The Fractured Smile is a Feydeau comedy of infidelity, coincidences and missed connections transported to sixties England and a universe where Brownian motion has replaced Newtonian mechanics. Jess wakes to a phone call saying that her husband, George, has been spotting boarding a train to the seaside with his very attractive secretary. Jess throws on a dress, digs George’s revolver out of the attic, and dashes out of the house still wearing her bright red fuzzy slippers, with son David in tow, to give chase.
From this point on, the chain reactions take off, carried along by their own momentum. Except that Sully’s chain reactions have a unique characteristic. While each propels the story along, it also causes her characters — and the reader — to adapt to a shift in perspective. Piling into the first train compartment with any space, full of adrenaline and jealous rage, Jess gradually realizes that her compartment mates are not aloof and anonymous but a group of little people, elderly, alert, and considerate: “She looked around at their faces — they were pocket-sized angels in moth-balled reach-me-downs.”
Once at the coast, Jess quickly discovers how difficult it is to track down an unfaithful husband in a resort town full of hotels when his name really is Mr. Smith. Jess becomes separated from David and the gun. David meets up with a fearless local seven year-old named Rodge and the two of them meet up with a tenacious little dog they name Stray. Both Jess and George’s parents learn of her homicidally-minded flight to the coast and decide to team up and head off in pursuit.
Characters rush in and out of places with the manic energy of a farce on fast-forward. The two sets of in-laws, at distant ends of the financial and cultural spectrum, find they have far more in common than suspected. George eventually shifts from skulking husband to ally in the hunt for the lost boys. But in Sully’s physics, nothing that’s been upended can’t be upended again. Another accident, an angry word, and soon the in-laws are at battle again: “She could hear their querulous voices, her mother’s dominating all, as they quarrelled, heavily and bitterly, bringing up old wounds from the past, personal slights, imagined insults, broken promises — anything, anything at all so long as it could be hurled spitefully at the other.”
And as seems to be a rule in Sully’s universe, death is never too far off stage. Emotions tumble one after another like the balls in a bingo spinner, so love and loyalty and giddy delight can be followed a page or two later by fear, bitterness, and dread. As one might expect in a universe ruled by a healthy dose of randomness, some reactions shoot characters off into quite unexpected directions and some simply ricochet them right back where they came from. One thing’s for sure, though: when you start The Fractured Smile, you won’t be able to predict how things will turn out.
The Fractured Smile, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1965
I don’t think it qualifies as a spoiler to say that the man on the roof in A Man on the Roof is a ghost. Specifically, he’s Wilfred Clough, late husband of Peony. Obsessed with stamp collecting while living, he returns to haunt — or rather, berate — his wife after she sells his collection.
Left with little after Wilfred’s death, Peony has moved in with Ada Frisby, a spinster and oldest friend. Though the two women find happiness in each other’s company, people make fun of their situation — their relationship, their age, their poverty. Even their landlady whispers behind their backs: “Ada-Boy” and “fat as a pig.”
Kathleen Sully’s inscription in my copy of “A Man on the Roof”But these old girls still have some spunk. Indeed, they constantly manage to bolster each other’s confidence. When Wilfred suddenly appears in their flat demanding that Peony retrieve his stamps: “I shall not go until you fetch them back.” “You must do as you please,” she replies. “It won’t affect us in the least.” And though Wilfred is further infuriated when he learns his coveted collection has gone for little more than three hundred pounds, Peony and Ada consider it more than enough to start a new chapter in their lives.
A Man on the Roof could have been made into a great little Ealing comedy had it been published a few years earlier. The ladies buy a junky old van, have it fitted with a couple of beds and a gas ring, and set out for a life on the road. Though hoping to leave Wilfred behind in the flat, he manages to latch onto them like a limpet. They have their share of misadventures, all accompanied with Wilfred’s grumpy commentary, and have a gay time.
And their dogged independence and bedrock optimism alters how they’re perceived. Instead of mocked for being too old, too fat, too poor, too ineffectual, people begin to see their better qualities:
But he did not see the wrinkles around her bird-like eyes, nor did he notice the grey amongst the soft brown hair which was cut in a modern cap of loose waves and curls. His did not see the strings showing her neck; he admired her hands because of the signs of toil.
He saw a small woman — remarkably fit and spry, sun-burnt and clean — no messy make-up or varnish, a gently smiling mouth — as sweet and modest as a young girl’s, slim, pretty legs –decidely pretty legs. And pretty knees — decidedly pretty knees. He saw a fine woman — a charming woman — and a woman who couldn’t be bribed or intimidated.
Even Wilfred starts to look at Peony differently. Her refusal to listen to his criticism or let his constant presence (he’s visible but immaterial, if that makes any sense) eventually wins his respect:
“I’m beginning to think that I wasted my life living all those years in that hole of a town. Why didn’t we come to live in the country?”
“I always wanted to live in the country,” said Peony.
“You should have forced my hand.”
“Easier said than done.”
“And to think of all the time and money I wasted on those stamps and what good did they do me or you?”
Farcical comedies are bit like wind-up toys: no matter how fast they run along at first, at a certain point it’s hard for them to keep going. The trick is wrap things up while there’s still some energy left. It should be easier to do with a ghost story: after all, ghosts can live happily ever after. In the case of A Man on the Roof, however, Kathleen Sully resorts to some cumbersome narrative machinery that takes most of the glow from what should be a sunny ending. (Tip to writers: if you find yourself introducing new characters in the last chapter — don’t.) Otherwise, A Man on the Roof is a bit of fun with no more substance than a champagne bubble.
A Man on the Roof, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1961
Edmund Naughton’s 1959 western, McCabe, is mainly mentioned as a footnote to Robert Altman’s first masterpiece, his 1971 film McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Reissued as a tie-in to the film when it came out, it’s been out of print for over three decades now and fetches some fairly steep prices. (My tip: the cheapest copies seem to be of the 1961 Oldham Press edition — the “Man’s Books” version, which bundles McCabe with two other macho titles in what appears to have been attempt to create a testosterone-rich alternative to Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.)
This is a real shame because it diminishes how much of Altman’s “revisionism” in his approach to the western movie derives from Naughton’s work. Superficially, McCabe follows a classic western formula: stranger comes town, a reputation as a gunslinger trailing behind him; he settles in and the town settles to him; then he is forced to decide whether to run and save his skin or stand his ground and take his chances. There’s a showdown scene as dangerous and gripping as the climax of High Noon.
Yet, writing just seven years after High Noon, Naughton is far less looking back at the traditions of the western than anticipating much of what came in the next 10-15 years, in films and, to a lesser extent, in novels. Naughton’s protagonist, John McCabe, is closer to an anti-hero like Catch-22’s Yossarian than Marshal Will Kane. Though a dead-eye shot who’s adapted his Colt to fire without a trigger, he has only killed one man and him mostly by accident. He lives mostly as a traveling gambler but reminds himself that he was chased off a riverboat as a greenhorn amateur. He tries to be fair to the Chinese and Indians in the little mining town of Presbyterian Church where he decides to set up a saloon and, later, a whorehouse.
And he is far ahead of his time in his attitude towards women — or at least towards Mrs. Miller, who arrives and takes over the job of running McCabe’s whorehouse. Though the two are partners in business and, fairly regularly, in bed, McCabe understands that he cannot take their relationship for granted:
McCabe was sensitive about being noticed in her room. He took care, thought, to be discreet, to attend to business, and there were nights when he didn’t want to go over there.
Those were the nights when he knew she would like there smoking naked on the bed with the wicks down in the kerosene lamps; and, if he came, she would look at him with eyes like violet stones in cold water — as if he were to blame for the man she had sold herself to that evening.
McCabe also exhibits a degree of emotion intelligence that’s still pretty rare in most male characters. He struggles with Mrs. Miller’s dispassionate approach to their nights together. Though frustrated that she quickly sees that he is close to illiterate and far less trustworthy with figures, he wishes they could share more than just a physical intimacy: “All my like I been walking around with a block of ice inside me, Constance, and I don’t hardly get the sawdust brushed off before you got me back in the icehouse.”
Naughton’s view of good and evil is a far cry from High Noon, too. McCabe is a gambler, a schemer, a coward and, when pressed, a killer. Rev. Elliott, who has erected the church that gives Presbyterian Church its name, is bitter, bigoted, and anti-social: he would prefer that the rest of the town disappeared. When gunmen arrive to face off with McCabe, they are there as stooges of a distant corporation, carrying out a business transaction:
Snake River Mining Company can’t afford you: can’t afford a man it can’t buy out. Know that? Never tolerate that. Can afford Sheehan, damned fop they sent to you last week: margin of corruption it allows for in its budget. Company calculated the cost of Presbyterian Church; who collects doesn’t matter. More corrupt people are, easier they can be controlled; company can always send them to jail when they get to be a nuisance.
… At any rate, McCabe, they can’t afford you around. Bad example. Pile all these mountains on you, if they have to; so people thereabouts will believe it, if they deny you ever existed.
Naughton may have been the only writer of westerns to have learned more from George Orwell than Zane Grey — although one English reviewer cited a different influence, dismissing the book as the “Latest example of the neo-Freudian intellectual death-wishful Westerns.” Suffice it to say that McCabe merits more than just footnote status in reference to a much better known movie. It’s original, innovative, and as gripping as any thriller. And, as one reviewer put it, “You don’t have to like westerns to like this one.”
McCabe, by Edmund Naughton
New York: Macmillan, 1959
Kathleen Sully uses death as punctuation in A Man Talking to Seagulls, a tale of one day in the life of Dundeston, a resort somewhere on the east coast of England. She opens the day with the body of a young woman washed up on the beach. Scratcher, a vagrant living in a shack on the beach, “a man of little account to anybody — even himself,” is the first to find her and, it seems, the only one to take any note of her death. “Where is she?” he asks the seagulls as he feeds them.
She must be somewhere; she can’t be nowhere. A person is a person the same as a gull’s a gull. And a soul’s a soul: indestructible, quite — quite indestructible, everlasting, for ever and ever. The good Lord said it was so — is so. The body holds the soul — holds us.
