“Once a bear kept a small inn for animals. Not many, just a mole or so, a chipmunk, a cat, several birds, a sheep and a deer. Wasps and bees, also inhabitants, didn’t count because they were innumerable.” Jean Garrigue’s 1966 novella, The Animal Hotel seems at first to be just a charming children’s story. The bear is a marvelous host, a diligent housekeeper who reminds the cat to keep its fish heads in a neat pile and the deer not to leave a trail of grass in the living room. She fixes wonderful meals of seeds and berries and each night they entertain each other with stories.
During the day, they wander through the fields and forest nearby, “traveling the way a brook does, by the path of least resistance”:
True enough, it took them like the brook longer to get wherever they wanted to go, but again, what of it? Every brook may feel that its destiny magically and magnetically draws it to some distant river but does the attraction of that looming end oblige it to get there by that shortest distance, a straight line? No. The sense of other destiny is there all the way, in every flat or round stone the brook trips over, under every bush, tree or moss-ledged wall the brook passes by, and so it was with these beasts when they went out on their rambles. Every moment of divaricating, very desultory direction they took was as significant to them, as bewitching and surprising as whatever it was they thought would be awaiting them.
But soon the simple tale of the happy life led by this rag-tag clan reveals a deeper layer underneath. There a loneliness in the bear unlike the other animals. The mole was blind, “didn’t care and had never known better.” But the bear “seemed to have renounced society.”
When hoof prints appear in the forest, the animals grow concerned. Too big, too nervous, too powerful to be trusted in their household. The bear goes out to look for him, so shoo him off. But then she stays away most of the day and then she disappears entirely. Each beast begins to feel “that the great days were over and their queen gone,” and to wonder if it is now time to move on.
Then, “after days and days, a very little packet of eternity,” she returns. Bedraggled, thin, with a thick leather collar around her neck and a chain dangling from the collar. The animals brew up a pot of tea and set to nursing her back to health.
When she recovers, she tells the animals not just of how she fell in love with the horse and went with him to the land of men but of the great career she had had many years before, performing in the greatest of circuses with another horse. And just as she had escaped from the circus to build a refuge deep in the forest, so she fled again this second time. Their special world restored to the animal hotel, they can look forward to the good times going on and on and on. “Would they not go on, and forever?”
At just under 100 pages and published by a small and then-new New York firm, the Eakins Press, The Animal Hotel went virtually unnoticed. In one of its very few reviews, Denis Donoghue wrote in The New York Review of Books that Garrigue’s writing had “a Book of Hours simplicity”:
Something of this quality is audible in The Animal Hotel. But the most important thing is that she knows her powers, she knows what she can do. If you want to write fabulous prose, the best bet is to compose a fable; to get the genre right before trying to get everything else right. Miss Garrigue has done this. So she is free to turn her pretty phrases, to speak of “the curl and curlycue of her voice,” giving the language its head: “Not me, I replied, for I saw what I knew and knew what I had to do and threw up the cards, every one, all the trumps of them and the trumpets, the trumpery too, and the triumphs.”
This is Miss Garrigue’s way of restoring the magic, by writing a book of charms, making the sentences charming.
In a short memoir of the early days of the Paris Review, George Plimpton claimed that The Animal Hotel was inspired by Garrigue’s experiences living at the Hotel Helvétia and its proprietors, Monsieur and Madame Jordan, who were generous and understanding hosts. Garrigue strung a clothesline across her room to allow a group of finches to reside with her. Not surprisingly, when Plimpton was offered to take the room over after she’d left, he found it “filled with sticks, stones, moss, seeds, wings, thistles, parts of dandelions, parts of pigeon’s eggs and snail whorls, etc.”
Josephine Herbst and Jean Garrigue clowning at Herbst’s Erwinna, PA house, 1957But there should be no mystery about the inspiration behind The Animal Hotel. “For Josephine Herbst” reads the dedication. By the time the book was published, Herbst and Garrigue were no longer lovers, but they were still involved in others lives. And they had spent much of the 1950s in a relationship that centered around the busy circle of people that swirled around Herbst’s somewhat ramshackle country house near Erwinna, Pennsylvania.
When I think of Josie as she was in her later years — or rather, as she appeared — I see a vital woman surrounded by a circle of eager admirers, somewhat after the manner of the classic fairy tale in which a maternal figure has taken shelter deep in the heart of an enchanted forest surrounded by swarms of little people on whom she is really dependent but who are also under her spell. In the story the unorthodox household is occasionally menaced — someone is wounded or lost or word drifts in on the lips of animals about trouble in neighboring territories or from remnants of the past — but on the whole it is a safe and sufficient unit, mysteriously enveloped in a kind of protective charm. There actually was such a fable written about Erwinna, by Jean, a prose novella, The Animal Hotel, first published in the periodical New World Writing in 1956. The saga of a country lodging run by an amiable but elusive Bear whose “past was more complicated than anybody could guess” had its origin, more or less, in fact, for as the 1950s progressed, the house in Erwinna was becoming a stopping place for a group of young men and women just beginning to make their marks on the world, and Josie was very much the star…. Through their eyes the idea of Erwinna as a place of fellowship and creativity not just aloof from but superior to the world’s demands was magically reborn.
One of these young women, Jane Mayhall, later wrote that Herbst “made one feel that life was a kind of involved continuity”: “Reassurances and advisos toward attention to immediate events.” But like Garrigue’s bear, “she did suggest that there were realities beyond the moment.” As Langer shows, one of Herbst’s painful realities was Garrigue’s constant affairs and dalliances with other women and men, which by the time The Animal Hotel was published had left her lonely and forgotten.
Josephine Herbst died of cancer in early 1969; Jean Garrigue died of Hodgkin’s disease almost exactly three years later. In her last collection of poems, Studies for an Actress and Other Poems, Garrigue included a tribute to Herbst in a poem entitled, “In Memory”:
You did not doubt that you were beloved
And by good strangers, friends to you
Bearing the promised language.
Yet skeptic you could doubt
Out of a full heart
Who tried to beat the game
And did so, again, again,
And raised us leaves of hope by that
For something simple like a natural thing,
for something large, essential, driving hard
Against the stupors of too much gone wrong.
And by your intensity
Of flame against the dark
(You beat up flame,
You beat it up against the dark)
Gave us greater want
To change the heart to change the life
Changing our lives in the light that is changing
But which has no future, no yesterday.
“Bikka’s rats are large, fierce and tenacious. They find rich pickings in the garbage of the extravagant Bikka poor which nourishes bodies and whets appetites for yet more. Only the boldest or most foolhardy of the Bikka cats ever stalk one, so they go from strength to strength; feared and shunned or abhorred and ignored.”
The opening lines of Kathleen Sully’s first novel, Canal in Moonlight, make it clear that the reader is well past even the territory of the “kitchen sink realism” of the Angry Young Men. This is the lavatory pan (toilet bowl for us Americans) realism. Indeed, one of the early crises in the book is the loss of the one and only lavatory pan at number 65, Bikka Road, home of Horace and Belle Hoppe and their sixteen children.
The Hoppes live along a former industrial canal, “now disused … a problem to the local authorities, a forbidden place of muddy excitement to small boys, and a dump for rubbish.” And, as the story develops, for junky old cars, broken furniture, and other unwanted problems.
“Canal in Moonlight” may be a romantic image, but there is nothing remotely romantic in this book. The Hoppes have far too many children to care for or even reliably keep track of. Belle is a former prostitute wed years ago to Horace, considered of “abnormal or subnormal intelligence” by his family. An utter stranger, he had walked up to her on the stroll one evening and proposed marriage. She had accepted. “Whether she had ever loved her even she did not know, but her respect for his respect of her was beyond measure, and she had never overcome her surprise at being asked, nor did she ever come to the dregs of her happiness arising out of it; her cup of happiness was ever full.”
So this is a family living in filth and degradation, totally dependent on the tiny allowance Horace receives from his wealthy brother (clearly to keep him at a safe distance), despised by their neighbors, never more than an accident away from complete disaster. Yet Belle considers herself near constant bliss. And despite the fact that Horace “had a strange, detached, unpractical and at times wholly stupid attitude towards all that his parents held important,” we soon come to realize that he is far closer to a holy innocent than a shiftless idiot. Indeed, when he feels compelled to provide Belle with the slight relief of a day’s outing to the seaside, he goes right out, secures a job as a delivery boy, and quickly pulls in some generous tips for his exceptional service and courtesy.
Such are the paradoxes that fill Canal in Moonlight. The Hoppe house may be crawling with children, not to mention the pregnant goat in the living room and the decrepit old horse in the front yard, but there burns a steady flame of … well, call it as you like — goodness, joy, or love. Meanwhile, next door at the house of the “good” Dyppes (surely Sully meant something by this Hoppe/Dyppe parallel), an air of bitterness and resentment prevails — and proves only a veneer covering a far more profound sickness at its core.
There’s no doubt that Sully was aiming for something that proved somewhat beyond her reach. As in the two other books I’ve read so far (Merrily to the Grave and A Look at the Tadpoles), she likes to work with a cast of dozens (a dozen and half just with the Hoppes) and as one might expect with a first novel, a few of them seem to have no particular purpose or quickly get lost in the hub-bub of her narrative. Some of her detours in telling the tale prove dead ends.
But as most of the book’s first reviewers recognized, there is a remarkable and original perspective on view for the first time in Canal in Moonlight. From those first lines, you know the narrative arc can only be headed in a downward direction. Bad things are going to befall the Hoppes, and they prove to be very, very bad things. And yet … well, it’s a bit hard to explain, but none of them manage to snuff out the little flame that each of the Hoppes somehow manages to keep alive. “So quiet, my soul, relent thy bitterness, garner thy strength,” Horace thinks as he briefly contemplates suicide near the very end of the book. “Who knows what struggle yet awaits us….”
Kathleen Sully was forty-five, a housewife and mother of three in Weston-super-Mare when Canal in Moonlight was published. No Angry Young Man, she, nor a heady young woman such as Doris Lessing or Iris Murdoch. But neither was Canal in Moonlight a safe bit of middlebrow comedy or Regency romance. And I think this was part of the problem that dogged her throughout her next fifteen years and sixteen novels. Those whom the gods would forget they first set outside any the limit of the known labels and categories.
This is so evident in the cognitive dissonance expressed by many of her reviewers:
• John Davenport, The Observer
Canal by Moonlight is a first novel. It is very odd. I don’t quite honestly, know what to make of it. I do know that I couldn’t put it down; or rather, that I dropped it like a hot brick, again and again, only to pick it up once more…. A short, phosphorescent insomniac’s white night.
• Douglas Hewitt, The Guardian
It would be difficult to find a greater contrast than between the work of the astute Mr Powell [a fair number of the reviews discussed Anthony Powell’s The Acceptance World alongside Sully’s book] and Kathleen Sully’s first novel, Canal in Moonlight, which is, in its own way, just as distinctive a performance. The brief notations with which a reviewer indicates to the potential reader that he will have met this kind of thing before and that this is a good or bad specimen of the type will not do for this novel. It bears all the marks — good and bad — of proceeding from a markedly idiosyncratic individual vision.
• Angela Milne, The Sketch
But no summary can give a clue to its quality; for here the ordinary standards of happiness and virtue are challenged and, through a sort of Chorus in the form of the spinster next door, Kathleen Sully puts forward a philosophy that binds these beautifully-written pages into a work of war. “She is a good mother,” the spinster says of Belle; and in that paradox lies the essence of a book that you may hate to read, yet will be glad to have read. It is a first novel for which “promise” is a mild word.
• Elizabeth Bowen, The Tatler
Bizarre? A nightmare prose-poem, a lyric nightmare? How shall one describe Canal in Moonlight?…. A well-nigh witchcraft quality in Miss Sully’s art makes what is barely possible seen probably — and, as in an Elizabethan play, violence goes hand-in-hand with purity.
• Vernon Fane, The Sphere
Canal in Moonlight is short and it is misleadingly simple. It is also dramatic, violent and unexpectedly tender in turn. This is Miss Kathleen Sully’s first novel and I know of no exact category into which it can be fitted, except perhaps that of books that are very well worth reading.
