I’ve long wondered about one of the longest modernist novels ever written, Evelyn Scott’s A Calendar of Sin (1931), an epic of the Reconstruction and after that took two volumes to encompass its over 1300 pages. When I stumbled across a copy with the original dust jackets at a reasonable price recently, I grabbed it. But I have yet to read it, so this is not about A Calendar of Sin.
On the back of the book, however, as was often the practice of publishers in those days, there appears “A Check List of Good Books,” which lists thirty titles then available from Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith. Cape & Smith was a brief and unsuccessful joint venture between the veteran British publisher Herbert Jonathan Cape and the American Harrison Smith. Established in 1928, the partnership lasted just three years. Smith left to form his own house and Robert Ballou, the former literary editor of the Chicago Daily News, who’d been the treasurer, took over and the firm reformed as Jonathan Cape and Robert Ballou. This incarnation was even briefer, closing its books in 1933.
The Cape & Smith check list, however, is an interesting mix of classics and the now-forgotten. The books by William Faulkner, Sigmund Freud, Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence, and Evelyn Waugh have remained in print and are well-established as 20th century classics. Several others (Maurice Hindus’s two books, Louis Fischer’s study of Soviet foreign policy, Charles Yale Harrison’s biography of Clarence Darrow) are too contemporary not to have been superseded by other studies. But let’s take a quick look at a few of the less well-known titles. A number of these have been reissued from time to time — Plagued by the Nightingale, for example, was a Virago Modern Classic. But these are the sort of almost-classics that never quite manage to stay in print without the support a champion or two.
- • A World Can End, by Irina Skariatina
- A candid, if at times disingenuous, account of the Russian revolution as seen by a member of the aristocracy. In his review for The Spectator, Graham Greene wrote:
“Here is death as we might ourselves experience it, not death in the desert or the jungle, but death in the drawing-room, the bullet that smashes the familiar picture…. The sufferings of her family, of her deaf old father, the General, who could not be stopped from criticizing the Revolution at the top of his voice until at last he was struck down in a street brawl, of the old Princess, her mother, married to an Estonian gardener that she might be allowed a passport to leave Russia, then dying when she crossed the frontier, are described with a freedom from prejudice, even with some sympathy for the Revolution, which makes her story the more terrible. If this is the best that can be said, one wonders at the worst.
- Skariatina was able to leave the Soviet Union and come to New York, where she married an American, Victor Blakeslee, an experience she wrote about in a sequel, A World Begins. Shortly afterward, she and Blakeslee visited Russia and she published an account of their trip with the somewhat boasting title of First to Go Back.
- Skariatina’s memoir was based on her diary, which gives the book an immediacy — but also a certain amount of undiguised naïveté, as in this entry from early 1917:
On my way home this afternoon, just as I left the hospital, I saw a wretched little dog perishing of cold and hunger. Its bones were sticking out in the most ghastly way and as for its eyes — the anguish in them cannot be described! Right next to where the little thing lay was a grocery store — so I dashed into it, bought an enormous sausage and was just about to feed the beastie, when all of a sudden passers-by, of the kind one sees in the hospital district, began to stop and stare and grumble out loud: “Look at her feeding a dog, when Christians are hungry nowadays. Ugh, those idle rich!” … Nothing like it ever happened to me before. It proves that there is a feeling of hostility among the poor that is ready to crop up at the slightest pretext.
- • Juan in America, by Eric Linklater
- Juan in America tells the story of Scotsman Juan — the name is meant to evoke Byron’s Don Juan, though it’s a loose connection at best — and his adventures in 1920s America. As the
summarized it, Juan encounters “gangsters bootleggers, wenches, bean-wagon proprietors, Carolina negroes and Hollywood deities. He runs rum from Windsor to Detroit, rides a mule for twenty-four hours down a flood-swollen river, invades a beer baron’s Everglade retreat and seduces his daughter, and accompanies these adventures with a running fire of commend and ribald laughter.” - Linklater wrote the book after spending two years in America, so it’s filled with dry British satire of American customs and manners. The book is often cited as an example of a modern picaresque novel, and it stands (or falls) on the strength of its episodes rather than its narrative arc. Juan in America has been a perennial favorite of reissuers, coming out several times as a Penguin Modern Classic and within the last twenty years as a Capuchin Classic. At the moment, it’s available as an eBook from Bloomsbury in the U.S., but not in England.