The police come quickly and take the body away and Dundeston carries on with its day. The man who rents the beach chairs begins setting them up. The man with the donkeys brings them out to await a new batch of riders. The cockle seller lights up his stove and raises the awning on his stand. The day-trippers start flowing in from the bus stand and train station. The people staying in holiday bungalows awake and breakfast.
In one of the bungalows, two young people away for a secret weekend begin arguing. He loses his temper and throws a vase at her head. She collapses. He tries to rouse her. Finding no sign of life, he decides he must dispose of the body. “Val won’t be missed — yet,” he thinks. “When she was missed — and who would miss her apart from her landlady and a few casual friends — would she be traced?” He stashes the body in a shed and heads into town for breakfast.
This disregard for the value of a life threads throughout A Man Talking to Seagulls like a motif in a minor chord: never too long, never too loud, but persistent and unsettling. To the young and healthy, it’s an irrelevance. To the middle aged trying to get through another day, it’s an annoyance. And to an old woman quietly nipping from the bottle of gin in the family picnic basket, it’s a disturbing inevitability:
Her youth was long past, yet she found it difficult to accept the fact that she was old — really old. But her weak and trembly legs insisted upon it; her gnarled and blue-roped hands proclaimed it; only the oldest of human flesh was as crepe-like and yellowed as her own.
And a little while after having these thoughts, as she sleeps in her beach chair, death makes its second appearance of the day. “What can we do with her out here — how will we get her home?” is her daughter’s first reaction. She is still at the annoyance stage.
Sully manages to squeeze a cast of dozens into the space of barely 160 pages. They weave in and out, crossing paths or missing each other entirely. Val, the girl with the cracked skull, comes to, finds herself wrapped up in a canvas cloth in the shed, susses the situation, manages to slip out, and heads for the first train out of town. Her would-be murderer wanders the town trying to decide between finding a shovel and a discreet bush to bury her behind and attempting to toss her body into the sea that night. He meets a creepy old man in a isolated mansion at the edge of the town and is left with the distinct impression that the old man may have buried a body or two himself.
But he never meets with any sense of regret until death makes its last visit of the day. Wandering along the beach, he comes across another body:
For an instant he knew that he beheld a husk — that the man was elsewhere — and that life was life and could not be denied or extinguished — ever. The body was merely a shack.
The instant passed and all knowledge of it: all he knew afterwards was that he had felt something to stupendous to comprehend.
After reading six of Kathleen Sully’s seventeen novels, I think I can see two themes emerging in her work: life is chaotic and rarely comprehensible; and death is inevitable and never more than a breath away. A Man Talking to Seagulls is an apt example of how she managed to weave both themes into a single composition almost Simenon-ian in its grim efficiency.
A Man Talking to Seagulls, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1959
Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Daniel Wintle MC, or A. D. Wintle for short, was one of the great characters of the 20th century, a genuine war hero, egoist, eccentric, and defender of all things gentlemanly. He died before finishing his autobiography, but when his friend Alastair Revie condensed the million-some words of manuscript that Wintle left behind him into under 300 pages, he was sure to keep Wintle’s chosen title: The Last Englishman (1968). I’m sure Wintle would have held that there was nothing the least bit presumptuous about it.
This is the book I wanted to write about, but unfortunately, copies fetch anywhere from $300 to $2,000 — too rich for my peasant blood. So I had to make do with what I could find and afford: Wintle’s 1961 novel, The Club, which can be had (at the moment) for as little as 64 cents. Although calling it a novel vastly exaggerates the book’s substance. It’s more of a will-o’the-wisp in hardback form.
It is not one of the leading clubs. It is The Leading Club itself. It is the standard club on which all other clubs leading or following would wish it to be supposed that they themselves are modelled.
It is “The Club,” and as such it is known, not only to taxi-drivers and other persons in equally specialized professions, but also to all members of all clubs or would-be clubs.
The Club claims to be a history of The Club assembled by a group of distinguished editors, but it is in fact merely a collection of old warhorses of anecdotes told by Sir Milner Gibbard, Baronet, of Blandwich Place in the County of Wessex, the member of over fifty years’ standing proposed as their expert source — although Sir Milner’s first reaction is to dismiss the idea outright: “‘No!’ he snapped. ‘Absolutely out of the question,’ he added, no doubt with the intention of making his intention crystal-clear.”
“The trouble is … the great trouble is, that I don’t know anything about it.”
The editors are confused.
“You talk as if I had been here for five thousand years instead of fifty,” he explains.
After a fair amount of fruitless negotiations, one of the editors suddenly realizes the problem. “He paused, then raised his voice and spoke very slowly and very clearly: ‘We were asking … I mean to say, that I was asking you to write us a History of The Club.”
“The Club!” he exclaims. “Good God, I thought you said The Flood.”
This gives you an idea of the tone (and content) of the rest of the book. Just imagine Spike Milligan in the role of Sir Milner and you’ll find you’re reading a collection of never-performed skits from The Goon Show.
And just what exactly is wrong with that? I hear you ask. My point precisely, sir!
None of the four novels by Kathleen Sully I’ve read so far is anything quite like the others, but I feel safe in saying that Skrine is the most unlike the rest. In fact, in his TLS review, Arthur-Calder Marshall observed that Sully’s critical reputation (back when she had one) would have been higher if she’d had the stamina to rewrite the same novel over and over, like Ivy Compton-Burnett. Instead, he wrote,
Each of her novels, like those of Miss Muriel Spark, is original in the sense of being not merely unlike those of other authors but also unlike her other novels. Each demands from the reader an approach without preconceptions; each erects the standards by which the author wishes this particular book to be judged. There is no Sullyland, but there is a Sully world, as yet as ill-defined in her eight novels as the maps of the early cosmographers. It is being filled in piece by non-continguous piece.
From what I have been able to learn, Sully’s novels were set in southern England in a time somewhere between the early 1950s and the late 1960s. Skrine, however, while set in the same area, takes place in a time after most of the population and signs of civilization in England — and the rest of the world, we must assume — has been wiped out by some worldwide holocaust. Nuclear war? Plague? One cannot tell. “Surface earthquakes” is the most we are told. Survivors band together in scattered farms or the startings of small walled towns. Others roam the landscape, living by their wits and ability to overpower those like them.
As Skrine opens, the title character, has just killed a woman for a pack of cigarettes. He finds just one cigarette — desiccated or ersatz — left in the pack. No matches on her. And his lighter long out of fluid. He moves on.
A lone wanderer, Skrine is a stranger, looked at with suspicion and fear by anyone he encounters. And his memory is haunted by people — an old woman, a man, a child. Are they people he killed? “These people don’t exist — except in my brain. I must rid myself of them.” “I’ll be the boss,” he tells himself. “I’ll banish these apparitions for once and all time.”
But after he swims across a wide river — the Thames? — and collapses on the far shore, his imagination kicks in again. He sees a boy watching him. He cannot recall killing a child. Had he stolen food from him? “Children had been abandoned or deliberately lost and there had been rumours of cannabalism and the rumour hadn’t surprised Skrine or troubled him in those days — at least, not much.”
After stumbling on in a delirium of hunger, he comes across a group outside a walled town burying four bodies — three adults and a child. He edges up, watches, then cries out, “This child is alive.” Taken into the town, he is hailed as a healer. Some sort of illness is taking its toll, and the inhabitants flock to him to be cured. The mayor holds a council and it is decided to let Skrine stay.
At this point, the narrative shifts. Within a few days, Skrine discerns that the arrangements of power are more complex than he first thought. The real power is held by Jervis, a short, nasty, and brutish man who took over the town with the help of a small band of men armed with guns. Do the guns really work? No one has the appetite to find out. A few of the original inhabitants murmur about taking control back. Jervis recognizes the value of an ambiguous opposition and gives them just enough rope to keep muttering behind his back. He cultivates Skrine as an ally — also recognizing that Skrine sees himself as a loner and idealist, and hence probably not capable of organizing any viable resistance.
Skrinecould be read as a parable for the use of power in the age of Twitter. Jervis warns the people of the threat of attacks from other towns to the south. In reality, he wants to take their remnants of running machinery and supplies. In response to his threats, Skrine and others mutter their objections — but no one makes any over gesture of opposition. And Jervis has his trolls among the small population, raising charges against Skrine: Theft! Rape! Murder!
If a parable, then Skrine offers little hope for us today. Fear may be a negative force, but in the right hands it can be extremely effective, especially when it gathers an influential minority to its cause. A reviewer in the Catholic Herald called Skrine “an absolutely remorseless, post-Apocalypse novel, uncompromisingly bleak.” It is all those things — and also impossible to put down. One wonders how Kathleen Sully — then a mother of three teenagers — found a way to such dark emotions and then translated them so powerfully to the page. And one also has to wonder: how is it that Lord of the Flies has sold in the millions and is taught in classrooms around the world, while Skrine has vanished so successfully that not even a single copy appears to be available for sale?
Skrine, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1960
I wrote about Frank Laskier’s fictionalized autobiography, Log Book, over six years ago, but it wasn’t until recently that I had the chance to read My Name is Frank, the collection of BBC broadcast talks that brought him to fame. Even slighter in length than Log Book, My Name is Frank still manages to carry a powerful message after over seventy-five years.
In the spring of 1941, a small crew led by BBC reporter Terence de Marney toured some of the ports most badly damaged in the Blitz. They spent an afternoon at the Seamen’s Home in Liverpool, where they met numerous merchant seamen just ashore from Atlantic convoys under constant attack by German U-boats. De Marney decided it would be a good source of material and returned soon after, spending six weeks as an ordinary resident, collecting stories. But when he sat down with Frank Laskier, who was at the home waiting for an artificial foot to replace the one shot off when the German raider Komoran attacked and sank his ship, de Marney realized he’d found a perfect personality for radio.
Over the next few weeks, de Marney sat down with Laskier and recorded around a dozen talks, all roughly 10 to 15 minutes long. The first of these, broadcast on 5 October 1941, recounted his experience of being sunk, spending two days on a raft with nine other survivors, being rescued by a Spanish steamer and then transferred to a Royal Navy cruiser. “I am a sailor, an Englishman, and my first name is Frank,” Laskier begins. “I am quite an ordinary sort of individual — all we sailors are,” he continues in the matter-of-fact tone that characterizes the entire book.