• The New Yorker
A curious piece of work — awkward, spontaneous, honest, and as real as the dream that wakes one suddenly in the middle of the night.
• John Betjeman, The Daily Telegraph
Kathleen Sully is above all things a born writer. This explains the mystery of her being able to hold one from her very first sentence to her last.
• Julian Symons, TLS
From the dramatic moments of these stunted lives Miss Sully has made comedy; but this raw, strange, imperfect novel is notable also for its awarenes that human dignity can endure through wretchedness and filth.
• Isabel Quigley, The Spectator
It is difficult to describe the extraordinary power of Canal in Moonlight. Among the rest of the week’s novels it sits about as cosily as an esquimo in an espresso bar. For it is a true primitive, something preciously rare among novelists, with the ruthlessness, the ferocious exactitude of observation that implies; an exactitude that may even make things look unfamiliar, so used have we grown to the layers upon layers with which our normal experience is overgrown…. To say it is a slum story of seduction, murders, suicide and desolation, conveys nothing. To say the house in it stinks of goats, blood seeps under the garage door for a child to bounce his ball in, and the warehouse rats are as big as cats, gives an impression of plain squalor. And squalor is far from being the final mood. This impressive book is, even more impressively, a first novel. I cannot for the life of me imagine what Miss Sully’s second will be like, for this one reads like a single, compact, and unrepeatable phenomenon.
For me, three novels have not quite been enough to form a coherent view of Kathleen Sully’s work. But Canal in Moonlight was certainly a unique book in 1955 and remains so from a distance of 63 years, and provides proof enough that her utter neglect in British literary history is inexcusable, if explainable. I have half a Hoppe-ful of her other books on order. The exploration continues.
Canal in Moonlight, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1955
Jack kills the giant, from Jack the giant killer: a hero celebrated by ancient historians (1820)
Back in the days when the average lifespan was about 40 years, children’s books could be pretty brutal. Take the story of Jack the giant killer, which now we almost exclusively see in its vegan variant, Jack and the Beanstalk. Here is a sample of some of the violence to be found in the pages of 19th century English and American versions of the story. The illustration above, which could easily date from the 17th century, comes from Jack the giant killer: a hero celebrated by ancient historians, by John Rush Golby, John Lee, and William Marshall Craig, published in 1820 (all links are to the titles in the Internet Archive.)
Jack and the giant, from The history of Jack the giant killer (1830-1835?)
Jack fools the giant, from The History of Jack the Giant Killer (date unknown)
We know, of course, that the giant was a bad guy, but today’s accounts shy away from the details of his crimes. In The history of Jack the giant killer, published by Walker and Sons of Otley, we learn that the giant (of Welsh origin this time) was a less than adequate host. As we see above, the giant, having invited Jack to spend the night in his castle, sneaks into the bedroom in the middle of the night to hack Jack into tiny bits. Fortunately, cunning Jack has put a log in his place and watches the attack from behind a column.
Jack and the Two Giants, from The history of Jack the giant killer (1860)
In many of the 19th century accounts, there are more than one giant. Sometimes there are several. Above, from The history of Jack the Giant-Killer by W. S. Fortey, we see Jack subduing two giants at once.
The two-headed giant, from Jack the giant killer (1843?)
Sometimes, the giants had two and even three heads. In this version. from Percival Leigh’s Jack the giant killer, the giant hails from Scotland.
Jack and the giant, from Jack the giant killer (between 1865 and 1889)
In later versions of the story, the giant grows less gruesome and more human. In the illustration above, from Jack the giant killer, published by George Routledge and Sons, Jack looks a right little prig while the giant could well take his place in a Biblical setting by Michelangelo or Rembrandt.
Jack kills the giant, from Jack the giant killer (1870?)
The taste for blood remained well into the second half of the century, though, as in this illustration of Jack with his nine-pound pickaxe from the McLoughlin Brother’s gore-packed Jack the giant killer from around 1870.
Jack wails on the giant, from Favourite Fairy Tales (1861)
Or this illustration, from John Corner’s Favourite Fairy Tales, of Jack wailing with Stakhanovite fervor on a particularly hideous giant’s head.
Grecian Jack and the Pre-Raphaelite Giant, from The Old Fairy Tales Retold (1870)
Still, the overwhelming trend was towards a kinder, gentler Jack and giant — as in the above illustration from James Mason’s revisionist The Old Fairy Tales Retold, where Jack is quite Grecian in his figure while the giant seems merely a troubled, if plus-sized, pre-Raphaelite soul.
By the time Andrew Lang and Kate Wiggins got their hands on them, is it any wonder the last bits of blood lust were wrung from this tale?
When I did the research for the recent post on novelist and poet Eleanor Saltzman, I had to make do with reading a copy of her first novel, Ever Tomorrow for an hour or so in one of the few libraries that has a copy. I wasn’t ready to spend $188 for the one copy I could find for sale. I was, however, able to find a copy of her second and last novel, Stuart’s Hill, for … well, less than the $95 it goes for now, and it finally arrived this week.
The book’s cover describes it as “A Tremendously Moving Story of the Life of a Little Community, as Reflected in the Chapel Planned in the Hearts and Minds of the People and Erected by Their Hands.” And hyperbole aside, this is the skeleton of the story. Tired of meeting with a traveling preacher in the little schoolhouse, the farmers in an area some miles from the nearest town decide to put their resources together and build a church. The wives make quilts to raise money for an organ. David McEwen, an upright Scot, offers a piece of land. William Stuart and his wife Margaret offer a hilltop spot in a grove of hickory and oak trees. The congregation votes for Stuart’s hill.
McEwen works on the project “faithfully and earnestly, as was his wont, but sometimes his words were edged with sharpness, and on Sundays something was gone from his voice when he led the people in singing.” Even before the site is cleared, a little crack has begun to open. McEwen urges the men to use bricks from his brother-in-law’s kiln: they’re cheaper. Everyone knows Stamper’s bricks are far superior, but they go along to humor Dave. “We’ll be repairing the foundation in ten years,” some men grumble. A day or so after his first child, a son, is born, William Stuart hauls a load of beams from town, and in his delight, he breaks into song, singing “Horo Mhairi dhu.” McEwen and others mutter about his impiety — bringing materials for the church when he’s liquored up.
As the years go by, the church hosts many services, Sunday school classes, weddings, funerals, church suppers. And the cracks keep appearing. Jealousy over the first automobile. Disdain for a feckless pastor. Angry words. Suspicions about Young Dave McEwen and Eulah Peterson. Young people moving to town. Elizabeth Grayson gets pregnant, and everyone knows Mel Hone, the pastor’s son, is the father.
The service was well under way when Amos Grayson entered, alone. He went to his accustomed pew, and even Jim, seeing his stark, hardened fact, wondered what had befallen the round goodness of his countenance. For his eyes fastened on the minister, and the depths of the hatred of Hell dwelt in them, unyielding….
The people wiped their foreheads, bleakness still as death in their throats, for the despair of their brother Amos touched them electric with knowledge and fear. And their fear was not for Elizabeth alone, not for Amos and Rachel, but for them all and their fellowship seeking the ways of the Lord. Not this, Jesus, not this curse, this violation of our sanctuary. And the hard agony of the good man Amos left them no peace from the tight breath aching within them.
Stuart’s Hill is a lean, strong parable of how a community that lacks the capacity to forgive ultimately destroys itself. Writing in simple, pious language, Saltzman managed to accomplish in under 150 pages what Steinbeck tried and utterly failed to do in the nearly 700 bloated pages of East of Eden.
Stuart’s Hill, by Eleanor Saltzman
New York: Bernard Ackerman, Inc., 1945
What a contrast between Kathleen Sully’s last novel, A Look at the Tadpoles, and her first, Canal in Moonlight (1955). Canal was about a family of umpteen kids living in rat-infested digs in the midst of some nameless industrial hellhole. Tadpoles is about two only children who spend a lovely summer day traipsing merrily around Sussex. Yet the two books are united in a belief in the indestructible power of a child’s optimism.
When sixteen year-old Mark decides to escape from the train taking him back to boarding school, he triggers a chain of events that knocks an ever-widening array of characters out of their routines and into new perspectives. His first victim — or rather, beneficiary — is twelve year-old Cecily, stuck in her garden flat by some unnamed handicap (Sully glancingly mentions withered legs and dependence on “walking aids”). “Why are you running away?” she asks:
“Running away?” he replied. “I’m not running away. I’m running to something — there’s a vast yet subtle difference.”
“Yes, but why?”
“Because it’s just the kind of day to run to something. Look at it — it’s perfect.”
He sweeps up Cecily and carries her off on a random spree on a cart stolen from a neighbor’s yard, the first of a series of hijacked vehicles that ultimately includes a horse and buggy, a city bus, and a Piper Colt airplane. Mark brims with a young man’s untested self-confidence, but it’s given an extra boost by Cecily’s capacity for enjoyment: “Her happiness gave point to everything and enabled him to push all thought of tomorrow and consequences.”
Together, their spirit infects everyone they come in contact with. A grumpy farmer falls back in love with his wife. A despondent inn-keeper reawakens to the value of her little place as the hub of its community. Cecily’s mother and her boss discover a mutual attraction. A bus driver realizes how much he loves his baby son. And a failing circus finds its power to entertain again:
Cecily was quiet and still, showing nothing of the excitement she felt within until a clown lifted his hat to her and a jet of water sprang from his head. Then she shrieked with laughter and it was not long before the ringmaster and everyone in the ring knew that they had with them the magic kernel of all great audiences — an innocent heart which believed the unbelievable, an unsophisticated soul with the capacity and capability of being lifted to the highest heights of happiness and laughter.
A Look at the Tadpoles has all the substance of champagne bubbles. It’s a giddy, harmless bit of fun in which a great lot of sensible English people go mad in a very moderate and middlebrow way. It reminded me very much of the wonderful 1986 film, Clockwise, starring John Cleese (and written by Michael Frayn), in which another missed train sets off a similarly anarchic chain of events that upsets a few well-dug-in mindsets. And merely whet my appetite to continue exploring the works of Kathleen Sully.
A Look at the Tadpoles, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1970
Kathleen Sully published 17 novels between 1955 and 1970. She was compared to Muriel Spark and Brigid Brophy. John Betjeman called her “above all things a born writer.” In 1960, John Davenport wrote, “If she is not among the leading English writers of the day, she is certainly among the most arresting and original.” Her play, “The Waiting of Lester Abbs,” was one of Lindsay Anderson’s first London productions. Alan Nicholls, a Melbourne critic, wrote that “Kathleen Sully … always does something unexpected with a novel.”
Until a few days ago, I’d never heard of her. I suspect you haven’t either.
I came across her name in a list at the back of Margaret Crosland’s survey of 20th century English women novelists, Beyond the Lighthouse (1981). Doing a little more digging, I quickly discovered a few things. In the space of 15 years, she managed to write over a novel a year, all of them published by Peter Davies. None of them are in print or have ever been reprinted. A couple appear to be utterly unattainable outside a few libraries. A few that are for sale fetch thousands of dollars. And one of them, Merrily to the Grave, is available on the Open Library.
That seemed like the right place to start.
Merrily to the Grave is set in a run-down rooming house in Brighton. This is the Brighton of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock — dreary, dismal, with a few glitzy attractions and a lot of people just hanging on for dear life. Whether pensioner, two-bit performer, shopgirl, prostitute, drunk, or thief, one thing unites all the residents of Hesta Blazey’s on Eastley Crescent: failure. They’re all just a few pounds away from the street, always hovering on the edge of “self-pity, shame and desolation.” The house smells of “kippers, dust, onions, hair-oil, sopa, turpentine, bath cubes, floor polish (though nothing looked polished), human sweat and cat.”
