Candidates for the #1956Club

For about five years now, Karen Langley (Kaggsy of Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambles) and Simon Thomas (of Stuck in a Book) have instigated a semi-annual event in which people around the world take a week to read and write about books published during a particular year. The next round, coming up the week of 5-11 October, will look at books from the year 1956.

1956 was a terrific year for what I might call good but not stuffily great books. Perhaps the best example is Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, which won her the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and which is much loved for the spirit embodied in its opening line: “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.” This was Macaulay’s last novel; also appearing in 1956 is Anthony Burgess’s first novel Time for a Tiger, the first book in his Malayan Trilogy.

To encourage folks to take advantage of the #1956Club while also discovering something beyond what’s readily available for instant download or overnight delivery, I’ve put together this list of 10 long-forgotten and out of print books from 1956.

• Solo, by Stanford Whitmore

A first and only novel about a jazz pianist working in Chicago. In the Sphere, Vernon Fane wrote, “Mr. Whitmore’s hero is an eccentric young man who describes himself as the last individual in the world, is a brilliant jazz pianist and, by his almost total independence, makes himself as many enemies as fans.” In the Guardian, Anna Bostock found Whitmore’s knowledge of Chicago and jazz “fascinating … with its own values, manners, and language, and the author’s sure command of these gives the novel something of the quality of a good travel book.” In the Observer’s year-end wrap-up, John Wain wrote that he’d under-praised Solo, “which has stayed in my mind very firmly since January, and show no sign of dissolving.”

 

• For All We Know, by G. B. Stern

A novel about the theater and all the personalities around it. In the New Statesman, Michael Crampton wrote that it “throbs with the passionate, false life of the stage. Everybody strikes poses, and there’s a good deal of sharp elbowing up right and down left in the crowd scences. But I find that green-room novels, like salted almonds, are insidiously to my taste.” Isabel Quigly praised Stern’s ability to manage a vast cast with sublime nonchalance. “For All We Know (a suitably airy title) is about one of those brilliant, fictional families with ramifications so complex that even with a family tree at the beginning you can hardly tell by the end exactly who is whose great-aunt or grandmother or second cousin. But it doesn’t really matter; what does is the frightful, fascinating buoyancy of plot, characters, conversations and, of course, plain narrative.”

 

• The Brazen Head, by John Cowper Powys

One of Powys’s last books, described as a phantasmagoria and set in Wessex at the time of Roger Bacon. “A profusion of odd characters — barons, sorcerers, giants, enchantresses — appear and disappear, argue, tangle and disentangle, evacuate, copulate or die,” wrote Tom Hopkinson in the Observer. Hopkinson found the book a molten, formless mass — but didn’t think that mattered much. “The book’s chief quality,” he wrote, “lies in the author’s immense erudition and expansive kindliness of heart, which gleam, whenever they are allow to, through the boisterous confusion of action and the ceaseless babel of talk.” Both Stevie Smith and Angus Wilson named The Brazen Head one of their books of the year. “It is beautifully, deeply weird and also happy,” wrote Smith, while Wilson called Powys “still the most original living English writer.”

 

• Remember the House, by Santha Rama Rau

A novel about an English-educated Indian young woman in Bombay (Mumbai). Isabel Quigly found it seems—and maybe is—the first novel I remember reading which takes you right away from, right beyond, the confines of western thought. And so delicately that you barely notice, till afterwards, you have spent time in another world. The surface is perfectly familiar—a light, glittering, conversational style, dialogue that often recalls Mr. Waugh in his bright young days, action at just the right pace to keep you interested but not breathless, characters beautifully disposed and organised. ” “The worn old adjective ‘brilliant’ does really apply to this extraordinary eyocation of a way of life at once familiar and remote: and so deftly, so—in a brash, lighthearted way—femininely” Quigly concluded, “that you are half lulled into thinking it just another novel about social habits: which it is, but so very much more. And, I almost forgot to say, highly entertaining, at the idlest level of appreciation, as well.”