You can hear a recording of the original broadcast, released as a 78 RPM single on His Master’s Voice, on YouTube:
I highly recommend taking the time to listen to it all. For a story about violence, survival, and suffering, there is no extraneous dramatization. Instead, there is a sense of calm resolution and, most remarkably, a tenderness rarely found in a man’s account of war. I can’t listen to the last two minutes without tearing up.
The response to the first broadcast was beyond any expectations. BBC not only broadcast the rest of Laskier’s recordings with de Marney but London publisher Allen & Unwin arranged to release them as a book, with an introduction by noted sea writer William McFee a foreword by BBC staffer Eldon Moore. The U.S. rights were bought by Norton, and the book sold well in both countries.
Laskier returned to sea after receiving his artificial foot and survived two more sinkings, but the demand for his material led to a further contract from Allen & Unwin and Scribner’s for his autobiography, Log Book, which they released in 1942. Laskier was then hired by the British Council to do a tour of Canada and the U.S., giving talks in support of the Allied cause. He married an American woman, settled in a town up the Hudson valley from New York City, and began a second career as a writer. He published sea stories in Collier’s and other magazines and a novel, Unseen Harbor, in 1947. He died in July 1949 when a car he was riding in veered off the road and struck a tree. In 1954, John Harris, author of The Sea Shall Not Have Them, edited a second novel Laskier was working on when he died, and it was released as Siren Sea.
My Name is Frank, by Frank Laskier
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1942
“Bikka’s rats are large, fierce and tenacious. They find rich pickings in the garbage of the extravagant Bikka poor which nourishes bodies and whets appetites for yet more. Only the boldest or most foolhardy of the Bikka cats ever stalk one, so they go from strength to strength; feared and shunned or abhorred and ignored.”
The opening lines of Kathleen Sully’s first novel, Canal in Moonlight, make it clear that the reader is well past even the territory of the “kitchen sink realism” of the Angry Young Men. This is the lavatory pan (toilet bowl for us Americans) realism. Indeed, one of the early crises in the book is the loss of the one and only lavatory pan at number 65, Bikka Road, home of Horace and Belle Hoppe and their sixteen children.
The Hoppes live along a former industrial canal, “now disused … a problem to the local authorities, a forbidden place of muddy excitement to small boys, and a dump for rubbish.” And, as the story develops, for junky old cars, broken furniture, and other unwanted problems.
“Canal in Moonlight” may be a romantic image, but there is nothing remotely romantic in this book. The Hoppes have far too many children to care for or even reliably keep track of. Belle is a former prostitute wed years ago to Horace, considered of “abnormal or subnormal intelligence” by his family. An utter stranger, he had walked up to her on the stroll one evening and proposed marriage. She had accepted. “Whether she had ever loved her even she did not know, but her respect for his respect of her was beyond measure, and she had never overcome her surprise at being asked, nor did she ever come to the dregs of her happiness arising out of it; her cup of happiness was ever full.”
So this is a family living in filth and degradation, totally dependent on the tiny allowance Horace receives from his wealthy brother (clearly to keep him at a safe distance), despised by their neighbors, never more than an accident away from complete disaster. Yet Belle considers herself near constant bliss. And despite the fact that Horace “had a strange, detached, unpractical and at times wholly stupid attitude towards all that his parents held important,” we soon come to realize that he is far closer to a holy innocent than a shiftless idiot. Indeed, when he feels compelled to provide Belle with the slight relief of a day’s outing to the seaside, he goes right out, secures a job as a delivery boy, and quickly pulls in some generous tips for his exceptional service and courtesy.
Such are the paradoxes that fill Canal in Moonlight. The Hoppe house may be crawling with children, not to mention the pregnant goat in the living room and the decrepit old horse in the front yard, but there burns a steady flame of … well, call it as you like — goodness, joy, or love. Meanwhile, next door at the house of the “good” Dyppes (surely Sully meant something by this Hoppe/Dyppe parallel), an air of bitterness and resentment prevails — and proves only a veneer covering a far more profound sickness at its core.
There’s no doubt that Sully was aiming for something that proved somewhat beyond her reach. As in the two other books I’ve read so far (Merrily to the Grave and A Look at the Tadpoles), she likes to work with a cast of dozens (a dozen and half just with the Hoppes) and as one might expect with a first novel, a few of them seem to have no particular purpose or quickly get lost in the hub-bub of her narrative. Some of her detours in telling the tale prove dead ends.
But as most of the book’s first reviewers recognized, there is a remarkable and original perspective on view for the first time in Canal in Moonlight. From those first lines, you know the narrative arc can only be headed in a downward direction. Bad things are going to befall the Hoppes, and they prove to be very, very bad things. And yet … well, it’s a bit hard to explain, but none of them manage to snuff out the little flame that each of the Hoppes somehow manages to keep alive. “So quiet, my soul, relent thy bitterness, garner thy strength,” Horace thinks as he briefly contemplates suicide near the very end of the book. “Who knows what struggle yet awaits us….”
Kathleen Sully was forty-five, a housewife and mother of three in Weston-super-Mare when Canal in Moonlight was published. No Angry Young Man, she, nor a heady young woman such as Doris Lessing or Iris Murdoch. But neither was Canal in Moonlight a safe bit of middlebrow comedy or Regency romance. And I think this was part of the problem that dogged her throughout her next fifteen years and sixteen novels. Those whom the gods would forget they first set outside any the limit of the known labels and categories.
This is so evident in the cognitive dissonance expressed by many of her reviewers:
• John Davenport, The Observer
Canal by Moonlight is a first novel. It is very odd. I don’t quite honestly, know what to make of it. I do know that I couldn’t put it down; or rather, that I dropped it like a hot brick, again and again, only to pick it up once more…. A short, phosphorescent insomniac’s white night.
• Douglas Hewitt, The Guardian
It would be difficult to find a greater contrast than between the work of the astute Mr Powell [a fair number of the reviews discussed Anthony Powell’s The Acceptance World alongside Sully’s book] and Kathleen Sully’s first novel, Canal in Moonlight, which is, in its own way, just as distinctive a performance. The brief notations with which a reviewer indicates to the potential reader that he will have met this kind of thing before and that this is a good or bad specimen of the type will not do for this novel. It bears all the marks — good and bad — of proceeding from a markedly idiosyncratic individual vision.
• Angela Milne, The Sketch
But no summary can give a clue to its quality; for here the ordinary standards of happiness and virtue are challenged and, through a sort of Chorus in the form of the spinster next door, Kathleen Sully puts forward a philosophy that binds these beautifully-written pages into a work of war. “She is a good mother,” the spinster says of Belle; and in that paradox lies the essence of a book that you may hate to read, yet will be glad to have read. It is a first novel for which “promise” is a mild word.
• Elizabeth Bowen, The Tatler
Bizarre? A nightmare prose-poem, a lyric nightmare? How shall one describe Canal in Moonlight?…. A well-nigh witchcraft quality in Miss Sully’s art makes what is barely possible seen probably — and, as in an Elizabethan play, violence goes hand-in-hand with purity.
• Vernon Fane, The Sphere
Canal in Moonlight is short and it is misleadingly simple. It is also dramatic, violent and unexpectedly tender in turn. This is Miss Kathleen Sully’s first novel and I know of no exact category into which it can be fitted, except perhaps that of books that are very well worth reading.
• The New Yorker
A curious piece of work — awkward, spontaneous, honest, and as real as the dream that wakes one suddenly in the middle of the night.
• John Betjeman, The Daily Telegraph
Kathleen Sully is above all things a born writer. This explains the mystery of her being able to hold one from her very first sentence to her last.
• Julian Symons, TLS
From the dramatic moments of these stunted lives Miss Sully has made comedy; but this raw, strange, imperfect novel is notable also for its awarenes that human dignity can endure through wretchedness and filth.
• Isabel Quigley, The Spectator
It is difficult to describe the extraordinary power of Canal in Moonlight. Among the rest of the week’s novels it sits about as cosily as an esquimo in an espresso bar. For it is a true primitive, something preciously rare among novelists, with the ruthlessness, the ferocious exactitude of observation that implies; an exactitude that may even make things look unfamiliar, so used have we grown to the layers upon layers with which our normal experience is overgrown…. To say it is a slum story of seduction, murders, suicide and desolation, conveys nothing. To say the house in it stinks of goats, blood seeps under the garage door for a child to bounce his ball in, and the warehouse rats are as big as cats, gives an impression of plain squalor. And squalor is far from being the final mood. This impressive book is, even more impressively, a first novel. I cannot for the life of me imagine what Miss Sully’s second will be like, for this one reads like a single, compact, and unrepeatable phenomenon.
For me, three novels have not quite been enough to form a coherent view of Kathleen Sully’s work. But Canal in Moonlight was certainly a unique book in 1955 and remains so from a distance of 63 years, and provides proof enough that her utter neglect in British literary history is inexcusable, if explainable. I have half a Hoppe-ful of her other books on order. The exploration continues.
Canal in Moonlight, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1955
When I did the research for the recent post on novelist and poet Eleanor Saltzman, I had to make do with reading a copy of her first novel, Ever Tomorrow for an hour or so in one of the few libraries that has a copy. I wasn’t ready to spend $188 for the one copy I could find for sale. I was, however, able to find a copy of her second and last novel, Stuart’s Hill, for … well, less than the $95 it goes for now, and it finally arrived this week.
The book’s cover describes it as “A Tremendously Moving Story of the Life of a Little Community, as Reflected in the Chapel Planned in the Hearts and Minds of the People and Erected by Their Hands.” And hyperbole aside, this is the skeleton of the story. Tired of meeting with a traveling preacher in the little schoolhouse, the farmers in an area some miles from the nearest town decide to put their resources together and build a church. The wives make quilts to raise money for an organ. David McEwen, an upright Scot, offers a piece of land. William Stuart and his wife Margaret offer a hilltop spot in a grove of hickory and oak trees. The congregation votes for Stuart’s hill.
McEwen works on the project “faithfully and earnestly, as was his wont, but sometimes his words were edged with sharpness, and on Sundays something was gone from his voice when he led the people in singing.” Even before the site is cleared, a little crack has begun to open. McEwen urges the men to use bricks from his brother-in-law’s kiln: they’re cheaper. Everyone knows Stamper’s bricks are far superior, but they go along to humor Dave. “We’ll be repairing the foundation in ten years,” some men grumble. A day or so after his first child, a son, is born, William Stuart hauls a load of beams from town, and in his delight, he breaks into song, singing “Horo Mhairi dhu.” McEwen and others mutter about his impiety — bringing materials for the church when he’s liquored up.