In the basement, Henry and Bertha Titheridge have grown so intolerable to each other that Henry has cut their double bed in two. Beatrice Goodall sees her life disappearing in an endless series of monotonous work. Elsie sells stockings and spends her evenings attempting to improve her thin soprano voice. Madge comes home each evening with more cash in her purse than she left with. Edward Maxwell teaches woodworking and attempts rejuvenating exercises in his room. They only cause him “to dread his retirement and turn his thoughts abruptly away from death whenever he encountered a reminder.” They all feel trapped in a treadmill of poverty and hopelessness. “To own a body was to own a vehicle for pain,” one concludes.
Yet there is also something of a fundamental goodness in the book. Hesta Blazey, in her late fifties, heavy and aching, is also a generous host, welcoming in lost souls collected on the streets by the police. She tells people her fiancé died in the Great War. In truth, he simply rejected her: “He had been brutally, harshly, tersely yet mercifully brief and to the point: the war had changed his ideas and he no longer wanted marriage, a home and children.” But not even this is enough to snuff her belief in the possibility of love. If not romantic love, then at least a Christian love for her fellow man.
Despite their reduced circumstances, Hesta treats every tenant with a certain amount of kindness and dignity that manages to reassure them they haven’t quite reached rock bottom. “Not all of us can withstand the inequalities of life: its buffeting, its knocks,” she holds. When Elsie enters a talent contest, a group of them go along to offer moral support. The audience jeers and laughs at her awful singing. One resident steals a bouquet of flowers from the lobby to present to her. As they leave the auditorium, another finds himself “becoming aware of other kinds of poverty, other kinds of nakedness, other kinds of crime. A blow or knock on the head could kill a man; but Elsie had been flayed alive.”
I was strongly reminded of Georges Simenon when reading Merrily to the Grave. Like Simenon, Sully had a fine touch for noticing just the right detail — a half-eaten kipper left overnight on a greasy plate, a poorly-mended rip in the shiny seat of a pair of pants, a tatty china souvenir gathering dust — to evoke a deep sense of desperation. Like Simenon, Sully writes lean prose that pulls the reader almost breathlessly through page after page. I sat down to read a couple of chapters and stayed up past midnight to finish the book.
Unlike Simenon, however, Sully is not an entirely impartial God in her fictional universe. Reviewing for Merrily to the Grave in The Age, Alan Nicholls captured the unique spirit that permeates her writing:
Kathleen Sully writes her novels in a mood of dreamy horror. Quietly, and with scarcely a strong word, she reveals the squalor of the world. Her starting point is a little like that of Sartre — a reaction of nausea toward the day-to-day life. But she does not embrace squalor. She makes it rather the materials of a poetry which affirms the deeply buried and disguised dignity of man.
Kathleen Sully, 1958
Kathleen Sully was 45, a housewife and mother of three living in Weston-super-Mare when she published her first book. She was the second of eight children in a family that seems to have moved around quite a bit as she grew up. “Perhaps my childhood was mad, too,” she told a BBC interviewer once. “But it seemed stark raving sane to me.” In response to a Contemporary Authors questionnaire, she stated that she had “written since a child but stuff mostly too off-beat for publication.” She identified her politics as Liberal (“if anything”), her religion as Christian (“not a church-goer”), and her “Main interest now and ever since I could think: Man — why and whence.”
Despite a string of generally enthusiastic reviews for the majority of her books, none of the major U.K. newspapers appear to have reviewed her last novel, Island in Moonlight (yes, that is $8,116 the seller is asking for the one copy on Amazon). Nor could I find any mention of her name in any academic survey aside from Crosland’s (which doesn’t even discuss her work). About the only item of any substance to be found on the Internet is this 2012 entry on the fantasy literature blog Wormwordiana. When she died in 2001 at the age of 90, no obituary appeared.
Sounds like a job for Neglected Books!
Merrily to the Grave, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1958
Cover of Dell paperback edition of The Flagellants
My annual visit to Montana was shorter than usual this year, but still I made sure to take a run out to the legendary Montana Valley Book Store in Alberton. I’ve been going through its stacks for years now, yet somehow I manage each visit to find something surprising. This time, it was a little Dell paperback from 1967 titled The Flagellants. Its cover, a gauzy-lensed short of a light-skinned black woman on a brass bed reminded me a bit of Maxine Kumin’s The Passions of Uxport, another Montana Valley find I wrote about three years ago. Opening it at random, I read:
Admonishing the victim to stop its whining, clean up its bloody mess, unimpeachable duty retreats, undismayed, exhausted with fellow feeling. Throughout the discipline, duty remained on a self-forgiving place. There was no need to question or justify its action; if anything the punishment was not thorough enough. The victims should have been molested, hanged from trees; their innocent prayers bombed into fragments.
Wow. This is not your mother’s Dell paperback. Flipping fifty pages forward, I read:
The complexities of organization, the created outcome, the materialization of concrete and abstract goals, were relegated to bosses, green-horned, starry-eyed idealists recently hired, bookworm intellectuals living in unreality, baggy-pants radicals classified as subversive. Talking about the boss killed just as much time. Calling him a fool for not knowing where data-processed, key-punched records were filed, resenting his issuing orders and taking two hours for lunch fueled the robots with a constant sense of worth. A common sense told them the organization would fall apart if they were not there to do the real work.
This is writing with an anger and energy that jumps off the page. It is often chaotic, a kaleidoscope with two primary colors — those of Ideal, a young black woman in New York City, and Jimson, her lover. Their relationship is violent, a hip form of mutually-assured destruction that only ends when they go flying off like riders flung from a runaway merry-go-round.
Carlene Hatcher Polite (1967)Carlene Hatcher Polite wrote The Flagellants after she moved to Paris at the suggestion of Dominique de Roux, an influential French writer and publisher she’d met while working as an organizer for the Michigan Democratic Party. As she later told a New York Times reporter, “I didn’t come looking for paradise. I came not to be distracted.”
It proved a smart decision, as she whipped out The Flagellants in under a year. De Roux arranged a translation by Pierre Alien and the book was first published in French as Les Flagellants by Christian Bourgois in 1966. Farrar, Straus and Giroux then bought the U.S. rights and published it in 1967.
It was fascinating to dig through the reviews that greeted the book upon its U.S. publication. If nothing else, they demonstrate just how clunk-headed the book business was back in the mid-1960s. Its racism and sexism was both institutional and blithely unconscious. Although most of the major magazines and newspapers reviewed it, usually in a batch with other novels by black writers such as William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer and Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, all the reviewers were white and, with the exception of Nora Sayre (The Nation), male.
Perhaps the worst of the lot was Prof. Francis J. Thompson’s item in the Tampa Tribune, which concluded that “the gallant Negroes who inhabit Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha are a greater credit to their race.” Little better, however, was Frederic Raphael’s review for the New York Times — a classic example of what Rozalind Dineen recently described in the TLS as “those in which the critic finds it necessary to explain the book under consideration to its author”:
It is the crisis of négritude (though a brief summer of Jewishness played its part) that has blown apart the cosy, ingrown ambitions of writer, and shouted the need for a new and direct form of fiction.
Miss Polite does not know — and her predicament is a crucial one — to whom she is speaking.
Wow again. Raphael’s summary judgment on the book? “A dialectical diatribe.”
“In its time, it was a difficult novel to take,” Dr. Laurie Rodrigues acknowledged in a recent paper on The Flagellants in College Literature. It went against too many norms of the time. It centered on a relationship between a black man and woman who intensity, violence, and power plays wouldn’t be seen again until the late 1990s with books like How Stella Got Her Groove On. It was told mostly through the stream of consciousness of the two main characters. It used language in a headlong, almost heedless manner that might have put off many readers. (Although I have to note that just a few months later, Ishmael Reed opened his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers with the following: “I live in HARRY SAM. HARRY SAM is something else. A big not-to-be-believed out-of-sight, sometimes referred to as O-BOP-SHE-BANG or KLANG-A-LANG-A-DING-DONG.” I wonder if the problem was the language or the fact that experimentation was considered the exclusive domain of male writers.) And, yes, at times Polite gets as carried away in her fury as a gospel preacher on a roll. As Rodrigues wrote, it “offers a perfect storm of aesthetic elements that, given their contextual framing, have contributed to the novel’s obscurity.”
A similar view was expressed by Devona Mallory in an entry on Polite in Writing African American Women, Volume 2. Mallory concluded that The Flagellants and Polite’s second novel, Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play were “overlooked because of their experimental and unique nature. Influenced by existentialism and satire, Polite’s unique prose style and form and her use of various African American dialects that honor the oral tradition reflect the emotional highs and lows in dancing choreography.”
I’d argue, though, that at the core of this novel lies a fierce tension between an allegiance to notions of African American traditions and a desperate drive to tear away from them. As Rodrigues writes in her paper — which is a far most insightful and thorough treatment of the book than I could manage in this short space, Polite’s novel “rigorously questions whether the South should be considered the authentic — that is, productive, empowering — source of African American culture.” In the novel’s Prologue, we see Ideal as a child, an orphan being raised under a barrage of contradictory messages from the women around her. “Walk a chalked line.” “Watch [Ideal’s] every move.” Have “the devil beat out of her constantly.” “Always walk tall. Never bow down to anything or anyone; unless, of course, you feel like bowing — quite ,em>naturally, you will then.”
Polite captures exactly the sort of messed-up perspectives that result from years of these experiences:
The tones she overheard became her mother language. the beliefs she overheard became her first fear. She would remember these sounds and images for the rest of her life. They were her roots. She would retain this life in that part of her mind that dwelled deep within her eyes — behind a frown. The images would become less distinct with time, but she would be colored by them until her dying day. The child’s head would carry the candy store where she bought stale, imitation watermelon slices, double-dip ice cream cones. She hated imitation fruit, wax flowers. Perhaps because one day she had spied a luscious-looking piece of fruit, reached for the offered apple, only to find that it was unreal.
Frederic Raphael picked an apt adjective in describing The Flagellants as “dialectical,” but he was dead wrong about it being a diatribe. Yes, she is able to see both Ideal and Jimson as victims and victimizers. That doesn’t mean she sides with either of them. Sometimes you have to stand far away from something to see it in perspective. Ironically, writing from the distance of Paris seems to have given Polite the ability to see better the nuances and complexities in the situation of black women and men in America. There are no clear heroes or villains in this story. If the women raising Ideal sent her mixed messages, it was because the world they lived in every day was full of mixed messages. Real life is like that. When Rodrigues writes that The Flagellants is “a novel that simply refuses to choose a side,” a serious reader will recognize that as a compliment.
The Flagellants is not a masterpiece. It is perhaps a bit overwritten, perhaps a bit under-developed in its characters, perhaps a bit too strident at times, a bit too obscure in others. But it is absolutely a novel worth being read and written about and argued over because it is full of energy, ideas, anger, pain, and passion –and surely these are what we want from any challenging book. If The Confessions of Nat Turner deserves to be in print and put on reading lists and course syllabi, then The Flagellants does too.
The Flagellants, by Carlene Hatcher Polite
New York City: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967
From what I can determine, there are all of three available copies of Eliot Wagner’s first novel, Grand Concourse for sale. One goes for $25; a second for almost $650; and the third for nearly a grand.
Pretty impressive for a book that received only mildly positive reviews when it came out. Commentary’s reviewer praised Wagner’s “modest ambition.” In the New York Times, Dan Mankiewicz said it was “what used to be called ‘a slice of life'” — then added that Alfred Hitchcock called drama “a slice of life, with the drab spots removed.”
These were bum raps. Grand Concourse may not be a masterpiece, but it’s a solid, lively, entertaining book, rich with Bronx atmospherics. The story revolves around the six Margulies, a family trying to work its way up the social and economic ladder. Living on Tiffany Street in the Hunts Point neighborhood (“poor in most things, but never in garbage”), they dream of moving into an apartment with a doorman on the Grand Concourse. Papa runs a corner grocery store and spends his day hectoring the local housewives not to squeeze the tomatoes, and Mama keeps careful track of the rise of acquaintances like the Eislers, who run a successful restaurant in Times Square, or Deborah Weiss, who married into money and moved all the way up to a big house in Reverdale. Julie, the oldest, goes to night school and aspires to get a job and apartment in Manhattan. And Gerald, perhaps like Wagner, kills time as an usher at the Excelsior, the local movie house, and fills notebooks with unpublished poems and stories — “the sum of his false starts.”
