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O Western Wind (1943) and You’ve Gone Astray (1944), by Honor Croome

First editions of O Western Wind and You've Gone Astray by Honor Croome

Most writers will be forgotten. While there are plenty of examples where a writer’s work has been neglected through deliberate acts of suppression, there are far more where the neglect is due to the lack of any deliberate act of remembrance. Fortunately, when it comes to the work of British women writers of the 1920s to 1950s, there have never been so many people committing deliberate acts of remembrance on a daily basis. Beginning with the ground-breaking Virago Modern Classics series, publishers such as Persephone Books, Dean Street Press, Handheld Books, Turnpike Books, NYRB Classics, and the recently-launched British Library Women Writers are busy bringing the work of dozens of writers back to print. Dozens of book bloggers are helping promote and celebrate these reissues. Academics are collaborating through such initiatives as the Middlebrow Network and Transatlantic Literary Women. And through his Furrowed Middlebrow blog, Scott Thompson continues to reveal just how rich and vast the ranks of these women writers were.

Yet even with all these hands to the task, some remain overlooked. Take Honor Croome for example. She published five novels between 1943 and 1957, all of them received with enthusiastic reviews that praised her precise prose style and her sensitivity to the qualities of even her most unlikeable characters. Two — the ones discussed here — deal with the relatively popular subject of the experience of women during the Second World War. And yet not only have her books all fallen out of print but her name doesn’t even appear in what is likely the most comprehensive catalog of the writers, Scott Thompson’s Master List on Furrowed Middlebrow. It’s not through lack of trying. But when being lost and forgotten is the default end state for writers, there can never be enough deliberate acts of remembrance.

And so I want to take a few minutes to recognize Honor Croome’s work by looking at her first two novels: O Western Wind (1943) and You’ve Gone Astray (1944). O Western Wind focuses on the lives of four women and their children while You’ve Gone Astray deals with just two — yet it’s the latter which ultimately has a broader scope.

O Western Wind opens on a crowded passenger ship crossing the rough waters of the Irish Sea, on its way to take hundreds of British women and their children to safety in Canada. Most of them are in the Third class compartments: “One can get away from the smell of ship in the first class lounges and even, occasionaly, in Tourist; never in Third. There is oil in it, and brass, and sea salt, and, particularly in Third, disinfectant, and bad sailors find it conducive to seasickness.” Sitting in the Third class bar are two cousins, Margaret and Cora, happy to have their children settled for the night.

Margaret is older, longer married; Cora is younger, wed to an RAF bomber pilot, and stunningly attractive. “I wish I could feel like Cora looks, at the end of a day like this,” Margaret muses. In the lounge, they meet Mary Hallam, a nervous mother, with a two-year-old daughter and just months from delivering a second child. To these three women, Croome adds Daphne Torrance — divorced with two teenage sons and an eye for available men — and then takes us through their first year of life as evacuees.

The women are settled outside Boston with the help of a local refugee committee. The contrast with wartime England strikes them as soon as they leave the train station: “No sand-bags or strong-points anywhere. No road-blocks, no sentries. Not a man in uniform to be seen. Not a plane in the sky. No one carrying gas-masks. No steel helmets on the policemen. A carefree, lovely land. And tonight there would be lights again.”

Margaret and Cora and their children end up in a remote country house. The peace and quiet of their surroundings seem unworldly after life in crowded, busy, noisy London:

Margaret and Cora, like dwellers on another planet, went marketing and swept and scrubbed and cooked, tended their children, drank their tea, and sat by the fire, evening after lonely evening. They had the children; they had housework. There — as mothers and drudges — they stopped short. It was a great deal, but a great deal was missing. Friendship meant an envelope with a printed slip “Opened by Examiner 3697” gummed over one end.

“Whole tracts of faculties lay idle,” Croome writes, and in both novels she examines the uneven and often unbalanced mix of domestic, economic, and intellectual demands that women who take on the responsibilities of child-rearing have to meet. Margaret thinks, only half-jokingly, “We should have been Victorian wives…. Then we should have found this a lovely, lovely rest.” Except, as she quickly adds, that probably would have meant she would have had eight children to care for and Cora four.

Eventually, the Greater Boston Hospitality Committee brings the four women and their kids together to live at Southwood, a large mansion left empty after the death of its dowager owner. In some ways, it comes to seem even more artificial than the isolation of their farmhouse in the country. Everything around them speaks of wealth, luxury, comfort — but it’s all given by the grace of the Hospitality Committee. “It seemed as though several new layers of unreality had interposed themselves between them and the great tragedy from which they had cut themselves off; and in their varying ways they fretted against their physical good fortune.”

I was often remind of Paul Cohen-Portheim’s Time Stood Still, his account of four years spent as an internee in a British camp during the First World War. Like him, these women are not abused in any physical way; and yet, the very artificiality and limitations of their situation become, in the end, a sort of torture. And like Cohen-Portheim, Croome’s women find that “The worst tortures of camp life were due to the small failings of one’s fellow creatures everlastingly in evidence.” Margaret thinks at one point:

For the duration, Clive Torrance would infest the dinner table. For the duration, they would have to check their conversation to keep it within Mary Hallis’s scope. For the duration, they would chit-chat with Mrs. Torrance about nothing in particular. Margaret found herself wanting, frantically, to hear the sound of a masculine voice, preferably several of them. I’m not turning into a man-hunter, I’m resigned to celibacy, but I am tired of being a full-time hen….

It is only after several crises that Margaret, whose voice seems to speak Croome’s own thoughts most often, finds a way to look beyond the walls of their comfortable but indefinite existence. “There would be moments of black depression,” she thinks, but she can at least “distinguish between the superficial and the real, now.”

O Western Wind draws in part on Honor Croome’s own experiences. She left Liverpool bound for Canada in July 1940 with two children (and, like Mary Hallam, within weeks of delivering another). Although the family would eventually settle in Ottawa after John Croome was appointed head of the British Food Mission to Canada, Honor and the children spent over a year living as refugees in Westwood, Massachusetts outside Boston. While there, she wrote a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe taking exception to another British refugee’s suggestion that Americans were not showing sufficient gratitude for Britain’s sacrifices: “You owe us much, we owe you much,” she wrote. “Among other things each owes the other for their share in our joint victory over Hohenzollern Germany. Of what those shares were, let our dead as well as our dollars speak.”

When the Croomes returned to England in 1946, they needed a much bigger cabin. They were now a family of seven, bringing along three sons born in Canada. In other words, Honor Croome managed to produce two novels and three children during her own indefinite existence in the US and Canada. Her capacity for work seems astonishing. Both before and after the war she was a frequent reviewer for The Economist, and one of her editors, Sir Geoffrey Crowther, once said of her speed in reading, “A thousand pages in her sight are but an evening gone.” The same may have been true for her speed in writing. She must have been one of those rare writers who can work in short snatches, for she dedicated her second novel to “John, Ursula, Gilbert and David, because they occasionally kept quiet.”

Yet in neither book does Croome suggest that the solution to a woman’s challenges in juggling both family and a career is simply to work harder. You’ve Gone Astray (1944), in fact, is a demonstration that this is a recipe for failure. In some ways, the book is a prequel to O Western Wind: taking place between the early 1930s and the first year or so of the war, it follows two women — Linda and Kitty — from a short spell of sharing a flat in London through marriage, children, and successes and failures at work.

You’ve Gone Astray is far more about Linda than Kitty. Kitty — slight, beautiful, flirtatious and starting out as a writer of romance novels — is more of a leitmotif than major character. Though we enter the story through Kitty’s eyes, it’s Linda — tall, Amazon-like, with a fearsome intellect (if less formidable practical knowledge) — with whom we spend most of our time.

The daughter and niece of vigorous Edwardian activists, Linda feels somewhat guilty for taking a job with a reform-minded organization called the Housing Plan rather than heading off to India to run a hospital as her aunt did or crusading for women’s right as her mother did. Her work brings her in contact with Hugh, a journalist with a strong interest in social reform, and soon the two are married — and Linda is pregnant.

As she tries to raise her daughter while continuing to work for the Housing Plan, she realizes she’s missing out. On burning the midnight oil with colleagues, on a pint after work, on the Budapest Conference. She struggles with the cognitive dissonance of being both mother and manager: “She had to turn dislocating psychological somersaults, morning and evening, Saturday and Monday, switching from the role of expert and organizer to that of suburban housewife and back again.” And the simply physical toll: “She was almost always tired.”

Kitty encounters the same issues when she becomes pregnant several years later than Linda. She expresses a feeling my wife often recounted during her pregnancies: “It’s so inevitable. As though something had you by the scruff of the neck and were whispering in your ear, ‘You can’t get out of this. You can’t get away. You can’t talk your way out, no one can help you out, it’ll happen, I’m not sorry for you, my name is Nature.'” Unlike Linda, however, Kitty can afford to park her son with a kindly couple in the country while she types and socializes away and her husband — present in the book for little more than the essential biological moment — is off on archaeological expeditions.

Croome captures the blur of considerations and commitments that must swirl through the head of any working mother:

… waking with an eye on that clock, working, still with an eye on that clock, frantically, among perversely uncooperative kitchen utensils and crockery, listening desperately for Mrs. Pratt’s click at the gate, picturing the London train remorselessly pulling out of the station a mile away; crawling home in a rush-hour train, supper menus and unfinished business dancing an unholy saraband in her brain; listening to Mrs. Pratt’s chronicle of leaking taps, spoiled potatoes, mistakes in the grocery bill, and misdeeds by Diana (more a problem child than ever these days); flinging off her town clothes, flinging on an apron, plunging through the preparation for supper, with scarcely time to give Diana a good-night kiss; spending her evenings on endless letters to agencies and to the malevolent half-wits or mere phantoms whom those agencies recommended.

In a sentiment many women might share, she adds, “Linda yearned for a good servant as a prisoner for freedom, as a miser for money, as a sick man for health.”

The strain of it all takes its toll in numerous ways, leading to arguments, separation, even death. There are some grim chapters in this book. And though Linda and Hugh find some happiness on the other side — and Kitty finds an escape from her worries — Croome doesn’t offer us happy endings, just sustainable compromises. She was nothing if not a realist.

Croome’s own background bore some resemblance with Linda’s. Her mother, Mildred Minturn, was an American socialite who graduated from Bryn Mawr, where she became a close friend of Frances Fincke, later wife of the famed judge Learned Hand. In fact, Fincke turned down Hand’s first proposal to marry because she and Mildred had planned to live together and pursue careers as scholars and social reformers. Bertrand Russell met Mildred while she was at Bryn Mawr and the two maintained a flirtatious relationship even after she married Arthur Hugh Scott, an Englishman, in 1906.

Mildred took graduate classes at Barnard and traveled widely after leaving Bryn Mawr, visiting Japan and Europe and taking a desert caravan in Egypt with a fellow classmate. She was outspoken in her views, writing frequent letters to magazines in England and the U.S., and translated French Socialist Jean Jaures’s Studies in Socialism shortly before her wedding to Scott. She struggled, however, with health problems and died in 1922, when Honor was just a teenager.

Honor had a most cosmopolitan upbringing. She spent her early years in France, where her father taught at l’École de l’ Île-de-France, a French boarding school run on the model of an English public school. She attended a girl’s school in Switzerland (an experience she used as the basis for her 1955 novel, The Mountain and the Molehill), the Hayes Court School in Kent, Bryn Mawr College in the US (for a year — “I did not flunk out,” she was careful to note), then the Sorbonne in Paris, and finally the London School of Economics.

After the LSE, she wrote her first book, The Approach to Economics, then landed a job at the New Fabian Research Bureau, a left-leaning organization involved in statistics and planning — most probably the inspiration for the Housing Plan in You’ve Gone Astray. Soon after, she married John Lewis Croome, who’d been a year ahead of her at the LSE.

Honor Croome, 1944
Honor Croome, from a 1944 newspaper article

In 1935, as she informed the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin, she took a job as political secretary to Lady Astor. She wrote that “It’s tremendous fun” but also tiring: “I am rapidly going grey and can hear imaginary typewriters and telephones in my dreams.” A year later, she wrote that she left the post “owing to (a) nervous exhaustion and (b) incompetence” and “returned to the fleshpots and to society of son [John] and heir aged 2½.” “Very nice, too,” she added. She gave birth to a daughter, Ursula, in 1936 and wrote her classmates that she was busy with a family “to cook for, a job to hold down, and book to see through the press.” The book she referred to was her weightiest economic text, The Economy of Britain: A History, published in 1938, which she co-wrote with R. J. Hammond.

After nearly six years in the US and Canada, Croomes returned to their home in Claygate outside London in 1946 and Honor resumed her work as an economist and journalist while continuing to write and raise her children. She published her third novel, The Faithless Mirror in 1946 and began publishing articles for the general public in magazines such as Home & Garden. Included in Who’s Who’s starting in 1950, she answered the book’s pro-forma questionnaire by listing her primary form of recreation as “domesticity.” She published two more novels in the 1950s: The Mountain and the Molehill and The Forgotten Place (1957). She also published a further economics text, Introduction to Money in 1956.

When she died in 1960, The Economist made an exception of its practice of being “anonymous by conviction as well as by tradition” and printed a black-boxed notice of her passing. “To those who knew her,” the editors wrote, “every piece she wrote could only be hers; to those who did not, her reviews were no less identifiable, running like a strong shining thread through these pages. The style was the woman.”

They paid tribute to the high quality of her prose: “The cutting-edge and quality of what she wrote was that she knew, respected and was mistress of the English language. It was almost impossible to alter or cut her contributions.” As a reviewer, she was “lively and learned in the right sense of both words; sensitive but never soft; humane and good-humoured but never sentimental or trivial; critical, sometimes in a biting and indignant fashion, but never censorious; a civilised human being with a zest for life and people as well as understanding of great ideas and arguments.”

“It is hard to believe that there can ever be another like her,” The Economist piece concluded. “This is understatement,” responded Sir Geoffrey Crowther in the next issue. “Such beauty, such wite, such capacity to understand other people’s minds, sometimes even better than they do themselves, such capacity to move with grace in so many different fields from housewifery and writing about it to the most abstruse theoretical economics — all these in combination made her unique.”

Perhaps this post will now motivate other readers to discover Honor Croome’s unique qualities as a novelist.

O Western Wind
London: Christophers, 1943

You’ve Gone Astray
London: Christophers, 1944

Both by Honor Croome

The Beautiful Life, by Edwin Gilbert (1966)

Cover of The Beautiful Life by Edwin Gilbert

The sweet spot for my individual strain of nostalgia is right around 1965. That was about the time I began to get an allowance and to be free to wander around on my own — which, taken together, meant I could go to Saturday matinees, buy comic books, baseball card, and model airplanes, and eat at the snack bar. In other words, begin to exist as a semi-autonomous consumer of then-contemporary culture. I knew, of course, that I was on the outside of the real world — the adult world — but at least now I could press my face up against the glass.

There were many things about the adult world I didn’t understand, but there were a few things that I knew for sure belonged to adulthood. Driving and cars, of course. Smoking and drinking. Hairdos for women and suits and ties for men. Cocktail parties and dancing. These were all things I saw my parents doing, wearing, going to, talking about — but the guides to the adult world I trusted most were magazines like Life, Time, and (when I could sneak a peak at it) my dad’s Playboys.

Debutante at the Embers
From LIFE magazine, 1965: Debutante Anne Morris on a date at The Embers in Manhattan.

The adult world I saw in the ads and photo spreads in these magazines is the world of Edwin Gilbert’s The Beautiful Life (1966). Everything that constituted “the beautiful life” — the life led by the best people, the in-est of all the In Crowds — as represented in the magazines can be found here. Slim, straight-line, minimalist dresses; Twiggy-style short hairdos; glamorous women in evening gowns on the arms of rich, handsome men in tuxedos; discotheques and designer living rooms; pop art and dinners at the Four Seasons.

As a work of fiction, it’s moderately above average. Gilbert made his living writing well-constructed but somewhat superficial novels that offered readers glimpses into worlds they probably didn’t have access to: the late-stage 400 (Silver Spoon, 1957); silver salver diplomacy (The New Ambassadors, 1961); Detroit auto executives (American Chrome, 1965); old money (Newport, 1971). He was a craftsman whose sales and reputation depended more on consistency than genius.

This shows most in Gilbert’s choice of protagonists. Bayard Burton “Grove” Grovenour is a 30-something heir with old money and new ideals. He and his daisy-fresh wife Rosemary return from the Siberia of suburban Connecticut to dive into the deep end of Manhattan life, taking a penthouse apartment at 1027 Fifth Avenue as their modest pied-a-terre. Grove wants to save New York from godless modernistic architecture and city planning. Rosemary just wants to belong. Grove fails spectacularly; Rosemary manages to reach the epicenter of In-ism, becoming the icon everyone wants at their party or on their magazine spreads. But none of that much matters: they are merely the jetsam Gilbert tosses in to lure the sharks, remoras, and other prey and parasites of High Society.

It’s not the story that matters here, anyway. The best way to enjoy The Beautiful Life is as a time-capsule. It’s like a trip back to the poshest parts of Manhattan when to be rich, young, and white in Manhattan was to be at the apex of the food chain.

But that’s not what makes the book interesting. Grove, Rosemary, and all their rich friends are, after all, pretty dull stuff. It’s the ecosystem that serves, entertains, dresses, drives, houses, feeds, doctors, and otherwise supports them Gilbert meticulously documents that raises The Beautiful Life above its mid-60s airplane reading peers.

Gilbert structures his book as a series of set-pieces, each taking place at a specific address, each hosted by a particular enabler, starting with Andrew, the doorman of 1027 Fifth Avenue. Andrew “knows his air of solicitude is both pleasing and proper to their rank (or what they might wish their rank to be)” and maintains careful control of the hierarchy of the building’s tenants through the nuances of his service. Mrs. Alfreda Peysen, 44-year resident and minked-and-bejeweled heiress, gets “his warmest (seniority) greeting.” Young Mr. Grovenour, newly-arrived and prone to poking around at the base of the trees along the sidewalk, on the other hand, gets just enough politeness to cover up Andrew’s contempt.

Next, we meet Katherine Reeves, the stiff-coifed, tight-lipped real estate agent who shows the Grovenours their prospective apartment. Their judgment of the place, of course, is far less important than her approval of them. She finds “simple satisfaction from passing judgment on the lowly and on the highly who come within the precinct of her verdicts.” As a result, Gilbert tells us, she is “one of the happiest of human beings.”

Smirnoff ad from Life magazine
Smirnoff ad from LIFE magazine, 1965, with Killer Joe Piro and Skitch Henderson.

Gilbert’s tour of High Society’s courtiers and household staff continues with a visit to Big D’s, the Park Avenue discotheque where DJ Ray Noonan (a surrogate, perhaps, for Killer Joe Piro) takes control over a crowd of the idle and powerful each night:

Watch him now: a record is playing on the first turntable; a second record is already silently spinning on the second turntable; a third is in place. As the first disc nears its rockrolling end, Roy deftly drops the arm onto the second platter so that one overlaps the other and he reaches to the control panel and juices up the volume so that the changeover is made with kinetic brilliance; and then he dials it down again and prepares the record to go next on turntable number three.