As the years go by, the church hosts many services, Sunday school classes, weddings, funerals, church suppers. And the cracks keep appearing. Jealousy over the first automobile. Disdain for a feckless pastor. Angry words. Suspicions about Young Dave McEwen and Eulah Peterson. Young people moving to town. Elizabeth Grayson gets pregnant, and everyone knows Mel Hone, the pastor’s son, is the father.
The service was well under way when Amos Grayson entered, alone. He went to his accustomed pew, and even Jim, seeing his stark, hardened fact, wondered what had befallen the round goodness of his countenance. For his eyes fastened on the minister, and the depths of the hatred of Hell dwelt in them, unyielding….
The people wiped their foreheads, bleakness still as death in their throats, for the despair of their brother Amos touched them electric with knowledge and fear. And their fear was not for Elizabeth alone, not for Amos and Rachel, but for them all and their fellowship seeking the ways of the Lord. Not this, Jesus, not this curse, this violation of our sanctuary. And the hard agony of the good man Amos left them no peace from the tight breath aching within them.
Stuart’s Hill is a lean, strong parable of how a community that lacks the capacity to forgive ultimately destroys itself. Writing in simple, pious language, Saltzman managed to accomplish in under 150 pages what Steinbeck tried and utterly failed to do in the nearly 700 bloated pages of East of Eden.
Stuart’s Hill, by Eleanor Saltzman
New York: Bernard Ackerman, Inc., 1945
What a contrast between Kathleen Sully’s last novel, A Look at the Tadpoles, and her first, Canal in Moonlight (1955). Canal was about a family of umpteen kids living in rat-infested digs in the midst of some nameless industrial hellhole. Tadpoles is about two only children who spend a lovely summer day traipsing merrily around Sussex. Yet the two books are united in a belief in the indestructible power of a child’s optimism.
When sixteen year-old Mark decides to escape from the train taking him back to boarding school, he triggers a chain of events that knocks an ever-widening array of characters out of their routines and into new perspectives. His first victim — or rather, beneficiary — is twelve year-old Cecily, stuck in her garden flat by some unnamed handicap (Sully glancingly mentions withered legs and dependence on “walking aids”). “Why are you running away?” she asks:
“Running away?” he replied. “I’m not running away. I’m running to something — there’s a vast yet subtle difference.”
“Yes, but why?”
“Because it’s just the kind of day to run to something. Look at it — it’s perfect.”
He sweeps up Cecily and carries her off on a random spree on a cart stolen from a neighbor’s yard, the first of a series of hijacked vehicles that ultimately includes a horse and buggy, a city bus, and a Piper Colt airplane. Mark brims with a young man’s untested self-confidence, but it’s given an extra boost by Cecily’s capacity for enjoyment: “Her happiness gave point to everything and enabled him to push all thought of tomorrow and consequences.”
Together, their spirit infects everyone they come in contact with. A grumpy farmer falls back in love with his wife. A despondent inn-keeper reawakens to the value of her little place as the hub of its community. Cecily’s mother and her boss discover a mutual attraction. A bus driver realizes how much he loves his baby son. And a failing circus finds its power to entertain again:
Cecily was quiet and still, showing nothing of the excitement she felt within until a clown lifted his hat to her and a jet of water sprang from his head. Then she shrieked with laughter and it was not long before the ringmaster and everyone in the ring knew that they had with them the magic kernel of all great audiences — an innocent heart which believed the unbelievable, an unsophisticated soul with the capacity and capability of being lifted to the highest heights of happiness and laughter.
A Look at the Tadpoles has all the substance of champagne bubbles. It’s a giddy, harmless bit of fun in which a great lot of sensible English people go mad in a very moderate and middlebrow way. It reminded me very much of the wonderful 1986 film, Clockwise, starring John Cleese (and written by Michael Frayn), in which another missed train sets off a similarly anarchic chain of events that upsets a few well-dug-in mindsets. And merely whet my appetite to continue exploring the works of Kathleen Sully.
A Look at the Tadpoles, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1970
Kathleen Sully published 17 novels between 1955 and 1970. She was compared to Muriel Spark and Brigid Brophy. John Betjeman called her “above all things a born writer.” In 1960, John Davenport wrote, “If she is not among the leading English writers of the day, she is certainly among the most arresting and original.” Her play, “The Waiting of Lester Abbs,” was one of Lindsay Anderson’s first London productions. Alan Nicholls, a Melbourne critic, wrote that “Kathleen Sully … always does something unexpected with a novel.”
Until a few days ago, I’d never heard of her. I suspect you haven’t either.
I came across her name in a list at the back of Margaret Crosland’s survey of 20th century English women novelists, Beyond the Lighthouse (1981). Doing a little more digging, I quickly discovered a few things. In the space of 15 years, she managed to write over a novel a year, all of them published by Peter Davies. None of them are in print or have ever been reprinted. A couple appear to be utterly unattainable outside a few libraries. A few that are for sale fetch thousands of dollars. And one of them, Merrily to the Grave, is available on the Open Library.
That seemed like the right place to start.
Merrily to the Grave is set in a run-down rooming house in Brighton. This is the Brighton of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock — dreary, dismal, with a few glitzy attractions and a lot of people just hanging on for dear life. Whether pensioner, two-bit performer, shopgirl, prostitute, drunk, or thief, one thing unites all the residents of Hesta Blazey’s on Eastley Crescent: failure. They’re all just a few pounds away from the street, always hovering on the edge of “self-pity, shame and desolation.” The house smells of “kippers, dust, onions, hair-oil, sopa, turpentine, bath cubes, floor polish (though nothing looked polished), human sweat and cat.”
In the basement, Henry and Bertha Titheridge have grown so intolerable to each other that Henry has cut their double bed in two. Beatrice Goodall sees her life disappearing in an endless series of monotonous work. Elsie sells stockings and spends her evenings attempting to improve her thin soprano voice. Madge comes home each evening with more cash in her purse than she left with. Edward Maxwell teaches woodworking and attempts rejuvenating exercises in his room. They only cause him “to dread his retirement and turn his thoughts abruptly away from death whenever he encountered a reminder.” They all feel trapped in a treadmill of poverty and hopelessness. “To own a body was to own a vehicle for pain,” one concludes.
Yet there is also something of a fundamental goodness in the book. Hesta Blazey, in her late fifties, heavy and aching, is also a generous host, welcoming in lost souls collected on the streets by the police. She tells people her fiancé died in the Great War. In truth, he simply rejected her: “He had been brutally, harshly, tersely yet mercifully brief and to the point: the war had changed his ideas and he no longer wanted marriage, a home and children.” But not even this is enough to snuff her belief in the possibility of love. If not romantic love, then at least a Christian love for her fellow man.
Despite their reduced circumstances, Hesta treats every tenant with a certain amount of kindness and dignity that manages to reassure them they haven’t quite reached rock bottom. “Not all of us can withstand the inequalities of life: its buffeting, its knocks,” she holds. When Elsie enters a talent contest, a group of them go along to offer moral support. The audience jeers and laughs at her awful singing. One resident steals a bouquet of flowers from the lobby to present to her. As they leave the auditorium, another finds himself “becoming aware of other kinds of poverty, other kinds of nakedness, other kinds of crime. A blow or knock on the head could kill a man; but Elsie had been flayed alive.”
I was strongly reminded of Georges Simenon when reading Merrily to the Grave. Like Simenon, Sully had a fine touch for noticing just the right detail — a half-eaten kipper left overnight on a greasy plate, a poorly-mended rip in the shiny seat of a pair of pants, a tatty china souvenir gathering dust — to evoke a deep sense of desperation. Like Simenon, Sully writes lean prose that pulls the reader almost breathlessly through page after page. I sat down to read a couple of chapters and stayed up past midnight to finish the book.
Unlike Simenon, however, Sully is not an entirely impartial God in her fictional universe. Reviewing for Merrily to the Grave in The Age, Alan Nicholls captured the unique spirit that permeates her writing:
Kathleen Sully writes her novels in a mood of dreamy horror. Quietly, and with scarcely a strong word, she reveals the squalor of the world. Her starting point is a little like that of Sartre — a reaction of nausea toward the day-to-day life. But she does not embrace squalor. She makes it rather the materials of a poetry which affirms the deeply buried and disguised dignity of man.
Kathleen Sully, 1958
Kathleen Sully was 45, a housewife and mother of three living in Weston-super-Mare when she published her first book. She was the second of eight children in a family that seems to have moved around quite a bit as she grew up. “Perhaps my childhood was mad, too,” she told a BBC interviewer once. “But it seemed stark raving sane to me.” In response to a Contemporary Authors questionnaire, she stated that she had “written since a child but stuff mostly too off-beat for publication.” She identified her politics as Liberal (“if anything”), her religion as Christian (“not a church-goer”), and her “Main interest now and ever since I could think: Man — why and whence.”
Despite a string of generally enthusiastic reviews for the majority of her books, none of the major U.K. newspapers appear to have reviewed her last novel, Island in Moonlight (yes, that is $8,116 the seller is asking for the one copy on Amazon). Nor could I find any mention of her name in any academic survey aside from Crosland’s (which doesn’t even discuss her work). About the only item of any substance to be found on the Internet is this 2012 entry on the fantasy literature blog Wormwordiana. When she died in 2001 at the age of 90, no obituary appeared.
Sounds like a job for Neglected Books!
Merrily to the Grave, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1958
From what I can determine, there are all of three available copies of Eliot Wagner’s first novel, Grand Concourse for sale. One goes for $25; a second for almost $650; and the third for nearly a grand.
Pretty impressive for a book that received only mildly positive reviews when it came out. Commentary’s reviewer praised Wagner’s “modest ambition.” In the New York Times, Dan Mankiewicz said it was “what used to be called ‘a slice of life'” — then added that Alfred Hitchcock called drama “a slice of life, with the drab spots removed.”