As Constance Rosenblum wrote in her 2011 book, Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope Along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, “Despite the book’s obscurity, Grand Concourse is an unexpectedly moving work, peopled by characters whose lives are measured almost entirely by their proximity to or distance from the thoroughfare of the title.” Just a generation after their parents and grandparents emigrated to America, the Margulies and their friends may not have reached the Grand Concourse but they have already lost contact with the shtetl culture:
Sam squinted at two lofts side by side, one the synagogue, one the poolroom. Sam occasionally placed a horse bet in the poolroom. The synagogue he had never been in. Its windows, in spidery black, red and blue, proclaimed — what? He knew no Hebrew. Once, coming from the poolroom, he had, on the landing, jostled a short man in black with a pointed beard. Sam had taken him to be the rabbi, and with his apology, had impulsively raised his hat. He didn’t know why to this day.
Grand Concourse is a book about people in transit — literally. If there’s any culture that permeates the story, it’s the culture of New York buses, subways, trolley cars, taxis, commuter trains: hardly a chapter goes by without someone squeezing into one or the other:
Eliot Wagner (1954)
To his dismay the train was stalled on a curve, still in daylight. Newspapers crackled, coughs answered sneezes over the clearing of phlegmy throats. Somebody’s elbow prodded his shoulder where it was fleshiest. A handbag jabbed his thigh. He stood toe to toe against the man seated in front of him. Tenderly a back pressed his own, and this he turned and tried to see. A woman — he could tell no more.
The train hissed, trembled, moaned and moved on.
There are a fair number of parallels between Grand Concourse and Lonely Boy Blues, Alan Kapelner’s 1944 novel. Both are about young men of somewhat aimless creative ambition growing up in wartime New York City. Both are full of verbal energy and the noise and bustle of city life. And both books were flops. As Wagner told Rosenblum, “There were so few copies. Maybe five thousand. It died quickly.” Wagner gave up his hopes of making it as a writer and went to work for the city Board of Transportation.
His “modest ambition” never dimmed, however, and he kept working on various projects. Finally, in 1974, he published Better Occasions, about the financial, family, and romantic woes facing a middle-aged Bronx plumber. Once again, a few reviews, slightly more enthusiastic, then nuttin’. A few years later, he gave it one more shot, publishing My America! (1980), a nostalgic account of a young Jewish immigrant savoring the Roaring Twenties in — you guessed it — the Bronx.
Grand Concourse, by Eliot Wagner
Indianapolis, Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1954
Born in Galicia–meaning Poland–er, now Ukraine, coming of age in Vienna, working as an actress on stage and screen, marrying screenwriter and director Berthold Viertel, living in Berlin in the days of Brecht and Weimar, moving to Hollywood just ahead of the first Nazi persecutions of Jews, becoming something of a center of the German intellectual exile community, then surviving the McCarthy Red Scare, Salka Viertel came to know, clink glasses, break bread, and shed tears with about half of the entries in James’ encyclopedia. Kafka and Max Brod dropped by her Prague apartment for supper; she and her husband worked at the legendary Berlin film studio, UFA; Eisenstein wrote to her in desperation when he ran out of money filming “Que Viva Mexico!”; she wistfully knocked back vodka shots with Garbo on New Years Eve after Berthold left her for a younger woman; her son, Peter, worked on “The African Queen” with John Huston (and later turned the story into the novel White Hunter, Black Heart). Hers was a fruit cake of a life story.
Sergei Eisenstein and Salka Viertel on the beach in Santa Monica, 1930
I was going to write up a longer post about The Kindness of Strangers, but then I discovered that NYRB Classics is about to reissue it in a few months. So, in commemoration of Independence Day, I will just quote the following story from her time in America.
Having room to spare in her house in Santa Monica in the 1950s, Salka offered the use of a studio over the garage to the black documentary filmmaker, Carlton Moss, and his wife, Lynn. Because Lynn was white, the couple hadn’t been able to find anyone willing to rent to them. A while after the Mosses moved in, Salka had an encounter with her neighbor:
In all the years I had lived on Mabery Road, I had exchanged merely friendly nods and brief greetings with my next-door neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Ferris, an old retired couple. Aloof and gentle, they did not even reproach me when my dogs dug a hole under the fence and killed their pet duck, Matilda. Lynn and Carlton had lived for some time in the “Schloss,” as Carlton called the house (pronouncing it “slush”), when early one morning, as I was watering my roses, I saw Mrs. Ferris cutting flowers in her garden. I wished her a pleasant day; she called back: “Oh, I am so glad to see you,” and came to the fence with a huge bunch of sweetpeas.
“I’d like you to give this to your mother.” I thanked her and said that my mother would be enchanted with the lovely bouquet.
Then Mrs. Ferris asked: “That nice couple over your garage, are they staying with you for any length of time?”
“As long as they wish it,” I answered defensively.
But Mrs. Ferris had more on her mind and slowly and hesitantly it came out. “You know that Mrs. A., the lady who owns that large Spanish house down the road, has been canvassing for signatures to protest your renting to Negroes?”
“No one can tell me who should or should not live in my house …” I burst out angrily.
Mrs. Ferris reached over the fence and put her hand on my shoulder. “Don’t get excited! I want you to know that no one signed. We, the property owners on this side of the Canyon, had a meeting”–apparently I was not considered a “property owner” as I had been excluded–“and my husband told them: These are friends of Mrs. Viertel. We are pleased she is our neighbor.”
Moved by the unexpected support, I thanked Mrs. Ferris profusely. But she had not finished. Taking a deep breath, she shook her head and looking reproachfully at me, added: “Yes, that’s what my husband told them, regardless of the fact that we’ve seen you driving around with that ‘Roosevelt for President’ sticker on your car.”
Dear Mrs. Ferris! This was the only time in my life I regretted not being a Republican.
Marcus Bach was something like the Jan Morris of religion. Starting with They Have Found a Faith (1946), he wrote around a dozen books about his encounters with religions, cults, sects, and other groups of people gathered around a belief system, be it large or small. Every once in a while, I read a chapter or two from one of his books, a number of which are available from the Internet Archive or Open Library. The diversity of faiths is something that fascinates me, even if I haven’t yet found a particular harbor in which I’m ready to drop anchor, and Bach had an admirable capacity for openness and accepting people’s beliefs at face value.
Feeling rather bleak about the state of things after spending the last three weeks in the U.S., I went to find one of Bach’s books to sample and was surprised to find What’s Right with the World (1973) — a title I’d managed to overlook. Its title certainly offered about as obvious a palliative to my discontents as one could ask for. I’m pretty skeptical when it comes to any self-help-ish sort of book. From my experience, they’re usually a handful of good but simplistic ideas swaddled in a hundred pages or more of padding, a bit like feeding your soul or character a marshmallow. When I saw the inscription in the Open Library copy, however — “For Alice — What’s right with the world? You! Marcus Bach” — I couldn’t resist. One of the constant right things in my world is my daughter Alice.
At the time Bach wrote the book, he and his wife were living in Palos Verdes, California. In those days before emission standards, things in the L.A. area tended to appear bright and sunny but a bit too hazy, and one could argue that Bach’s outlook in What’s Right with the World suffers from the same effect. As a reviewer once wrote of another of Bach’s books, “One wishes at times he would use a dash of bitters.” And when Bach shifts from observation to reflection, he can become as fuzzy as the best new-age guru Southern California could offer: “The best way to deal with complexities and dilemmas is to view the macro-world from within the framework of a balanced micro-world until the outward vision can be gauged and governed by a sound inward sight.”
R-i-g-h-t.
But at least he’s honest about his lack of definitive answers:
Religion is my beat, and in my research I had often tried to figure out the complex gamut of life’s strange polarities. I had engaged in speculation all the way from karmic causes, on to the sins or virtues involved in these equations, straight through to plain, unadulterated fate. Rarely had I been any wiser for it all.
What’s Right with the World is a collection of anecdotes from Bach’s life and travels, involving everything from bird-watching in Australia to listening to a Russian Orthodox choir in Kharkov to sitting in a 24-hour rest-stop restaurant in Illinois. From these he gleans just a few conclusions about “what’s right with the world.” And though 45 years separate us from that time, I found them useful reminders of what we still have the opportunity to advance, no matter what vandalism a few people in power manage to commit:
The overall trend from exclusiveness to inclusiveness
The shift from a sense of infallibility to an attitude of honest evaluation of what we actually believe in enough to live by
A turn from a disregard of nature to a respect for nature and her laws
I’ll skip Bach’s final conclusion, which involves something about “balanced micro-macro persons” that is probably best left back in 1973. These three are good enough for me to hold onto.
Because I need to remind myself that most of the events that have caused me to lose sleep lately are signs of the energy people can put into holding onto beliefs long past their sell-by dates. Nature is holding us accountable no matter what further disregard Scott Pruitt shows for it. Lying is not a viable way to prop up an aura of infallibility. And the only exclusive membership any of us can truly claim is in the species Homo sapiens: anything else is a temporary construct. Few writers remind one of that fact as effectively as Marcus Bach — but I recommend looking to They Have Found a Faith, Faith and My Friends (1952), Had You Been Born In Another Faith (1961), or Strangers at the Door (1971) rather than What’s Right with the World. It’s a bit too hazy.
What’s Right with the World, by Marcus Bach
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1973
God help that country where informers thrive
Where slander flounshes and lies contrive
To kill by whispers
Where men lie to live!
God help that country by informers fed
Where fear corrupts and where suspicion’s spread
By look and gesture, even to the dead
God help that country where the liar’s shame
Outshouts the decent silence to defame
The dead man’s honor and defile his name
God help that country, cankered deep by doubt,
Where honest men, by scandals turned about,
See honor murdered and will not speak out
God help that country
But for you– for you–
Pure heart, sweet spirit, humble, loyal, true,
Pretend, pretend, we know not what we do
MacLeish and Mark Van Doren later discussed this poem, written in immediate response to the suicide of Laurence Duggan, who had been accused (justly, it was later shown following the declassification of the Venona telegrams) of passing military secrets to the Soviets:
Van Doren: And your poem appeared in a newspaper. I believe it was the New York Herald Tribune. You were very indignant, obviously. As I read that poem that day, in that morning’s paper, I realized that you were simply blazing.
MacLeish: Right!
Van Doren: Now, don’t you think that’s a right thing to do? Don’t you think there were many people who understood you?
MacLeish: I think the wrath was right. And I think that wrath might perhaps provide a touchstone for a poem attempting to involve itself in a political situation in an effective way.
Van Doren: I don’t think you should expect poetry to make things happen in the world if you mean by things, actions of individuals or actions of nations. I don’t know that poetry has ever had that effect. To the extent that it is real I shouldn’t think it ever did anything more than remind us of what the world already is. The world is whatever it is. Now, that is begging a great question, I know, but the world is what it is. And I think–I’d be subject to correction here–I think the function of poetry is to remind us of our own knowledge of what the world is. Because we know what it is already.
MacLeish: I think you and I agree on the fundamental position here. I’m sure we do from what you’ve written and what we’ve said to each other. I think both of us feel that the real effect of a great poem is to make one really know what he thought he knew. What a great poet does is to bring to knowledge what had become so well known that it ceased to be knowledge at all.
“The Black Day” can be found in a number of collections of MacLeish’s poems, including Collected Poems (1917-1952), available on the Internet Archive: Link.
Eleanor Saltzman, 1936In and among all the dispiriting and infuriating news we’ve been exposed to lately, several efforts to recognize the work of some women writers have provided some refreshing and inspiring relief. Last week, the Paris Review debuted a new monthly feature, Feminize Your Canon, written by Emma Garman, which will explore “the lives of underrated and underread female authors.” The Guardian added to its long-running “Top 10” feature a list of the “Top 10 Lost Women’s Classics.” And the ground-breaking Virago Press celebrated its 45th anniversary, having recently reissued Anna Segher’s 1942 novel, The Seventh Cross.