But this is not the artistry for which he is paid. Roy’s gift lies in his ability to pace the dancers, and to anticipate their moods:
Is the Frug blasting too long?
Is the age group changing?
Is fatigue or boredom seeping in?
Has he caught the signal from the bar that business needs to be escalated?

Roy, an ex-GI from Oklahoma who quietly seeds his fat tips into a house for his family in Queens, has classified all the fauna that congregate on his dance floor: “the old Crust and the young Crust, the Cafe Mafia, the Jets, the Pop people, and a few, a very few Just Plain Money.”

Gilbert’s tour continues with a lunch visit to Le Trianon, overseen by Claude Troube, who enforces the restaurant’s code with a velvet-gloved iron hand:

His attention is also sensitive to the welfare of the diners, particularly to those who are new to his tables, those who might violate any of a number of decrees: pipes and cigars are interdit; cigarettes are permitted but not between courses. It is also to be understood that since too many martinis before dining anesthetizes the senses, the waiter will not serve more than one, possibly two, cocktails; but not a soupçon more. As for the so-called health diets of some Americans who fuss about the use of butter, cream or salt — such idiocies will not be tolerated here.

In the course of the book, we meet Chet Darnell, the fresh-faced juvenile of 46 who tickles the ivories for the private parties of the most exclusive clientele; Lorio, maître d’ “haute coiffure who turns each customer “from a flat-heeled, over-scrubbed, dull-suited, tight-curled nonentity into a chicly shod, clad and coiffed creature of infinite allurement’; Martine, who dresses them at her by-name only boutique, and Dolores the masseuse, catering to the oft-divorced and accustomed to “working on the same body while the name keeps changing.”

Arthur's discotheque from LIFE magazine 1966
From LIFE magazine 1966: “At Arthur, in New York, the country’s most famous discotheque, the patrons lend a bizarre air to the club, arrayed before a Mondianesque background in their Op art mad rags. In foreground is director, Sybil Burton Christopher.”

We hang out in the chauffeur’s room in the garage of 1027 Fifth Avenue and in the apartment of Hank Hartley, art dealer to the elite, who helps them cover their walls “with paintings of monumental cheeseburgers, colossal Coke bottles, cans of baked beans, soaring syringes, F.B.I, posters, ceiling-high photos of Clara Bow’s face and Elizabeth Taylor’s mouth, and many other fine artworks of this genre.” We visit the atelier of Waldo Stryker — Andy Warhol stand-in — who produces these paintings to fund the art films he forces his patrons to endure:

There followed a shadowy view of an amorphous room which contained a bed on which lay a long-haired, pock-faced girl in white leotards; she was reading a book and she would wriggle around sporadically, and then putting the book aside would stare languidly to her left. The camera would hold on her for what seemed an interminable time as she stretched her body and began undulating in a clumsy and prolonged exhibition of sexual frustration or, if you chose, desperate longing for human recognition and affection. Alternating with these views, the camera would swing leftward to show nearby a brutish young man of outsized shoulders and biceps, attired in the glossy black deep-sea diving gear of a frogman, as he kept checking his twin-tubed oxygen tanks and his elongated spear gun, working away with total masculine preoccupation.

In silence the film’s monochromatic images continued their alternating rhythms with absolutely no variety and with no regard for time until the final shot, which was sustained for nine minutes as the camera held on the girl’s blemished face, the only relief coming when a fly, which touched down on her cheek, caused her to twitch the insect away.

As we swirl along through the haunts of the hoi-polloi, we watch as earnest Grove is discreetly shuffled off to the fringe as an idealistic nut-case and Rosemary becomes a star entrant in the popularity contest, “in full combustion as she hastened her pace, projecting her personality, driving fiercely to hold onto her rating in the popularity poll, the trophy that confirmed her position as one of the prize tigers running in the annual New York In-ism Sweepstakes.” The lesson, I suppose, is that success is hollow, but Gilbert makes Grove’s righteous failure look pretty hollow, too. The only characters who truly seem happen in this book are all the extras who open the doors, spin the records, tinkle the ivories, drive the cars, and otherwise make sure that the Good Life, if not really all that good, is at least comfortable. They seem to have the wisdom to stay on the sidelines of the Rat Race and carefully manage the bits of cheese they collect.

You can have your Jane Austens, or go back to the Regency days courtesy of Georgette Heyer, or the tea-cosy days courtesy of E. M Delafield. When I’m suffering from a serious spell of nostalgia, keep that land spreadin’ out so far and wide — just give me Manhattan in ’65.

The Beautiful Life, by Edwin Gilbert
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966

The Wreck Out on the Highway: Novels and Auto Accidents

The wreckage of James Dean's Porsche, September 30, 1955
The wreckage of James Dean’s Porsche, near Cholame, California, September 30, 1955

It only takes a second. One moment, everything’s fine; the next, everything’s shattered. A friend of mine said her father once told her, handing over the keys to the family car, “When you get behind that wheel, you’ve put your finger on the trigger of a loaded gun.” For decades, “Road injury” has, according to the World Health Organization, been one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide. As irrational as America’s obsession with gun ownership is, the fact remains that most of us don’t own one and gun violence affects far fewer of our lives than death and injury from automobile accidents.

It’s the dramatic potential — and here the meaning of potential in mechanics is also relevant — in an automobile accident that has tended more than a few novelists to use it as a catalyst or centerpiece. It’s probably no coincidental that most of these novels appeared between the late 1940s and mid-1960s: these were the years when American cars were big, fast, and almost completely lacking in any safety measures aside from the driver’s attention and skill. Freeways hadn’t yet overtaken two-lane blacktop highways as the primary conduit for travel of any distance, and any kid with memories from those days will be able to recall wincing as soon as their dad started to move out to pass some truck or car driving too slow for his taste.

Covers of The Descent by Fritz Peters

One of the first of these novels was Fritz Peter’s The Descent (1952). Peters spent his teenage years living in the loose community of followers around the mystic George Gurdjieff, arriving not long after Gurdjieff suffered a near-fatal car accident outside Paris and often wheeling him around the grounds in those first months — one of the memories recounted in his Boyhood with Gurdjieff (1964). It’s not surprising, then, that his experiences with Gurdjieff and the philosopher’s interest in man’s ability to control his destiny led him to use a multi-car accident on a mountain highway in New Mexico as an instrument for illustrating how its outcome might or might not be affected by the actions or thoughts of its victims. Peters captured the disruptive effects of an accident:

Reality, the fundamental, basic reality of life, had been imposed upon everyone involved in the accident for at least a short time. The dreams, illusions and enchantments, the superficial aims and purposed, desires and wishes, of the victims and the spectators were stripped away by the shock, leaving only the human essentials. The veneer of civilization that passes for human dignity had — for a time — ceased to exist.

Peters takes a Ship of Fools/Grand Hotel approach, leading up to the event through the eyes of a dozen or more of the people involved — victims as well as those who have to clean up the mess. For some, the accident quickly becomes a faint memory or statistic, but for those responsible and injured — physically or emotionally — their lives “continue to reverberate to the consequences.”

Covers of The Accomplices by Georges Simenon

Joseph Lambert, the rich businessman who kills a busload of school children when he’s focusing on the hand up his mistress’s skirt than the one of the wheel of his Citroen in Georges Simenon’s The Accomplices (1955), has his own sense of predestination in the first moments after the impact:

It was brutal, instantaneous. And yet he was neither surprised nor resentful, as if he had always been expecting it. He realized in a flash, as soon as the horn started screaming behind him, that the catastrophe was inevitable and that it was his fault.

As Simenon was often wont to do, he takes morbid pleasure in compounding the sins involved in his hero’s downfall. Not just a hit-and-run accident, but adultery, corruption, cover-up, collusion, and good old-fashioned hypocrisy. The sinister possibilities of the situation, in the hands of a master of human fallibility, make The Accomplices one of Simenon’s all-time best romans dur.

Covers of Juice by Stephen Becker

In Juice (1958), on the other hand, Stephen Becker’s focus is less on the psyche and more on the system. When Joe Harrison, heading home after three martinis and feeling no pain, runs down and kills a pedestrian on his way home, the system of business and justice in Southern California kicks in. The head of a chain of newspapers and television stations, Joe is in too prominent a position for those with a stake in his reputation to sit idle. The chairman of his board steps in, hires an expensive Hollywood lawyer, and mounts a campaign of public and private persuasion — the “juice” of the title — to swing a verdict of innocence. Becker caves in to his sense of justice in the end, which prevents Juice from being quite as juicy as it could have been.

Covers of Be Silent Love by Fan Nichols

Fan Nichols is an unjustly neglected woman “hard case” novelist who had a unique take on a hit-and-run story in Be Silent Love (1960) (also known by its unsubtle pulp paperback title The Girl in the Death Seat). Here, the focus is on the passenger, not the driver or the victim. Riding alongside her married boyfriend on the way to their weekend hideaway along the Hudson, Kay Hubbard begins to realize that adultery isn’t the worst thing he’s capable of after he clips a teenager and decides to drive away, hoping that no one has seen the accident. For a while, she plays along — it was her car, after all — but gradually understands the inevitable domino effect of compounded lies.

Ironically, though, Nichol’s most convincing character is the boyfriend, David Drake, a mass market paperback version of Richard Yates’ Frank Wheeler from Revolutionary Road. On the one hand, he’s full of his own superiority, smugly satisfied that he has managed both to wed a Congressman’s daughter and to bed a gorgeous redheaded girlfriend. On the other, no matter how high up the ladder he might rise, he can never stop looking down in fear:

Everybody was jealous of his success and he had to fight for what he wanted; he had always had to fight everybody, the ones trying to pull him down, step on him, knife him, crush him, all the bottom dogs of the world after him, snapping at his heels to stop him from climbing a ladder they could never, never climb.

Unfortunately, to resolve the predicament she’s created, Nichols has to turn Drake into a psychokilling machine and plausibility flies out the door by the third or fourth murder-to-cover-up-the previous-murder. Well, at least the pages fly by.

Covers of Accident by Elizabeth Janeway

In Elizabeth Janeway’s The Accident (1964), the young spoiled son of a wealthy importer runs into a tree at 97 miles per hour. He walks away with a few scratches; his college friend in the passenger seat is disabled for life. The accident sparks a previously faint sense of conscience in the young man. His family, on the other hand, responds in a variety of unhelpful ways: denial (his mother); corruption (his father); abandonment (his father again). Janeway introduces the wreck into their lives like a tiny drop of acid on a set of poorly-finished welds, and soon the connections are all coming apart: the center cannot hold when there’s nothing there in the first place. The New York Times gave the book to Frederick C. Crews, hot off his moralistic bestseller, The Pooh Perplex, and his verdict was predictably castigating. He called The Accident a “very adult soap opera” and found it typical of the genre of soft-hearted liberal literature whose “distinctive aspect … is its morbid sympathy for human weakness; any weakness will do.” Janeway, whose Powers of the Weak cries out to be rediscovered as a guide to help us rebalance the allocation of power and navigate out of the mess America’s in, was anything but soft-hearted, but Crews wasn’t the first or last man with an agenda to employ something a woman had written as a soapbox to hector from.

Covers of The Pursuit of Happiness by Thomas Rogers

Though published just four years after The Accident, Thomas Rogers’ The Pursuit of Happiness (1968) in some ways seems the more dated book. There are more than a few parallels between the two novels. In both, the driver at fault is a college student and son of a wealthy family. Janeway’s Steven Benedict destroys the life of his friend; Rogers’ William Popper kills a black woman on the streets of Chicago while’s chatting away with his girlfriend. Both men take responsibility, if not immediately — Popper going to jail for manslaughter, though he eventually decides to escape to Mexico. Both families respond in a variety of ways — protective, abetive, supportive.

But The Pursuit of Happiness is very much a novel of its particular time: 1968. William Popper’s classmates would be marching against Mayor Richard Daley’s police a few months later and the living rooms of his parents and aunts and uncles would be filled with images of dead soldiers in Vietnam and race riots in Watts and Detroit. Rogers took his epigraph from the Nichomachean Ethics: “There is a general assumption that the manner of a man’s life is a clue to what he on reflection regards as the good — in other words, happiness.”

This book came out around the time that you could buy a poster with Charles Schultz’s Peanuts character Linus and the slogan, “Happiness is a Warm Blanket.” And that, in the end, appears to have been William Popper’s own definition. The book is unquestionably well-written, well-constructed. It’s a classic of a certain spare, dispassionate style of fiction. Marian Engel found it “a novel remarkably free of cant,” wrote that the book “gains its stature from its honesty, its truth to patterns of speech and feeling, its accurate and free rendering of the conundrums of human relationships”: “There is no clumsy exposition; there are no purple passages; nothing is particularly quotable.”

And this, I’d argue, is what ultimately undermines the book. William Popper is the epitome of the well-bred, well-educated, well-fed white American who wishes everyone well as long as there isn’t too much discomfort involved for himself. His answer to the American dream is to escape America — which leads me to agree with The New Statesman’s reviewer, Vernon Scannell: “Well, that’s all very fine, I suppose, if you are living on unearned income with a smashing bird in sunny Mexico, but it doesn’t help those millions doing time in the big gaol of the USA.” If the USA is something of a car wreck itself right now, running away from the scene might be an easy answer, but it’s probably not the right one.

John Timbs, Scissors-and-Paste Man

John Timbs, watercolor by Thomas John Gullick (1855), from the National Portrait Gallery
John Timbs, watercolor by Thomas John Gullick (1855), from the National Portrait Gallery

If I live to be 100, I vow to spend at least one of my remaining years compiling a “Best Of” compilation from the God-knows-how-many compilations assembled by John Timbs, perhaps the greatest of all compilers. We’ve all heard of Dickens and the many lesser ranks of Victorian writers who industriously cranked out three-volume novels at rates that competed with the fearsome cotton mills of the North, but poor John Timbs was forgotten not long after his body was placed in a pauper’s grave.

John Timbs was not really a writer. He was more of an assembler. He took things he found and assembled them into books with titles like Anecdote Lives Of Wits And Humourists, Curiosities of Science, Past and Present, a book for the Old and Young, Mysteries of Life, Death, and Futurity: Illustrated from the Best and Latest Authorities, and Things Not Generally Known: Popular Errors Explained and Illustrated. These were all published cheaply, in low-priced editions with weak bindings and poor, thin paper, for the purpose of informing as many people as possible.

Timbs worked to improve people like himself. His father was a warehouseman who managed to pull together enough money to send his son to New Marlows, a school run by Rev. Joseph Hamilton and his brother Jeremiah Hamilton. There, he discovered his talent and put it to quick use, writing by hand a school newspaper that was passed among his classmates. He was then apprenticed to a chemist and printer in Dorking, where he met Sir Richard Phillips. Phillips had just published his little travel guide Morning’s Walk from London to Kew.

In the preface to that book, Phillips apologized for writing a guide to such a mundane journey, “which thousands can daily examine after him,” and for relying solely on the evidence of his own senses and deductions of reason.” Because of this, he wrote, “He therefore entertains very serious doubts whether his work will be acceptable to those LEARNED PROFESSORS in Universities” or “STATESMEN who consider the will of princes as standards of wisdom” or “ECONOMISTS who do not consider individual happiness to be the primary object of their calculations” or a dozen other types such as TOPOGRAPHERS, BIBLIOMANIACS, and LEARNED PHILOLOGISTS. Instead, he wrote for “AMATEURS of general Literature,” those “free and honest searchers after MORAL, POLITICAL, and NATURAL TRUTH.”

This was a man after Timbs’s heart and mind. Phillips encouraged the young man to contribute to his Monthly Magazine. Perhaps inspired by Phillips’ book, Timbs soon wrote his first book, A Picturesque Promenade round Dorking, in Surrey in 1823. Timbs then moved to London to work for Phillips and started reading voraciously. He quickly produced Laconics, the first of what would become a lifetime’s production of books in which he compiled, accumulated, integrated, and occasionally distilled what he’d read.

Front page of The Mirror from 1824
Front page of The Mirror from 1824

He moved on to become editor of The Mirror in 1827, then on to John Limbird’s The Mirror of Literature. There, he mastered his technique. Henry Vizetelly, who later worked with Timbs at the Illustrated London News, described it in his crotchety memoir, Glances Back Through Seventy Years:

Timbs spent the best part of a busy life, scissors in hand, making ‘snippets.’ Such of these as could not be used up in The Mirror were carefully stores, and when later on he became sub-editor of the Illustrated London News and editor of the Year-Book of Facts, he profited by his opportunities to add largely to his collection. By-and-bay he classified his materials, and discovered that, by aid of a paste brush and a few strokes of the pen, he could instruct a lazy public respecting Things not generally known, explain Popular Errors, and provide Something for Everybody, and that he had, moreover, amassed a perfect store of Curiosities of science, history, and other subjects of general interest, wherein people partial to snippets might positively revel.

There was no love lost between Vizetelly and Timbs, whom he called “quintessentially a scissors and paste man” — which was at least better than his assessment of Timbs’ predecessor, Thomas Byerley: “a crapulent hack.” Vizetelly wrote that “the tinted tip of Timbs’s nose suggested that The Mirror editor was not averse to what is called the cheerful glass, and yet he developed into a singularly sour and cantankerous individual” and accused him of being a vicious gossip who “seemed to take especial delight in repeating all the spiteful tales he could pick up” — to which the reader is tempted to mutter, “Et tu, Brute?”

One wonders where Timbs found the time to indulge in gossip. He never married, socialized little, and seems to have spent most of his hours bent over his desk with stacks of books at his elbows. In a study of early Victorian editors that F. David Roberts published in the Victorian Periodicals Newsletter in 1971, he wrote that these men were marked by certain common characteristics: “One obvious one was that they could write. Most not only could write but had a passion to publish.” Of the 165 men covered in Roberts’s study, they averaged 9 books each (“considerably about the going average for academics today). Yet for Roberts, these men “were pikers compared to Mr. John Timbs,” whom he credited with 150 volumes.

Advertisement for John Timbs's Knowledge for the People
Advertisement for John Timbs’s Knowledge for the People

His Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry (originally written by future Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald) gives a flavor of the range of Timbs’s production:

They include, on subjects of domestic interest, Family Manual (1831), Domestic Life in England (1835), and Pleasant Half-Hours for the Family Circle (1872), and, on scientific subjects, Popular Zoology (1834), Stories of Inventors and Discoverers (1859), Curiosities of Science (1860), and Wonderful Inventions: from the Mariner’s Compass to the Electric Telegraph Cable (1867). He also wrote on artistic and cultural matters works such as Painting Popularly Explained (jointly with Thomas John Gulick) (1859) and Manual for Art Students and Visitors to the Exhibitions (1862). Through his connection with The Harlequin he has been identified as the likely compiler (under the pseudonym Horace Foote) of the Companion to the Theatre and Manual of British Drama (1829), which contains much valuable information on London theatres of the period. On contemporary city life his works included Curiosities of London (1855), Club Life of London with Anecdotes (1865), Romance of London: Strange Stories, Scenes, and Persons (1865), and London and Westminster, City and Suburb (1867). He also published on subjects of biographical and historical interest, including Schooldays of Eminent Men (1858), Columbus (1863), Curiosities of History (1859), Anecdote Biography (1859–60), Anecdote Lives of Wits and Humourists (1862), Ancestral Stories and Traditions of Great Families (1869), and Abbeys, Castles and Ancient Halls of England and Wales (1869). He also edited Manuals of Utility (1847), the Percy Anecdotes (1869–70), and Pepys’s Memoirs (1871).