These were bum raps. Grand Concourse may not be a masterpiece, but it’s a solid, lively, entertaining book, rich with Bronx atmospherics. The story revolves around the six Margulies, a family trying to work its way up the social and economic ladder. Living on Tiffany Street in the Hunts Point neighborhood (“poor in most things, but never in garbage”), they dream of moving into an apartment with a doorman on the Grand Concourse. Papa runs a corner grocery store and spends his day hectoring the local housewives not to squeeze the tomatoes, and Mama keeps careful track of the rise of acquaintances like the Eislers, who run a successful restaurant in Times Square, or Deborah Weiss, who married into money and moved all the way up to a big house in Reverdale. Julie, the oldest, goes to night school and aspires to get a job and apartment in Manhattan. And Gerald, perhaps like Wagner, kills time as an usher at the Excelsior, the local movie house, and fills notebooks with unpublished poems and stories — “the sum of his false starts.”
As Constance Rosenblum wrote in her 2011 book, Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope Along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, “Despite the book’s obscurity, Grand Concourse is an unexpectedly moving work, peopled by characters whose lives are measured almost entirely by their proximity to or distance from the thoroughfare of the title.” Just a generation after their parents and grandparents emigrated to America, the Margulies and their friends may not have reached the Grand Concourse but they have already lost contact with the shtetl culture:
Sam squinted at two lofts side by side, one the synagogue, one the poolroom. Sam occasionally placed a horse bet in the poolroom. The synagogue he had never been in. Its windows, in spidery black, red and blue, proclaimed — what? He knew no Hebrew. Once, coming from the poolroom, he had, on the landing, jostled a short man in black with a pointed beard. Sam had taken him to be the rabbi, and with his apology, had impulsively raised his hat. He didn’t know why to this day.
Grand Concourse is a book about people in transit — literally. If there’s any culture that permeates the story, it’s the culture of New York buses, subways, trolley cars, taxis, commuter trains: hardly a chapter goes by without someone squeezing into one or the other:
Eliot Wagner (1954)
To his dismay the train was stalled on a curve, still in daylight. Newspapers crackled, coughs answered sneezes over the clearing of phlegmy throats. Somebody’s elbow prodded his shoulder where it was fleshiest. A handbag jabbed his thigh. He stood toe to toe against the man seated in front of him. Tenderly a back pressed his own, and this he turned and tried to see. A woman — he could tell no more.
The train hissed, trembled, moaned and moved on.
There are a fair number of parallels between Grand Concourse and Lonely Boy Blues, Alan Kapelner’s 1944 novel. Both are about young men of somewhat aimless creative ambition growing up in wartime New York City. Both are full of verbal energy and the noise and bustle of city life. And both books were flops. As Wagner told Rosenblum, “There were so few copies. Maybe five thousand. It died quickly.” Wagner gave up his hopes of making it as a writer and went to work for the city Board of Transportation.
His “modest ambition” never dimmed, however, and he kept working on various projects. Finally, in 1974, he published Better Occasions, about the financial, family, and romantic woes facing a middle-aged Bronx plumber. Once again, a few reviews, slightly more enthusiastic, then nuttin’. A few years later, he gave it one more shot, publishing My America! (1980), a nostalgic account of a young Jewish immigrant savoring the Roaring Twenties in — you guessed it — the Bronx.
Grand Concourse, by Eliot Wagner
Indianapolis, Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1954
Marcus Bach was something like the Jan Morris of religion. Starting with They Have Found a Faith (1946), he wrote around a dozen books about his encounters with religions, cults, sects, and other groups of people gathered around a belief system, be it large or small. Every once in a while, I read a chapter or two from one of his books, a number of which are available from the Internet Archive or Open Library. The diversity of faiths is something that fascinates me, even if I haven’t yet found a particular harbor in which I’m ready to drop anchor, and Bach had an admirable capacity for openness and accepting people’s beliefs at face value.
Feeling rather bleak about the state of things after spending the last three weeks in the U.S., I went to find one of Bach’s books to sample and was surprised to find What’s Right with the World (1973) — a title I’d managed to overlook. Its title certainly offered about as obvious a palliative to my discontents as one could ask for. I’m pretty skeptical when it comes to any self-help-ish sort of book. From my experience, they’re usually a handful of good but simplistic ideas swaddled in a hundred pages or more of padding, a bit like feeding your soul or character a marshmallow. When I saw the inscription in the Open Library copy, however — “For Alice — What’s right with the world? You! Marcus Bach” — I couldn’t resist. One of the constant right things in my world is my daughter Alice.
At the time Bach wrote the book, he and his wife were living in Palos Verdes, California. In those days before emission standards, things in the L.A. area tended to appear bright and sunny but a bit too hazy, and one could argue that Bach’s outlook in What’s Right with the World suffers from the same effect. As a reviewer once wrote of another of Bach’s books, “One wishes at times he would use a dash of bitters.” And when Bach shifts from observation to reflection, he can become as fuzzy as the best new-age guru Southern California could offer: “The best way to deal with complexities and dilemmas is to view the macro-world from within the framework of a balanced micro-world until the outward vision can be gauged and governed by a sound inward sight.”
R-i-g-h-t.
But at least he’s honest about his lack of definitive answers:
Religion is my beat, and in my research I had often tried to figure out the complex gamut of life’s strange polarities. I had engaged in speculation all the way from karmic causes, on to the sins or virtues involved in these equations, straight through to plain, unadulterated fate. Rarely had I been any wiser for it all.
What’s Right with the World is a collection of anecdotes from Bach’s life and travels, involving everything from bird-watching in Australia to listening to a Russian Orthodox choir in Kharkov to sitting in a 24-hour rest-stop restaurant in Illinois. From these he gleans just a few conclusions about “what’s right with the world.” And though 45 years separate us from that time, I found them useful reminders of what we still have the opportunity to advance, no matter what vandalism a few people in power manage to commit:
The overall trend from exclusiveness to inclusiveness
The shift from a sense of infallibility to an attitude of honest evaluation of what we actually believe in enough to live by
A turn from a disregard of nature to a respect for nature and her laws
I’ll skip Bach’s final conclusion, which involves something about “balanced micro-macro persons” that is probably best left back in 1973. These three are good enough for me to hold onto.
Because I need to remind myself that most of the events that have caused me to lose sleep lately are signs of the energy people can put into holding onto beliefs long past their sell-by dates. Nature is holding us accountable no matter what further disregard Scott Pruitt shows for it. Lying is not a viable way to prop up an aura of infallibility. And the only exclusive membership any of us can truly claim is in the species Homo sapiens: anything else is a temporary construct. Few writers remind one of that fact as effectively as Marcus Bach — but I recommend looking to They Have Found a Faith, Faith and My Friends (1952), Had You Been Born In Another Faith (1961), or Strangers at the Door (1971) rather than What’s Right with the World. It’s a bit too hazy.
What’s Right with the World, by Marcus Bach
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1973
Robert Cenedella spent a lifetime writing, but A Little to the East was the one and only novel he ever published. Cenedella began writing short stories as a high school English teacher, got some of them published in popular magazines, then moved to New York City and into radio. By the late 1940s, he was on the board of the Radio Writers Guild, which was dealing with the first impacts of blacklisting. For his efforts to oppose the witch hunt, he became a victim himself, only managing to get back in as a television writer in the late 1950s.
In the early 1960s, he followed the dream of many a scriptwriter and threw himself into a novel set in a town based on his hometown of Milford, Massachusetts. A Little to the East hinges on a murder trial, a reluctant defense attorney, and an even more reluctant defendant. Grieving for his recently-deceased wife, Joe Monti, struggling to make his way as an Italian American in a town run by its WASP establishment, agrees to take the case of Martin McQuaid, a young man who had clearly killed his wife in the heat of passion. McQuaid wants to plead guilty to first-degree murder, apparently in an attempt to commit suicide by state. As a Catholic, Monti finds McQuaid’s motive sinful, and the relationship between attorney and client becomes another of the complicating factors that raise A Little to the East above the level of a simple pot-boiler:
He was feeling some excitement, the excitement that sometimes came upon him when he rose to face a jury or cross-examine a witness, and he knew he was going to do something, but he could not yet tell what. Artist, he said to himself, go ahead, artist, let’s see you draw a pretty picture. But even if his own method was a secret from him, one thing he’d have to know for sure was he’d have to know what his purpose was. To get Martin to want to live, that was it. Ultimately, anyhow. And for that (or after? he couldn’t say) to find out what had happened that night Martin killed his wife. Well, no. He knew what had happened. He had acknowledged that the bare facts Martin had recited so often were substantially true. But the cause, that’s what he had to find out–why Martin had done such a thing. And that meant that the events must be recited once more, but in a different way. So that he could save Martin. So that he could save Joe.
All right. His purpose was clear. He turned from the window and walked toward the table and wondered what his artist’s tongue would say.
A Little to the East earned relatively positive reviews when it came out. The New York Times’ reviewer wrote, “The characters he has created are entirely believable, particularly the first and second generation Italian-Americans whom he understands so well. By the kind of fictional magic that is all too rare, he makes the story of Joe Monti seem a matter of great importance. The result is a book as provocative as it is convincing–a ‘first novel’ that should win an enthusiastic audience.” Cenedella also gained some attention as a novelty, being a first author at the ripe age of 53, with both a grandson and an infant son (from a second marriage).
He soon returned to television, however, writing mainly for soap operas, including “Another World,” “The Guiding Light,” “The Secret Storm,” and “The Doctors.” “If a writer ever says soap operas are crap, or mysteries or romances are crap, as in I’m just doing this crap to make money,” he once said, “well, crap is what they’ll write. It’s not the category that makes it art, it’s the care you put into writing it.”
Cenedella was a firm believer in discipline as the key to writing. As his son recalls in a 2010 tribute, the only writing advice he had to offer was: “Seat of the pants to seat of the chair.” He lived and died by this principle. After he died in Tucson, Arizona at the age of 90 in 2002, his son, helping with the estate, went to clear out his father’s office: “Then my eye fell on the barrel of his Selectric. There was a piece of paper in the typewriter. I looked at it. It was page 27 of a new novel. My Mom said he’d been in the office the day before he died, typing away.”