I quibble though, in seeing any of the books and writers discussed in the above items as truly lost. Underread, underappreciated, underrepresented in the canon? Yes, absolutely. But lost? If it takes just a click or two to order a new, in print copy of her books from Amazon or Waterstones or take your pick, then she’s certainly not lost.
Take, by contrast, the example of Eleanor Saltzman. She published two well-reviewed novels of life in rural Iowa–one of them earning a Kirkus Reviews starred review–as well as a dozen or so short stories and poems before she died suddenly at the age of 41 in 1946. A few paragraphs in Clarence Andrews’ 1972 A Literary History of Iowa appear to be the only record of her work since then. The only copy of her first novel, Ever Tomorrow (1936), sells for $188. I could find no copies of her second novel, Stuart’s Hill (1945), outside Worldcat.org. This is what lost looks like.
Born in Mount Ayr, Iowa in 1904, she was afflicted with infantile paralysis at the age of nine. Despite this, she attended Drake University, graduating with a bachelor’s in 1928, and went on to take a master’s from the University of Iowa a year later. She remained there as an editorial assistant of the school’s Classical Journal. Later, she worked on the staff of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, where she wrote a number of papers, as well as didactic short stories, on the subject of child rearing. Starting around 1930, she also began publishing short stories and poems in magazines such as Prairie Schooner, The Midland, The Cornhill Magazine, and American Prefaces.
Ever Tomorrow, published in 1936, was set in the area around Mount Ayr and told the story of Iowa farmer Joe Mueller, tracing his family’s decades of back-breaking work back to his parents and grandparents and forward into his hopes and expectations for his children and grandchildren. Its first section, “Genesis,” opens with Joe’s grandfather hauling the lumber for the farm house from a nearby sawmill, then, chapter by chapter, follows Joe through various ages from five to thirty-three. Though he dreams of leaving for Chicago like his brother Pete, Joe remains as the breadwinner and foundation of his family.
In the second section, “Exodus,” Joe moves his family into town as his children enter high school and talk about moving on. “I haven’t got anything against the farm,” Joe’s son Carl tells him. “Only I don’t want to get myself stuck off down here in the sticks and never get out. You don’t go anywhere on a farm. I want to go places and do something else besides plow corn.”Then, in “Return,” Joe moves back to the farm, seeing it less as a burden and more as the place where his roots originate. Finally, in “Tomorrow,” Saltzman hints at a tension between the solidity of the farm and the more sophisticated and perhaps less trustworthy worlds of the town and the big city.
As one reviewer put it, “There are no scenes of violent drama in Ever Tomorrow. There are no villains. The presentation of human desires, tragedies, and fulfillments, however, is poignant throughout.” Not everyone was quite so generous, though. Writing in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Roland White classed it as “softened realism”: “Softened realism is earnestly concerned with being faithful to reality, but it differs from common realism in not believing it necessary to go into all the physical details of life…. Softened realism prefers to deal chiefly with spiritual character, although always in relation to fairly commonplace reality. Its details are often disagreeable, but seldom nasty.” On the other hand, White assessed it “a work of honest craftmanship…. Its language is simple and clear, brightened by a gift for phrasing about characters.” Kirkus Reviews gave it a starred review, stating pointedly,
We are pulling this out of the run of the mill novels because we feel it should not be sidetracked as “another novel of the soil.” As a first novel, it deserves high praise; as a vigorous, simple poignant bit of Americana, it stands up against such novels as Time Out of Hind, As The Earth Turns, State Fair, etc. As Iowa background, with no sentimental trimmings for the back to the land cult, none the less the story unfolds as a saga of one man’s love of his land, a love not consciously inborn, but growing out of toil and pain and sacrifice.
Saltzman Hotel and Mineral Baths, where Eleanor Saltzman spent her last years
In 1941, as her paralysis became more severe, Saltzman moved to Benton Harbor, Michigan where she stayed at the Saltzman Hotel, a therapeutic clinic run by her cousin, Dr. W. E. Saltzman, taking mineral bath treatments, managing the hotel’s accounts, and writing short pieces for the daily menus. She continued to write, however, and her second novel, Stuart’s Hill was serialized in Household magazine and later published by Bernard Ackerman, a small New York press.
Stuart’s Hill was certainly closer to White’s “softened realism.” Centered around the building of a chapel for a small farm community, it was something of a parable, in which sin (adultery) undermines the spiritual unity of the people and leads to the chapel being sold off for use as a barn. Reviewers saw in it similar qualities as Ever Tomorrow: “a simple story well told in a style of sustained beauty;” “a book of rare quality, a book that comes with a quiet grace in this day of tumult;” “written with almost biblical simplicity.” This is not to suggest, however, that Saltzman’s viewpoint was simplistic: the collapse of the community is due as much to the uncompromising scruples of the elders as to the actual act of sin. John T. Frederick called Stuart’s Hill a “fine example of a writer’s recognition and realization of a significant theme in Iowa rural life … of a country church and … its slow disuse, its decay, and its final destruction.”
Saltzman died unexpectedly in early January 1946 while staying at the hotel. An unpublished novel, Carpthorne, was found among her papers and is included in the collection of her papers at the University of Iowa library. Several months after her death, William Rose Benet wrote in The Saturday Review:
Have been grieved to hear that one of my contributors, who had been afflicted from childhood with infantile paralysis, died recently in a sanitarium in Benton Harbor, Michigan. This was Eleanor Saltzman, who still managed to get through high school and enter Duke University, where she was graduated with honors and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She obtained her M.A. at the University of Iowa, majoring in Greek. She worked in the Greek department and in child welfare for ten years. She also devoted much time to writing, and had two novels published, Ever Tomorrow (Coward-McCann, 1936) and Stuart’s Hill (Bernard Ackerman, 1945). In November I published in this department a poem of hers which I still regard highly, a poem about immortality.
In her memory I now print the following little poem, sent me by her sister. It was, I understand, written about eight years ago. Obviously, Eleanor Saltzman was one of the elect of this earth, a person acquainted with great pain but with clear, unfaltering courage. It is good to know of lives such as hers.
Requiem
It is not death
When we lie down and close our eyes
Because they see no more.
Serenity can touch us then,
And mold us into peace, and quietude.
Unity it is, of myriad atom dust
Released again to live again–
Tree and rain and
Stardust infinite.
Death found us earlier.
The stone we could not turn.
The grass sun-slain in June,
Our child who was not,
Our love, stillborn.
Saltzman’s last publication was the following poem, published posthumously in the Summer 1947 issue of Prairie Schooner. Knowing her thirty-plus year struggle with polio, its message is clearly as much one of physical as of romantic longing:
Release
And if I never move again,
I can lie still and think, and where my thoughts
Will go there is a quiet coral sky
Behind the leafing trees astir as stirs
My quickened breath, and I shall walk my road
As far as the farthest hill, and I shall wait
For you until the newborn moon is set.
You will come. My lips say you will come.
I shall rise as soon as dawn begins,
And I shall run, fleet as the lifting mist
And joyous in the strength our hearts have found,
Until I reach the deep blue morning lake,
Knowing you are with me, palm in palm.
Clothes abandoned on the naked sands,
Gasping I shall plunge in the water’s cold
And rising, plunge again, and I shall swim
Into the blue horizon, I shall swim
To the very end of time which has no end.
I can. I know I can. My arms are strong.
My body new alive, and you are near.
And if I never never move again,
I can lie still and think …
Perhaps someone will now find the time to track down Eleanor Saltzman’s books and help retrieve her from the realm of writers who are truly lost.
Robert Cenedella spent a lifetime writing, but A Little to the East was the one and only novel he ever published. Cenedella began writing short stories as a high school English teacher, got some of them published in popular magazines, then moved to New York City and into radio. By the late 1940s, he was on the board of the Radio Writers Guild, which was dealing with the first impacts of blacklisting. For his efforts to oppose the witch hunt, he became a victim himself, only managing to get back in as a television writer in the late 1950s.
In the early 1960s, he followed the dream of many a scriptwriter and threw himself into a novel set in a town based on his hometown of Milford, Massachusetts. A Little to the East hinges on a murder trial, a reluctant defense attorney, and an even more reluctant defendant. Grieving for his recently-deceased wife, Joe Monti, struggling to make his way as an Italian American in a town run by its WASP establishment, agrees to take the case of Martin McQuaid, a young man who had clearly killed his wife in the heat of passion. McQuaid wants to plead guilty to first-degree murder, apparently in an attempt to commit suicide by state. As a Catholic, Monti finds McQuaid’s motive sinful, and the relationship between attorney and client becomes another of the complicating factors that raise A Little to the East above the level of a simple pot-boiler:
He was feeling some excitement, the excitement that sometimes came upon him when he rose to face a jury or cross-examine a witness, and he knew he was going to do something, but he could not yet tell what. Artist, he said to himself, go ahead, artist, let’s see you draw a pretty picture. But even if his own method was a secret from him, one thing he’d have to know for sure was he’d have to know what his purpose was. To get Martin to want to live, that was it. Ultimately, anyhow. And for that (or after? he couldn’t say) to find out what had happened that night Martin killed his wife. Well, no. He knew what had happened. He had acknowledged that the bare facts Martin had recited so often were substantially true. But the cause, that’s what he had to find out–why Martin had done such a thing. And that meant that the events must be recited once more, but in a different way. So that he could save Martin. So that he could save Joe.
All right. His purpose was clear. He turned from the window and walked toward the table and wondered what his artist’s tongue would say.
A Little to the East earned relatively positive reviews when it came out. The New York Times’ reviewer wrote, “The characters he has created are entirely believable, particularly the first and second generation Italian-Americans whom he understands so well. By the kind of fictional magic that is all too rare, he makes the story of Joe Monti seem a matter of great importance. The result is a book as provocative as it is convincing–a ‘first novel’ that should win an enthusiastic audience.” Cenedella also gained some attention as a novelty, being a first author at the ripe age of 53, with both a grandson and an infant son (from a second marriage).
He soon returned to television, however, writing mainly for soap operas, including “Another World,” “The Guiding Light,” “The Secret Storm,” and “The Doctors.” “If a writer ever says soap operas are crap, or mysteries or romances are crap, as in I’m just doing this crap to make money,” he once said, “well, crap is what they’ll write. It’s not the category that makes it art, it’s the care you put into writing it.”
Cenedella was a firm believer in discipline as the key to writing. As his son recalls in a 2010 tribute, the only writing advice he had to offer was: “Seat of the pants to seat of the chair.” He lived and died by this principle. After he died in Tucson, Arizona at the age of 90 in 2002, his son, helping with the estate, went to clear out his father’s office: “Then my eye fell on the barrel of his Selectric. There was a piece of paper in the typewriter. I looked at it. It was page 27 of a new novel. My Mom said he’d been in the office the day before he died, typing away.”
Murder City was Oakley Hall’s first novel, published under the name of “O. M. Hall.” Although Hall came to be known as the dean of Western writers, particularly based on his 1958 novel, Warlock, he developed his chops with a number of thrillers full of guns, girls, and gangsters. The next four of these after Murder City were under the pseudonym of Jason Manor: Too Dead to Run (1953); The Red Jaguar (1954); The Pawns of Fear (1955); and The Tramplers (1956).
All of them shared urban California settings, usually a fictional version Hall’s native San Diego, as well as a cynical view of how power was abused in government, the police, business, and labor. Murder City is easily the most rough-and-tumble of the batch and displays the many shortcomings of a first novel. Every character can be labelled as either good or bad; plotting is haphazard and turns on too many awkward coincidences. The dialogue is packed with more wiseguy slang than a B movie, and when judgments are proclaimed, the evidence is piled on like corned beef in a Broadway deli:
You don’t realize what a dynasty you have. All those rented politicians and heisters and yeggs and torpedoes and tush-hogs. All your tea-pad boys, your gambling bosses, your labor racketeers. That’s your organization; you made it, but you can’t break it up. I don’t know why I feel sorry for you, Fats. All the killings that can be chalked up to your boys, the holdups, the beatings. The drunks and the hopheads you’ve made; the brothels you’ve set up and the girls you’ve buried in them.