Not surprisingly, with such an output, quality often suffered. “Mr. Timbs has an inexhaustible supply of quaint stories,” one reviewer wrote, “but his critical judgment is not quite as good as his industry is formidable.” John Bull’s reviewer was critical of Timbs’ multi-volume Anecdote Biography, observing that “Biography is something more than a collection of anecdotes.” Timbs’s portraits, he found were “lifeless; they are models, not men”: “He has dressed up a variety of figures which would make the fortune of Madame Tussaud in a week.” A Spectator reviewer, a little more charitably, acknowledged that “His books are of a kind to which it is easier for a reader than a reviewer to do justice.” Many of his books were reprinted in America, where reviewers focused on the positives. A North American Review assessment of School Days of Eminent Men is typical, saying the book could be “commended as a handy manual, containing a great deal of curious information, told in a playful, conversational style.”

Indiscriminate accumulations of anecdotes and trivia can often contain gems among all the junk, and the chief reason to remember the work of John Timbs today are the nuggets you can usually find within a dozen or so pages of any of his books. Long before anyone came up with the idea of bathroom books, a Spectator reviewer identified the peculiar merit of Timbs’s books: “His readers, if they do not gain instruction, will be amused, provided that they are satisfied with a few pages at a time. Such a collection of wit and humour can only be digested at intervals.” Here is a tiny sample of the things you can learn from a few minutes spent — wherever you happen to choose — with John Timbs:

The Fitzwalters had, however, a stranger privilege than even this: they had the privilege of drowning traitors in the Thames. The “patient” was made fast to a pillar at Wood Wharf, and left there for the tide to flow twice over, and ebb twice from him, while the crowd looked on, and enjoyed the barbarous spectacle.

From Abbeys, castles, and ancient halls of England and Wales

Peter the Great was a gourmand of the first magnitude. While in England, on his return from a visit to Portsmouth, the Czar and his party, twenty-one in number, stopped at Godalming, where they ate: at breakfast, half a sheep, a quarter of lamb, ten pullets, twelve chickens, seven dozen of eggs, and salad in proportion, and drank three quarts of brandy, and six quarts of mulled wine; at dinner, live ribs of beef, weight three stone; one sheep, fifty-six pounds; three quarters of lamb, a shoulder and loin of veal boiled, eight pullets, eight rabbits, two dozen and a half of sack, and one dozen of claret. This bill of fare is preserved in Ballard’s Collection, in the Bodleian Library, at Oxford.

From Hints for the table: or, The economy of good living. With a few words on wines

The bone of the Lion’s fore-leg is of remarkable hardness, from its containing a greater quantity of phosphate of lime that is found in ordinary bones, so that it may resist the powerful contraction of the muscles. The texture of this bone is so compact that the substance will strike fire with steel. He has little sense of taste, his lingual or tongue-nerve not being larger than that of a middle-sized dog.

From Eccentricities of the animal creation

In the winter of 1835, Mr. W. H. White ascertained the temperature in the City to be 3 degrees higher than three miles south of London Bridge; and after the gas had been lighted in the City four or five hours the temperature increased full 3 degrees, thus making 6 degrees difference in the three miles.

From Curiosities of Science, Past and Present, a book for the Old and Young

When the Archduke of Spain was obliged to land at Weymouth, he was brought to the Sheriff of Dorset, and lived at Woolverton House. The Sheriff, not being able to speak in any language but “Dorset,” found it difficult to converse with the Archduke, and bethought him of a young kinsman, named Russell, who had been a factor in Spain, and sent for him. The young man made himself so agreeable to the Archduke that ho brought him to London, where the King took a fancy to him, and in time he became Duke of Bedford, and was the founder of the House of Russell.

From Nooks and Corners of English Life, Past and Present

In 1865, there died in Paris the dwarf Richebourg, who was an historical personage. Richebourg, who was only 60 centimètres high, was in his sixteenth year placed in the household of the Duchess of Orleans (the mother of King Louis-Philippe). He was often made useful for the transmission of dispatches. He was dressed up as a baby, and important State papers placed in his clothes, and thus he was able to effect a communication between Paris and the émigrés, which could hardly have taken place by any other means. The most suspicious of sans culottes never took it into his head to stop a nurse with a baby in her arms.

From English Eccentrics and Eccentricities

Timbs was given a pension as one of the “Poor Brethren” of the Charterhouse in 1871, but for some reason he resigned his place and died in poverty at 28 Canonbury Place, London, on 4 March 1875. “He died in harness,” reported The Times, “almost with his pen in his hand, after a life of more than 70 years, and a literary career extended over more than half a century.” The Times faintly praised his special talent: “Though not gifted with any great original powers he was one of the most industrious of men, and there was scarcely a magazine of the last quarter of a centure to which he was not at least an occasional contributor.” In reviewing Timbs’s English Eccentrics not long after his death, the Spectator noted somewhat wistfully, “This is, we suppose, the last work of an indefatigable compiler, who had a talent for finding odd things hidden away in odd corners, and presenting them for the amusement of readers.”

The Laughing Cavalier, by Allan Turpin (1969)

Cover of first UK edition of The Laughing Cavalier by Allan Turpin

How does a book or writer get forgotten? There are a few instances where it’s a matter of deliberate suppression: who in Nazi Germany read the work of Stefan Zweig or Thomas Mann after their books were burned? There are cases where it’s a matter of institutional prejudice, such as the tendency of university English departments to ignore the work of women writers and people of color. Cultural disinclination is a big factor: until magic realism burst upon the scene with One Hundred Years of Solitude, Latin American literature was considered as obscure specialty subject in the U.S. “Canadian novelist” is a label still dismissed by many American and U.K. readers; and “French Canadian novelist” is almost the kiss of death, as the example of Marie-Claire Blais illustrates. Product distribution channels disable as much as they enable access to writers’ work: where U.K. books routinely leap over to U.S. bookshelves, one in ten of the same number of Australian titles make the trip across the Pacific.

But the most common and by far most effective way things get forgotten is inertia. Forgetting is the human condition. Dementia is only noticeable because it’s such an aggressive form of forgetting. Remembering takes effort, and if no one makes the effort, the inevitable result is that people and what they accomplished in their lives are forgotten.

Take Allan Turpin as an example. He published ten novels in his lifetime, most of them in the space of a little more than dozen years between 1964 and 1977. All received favorable but not glowing reviews: praise for his light, sophisticated comedy, mild caution over his old-fashioned style. None of them were ever reissued. When he died in 1979, there was no notice in any of the major papers. He died without heirs and left his entire estate to the Royal Literary Fund.

If Turpin is remembered at all today, it has nothing to do with his writing. In 1925, he and a young woman named Molly Ackland convinced themselves they were in love and decided to get married. He was 22, she was 19. He had little experience of romantic love and neither had experience of heterosexual love. The marriage was misguided from the start and was ultimately annulled. Molly Turpin began wearing male clothing, transformed herself into Valentine Ackland, became a poet and met and became the lifelong companion of the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner. Richard Turpin — born Allan Richard Turpin, he was known to his friends as Richard — exited stage left and disappears from Ackland’s story.

Part of the problem with the marriage, as Ackland later wrote in her memoir For Sylvia, was Turpin’s confusion over his own sexuality: “Richard was without any experience of women, and he was suffering from remorse and fear because of certain homosexual relationships he had enjoyed recently. ‘Enjoyed’ is the important word. He was now horrified to remember that he had been happy.” Her suspicions may have been well-founded. After the annulment, Turpin remained single for the rest of his life and census electoral records show him sharing an address with another man or a married couple.

Turpin shared some of Ackland’s desire to write, though it manifested in a very different way. Where she wrote confessional poetry, he converted his own experiences into a diffident sort of comic fiction. His first novel Doggett’s Tours, published as Richard Turpin in 1932, drew from the several years he spent as a tour guide on the Continent. His first love was for the theatre, but he had little success there. A comedy titled “The Fare Includes Romance” was produced in 1933 and closed after a week. His adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw was forgotten just as quickly in 1946.

James remained, however, a dominant influence on his writing. On the strength of The Laughing Cavalier, I would describe Turpin’s work as Evelyn Waugh channelled through Henry James: his pages are peopled by ridiculous people, his paragraphs riddled with sentences of near-Jamesian convolution:

No particle of her was excited by George, fair-haired, as pink-cheeked as a girl, naïve, awkward, diffident; with the wrong ties, slovenly speed, and an unappetizing background; given, once his diffidence had worn off, to a great deal of rather foolish laughter and talk about nothing; generous, but feckless, and apparently without ambition ever to be anything more than a clerk on 30/- a week; a young man who, although the least knowable of young men since he never knew himself, seemed on first acquaintance rather boringly knowable and predictable; an absurd young man who, nevertheless, like all men, took his feelings seriously and could be alarmingly melodramatic and sentimental — than which nothing is less attractive when you don’t want it.

If Turpin’s style owed something to James, his attitude could be attributed to Waugh (or perhaps, going back a generation, as Turpin often seemed wont to do, Wilde). “I think that animals are fortunate in that their relationship with their parents is healthily short,” Turpin’s narrator announces at the start of The Laughing Cavalier. “Rather than see children exposed to the enormous risk of being brought up by their own parents,” he argues, “I would prefer state rearing. A visit to hospital must convince anyone of the extraordinary amount of disinterested humanity that exists where there is a need for it.”

The Laughing Cavalier was one of what Turpin at some point intended to be an eight-novel sequence called Memoirs of a Naïve Young Man. The naïve young man, Geoffrey Gillard, clearly becomes a fictional stand-in for Turpin himself once one discovers the coincidences between Gillard and Turpin’s life.

Allan Richard Turpin was born in 1903 to Frank Turpin and Clara Turpin (née Gillard). At the time, Frank Turpin’s profession was listed as “stamp dealer” — the same profession as George Gillard, the narrator’s father and the subject of the book. An earlier volume in the Memoirs series, Innocent Employments, describes the rise of this stamp business. As in the book, Richard Turpin joined his father in the business after a few unsatisfactory years as a tour guide. A passenger list from a trip he made to the U.S. in 1927 identifies Turpin as a “philatelist.” In 1930, Turpin and his older brother took over F. B. Turpin when their father retired.

Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals
Laughing Cavalier, a portrait by Frans Hals (1624)

Turpin/Gillard takes his title from Frans Hals’ famous 1624 portrait Laughing Cavalier. Remembering his father as seen through his son’s fourteen-year-old eyes, Turpin describes “a man who, although his thick auburn hair and pointed imperial were quite impressive, was, beneath them, unexpectedly short and rather self-indulgently plump; a man who, because of this beard, his rich red complexion, and light blue, constantly smiling, not very penetrating eyes, rather resembled, everyone said, Hals’s Laughing Cavalier, of which we had a colour print in the hall; a man than whom, in fact, no one could be more amiable and less terrifying.”

George Gillard disappoints his son by his obstinate insistence on being himself. It’s not the obstinacy that irritates: it’s his father’s blithe disregard for how relentlessly mundane his taste, talk, habits, thoughts, opinions — even his gestures are. Though a tremendous success in his stamp business, he is utterly lacking in ambition. Though he can afford to go to the theatre regularly, he enjoys the most formulaic romance every bit as much as something by Shaw. And yet, to his son’s annoyance, he is also “the most universally liked man I have ever met.”

If you pick up The Laughing Cavalier hoping for a Waugh-like dissection of the older generation, however, you’ll be disappointed. Writing reflectively at 66, Turpin finds it harder to maintain the uncompromising standards of a twenty-something. “If I did not admire my father, I, as I have already suggested, loved him much more than I knew,” he writes about halfway through the book.

George Gillard’s greatest failure in his son’s eyes is his failure to adequately mourn the death of his wife. Although her son acknowledges that his mother, who was often ill through his childhood, often left his father in the position of having to attend social engagements solo, he is shocked when — just six months after her death — he begins to court another woman. “If he had not murdered my mother, he had, in my youthful eyes, committed a crime that was almost the equivalent of murder”: “he had not regretted her death.”

Choosing to close up and sell off the house his sons had grown up in, George falls from an exotic-looking younger woman he meets when viewing a prospective new flat with his son. Turpin’s description of their accidental encounter contains one of the many gems of observation that are studded throughout the dense weave of his prose: “We moved across the sitting-room and, at the door, confronted the ladies, who were just about to wander in. There was the usual exchange of ‘sorries’ by which the English cover their acute embarrassment when proximity forces them to recognize the existence of strangers.”

Fifty-seven to the woman’s thirty-five, ready to retire from a successful but not wealthy business, George fails to see the limitations of his attraction, much to his son’s further exasperation. To everyone’s great relief, when the woman does let him down, she does so with enough grace as to merely deflate, rather than shatter, his ego, and a much more suitable mate is soon found. Turpin lacks the cold-bloodedness to leave any of his characters in shreds.

And this may offer a clue to why Allan Turpin’s work has become forgotten. It was just this quality that appealed to Turpin’s original reviewers. Claire Tomalin wrote that, “With fewer ponderous generalisations and more laughter this would have been an even better book: as it is, it deserves a place in the rich chronicles of the English petty bourgeoisie of our century.” Robert Baldick, in The Daily Telegraph, observed that “If Mr. Turpin cultivates a small plot of literary earth, he tends it with exquisite skill, and the results are never disappointing…. Few authors have written so perceptively about the father-son relationship: it is high time Mr. Turpin’s quiet talent was more widely recognized.” Instead, Turpin’s quiet talent was forgotten soon after his last book was published. This is good but unshowy work. The lack of cold-bloodedness is considered a virtue in a female middlebrow novelist: gentle-hearted satire has long legs in this era of Persephone Books and the Dorothy Whipple revival. In a male middlebrow novelist, however, gentle satire is reason enough to let his work slowly moulder into earth.

I’ll admit that when I first started reading The Laughing Cavalier, I was put off by the Jamesian-ness of Allan Turpin’s prose. But at a certain point, probably no more than a chapter in, I found myself relaxing, giving in to the leisurely pace, appreciating the subtlety of observation and the lightness of the comic touches. And once you adapt to Turpin’s Edwardian speed, the journey becomes much easier to enjoy.

The Laughing Cavalier, by Allan Turpin
London: Michael Joseph, 1969

We Can’t Breathe and Many Thousand Gone, by Ronald Fair (1972, 1965)

Cover of We Can't Breathe, by Ronald Fair

It’s a little surprising, given how George Floyd’s dying words “I can’t breathe” have been heard around the world and ignited such widespread protests against institutional racism and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, that no one has noted their echo in the title of Ronald Fair’s novel We Can’t Breathe. A largely autobiographical novel of growing up as a black child in Chicago during the Second World War and after, Fair called it “the work of my lifetime, the book I’ve been trying to write for 10 years.”

Its central theme is that of finding a way to achieve some success as a black man in a white man’s world while maintaining some remnant of self-respect. All the ingredients of ghetto life are here: poverty, prejudice, drugs, numbers runners, petty crimes, gospel churches and corner gangs, rotten landlords and decent hard-working people being ground down by the daily friction of life. Fair’s fictional self, Ernie, narrates the story retrospectively, speaking as one who has managed to escape the worst effects of this childhood.

Ernie and four of his friends form a band after they are tormented and mocked by a group of older boys. “The five of us were brothers now, and we had to fight the others for fear that they would rob us of what little manhood we had. We had to fight the others, otherwise we would have lived in such fear of them that we would not have been able to breathe.” As they grow, they confront the threats of their world: gangs and dope dealers; the ferocious, relentless rats that infest their basements and alleys; and the prejudice of most of the white people they come in contact with. At times, they find themselves in situations where the only options are fight or flight, others where it’s a choice between surrendering — or bullshitting one’s way out.

One of the boys, Willie, takes the latter approach when caught shoplifting in a white store. “Catch the nigger before he gets away!” one of the clerks screams. he coolly walks up to her, sticks a finger in her face, and asks, “Bitch, just who the hell you think you callin a nigger?” When the manager responds by slamming him against a counter shouting, “But you were stealing, boy, and you know that’s wrong,” Willie shifts gears and adopts the stereotype of the chasten, contrite Uncle Tom:

I sho do, suh, but I had to do it to get some money for my baby sister,” he lied. “We ain’t got no food at home. Honest. We ain’t even got no bread. You know what it’s like, mister, you know, to be hungry — I mean to be real hungry? My mama left home las week and ain’t nobody there to take care of the baby cep me and I had to do somethin cause we so hungry. I didn’t know what to do, mister, I swear I didn’t. I thought if I stole somethin I could maybe, you know, sell it and get some money for food. Know what I mean? Ain’t gonna call no police, are you? Please don’t, mister, please. Please. I’m sorry.

Willie proceeds to lay out a woeful tale designed to induce maximum sympathy and swears to come work sweeping out the store’s basement — knowing full well that the white manager wouldn’t recognize him if he walked into the store the very next day.

Ernie is a little luckier than his friends. Though he’s exposed to the same environmental and institutional obstacles, his mother and father stay together, they eat together each night, and no matter how dismal their apartment, he has his own bed to sleep in each night. His father encounters humiliating discrimination in trying to work in a defense plant and becomes for a time an angry and abusive drunk, but he finds a way out and Ernie has more of a sense of home and family than Willie and the others.

He also has the luck to encounter a friendly, and for the time, exceptionally enlightened English teacher in junior high school. She sees some promise in his awkward attempts at writing and gives him a book to take home and read. “I thought reading was a drag,” he recalls.

I had spent years reading about white children on farms, white men at their work, white mothers at their household chores, white animals with black spots, white families going on picnics, white grandparents coming from the country to visit their children and grandchildren, white soldiers, white generals, white sailors, white naval captains, white admirals, white explorers, white heroes, white traitors, white pilots—white-white-white-white-white everybodies with white everything they did being about as interesting to me as all of the white teachers I had had who really did not give a damn if I ever learned to read or spell or write or think.

The book Mrs. Taylor gives Ernie is a biography of Toussaint l’Ouverture, the black general who led the Haitian revolution against the Spanish and the French. After resisting it for weeks, Ernie picks it up while staying home sick and is thunderstruck. “A Negro general,” he tells his mother. “Wow, Mom, I never knew there was a Negro general did anything anywhere. A Negro! Wow, Mom, I gotta read this whole book.”