How to describe A Visit from Venus? How about P. G. Wodehouse meets Olaf Stapledon? This assumes people recognize Stapledon, a contemporary of Wodehouse’s who wrote cosmic fantasies that swept the reader through spans of time that make millenia look short and distances that make parsecs seem like a stroll around the block. Ronald Fraser (that’s Sir Ronald Fraser of the British Army and Foreign Service, not Ronald Fraser of In Hiding: The Life of Manuel Cortes and other books of Spanish history) would have been quite at home on one of Stapledon’s interplanetary voyages–and equally at home on a weekend at Blandings.
A Visit from Venus opens with General Sir Brian Hungerford, veteran of two world wars, hunter, and club man, planning the upcoming weekend at his country manor, Abbotsfield, with his batman/valet/butler, Troutbeck:
“Let’s see … who’s coming this weekend?” He ticked the visitors off on his fingers. “And the Nibb of Nizam or something. D’you remember him?”
“Not by the name you mention, sir.”
“We shot with him, on the borders of Afghanistan.”
“I remember him, sir. The Maharaja of Jellalabad.”
“That’s the chap. Likes leopards.”
“Of which we have few or none, sir. The gentleman is somewhat exotic as regards tastes, I recollect.”
“Eats shrimps with the shells on…. I’ve just seen him do it. So don’t shell your shrimps, Trout.”
Sir Brian’s other guests include Sir James Outright, Lord and Lady Willowpattern, Lord Undertone, Lady Harriet Trusty, Mr. Shandy the author and Mr. Gaffe the critic, and Mr. Michael Brand, “whose looks and magnetic presence puzzled the guests exceedingly.” At the house, they quaff champagne and dine on lobster Mornay, exchanging clever repartee.
And then Sir Brian invites them to retire to a former convent chapel located on his estate, where Mr. Brand proceeds to activate “the Eye” an enormous piece of machinery of indefinite description. With it, they then take turns looking at the movement of creatures on the surface of Mars. The view is quite crisp, and the movement of the Martians mesmerizing. Everyone heads to bed marveling at the sights.
Leap forward a month or two, and another such weekend, Mr. Brand and the General’s daughter Ariadne slip from the dinner table, only to return a few minutes later with what Troutbeck later attempts to describe as “a little more than a half-dozen Presents of an ill-defined character; Essences rather than forms, if I may use such an expression. They appear to glide through the furniture towards the fireplace, where Sir Brian … and Miss Ariadne … greeted them.” As a result, Troutbeck finds “my habitual mind began to look over the possibilities with regards refreshment: but what is it appropriate to offer to ladies and gentlemen whose presence can only be detected by the glow of their impact on our dense atmosphere?”
Later, the visitors from Venus return the courtesy and host Sir Brian, Troutbeck, and a collection of house guests on a short tour of their own planet. Mr. Brand’s unusually magnetic personality turns out to have an otherworldly source. There is much discussion of communing with the source of all energy. The Maharajah decides to surrender his throne and become a monk. Finally, “when the uncreated Essence withdrew from the Sun and the Sun himself withdrew into a glory of cloud there were great angels who drew veils, and we were aware of silence.” And they find themselves back on Earth, welcomed by the news that that nasty Lord Poxmarket, an obstreperous millionaire from the City whom no one much cared for, has drowned in the Thames while in pursuit of what he perceived as a mermaid.
It’s something of a demonstration of the British capacity for discretion that none of the few and brief reviews of A Visit from Venus began with “WTF??” I would say that it’s unlike any other book, but in fact it’s like three other books, for Sir Ronald followed it with Jupiter in the Chair (1958), Trout’s Testament (1960), and City of the Sun (1961), all dealing with the cosmic adventures of Sir Brian and his trusty Troutbeck. I can’t believe I’m writing this for you people and not ordering them right now! Stay tuned.
A Visit from Venus, by Ronald Fraser
London: Jonathan Cape, 1958
Just in case the newest addition to the British Royal Family, the Duchess of Sussex, is in need of some self-help reading, here is a tiara-full of memoirs written by princesses from the past.
Lady Craven and her son, from The Beautiful Lady Craven
• The beautiful Lady Craven; the original memoirs of Elizabeth, baroness Craven, afterwards margravine of Anspach and Bayreuth and princess Berkeley of the Holy Roman empire (1750-1828), edited by
A. M. Broadley and Lewis Melville (1914)
Elizabeth Craven’s was only a morganatic title, granted after her second marriage to the Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach. She was easily the most prolific writer in this bunch, but her memoirs were not collected and published for over eighty years after her death. It’s a wonder she had time to write, given her seven children and many affairs. But the book was worth the wait. She conversed with Voltaire and Samuel Johnson, witnessed the French Revolution, and dined with much of Europe’s royalty of the time.
If it’s the best in blue blood Regency gossip you’re interested in, look no further. Here is her sketch of Ferdinand IV, then King of Naples:
His features were coarse and harsh; yet the general expression of his countenance was rather intelligent, and perhaps even agreeable, although, separately taken, every feature was ugly. His conversation, his deportment, his manners, were, from an unpolished simplicity, rude in their nature, though rather pleasing; as they removed from the mind what is always to be expected from a sovereign, that habit of disguise, artifice, and concealment, which accompany the possessor of a throne. If he did not converse much with strangers, yet he always appeared to say what he thought; and, although destitute of art or elegance, he did not betray a want of understanding or of information. He reminded me of a rustic elevated by accident to the crown.
The two volumes of The beautiful Lady Craven are available on the Internet Archive: Volume 1 (link) and Volume 2 (link).
The cover of Memoirs of an Arabian Princess, with a photo of Emily Ruete in costume
• Memoirs of an Arabian princess: an autobiography, by Emily Ruete (1886/1907)
Emily Ruete was born Salama bint Said, a Princess of Zanzibar and Oman, and grew up on the island of Zanzibar, where her father ruled–and profited from the busy spice trade. Much of the book is devoted to memories of her childhood, such as the excitement surrounding the arrival of ships returning from Europe:
For us children those ships symbolised delightful mystery, as they brought us all our lovely toys from Europe. Upon the fleet’s arrival a day would soon be fixed for the distribution of the goods among high and humble, old and young. Twenty or thirty boxes were full of playthings: horses, carts, dolls, whips, fishes and ducks that followed a magnet, musical boxes of all dimensions, concertinas, flutes, trumpets, mock guns, and what not. If we were displeased, woe to the delinquent captain; he was a plenipotentiary entrusted with full powers and no restrictions; he sailed under the one specific order to purchase the best regardless of expense.
When finally the division was enacted at Bet il Mtoni and Bet il Sahel, it took three or four days to get everything duly apportioned among several hundred persons. Eunuchs attended to the unpacking and sorting out, while a few of the Sultan’s elder daughters performed the allotment proper. Jealousy, envy, and malice were unfortunately more conspicuous on this happy occasion than at any other time of the year.
It was in Zanzibar that she met and became pregnant by a German trader named Rudolph Heinrich Ruete. He arranged for her to escape to Aden, where she had the child, and where they married. She took the name of Emilie (spelled Emily in the English translations of her book) and traveled with her husband to Germany, losing the baby to illness along the way. They had three more children after settling in Germany. Unfortunately, several years after their arrival, Rudolph slipped while stepping off a tram and was struck and killed. Left with few resources, she wrote her memoirs to raise some money, and later, agreed to assist Chancellor Bismarck in several intrigues involving German interests in East Africa. She died in Jena at the age of 79 in 1924. Christiane Bird published an account of her life, The Sultan’s Shadow: One Family’s Rule at the Crossroads of East and West, in 2010.
The 1886 English translation of her memoirs can be found on the Internet Archive (link), but it is better to read the superior translation, by Lionel Strachey, published in 1907, which can also be found there (link).
Princess Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich and her book
• Pleasures and palaces; the memoirs of Princess Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich (1915)
Princess Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich offers the new princess-to-be her closest example. Born Eleanor Calhoun, she was an American actress who appeared with great success in numerous productions in London’s West End and at the Theatre National in Paris before marrying a Serbian prince in 1903. Thanks to the Balkan war and then the First World War, her reign was brief, but there is no sense of resentment for lost glories in this book. Although the Times Literary Supplement sniffed that “If it were not written by a Princess, we should say that there were too many Kings and Queens in it,” the book is suffused with her spirit of playfulness, as in this anecdote of a royal reception at Kensington Palace:
Standing near the entrance to the royal marquee, under the grand old trees, were King Edward and Mark Twain, the king laughing at the remarks of the American wit and philosopher, who was slightly smiling. Mark Twain, it was remarked, wore his hat, which an Englishman would not have done while in talk with the king. It was a wide, soft white felt hat, matching his white hair, and he was also clad in creamy-white broadcloth made ample and easy, a subject for Fragonard. The king, on the contrary, was wearing a strange assemblage of garments of varying cut and hue, producing an effect the opposite of happy. A relative of his, admiring Mark Twain’s beautiful appearance, scrutinized the king’s costume with a puzzled look, and aware of his usual good taste, she ventured to say:
“I am looking, sir, at your purple waistcoat. Your coat is — a kind of — pea-green, and — and your — h-m-m — upon my word! Really, how did it happen?”
The king in answer laughed and named different tailors who had at different times, he said, sent him a garment, begging him to wear it, and he had put them all on at once, “to do the tailors a good turn.”
The Princess became a fierce advocate for Serbian victims of the war and published a book about their plight. She died in New York City in 1957 at the age of 92.
• Arabesque, by Princess Musbah Haidar (1944)
Princess Musbah’s father was Ali Haidar Pasha, a Sherif of Mecca, which meant he was a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. He was also an important member of the Ottoman court, and Arabesque provides an insider’s view of life in the final years before foundation of the Turkish republic. Her mother, Isobel Duncan, was the daughter of a British general serving as an advisor to the Ottoman Army, and her father served in various administrative posts in Istanbul, Syria, Medina, and Beirut.
In their book, Gender, Modernity and Liberty: Middle Eastern and Western Women’s Writings, Reina Lewis and Nancy Micklewright call Arabesque “a unique and extremely well-informed window onto the political and social events unfolding around her.” Princess Musbah shows the role of women in the Ottoman court to have been misunderstood by many Westerners: “[T]hese foreigners did not realise that many of the veiled ladies of the Harems were better born, better read, spoke several languages and dressed with a greater chic than some of their own most famous society women.” Ironically, one of the few Western women to express a different perspective was Lady Craven, who wrote in her memoir:
The women, who were very numerous, were like walking mummies. A large loose robe of dark green cloth covered them from the neck to the ground; over that was a large piece of muslin, which wrapped the shoulders and arms, and another which went over the head and eyes. All these coverings confound the shape and air so much, that any rank may be concealed under them. I never saw a country where the women may enjoy so much freedom and liberty as here, free from all reproach.