- • Mad Man’s Drum and Gods’ Man, by Lynd Ward
- Two wordless novels, in which the story is told through a series of full-page woodcuts. The form was pioneered by the Belgian artist Frans Masereel, and these, Ward’s first two attempts, are far more interesting as art than literature. Both suffer from excessive abstraction, with every character treated as symbol rather than individual. Susan Sontag considered God’s Man so awkward that she listed in her Camp canon in her milestone essay, “Notes on Camp.”
- By far Ward’s best graphic novel was his last, Vertigo (1937). In his introduction to the two-volume Library of America edition collecting all seven of Ward’s novels, Art Spiegelman writes of it,
“Genuinely novelistic in scope, it is a difficult work that grapples with perilously difficult times. As emblematic as Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, as ambitiously experimental as Dos Passos’s U. S. A/ trilogy, as apocalyptic as Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, it is a key work of Depression-era literature, and useful in understanding what is being down to us right now.”
If you are interested in sampling Ward’s novels but reluctant to go for the magnum opus, budget versions of God’s Man, Mad Man’s Drum, and Vertigo are available from Dover Books.
- • The Wave, by Evelyn Scott
- When The Wave was published in 1929, Carl Van Doren called it “the greatest novel on the American Civil War.” At the time, with five novels to her credit, Scott was considered one of the premier American modernists. In fact, publishers Cape & Smith touted a novel by another of their Southern-born writers by saying, “The Sound and the Fury should put William Faulkner in the company of Evelyn Scott.”
- In his 1950 study The American Historical Novel, Ernest Leisy wrote that The Wave “marked a new advance in the technique of historical fiction, and in an article from 1964, Robert Welker asserted that the book should be seen as “the standard measure against which novels dealing with the war were tested, and perhaps more than any one book, it is responsible for opening up the materials of the Civil War to fiction. It is unique in American fiction.”
- Peggy Bach, whose advocacy of the novel, along with that of her frequent collaborator David Madden, wrote of The Wave in a 1985 article in Southern Literary Journal,
Scott’s style is elaborate; her sentence structure is complex and often convoluted. Her characters, even when they are the great men about whom much Civil War fiction is written, exhibit particular human behavior in a particular situation. Upon the firm foundation of her intellect, her interests in various groups of people — Negroes, Jews, poor whites, politicians, military leaders — her strong compassion for the plight of women in the South, and her knowledge of history, Scott formed a novel unusual in content, character, tone, and structure.
Bach and Madden were responsible for the Louisiana State University Press reissuing the book in 1996 as part of the “Voices of the South” series. Since then, however, the book has, like much of Evelyn Scott’s work, fallen out of print again.
- • Gallows’ Orchard, by Claire Spencer
- Claire Spencer, the author of Gallows’ Orchard was, conveniently, Harrison Smith’s wife. Still, that doesn’t account entirely for the hyperbolic reception her debut novel received. As Harvard Crimson’s reviewer gushed, it “has everything and is everything necessary to make it an extraordinary good novel.” Amy Loveman, the Saturday Review’scritic, tried to chalk it up to that old stereotype, the natural born writer:
- Gallows’ Orchard tells the story of a Scottish girl who becomes pregnant by one man and marries another to save her name. When the truth finally comes out, her village takes its revenge in a manner, well, befitting Thomas Hardy … or Shirley Jackson.
- Spencer later divorced Smith and married Mabel Dodge Luhan’s son John Evans. The poet Robinson Jeffers, with whom they stayed after Spencer obtained her divorce in Reno, wrote a friend, “You never saw a pair of such handsome creatures — in a strange unusual way & so different.” they lived in Luhan’s compound in Taos until they sold it in the late 1960s and moved to Maine. Claire Spencer Evans died in 1987 at the age of 91.
