Some Neglected Candidates for the 1961 Club

Next week, Simon Thomas (Stuck in a Book) and Karen Langley (Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings) will once again host their semi-annual experiment in which bloggers around the world will read and write about books published in a particular year. This time, it’s 1961, which I find a particularly interesting year as it represents a transition between the relatively conformist culture of the 1950s and the counter-culture just coming around the corner of the 1960s, with the two ends of the spectrum well-represented by the first and last titles on this list.

• Baron’s Court, All Change, by Terry Taylor

Probably THE classic of London/Soho beatnik life. It introduced a fair number of uninitiates to terms such as “spliff” that would later work their way into our lingua franca. Reissued a while ago (15 years!) as a New London Edition by Five Leaves Publications, but once again out of print.

• Trust in Chariots, by Thomas Savage

Trust in Chariots is the novel some reviewers considered Savage’s his best before The Power of the Dog. Inspired in part by his own road trips after he bought a 1939 Rolls Royce in the early 1950s, it’s a bit of a picaresque journey through 1930s America taken by Sheldon, an unhappy man in his thirties, and Pal, the teenage mechanic he befriends — a relationship that somewhat parallels Savage’s relationship with the children’s author and illustrator Tomie de Paola. Now extremely scarce and expensive, so one to read online.

• A Handful of Time, by Helen Foley

This story opens with Frances, an Englishwoman, traveling to Cornwall to identify the body of Fanny, the Austrian woman she’d befriended when they were both undergraduates at Cambridge in the 1930s. Reviewers found it a particularly effective account of the decade-plus between Munich and the early 1950s, both in terms of political and social developments. Michael Hardcastle of the Bristol Post called it a rare Book Society choice he could applaud wholeheartedly.

• Portrait of an Officer, by Pierre-Henri Simon (published in the U.S. as End of Glory

An intriguing short novel about a French Army colonel and his increasing moral struggles through WWII, a German prison camp, time as an occupier in post-war Germany, lost battles in Indochina, and brutal and ultimately ineffective suppression of Algerian independence movements. Worth a look now when the U.S. military is being presented with similar ethical dilemma.

• The Watchman, by Davis Grubb

A sheriff in a small West Virginia city full of Gothic oddities has to deal with a murder likely committed by one of his daughters. Oakley Hall wrote admiringly of it, “In the world of grim existence and midnight suspense, in the realm of the looming dread and inexorable tragedy, The Watchman has few competitors.”

• No Signposts in the Sea, by V. Sackville-West

Vita Sackville-West’s last novel, written after she was diagnosed with cancer, about a world-weary reporter who has to come to grips with his own terminal diagnosis. Once upon a time, it was reissued as a Virago Modern Classics, but now it’s decades out of print and largely forgotten.

• The Identity of Dr. Frazier, by George Sklar

he premise sounds fascinating: a highly-regarded surgeon gets very drunk one night and launches into a virulent and profanity-filled rant against the Jews. What happens to his marriage (to a Jewish wife) and his practice (with Jewish colleagues) when his real character comes out?

• The House of Five Talents, by Louis Auchincloss

A classic example of Auchincloss’s approach, a tale of wealth and decline told through different members of a moneyed Old New York family — and like many of his, a battle of an increasingly isolated, if superior, circle against the antibodies of social change and new money.

• The Atrocity, by Jackson Burgess

Three American G.I.s in Italy get drunk and rape a local girl. A fourth finds the courage to bring them to justice against considerable institutional resistance.

• In the Forests of the Night, by Stephen Martel

Also set in Italy during WWII, but a very different story, about the temporary but wildly imaginative insanity of a wounded Canadian officer. Its critical impact may have been diminished by the publication of Joseph Heller’s even wilder and more insane comedy (also set in the Italian theater), Catch-22, which came out around the same time. Although just being by a Canadian writer was probably damning enough for American reviewers.

• The Proverb and Other Stories, by Marcel Aymé

This selection of Aymé’s stories from three decades may be the best place to get to know his work. There are realistic snapshots of French provincial and Parisian life in all its charms and hypocrisies; compact human comedies that reflect the changing political landscape; and surrealist and absurd fables that verge on magical realism. “The Life Ration,” in which people are limited to live on only authorized days of the week (wartime hardships), is a wonderful tale that would make the mathematician and logician in René Descartes smile.

• Midcentury, by John Dos Passos

This was Dos Passos’s attempt to revisit the techniques of his U.S.A. trilogy in a portrait of 1950s America. Unfortunately, by then, he’d lost the fire and radicalism that fueled that classic, and this novel is in some ways an epitome of the conformist culture of that decade. Ward Cleaver would have liked it.

Some other candidates from 1961 previously featured on Neglected Books:

• A Man on the Roof, by Kathleen Sully
• The Undesired, by Kathleen Sully
• A Matter of Life and Death, by Virgilia Peterson (a book I allow to continue festering on my shelf for some mystifying reason)
• When Found, Make Verse Of, by Helen Bevington (who called A Matter of Life and Death “a self-wounding book with no healing in it, no cure, filled with revenge, the desire to hurt and destroy a dead woman.”)
• The Darkened Room, by Hilde Spiel
• The Club, by A. D. Wintle
• The Big Love, by Mrs. Florence Aadland (as told to Tedd Thomey) — still the most unintentionally funny books I’ve ever read.