Arabesque is also full of wonderful details of the bustling life in the streets of Istanbul, Damascus, and Beirut, including the many temptations that they presented to a child:
On the shelves, which ran the length of the shop, were stacked gaily painted wooden boxes of sweets, and on the long counters stood big glass bottles, each one holding a different-coloured sweet, green, pink, brown, red. A fat smiling man asked Musbah which one she wanted. Haji Bekr himself. Musbah pointed at each one in turn–she wanted a taste from them all. Haji Bekr, with a laugh, put a large hand into each bottle and filled up a box for her. The variety of the sweets made one’s mouth water. The Turkish Delight, Rahoul Lacoum; akidas, a kind of hard boiled sweet; there were long, wriggly pink and white sticks; round rings like transparent glass of different flavours and colours; cakes of crushed nuts and pistachios, with sugar sparkling like crystals; there were kurabiyahs, macaroons stuck on sheets of paper.
The Ottoman Caliphate was abolished in 1924, forcing the break-up of Princess Musbah’s family. Her father went to Beirut; some relatives returned to Mecca; others joined the community of European royal exiles in Paris and on the Riviera. Her mother stayed in Istanbul to raise her daughters, and Musbah eventually married a British army officer like her grandfather and settled with her husband in England
• The Memoirs of Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester
“A sense of dedication is an excellent quality; so is a sense of humour. The two are not always found together in one person.” This judgment, from one of the reviews of The Memoirs of Princess Alice, sums up the mix of a near-Victorian commitment to duty and a Bright Young Things spirit of carefree fun. Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester was the daughter of the 7th Duke of Buccleuch and married Prince Henry, the Duke of Gloucester, making her (among many other things royal) Queen Elizabeth’s aunt. Before she died at Kensington Palace in 2004 at the age of 102, she had become the oldest member of the British royal household in history.
Her memoirs, as with her life, can be divided into two clear sections: life before and after royalty. As a young woman in the 1920s, she enjoyed all the recreations of the Jazz Age, including a year in Kenya amidst the parties, drinking, and affairs of the Happy Valley set. As Isabel Colegate wrote in her review for the Times, “Altogether there is more than one echo of Nancy Mitord in the author’s account of her growing up.”
As the wife of the third son of the King of England, however, she had to focus on raising a family and following wherever duty led Prince Henry (usually referred to as the Duke)–which included time in Australia in the late 1940s as the Governor General. A very private person by nature, she was never truly comfortable with the constant demands for public appearances such postings required, but she summoned what the Queen Mother called “the courage of a lion” on countless occasions–even if it was only for what one wit described as “doling out the last of the roly-poly pudding to a houseful of pensioners.”
Although the Duke was a man of dedication and responsibility himself, he also betrayed at times the consequences of being raised at the height of privilege:
The Duke was doing The Times crossword when the news was breathlessly broken to him by two of his daughters that they had just left the third in hospital with a broken collar-bone after all three had been in a car crash; he merely asked them for a three-letter work for sheep. He could not bear his tea to be too hot and nothing would prevent him from sloshing it from cup to saucer and back if it was. At home his valet poured his tea out for him at five to nine so that it should be cool enough for him to drink when he came down at nine. Unsuspecting guests who drank it were in trouble….
It’s anecdotes like these that led Hugo Vickers, a prolific biographer of British royalty and society, to include the memoirs on his list of best royal biographies for Five Books: “I reviewed the book when it came out. I just found myself laughing on every page. I was gripped and again it was this wry quality that attracted me.”
George Arbuthnott Jarrett was one of the most striking debuts in English fiction in the 1960s. There was nothing in Bernard Toms’ background to suggest that this ex-RAF mechanic and former Metropolitan Police officer had a work of such intensity and originality in him. As Irving Wardle, the TLS reviewer wrote:
Originality is the last thing you would normally look for in a novel of introspective analysis, but the narrator of Bernard Tom’s first book has managed to find something new in the mirror. Previously the divided self has found expression either in the Jekyll and Hyde manner, or in the anonymous communings of the stream of consciousness: Mr. Toms has found a middle-ground between these two and written what amounts to an autobiography of a super-ego.
It is a method that gets the best of both worlds: the hero remains intact instead of being split into two characters, while his internal argument develops from the usual colourless monologue into sharply dramatised conflict. The effect is partly a matter of distance: and the extent to which the super-ego’s view of things differs from that of straightforward first- or third-person narrative puts familiar incident into fresh perspective.
George Arbuthnott Jarrett is the story of a man coming apart. As Eleanor Perry wrote in her Life review:
The George part of him is a storming rebel against the strictures of convention. He feels his masculinity, his very humanity, is being crushed by the rules of polite society. He has nothing but contempt for tamed men who spend their lives at desks.
Arbuthnott is his conscience, the defender of morality, the guardian of his soul and his Catholic faith. It is Arbuthnott who narrates the entire story with continual needling interruptions from George.
Arbuthnott longs for what Warren G. Harding called normalcy:
I wish we could be like these other men here. The way they drink is all right; half-pints and a convivial chat with their office friends about their gardens, homes and children. They’re not saints, they like a drink; but with them it’s not a case of gulping down great pints of wallop hour after hour like it is with George. They call in, as I said, for a small, quiet drink to avoid the rush home. They have their values right. After this they’ll go and nestle in the bosom of a family, in a small suburban house–a clean, comfortable, well-ordered house. After dinner they’ll play with the children, decorate a room, tinker with the family car ready for the weekend jaunt, or watch television. In the summer they’ll dig the garden, mow the lawn, tend roses. Dull? No, it’s not dull. That kind of life is dull only to the adolescent mind. Put some of your swashbuckling paramours, your Errol Flynns, your Georges, in a tight corner and they’d give their right arms for such a life.
To which George replies:
Fat, spineless frumps, feeding the little bit of man left in them before rushing off home to poor, adulterous little wifey. Chewing chlorophyll and concocting stories of missed connections and heavy traffic. Washing up after dinner, watching telly, mending and tinkering, assembling and re-assembling; anything to keep sane. I’d rather be shot from a cannon.
The two minds take very different views on even the simplest things. Arbuthnott sees an old newspaper poster floating in the river, turning to pulp. George “sees it as rotting human flesh; it forms the tortured, writhing face of Eve in our dream.” Arbuthnott struggles to stick to a routine, to get to work on time and behave as a good employee. George doesn’t just head for the pub–he heads for the place where the drug dealers, prostitutes, and small-time crooks hang out, and when there, shouts, insults, and provokes them.
Putting the name schizophrenia to their condition merely confirms to George the rightness of his perspective: “I like to think of schizophrenia as an inability to adapt to the petty restrictions of Society…. Well, any many who can’t conform to this bloody idiotic arrangement is probably a damned sight saner than the ones who can and do.” One knows from the beginning that this story won’t end well. From Arbuthnott’s perspective at least. For George, murder, destruction, and imprisonment are nothing more than his rotten world deserves.
Toms published one other novel, The Strange Affair, a solid if conventional police thriller, the year after George Arbuthnott Jarrett, and appears to have done some work as a ghost writer. The Strange Affair was made into a film starring Michael York, but Toms was not involved in the screenplay. He died Newport, South Wales, in February 1990 at the age of 57.
George Arbuthnott Jarrett, by Bernard Toms
London: Constable, 1965
Every year or so, I reach for one of Georges Simenon’s “straight” novels–those bitter human comedies, such as The Rules of the Game, that he turned out as regularly as his Maigrets, usually spending under two weeks in writing them. As I once wrote, these novels have something of the attractive bitterness of a glass of Campari. I wouldn’t drink one every night, but they have the same effect of bringing your senses to attention. They’re rarely more than 150 pages long, something you can read in a couple of days, and involve people getting knocked out of their comfort zone and into some unsettling predicament–sometimes life-threatening, always character-testing.
It’s reassuring to know there are enough of these romans durs to satisfy my appetite for as long as I can manage to keep reading–which led me to consider what other writers had a similar capacity to produce books in quantities and qualities likely to provide a near-lifetime supply. The easy answer, of course, is to look at genre writers: Barbara Cartland (romance), Isaac Asimov (SF), Erle Stanley Gardner (mystery), and many others wrote many dozens, if not hundreds, of books in the course of their careers, consciously aimed at feeding the hunger of their readers for a certain predictability of content and effect. I have a friend who’s read nothing but westerns by Louis L’Amour for over twenty years and still hasn’t read the same book twice. And there is the example of P. G. Wodehouse, who in his Jeeves, Psmith, and other effervescent comedies invented a genre of which he was the master and sole proprietor.
The label most commonly applied to writers who, like Simenon, produced many good but few great books, is middlebrow, but this is too often associated only with women (and those mostly English) writers such as Angela Thirkell. As with any spotlight, however, there are still more writers left in the shadows despite all the attention given by the middlebrow movement, particularly in academic circles, to a relative few.
One of these is Peter de Polnay. I’ve probably been vaguely aware of Peter de Polnay for years, since at least one of his books can be found on the shelves of just about every bookstore in England, but it wasn’t until recently that I actually read one — Blood and Water (1975). Blood and Water opens with a young and rather sheltered man, Claud Darnell, waking to find his father lying, eyes open and mouth agape, dead. The shock sends him into a sort of limbo: “On reaching the dead man’s bedroom it struck him that if he continued to shunt between their bedrooms the present situation would become endless; and he saw himself alone in the world going from one room to another with nobody to speak to.” What follows is a systematic peeling away of the layers of lies by which Claud had been insulated from the real world. These include the fact that his father was not his real father, that his mother was a former prostitute and current madam of a discreet house of pleasure in Cannes, and that the property he thought had been in the family for generations had been actually been the pay-off for blackmail.
