dialogue), written in a chanting, doubling-back-on-itself prose, which may or may not be the author’s style but which is nevertheless just right.

• Elizabeth Cade in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

This beautifully written memoir of a Polish girl’s imprisonment in a Nazi slave labor camp, her intense bond with another woman, and their respective adjustments to freedom takes a unique place in contemporary writing. It touches, in a new and two-sided approach, the questions which have concerned the existentialist school of thought: personal integrity and the usage of freedom.

The narrator is still a young and idealistic girl when she is deported. In the camp she meets an old school pal, Lucile, who becomes her friend, protector, and above all, the guardian of her self-respect. “Let go” is Lucile’s motto, whenever her younger friend is about to give up wht last vestige of human dignity and sink to an animal level in the despair brought on by hunder and physical suffering. It is Lucile’s belief that survival must not be bought at any cost.

Freedom seemed to justify such moral strength. They “cherished the image of freedom as a higher and more just form of existence … a paradise of perfection where the lion and the lamb would lie down together, where everything would be given back to everyone.” When confronted with the realities of the world, in which compromise seems to be the accepted modus vivendi, both women take different paths in utilizing their hardwon survival.

The novel switches with flashbacks to the camp days to its locale in post-war Paris, winding up in a dramatic climax. Brilliantly translated by Virgilia Peterson, this is a fascinating exploration of human relationships and values.

• Polly Saunders in The Newport News Daily News:

For those of us who never spent time in a concentration camp this intense novel might seem to be an exaggerated account of morbid emotions. If we sharpen our imaginations, however, we can appreciate it as a small masterpiece written by a survivor of just such an inferno.

… Lucile was the elder of the two. She had been the younger girl’s only reason for being. “Lucile had known more about me than I knew about myself and sometimes, thanks to her, there came to life in me whole worlds the existence of which, until now, I had not suspected.”

This attachment is so powerful that it carries over into her present life in Paris. She still needs Lucile’s support and nostalgically recalls their camp days (despite their horrors) when she basked in her warm protection and love. The anticipated reunion finally takes place and there is utterly crushing disillusionment when she finds a changed Lucile. Lucile’s strength now lies in her ability to forget the past. She is interested only in wrenching from her present life whatever pleasures present themselves. References to their former life are taboo. Meantime, her worshipper practically dissolves in her disappointment.

The writing is intense. Sentences are long and repetitious and, for this reason, often monotonous. The story is depressing, but it is powerful in its turbulent outpouring from a young girl’s heart.

The best source on Zofia Romanowicz is a 2016 article by Alice-Catherine Carls from World Literature Today blog titled “The Renaissance of Zofia Romanowicz,” which includes a link to four poems newly translated into English.

A Distant Summer: Three Narratives, by Renzo Rosso (1962)

Cover of US edition of A Distant Summer by Renzo Rosso

A Distant Summer collects three long stories: “A Distant Summer,” “The Bait,” and “A Brief Trip Into the Heart of Germany.” Saturday Review’s reviewer tried to sum them up cleverly as “a scene erotic, a scene exotic, a scene psychotic,” but like most pat descriptions of a book, left a largely inaccurate summation of its true qualities.

Each story offers a snapshot of Italian life during and just after the Second World War. In “A Distant Summer,” set in the late summer of 1943, a seventeen year-old boy awakens to the complexity of adult life. Staying with his mother in a fine resort hotel at the foot of the Alps, he, like the other residents, is trapped in a sort of limbo. Mussolini has been removed from power by King Victor Emmanuel III and Marshal Badoglio named Prime Minister, but there are rumors that German divisions are preparing to come through the passes and take over control. Uncertain and fearful, they cling to the hotel as a refuge, sitting

… from morn to dusk on benches in the same square or around a clump of pines in the park or at tables in the bar. And these places might have been borders of the world or confines of a leper settlement, for no one crossed them, preferring extenuating boredom at the hotel to excursions and even simple walks in the lovely surroundings, lest these interrupted the reassuring sense of closeness to other besieged ones.