With Mrs. Taylor’s encouragement, Ernie begins to write stories set in the world he’s grown up in. When she returns his first piece, however, he is surprised at her corrections. “I was shocked to see how many times she had drawn a line through the word ‘mothafucka.'” Thinking back on the experience, he reflects,

I realize that it was a story about a mothafuckin bunch of fuckin drunks in a rotten fuckin mothafuckin town with a mess of mothafuckin other mothafuckas, fuckin around and fuckin up their lives and every other mothafuckin person in the mothafuckin neighborhood who was unfortunate enough to live in the mothafuckin city with all the fucked-up mothafuckin white people fuckin over the black mothafuckas all the fuckin time. The story ended with the only way to get out of the mothafuckin trouble in the mothafuckin world was to end up as a mothafuckin dead man, six mothafuckin feet under the mothafuckin ground.

“Is this really the way they talk?” she asks him. When he replies, “Yes, ma’am,” she responds — and here I suspect we are dealing with fiction rather than autobiography — “If that’s the way some of the people you know really talk, then I suppose I had no right to change their language.”

Ronald Fair, 1975
Ronald Fair on the cover of his 1975 chapbook, Excerpts

Perhaps this did occur. Perhaps Fair did have such an open-minded, sympathetic teacher at some point. But this anecdote illustrates why We Can’t Breathe, although undoubtedly a highly accurate picture of black life in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, fails to satisfy as a work of fiction. Ernie emerges as a young man largely unscathed. He is the survivor, but his survival seems to owe much to — well, either luck or predestination. “I had been granted immunity by the gods or by God or by the natural order of things,” he writes, “because I had been given a vision of survival without dehumanization. I would survive in spite of what happened to everyone around me.” It is hard to empathize with a character who comes off as a bit of a Teflon man. And to be honest, throughout the book, Fair’s anger is often muted by a certain amount of nostalgia for his good old days, no matter how unlikely he’d really want to turn back the clock.

George Davis, reviewing We Can’t Breathe in the New York Times, saw it as weaker overall than Fair’s first novel, Many Thousand Gone, which had been published seven years earlier and which Davis called “One of the most beautifully written books of the last decade.” Readers who turn to Many Thousand Gone for beautiful writing, however, are in for a shock. Fair subtitled the book A American Fable, but it bears little resemblance to anything Aesop ever wrote — unless there’s a version of “The Tortoise and the Hare” floating around somewhere that ends with the tortoise eating the hare.

The premise of Many Thousand Gone is simple and gut-wrenching: in a little quadrant in the middle of Mississippi called Jacobs County, wholly owned and run by the Jacobs family, slavery has never ended. Tiny, unimportant, in the midst of a state resentful of its status after the war, and surrounded by sympathetic counties, Jacobs County has managed to keep history from moving past 1864. Few outsiders — and definitely no black ones — are allowed in. The only way out for the slaves is escape. Letters in and out are censored. Black men who show any sign of resistance are beaten to death and buried. All black women are considered fair game for any white man to take in the bushes and rape.

Although Samuel Jacobs, the founder of Jacobs County, had originally strived to keep his slaves of pure black blood, over the decades the policy of his descendants towards rape has meant that there are fewer and fewer pure black babies. When the last of these is born, Granny Jacobs — like most of the black residents, she carries the name of the county’s founder — dubs him “the Black Prince” and vows to arrange his escape. When he is still a teenager, she carries out an elaborate plan by which she smuggles him to a friendly black family in a nearby county while convincing the sheriff of Jacobs County that the young man has died. The family takes him to Chicago, where he becomes a writer. The episode cannot help but bring to mind the story of King Herod and the infant Jesus.

The catalyst that sets off the chain reaction that destroys the century-long status quo in Jacobs County is when the Black Prince publishes a book about the town. He sends his grandmother a copy of Ebony with an article about it. The censor in the Jacobsville post office passes it to the sheriff, who recognizes immediately the danger in allowing the slaves in his county — all but one, the preacher, kept illiterate — see photos of black people living better than most of the whites they knew. “I can tell you one thing,” he says. “You ain’t gonna see none of them pictures as long as I’m alive.”

But word gets out and soon the slaves are curious. “They wanted to know more about the magazine, about the bright cars and fine clothes, the beautiful black women and the big houses, and especially about the schools, where colored boys and girls and young men and women learned about things the Jacobs County Negroes didn’t understand, but knew must be worth learning if the colored folks up north bothered about them.” The young black men in the county begin to talk of organizing against the whites and to placate them, the preacher writes a letter to the President of the United States:

I is writin to tell you about us because if you dont come down here or send that army down to do something to free my people they is going to kill every white man and every white woman and every white child in Jacobs County. We slaves down here Mr. President. We been slaves ever since I can remember and I been here sixty years and Granny Jacobs been here more than eighty years and she still a slave. The sheriff and Mr. Jacobs and the sheriffs deputies make us work in the fields and in the house and in the warehouse and on folks farms and in the post office and in the stores and in the jails and everywhere and aint never paid us no money cep when we ask for food or for some clothes or things like that and they dont let us leave Jacobs County. Ifen one of us tries to leave we gets kilt just as quick as swattin a fly we gets kilt. We just found out that colored folks aint slaves nowheres else cep here and we want you to free us.

The letter is smuggled out of the county. There is no reply. But months later, a carful of Federal men arrive in Jacobsville and start asking questions. The sheriff is cagey enough to keep them from discovering too much and concocts a reason to lock the agents up. Unfortunately for him and the rest of the white population of Jacobs County, however, any combustible mixture held too long and under too much pressure is bound to explode. The ending is swift, violent, and ruthless.

Many Thousand Gone is not the black equivalent of The Turner Diaries, however. This is a less a fable than a parable, a story to be told and read not literally but for its lesson. When Lillian Smith reviewed the book for St. Louis Post-Dispatch shortly before her death, she wrote, “It would be a wonderful thing if we had on our streets … storytellers telling long tales to the people. What a story this is to tell! What a soft mercy might creep into dry, hating hearts if only they could feel the poetry of this little book.” Many Thousand Gone is brief — barely more than a hundred pages — crisp, powerful as a gut-punch but told in a cool, matter-of-fact tone. There may be no actual Jacobs County, but in creating it, Ronald Fair illustrated with the precision of a haiku the damage that any inequality too long sustained can wreak upon both the oppressed and their oppressors. It’s not a book whose time has come, sadly. It’s a book whose time has never left.

We Can’t Breathe, by Ronald L. Fair
New York: Harper & Row, 1972

Many Thousand Gone, by Ronald L. Fair
New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965

A War Without a Hero, by G. E. Trevelyan (1935)

Front page of A War Without a Hero by G. E. Trevelyan

I write this piece with a mixture of sadness and disappointment. Sadness because this is the last novel by the remarkable G. E. Trevelyan I have to write about. And disappointment because A War Without a Hero is not a book I would recommend to anyone not interested in becoming a G. E. Trevelyan completist.

Over the last year and a half, I have tracked down, either purchased (usually at greater expense that I’m used to) or copied (thanks to the British Library), read, and written about all eight novels that Trevelyan wrote between 1932 and 1939. And I’ve become convinced that her utter absence from any history or study of the English novel between the two wars has nothing to do with her merit or significance as a writer and everything to do with the tendency of literary academics to stick to well-travelled paths. I’ve contacted several dozen researchers specializing in this period over the last year and in every case had the same responses: ignorance (“Who? Never heard of her.”) and uninterest (“Good luck with your research. Goodbye.”).

G. E. Trevelyan, perhaps more than any writer of the generation that came after Virginia Woolf, followed Woolf’s advice in “A Room of One’s Own.” An only child whose father’s occupation on census forms is always listed as “independent means,” she came down from Oxford, found herself a flat in Kensington and went to work writing novels. Though she once said that she went through three drafts of every novel, she managed to produce eight in the space of as many years and in each case, to produce something that was not in any way like the others. It may have been health problems that kept her from developing a wider circle of connections to the literary world: though she died from injuries sustained when a German bomb hit her building, her death certificate also mentions that she suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis. She didn’t review other people’s books, didn’t get her photo taken at other people’s parties, didn’t travel much, didn’t lose herself to drink, sex, or politics. She sat in her room and wrote.

And took enormous creative risks. If she took anything from the example of Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, it was to commit fully to her artistic vision and hold nothing back in trying to realize it. In some cases — Appius and Virginia (1932); As It Was in the Beginning (1934); Two Thousand Million Man-Power (1937); and William’s Wife — she succeeded. In others — Hot-House (1933); Theme with Variations; and Trance by Appointment — her experimentation had mixed results. And in the case of A War Without a Hero, she failed.

If she failed, it was not due to half-heartedness. In A War Without a Hero, Trevelyan built upon the experience of writing As It Was in the Beginning, which takes place entirely in the mind of a woman in her dying days and uses the stream of consciousness approach developed by Woolf, Richardson, May Sinclair and others of the generation before hers. Where As It Was involves one character’s thoughts and perceptions, A War interweaves the streams from multiple sources.

Unfortunately, none of these sources is fully convincing — and the story itself implausible if not unbelievable. The book opens as Ann Cavan, a London woman with some money and artistic interests, approaches the tiny Channel Island where she’s decided to lay low while waiting for her divorce decree. In her late twenties or early thirties, attractive, well-dressed and used to good food and fine accommodations, she has for no obvious reason set upon taking a room in a rough cottage on a tiny island accessible from a slightly larger and more populated one only at low tide.

Four people live in the house: Mrs. Hymes, a widow, her sons Matthew and Joshua, fishermen, and Davey, who is blind. They live off the fishing and a few cows and pigs that roam freely around the island. The cottage has no electricity and no running water. The island is enveloped in fog much of the time, rough and rocky all of it. This is not B&B territory.

Once settled in her upstairs room at the cottage, Ann quickly realizes there is nothing to do. She’s not a reader, not a sketcher or painter or whatever her vague artistic inclination might actually manifest itself as. And the Hymes are not much for conversation. Matthew and Joshua spend most of their time out fishing and when on land communicate in grunts and monosyllables. Mrs. Hymes is bitter, tired, and contemptuous of the silly useless woman renting her room. Davey spends his days doing little besides sitting in a chair outside the cottage.

“This is utterly hopeless and sickening and impossible,” Ann thinks early on in the book and it’s this sense that Trevelyan is most effective in expressing. Things like listening for hours to water drip from the gutters:

Water ran into the butt almost continuously. Foghorns boomed without an interval through the darkness. Revolution, earthquake, half London wiped out: lot of difference it would make, she thought bitterly. The drips were joining up, drip drip drip drip and then the pause of a heart-beat. And drip again, and pause, and drip, and drip drip dri-i-p, and a thin, trickling stream.

This is not fertile ground from which any vibrant drama is likely to spring … and it doesn’t. Ann convinces herself that Davey is a prisoner of his family’s ignorance and arranges to take him to London to see if a Harley Street specialist can restore his sight. Once Davey can see, Ann then decides the two of them will marry and break free of Mrs. Hymes’ tyranny.

But then they return to the island and make themselves at home in that upper bedroom. Able to see, Davey is transformed. Once a bore, he’s now a brute. Mrs. Hymes takes revenge by carrying out her own transformation, turning Ann from a woman of the world and into a slave:

Mrs. Hymes slapped their food on the table; she pinched her mouth. And him that’s been brought up so nice. Never let to get into no rough ways. She saw Annie standing, looking at him. “What you standing there for?” Gaping at him that you’ve done your best to drag him down and down. Done your best you have, and aren’t fit to black his boots. “Get out and shut up the chickens.”

And so it goes. Life on the island is nasty, brutish, and endless. Everything is painted in shades of grey. There is a lot of staring and hopelessness. A War Without a Hero is like the written equivalent of a bad art film. Fin.

Reviews in the Thirties tended to run under 300 words and offer little insight into a book, but in the case of A War Without a Hero, the reviewers took its measure with deadly accuracy:

• A. G. Macdonell, The Bystander:

It is very seldom that a true-blue, hard-boiled reviewer, born and bred in the trade — a tough baby, in fact — reads a book that makes him want to go and shoot himself. But if ever a book was liable to induce insanity, melancholia, tendencies towards suicide, inflammation of the eyes, and general Dostoievsky-complex, it is A War Without a Hero by Miss G. E. Trevelyan. Consider the plot for yourselves. Just run your eye over it and let me know by post-card, duly stamped, whether you think it is a reasonably likely one. An artistically-minded lady wants to be divorced from her husband. During the six-months time-lag she decides to go to a remote Channel Island, and there she lodges with a fearful family of illiterate yokels. One of them, David, a lad of twenty, is blind, and the artistic lady decides to marry him. This she does. Her life is then devoted to looking after this fiendishly dull, semi-witted youth and to washing up dishes and scrubbing floors in mid-Channel. I ask you. The real trouble about the book is that the moment the arty lady decides to marry the blind youth, all interest vanishes. You simply cannot believe that such a thing is possible, and the moment you find yourself doubting the possibility of a plot you find yourself either bored to tears, as with Miss Trevelyan, or excited beyond works, as with the late Mr. Edgar Wallace.

• Peter Quennell, The New Statesman:

A War Without a Hero is an intelligent book, but not very readable. Miss Trevelyan certainly knows how to write; but I wish that she did not mistake abruptness for vividness, and that her characters’ thoughts were not perpetually cropping up in broken bits and pieces of interior monologue scattered broadcast all over the printed text. Her story would be twice as impressive if it were half as long. Incidentally, the complete aimlessness of the central character — a young woman of means who marries the blind boy she discovers on an imaginary Channel Island — lends a sort of reflected aimlessness to the whole narrative…. After almost four hundred gloomy, capable and unsparing pages, the reader’s spirits have declined to their lowest ebb.

• The Observer:

If Dostoievsky had laid a wager that he could write an even gloomier book than The Brothers Karamazov, and if, while trying to win the wager, he had been attacked by biliousness, gout, arthritis, and neuralgia, and if he had lost all his money, and if he had been sent back to Sideria, he might well have written A War Without a Hero. And if he had, he would undoubtedly have won his bet hands down.

• Leonora Eyles, Times Literary Supplement:

In each of her previous books Miss G. E. Trevelyan used her talent to delve into morbidity to such a degrees that they fascinated while repelling the reader. In her latest novel, A War Without a Hero, the same talent for atmosphere is there, but we get very little of the compassion and humanity that lightened the others. And the story is so incredible — even more incredible than that of the woman and the ape [Appius and Virginia] — that it sometimes tasks the reader to go on with it…. In this book, as in the others, the reader gets a sense of unendurable spiritual claustrophobia, a sense of life lived in unutterable degradation of mind and body from which there is no escape. The style is very difficult; sometimes it becomes so allusive as to be hardly comprehensible. Once again Miss Trevelyan has given us an insight into things that seem to find their real place in a psychiatrists’s notebook.

• Francis Iles, The Daily Telegraph:

In A War Without a Hero, Miss G. E. Trevelyan set herself a difficult task: to depict a marriage between a lady and an oaf, and the slow deterioration of the lady to the oaf’s level. The task was too difficult; for never for an instant does the book carry conviction…. None of this will do. Ann, as she is first shown to us, would (a) never have married the young oaf, (b) if she had done so, would never have stayed with him, to be buffeted and bullied. There is a D. H. Lawrence vague fog over it all, in which ideas become personified and actions stultified because real human character is disregarded.

As an experiment in fictional technique, A War Without a Hero is a failure. As a book … well, it’s waiting there in the British Library and a few others around the world for the next time a Trevelyan completist comes along.

A War Without a Hero, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: Martin Secker, 1935

Strange Journey, by Maud Cairnes (pseudonym of Lady Kathleen Curzon-Herrick) (1935)

Cover of first UK edition of Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes

Body swapping, where two characters end up in each other’s bodies is such a staple of comic and fantastic theater, fiction, and film that it’s got its own Wikipedia page, which links in turn to a list of over 100 examples of body swapping in media. Many of the modern interpretations can be traced back to F. Anstey’s 1882 novel, Vice Versa. Usually the exchange occurs between sharply contrasting individuals: a father and his son (Vice Versa); a mother and daughter (Freaky Friday); a boy and a girl (The Swap). In the case of Strange Journey, the opposites in question are a middle-class suburban English housewife (Polly) and a landed/titled member of the ruling class (Lady Elizabeth).

Polly and Tom live in one of the new garden cities ringing London that began popping up after the First World War. As much as she loves Tom and her two children, she does tire of the endless demands that other people make on her time and energy. One day, as she stands at her front gate watching a queue of traffic idling behind a bit of road work, she sees an elegant woman sitting inside a Rolls Royce and looking out idly:

Suddenly I felt a longing to change places with her, to get into that big, comfortable looking car, lean back in the soft cushions I felt sure that it contained, while the chauffeur made it glide away through the dusk to some pleasant house where there would be efficient servants and tea waiting, with a silver teapot, thin china, and perhaps hot scones, nice deep arm chairs to sit in, and magazines lying on the table.

The traffic moves, the Rolls passes, and Polly goes back into the house. A week or so later, a picture of a similar Rolls in a magazine brings back that daydream. But suddenly, Polly feels a moment of dizziness, after which her head clears and she looks down at her hands.

They are not hers. They are hands “of the sort that I should have loved to possess, white and slim, with long fingers and shining almond-shaped nails.” She finds herself in exactly the sort of place she’d dreamt of: fireplace roaring, walls lined with portraits, battle scenes, and books, and a butler bringing in the afternoon tea. She manages to mask her complete disorientation, but quickly finds herself unable to come up with the appropriate responses to the older woman sitting with her. Worse, two large dogs that wander in bristle and growl at her. “Good Lord, one would think they were seeing ghosts,” the woman remarks. After a few more moments of panic, Polly finds herself back home again.

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Over the following months, she finds herself transported to the grand country house again and again, and she begins to suss out a little about the woman whose skin she’s in. Her name is Lady Elizabeth. She is married to Major Forrester — Gerald — who appears to enjoy flaunting his interest in several different beautiful and flirtatious women. She is an avid shooter and rides to the hounds, skills which Polly utterly lacks, leading to embarrassing and awkward moments with Lady Elizabeth’s acquaintances. The shooting in particular proves particularly disturbing:

All those people who seemed quite pleasant and ordinary had taken the massacre as a matter of course. Only I had never seen things killed, except on the films, when naturally one knows that it does not hurt…. Of course I had known that such things took place; that the meat people eat gets knocked on the head, and chickens have their necks wrung, but I had never visualised what slaughter was actually like. I simply had never thought about it.

Polly struggles to navigate her passages through Lady Elizabeth’s life — just which of the dozens of bedrooms in the house is hers, for example? She also realizes how little she actually knows about the simplest protocols and assumptions of the gentry. £1,000 a year, for example, seems a fortune to her; it is, however, considered one step from the poorhouse for any young man hoping to marry into a good family. On the other hand, she’s a whiz at bridge, which astonishes everyone who thought Lady Elizabeth looked on all forms of card play with distain.

