When I picked up an old Panther paperback copy of Penelope Gilliatt’s novel One by One at Bookcase, a veritable treasure trove of old books near the cathedral in Carlisle just a few weeks ago, its cover blurb was already a bit too real: “London is once again an isolated, panic-stricken city … in the grip of a fearsome plague that has killed 10,000 by the third week of August.” Now, like Polly Talbot, Gilliatt’s protagonist, I am holed up in my home, advised to avoid venturing out in the interest of containing a new and dangerous virus — which made reading this book a particularly unsettling experience.
It’s impossible not to look for parallels between Gilliatt’s fictional epidemic and today’s COVID-19 pandemic. Polly’s husband Joe is a veterinarian, but he becomes involved early in the response to the mysterious illness that begins taking lives as Europe swelters in a July heatwave — first helping out in a laboratory, then as a lowly orderly in a make-shift morgue and finally seconded as a doctor in a London hospital as the numbers rise. Aware of its contagion potential, he insists that Polly — seven months pregnant — remain at home weeks before the government responds and takes steps to quarantine London from the rest of the UK.
As in today’s crisis, the government is slow to act: “People were asked, but not ordered, to avoid travelling in and out of London.” Swimming pools are shut; the infected are isolated in their homes, food and supplies being brought to them by civil defense workers in protective gear. “For many days, far too many, no one in power grasped the danger because everyone was busy trying to find a scapegoat.” Before long, however, most of the city is shut down. Racketeers posing as undertakers take away corpses and set them alight with petrol in empty lots. As in time of the Black Death, survivors find themselves confronted by the overwhelming presence of death, but few are equipped with a faith to cope with it: “The difficulty of living without any system for thinking about dying was unacknowledged, and for that reason very acute.”
And as we are seeing now, some respond by grasping at war as an analogy. “In the emergency the right thing to do was to stir other people to a sense of outrage, to make a stink about it and hope it could be turned into the Armada or Dunkirk or anything but a biological affliction.” At the same time, those at a distance from the worst affected find it hard to break out of their everyday concerns. Over a few days before London is fully quarantined, Polly is able to visit her mother and her friends in the countryside. There, the discussion is not about the virus but about the scandalous public school careers of various MPs: “Our friend was always a great beater…. I should say he has beaten at least half the Cabinet.” The topic shifts then to speculation about closeted gays and unfaithful wives. The old boys express some sympathy for the PM’s wife and her series of ever-richer and fatter lovers: “I always think of Daphne like that, pressed out like a wafer by the great weight of men traveling over her, bumpetty bum, bumpetty bum.” When one finally turns to acknowledge Polly, he asks about the parties she must be missing.
“‘I shouldn’t think there are many,’ she said. ‘Too many of the guests are dead.'”
“It’s not on to mope,” the peer cautions her. As she approaches London on her return, she sees an orange glow in the distance. Burning corpses.
In the novel’s final chapters, the focus shifts from the epidemic writ large to the individual stories of Polly and Joe and situations having little to do with the illness. Polly manages to get out of London to the safety of her mother-in-law’s house by the sea, but finds the potential for harm there — emotional from Joe’s mother and medical from her degenerative GP — far worse than anything in London. Meanwhile, the Press (Gilliatt uses the capital P to hammer home her point), having first made Joe into hero for his selfless hospital work, turn him into a pariah by digging up evidence of a teenage experiment with homosexuality.
It is in these pages that Gilliatt’s aim becomes clear: to skewer the Establishment (using the capital E with which it was hammered in the 1960s) for its complacency. She sees in how upper- and upper-middle class parents cared for their children — including their gay children — indicators of how these children (now the adults in charge) deal with the epidemic:
You never gave him a chance to get near you. You shoved him into a grey flannel suit and sent him to some prissy dame’s-school when he was six, you gave him a meringue or something when he had a good report and you saw that he had his castor oil and you took him to those god-awful mournful churches without even believing a word of it yourself; and that was it. Then you packed him off to boarding school for more of the same when he was eight. Eight. And it went on for ten more years.
In other words: pack them up and get them out of sight. Unfortunately, as is often the case with fiction, messages can get in the way of stories, and One by One ends with what The New York Times’ reviewer, Martin Levin, called a “climactic no sequitur.”
One can identify, in hindsight, which reviewers considered themselves part of the Establishment by their verdicts of the book. Writing for The Listener, Hilary Corke regretted that Gilliatt had chosen to mix good old fashioned science fiction with “social satire and commentary.” Marigold Johnson, the TLS reviewer and never one to blunt her arrows, found the book “Too much of a rag-bag of protest, comic observation, emotional analysis, fantasy and cleverness.” Anthony Burgess, whose own novels were often similar rag-bags, loved it: “If it had a fault, it was the best fault imaginable: more action and characters and ideas than the small space could carry.” Johnson did, however, credit Gilliatt for displaying a “passion and intelligence … far too rare and ambitious for one to wish that it had been written in any other way or to forget the impression it leaves.”
One by One was Penelope Gilliatt’s first novel and though it’s also her shortest, its mix of sharp and strong set pieces of description and dialogue and hazy passages of internal monologues suggest that her fictional talents were better suited for the short story form. Although Gilliatt is primarily remembered now as a film critic, she left behind a considerable body of fiction, most of which can be found online at the Open Library (Link), including One by One. When Gilliatt died of alcoholism in 1993 at the age of 61, her friend lyricist and playwright Betty Comden, wrote, “What a glowing further career she might have had, and what beautiful, inventive, never-to-be-written pages this cleverest of all sausages [a bit of British slang Gilliatt often used] might have produced we will never know.” Were she alive today, however, she would also be among those at most risk in the face of our real-world epidemic.