In his idleness, the boy becomes fixated on the only lone woman staying at the hotel, Signora Borghi, waiting with a young son while her husband, an Air Force pilot, is stuck with his unit. His adolescent reverie is broken when a tall, dark, well-dressed man, Signor Rangoni, arrives. He is an unashamed slacker: “I suffer from a rare and costly disease,” he says, “It costs me a fortune to have this disease till the end of the war.” But he and Signora Borghi are quickly attracted. In the course of an evening or two, the boy spies them walking off together into the evening shadows after dinner, and when he follows, see Rangoni pressing her up against a wall, her legs wrapped around him.

The boy’s anger, jealousy, and confusion are further compounded when the husband arrives. The boy is infatuated with the image of the dashing and heroic pilot, and emotionally sides with him until he overhears him say to his wife, “I hope one day someone will write me an anonymous letter and tell me. I’ll kill you and you know why now, I’ll beat you black and blue.” Exposed to aspects of the relations between men and women he had never encountered, the boy is left feeling something of a stranger in his own world.

Although it doesn’t quite match the quality of “A Distant Summer,” “The Bait,” which tells about how a charismatic young figure in the local Communist movement manipulates an admiring boy into becoming his accomplice, is certainly the better of the two remaining stories. “A Brief Trip Into the Heart of Germany,” about an encounter between a war crimes investigator and a former concentration camp guard, comes off less convincing.

“A Distant Summer” seems a perfect candidate for filming, rather an Italian counterpart to L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Beween: a story in which a boy is given a glimpse into the existence of sex as a force quite separate from any notions he might have of love or romance. The scenes are well-shaped, focused, precisely and efficiently sequenced, the prose — translated by Archibald Colquhoun — clean, exact, and specific. As the TLS reviewer wrote, “Signor Rosso can draw the pith of a man or a situation in a few words; he seems to have no tricks and an apparently transparent style, and all he says, with such brevity and such lack of elaboration, strikes one as piercingly accurate.”

A Distant Summer is available in electronic format on the Open Library (Link).

A Distant Summer: Three Narratives, by Renzo Rosso, translated by Archibald Colquhoun
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1962

Published in the U.K. as:

The Bait and Other Stories
London: Secker & Warburg, 1962

The Undesired, by Kathleen Sully (1961)

Cover of The Undesired by Kathleen Sully

Having now read a full dozen of Kathleen Sully’s 17 books, I’m beginning to see the outlines of her moral universe. Though it’s rich in comic circumstances and peopled more by the good than the evil, there is never more than a razor’s edge separating life from death, never more than a chance accident separating life’s winners from its losers. The Undesired is an object lesson in how to survive in her world — and how not to.

Stanley Chubb is one of the losers. A meek little man, he is so little noticed when retiring after thirty years in the same government office that a co-worker mumbles “See you Monday, Chub” as he leaves. He is as alone in the world as one can be: “… he was an old man without close friends or relatives — a lone man at the end of his life and usefulness, traveling in a train to a small flat in a nondescript street. He had done nothing worth recounting; he had see nothing worth remembering. He was nothing — a speck in the universe, less than a speck — merely a point in space.” Faced with a future in which he will simply “moulder away as if he had never been born,” he decides he must “blast this world wide open.”

He heads into the West Country and picks a little resort village on the coast to settle in, taking a decrepit cottage without electricity or running water and pledging to engage with the people there instead of receding into the background as he’s done all his life. Soon after, another retiree, the erect and tweedy Agnes Strathers — universally called “Horse” behind her back — shows up and demands to know if the cottage is for sale. She, too, is one of the undesired: “unlucky enough to feel alone in the world, unwanted, unlovely, unloved.”

Sully weaves Stanley, Agnes, and the growing circle of people they become involved with through an intricate choreography of encounters, misunderstandings, and accidents, but the real story here is far simpler than that. The Undesired is about nothing more than learning to survive by reaching out to the people around us — for help and to help.