She also soon realizes that her exchanges are mutual. When she’s transported into Lady Elizabeth’s skin, the Lady finds herself in Polly’s. She’s dismayed to learn that her children love the stories of castles and knights their mother has been telling them, stumped to come up with a good explanation of how she can suddenly play the piano with ease. Worse, while she feels certain the Lady Elizabeth views her own husband Gerald with a mixture of dislike and disinterest, she begins to suspect the Lady of having designs on Tom.

Eventually, Polly and Lady Elizabeth — as themselves — make contact and attempt to come to an understanding of how the mechanism linking them operates. Much of it seems to depend on a sort of synchronized wishful thinking, just the kind of idle daydreaming that led to their first experience. Simply arranging to meet, however, brings Polly to an understanding of just how constrained her lot is compared to Lady Elizabeth’s. “Gerald would never ask what she had been doing, and she could go to a picture gallery or a concert and nobody would think it at all queer.” Polly, on the other hand, sees that “I really had no private life at all”: “If I should feel inclined to do something quite ordinary like that, by myself, everybody in my neighbourhood would wonder why.”

The most interesting the twist in Strange Journey is not the details of how the two women are able to exchange lives — and they do, at least for a while, manage to use it at will — but the author’s attempt to pull off her own swap.

Maud Cairnes - Lady Kathleen Hastings Curzon-Herrick
From The Bystander, 3 April 1935.

Maud Cairnes — as The Tatler and several other society-radar magazines revealed soon after the publication of Strange Journey — was a pseudonym. She was not a literarily-inclined middle class woman but the Lady Maud Kathleen Cairns Plantagenet Hastings Curzon-Herrick, eldest daughter of the 14th Earl of Huntingdon and wife of Mr. William Montagu Curzon-Herrick, whose own grand house, Beaumanor Hall, and its surrounding estate had been in his family for over 300 years. When William and Lady Kathleen were married in 1916, their wedding was called “The Event of the Week” and featured in a full-page spread in The Illustrated London News. Going by the story in The Times, I counted fourteen lords and ladies, at least eight counts and countesses, three viscountesses, one earl (Huntingdon, of course), and one each baroness, duchess, and marchioness.

A Hunting Party at Beaumanor Park
A Shoot at Beaumanor Park, from The Illustrated London News, 1925. Lady Kathleen Curzon-Herrick is third from left.

Lady Elizabeth’s world was Lady Kathleen’s. Her father the Earl, and later she and Mr. Curzon-Herrick, regularly hosted great shooting slaughters at their estates. Lady Kathleen was as much at home in the saddle, if perhaps not cutting quite the same slim, elegant figure in her riding gear. She frequented the ballet, theater, and concert hall, saw her name in Court Circulars, set an example for housewives like Polly with her reputation for wit, grace … and heavy smoking.

Lady Kathleen Curzon-Herrick in riding gear, from The Illustrated London News, 1930
Lady Kathleen Curzon-Herrick in riding gear, from The Illustrated London News 1928.

She was also long an amateur at the writing game. Her sister Grace recalled Kathleen writing plays the three Hastings girls would perform while still being taught at home, and in the mid-1920s, the Lyceum’s Stage Club put on a production of Kathleen’s play, “It is Expedient.” Strange Journey was her first novel, but its reviews in both England and the U.S. would have pleased most seasoned writers. In The New Statesman, Cyril Connolly — after savaging the more established Kay Boyle’s novel The Next Bride (“a very annoying book”) — praised it as “an original and charming story; a very good idea is neatly worked out, and there is something fresh and delightful about this first novel.” The Illustrated London News repaid Lady Kathleen for her many appearances on its pages by calling her book “fresh and odd, and an unusually good first novel.”

The Spectator’s anonymous reviewer, after saying that Strange Journey was “a remarkable little book: a good novel on a theme that is pure housemaid’s delight,” identified its greatest strength:

It does verge on the romantic; but it is saved, and made, by being told in the practical words of Polly Wilkinson herself. Her gaffes on her various translations into the body of Lady Elizabeth, her suburbanisms, her anguish when she finds herself suddenly on horseback in the middle of the hunting field, are all related with extreme common sense. One likes Polly Wilkinson.

Considering that the voice of Polly Wilkinson is the voice of a Lady Elizabeth translating herself into the mind of someone she could only have experienced or imagined at some remove, Lady Kathleen’s success in her first attempt at fiction is even more remarkable. And the down-to-earth tone of Polly Wilkinson’s voice is what prevents Strange Journey from sinking into cringe-worthy farce and keeps it at the level of simple human comedy:

She then opened a big jewel case in which there were several tiers. I thought it looked like a real treasure chest, when I saw brooches and necklaces, bracelets, ear-rings and rings, all in velvet compartments. I just stared. Late for dinner or not I had no intention of hurrying over my choice. I took a sort of collar of emeralds and diamonds, and put it round my neck; it looked wonderful. Then I found some emerald and diamond ear-rings, long ones, and some bangles; I put two or three of these and a big diamond brooch like a spray, that cheered up the dress a lot.

Then I saw the pearls — three long ropes of them — and one shorter one. I put the ropes on and looked happily at my reflection in the mirror.

“I think I want something on my head now,” said I, wondering if it was a grand enough party for a tiara.

Foley, who had been looking rather stunned, smiled respectfully as though I had made a joke. I gathered that it was not a tiara occasion.

Lady Kathleen made just one other excursion into novel-writing. She followed up a few years later with The Disappearing Duchess (1939), which required less of an imaginative stretch. It told of how the Duchess of Darenth went missing from a French villa while on a visit in the summer of 1913 and how an ex-Secret Serviceman found her. Sold and reviewed as a conventional mystery, it earned brief, respectful reviews: “A neat and pleasantly readable story” (TLS); “cunningly compiled to sound plausible to our expectant ears” (The Daily Telegraph).

From this point forward, Lady Kathleen faded slowly from sight. Her husband died suddenly in 1945 and much of the land around Beaumanor Hall had to be sold off to pay his death duties. When the Curzon-Herrick name appeared in the press, it was more likely to be about her daughter. She died in Hove in February 1965 at the age of 71, earning no more than a one-line notice in The Times.

Strange Journey, by Maud Cairnes (pseudonym of Lady Kathleen Hastings Curzon-Herrick)
London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1935
New York: Norton, 1935

By the Sea, By the Sea, by George Sumner Albee (1960)

Cover of first UK edition of By the Sea, By the Sea by George Sumner Albee

Few things give you as good a picture of life at a particular time and place as seeing what people considered satire. Satire with legs is tough to write. Barbs that seemed razor sharp at the time can strike today’s reader as dull — or worse, off-target or unsuccessful to an extent that can be excruciating to watch as a rerun. What was meant to poke the funnybone can seem like an unwelcome jab in the ribs. George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea is an example of the dangers of consuming satire too long after its sell-by date.

By the Sea is set in the remote seaside town of Plankton. When I read the book, I was sure that Plankton was somewhere along the Central California coast, but many of its contemporary reviewers were convinced it was in New England. Albee offers no good geographic reference points to anchor it, so let’s say we’re both right.

Plankton’s original name — as not even the Indians found the place habitable before the crazy white men showed up — was Zion’s Golden Strand. A religious sect named the Semi-Submersion Redemptionists, whose men wore beards like Spanish moss and women dressed “like adders in calico,” settled there around 1900 to practice their faith in peace. Which they did for several decades, until their stricture against sex in any form began to whittle their number down to a handful. Then, during Prohibition, the rumrunners moved in, using it as a quiet and safe to land fast boats full of illegal hooch. After FDR eliminated the profit margin, the town was left for the strays and stragglers to occupy.

There is Bonesetter, a retired seaman who runs the town’s drug store and lives in a loose menage with his wife and her ex-stripper sister, Zarafa. There is Manuel Ortega, known to everyone as “Spic” (and here we begin to see the stretchmarks in the satire), who lost an arm bringing a load of whisky ashore and stayed to run the general store. There are the Tatum sisters, two retired librarians, and their mother, whose dementia takes the peculiar form of believing herself to be General George Custer. And there are a handful of artists, sculptors, and miscellaneous Bohemians.

The diverse collection of Planktonians is united on one point: that success as defined by the world outside is an anathema. “The human race, friends, cannot stand success,” Bonesetter tells his fellow townspeople. “Prosperity makes monsters of us all. Plankton has never known prosperity, and never will. Plankton is a serene place, a joyful place, an undiscovered place; what the literary critics call a happy valley. Let us keep it that way.”

Cover of first US paperbackedition of By the Sea, By the Sea by George Sumner Albee

Of all the misfits, none is quite so ill-fitted as Myrthis Lathrop. Having been sent to university to study law by his father, Myrthis rejected the notion that commerce was a game he needed to play. “The world is a mighty tough place, my fine young liberal,” he father told him, “as you’ll find out when you try to make a dollar.” To which Myrthis replied, “The world is a mighty tough place because it’s full of men trying to make a dollar.” He decided instead to move to Plankton, where he could live in one of the old abandoned Redemptionist houses for nothing, and be a bum, making a few bucks by selling samples of plants, sea creatures, and insects to his old university’s laboratories. When we first meet him, Myrthis is spending his day lying on the ground, taking notes on the second day of the Ant War.”22 blacks still on their feet, to 112 browns.”

Myrthis is himself a bit of a parasite. His fellow Planktonians feed him, fuel him, clothe him, fix his plumbing, and when necessary, save him from drowning. As little as they aspire to material success, Myrthis’s obstinate aimlessness irritates many and maddens Bonesetter in particular. He concocts a scheme to marry Myrthis off to Vitalia, a scroungy young woman recently arrived in town.

Hoping this will force Myrthis to settle down, Bonesetter is disappointed. Myrthis and Vitalia decide to establish a newspaper, despite the fact that they have no printing press and can’t write — or at least, spell. Undismayed, Myrthis types up the first issue with its front page story, “YOUR FRIEND AND MINE THE COKROACH.” Myrthis is not just pro-roach: he is a zealous roachist. “Those of us who are a bit too sure that we are the final and fairest flower of Creation will do well to reflect upon the fact that the cokroach has been here longer than we have and will be here when we are all through.” When the universe comes to its whimpering end, he assures his readers, “it will be the roach, not Man, who will stand on tip-toe on the last charred Reef of Earth and cry farewell my brothers farewell farewell.”

Somehow, Myrthis’s piece gets into the hands of a desperate syndication agent, and the next thing you know, all of America is calling for more. Myrthis and Vitalia are swept off to New York City to make the rounds of television game shows, news shows, and talk shows, all of which offer Albee opportunities to satirize What’s My Line, The Tonight Show, and other artefacts of the time that have now grown quaint or forgotten.

Cover of first UK paperbackedition of By the Sea, By the Sea by George Sumner Albee

P. G. Wodehouse described By the Sea, By the Sea as “like a sort of innocent Peyton Place,” which may be more accurate now than when he said it. Peyton Place long ago lost its scandalous reputation, and so, by extension, has By the Sea. When the book was marketed, the favored hashtags were #lusty and #Rabelaisian, neither of which could manage to raise the lightest eyebrow today. Yet some of the reviewers were still able to wind themselves into a righteous tizzy about it. Writing in The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Martin Quigley practically issued an invitation for a book-burning: “This is a rather pleasant and funny little summer story that has been spoiled by self-conscious and witless dirty talk. The publisher and the author are trying to justify and exploit the dirty talk on the grounds that it is Rabelaisian.” Scoring points with the chauvinists in his audience, he added, “It is remindful of a sissy trying to pass himself off as a tough guy.”

Barely two hundred pages long, By the Sea, By the Sea could easily sit at one end of the bookshelf alongside Tobacco Road and Cannery Row — neither of which, IMHO, carry much more than trace amounts of the humor and raucousness that made them favorites of a generation or two of mostly male readers. It takes a lot more to stand out as a drop-out from society in today’s world.

Not that George Sumner Albee hadn’t earned his stripes as an outsider. He’d taken to the road early in life, traveling around the world in his twenties, stepping in to save Hemingway from getting pasted by a boxer in Key West in the thirties, taking a house in Cuba’s own Key West, Varadero, in the 1950s. He was a connoisseur of the laidback expat lifestyle, capable of writing a long and gushing letter in praise of Under the Volcano to Malcolm Lowry. Lowry, replying from an unhappy spell in England, was somewhat envious: “I have an impression that Cuba must be a marvellous place in which to live, and pursue the Better Life, the Better Thing, and indeed celebrate generally the Life Electric.” Finding the political climate in England not much more enlightened that that of Eisenhower’s US, he added, “… the only thing one could do is to put one’s school cap back on and read Wordsworth, or perhaps Henry Adams, until it all blows over. Meantime it is likely that no contribution will be made to human freedom.”

Albee had made his living as something of an acceptable rebel, a gentle satirist. His first novel, Young Robert, was a semi-autobiographical jab at his own young self, a story about a San Francisco youth full of the spirit of the Gold Rush and progress with a capital P. Although he published a couple of softer, more nostalgic novels in the 1950s, he earned his living as a writer of magazine fiction back in the days when that was still possible.

Albee’s magazine fiction was often satire a soft S. His 1948 story for Cosmopolitan, “The Next Voice You Hear,” played out a premise he came up with over lunch with a friend. “You know,” he said, “wouldn’t it be something if God would come on the radio and give people such a bad scare they’d wake up and behave themselves!” He repeated the story to his friend, Cosmopolitan’s fiction editor, Dale Eunson, and Eunson told Albee the magazine would buy the story if he wrote it.

George Sumner Albee's story, "The Next Voice You Hear," from Hearst International - Cosmopolitan, August 1948.
George Sumner Albee’s story, “The Next Voice You Hear,” from Hearst International-Cosmopolitan, August 1948.

In the finished product, the voice of God goes out over every radio station on Earth one day: “A plan of creation ought by rights to go forward under its own rules, but you, dear children of the Sun’s third planet, are so near to destroying yourselves I must step in. I shall spend this week with you.” As you might expect, this news sends everyone but the most deeply devout into a panic, but God’s subsequent broadcasts are written in a wholly New Testament voice. When he takes leave on the following Saturday, his voice has “the gentleness, the fondness, the inifinite patience of the voice of an older brother teaching a beloved younger brother to skate, or make a kite, or whittle”: “A planet is a school. Live, dear children, and learn.”

Poster for the 1950 movie, The Next Voice You Hear
Poster for the 1950 movie, The Next Voice You Hear

“The Next Voice You Hear” was made into a film with the same name in 1950, starring James Whitmore and Nancy Davis (soon to be Reagan). Producer Dore Schary wrote an account of the making of the film, Case History of a Movie, soon after. James M. Cain, reviewing the book for the New York Times, wrote that “it gives a picture of movies that is almost definitive, with a singularly candid viewpoint.”

First page of The Mysterious Mr. Todd, from The Saturday Evening Post Feb 9 1957
Illustration from The Saturday Evening Post, February 9, 1957.

Albee was a flower child before the name existed. In his 1957 story, “The Mysterious Mr. Todd,” an updated version of Twain’s Mysterious Stranger pleas for a town council to turn a patch of land into a park instead of a prison:

There are people in this world who like prisons. They like them because prisons lock up souls, and they believe in locking up souls. They want to see all of us in uniform, marching along in lock-step, saying, “Yes, boss; yes, Fuhrer; yes, commissar.” A prison is the sorriest place in the world, sorrier than any cemetery, because in prison you bury souls. Now what does a park stand for? A park is a scale model of what we hope we’ll turn the whole danged world into someday. A park is a place where we can walk under trees, with flowers around us, and meet our neighbors and shake their hands and ask them how things are going and meet ourselves, too, maybe, on a quiet path, and find out who we are. A park is a freespace for free men. That’s why we’ve got to choose it every time — every time! Because the men in prison are the men who never had parks.

Illustration from "Let's Put Women in Their Place," by George Sumner Albee, from The Saturday Evening Post, December 16, 1961
Illustration from “Let’s Put Women in Their Place,” by George Sumner Albee, from The Saturday Evening Post, December 16, 1961.

But not all of Albee’s satire reads quite so benignly today. In a 1961 piece for The Saturday Evening Post, for example, his tongue was perhaps too deeply buried in his cheek for his self-mockery to come through. Titled, “Let’s Put Women in Their Place,” he criticizes the U.S. for being the only country where women are not banished when men sit down to talk. He sorts women into seven categories such as “The Frustrated Actress” and “The Compulsive Talker.” He then lays out a program by which husbands can retrain their wives: “Take her to court trials. Take her to visit a chemical laboratory. Play Bach to her. Read her a bit of Kant, showing her how he extrudes one idea from another. From time to time, hit her.” With a little patience and persistence, he assures the reader, “in a year’s time you may find you have a chastened, thoughtful, well-mannered, reticent woman who can actually join in a conversation without destroying it.” And if she happens to slip into her old habits, “Check her promptly. ‘How would you like a rap on the mouth?’ is a query that startles the sturdiest woman.”

This is impossible to read without cringing. If you ever wondered what men like Mad Men’sDon Draper were reading, it was far more likely to be this than the poetry of Frank O’Hara, I’m afraid. George Sumner Albee may have been lucky that he died in 1965: I’m not sure how he would have fared when the Women’s Lib movement got going.

In 1974, by the way, Paramount Studios announced that producer Jerry Bruckheimer would be filming By the Sea with a script by Steve Tesich, but the project appears to have stalled soon afterward.

By the Sea, By the Sea was recommended to me by Kate Peacocke, who wrote from New Zealand, saying her father “loved its zany humour and its gentle wisdom, and so do I.” For me, the book lands halfway between unjustly and justly neglected. If you do read it, it’s best to look for the spirit of “Mr. Todd” and ignore the brief flashes of “Let’s Put Women in Their Place.”

Other Reviews

• Vernon Fane, The Sphere

… a happy, bawdy and very funny novel indeed; Mr. George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea, which I propose to re-read often and certainly not to lend, unless it is to benighted travellers unable to get to a bookshop. Mr. P. G. Wodehouse has gone on record as finding it one of the funniest books he has read for ages and full of charm, too. He adds that it is like a sort of innocent Peyton Place, as contradictory a statement as the old master can ever have emitted. Be that as it may, he is certainly right about its being funny, and since that is a quality fairly thinkly parcelled out in contemporary fiction, I can recommend it to those readers who are free, broadminded and twenty-one.

• Dave Lipman, The Kansas City Star

If Aldous Huxley had stumbled across Plankton, he would not have had to search around bravely for new worlds. He could have loosened his tie and luxuriated in the company of somebody like Myrthis Lathrop…. There’s a theory, unproved, that a man who uses shingles from his own roof for firewood is a man worth meeting. It follows that a book in which such a man plays a leading role is a book worth reading.

• Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Guardian

the funniest book I have read in years: that is to say it is not “a riot of fun” but witty; satirical, not smart; adult, not “adult”; and like funny books from Candide to Lucky Jim, basically serious…. A young man’s book, presumably, which I wholly recommend.

• Lynn Hopper, The Indianopolis Star

Light, brassy, with serious undertones, and definitely on the wild side. A new book with more charm than most summer fiction is George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea.