The Pocket Books cover is the best thing about the book. KILL-CRAZY gangsters! A fight in what looks to be a pool hall. That title: MURDER CITY! This thing must have jumped off the newsstand shelves. On the other hand, there is the oddly feminist slant: the hero is on the ground, stroking the jaw that just took a punch, while his girlfriend covers him with a six-shooter. Who’s really in control, boys? And note that she also keeps a firm grip on her clutch purse. Why isn’t she the protagonist, and not her loser ex-Marine boyfriend?
Murder City, by O. M. Hall (Oakley Hall)
New York City: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1949
New York City: Pocket Books, 1951
How to describe A Visit from Venus? How about P. G. Wodehouse meets Olaf Stapledon? This assumes people recognize Stapledon, a contemporary of Wodehouse’s who wrote cosmic fantasies that swept the reader through spans of time that make millenia look short and distances that make parsecs seem like a stroll around the block. Ronald Fraser (that’s Sir Ronald Fraser of the British Army and Foreign Service, not Ronald Fraser of In Hiding: The Life of Manuel Cortes and other books of Spanish history) would have been quite at home on one of Stapledon’s interplanetary voyages–and equally at home on a weekend at Blandings.
A Visit from Venus opens with General Sir Brian Hungerford, veteran of two world wars, hunter, and club man, planning the upcoming weekend at his country manor, Abbotsfield, with his batman/valet/butler, Troutbeck:
“Let’s see … who’s coming this weekend?” He ticked the visitors off on his fingers. “And the Nibb of Nizam or something. D’you remember him?”
“Not by the name you mention, sir.”
“We shot with him, on the borders of Afghanistan.”
“I remember him, sir. The Maharaja of Jellalabad.”
“That’s the chap. Likes leopards.”
“Of which we have few or none, sir. The gentleman is somewhat exotic as regards tastes, I recollect.”
“Eats shrimps with the shells on…. I’ve just seen him do it. So don’t shell your shrimps, Trout.”
Sir Brian’s other guests include Sir James Outright, Lord and Lady Willowpattern, Lord Undertone, Lady Harriet Trusty, Mr. Shandy the author and Mr. Gaffe the critic, and Mr. Michael Brand, “whose looks and magnetic presence puzzled the guests exceedingly.” At the house, they quaff champagne and dine on lobster Mornay, exchanging clever repartee.
And then Sir Brian invites them to retire to a former convent chapel located on his estate, where Mr. Brand proceeds to activate “the Eye” an enormous piece of machinery of indefinite description. With it, they then take turns looking at the movement of creatures on the surface of Mars. The view is quite crisp, and the movement of the Martians mesmerizing. Everyone heads to bed marveling at the sights.
Leap forward a month or two, and another such weekend, Mr. Brand and the General’s daughter Ariadne slip from the dinner table, only to return a few minutes later with what Troutbeck later attempts to describe as “a little more than a half-dozen Presents of an ill-defined character; Essences rather than forms, if I may use such an expression. They appear to glide through the furniture towards the fireplace, where Sir Brian … and Miss Ariadne … greeted them.” As a result, Troutbeck finds “my habitual mind began to look over the possibilities with regards refreshment: but what is it appropriate to offer to ladies and gentlemen whose presence can only be detected by the glow of their impact on our dense atmosphere?”
Later, the visitors from Venus return the courtesy and host Sir Brian, Troutbeck, and a collection of house guests on a short tour of their own planet. Mr. Brand’s unusually magnetic personality turns out to have an otherworldly source. There is much discussion of communing with the source of all energy. The Maharajah decides to surrender his throne and become a monk. Finally, “when the uncreated Essence withdrew from the Sun and the Sun himself withdrew into a glory of cloud there were great angels who drew veils, and we were aware of silence.” And they find themselves back on Earth, welcomed by the news that that nasty Lord Poxmarket, an obstreperous millionaire from the City whom no one much cared for, has drowned in the Thames while in pursuit of what he perceived as a mermaid.
It’s something of a demonstration of the British capacity for discretion that none of the few and brief reviews of A Visit from Venus began with “WTF??” I would say that it’s unlike any other book, but in fact it’s like three other books, for Sir Ronald followed it with Jupiter in the Chair (1958), Trout’s Testament (1960), and City of the Sun (1961), all dealing with the cosmic adventures of Sir Brian and his trusty Troutbeck. I can’t believe I’m writing this for you people and not ordering them right now! Stay tuned.
A Visit from Venus, by Ronald Fraser
London: Jonathan Cape, 1958
Lurid covers full of sexual innuendos and implications of violence were the primary marketing tool for cheap paperback books back in the 1950s and 1960s, and few publishers were more lurid and cheaper in their tastes than Belmont Books. The staples of their line were science fiction (they published Philip K. Dick, Philip Jose Farmer, and others), Westerns (Fast Gun), thrillers (Hong Kong Kill), and sex (Jailbait Jungle). They sometimes combined genres, as in Rod Gray’s sex/spy series, The Lady from L.U.S.T..
As any fan of space age pop music knows, however, the inability of cheap record labels and paperback publishers to exercise discrimination in feeding their insatiable appetite for material sometimes led to gems slipping out under the cover of junk. Here are a half-dozen of Belmont’s neglected classics in disguise.
#1: The Question, by Henri Alleg
This is the English translation of La Question, French journalist Henri Alleg’s account of his imprisonment and torture at the hands of French paratroopers attempting to put down the Algerian revolt depicting in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 movie, The Battle of Algiers. The book’s suppression by French authorities only guaranteed that even more attention was focused on the methods used to deal with the anti-colonial movement–their increasing brutality and ineffectiveness, and became one of the turning points in the Algerian war for independence.
Belmont’s release of The Question was certainly not a high point in the book’s history. But the issue of the use of torture by military forces raised interest in the book again during the Vietnam War and, more recently, following the revelations regarding the treatment of inmates by U. S. Army personnel in Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere. Bison Books reissued The Question in 2006, featuring the following quote from historian David Levering Lewis: “I read The Question in one quick sitting, riveted. It packs a tremendous punch today. It ought be required reading in all the military academies and issued to all DOD employees GS-11 and above.”
#2: The Cheat, by Charles Jackson
The Cheat is a repackaging of Earthly Creatures, the second collection of short stories published by Charles Jackson, best known as the author of The Lost Weekend. In his superb biography of Jackson, Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson, Blake Bailey discloses that Jackson went along with the book’s publication mostly in the interest of making some money and that he considered just two of its stories–“The Boy Who Ran Away” and “The Break”–as more than magazine fodder.
The New Yorker’s anonymous reviewer agreed: “The reader sees the point well ahead of time and is left tapping his foot, waiting for the moment of revelation.” Jackson’s acquaintance Budd Schulberg thought better of them, writing in The New York Times: “The stories of Charles Jackson are not the sort that powerful national weeklies order and ballyhoo in advance. They do not make us more pleased with ourselves, or our ways. One does not close this book with a sense of self-satisfaction, of sentimentalities coddled and preconceptions indulged.” And in The Saturday Review, William Peden, something of a short story specialist, saw elements in the stories that reveal parallels with Jackson’s own troubled history:
The central character of most of the short stories in Charles Jackson’s Earthly Creatures is his own worst enemy. He turns up in many forms: as an adolescent boy, as a young woman, as a middle-aged novelist, as an elderly mother. Something is either going wrong in his life, or has already gone wrong. Self-pitying and self-indulgent, he lashes out wildly at life. We watch him, in story after story, methodically going about the business of destroying himself. But he is seldom a fool, and herein lie the power and pathos of most of his stories.
#3: The Education of a French Model, by Kiki (Alice Prin)
When this book was first published in the U.S. in 1930, playwright Robert E. Sherwood, reviewing it for Scribners, was not impressed:
Kiki was and is a queen of Montparnasse, a central figure in the weird, eye-filling, sense-curdling decoration of the Dome. She has been the subject and pal of most of the artists who, in the past decade, have been rejected by the Salon and ridiculed by the elder satirists only to awaken one morning to find themselves famous with Frank Crowninshield. Several of their portraits of her are reproduced in her book, but they are not nearly so good, as specimens of genuine modern art, as are her own scrawled sketches.
Ernest Hemingway has provided an introduction for the English version of “Kiki’s Memoirs.” He says that “it is written by a woman who, as far as I know, never had a Room of Her Own, but I think part of it will remind you, and some of it will bear comparison with, another book with a woman’s name written by Daniel Defoe.” He also says, “It is a crime to translate it,” and he is presumably right for, whatever the work may have been in its original form, in English it is thoroughly undistinguished, not particularly diverting, and hardly worth the wear and tear on the Customs officers imposed by those who attempt to smuggle it in.
Better known as Kiki de Montparnasse, Alice Ernestine Prin posed for just about every artist to wield a paintbrush or chisel in Paris in the 1920s (and slept with a number of them, too). She packed in enough experience to deem it worth writing a memoir at the young age of 28. Translated into English by Samuel Putnam, it was published with an introduction by Ernest Hemingway by the Black Manikin Press, a small press run by Edward Titus, cosmetics queen Helena Rubenstein’s husband, and promptly censored upon the arrival of the first shipment in the U.S..
But Kiki’s memoirs have had more lives than a cat. It was reissued, sans ban, by Boar’s Head Books in 1950, by Bridgehead Booksin 1955, as this Belmont paperback in 1962, by Tandem in London in 1964, and by both Ecco and Harper Collins in 1996. Kiki’s life was chronicled in Kiki’s Paris: Artists and Lovers 1900-1930, by Billy Kluver and Julie Martin in 1989 and more recently was the subject of Kiki de Montparnasse, a 2012 graphic novel by Catel Muller and Jose-Luis Bocquet.
#4: There was a Rustle of Black Silk Stockings, by Robert McAlmon
A title almost too long to fit on the spine of this slim Belmont edition, There was a Rustle of Black Silk Stockings is another souvenir from 1920s Paris. In this case, it’s a collection of three short stories originally published in 1925 as Distinguished Air by McAlmon’s own small press, Contact Editions. Contact is best known for issuing Hemingway’s first book, Three Stories & Ten Poems (1924) and Gertrude Stein’s Making of Americans (1925). McAlmon had founded the press after he married Winifred Ellerman, better known by her pen-name of Bryher. He was gay, she lesbian, and the marriage served only to deceive her father and keep her substantial inheritance intact.
Together and apart, they lived in all the right places to experience the artistic and sexual freedom of the time–Berlin, Paris, the Riviera. The stories in Distinguished Air are all set in Berlin and revolve around the world of sex, drugs, and cabaret:
When the cocaine dealer tired to get affectionate with me, and kissed me on the cheek, I pushed him away with feeble protest. The Polish boy took my arm, warningly, informing me, what I was ready to believe, that the German was schlecht (bad). He also became affectionate, as the men around Kepler were attempting to become with him, and Kepler’s protest was no more violent than mine had been. I felt vaguely resentful towards Flora, who, it seemed, could have paid more attention to me than she did, but it was easy to be seen that she was interested only in her own morbidity at the time.
As this excerpt should demonstrate, There was a Rustle of Black Silk Stockings is not in the same league as Christopher Isherwood’s better known Goodbye to Berlin. Malcolm Cowley considered 90% of McAlmon’s writing slapdash, betraying his lack of patience with rewriting and editing.
Halper was the premier American proletarian novelist of the 1930s, focusing on the lives in and around great workplaces such as printing plants, foundries (The Foundry (1934)), and, in the case of The Chute, the warehouse of a great mail-order company.
When it first came out, Saturday Review’s reviewer, N. L. Rothman praised the power of Halper’s prose:
To say that The Chute is even better than The Foundry would be an inconclusive half-truth; the more important half is that both, as well as Union Square, are sequential parts of an organic, growing body of work. Each of Halper’s novels has been a sure progression from, almost out of, the last, reflecting his steady development. He works with a prose that seems easy and artless, until you notice that other dimension he has given it, a pulsing, rhythmic quality which triples the meaning and the power of his severely simple vocabulary.