- Gallows’ Orchard is available on HathiTrust (to those who have access).
- • Brother and Sister, by Leonhard Frank
- Leonhard Frank gained international acclaim for his first novel Carl and Anna, and American reviewers seemed inclined on the strength of that to give this account of a brother and sister who accidentally fall in love and marry (the old trick of long separation and a broken family). The New York Times thought that “so great is Frank’s art in portraying the love that is theirs [Constantine and Lydia, the two sibling/spouses], that one understand and sympathizes. One can no more censure them for what has happened than one can upbraid a mountain torrent for going out of its course and inundating ground that had hitherto slumbered in peaceful repose.”
- But British critics were less enthusiastic. The historian E. H. Carr wrote in The Spectator, “If his intention was to write a modern realistic novel on these themes, he has stopped half-way in the attempt. He ostentatiously flouts realism by a Shakespearean use of the long arm of coincidence; and he adopts, both for narrative and for dialogue, a purely poetical style which sometimes achieves beauty and occasionally, at any rate in translation, descends from the sublime to the ridiculous…. The result is a powerful and striking book which will be widely read and discussed; but Herr Frank has not solved, has not even really faced, the problems which he raises.
- • Bystander and The Magnet, by Maxim Gorki [Gorky]
- I must confess that these two titles were unfamiliar to me. But they’re also just the tip of the iceberg, or, more accurately, the first half of The Life of Klim Samgin, a tetralogy that Wikipedia describes as “Gorky’s most ambitious work, intended to depict ‘all the classes, all the trends, all the tendencies, all the hell-like commotion of the last century, and all the storms of the 20th century.'” Bystander and The Magnet were followed, in English translations, by Other Fires in 1933 and Specter in 1938. The first two volumes in English were published by Cape & Smith; the second two by Appleton-Century. None of them has ever been reissued in English.
- Among English-language readers, Maxim Gorki’s reputation has fallen dramatically since these books were published. Once considered the moral pillar of Russian literature after Tolstoy, Gorki had a problematic relationship with Lenin and even more so with Stalin, and his collaboration in the white-washing of the disastrous Belomor Canal, a pointless project to which thousands of Gulag prisoners were sacrificed has tended to outweigh his literary accomplishments since his death.
- This is a work of massive scale. The four books add up to over 2,700 pages. If you really wanted to read them, you’d have to be prepared to shell out over $500. While there are plenty of copies of Bystander available for under $20, there is just one copy of Other Fires currently listed for sale, and it goes for over $400.
- Whether it would be worth the effort in terms of reading satisfaction is another question. There was no difference of opinion among reviewers on one point: these are wordy novels. Gerald Gould, who reviewed Bystander for the Observer, was not a fan:
At first sight, one might merely wonder why this enormous book is not more enormous. Since the conversations seem endless, why not make them literally endless, especially as they all agree in finding nothing to agree about? But an artist of Gorki’s stature is entitled to his method, even when it involves tedium: and his book must be read for the impression of muddle it conveys. This, after all, is but the first volume of a trilogy: between the dissolution of this, and the Revolution that is coming, there may be an intention of violent contrast. Certainly the theory, so far, appears to be: “Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat.” The subject is the Russian Intelligentsia as it lived and talked — O how it talked! — between the assassination of Alexander II and the coronation of Nicholas II. The intelligentsia is unintelligent. Vagueness, vanity, morbidity, self-consciousness, lack of Ideals, a soft snow-drift of purposeless arguments and feckless delays, a sniffing at revolution — such is the picture: the few people who do anything quickly pass out of it: the hero goes on wondering about himself.
E. H. Carr put it more succinctly in reviewing The Magnet for the Spectator: “Gorki wields an amazingly fluent pen, but ‘the art to blot’ is one which he forgot at an early age.”