By the Sea, By the Sea, by George Sumner Albee
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960
London: Victor Gollancz, 1960

This Little Hand, by Pamela Kellino (1941)

Cover of first UK edition of This Little Hand by Pamela Kellino

Should Pamela Kellino have written this book? Set in the East End of London and narrated by the pretty but not very bright daughter of a cleaning woman and a fairly useless former soldier, it’s a grim but vivid story of the bad things desperate people can do. The sins and crimes committed range from petty theft to grand larceny, from white lies to false accusations, from prostitution to illegal abortion, from hot- to cold-blooded murder. A book with few nice things and no nice people, This Little Hand is a long way from your typical middlebrown English novel of its time.

Young Flo lives with her parents, sister and orphaned cousin Ol in what they consider a rather plush flat: two rooms and a kitchen. “We didn’t have any water and you had to go down to the end of the street to get any. It was about five blocks down — they had a lavatory there too. It was a wonderful building.” Ma does the morning cleaning at Greenaway’s, the local department store specializing in cheap and shoddy goods. Flo gets a job wrapping packages at Greenaway’s, and the store serves as the object and instrument of much that happens from then on. As with Raskolnikov’s old pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment, when you’re dirt poor, the most miserable enterprise can seem like Fort Knox.

One night, looking for a back-alley abortion for a friend, Flo meets Karam, an Anglo-Indian whose operations aren’t limited to helping out desperate young women. Flo is immediately attracted. “He was the last thing in the world I would have expected. He was so beautiful that tears had come in my eyes. He was an Indian, but lovely, lovely, like nothing I’d ever seen before.” Struck by Karam’s good looks, confidence, and smooth manners, Flo allows herself to be seduced and then drawn into his other shadowy affairs. From there, the story quickly swirls itself down into a vortex of corruption and violence that ends with Flo holding a knife to Karam’s neck.

This Little Hand could be seen as the distaff counterpart to Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, with Kellino’s Flo and Karam as parallels to Greene’s Rose and Pinkie. In both stories, an innocent — perhaps not truly good, but at least not overtly bad — is pulled over to the dark side by the strength of one truly corrupted and evil.

And yet I knew too much about Pamela Kellino to be fully drawn into This Little Hand. At the time she wrote it, Kellino was roughly the same age as Flo, but at that point their similarities end.
Kellino was born into wealth and comfort. Her father, Isidore Ostrer, was a banker who became own of the moguls of British film when he took over as president of the Gaumont British Picture Corporation in the 1920s. By the age of 24, his daughter Pamela had married twice: first the cinematographer Roy Kellino and then the actor James Mason. She’d also starred in a number of stage and radio productions as well as in a couple of films. Although she wrote two further books as Pamela Kellino and continued to use that name in films until the mid-1950s, she was known as Pamela Mason for most of her career (despite her contentious divorce from Mason in 1962).

Pamela Kellino and James Mason, 1940
Pamela Kellino and James Mason in The Bystander and The Tatler, 1940

So Pamela Kellino and Flo, the narrator of This Little Hand, lived at near-opposite ends of the social and economic spectrum in England. When Flo was being packed off to reform school, Kellino was being photographed for The Tatler and Bystander society pages. Which raises the question: should This Little Hand be criticized in the same way that Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt was?

In the letter that 142 American writers sent to Oprah Winfrey calling for her to pull American Dirt from her book club, they argued that Cummins’ novel was not “imagined well nor responsibly, nor has it been effectively researched. The book is widely and strongly believed to be exploitative, oversimplified, and ill-informed….” They acknowledged that “Many of us are also fiction writers, and we believe in the right to write outside of our own experiences: writing fiction is essentially impossible to do without imagining people who are not ourselves.” So their reservations about American Dirt were, in effect, about degrees. One has to assume that they wouldn’t have objected if the book had been imagined well and responsibly and effectively researched.

I’m at an even farther remove from Flo and her world as depicted in This Little Hand than was Pamela Kellino, so I’m not in a strong position to be passing judgment. But I could not shake a certain skepticism about the book when reading it, in a way that I never once considered when reading G. E. Trevelyan’s story of a London bag lady, William’s Wife (for the sake of comparison). Trevelyan immersed herself in the sensibility of Jane, her bag lady. Jane’s paranoia and extreme avarice becomes the reader’s. In the case of Flo, however, I had more the sensation of watching rather than experiencing — rather like looking at an animal through the bars of a zoo cage. Perhaps Pamela Kellino could have gone on to write better, more convincing accounts of the lives of people far from her experience had she been willing to commit as completely and intensively as G. E. Trevelyan did. But there is throughout This Little Hand an air of dilletantism that the stench of sweat and dirt from Flo’s East End never quite overcomes.

Other Reviews

• Times Literary Supplement

This Little Hand is the story of a young girl brought up in hideous slum conditions and of her introduction into the London underworld. Although it may seem a little too meaty towards the close, the reader is left with an impression of sober imaginative truth, of genuine power also, possibly as yet immature, to convey such truth.

• Edwin Muir, The Listener

[T]he book … is written with an astonishing passion and directness that burns up the squalor. Flo herself is an originally conceived character, a baffling but quite natural mixture of innocence and toughness, only seventeen when she stands her trial… [I]t is quite without the mechanical quality which goes with that kind of writing. It is the work of a sensitive writer whose mind is possessed by the extremes of human misery. As a mere story it is sometimes magnificent.

• Britannia and Eve

When I first met Pamela Kellino, the daughter of a film magnate, she was starring in her first film and was officially listed as a starlet. What she had learned since those days seems to be a lot about a very grim type of life, a London girl who goes to live with an Indian ‘doctor’ who performs illegal operations.

• Vernon Fane, The Sphere

It is all very tough and sordid, yet at the same time it has a warm and human quality, and it is Miss Kellino’s achievement that she never yields an inch in her sympathy for her tragic little heroine. There is a good deal of power in this book, and some signs that when certain immaturities can be overcome the author may have a long way to go on the literary road.

• A. P. West, The New Statesman

One has a feeling that this promising first novel is a failure because the author is writing about a world in which she has no first-hand experience: one recognises vestiges of a number of cases which were reported in newspapers in the narrative, one detects patches of guesswork. If Miss Kellino abandons the practice of dealing in second-hand experience she should become an interesting writer.

• Kate O’Brien, The Spectator

The merits of the book are its simplicity, its truth of dialogue and physical detail, its hurrying sense of life, and its clean, unshrinking characterisations. Its especial merit is in the central character of Flo, who all the way down to disaster never puts a foot wrong — that is to say, never blenches before herself, and never, in the thick of her temptations and sins, really loses love of life, or her curious, much-battered sense of moral obligation to it.

This Little Hand, by Pamela Kellino
London: Robert Hale Limited, 1941

Herbert Clyde Lewis and the Rescue of Gentleman Overboard: A Work in Progress

“Listen to me! Somebody please listen!” cries Henry Preston Standish, the hero of Herbert Clyde Lewis’s 1937 novel, Gentleman Overboard, as he struggles to stay afloat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, exhausted and past hope of rescue. “But of course nobody was there to listen,” Lewis wrote, “and Standish considered the lack of an audience the meanest trick of all.” Lewis died of a heart attack at the age of 41, broke, out of work and alone in the middle of New York City, a victim of Hollywood blacklisting, his three novels long out of print: a writer who’d lost his audience. No one came to rescue him. As long as a writer’s words are preserved, though, there is a chance of his work being rescued. In the case of Gentleman Overboard, it took over seventy years for someone to spot the book, lost in the ocean of forgotten books, and the rescuers came from three different continents. Lewis’s story of one man dying alone and forgotten is now being read by thousands who find it speaks to a sense of “shared loneliness.”

Born in Brooklyn in 1909, Lewis was the second son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His mother Clara came to the U.S. with her family in 1887 at the age of two. His father Hyman arrived a year later at the age of thirteen, apprenticed to work for his older brother Samuel as a tailor. By the time Herbert was born, the Lewises were living in the Brownsville neighborhood around Tompkins and Lafayette Avenues. The area was then the heart of the largest Jewish community outside Europe, the first stop for tens of thousands of like Lewis’s parents, immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe. Between 1890 and 1915, the number of Jews living in New York City jumped from under 100,000 to nearly one million. The name Lewis was Anglicized from Luria and Hyman and Clara helped ease their sons’ integration into American life by giving them solidly Anglo-Saxon names: Alfred Joseph, Herbert Clyde and Benjamin George.

For Herbert Clyde Lewis, Brownsville was the quintessential American melting pot — at least in hindsight. In 1943, he wrote an article titled “Back Home” for The Los Angeles Times about visiting his boyhood streets for the first time in twenty years. “As I walked slowly around the block and let the memories flood back,” he wrote, “it seemed to me that my old neighborhood was a miracle—the greatest miracle that had ever visited the earth. Here, for the first time, people came from all the corners of Europe, the Near East and China — and lived side by side in close quarters and did not cut each other’s throats.” There was something in the air, he believed, “that made us feel maybe the other fellow’s beliefs and background were all right too.”

However rosy Lewis’s memories of his boyhood in Brownsville may have been, he left home early and quickly established what became a lifelong pattern of short stays and frequent moves. He quit high school at the age of sixteen, worked a variety of jobs with local newspapers, briefly attended both New York University and the College of the City of New York (finding “neither institution suited him”), then spent the winter of 1929-1930 in Paris. He returned to America in March 1930, took a job as a sports reporter in Newark, New Jersey, then moved nearly halfway across the world to Shanghai, China. He spent the next two years there working as a reporter for The China Press and The Shanghai Evening Post.

Herbert Clyde Lewis in his early 20s
Herbert Clyde Lewis in his early 20s, courtesy of Michael Lewis

Living in China may have satisfied his appetite for travel at first. In early 1933, Lewis returned to New York, took a job with The New York World Telegram, switched to The New York Journal American, got married, and rented an apartment in Manhattan — one of the few times he kept the same address for longer than a year. His time in China provided the material for his first ventures into fiction, which were short but action-packed. “Tibetan Image,” for example, tells of fortune hunters forced to abandon a million dollars’ worth of silver fox pelts in the Gobi Desert when they are attacked by a pack of man-eating dogs. It appeared in Argosy magazine in November 1935 and was followed by others full of stereotypes of enigmatic, slightly sinister Chinese. He also tried to his hand at writing for the stage, collaborating with a former reporter, Louis Weitzenkorn, on “Name Your Poison.” In the play, a group of petty crooks take out a life insurance policy on a homeless derelict and then attempt — unsuccessfully — to kill him through a series of “accidents.” The show opened for a pre-Broadway run in late January 1936 and closed after six performances. The play needed “repairs” was the only explanation offered by its producer, who let his option lapse a few months later.

Although Lewis claimed he was happy with his job at the Journal American, a certain discontent with comfortable situations seems to have been part of his nature. As he later told Newsweek magazine, the idea for his first novel, Gentleman Overboard, came to him as he stood on the roof on his apartment in Greenwich Village one evening in late 1936. Lewis looked down on the street below and considered what would happen if he fell: “How would a man bridge that dizzy mental gap between the security under his feet and that world ‘down there’?” He decided to write a story to find out. To emphasize that mental gap, he chose as the subject of his experiment not an itinerant reporter like himself but with a man whose very being embodies security.

Henry Preston Standish, the gentleman of Gentleman Overboard, is as solidly fixed to the bedrock of the American establishment as a man could be. His family name evokes the English man of arms who sailed with the first Pilgrims on the Mayflower, the subject of “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem memorized by generations of schoolchildren. Graduate of Yale, partner in a Wall Street investment bank, member of the Finance Club, Athletic Club and Weebonnick Golf Club, owner of a comfortable apartment on the Upper West Side, faithful husband and loving father of two, Standish is the definition of a solid citizen. “He drank moderately, smoked moderately, and made love moderately; in fact, Standish was one of the world’s most boring men.” When Standish contemplates the prospect of a world without him, he thinks with regret that “New York City would be dotted with spaces that could never be filled by anyone but the real Henry Preston Standish.”

And yet, like Lewis, Standish feels an irresistible urge to leave and find something that was missing at home. In Standish’s case, the impulse hits him out of nowhere. One day, sitting in his office, he “suddenly found himself assailed by a vague unrest.” He feels compelled to get up, leave his office, and take a walk along the Manhattan waterfront in Battery Park. As he looks out at the water, “Forces beyond his control grasped him and shook him by the shoulders, whispering between clenched teeth: ‘You must go away from here; you must go away!’”

Standish does not understand this impulse. “There was no sane reason why he must go away; everything was in its proper place in his life.” At the same time, his instincts tell him “that he never would be able to breathe freely again unless he went far away.” Standish wasn’t the first character in American literature to feel this urge to escape. Fifty years before Gentleman Overboard, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn lit out for the Indian Territory “because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it.” Perhaps what Lewis called “security” was just another name for Huck Finn’s “sivilization.”

But when Standish sees the last sight of New York slip over the horizon as he sails away on a cruise through the Panama Canal to California, he feels as if “all his weariness, all his doubts and fears, vanished magically into the sea.” In California, the sense of relief continues. Standish discovers “a certain zest to things now that he had not experienced back home before; all his sensations were intensified.” He decides to keep going, to take another cruise, this time to Honolulu. “Why, Henry?” his wife begs when Standish calls to break the news. “I don’t know,” he replies. Even after he reaches Hawaii, he delays his return, exchanging his ticket back to San Francisco for a berth on the Arabella, a freighter taking a leisurely three-week voyage from Honolulu to Panama.

Lewis then sets his experiment in motion. Early one morning, while most on the ship are asleep and Panama still at least ten days away, Standish slips on a spot of grease while strolling on deck and falls overboard. Lewis has put his subject about as far away from the security of a comfortable life in New York City as one can get — two thousand miles from Panama, three thousand miles from Hawaii, along an infrequently-traveled route. Even here, though, conventions manage to reach out and control Standish. After he surfaces, when there is still a chance of his being heard by someone on the Arabella, he finds himself “doomed by his breeding”: “The Standishes were not shouters; three generations of gentlemen had changed the trumpet in the early Standish larynx to a dulcet violoncello.” Standish hesitates to cry out and the Arabella steams away, its crew and other passengers oblivious to his plight. Another twelve hours pass before his absence is confirmed—and, in a cruel irony foreshadowing Lewis’s own death, some onboard conclude that Standish’s accident was, in fact, suicide.

With cool precision, Lewis peels back the layers of “sivilization” as the hours pass and his subject tries to stay afloat, waiting to be rescued. Standish kicks off his shoes, then bit by bit removes his clothes, until he is naked, his eyes and lips scorched by the sun. At first, he feels embarrassed at making the Arabella turn around and rescue him; then pride in his “tremendous adventure” of staying alive until his rescue; and finally, when he realizes there is no hope, of regret. “And with each thought a pang came to his heart that had shattered, a pang of regret that he could not go on like other men having new extraordinary experiences day after day.” Extraordinary experiences like his heart “having gone on beating thirty-five years without once stopping”; like never having gone hungry; like having been given everything he had ever desired. In the end, “there is one desire that will not be satisfied”: to live.

When Lewis finished writing Gentleman Overboard, his own situation was precarious. He’d been living beyond his means, borrowing money and falling months behind in his rent. Just weeks before Viking published Gentleman in May 1937, Lewis declared bankruptcy with debts of $3,100—over a year’s income for a newspaperman—and “no assets, except possible royalties” from the book. It would not be the last time that Lewis would find himself flat broke. Reviews of Gentleman Overboard began appearing soon after—the first on May 23 in The New York Times, the same paper in which his bankruptcy notice had appeared. Reviewer Charles Poore called the book “entertaining” and “a flight of fancy,” but sensed Lewis’s underlying design: “Standish seems to be undergoing an experiment rather than an experience.”

The book’s brevity seems to have led many reviewers to consider it insubstantial. “It is a good enough book of its kind, but it is one of those stories that might have been a masterpiece and is by no means one,” William Rose Benet wrote in The Saturday Review. Only Arnold Palmer, reviewing the British edition published by Victor Gollancz in the magazine Britannia and Eve, saw the book’s length as a virtue: “He has told, with unusual skill and intensity, a story which ninety-nine writers in a hundred would have ruined by expanding into a full-length novel or compressing to the requirements of a magazine editor.” Evelyn Waugh on the other hand, writing in Time and Tide, thought it wasn’t short enough: “In spite of its brevity it is too long; a Frenchman could have told the story in 50 pages.” Viking issued a second printing; Gollancz did not.

Hollywood came to Lewis’s rescue. In August 1937, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Metro Goldwyn Mayer had signed Lewis as a “term writer” — a staff writer with a contract for a term, usually six months at the then-lucrative salary of $250 a week. Lewis, his wife Gita and their infant son Michael headed for California, arriving in early September “in our original protoplasmic state,” as he wrote his brother Ben (on MGM stationery). By Christmas, Lewis could report that he was busy working on a remake of the silent movie Tell It to the Marines and expected to “be here for a long time.”

He was still struggling to pay off his debts, though. He wrote Ben that people were “pressing me for debts and making my life miserable by threatening to sue me and attach my salary.” “All the other writers live in big houses and entertain,” he complained, “and we live in a shack.” MGM shelved the remake of Tell It to the Marines and Lewis’s contract was not extended. He was able to get a job with RKO, collaborating with Ian Hunter on a pair of B-movie musicals starring the boy tenor Bobby Breen, Fisherman’s Wharf and Escape to Paradise, both released in 1939 and both forgettable. By the end of that year, Lewis quit RKO and moved back to New York City with a job offer from the J. Walter Thompson advertisement agency and the manuscript of a second novel in hand.

Cover of Spring Offensive by Herbert Clyde Lewis

Lewis’s anti-war sentiments had been stirred by the outbreak of war in Europe. In Spring Offensive, Peter Winston, a young American out of work, unhappy in love and at odds with the isolationist mood in America, concludes “There was no place for him in his own country” and travels to England to enlist in the British Army. When he completes his training and deploys to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force, however, he finds there is nothing to do in the months of stalemate known as the Phony War. He decides to make a small protest by sneaking into the no-man’s land between the Maginot and Siegfried lines and planting a packet of sweet pea seeds. As Winston crouches there planting his seeds in the early hours one morning, however, the Phony War comes to an abrupt and violent end. He finds himself stranded between the two sides, unarmed and with little chance of survival. Like Standish in his last moments, Winston loses all hope: “There was no one who wanted him anywhere.” A shell strikes and Winston is obliterated.

Lewis’s timing could not have been worse. Spring Offensive was published in late April 1940. Two weeks later, German panzers began rolling into Belgium, France and the Netherlands. By the end of June, France had capitulated. “For its own sake, this slender novel should have made its appearance well before the beginning of the actual Spring Offensive,” concluded The Saturday Review. Ralph Ellison predicted in his New Masses review, “little will be said of it these days in the capitalist press.” He was right: the book sank without a trace.