But Sully will not let her readers be lulled by the soft glow of a happy ending. Just as the book closes, she draws our attention to another solitary visitor, a plain, grey nameless woman like Agnes, and leaves us with a grim reminder that we are never more than a step or two from death’s grasp. I recommend reading The Undesired in a warm place: a cold and bitter draft runs through this book.

The Undesired, by Kathleen Sully

London: Peter Davies, 1961

Horizontal Image, by Kathleen Sully (1968)

Cover of Horizontal Image by Kathleen Sully

Kathleen Sully was 58 when Horizontal Image was published. Liddy Creemer, her protagonist, is perhaps ten years younger. Her husband Tim is a good man: faithful, a good provider. Her daughter Olive is married to the also faithful Jeff. Together, they are visiting the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey when Liddy looks into a mirror set horizontal to the ground and sees “a visage of eighty years old.” It shocks her so much she reels, thinking, “My life has gone: I’m old — nearly dead.”

I’m not sure the phrase “mid-life crisis” was being used in 1968, but I’m pretty confident it wasn’t being applied to women. Reading Horizontal Image, I was often struck by how Kathleen Sully’s perspectives on the situation of women was far ahead of its time. Here, for example, is a short discussion between Liddy and her daughter:

“It’s my opinion that a woman can’t be a good mother and a career girl at the same time.”

“That’s right, Olive: you are beginning to see the problem. Husbands ought to share in the beginning and –”

“If any father ever took his responsibilities seriously, it’s Tim. He still does.”

“He takes the pleasure of his children — I’m talking about dirty diapers, feeding, cooking, cleaning, nursing and minding in those first years. A father should share the work and so allow the mother to continue to earn so that she may always be independent financially. And so that she can enjoy the children, too.”

“He takes the pleasure of his children” — that’s a fine (meaning, well-put) distinction. As a stereotypical housewife of her time, Liddy recognizes the steep economic uphill climb she faces if she wants to be independent: no skills worthy of easy employment; housekeeping and cooking skills sufficient to please a husband but not to work in either capacity professionally; no access to money without her husband’s permission. When she does decide to leave home and trying living on her own, Liddy has no other option but to pawn her jewelry, none of which is of any great worth.

Once on her own, when Liddy decides to explore the possibility of relationships with men other than Tim, she soon realizes that they all come with drawbacks of some type. One seeks sex but really wants a housekeeper; another is a fine companion in the day but an utter loss at night. Considering that Horizontal Image hinges on a woman’s negative self-image, it’s men who are seen in the worst light. Sully often offers up corrective asides to set the reader straight: John Downe was boyish in the manner meant when grown men are called boyish. Real boys are not at all like boyish men: they tend to be mischievous with a cruel streak, their energy is directed nowhere or anywhere, their innocence is a surface quality masking a furtive probing towards adult feelings.”

Liddy ends up in Sicily, where she manages to scrape out a way of surviving, but not before putting out a call for cash to avoid being put out on the street. She sends it in parallel to the three men — including her husband Tim — she thinks may still be prepared to help. The response is surprising and leads to a hectic and comic ending. But the reality of being female in a world run by men is never far, as an encounter on the steps of a Sicilian church reminds her:

She sat there, grey and old, dressed in dusty black — black cotton dress, black shoes and stockings, black shawl — all as old as herself and as worn. Her grey hair was drawn harshly back from her wrinkled brow and her nobbled, veined hands hung loosely over her skinny knees.

Liddy had been preparing to enter the church. The woman’s eyes caught hers and held them: not so much because they begged but by the surprise, amazement and envy in them. Liddy wore a simple pale cream dress, sleeveless, with a cream cardigan slung loosely over her shoulders.

The woman summed it all up in one simple gesture: with her left hand she indicated her own wretched attire — her own self — then moved the hand towards Liddy’s immaculate outfit and well-fed person. They looked into each other’s eyes — Liddy’s cool English ones and her near-black anguished ones. They were sisters: it was neither fair nor equal.