Ironically, given that he was writing in The New Masses, Granville Hicks focused not on the economic or political aspects of the novel but on its characters:
Halper’s obviously accurate account of the working of a mail-order house is impressive, but it would not accomplish his purpose if he were not able to set human beings before you. His characters are victims of a cruel type of exploitation, but they are remarkably resilient, full of hope, capable of joy. No one can accuse the author of a false optimism: most hopes are undeniably doomed to disappointment; the union that is organized conducts no victorious strike; the’ business itself has collapsed when the novel ends, and most of the characters, though they do not yet know it, are facing unemployment.
Halper was not, however, above depicting the men in charge as a bunch of soulless hard cases:
At the finish of the “tour,” Mr. McCracken said: “The floor is in good shape today.” He took a small book from his pocket, making the department 90 percent. At his last “tour,” the department had earned only 70 percent. He made these visits three or four times a year, unexpectedly, and the buyers were terrified when he came down. Their floors were marked on a “percentage” basis, and they never knew what was done with these reports. Mr. McCracken, though he stared at you pleasantly, had a certain amount of steel in his gray eyes. He reminded you somehow of an officer who, after shaking hands with his men as an equal, suddenly brings out” “All right, boys, over the top in a bayonet charge!”
Lonely Boy Blues was first recommended on this site by the intrepid Robert Nedelkoff in a list of recommendations he provided way back in 2007. Robert had written a long piece on Kapelner in his “Remainder Table” series for The Baffler ten years before that. Published by Scribner’s and edited by the legendary Max Perkins, the book is, as Robert has written, “by far the most experimental novel Perkins edited, clearly influenced by Dos Passos and Joyce–and this is remarkable because Perkins was known to usually discourage such experimentation by the writers he worked with.”
Kapelner had been kicked out of the American Communist Party and bummed around the U.S. before he sat down to write a story set in Brooklyn and buzzing with the manic energy of a big city:
Now let’s get this straight!
The flesh spins to the skull, and discharging in the skull lives the brain, jackpot brain, passport to a future, mardi-gras destiny drowning in confetti and wine. The future belongs to you, you are the future. Very elementary, my dear brain. Paste yourself to the bandwagon. Be the spoke in its wheel, you bitter American Dream brain, brain most likely not to succeed as a spoke, brain not knowing where it’s going, but it’s going. Oh, it’s a good brain as far as good brains go, but as far as good brains go it went. There’s one in every household.
No wonder that anyone who’s read the book instantly recognizes a precursor to the jazz-infused prose style of Jack Kerouac and other Beat writers. The publicity release for Lonely Boy Blues claimed that Kapelner wrote the book while listening non-stop to boogie-woogie records (including, no doubt, Jay McShann’s “Lonely Boy Blues”), and his wife, Edith Stephen, confirms that he used a manual typewriter exclusively because he loved the percussive sound of its keys.
But Lonely Boy Blues may also be the best novel for conveying the atmosphere of New York City in the midst of World War Two:
And then came the change in their voices, washed in mist. They walked like goons to a table, slumped in their chairs and the guy who said he’d get stewed was stewed, and he delivered a drooling lecture on topical themes:
The war and what’s gonna be?
How come housepainting wasn’t good enough for Hitler?
The brand of Churchill’s cigars.
Who told the Japs they can play baseball?
If the Russian women pilot boats and drive tanks who in the hell does the cooking?
Mahatma Gandhi’s laundry bills.
Why Mussolini should use Kreml.
The Turkish situation and the food in Chinatown.
The Man in the White House.
The meat situation in relation to the French situation.
V for Victory, da, da, da, DA!
The book was also undoubtedly too edgy for its time. Reviewing in The New York Times, Ruth Schorer (wife of critic Mark Schorer) gave it half a thumbs-up:
Lonely Boy Blues is the kind of book towards which it is almost impossible not to take a parental tone.
Every word of his novel, a publicity release has stated, was written to recorded boogie-woogie, and the expectation was that the jazz tempo and mood of metropolitan life would insinuate themselves into the prose. The result is an egregiously pretentious bit of fiction.
The view of metropolitan life which emerges from this book is the exact opposite of that which makes for the popular success of a novel like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. And what one likes about Mr. Kapelner is exactly his determination to admit no compromise with the Good, the Beautiful and the True, when he can find none of these in experience itself.
…despite himself, Mr. Kapelner produces a mood. Something of the vast aimless chaos of city life, of the corrosive effect of mass poverty, of the shrillness and the stridency, of the drowned individual tragedy in the great mechanical mass, of the lonely condition of the ant-like human creature–something of this he expresses.
The book didn’t sell, but its loose connection with the Beats was enough to convince Belmont and several cheap paperback houses (Mayflower, Belmont, Lion) to reprint it. None of them made a dent in Kapelner’s career. For years after writing Lonely Boy Blues, he later told the writer Seymour Krim, “I didn’t know what to do with my time. I screwed around a lot, I wasted a lot of years….”
Stapled to the cover of my copy of Lonely Boy Blues was a 3×5 card written and signed by Kapelner:
My guess is that “Mr. Kasher” was Charles Kasher, who produced a few Broadway shows and movies in the late 1960s and early 1970s. From the context of the note, I infer that Kapelner was writing around that time in hopes of interesting Kasher in an adaptation.
In 1960, he published a second novel, All the Naked Heroes, set in 1930s New York. The reviews were a little better, and it did earn the honor of being one of the 430 books found in Marilyn Monroe’s library after she died. It fell out of copyright after he died, so you can find it online at the Hathi Trust (link). Kapelner died in 1990 at the age of 77 without publishing another book.
Just last year, however, his wife Edith, who started a new career as a video artistin her 90s, released a short film, The Invisible Writer Becomes Visible, in tribute to Kapelner’s life and work. You can watch it now on YouTube:
It’s probably the first video you’ve ever seen that was produced by a 98 year old and a great way to bring this roundup of 50+ year old paperback covers to an end.
I have just finished a a truly remarkable novel that probably will not come your way: The Escape of the Notorious Sir William Heans (and the Mystery of Mr. Daunt) [which Hay subtitled “A Romance of Tasmania”] (that is the title) by author William Hay — British-born Australian author (died in 1945), writing about the penal settlement days in Tasmania (one of our worst convict settlements, that of Port Arthur). Given to me by friend-novelist Patrick White: he so greatly admires it that he “keeps buying it and giving it away.” This magnificent writer is a most serious deepdyed scholar, student of the epoch and his work is a sort of epic, an Inferno, not the usual horror-story of beatings and killings in prison (though he mentions it once or twice) but the story of an English gentleman sent to the Tasmanian penal settlement for “abduction”; and his life there — he is relatively well-treated, because of his station and his manners and dress which he keeps up with difficulty but without decline, until his escape; and this finickiness is an outward sign, not of vanity, but of his resolution. After two failures (accidental misfortune) he does escape and his escape with the help of some others (an aboriginal woman, a “lady” woman and even her husband, a prison architect) over the “goblin hills” (high dangerous heavily wooded and “paved” with the skeletons of previous escapees who could not find food in that unfamiliar bushland) is a real heart-teaser, you can hardly stand the tension; but it is also, one at once recognises, an ascent from Avernus. (But alas poor Sir William, all his friends are in Aervnus; and he goes to live in Dieppe — the closest he can get to England, the country that tossed him out to prison and exile.) It is done with great thought, painful solitary thought and the sensitivity of a “gentleman” — for the writer was, too. The women are beautifully, delicately treated. One of his wonders is his extraordinary use of the human face as a stage for conflicting emotions — often all at once! And for this play, these plays, his wonderful adjectives. Very fine writing…. No more on that. I would have you read the book, if you ever got a copy from me. I’ll look around. Should be able to get it here in sacred Erewhon [she was living in Australia].
Here are a few extracts to illustrate the strong prose and narrative drive of this remarkable novel.
On faces:
It is strange how the world will give a man a second chance — especially if he be a good-looking one. This perennial instance of man’s patience is no more evident in our male clubs and criminal courts than in the cabinets of the women. Sir William Heans’ crime — his sin — which we shall touch on most briefly hereafter, and the committing of which had pushed him from the places that he loved into exile and boredom in a wild island at the bottom of the world — his sin seemed like to have been forgiven him by certain of his new acquaintances…. This had not arisen from a rumour which had arrived with him … but from the far more potent argument of his good health and handsome face.
…
Steel-hard was Mr. Daunt; vigilant, regretful, deadly, a little sharp, a little careful, a little old. You would hardly have known him for other than a gentleman, in very difficult company, keeping himself on the civil side, except that upon the bottom of his face there was a smile-like contraction of the muscles, such as people have, they say, who have expired of thirst. It seemed involuntary. Perhaps he was trying to smile kindly. But that was not the significance of it as seen in conjunction with the vigilant eyes.
And the first moments of Sir William’s escape through the streets of Port Arthur:
He passed several people, and the face of one which he saw advancing right on him gave him a heavy pang. It was that of the small police sergeant who a year ago had ushered him into the waiting-room of Franklin’s audience-chamber: the man like a half-drawn knife. He was in smart cords and clawhammer and eyed him and his saddle with just a ghost of steely interest. He passed, however, without stopping him, and Sir William, on his part, threw him from his vision with a remarkable calm. Near the end of the street, he passed also, very down on his luck, a fellow with whom he had played at Fraser’s: a man who was remarkable for staring at each of the company in turn, and for long intervals, and saying never a word. He was aware that this gentleman stopped and stared after him disturbingly….
About the cart, as he looked, came the troublesome fellow on the restive horse. Heans stood there for a moment and stared steadily at this rider. He was a handsome man, with quite a Byronical air, a fine thin face, and prettily groomed whiskers. He came nobly and abstractedly along the road. He seemed younger than Sir William had supposed: not more than thirty to thirty-five years. Sir William did not think that he was particularly observed by him; nevertheless, he turned away with an unquiet heart-beat. A few yards on along the footpath was Six’s curio shop, and before he quite knew what he had done, he was standing before it, and looking at the prints and pieces of brass and copper. He there endeavoured to win back his calm of mind. Immediately, over the white glass behind, he saw Henry Six himself, his head a little bowed and the newspaper in his hand. For a flash Heans hesitated, but decided to wait again till the rider had passed by.
He waited five-six minutes. A horse with a vehicle passed down, but no hoofs passed up. He waited another three, four, five. Six continued to read his paper. No horseman went by. He now stole a glance southward. He immediately felt a sense of relief, for he could not see his sheep-like follower among the stockmen or by the wagon, and believed he had gone at last by his right-hand turning. He was mistaken, however, for on turning to look behind him, he recognised not the rider, but not far down his fine roan, held by a tout before a warehouse. Here were Six’s brass and copper baubles, here was poor Six sunk in his paper, and yonder was the horse, now singularly familiar even to its green forehead-band. Sir William examined each for a brief while; shifted his saddle to his left arm; and continued slowly up the north hill.
Alone, she persuaded Wall Street bankers to finance her unit, Gloria Swanson, Inc., to the extent of $1,200,000, taking as consideration her box office record and her insurance policies of several million dollars. Alone, she must make the money to pay her $10,000 monthly living expenses. She must keep up her $100,000 penthouse on top of the Park Chambers Hotel in New York, her Hollywood home, her $75,000 Croton country estate. Tied to her by a monetary thread are her four secretaries, her press agent, her vice-president, her production manager, her scenario manager. Her days are a constant series of disturbances by butlers and maids, by secretaries and camera men, by electricians, and writers and bill collectors.
Hers is a mad, chaotic organization, set into the tumultuous life of a tired, worried woman whose temperamental sympathies are fluid, running in channels dammed by her assistants. Everyone and everything influences her. She listens and weeps. She hires and fires, shoots situations that are never used, orders sets, and countermands, pays for sub-titles and throws them out the window, announces that she will not be bothered by details any more, and then insists on licking each fan mail stamp. And now, in the midst of the whirlpool of her life, brave and bewildered, is Gloria, going around faster than she ever believed possible. The waves wrap her, and she strangles in the seaweed tentacles of her octopus of troubles, her responsibilities, her enormous debts, her file of lawsuits for the non-payment of her extravagant bills.
