The paperback editions of The Fire Escape trumpet its message: “The tragic, unvarnished story of a prostitute.” Which is a bit like plastering the banner line, “The Story of a Cockroach” across the cover of The Metamorphosis: yes, well, I guess you could say it is, but that’s actually missing the point in a pretty big way.
Just what is The Fire Escape about, then, you ask? Boy, you’ve got me there.
It purports to be the autobiography of the youngest daughter of a curate, a woman never quite at ease in any situation for long, and positively antsy when it comes to any of the conventions of English middle class life shortly after the First World War. Shipped off to a boarding school, she befriends Norah, a day girl, and soon they are happily playing “Torture,” taking turns tying each other up. One day she does the job so successfully that Norah’s mother rushes in with a pair of scissors to cut the cord before the victim strangles.
Moved to a school for clergy daughters only, she quickly forms a secret society, “The Red Lamp,” with a new friend, Polly, and initiate a third member by locking her in a cupboard. Yet when she comes across a dog savaging a rabbit to death, she wonders, “Was I really so cowardly that I was going to maintain an acquiescent silence my whole life?”
Sent to a teacher’s college by her parents, she quits and signs up for an art school instead, then plays truant from that, finds a landlady willing to give her the use of an empty attic to live in, and takes up day work as a cleaning woman. When her father considers resigning his living out of shame, Susan up and takes off for Dublin with a boy from school, both mad over Yeats’s poetry. Running into the poet in the street, she recites the whole of “Sailing to Byzantium” and he invites them to watch a rehearsal of his play, The Cat and the Moon at the Abbey Theatre (which puts this incident, if true, in 1931).
Rescued and brought home from Dublin, she soon returns to the attic, accessible by the fire escape of the title. Putting the kettle on, she is startled when an old man enters from the floor below. He quietly sits on the sofa and watches her, occasionally speaking in a language she cannot understand. At some point, she learns his name: Alek Nauss.
Alek Nauss. Susan Kale. You see where the story goes from erratic to weird?
Over the next decade, Susan returns from time to time to the attic and has odd conversations with Alek. These she imbues with profound significance, though she manages to convey almost none of it to the reader. She falls in love with a puppeteer and wanders around southern England with him, often sleeping in the fields. He takes up with another woman and she gets a job scraping away excess lead from toy soldiers fresh from the molds. Ten hours a day for twenty seven shillings a week. Like the other women there, she merely endures it. “They endured the utter futility, the wretchedness of spending their days in scraping lead; the prostitution of their lives, in fact.”
She takes up with a poet, marries and has a son by him, then they divorce and she is forced to give the boy away to a relative. She goes through jobs and men and flats at a dizzying pace. She models for an artist, “a very ugly man.” Soon she and the artist are playing “torture” again, grown-up style. Except it’s all very British in its perversity:
One night, he suspended me by my ankles in a doorway. It was difficult because he didn’t want either to spoil the paintwork in his flat or to break my neck. It took more time than such things bearably can. We woke up to the insanity of our behavior simultaneously and didn’t meet again. He was sensitive.
Eighty-seven or so jobs later, she wanders out of a cafe and, while posting a letter, is approached by a man. “Are you doing anything tonight?” he asks. “What do you want?” “I wondered if you’d like to come to a show.” She repeats the question. “I’m game for anything,” he answers. Moments later, she agrees to sleep with him for two pounds, and suddenly she’s discovered her eighty-eighth job.
This being England in the late 1940s, setting oneself up as a prostitute involves a fair amount of subterfuge and thick swathes of middle class hypocrisy. She works mostly off ads posted in tobacconists: “Miss Domina Brand: Psychologist. Will Solve Your Problems Big or Small.” “Surely it’s wrong to put ‘Miss,’ isn’t it?” she asks. “Yes, but that’s what’ll convince them it’s not a real psychologist,” a helpful newsagent advises her.
Though a fair variety of fetishes are played out in her flats over the next decade, the one prevailing sense throughout this period is of dreariness. Susan Kale’s account of life in postwar London may capture its grey, tedious, tired attempts to keep up appearances better than any of the Kitchen Sink school plays and novels.
In the end, she gives up, worried she is running out of time. Or at least, so it appears. Because in the final pages, we return once again to the attic–now mostly a pile of rubble with a bit of the fire escape still clinging to its side. Alek Nauss is gone, dead years ago.
Is this meant as a metaphor for herself? What started as a secret place, a place where she could escape from her parents’ conventions, now just a ruin, “a broken-backed, disfigured space”? It’s difficult to tell but even more difficult to care, for by this point, the reader is likely exhausted from what has been nearly two hundred pages of “this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened” narrative that rarely offers more than a paragraph or two respite from Susan Kale’s relentless restlessness.
It is perhaps most interesting as a dramatic contrast to just about any other Englishwoman’s account of the same period. Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark undoubtedly knew of women like Susan Kale in their time, but they made sure to steer clear of their acquaintance. If there is any comparison one might draw, it is with the equally-forgotten Kathleen Sully’s early novels, particularly Canal in the Moonlight, with their odd mixes of grim poverty, black humor, and cruel fate. If any man picked up a paperback copy of The Fire Escape looking for a thrill, he would certainly have been disappointed, if not eagerly looking for the nearest bottle or narcotic instead.
I suspect there are a number of invented or adapted aspects in the book beyond “Alek Nauss,” and the author’s name is probably one of them. I think one would have to go through the archives of Putnam’s to track down more reliable information about her identity. The whole thing could be invented for all we know, though there are enough specifics to believe that there is more here based on first-hand experience than on imagination. I certainly would be interested in finding out more, too!
I’ve just finished reading The Fire Escape and suspect that I may have enjoyed it more than you. Yes, it’s one incident/pointless job/miserable rented room after another but it’s a story told with some skill and some sly humour, especially about her clients as a prostitute. What is surprising is how little she reflects on the emotional turmoil (if it was turmoil) of her life. There is one terse admission ‘ I am incapable of love’ which may account for a lot.
I was curious about ‘Susan Kale’ and what might be her true identity if ‘Kale’ is a pseudonym. There is no other book published under that name. The artists whom she knew (Meninsky, Gertler etc) were all real people but her connections with them were probably too tenuous to merit a mention in any of their biographies.
Possibly more promising is the name by which she is known within the book, ie ‘Susan Wyatt’. She withholds the name of the ‘thin octavo-sized magazine’ which apparently accepted four articles by her in the summer of 1945, but it’s not clear if they were actually published. There was a Susan Wyatt, married to the contrarian Tory Woodrow Wyatt, who co-edited with her husband in the early 1940s some editions of short story compilations entitled ‘English Story’. However this Susan Wyatt went to Oxford and there is no suggestion within The Fire Escape that she was ever a student. However, this may be the closest to a ‘lead’ that I uncovered.
Any other information would be very welcome!
Good comparison! It never occurred to me, but there are certainly similarities. Susan Kale never shared Bukowski’s taste for booze, though.
The themes related to social class sound interesting. The narrative structure – moving between a series of seemingly meaningless jobs driven by a mixture of tedium and desperation – seems somewhat like the American novels of Charles Bukowski.