Horizontal Image is no Golden Notebook, but it certainly is proof that feminism was, by the late 1960s, penetrating deeply into the sensibility of English women — including that of a 58 year-old housewife and mother of three well into her second decade as a novelist.

Horizontal Image, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1968

Horizontal Image

Small Talk at Wreyland, by Cecil Torr (1918, 1921, 1923)

Wreyland Manor in 1910
Wreyland Manor in 1910

One day in December 1916, Cecil Torr, a lifelong bachelor and amateur scholar, an expert in Roman and Greek history and author of books on Hannibal and ancient ships, began keeping notes on items of interest about the people and land around his family home, Wreyland Manor, on the edge of the village of Lustleigh in Dartmoor. “Down here, when any of the older natives die, I hear people lamenting that so much local knowledge has died with them, and saying that they should have written things down.”

The scope of his note-keeping quickly got out of hand. “I meant to keep to local matters,” he apologized, “but have gone much further than I meant.” And thank God for that. As the book’s original reviewer in the TLS wrote, “An analysis of the first few pages reveals: the value of local memory; … his parents, grandparents and kinsfolk; heaven; faith and works; infectious disease; weather-lore; singing birds; rooks; weather lore again; homely remedies for illness; open windows; the may-dew on the young barley.”

And thus what might have been a minor and justly forgotten bit of Dartmoor folklore became Small Talk at Wreyland, one of the great bedside companions of English literature. After getting the first volume together for printing in a private edition he planned to share with a few of his friends, Torr was contacted by S. C. Roberts, one of the editors at the Cambridge University Press, who’d been show the book by J. B. Peace, the firm’s chief printer, and asked if he was interested in having the book published. Torr agreed and when the book came out in the summer of 1918, it was soon being celebrated as offering a welcome relief from the constant drone of war news. “We feel that we have been invited to Wreyland and are sitting with him over the fire,” wrote one reviewer.

Torr, his father, and his grandfather had all been university-educated, well-traveled, and omnivorous in their appetites for knowledge of all types. Torr often draws upon what seems to have been a substantial library as well as a great supply of family letters and diaries, so that his “small talk” embraces large as well as small topics. A few pages into the book, we learn about the ritual of scrubbing the high altar in St. Peter’s Basilica on Maundy Thursday:

The dignitaries of the church come down in procession, each one carrying a candle and a mop; and they throw oil and wine upon the altar, and then begin to scrub. I was close by, and noticed how differently they all did it. Some evidently thought it symbolical, and merely waved their mops across the altar, hardly touching it. And others would scrub hard, and then put their heads down and look carefully through their spectacles to see what they had done, and then go on scrubbing again till they were satisfied that they had done their bit.

A page later, he shares a remark one of his “thoroughgoing Protestant” neighbors made upon being told of Cecil’s visit to Rome and seeing the Pope: “Well now, maister, what be he like? I reckon he be a proper tiger to fight,” considering the Pope the Devil’s agent on earth.

Further on, he shares his mother’s recollection of one of the last duels held in the area: “It was a quarrel of two retired officers over facts which they could easily have verified. They had both got the facts wrong, and each was right in disbelieving what the other said; but neither of them would allow his veracity to be impugned, and they settled the matter in this fashion at five o’clock next morning.” The two men settled the argument with brutal finality: they both died.

“Cecil Torr on Scilly,” an uncredited photo from the Dartmoor Archive
He was particularly fond of the work of one of his great uncles, the Reverend William Davy, who spent most of his adult life writing an enormous twenty-six volume System of Divinity, then went on at the age of eighty to produce a three-volume set of “improved” extracts (you can find one volume online in the Internet Archive (link)). In a work of such length, one might expect an occasional detour to be found, such as the following diatribe on the evils of drinking tea: “the immeasurable use of that too fashionable and pernicious plant, which weakens the stomach, unbraces the nerves, and drains the very vitals of our national wealth; to which nevertheless our children are as early and as carefully enured, from the very breast, as if the daily use of it were an indispensable duty which they owed to God and their country.” No wonder England never managed to establish an empire.