Lewis still had hopes for his career as a novelist, though. Convinced that his handicap had been trying to write while holding down a full-time job, he took his family, now including a baby girl, Jane, to quiet Provincetown, Massachusetts. There he wrote his third novel. Focused on the residents of a rooming house in Greenwich Village on Christmas Eve, Season’s Greetings is a love-hate letter to New York City. Lewis allowed himself a much richer prose style; the book is filled with vivid descriptions:

Slowly the noises of the city came to life, autos shifting gears, horns honking, doors slamming shut, trains rumbling underground, machines chugging and whirling, feet tramping, babies wailing, children shouting, peddlers calling their wares. Slowly the smells of the city came to life, coffee brewing, bacon frying, garbage stewing, chemicals churling in cauldrons.

Despite the vitality of Lewis’s writing, though, his subject once again was grim: “the problem of loneliness in a city of eight million people.” One of the residents is a German refugee without a single friend or acquaintance in his new country. Another is an embittered alcoholic, a third an old woman who has outlived her family. Although some of the residents do come together to create, for a few hours, a sort of community, Lewis refuses a happy ending for all. As his neighbours gather for an impromptu Christmas party, Mr. Kittredge, who began the day convinced “there was no purpose in living any longer,” finds that nothing in the course of the day has changed his mind. He quietly slips out to Washington Park with a rifle and commits suicide—alone and unseen: “Around the whole windswept park, in all the apartment houses and brownstone mansions and college buildings, not a single window opened and not a single person looked out.” Less than ten years later Lewis himself died alone and unseen in the Hotel Earle across the street.

Cover of Season's Greetings by Herbert Clyde Lewis

Published in September 1941, Season’s Greetings received favourable but not glowing reviews. The New York Times’ reviewer called it “a story that pulses with feeling for the complex and comprehensive personality of New York.” The American Mercury did not care for Lewis’s change of style: “Overwritten in spots, it belabors its point, yet it holds the reader’s interest.” Once again, Lewis was a victim of bad timing. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, fewer Americans were in the mood to buy books about Christmas. The short biographical sketch on the back of Season’s Greetings mentioned that the author and his family had returned to New York and promised that “This time Mr. Lewis expects to stay home for good.” But it didn’t work out that way.

After working for The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter for about a year, Lewis tried again to make it on his own as a writer—without much luck. As Los Angeles Times’ film industry reporter Fred Beck later told the story, by late 1942, Lewis “was a small, sad man, shivering on the streets of New York.” A short story Lewis had written, “Two-Faced Quilligan,” had been rejected by 33 magazines and he worried that his family “would have salami for Christmas dinner.” As Beck put it, “Herbie wished somebody he knew would come along so he could borrow a buck.” Instead, Lewis came home to find an acceptance letter from Story magazine and a check for $50—enough for a generous Christmas and a month or two more. Soon after, Variety reported that 20th Century Fox had bought the movie rights for the story and hired Lewis as a writer for $500 a week. Lewis and family returned to Los Angeles.

Despite the turnaround in his financial situation, Lewis was never content in Hollywood. “Life is rather dull here,” he wrote his brother Ben in July. “It’s completely unreal going to the studio every day and writing scripts about make-believe people while the real people are cutting each other’s throats with gusto everywhere.” In November, he complained, “I look around me and see the things that success buys out here, and I don’t like any of them. Swimming pools get full of dead flies and uninvited guests. Big houses get full of live flies and uninvited guests.” Lewis wrote that he had decided to take a job offer with radio comedian Fred Allen and move the family back to New York. Fred Beck made the news public in The Los Angeles Times with a sly aside: “Fred Allen has a new writer, brand new, and I’m just wondering if everybody is now going to be happy now that they’ve got what they wanted.”

The answer was no. Lewis expected to replace several writers who were going to be drafted. They weren’t. After eight weeks with Allen’s show, Lewis decided “I was tired of taking money under false pretenses” and returned to Hollywood. Lewis continued with 20th Century Fox, which released the movie version of Lewis’s story, Don Juan Quilligan, in June 1945. As little as he cared for the work, Lewis desperately needed the studio’s money. In early 1945, he complained to Ben that “the Internal Revenue Bureau has attached my salary to make me pay off an old tax debt to Uncle Sam, which cuts down my fun, finances and practically eliminates (for the next few months) all the plans we had to send you our wedding gift.”

Herbert Clyde Lewis (lower left), Dalton Trumbo (rear center), and other reporters in the South Pacific, June 1945
Herbert Clyde Lewis (lower left), Dalton Trumbo (rear center), and other reporters in the South Pacific, June 1945

Lewis’s only break from the studio grind came in May 1945 when he, Dalton Trumbo, and four other writers were sent on a six-week tour of combat areas in the Southwest Pacific at the invitation of General Henry “Hap” Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps. “I’m really seeing the war on this 16,000-mile junket,” he wrote from Guam on June 16, 1945: “the planes, the fleet, the infantry, almost everything else.”

The war ended just two months after Lewis’s return from the trip. He sold more stories: “D-Day in Las Vegas” to RKO and “The Fifth Avenue Story,” which Lewis co-wrote with Frederick Stephani, to Liberty Films. Filmed as It Happened on Fifth Avenue, the story earned Academy Award nominations for the two writers in 1947. But by then Lewis’s life had begun to fall apart. He was drinking heavily and taking barbiturates to help him sleep. His son Michael remembers seeing his father “naked and completely comatose, in a chair” around this time. “My mother told me it was alcohol and seconal.” Gita Lewis had begun to work for studios as a writer herself. As Michael recalls, “my & my sister’s real parents” during this time were the full-time maids his parents hired. The couple separated in 1947.

Lewis’s professional life was also coming apart. In January 1947, he became a member of the editorial staff of The Screen Writer, the magazine of the Screen Writers Guild. Unfortunately, the Guild was about to become the focus of Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiries into possible Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. Working in support of the U. S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the F.B.I. interviewed dozens of witnesses and collected thousands of documents related to liberal political activities in Hollywood. An F. B. I. informant identified Lewis as a member of the American Communist Party.

Whether the allegation was true or not, Lewis had taken up with the losing side. He joined over 100 writers, actors, directors, and musicians signing a full-page advertisement protesting the House committee’s hearings — which only added to suspicions about his politics. A month later, Dalton Trumbo and nine other members of the Screen Writers Guild were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the committee. A group of the most powerful studio executives met in New York in December and issued a statement vowing, “We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the Government of the United States.” The practice of blacklisting had begun. “The swimming pools are drying up all over Hollywood. I do not think I shall see them filled in my generation,” Lewis remarked to a reporter, jokingly. But he did not take the experience so lightly. He suffered a nervous breakdown in mid-1948 and was unable to work for a year.

In September 1949, he returned to New York City for what would be the last time — alone. His wife Gita chose to stay in Hollywood. He took a job as rewrite man for The New York Mirror. “I’ve enjoyed myself thoroughly and straightened myself out completely,” he wrote Ben from New York in October 1949, adding that he’d sold several of his stories to provide an allowance for Gita and the children. Michael Lewis recalls that “the four of us tried living together again as a family” in New York around Christmas 1949, but the marriage may have reached a breaking point. Gita took Michael and Jane back to Hollywood and moved in with Tanya Tuttle, wife of blacklisted director Frank Tuttle, who had gone to France in search of work.

In April 1950, Lewis filed for bankruptcy, citing over $26,000 in debts and unpaid income taxes. He moved into a room at the Hotel Earle in Greenwich Village. Although once considered among the best residential hotels in the city, in 1950, the Earle was, in the words of the poet Dylan Thomas, who stayed there around the same time as Lewis, “a pigsty.” Lewis moved from the Mirror to Time magazine, but he was still broke. He apologized to Ben for not being able to help pay their father’s bills from a prostate operation.

In late September, he left Time—whether voluntarily or not is unclear. Three weeks later, he was found dead in his hotel room. Although his death certificate stated the cause was heart attack, some of his acquaintances believed Lewis had committed suicide — which, Dalton Trumbo wrote his wife, was “sad, but no more than to have been expected.” “The only food on which a drowning man could subsist was the hope of being rescued,” Lewis wrote in Gentleman Overboard. Perhaps he had lost hope of being rescued himself.

He passed on to his widow only the prospect of future sales of his writing — of which there were few. In December 1950, one of his early stories, “Surprise for the Boys,” was adapted for the CBS television series Danger. A few years later, a producer bought the rights to Lewis’s story “The Bride Wore Pajamas,” but the film was never made. Finally, in 1959, Gita, now remarried, sold his unfinished novel, The Silver Dark, to Pyramid Books, a paperback publisher. Despite a cover plug by novelist Budd Schulberg proclaiming it “A genuinely original and compelling novel,” the book was never reviewed and never reissued. According to WorldCat.org, just two copies remain in libraries.

Cover of The Silver Dark, by Herbert Clyde Lewis

The Silver Dark might have marked the end of Lewis’s story. His work was ignored in studies of American novels. His film credits alone kept his name alive in occasional reference books. His daughter Jane died in 1985 from complications related to diabetes; his brothers both died in the late 1990s and his widow Gita in 2001. Only Michael, with a handful of his father’s letters and one lone page from his journal, remained to remember Lewis.

In the spring 2009, I came across a review of Gentleman Overboard while browsing through the archives of Time magazine. “What would it feel like to fall off a ship in mid-Pacific?” the reviewer asked. “With as much calm authority as though he had fallen overboard himself, Herbert Clyde Lewis tells just what it feels like.” Having established this website three years earlier, I was looking for long-forgotten books with unique qualities and Gentleman Overboard sounded like a perfect candidate. I located a copy, read it and posted a short enthusiastic review. Without having seen the Newsweek article describing Lewis’s original idea, I referred to the book as an experiment:

What matters is not whether it succeeds or fails but simply seeing what happens. Lewis puts his subject into the experiment and observes. This novel holds his notes. Few scientists could have recorded the results with such an elegant and light touch. It’s been said that a true artist knows when to stop … and does. By this criterion alone, Herbert Clyde Lewis proves himself a true artist with Gentleman Overboard.

A few months later, I received an email from Diego D’Onofrio, an editor with La Bestia Equilatera, a small Spanish-language publisher in Buenos Aires. “I would like to ask you,” he wrote: “Which neglected book do you recommend me to publish?” Not familiar with La Bestia’s audience, I was reluctant to offer many suggestions, but replied, “If I had to pick one off the top of my head that is very accessible to a wide range of readers, I guess I’d pick Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis. It should be relatively easy to translate and has a strong narrative line that should grab most readers very quickly.” Diego thanked me and said he’d order a copy.

Diego and his editor-in-chief Luis Chittaroni loved the book and in May 2010, they contracted for a translation and scheduled the book for publication. The Spanish title would be El caballero que cayó al mar (The Gentleman Who Fell into the Sea). The challenge of publishing a neglected book in another language is considerable, D’Onofrio later wrote. “Because nobody knows the author, not least the book, which is also not known in his native language … the only tool you have to sell the book is that it must be extraordinary in itself.”

Cover of El Caballero qui Cayo al Mar by Herbert Clyde Lewis

By this standard, El caballero que cayó al mar performed exceptionally well. Its early reviews were consistently enthusiastic: “Simple y magistral. Sólo eso. Sencillamente eso,” Alejandro Frías proclaimed in El Sol de Mendoza: “Simple and masterful. Only that. Simply that.” Another reviewer called it “una perlita”: “a little pearl.” The book continued to win critical acclaim as its readership spread beyond Argentina. In August 2018, one of Spain’s leading critics, Ignacio Echevarría, praised the book in his monthly column for El Cultural and in September 2019, a feature on CNN Chile recommended it: “Con magistral sencillez, Herbert Clyde Lewis lleva el relato a una dimensión filosófica.” (“With masterful simplicity, Herbert Clyde Lewis takes the story to a philosophical dimension”). Eight years after the first publication of El caballero que cayó al mar, D’Onofrio reported, “It is the book with the most unanimous praise from our entire publishing house, which now has more than 90 books.”

Even as the Spanish translation was underway, Luis Chittaroni began to share PDF copies of the original Viking edition with acquaintances in the Argentinian literary community. The novelist Pablo Katchadjian in turn recommended the book to his friend Uriel Kon, an Argentina-born Jew living in Jerusalem and then starting up his own small press, Zikit Books. Looking for English-language novels that could be easily translated and published in Hebrew, Kon found the book matched his criteria perfectly: “Clear, elegant prose; a compelling, existential story; a book you can sit down and read in a night.” He arranged for a Hebrew translation and Zikit published האדוּ שבפל לים (roughly, The Nobleman Fell into the Sea) in June 2013.

The book struck a chord among Israeli readers. A feature review in Ha’aretz, one of Israel’s most widely read newspapers, called it “A miniature masterpiece that emerged from oblivion.” Zikit printed 1,00 copies — a number Kon considered “somewhat optimistic” at the time. That edition sold out in under two months and Zikit went on to sell over 7,000 copies. “There are around three to four thousand serious literary readers in Israel,” Kon estimated. “By that standard, this was a huge best-seller — a cult classic.” Standish’s predicament — lost and forgotten in a great ocean — Kon believes, “Resonated with many Israeli intellectuals who felt themselves isolated—not only as Jews surrounded by the Arab world but also unheard in a society dominated by conservative forces.”

Cover of Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis

In September 2019, Auteursdomein, a small Dutch press based in Amsterdam, published the English-language text of Gentleman Overboard under the simplified title, Overboard. This edition was sponsored by Dutch novelist Pauline van de Ven, who had come across Gentleman in a box of old books and ashtrays left by a distant uncle. As she writes in her foreword, “I read it without interruption from cover to cover and was impressed by the austere language, the strong images and the universal scope of the haunting story.” For van de Ven, the book’s power lies in its appeal to a paradoxical sense of “shared loneliness.” It belongs, she believes, in “same gallery of honor” as Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a another short novel about a prosperous businessman facing his imminent death: “It’s an existentialist masterpiece.”

Despite its rescue by publishers on three different continents, however, Gentleman Overboard remains out of print in the United States. Just three copies of the 1937 Viking edition are available for sale. The book’s success with readers in Argentina, Chile, Spain, Israel, and the Netherlands suggests the time is ripe for its reissue in its native country. There is still a chance for a new generation of American readers to discover Herbert Clyde Lewis’s “little pearl.” All it will take is the right person to listen.

My sincere thanks to Michael Lewis for allowing me to quote from his father’s letters and his own emails.

The Penalty of Exile, by Edith de Born (1964)

Cover of The Penalty of Exile by Edith de Born

The Penalty of Exile demonstrates that although Edith de Born had a reputation for writing books that, in Peter Ackroyd’s words, “one can recommend to one’s grandmother,” she didn’t always stick to grandmotherly topics. Within the first 30 pages of the book, we find that its focus is a 14-year-old child prostitute whose mother — also a prostitute — has been stabbed to death. In an interview she gave about a year after publishing The Penalty of Exile, de Born expressed tremendous admiration for Nabokov’s Lolita, calling it one of the finest novels of the century and also characterising it as a love story. Knowing this, I found it hard not to read de Born’s novel as her own attempt to deal with the taboo subject of pedophilia.

Unfortunately, her sensibilities led her to take an indirect approach, telling the story of young Helga Vankammen primarily as seen by the two adults who become personally involved in her case after her mother’s murder. The first is Edgar Kermans, a wealthy Belgian businessman who encounters Helga on the streets around the Gare du Midi in Brussels. Helga is crouched on the sidewalk, gently caring for a ragged mutt of a dog. Struck by Helga’s beauty, despite her tattered clothes and dirty face, Kermans ends up buying the dog and getting some food for the girl.

He leaves her his business card, which is how he’s then contacted by the police after Helga’s mother is murdered. Kermans’ motivations are never quite clear. They seem to be part Good Samaritan, part infatuation, and part a belief that money can solve all problems. De Born sums up an entire slice of bourgeois society in her characterization of Kermans and his kind: “The distinctive trait they possessed in common was the firm belief that the only sure and efficient method of protection for themselves and their families against all potential risks and dangers was the acquisition and preservation of wealth.” (For more, viz. Capital by Thomas Piketty).

The other is Wilhelmina van Hemmen, a Dutch sociologist from a noble family, who takes Helga to live at her kasteel in the Netherlands and undertakes her rehabilitation. An erect, elegant, and iron-willed woman, Madame van Hemmen provides a safe and sheltered environment in which she begins to teach Helga about manners, culture, and trust. A bit like de Born herself, her attempts to work with Helga are awkward and unfamiliar. But de Born is at least capable of recognizing the limitations inherent in this kind of situation. Helga says to Wilhelmina at one point,

“You don’t really know whatmy life was. There’s no chance at all of my ever being happy like you say — through love.”

The last word was pronounced with an effort.

“You’re wrong, dear. I do know what your life was like and I know, and you do, that now it lies behind you. It is definitely past and over.”

Helga shook her head.

“You’ve never been in the middle of it. You’ve only seen it from above.”

Wilhelmina was at a loss to reply. It was a shaming truth that she had seen only from “above” the poverty, stupidity, vice and crime, protected as she was by money and her name; she was totally unaware of her innocence and goodness, an even greater protection than her position.

De Born’s story of Helga’s rescue and redemption is never fully convincing. Like Kermans and Madame van Hemmen, she recognizes the pain and violence that lies at the core of Helga’s experience but is at a loss for how to deal with it except through politeness and a diffident kind of empathy. The ingenue Helga grows up into a stunning beauty who becomes a top model in Paris, but she never sees that success as anything more than a matter of economics: “Once I was treated as a thing, and I’m still a thing, though a different kind put to a different use. Now I am a point of intersection for all sorts of commercial interests: textiles, dress-making, cosmetics, jewelry. I often represent a huge fortune; I never represent myself.”

To give de Born and Helga’s rescuers credit, kindness, comfort, and empathy can go a long way as substitutes for understanding. If The Penalty of Exile never descends into the belly of its beast, de Born once again proves a keen observer, particularly of the better sort of European — even if she does allow herself a very Belgian dig at the Netherlands, whose “insipid, badly-cooked food bore little resemblance to the cuisine on the other side of the border.”

The Penalty of Exile, by Edith de Born
London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1964

The Manner Music, by Charles Reznikoff (1977)

Cover of first US edition of The Manner Music by Charles Reznikoff

When poet Charles Reznikoff died in 1976, his wife, Myrie Syrkin, gave his papers to publisher John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, which had begun collecting and issuing his poetry and other writings. A while later, Martin called Syrkin to say he’d found the manuscript of a completed novel titled The Manner Music. She knew nothing of it — and Reznikoff had usually discussed anything he was working on with her. What’s more, Martin added, it’s a Hollywood novel. For a couple of years in the late 1930s, Reznikoff had worked in Hollywood as a researcher and assistant to Albert Lewin, an acquaintance from his Brooklyn youth who’d been a protege of Irving Thalberg and worked his way up to producer. Maurice Zolotow later compared the discovery to finding a T. S. Eliot novel about banks or one by Wallace Stevens about insurance.

