Macmillan splashed this ad for E. Arnot Robertson’s novel, The Signpost across the top half of page 13 on the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, consuming paper that British publishers struggling with wartime shortages would have coveted. A Book of the Month Club selection, The Signpost was expected to have good sales based on the popularity a decade earlier of Four Frightened People, and it seems to have done respectably well.
A month later, it was #7 on the Herald Tribune’s “What American is Reading” list, which surveyed 52 bookstores across the country, behind A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Lloyd Douglas’s Crucifixion epic The Robe. (“What America is Reading” offers a fascinating view of the American book market of the time, showing how many sales came from publisher’s stores (Scribners, Doubleday & Doran, Putnam’s) and department stores (Marshall Field in Chicago, Frederick & Nelson in Seattle, Woodward & Lothrop in Washington, D.C..)
The Signpost told of Tom Fairchild, an RAF pilot convalescing after being wounded, returns to Kildooey, a small fishing village in Donegal where he spent some happy summers as a boy. Getting from London to neutral Ireland seems impossible at first due to transportation restrictions and a closed border between Ulster and Ireland. A government clerk who conveniently turns out to be from Kildooey (it is fiction, after all) offers him a practical way past the latter problem, though:
“You go by Ulster, amn’t I telling you all this time?” said the clerk, irritable in his turn. “The frontier’s closed each night after six o’clock, mind, on the Ballinfaddy road.”
“Closed?”
“Closed. The guarda goes home then. Only a small road it is. There’s little traffic by day. Not worth keeping a man by night at the post.”
“So after six, you mean, I just go straight through?”
“Meaning that.”
Robertson dedicated the book “To the good friends I am about to lose in Eire.” The TLS reviewer wondered at this: “To lose through having written this book? But Miss Arnot Robertson would never have made friends of the kind of people who would take offence at The Signpost as another injustice to Ireland. Perhaps he missed the part where the RAF pilot sums up the Irish as “The kindest and most ruthless people, the most charming personally and the most stupid politically,” living in a land of “infinite leisure” which makes “poverty so bearable if inevitable.” Certainly one well-qualified critic, the Irish novelist Kate O’Brien, was less than impressed:
It is an Eire which I for one do not recognise, but it has the effect of toning down Miss Robertson’s customary assurance of judgement to a new speculativeness; it neutralises the well-known acidity and induces a warm, odd generosity. But, for all the author’s wit and goodwill, her beautiful village and crazy villagers are synthetic, straight out of a clever writer’s notebook. And, indeed, the two visiting strangers are synthetic also. I found the book entertaining in patches, but difficult to get through and impossible to believe in.
Despite its strong sales in the first lap, however, The Signpost failed to prove a winner in the long run and has been out of print for over 70 years now.
The Signpost, by E Arnot Robertson
Kate O’Brien