- On the other hand, those who loved 19th Century Russian novels found much to love in this one. In the Saturday Review, Alexander Kaun wrote that Bystander was not a historical novel but an immediate novel:
…we watch the bewildering Russian panorama, not in its cosy remoteness, but as a disconcerting immediacy. We miss the comfort of a historical novel, in which everything has been made clear and definite by the obliging author. Rather do we share the discomfort of contemporary Russians who lived in the chaos of an unduly protracted period of storm and stress. We speed headlong from the spectacular ‘Seventies, reverberating with terroristic explosions and culminating in the assassination of Alexander II, through the arid ‘Eighties, drabbish with pseudo-Tolstoyan passivitv and Chekhovian whimpering, and into the mad ‘Nineties, when a hothouse industrialization was foisted upon a rustic, famished country in which erstwhile peasants, stolid and pious, turned overight into militant proletarians, when the intelligentsia tried to digest a chop-suey of Marx-Nietzsche-Ibsen-Wilde-Verlaine-PIekhanov-Lenin-Mikhailovsky-Chernov.
Kaun was willing to excuse much in consideration of the energy in Gorki’s narrative: “A tremendous canvas of Russian life unfolds before our eyes, dizzying in its colorfulness and multiplicitv of action and movement…. Perhaps he uses his faculty a bit extravagantly; the abundance of faces and objects may tax our receptivity. But then, we recall the dimensions of the canvas, its Homeric proportions.”
- One wonders whether anyone will want to take on a new English translation (no one had good things to say about the first one). Is the work worth it? Or is The Life of Klim Samgin as justly forgotten now as the thick historical novels of Gorki’s contemporary Dmitry Merezhkovsky (who?).
- • Plagued by the Nightingale, by Kay Boyle
- This was Boyle’s first novel, written in part in anguish at her treatment by the Breton parents of her first husband, Richard Brault. Though mostly written between 1923 and 1927, it was not published until 1931, at which point she confessed to a friend, “I wrote [it] so many years ago that I feel it has nothing to do with me now.” In her review of the book, along with Wedding Day, Boyle’s first collection of stories, Katherine Anne Porter wrote,
The whole manner of the telling is superb: there are long passages of prose which crackle and snap with electric energy, episodes in which inner drama and outward events occur against scenes bright with the vividness of things seen by the immediate eye: the bathing party on the beach, the fire in the village, the delicious all-day excursion to Castle Island, the scene in the market when Bridget and Nicholas quarrel, the death of Charlotte, the funeral. Nothing is misplaced or exaggerated, and the masterful use of symbol and allegory clarify and motivate the mam great theme beneath the apparent one: the losing battle of youth and strength against the resistless army of age and death. This concept is implicit in the story itself, and it runs like music between the lines. The book is a magnificent performance; and as the short stories left the impression of reservoirs of power hardly tapped, so this novel, complete as it is, seems only a beginning.
After being out of print for decades, it was reissued in 1966 to launch the Crosscurrents/Modern Fiction series of neglected books from the Southern Illinois Press. In his introduction to that edition, Harry T. Moore wrote,
The novel that emerged is a variant on the Henry James theme of the clash between Americans and Europeans— and it may be asked, Who since James has handled this theme more skilfully? Indeed it can safely be said that Kay Boyle in her first novel portrayed a French provincial family far more convincingly than any other American writer, in her story of the American girl Bridget who has married a Breton and at- tempts to live with his fiercely clannisH family that dominates a village.
Every now and again there appears an author who is a novelist not by power of will, but as naturally as the bird is master of flight. Miss Spencer is of that happy company who write with so direct a vision as to seem to be improvising as they proceed. Her book has that appearance f unpremeditation which is the triumph of art. It has an urgency and immediacy of emotion that are the very accent of life, a sequence of happening as seemingly inevitable as the inescapable encounters of actual existence. Her narrative is electric with feel-ings -— quick with a passionate responsiveness to the beauty of nature, the pathos of dumb beasts, the calamities and complexities of the human heart.