From Doug and Mary and Others, by Allene Talmey with woodcuts by Bertrand Zadig
New York: Macy-Masius, 1927
Just in case the newest addition to the British Royal Family, the Duchess of Sussex, is in need of some self-help reading, here is a tiara-full of memoirs written by princesses from the past.
Lady Craven and her son, from The Beautiful Lady Craven
• The beautiful Lady Craven; the original memoirs of Elizabeth, baroness Craven, afterwards margravine of Anspach and Bayreuth and princess Berkeley of the Holy Roman empire (1750-1828), edited by
A. M. Broadley and Lewis Melville (1914)
Elizabeth Craven’s was only a morganatic title, granted after her second marriage to the Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach. She was easily the most prolific writer in this bunch, but her memoirs were not collected and published for over eighty years after her death. It’s a wonder she had time to write, given her seven children and many affairs. But the book was worth the wait. She conversed with Voltaire and Samuel Johnson, witnessed the French Revolution, and dined with much of Europe’s royalty of the time.
If it’s the best in blue blood Regency gossip you’re interested in, look no further. Here is her sketch of Ferdinand IV, then King of Naples:
His features were coarse and harsh; yet the general expression of his countenance was rather intelligent, and perhaps even agreeable, although, separately taken, every feature was ugly. His conversation, his deportment, his manners, were, from an unpolished simplicity, rude in their nature, though rather pleasing; as they removed from the mind what is always to be expected from a sovereign, that habit of disguise, artifice, and concealment, which accompany the possessor of a throne. If he did not converse much with strangers, yet he always appeared to say what he thought; and, although destitute of art or elegance, he did not betray a want of understanding or of information. He reminded me of a rustic elevated by accident to the crown.
The two volumes of The beautiful Lady Craven are available on the Internet Archive: Volume 1 (link) and Volume 2 (link).
The cover of Memoirs of an Arabian Princess, with a photo of Emily Ruete in costume
• Memoirs of an Arabian princess: an autobiography, by Emily Ruete (1886/1907)
Emily Ruete was born Salama bint Said, a Princess of Zanzibar and Oman, and grew up on the island of Zanzibar, where her father ruled–and profited from the busy spice trade. Much of the book is devoted to memories of her childhood, such as the excitement surrounding the arrival of ships returning from Europe:
For us children those ships symbolised delightful mystery, as they brought us all our lovely toys from Europe. Upon the fleet’s arrival a day would soon be fixed for the distribution of the goods among high and humble, old and young. Twenty or thirty boxes were full of playthings: horses, carts, dolls, whips, fishes and ducks that followed a magnet, musical boxes of all dimensions, concertinas, flutes, trumpets, mock guns, and what not. If we were displeased, woe to the delinquent captain; he was a plenipotentiary entrusted with full powers and no restrictions; he sailed under the one specific order to purchase the best regardless of expense.
When finally the division was enacted at Bet il Mtoni and Bet il Sahel, it took three or four days to get everything duly apportioned among several hundred persons. Eunuchs attended to the unpacking and sorting out, while a few of the Sultan’s elder daughters performed the allotment proper. Jealousy, envy, and malice were unfortunately more conspicuous on this happy occasion than at any other time of the year.
It was in Zanzibar that she met and became pregnant by a German trader named Rudolph Heinrich Ruete. He arranged for her to escape to Aden, where she had the child, and where they married. She took the name of Emilie (spelled Emily in the English translations of her book) and traveled with her husband to Germany, losing the baby to illness along the way. They had three more children after settling in Germany. Unfortunately, several years after their arrival, Rudolph slipped while stepping off a tram and was struck and killed. Left with few resources, she wrote her memoirs to raise some money, and later, agreed to assist Chancellor Bismarck in several intrigues involving German interests in East Africa. She died in Jena at the age of 79 in 1924. Christiane Bird published an account of her life, The Sultan’s Shadow: One Family’s Rule at the Crossroads of East and West, in 2010.
The 1886 English translation of her memoirs can be found on the Internet Archive (link), but it is better to read the superior translation, by Lionel Strachey, published in 1907, which can also be found there (link).
Princess Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich and her book
• Pleasures and palaces; the memoirs of Princess Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich (1915)
Princess Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich offers the new princess-to-be her closest example. Born Eleanor Calhoun, she was an American actress who appeared with great success in numerous productions in London’s West End and at the Theatre National in Paris before marrying a Serbian prince in 1903. Thanks to the Balkan war and then the First World War, her reign was brief, but there is no sense of resentment for lost glories in this book. Although the Times Literary Supplement sniffed that “If it were not written by a Princess, we should say that there were too many Kings and Queens in it,” the book is suffused with her spirit of playfulness, as in this anecdote of a royal reception at Kensington Palace:
Standing near the entrance to the royal marquee, under the grand old trees, were King Edward and Mark Twain, the king laughing at the remarks of the American wit and philosopher, who was slightly smiling. Mark Twain, it was remarked, wore his hat, which an Englishman would not have done while in talk with the king. It was a wide, soft white felt hat, matching his white hair, and he was also clad in creamy-white broadcloth made ample and easy, a subject for Fragonard. The king, on the contrary, was wearing a strange assemblage of garments of varying cut and hue, producing an effect the opposite of happy. A relative of his, admiring Mark Twain’s beautiful appearance, scrutinized the king’s costume with a puzzled look, and aware of his usual good taste, she ventured to say:
“I am looking, sir, at your purple waistcoat. Your coat is — a kind of — pea-green, and — and your — h-m-m — upon my word! Really, how did it happen?”
The king in answer laughed and named different tailors who had at different times, he said, sent him a garment, begging him to wear it, and he had put them all on at once, “to do the tailors a good turn.”
The Princess became a fierce advocate for Serbian victims of the war and published a book about their plight. She died in New York City in 1957 at the age of 92.
• Arabesque, by Princess Musbah Haidar (1944)
Princess Musbah’s father was Ali Haidar Pasha, a Sherif of Mecca, which meant he was a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. He was also an important member of the Ottoman court, and Arabesque provides an insider’s view of life in the final years before foundation of the Turkish republic. Her mother, Isobel Duncan, was the daughter of a British general serving as an advisor to the Ottoman Army, and her father served in various administrative posts in Istanbul, Syria, Medina, and Beirut.
In their book, Gender, Modernity and Liberty: Middle Eastern and Western Women’s Writings, Reina Lewis and Nancy Micklewright call Arabesque “a unique and extremely well-informed window onto the political and social events unfolding around her.” Princess Musbah shows the role of women in the Ottoman court to have been misunderstood by many Westerners: “[T]hese foreigners did not realise that many of the veiled ladies of the Harems were better born, better read, spoke several languages and dressed with a greater chic than some of their own most famous society women.” Ironically, one of the few Western women to express a different perspective was Lady Craven, who wrote in her memoir:
The women, who were very numerous, were like walking mummies. A large loose robe of dark green cloth covered them from the neck to the ground; over that was a large piece of muslin, which wrapped the shoulders and arms, and another which went over the head and eyes. All these coverings confound the shape and air so much, that any rank may be concealed under them. I never saw a country where the women may enjoy so much freedom and liberty as here, free from all reproach.
Arabesque is also full of wonderful details of the bustling life in the streets of Istanbul, Damascus, and Beirut, including the many temptations that they presented to a child:
On the shelves, which ran the length of the shop, were stacked gaily painted wooden boxes of sweets, and on the long counters stood big glass bottles, each one holding a different-coloured sweet, green, pink, brown, red. A fat smiling man asked Musbah which one she wanted. Haji Bekr himself. Musbah pointed at each one in turn–she wanted a taste from them all. Haji Bekr, with a laugh, put a large hand into each bottle and filled up a box for her. The variety of the sweets made one’s mouth water. The Turkish Delight, Rahoul Lacoum; akidas, a kind of hard boiled sweet; there were long, wriggly pink and white sticks; round rings like transparent glass of different flavours and colours; cakes of crushed nuts and pistachios, with sugar sparkling like crystals; there were kurabiyahs, macaroons stuck on sheets of paper.
The Ottoman Caliphate was abolished in 1924, forcing the break-up of Princess Musbah’s family. Her father went to Beirut; some relatives returned to Mecca; others joined the community of European royal exiles in Paris and on the Riviera. Her mother stayed in Istanbul to raise her daughters, and Musbah eventually married a British army officer like her grandfather and settled with her husband in England
• The Memoirs of Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester
“A sense of dedication is an excellent quality; so is a sense of humour. The two are not always found together in one person.” This judgment, from one of the reviews of The Memoirs of Princess Alice, sums up the mix of a near-Victorian commitment to duty and a Bright Young Things spirit of carefree fun. Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester was the daughter of the 7th Duke of Buccleuch and married Prince Henry, the Duke of Gloucester, making her (among many other things royal) Queen Elizabeth’s aunt. Before she died at Kensington Palace in 2004 at the age of 102, she had become the oldest member of the British royal household in history.
Her memoirs, as with her life, can be divided into two clear sections: life before and after royalty. As a young woman in the 1920s, she enjoyed all the recreations of the Jazz Age, including a year in Kenya amidst the parties, drinking, and affairs of the Happy Valley set. As Isabel Colegate wrote in her review for the Times, “Altogether there is more than one echo of Nancy Mitord in the author’s account of her growing up.”
As the wife of the third son of the King of England, however, she had to focus on raising a family and following wherever duty led Prince Henry (usually referred to as the Duke)–which included time in Australia in the late 1940s as the Governor General. A very private person by nature, she was never truly comfortable with the constant demands for public appearances such postings required, but she summoned what the Queen Mother called “the courage of a lion” on countless occasions–even if it was only for what one wit described as “doling out the last of the roly-poly pudding to a houseful of pensioners.”
Although the Duke was a man of dedication and responsibility himself, he also betrayed at times the consequences of being raised at the height of privilege:
The Duke was doing The Times crossword when the news was breathlessly broken to him by two of his daughters that they had just left the third in hospital with a broken collar-bone after all three had been in a car crash; he merely asked them for a three-letter work for sheep. He could not bear his tea to be too hot and nothing would prevent him from sloshing it from cup to saucer and back if it was. At home his valet poured his tea out for him at five to nine so that it should be cool enough for him to drink when he came down at nine. Unsuspecting guests who drank it were in trouble….
It’s anecdotes like these that led Hugo Vickers, a prolific biographer of British royalty and society, to include the memoirs on his list of best royal biographies for Five Books: “I reviewed the book when it came out. I just found myself laughing on every page. I was gripped and again it was this wry quality that attracted me.”
John Quill was clerk to Robert Shark, a legal man was he,
As dull, obscure, and technical as legal man could be;
And, perch’d before his legal desk, Quill learnt the legal rules
That give high principles to all who sit upon high stools!
John Quill with skill could doubt distil where all before was clear,
One would suppose that he was born with a pen behind his ear!
Though merely clerk to Robert Shark, so great was his address,
That many really thought J. Q. as knowing as R. S.
John Quill, however small the job, huge drafts of deeds could draw,
A puzzle quite to common sense, according to the law;
With vulgar, vile tautology to indicate his skill,
He did “enlarge, prolong, extend, and add unto” the bill
And thus he did “possess, obtain, get, have, hold, and enjoy”
The confidence of Robert Shark, who called him worthy Boy.
Birds of a feather were the pair, the aim of both their breasts
To pluck all others, plume themselves, and feather their own nests.
But ’tis a theme too dark for jest; oh! let him who embarks
Upon the troubled waters of the Law—beware of Sharks;
And such my dread of legal Quills, I readily confess
That Quills of “fretful porcupine” would terrify me less.
When poor men seek a legal Friend, the truth the Fable tells,
The Lawyer eats the oyster up, the Client has the shells;
And could the shells be pounded to a palatable dinner,
The legal Friend would swallow that, and Clients might grow thinner.
From Weeds of Witchery, by Thomas Haynes Bayly
London: Ackerman and Co., 1837
If you loved Clive James’ 
Robert Cenedella spent a lifetime writing, but 