 

• Image of a Society, by Roy Fuller

Mary Scrutton spoke for many potential readers when she wrote in the New Statesman, “I never met a more misleading title than Image of a Society. It sounds like yet another sociological survey. In fact it is rather like a good Arnold Bennett, only it is well written [posthumous apologies to Mr. Bennett]. It is about the people who work in a large Building Society in a provincial town, and more particularly about two of them—the ambitious, cocky, extrovert executive who is fancied as the next General Manager, and the sad, intellectual parent-ridden young solicitor who falls in love with that executive’s wife. Both men are most shrewdly studied, but not at the expense of the background; the whole movement of the office is tersely and wittily conveyed.” Scrutton had exceptional praise for Fuller’s skill: “It is a beautifully organised novel, all the more moving for being closely pruned. It gave me the feeling that I had when I first read Afternoon Men—namely, that most novelists never succeed in extracting the statue from the stone at all. No wonder it is often such hard work trying to enjoy them.”

 

• A Single Pebble, by John Hersey

This short novel drew upon Hersey’s years of living in China as the son of American missionaries. An American engineer travels by upon a junk up the Yangtze River in search of a location for a dam. But the story is more in the journey and the interactions between the young Westerner and the members of the crew, lead by a man known as Old Pebble. Howard Mumford Jones wrote that the book’s narrative “is merely the occasion of the novel, not the substance of Mr. Hersey’s art. He wonderfully succeeds in purveying the slow, dreamlike journey up this ancient river. We move with the junk as if under enchantment and are as helpless as the teller of the story to alter the drift of event or comprehend the Chinese enigma.” Santha Rama Rau found that Hersey “captured all the magic, the terror and the drama of that extraordinary stretch of water.” John Wain called it “the most distinguished book I read in the year — the one I would have least hope of ever being able to emulate.”

 

• A Dance in the Sun, by Dan Jacobson

A short novel about the encounter between two drifters and a farm family they meet on a road in South Africa. John Wain gushed about the book in his Observer review: “A Dance in the Sun is a beautiful performance, a model of how to treat a vastly complicated subject without over-simplifying, and yet without ever becoming confused. As a novel of suspense, it could be enjoyed in the simplest way, but I doubt if anyone will be able to keep his reaction dewn to this level; the real subject of the book, race relations in South Africa, is so insistently present that it will touch and move the stupidest and most calious reader.” “Altogether,” Wain concluded, “one might, without absurdity, put this novel on the same shelf with A Passage to India — and that is a very small shelf.”

 

• The Seven Islands, by Jon Godden

A short, simple, almost artless story about a holy guru living as a hermit on an island in the Ganges and the quite unholy measures he takes when he encounters competition in the form of Dr. Mishra, who wants to set up his own commune on a neighboring island. It’s a bit parable, a bit human comedy, and a bit distillation of Godden’s many years of observing Indian manners and thought. “This gravely mischievous fairy tale has a moral too good to give away,” wrote John Davenport. “A singularly charming book.”

 

• Jamie Is My Heart’s Desire, by Alfred Chester

Jamie Is My Heart’s Desire left many reviewers flummoxed but impressed. In the Listener, Sean O’Faolain wrote that it was “impossible to summarise … all a matter of mood, atmosphere, place, temperament: New York in a strangely, Parisian dress, more Baudelaire than Bonwit Teller.” The hero lives above a funeral parlor, hangs out with a deadbeat novelist, a one-eyed priest, and a warm-hearted social worker. The trappings and atmosphere of the mortuary seeps into everything in the book — “Only the vampires are missing,” O’Faolain joked. He was not entirely off the mark in writing that “Mr. Chester is a real writer; corrupted, somehow, astray somewhere, probably in French Lit., and exile — I hazard the guess.” “Would Mr. Alfred Chester, present whereabouts unknown, please return home immediately where his talent lies seriously ill?” O’Faolain pleaded.

 

• The Marble Orchard, by Margaret Boylen

The second of only three novels that Boylen wrote before dying at the age of 46, The Marble Orchard takes the Southern Gothic sensibilities of Flannery O’Connor and sets them down in the middle of Iowa, where Boylen grew up. Lovey Claypoole, a girl blinded as a result of one of her tinkerer-inventor father’s failed experiments, spends many hours roaming the graveyard — the marble orchard of the title — and talking with her town’s outcasts. Orville Prescott, the New York Times’s oracle of the time, only read the book because his daughter forced it on him. “I had to find’ out for myself about this strange novel which some people liked so much and some people disliked so heartily,” he later wrote. “Sometimes its crackling rainbow prose seems so artificial that all sense of reality is lost. But far more often Lovey’s extraordinary talent for the imaginatively right word, for the concrete detail that will bring a whole episode into life, for a fantastic but wonderful figure of speech, makes reading The Marble Orchard an exhilarating experience.