And there is no end of the talk of the people of Lustleigh and the surrounding countryside, which Torr considered the most beautiful in England. Looking at her garden one summer afternoon, one neighbor remarked, “I were just a-wonderin’ if Heaven be so very much better ‘an this: ’cause, aless it were, I don’t know as I’d care for the change.” Another assures him about the best way to forecast the weather: “If the signboard of the Punch Bowl creaked upon its hinges, and the smoke blew down at Treleaven’s corner, rain was sure to follow, let the quicksilver be high or low.”

Small Talk at Wreyland was not a best-seller by any means, but its reputation as a book of great variety, charm, and humor spread, and Torr was soon invited to put together another. Small Talk at Wreyland Second Series was published in 1921 and the Third Series volume in 1923. The later volumes are just as good as the first. In Series Three, for example, Torr offers a short disquisition on the subject of haloes:

Saints and angels had round haloes, but other people had to be content with square or oblong haloes while they were alive. I do not know why this was so, or what a halo really was whether it was a thing like a rainbow which always faces you, or whether it was a flat and rigid thing which you saw obliquely when the wearer turned aside: the Old Masters have depicted it both ways. For want of higher authority I draw my own conclusions from such things as Toto Maidalchini says: namely, that saint Cassian, being puzzled, scratched his head, and thereby put his halo all awry; or that saints Pancras and Sebastian went bathing in one of the rivers of Paradise, and then sat upon the river bank while their haloes were drying in the sun.

If there is a book heaven, I have a feeling Cecil Torr is sporting his own halo there.

A selection from the three books was published as an Oxford University Press paperback in 1979, but aside from the usual print-on-demand suspects, you’ll have to make do with the electronic versions (Internet Library Series One (link), Series Two (link) and Series Three (link)) or one of the many used copies you can find for as little as one buck online (AddAll.com).

There’s No Story There, by Inez Holden (1944)

Women workers training at a Royal Ordnance Factory, 1943
Women workers training at a Royal Ordnance Factory, 1943

I keep lists of books to find, to buy, to read, and three titles that have been on all of them for years are Inez Holden’s wartime memoirs/novels: Night Shift (1941); There’s No Story There (1944); and It Was Different At The Time (1945). When my friend Kate Macdonald recently announced that her Handheld Press would be issuing Night Shift and It Was Different At The Time in a single volume, Blitz Writing, edited by Kristin Bluemel in 2019, I was thrilled. Seeing my reaction, Kate very generously offered to send me a PDF copy of There’s No Story There that Kristin has been using for courses for years.

In her own post on There’s No Story There, Kate writes that this is “both a story and not a story” because it is essentially nothing more than a slice of time in the life of a secret munitions factory in Yorkshire and the lives of its workers, without a definitely beginning or end, which is certainly true. But anyone who’s worked in a high security situation knows, one of the easiest ways to spot one is by its deliberate efforts to maintain a low profile. “There’s no story there … move along” is the kind of thing a security guard might say as he quietly suggests you’d best move along. “Security is the foundation of the whole thing,” the chief of security tells the plant manager.

There’s No Story There is set in what was undoubtedly a Royal Ordnance Factory or its private equivalent run by ICI Nobel, one of the massive facilities, usually located well away from population centers and favored bombing targets, at which artillery shells and aerial bombs were manufactured. These facilities were literally powder kegs, where extraordinary precautions were taken to prevent sparks or anything else that might trigger an explosion that would very likely set off others and result in the whole facility being blown out of existence. No wonder such an accident is never far from workers’ minds: “Now supposing there was a ‘blow’ here … Another part of my consciousness would be taken clean away from me…. Maybe I wouldn’t even remember leaving the hostel this morning…. There would be a parting in my memory as if a zip fastener had been ripped back and then got stuck suddenly….”