As de Polnay’s Times obituary noted, he was “a cool and sometimes cynical observer of humanity at all levels (often the lowest),” and in Blood and Water the cynicism runs fast and far. If I had to sum up my impression in a short phrase, it would be “a poor man’s Simenon,” although de Polnay’s characters appear to be better acquainted with money and privilege. At the same time, however, he balks somewhat at going as far as Simenon. Claud manages to say relatively innocent, despite the revelations, and the story ends with him heading back to his beloved Sussex farm to live happily ever after, married to the sweet French ingenue he’s fallen in love with. Had Simenon written this story, Claud would have been more likely to end up as her pimp.
Born in Hungary to a well-placed family, de Polnay fought with his father, left home at an early age, roamed about for years that included a spells as a tram worker in Buenos Aires and a farmer in Kenya before ending up in Paris as the Germans invaded in 1940. He managed to escape to England, spending time in one of Franco’s jail along the way, and wrote his first best-seller, Death and Tomorrow (1945), about the experience. Although he wrote in English and was considered an English author, de Polnay returned to France after the war, set most of his novels in France, wrote numerous biographies of French figures from history, and died in Paris in 1984 at the age of 78.
Certainly Mr. de Polnay’s novel is as enjoyable as anything which appeared in the pre-Booker rush and far better written than any of them. So far as I know, he has never been awarded a literary prize of any description in his long writing career, although his work has been acclaimed by the great Anthony Burgess and laudatory comments are quoted from The Spectator and the Illustrated London News, whose perceptive novel reviewer often strikes me as one of the few in the business who does not actually hate novels. The most sickening aspect of it all is that Mr. de Polnay, whose appeal as a writer should embrace all educated and intelligent Englishmen, is tucked into a corner as if he were some bizarre minority taste while those who can only appeal to a bizarre minority taste are feted and lionised throughout the length and breadth of the land.
de Polnay currently lacks a Wikipedia entry and a complete list of his works doesn’t appear to have been assembled. Amazon reports 140 items under his name, but this number certainly includes some duplicates. On the other hand, by the 1970s his publishers were simply putting “Etc.” after listing a dozen or so of his novels. He also revisited the subject of Death and Tomorrow in a number of memoirs of the time of the German occupation of France and published several volumes of autobiography. Four of his novels, including Blood and Water, are available on the Open Library (link).
“Anybody who reads Mr. de Polnay will rejoice in the vitality of his imagination, the accuracy of his observation, the beautiful lucidity of his prose and the wisdom of his conclusion, but few, I fear, will ever be given the opportunity to learn about him,” concluded Waugh in his review of The Grey Sheep. Perhaps this post will encourage others to join those few.
Blood and Water, by Peter de Polnay
London: W. H. Allen and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975
Cover of 1956 US edition of The Second Curtain
“Life was simply not like a detective novel: motives were not clear, events had not a single cause, things did not wholly explain themselves,” Roy Fuller writes in The Second Curtain (1953), one of the three books in which he played an elegant series of changes on the conventions of the mystery novel.
In The Second Curtain, a second-rate writer, George Garner, divorced, living alone in London, and scrabbling along on the diminishing reputation of a decent first novel published a decade ago, is recruited into the role of amateur sleuth by the sister of a long-ago school chum with whom he’s kept up an intermittent correspondence. Widgery, the chum, head of a small factory in Lancashire that produces some sort of electrical components (Garner is never too clear about the details of the lives of the people he encounters), has disappeared. His sister thinks it may have something–a homosexual crush?–to do with a young man who came to work at the factory and then left suddenly just before Widgery’s own disappearance, and thinks the trails lead to London.
Within days, Widgery’s body is dragged from the Thames. Kershaw, a fellow manager from the factory also following up on the disappearance, is run down by a lorry in a London street. The police question Garner. He himself is at a loss to put the pieces together. He consoles himself in his ability to suppress these strange events into the routines in which he is more comfortable: “… whatever happens to oneself, however extraordinary or painful, becomes eventually commonplace and bearable.The empire of self constantly added to itself new wild tracts of territory which it was able to drain, plough, populate, and thus become once again an ordered, homogeneous entity.”
Cover of 1962 Penguin paperback edition of The Second CurtainIn keeping with the patterns of a conventional mystery, the odd events surrounding these deaths begin to intersect with other coincidences. Garner develops a crush on the secretary of the magnate offering to fund a new literary journal he wants Garner to edit. The secretary turns out to be living with Widgery’s young man–who himself turns out to have worked at the factory under an assumed name. The magnate appears to have, among his many business interests, some kind of speculation into a new line of electrical equipment.
Yet Garner fails to weave the threads into the answers that become apparent to the reader. “I’m very much afraid you haven’t got the right story,” he says at one point, only to have Fuller write, “Garner’s mind worked furiously: what was the right story?” Ironically, many of his thoughts about the explanations behind Widgery’s death dwell on the question of how he should approach things as a writer–and it also becomes apparent to the reader that Garner lacks the imagination to be much of a writer:
How could one get, if one wanted to, all this into a novel? The power behind the luxury, the figures and men and machines behind the power? Perrott’s desk had been empty, even of a pen. Perhaps he never wrote: a file was merely opened and put before him, and he then nodded or shook his head. Somewhere in other rooms of the building ingenious men sat in front of books on company law, ledger sheets, reports on technical processes, with trade-union leaders, secretaries of trade associations, spoke on the telephone to members of parliament for industrial divisions, factories on bypasses and coalfields, stockbrokers, authors of economic classics, bankers–but for Perrott everything was rendered down to the naked bones of a question. Shall we do this? And the cigar made its indication.
This passage illustrates just the sort of meta-fictional tricks that Fuller plays throughout The Second Curtain. Fuller, who had a successful career as a London solicitor and was involved with substantial commercial matters, knows very well what goes on behind Perrott’s clean desk, while to Garner it is just something of a blur. And he manages to convey this to the reader in a few strokes while leaving Garner in his muddled reality.
In the end, Garner can only write to Widgery’s sister that, “The more I think about the whole affair, the more I feel that it all lies in the realm of accident and coincidence.” And he himself can only sense that “The alien machine into which he had accidentally dropped from his own harmless world had thrown him out again, broken, with scarcely any damage or interruption to its purposive wheels.” Yet Fuller also makes it clear that Widgery and Kershaw’s deaths are quite directly and deliberately linked to a ruthless and objective calculation of gain and loss made by the magnate, Perrot.
The Second Curtain was the second of three meta-mysteries Roy Fuller wrote. With My Little Eye (1948) puts a magistrate’s son in the role of the ad-hoc detective and plays a somewhat less elegant set of changes on what Fuller calls “the fantasy of conspiracy and crime.” Julian Symons included it on his 1957 list of the 100 best crime and mystery novels. Fantasy and Fugue (1956) is Fuller’s most cerebral mystery, taking place in the head of a man who wakes up one morning convinced that he has committed a murder. The three books were collected by Carcanet Press in 1988 in Crime Omnibus and deserve a place on the shelf alongside Graham Greene’s “entertainments” such as Our Man in Havana.
The Second Curtain, by Roy Fuller
London: Derek Verschoyle, 1953
Digging for Mrs. Miller (1941) illustrates how, in the right hands, simple, undramatic, and limpid prose can have a stunning impact. Originally published as Post D in England, Digging for Mrs. Miller is John Strachey’s thinly-fictionalized account of his experiences working as an air raid warden during the most intense months of the Blitz in autumn 1940.
Strachey, who had been one of the most active members of the radical left in England in the 1930s, became a warden somewhat by accident. After one raid in September 1940, he came home to find his house roped off because of a nearby delayed-action bomb. Unable to sleep there, he bunked at the air raid post down the street, helping out with a few tasks to justify his place, and a few days later, he enrolled as an unpaid and part-time warden. His uniform was just a pair of overalls and a steel helmet. His equipment consisted of a flashlight (which had to be used sparingly in the blackout), a gas mask, some bandages, and a note pad.
Night after night, he would sit at an upstairs window in the house that served as the post for his sector–an area of perhaps 6-8 square blocks. The house belonged to his neighbor, Miss Sterling, who was also the head of Post D. Night after night, he would hear–and then see–the German bombers coming over London. And when a high explosive or incendiary bomb fell, he and the other wardens would run to locate the site, see if anyone was injured, and coordinate the work of the firemen, stretcher bearers, rescue workers, and the rest of the team that quickly appeared on the scene.
One of Strachey’s first realizations was how much working as a warden did for his own morale:
The main trouble of being a pure civilian during a prolonged air bombardment is that as such one’s only duty is to seek and to maintain one’s own, and one’s companions’, safety. And this is inevitably demoralizing. The instant that an individual is given even the simplest objective function, and becomes a member of an organized (and uniformed, this is notoriously important) group, the whole burden of deciding whether or not on any particular occasion to seek his or her own safety is automatically removed. While one is functionless one is continually irritated by such questions as, “Isn’t it really very silly to stay upstairs (or to go out) in this degree of Blitz?” The instant the individual has become a warden, ambulance driver, member of the auxiliary fire service, rescue and demolition squads, or stretcher-bearer, this question is, nine times out of ten, settled for him or her.
Though I’ve read several history books that dealt with the Blitz, Digging for Mrs. Miller was the first thing that really conveyed the sense of what it was like. Contrary to the impression one gets, the bombing was not on the level of the massive Allied raids against Germany. The Luftwaffe knocked out buildings more often than whole blocks, and Strachey’s team more often responded to single bombs than to wide scale destruction.
On occasion, though, a single large high explosive bomb could destroy the better part of a block. Strachey devotes 48 pages–nearly one third of the book–to “The Big Bomb,” a chapter detailing the hours of scrambling around and digging through the enormous piles of rubble left after a particularly large bomb exploded near their post. Hour after hour, working with no light and soaked with rain, he and other men tunneled their way in to locate victims, hauling away endless baskets full of rubble. In one case, it took the rescuers over 26 hours to reach a young woman buried under a small mountain of debris.
Strachey left the warden service at the end of 1940, when he joined the R.A.F.. Though he eventually wrote over a dozen works of political philosophy and advocacy, I suspect this short, simple tale is his finest legacy as a writer. It’s certainly one of the best books dealing with World War Two I’ve ever read.
Digging for Mrs. Miller, by John Strachey
New York: Random House, 1941
Robert Cenedella spent a lifetime writing, but 
Every year or so, I reach for one of 