In the end, Prescott found the book “so original in matter and manner, so startling in its verbal acrobatics and so witty in a raffish and bizarre fashion unlike anything ever printed on paper before that it ought to make Mrs. Boylen famous.” It did not, of course. But as Prescott acknowledged, “Queerly brilliant books are all too often ignored.”

If you’re running out of time to locate one of these ten neglected titles, however, here are some others worth at look. These well- or somewhat well-known and in print titles from 1956 are almost enough to tempt me to divert from my path through the land of the neglected:

• My Dog Tulip, by J. R. Ackerley

Ackerley’s loving memoir of his Alsatian dog Queenie (whose name was changed to Tulip out of concerns over inferences about Ackerley’s homosexuality) was turned into an animated feature with Christopher Plummer in the lead in My Dog Tulip in 2009. Both the film and the book are well worth looking for.

• O Beulah Land, by May Lee Settle

Settle’s third novel and the second volume in what would ultimately become known as the Beulah Quintet, O Beulah Land is about the early settlement of the Ohio Territory. Like all of Settle’s books, it combines deep tenderness towards nature and emotion with absolutely unflinching depiction of the violence that runs through so much American history.

• The Lost Steps, by Alejo Carpentier

This was really the first novel that made English language readers sit up and realize that Latin American novelists were coming up with something new — the sizzle before the Latin American boom, if you will.

• Andersonville, by McKinlay Kantor

A huge book (~800 pages) and a huge bestseller, this account of the grim conditions in the notorious Confederate Andersonville prison camp — particularly coming after World War Two and the grim images of Nazi concentration camps — helped offset (somewhat) the nostalgia for the antebellum South embodied in that other doorstopping bestseller, Gone with the Wind.

• The Tree of Man, by Patrick White

Technically, this only qualifies for the #1956Club for readers in the UK, where it was published about nine months later than its appearance in the US and Australia. Like The Lost Steps, The Tree of Man was a book that made readers in the Northern Hemisphere sit up and realize that great fiction that wasn’t just English stories transplanted were being written in Australia.

• The Emigrants, by Vilhelm Moberg

Moberg published the first of his four volume Emigrants series in 1949, but it first reached English readers in 1956. In a fair world, we’d recognize it as one of the better candidates for the Great American Novel: taken together, the four books are the closest thing we have to an epic of the American Dream in all its complexities.

• Tunes of Glory, by James Kennaway

Kennaway’s first novel, later made into a terrific film starring Alec Guinness, Tunes of Glory is a favorite with many a soldier for its knowing depiction of the turnover of traditions and generations that’s inherent in the history any military unit that wants to remain effective.

• Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, by Angus Wilson

Angus Wilson was just nine years older than Kingsley Amis but he unjustly got labeled as an old man (in contrast to the Angry Young Men), despite the fact that his satirical blade cut far deeper and sharper than Amis’s. I’m not sure he had the best judgment in his choice of titles, either, which is a shame. I’d take Anglo-Saxon Attitudes over Lucky Jim any day of the week.

• A Charmed Life, by Mary McCarthy

Although I prefer McCarthy as a critic than as a novelist, I had to include this book — which Edward Albee had to have read before writing “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — because it is so much better than the book she’s best known for (which need not be named).

• Pincher Martin, by William Golding

Another example where the novelist’s best known book pales in comparison to a somewhat lesser known work. I remember the impact when I realized, late in the book, was Golding was doing, what really was the fate of Pincher Martin. It was like that moment in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road when we learn that April Wheeler is dead: a punch in the chest that takes your breath away in shock.

• A Train to Pakistan, by Khushwant Singh

So much life, so much suffering, so much death is packed into the under-200 pages of this novel about the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. An antidote for anyone who gave up without finishing Midnight’s Children