Holden may have taken some inspiration from Henry Green’s superb factory novel, Living (1929), because she uses a similar approach, scanning through the minds of a variety of the men and women working at the munitions plant. Julian, the Dunkirk survivor who transports shells from one shed to another; Mrs. Karslake, the hyper-officious functionary whose chief task is arranging for film showings to keep workers’ minds from the fact that they are never more than a second from obliteration; Ysabette Jones, the schizophrenic who boasts of her Group Captain boyfriend who “knows German, Italian, Spanish and all those already.” Holden’s proxy is probably the observer, Geoffrey Dutton, who lurks on the edge of the scene, obsessively recording conversations in his notebook. Only Geoffrey notices that the male and female workers “shared the same table, the same food, and the same fatigue — yet the conversation of the women and the men was completely isolated, on from the other.”

It would explain both the exceptional accuracy of the book and its essential shapelessness. The plant, its workers hostel, its operations and the interactions of the people are all artificial, temporary, full of privileges unknown elsewhere in England (Ham! Fruit!), and always on edge, one ear cocked for the possibility of an explosion. “There’s no story there, one can’t know it all. How can one? — with thirty thousand workers, some brave, some sad, some stupid, some clever, and others just kind of comical,” one young woman writes home. Although her letter would most certainly have been censored by someone in the Security office. These places would, after all, have run much more smoothly if they didn’t have to use people. And that tension between the desire to dehumanize the process and the unsuppressible insistence of people to be human provides the energy that makes There’s No Story There such a fascinating read.

Kate is considering issuing There’s No Story There if the reprint of Blitz Writing does well. So keep an eye peeled for when Blitz Writing comes out next summer!

There’s No Story There, by Inez Holden
London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1944

Through the Wall, by Kathleen Sully (1957)

Cover of Mastowe is a miserable industrial town on the English coast. Life there, writes Kathleen Sully, “seemed to know no moderation”: in the summer, “everything became dehydrated”; “in the winter everything was wet and cold”; and even when frozen “Mastowe managed to be uncomfortably wet — wet walls, wet bedrooms, wet cellars, wet feet, wet overcoats, and spirits, damp perhaps elsewhere, were sogged and water-logged at Mastowe.”

And the most miserable being in Mastowe is little Celia Wick. With lice in her hair, a rip in her bloomers, locked out of her house for hours on a cold and rainy day, going to bed hungry because her mother is too busy arguing with her father for coming home drunk, trying to fall sleep on a filthy straw mattress. She escapes by flying out her bedroom window, floating down the streets, transporting herself to the sea to watch a magical show: “the shells gave out tiny musics and the pebbles captured the light of distant stars, and the waves, separate and personal for an instant, each broke upon the living sands, then merged into the mother sea again with contented sighs.”

Through the Wall is Kathleen Sully’s grimmest story. Celia’s father dies of tuberculosis; when her mother remarries, the new husband refuses to accept the child and she is given to a friend. Any happiness that might come her way is soon replaced by a new tragedy. At fifteen she hitch-hikes to London. We last see her being taken into a lay-by by a trucker.

Suddenly, the story jumps forward twenty years. The step-father who disowned her is tormented with guilt. He convinces himself that a woman in London who’s been sentenced to hang for murder is Celia and sends his nephew off to find her and seek her forgiveness. Reluctant at first, eventually the nephew leaves on a long and largely fruitless search that leads him through a series of London neighborhoods as hard and poor as Mastowe.

Through the Wall contains some of Sully’s strongest writing. As her first book, Canal in Moonlight suggests, she had more than a brushing acquaintance with the smells, the sounds, the sensations, and the desperation of poverty. The row houses with broken windows, a jake in the back, and underfed and dirty children playing in the street. The crowded pub full of people looking for an escape:

… the mixture of other sounds, the warmth of alcohol within, and the close-pressing bodies without, all added to the feeling of unreality and confusion.

A pair of feet tapped out the rhythm of the piano’s tune; two or three voices sang the words; glasses clinked; a man shouted, “Two beers”; a woman laughed with a full, unrestrained voice.

… A woman caught his eye, but her stare was vacant, unseeing; she raised a glass of gin to her mouth, drank, continued to stare, but her thoughts seemed far away.

A man rolled up his shirt-sleeve, and carefully explained something about a scar to a disinterested group of people who drew seriously on their cigarettes.

An old woman, black-hatted, stockinged, coated-and-scarfed, nodded her shriveled head as if counting the throng, and smiled secretly into a glass of stout every time she took a sip.

The power of Sully’s spare but evocative prose cannot disguise the awkward seam that joins the two parts of her story. Gradually, however, the real link between Celia and Rodney, the nephew searching for her, becomes apparent, and it has little to do with their practical circumstances. Through the Wall is ultimately a book about the possibility of spiritual survival in a relentlessly harsh world. I’m not sure I say that Sully fully realized what she attempted, but once again, she demonstrates a voice and vision that was unlike anyone else’s. My respect for her achievement grows with each book.

Through the Wall, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1957

A Breeze on a Lonely Road, by Kathleen Sully (1969)

Cover of A Breeze on a Lonely Road by Kathleen Sully

A Breeze on a Lonely Road may be the most level-headed account of madness every written. Not that Trevor Greyson, Sully’s lonely bachelor solicitor is raving and frothing at the mouth mad. Trev has a very moderate, very English form of madness: for over thirty years, he steps into an alternate reality out on the moor: “On the moor he had many friends — all who came there. On the moor, he was not a greying and balding man of fifty: he was a supple youth whose voice rang with enthusiasm.”

On the moor, exciting things happened. On the moor, people were friendly: genuinely interested in him, genuinely please with his company. Unfortunately, “He had been escaping to the moor for many years and now it had become a greater reality than his waking live. It was his reality — so much that his work and daytime activities had become less and less important.”

The matter comes to a head during one of his mental trips to the moor when he comes across a group of badgers who have been killed. Dozens of their bodies lie scattered about. Trev finds this deeply perplexing: if this is his fantasy, as he understands it to be, then why would such a violent, evil act have taken place?

The experience leads him to reflect deeply on what it means for the moor to be part of his reality. He neglects his work to prepare a detailed map of the moor as he has experienced it. He compares it with real moors around England and finds no match, not even close. One night, as he is out with his friends on the moor, he asks them for their names, addresses, other details about their lives.

These are pointless questions, one of them, Edward, responds:

Telling you would mean nothing, and there is no name — no name that one could name though, if there were, how to get there? No map or chart could show the way but there is no map and, if there were, you would not be able to travel in that direction. Dear boy, do be content.

When Trev wakes, however, he writes down everything he can recall. He shuts his office and heads off to follow these clues.

None of them leads to anything definitive. It’s the wrong address, or no one by that name has ever lived there, or other details are off. Not just a bit off — wholly wrong in most cases. But still there are … resonances. He neither finds clear answers nor convincing disproof.

Concerned, his few acquaintances arrange for two psychiatrists to speak with Trev. And in a remarkably moderated depiction of psychiatrists at work, they bring Trev’s attention to possible connections between his moor experiences and his real life and leave it at that. No locking him away, no drugs, and no miracle cures.

In fact, they confirm what Edward had told him on the moor: “What you find out, prove or disprove will alter nothing except your attitude.” In Trev’s case, the most significant change is indeed one of attitude: from quietly and covertly sneaking away from his own day-to-day reality to a fantasy that makes him happy to deliberately making happiness part of his day-to-day reality. In the end, he’s still fifty, balding, and single and still responsible for what makes him happy: it’s a moderate sort of transformation, and all the more convincing as a result. In its own calm, softly comic way, A Breeze on a Lonely Road is one of the healthiest books I’ve read in a long time.

A Breeze on a Lonely Road, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1969