The Hollywood label has stuck with The Manner Music ever since. In reality, saying The Manner Music is a Hollwood novel is like saying Moby Dick is a Nantucket novel: not untrue but generally missing the point. Milton Hindus, a friend of Reznikoff and a stalwart supporter, came closer to the mark in noting the parallels between the book and Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. Both stories involve two men: one a prosperous pragmatist, the other an ascetic idealist. In both stories, the narrator is nameless; in both, he is at a loss to understand the other man’s obsession. Both are case studies demonstrating the observation of Reznikoff’s friend William Carlos Williams that “The pure products of America go crazy.”

Reznikoff’s Bartleby is a composer named Jude Dalsimer. Like Reznikoff, Dalsimer works and lives alone in Hollywood while working for a studio producer, known as Paul Pasha in the book, so that his wife could stay in New York and keep her job as a teacher. He doesn’t mingle with the other writers, avoids most parties. He rents a room in a little hotel in Santa Monica, far out the tramline from the studios. Like Reznikoff, he prefers to walk, usually for miles along the beach, down the coast as far as Redondo and Hermosa Beach.

In his introduction, Robert Creeley observes that the two characters in The Manner Music resemble two aspects of Reznikoff himself. As Reznikoff did for a time after leaving college, the narrator is a traveling salesman in dry goods, and his work allows him to meet his friend Jude in both New York and Hollywood. Like Reznikoff, who held down a steady job as a social workder for years, the narrator accepts the monotony and occasional humiliations of the work in return for its security: “Like all salesmen, I suppose, I am very patient. We soon learn to wait for hours in anterooms and to send our cards again and again and still to be pleasant and to smile.” The narrator accepts listening to Jude performing his music on the cheap piano in his apartment in the same manner. “I listened patiently then for an hour or more — most likely less — and again heard nothing that moved me.” Jude’s music isn’t to his taste — not like band music or “an old fellow singing old songs for pennies in the backyards.”

Charles Reznikoff in the late 1960s
Charles Reznikoff in the late 1960s

Jude Dalsimer, on the other hand, represents Reznikoff’s artistic self. Though he wrote and published his poetry throughout much of his working life, Reznikoff never gained much recognitition for it until very late and he tended not to discuss it with many of his acquaintances. As a fellow Brooklyn poet, Harvey Shapiro once wrote, “Reznikoff devoted his entire life to verse, and whatever he did is characterized by meticulously fine and painstaking craftsmanship.” None of his poems, Hindus observed, “were made merely in order to ‘sell and sell quickly.’ They are without exception patient labors of love, pure skill and artistic integrity, and they seem bound, in time, to find fit readers (however few or many) to respond to their muted appeal.”

Jude is not particularly concerned with the success of his music: “As to whether it will be sold or not, sung or played, that is really not my business. I am not going to bother about that too much: my job is to write it. That no one else can do.” If anything, he is deeply suspicious of the American culture of consumerism. He tells of a dinner party at which a German refugee, a former concentration camp prisoner, was asked to speak. Instead of talking about his experiences in Germany, however, he told the story of a friend who’d committed suicide soon after arriving in America. “Why? Why did he do it?” the man asked. “I will tell you why. Because of the indifference here!” Late in the book, when destitute, homeless, and hopeless, he burns all his compositions in a trashcan in Central Park.

Both Dalsimer and Reznikoff were also great walkers and listeners. Reznikoff’s letters to Syrkin are full of things seen on his walks:

A study in tempo of conversation: a pretty big boy and a little boy are walking together. The little boy is really tagging after the other one- eager to be a fellow. The older fellow is wearing a peculiar hat and the younger fellow asks, “What kind of hat is that?” No answer. “What kind of hat is that, Stanley?” emphasizing the name. Stanley answers cheerfully, “A monkey hat.” “What kind of hat is that?” the little fellow asks again, not what kind of hat is that (namely a “monkey hat”) but what kind of a hat is that (namely, the hat you have on). And again Stanley says curtly and cheerfully, pleased with his own wit, “A monkey hat.” But, after a pause he adds, “A small round sailor hat.” Specific enough, to be sure, but the little fellow now says aloud to himself, “A monkey hat,” wondering, perhaps, if it is really a kind of hat and if so what an attractive name for a hat and could he get one …

Dalsimer’s music is also drawn from what he sees on his walks. The narrator compares one piece to the sound of the wind “blowing down a street on an April evening, rattling windows and making the swinging signs of the stores squeak.” When Jude tries to recount recent incidents, the narrator says, “‘Better yet,’ and here I lied as all salesmen lie and flatter, ‘play them.'” “Well,” Jude replies, “I was taking a walk,” and he proceeds to play.

Some of the walks in The Manner Music show us a country deep in the grips of the Depression:

As I walked along the drive again, I saw a man coming towards me; a poor man by his clothes: he had no overcoat and his trousers were of a cheap goods without the tailor’s crease. We were alone, for the day was cold and the drive was windy. I saw that he had stopped and was watching me furtively; a man of forty or fifty with an honest face, I thought, lined by cared. When I had passed, I could see that he stooped to pick up something — probably a cigar butt or cigarette that someone about to step on a bus had thrown away. Perhaps he had been ashamed to stoop for it in front of me.

The narrator has his last encounter with Jude in an automat in Manhattan. “I noticed that a seam in the collar had parted and another in the shoulder and that the thread that edged the buttonhole in the lapel was unraveling.” Asked where he’s staying Jude replies, “I have the airiest room in New York.” Only later does the narrator understand what this means.

A number of Reznikoff’s poems make their way into The Manner Music — or perhaps vice-versa. In the novel, for example, the narrator recalls,

When I left the theatre it was raining. I went to my hotel through the wholesale district, the streets of which were empty at night, rain or no rain, although busy enough by day when offices and lofts were full of people. I passed an old woman selling newspapers from the shelter of a doorway. As I bought one, I glanced down at her feet.

“You were looking at my feet, weren’t you?” she asked. “Aren’t they terrible—so big in these rubbers. But it is better to have your feet look big than to get them wet,’ she added, still dubious. “A man lent them to me. They are rubbers for a man and I had to tie them with a string. But better than to be sick, eh?”

I took shelter in the doorway, too, to get out of the rain for a moment. “But how big my feet look in them,” she went on. I wondered as I listened, Does this old woman selling newspapers in the rain on this lonely corner still think it matters how her feet look—big or small? I looked at her again: whatever she had been only life was left — and vanity.

This shows up again in a passage from Inscriptions: 1944-1956:

It was raining and the street
empty. I passed an old woman selling newspapers.
As I bought one
I glanced at her feet.
“So big
in these rubbers.
But it’s better than to get them wet,” she added,
dubious, “and to be sick.
A man lent them. They are rubbers for a man, not me,
and I have to time them on with a string.
But how big my feet look!” I looked at her again:
only this was left — vanity.

Sirkin thought her husband might have kept the book a secret because of its portrait of Jude Dalsimer’s wife: “A petulant, pretty, notably unsympathetic female, a Zionist, a high school teacher who tactlessly keeps complaining about her fatigue and lets her talented, unappreciated husband end his poverty-striken quest in Bellevue. A roman-à-clef with a vengeance!” Reading Reznikoff’s Selected Letters, however, one sees that much of it was drawn from his letters to her. In September 1939, for example, as he saw his job with Albert Lewin about to come to an end, he wrote:

At lunch, and we go to lunch together every day, I am silent for long stretches and obviously comfortably so; now he makes conversation, tells stories I have heard before, and which he feels, somewhat uncomfortably that I have heard him tell; they are not particularly good stories, for example, how he dined with a certain friend and this friend engaged in a quarrel with somebody at another table, who was then insignificant but is now the head of a studio—a great man; I listen politely and think with some satisfaction that now I can make a suitable reply.

In The Manner Music, this becomes a lunch between Jude Dalsimer and Paul Pasha:

Paul and he went to the studio each day, but did nothing, waiting for the next move by the heads of the studio. They went out to lunch together, daily, for Paul no longer had any appointments. There was a change between them — slight but perceptible to both. Now that the relation of master and man was about to end — most likely in a week or two — they became equals again. At lunch Jude was generally silent. Comfortably so. It was Paul who tried to make conversation, who told stories which Jude had heard and which Paul felt, uncomfortably, that Jude had heard him tell.

Myrie Sirkin suspected that he wrote The Manner Music after William Carlos Williams suggested that the exercise might help him overcome a writer’s block he was experiencing in the late 1940s. “Perhaps it was the writing of this novel which enabled Reznikoff to overcome what appears to have been a psychic or spiritual blockage (whatever the causes were) to rediscover his ancient springs, to return to poetry,” Anthony Rudolf later speculated. This should not, however, diminish the value of The Manner Music. It is, in the words of Milton Hindus, “a small, multi-faceted gem” that deserves its place on the shelf of great American short novels alongside Bartleby.

The Manner Music, by Charles Reznikoff
Santa Barara: The Black Sparrow Press, 1977

Daylight in a Dream, by E. M. Butler (1951)

Cover of Daylight in a Dream by E. M. Butler

When Eliza Marian Butler, who published as E. M. Butler, died in November 1959, her Times obituary noted, among her many accomplishments, that “She also published two not very good novels.” Daylight in a Dream was the first, and I hope here to demonstrate that the Times writer was not only tactless but wrong.

The story in Daylight in a Dream reminded me a bit of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Solder and Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. In all three books, a character is confronted by the uncomfortable fact that they’ve fundamentally misunderstood some key aspect of their past — the kind of realization that shakes a person to the roots. In this case, however, the fiction is also an attempt by its author to look back on her experiences — in particular Butler’s experiences during World War One — through the eyes of an alter ego.

Butler’s fictional self, Miss Rawlinson, is known and feared among the other faculty at Arcady Teaching College as “Old Raw.” “Her behaviour, her silences, her very pronunciation and choice of words implied a tacit criticism of their standards of conduct.” When they all relapse “one and all into mental undress” at the end of a hard day, she holds herself erect and aloof. She refuses to engage in gossip or impugn the good character and motives of the Principal, Miss Cardigan. “You ought to be governess to the Vere de Veres, that’s what you should be,” one of them snips sarcastically. [The Vere de Veres refers to a family of stratospheric nobility invented in a Tennyson poem, the source of the line “Kind hearts are more than coronets/and simple faith than Norman blood.”]

The very qualities that alienate “Old Raw” from her common room peers were what endeared her to the women’s nursing unit she served with on the Eastern Front in Russia in 1916-17. They were “fascinated by her phraseology, by her excessive personal modesty, by her manners, by her morals, by everything that was hers.” Soon after her arrival, someone refers to her as “Heart of Oak” and this quickly becomes her universal pet-name, “Oakey Darling.” Her Red Cross commander recommends her to Dr. Everet, the head of the unit, as “a capable mechanic, as steady as a rock, hasn’t a nerve in her body or one flighty thought in her head.”

Dr. Elsie Inglis in the uniform of the Scottish Woman’s Hospital

Dr. Everet is Butler’s fictional substitute for Dr. Elsie Inglis, the Scottish surgeon and suffragette who established the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service at the start of World War One. The SWFHS organized and deployed field hospitals manned by women volunteers near the front lines in France, Romania, Russia, Macedonia, and Serbia. Inglis led the mission to Russia, which E. M. Butler joined as a translator and driver in 1916.

Already fluent in German and French and working as an assistant lecturer at Newnham College, Butler added a third language to make herself useful in the war effort. As she later wrote in her autobiography Paper Boats (1959) (available on the Open Library), “I set about learning Russian as a first step to getting out to Russia with the Red Cross or in any other way.” The Red Cross took her word that she could speak Russian and assigned her to escort four nurses down to the SWH unit already in place in Bessarabia (now part of Moldova), traveling via Norway, Sweden, Finland and down through much of White Russia and the Ukraine.

Along the way, she had an unsettling encounter with a seer while waiting to change trains in St. Petersburg. “Kakoe narod? (What people?),” the woman asked Butler. “Angliski,” she replied. “Ah,” the woman exclaimed, “Haroshi narod! (A fine people).” The woman told her to listen, then recited this list of names: “Kathleen Theresa Blake, Maude Juhemie, Rose Georgina, Theobald Blake, Fitzwalter, Francis James.” Despite the mispronunciation, Butler recognized the names of her six brothers and sisters. Butler, who later wrote an influential book on Ritual and Magic (1949), was always open to supernatural phenomena and accepted the woman’s instruction to “Go where you are waited for,” despite the warnings of the nurses accompanying her. Butler later claimed that the ghost of her first biographical subject Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau came to her while she was studying his papers and promised to make his handwriting decipherable.

Butler described her time at the front as “the happiest in my life.” In Paper Boats, she recalled odd mix of the grim and the sublime she experienced there:

At least twice every night it was my duty to collect all the bed-pans in the hospital and all the blood-stained dressings, empty them into so-called sanitary pails and stagger with them for about a quarter of a mile across the steppe to the so-called sanitary trench. It was noisome work, and frightening too, for I was nearly always accompanied by a savage pack of pariah dogs snapping and snarling at my heels. On the way back, I used to pause, drink in great gulps of air and look up at the stars. I would then become conscious of a sound never heard in the daytime. It was as if the steppe were sighing, softly, hopelessly, uncomplainingly. It was in fact the subdued chorus of the wounded men, hundreds of them, moaning in the night. They were heroically silent under suffering by day; but nature spoke at nightfall.

The dynamo powering the SWH unit in Russia was the organization’s founder, Dr. Inglis. Butler pays eloquent tribute to Inglis in Daylight in a Dream:

There was a driving-power in her fragile body which would have put a Rolls-Royce to shame, a genius for getting miracles to happen, and administrative gifts hardly distinguishable from statesmanship; for she refused to recognise impossibilities, and the hearts of her subordinates often sank like lead when she issued orders which must be obeyed and yet seemed impossible to fulfil.

A description that makes one long for such leadership today’s pandemic. In her book, British Women of the Eastern Front: War, Writing and Experience in Serbia and Russia, 1914-20, Angela K. Smith calls the SWH units “one of the most successful women’s organisations of the war”: “Of primary importance, they enabled women doctors to get to the heart of the action and save lives.” Inglis continued to work with the unit even after it became clear she was dying from cancer.

In October 1917, recognizing the increasing instability of the situation in Russia as the war was being overtaken by revolution, Dr. Inglis was ordered to evacuate her unit and take it by train to Archangel, from where it would sail home to England to be reorganized and sent to support the Serbian army fighting in Macedonia. Butler vividly recalls the long and difficult journey all the way from Odessa to the port in the Arctic north.

At one point, the driver takes the train through Moscow at high speed to avoid being stopped and attacked by rioting mobs. “Outside was the unknown and the unknowable,” she writes. “Inside, crowded together in fourth-class compartments, eating what little bully-beef there was out of battered tins, sharing knives, forks, and spoons and their inmost thoughts a handful of girls and women were living with an intensity which perhaps comes to few in a lifetime; and one of them with equal intensity was dying.”

This train journey is at the heart of the crucial revelation that comes to Miss Rawlinson. She encounters another former member of the unit, Miss Pearson, and they dine together, sharing memories. Pearson makes a passing comment to the unit’s almost losing all its supplies just before sailing from Archangel. Rawlinson is mystified and Pearson recounts a long and complicated tale of how Brook, the woman charged with getting the equipment on board, battled with recalcitrant rail officials and customs officers and managed, despite speaking almost no Russian and the imminent start of a nationwide strike, to prevent its being abandoned miles outside Archangel on a lonely siding.

This forces Rawlinson to remember the task given her at the start of the trip from Odessa: “You will place yourself unreservedly at Brook’s disposal on the journey whenever she needs help with the equipment.” When Brook had been asked who she wanted as an assistant, she had specifically picked “Oakey Darling.” Though Oakey Darling had accompanied Brook in checking on the cars holding the unit’s supplies at every stop along the way, when they arrived at Archangel she thoughtlessly boarded the freighter with the rest of the group, leaving Brook in the lurch. This, Rawlinson suddenly realizes, was why she had been ostracized — suddenly and without explanation, on the voyage back to England and thereafter. “There must be a blind spot in her somewhere,” she thinks. “That blind spot was her heart.”

E. M. Butler in her library at Cambridge

In reality, it was Butler who saved the equipment. After pleading fruitlessly with the Archangel station master to shift the cars so the equipment could be loaded, she sought Dr. Inglis in her cabin on the Porto Lisboa. “She opened eyes which looked enormous in her small, white, freckled face, and whispered: ‘You must either get the equipment on board before we sail, or stay behind to guard it. Your duty is to the equipment.” Butler returned to the rail yard, where she spotted a last lone engine being returned to its depot in preparation for the strike. “In much more fluent Russian than I have ever commanded,” she recalled, “I told him what lay in store for me if those vans weren’t shifted immediately; and to my horror and dismay I found myself pulling out the vox humana stop. That did it. Without a word said on his side, the engine was driven up to the vans, coupled to them and driven up to the quay.”

Rawlinson leaves the unit when it arrives back in England. As with the real Elsie Inglis, Dr. Everet survives long enough to salute the Serbian troops accompanying the unit as they debark in Newcastle, only to retire to a nearby hotel and die in her sleep. Butler herself stayed with the SWH through its time in Serbia, returning to England in December 1918, whereupon she was hospitalized for nearly a year with malaria.

She went back to lecturing at Newnham in 1921 and remained until 1935, when she took a full professorship at the University of Manchester. She then returned to Cambridge in glory in 1945 as the Schroeder Professor, the pre-eminent faculty post in German language and literature. Her partner, Isaline Blew Horner, was a leading scholar of Pali literature, the canon of religious writings at the core of Theravada Buddhism. In keeping with the discretion of Butler’s time, Horner names appears just once, and in an innocuous context, in Butler’s autobiography. When he reviewed Paper Boats for the Telegraph, Anthony Powell wrote, “There is nowhere else in the world except these islands where women of Miss Butler’s kind are produced, scholarly and daring lades, never wholly out of touch with a kind of Jane Austen primness even at their most rebellious and outspoken, and in the midst of unlikely adventures.”

Daylight in a Dream is a slight novel, more of a novella at a mere 125 pages. But the Times did it and Butler a disservice by calling it “not very good.” In reality, it’s the kind of book that can only be written late in life, when the blacks and whites of youth and idealism have shaded and grown subtle with age and perspective. A book of the quality of A River Runs Through It or H. L. Davis’s The Winds of Morning — books in which, as I once wrote, the author’s voice is “spare, ironic, experienced but never claiming to be wise, with a soft-spoken good humor.” It’s also a book where you get the sense that by waiting so long to tell the story, the author was able to make it as short as possible.

Daylight in a Dream, by E. M. Butler
London: The Hogarth Press, 1951

Spillville, by Patrica Hampl (1987)

Cover of Spillville by Patricia Hampl

Reading Spillville is a pleasant way to take a trip while cooped up in lockdown. It’s short, like the trip Patricia Hampl and artist Steven Sorman took in the summer of 1986, driving down from Minneapolis to Spillville, Iowa, where the composer Antonin Dvorák spent a summer with his family in 1893.

Back in 1893, Spillville was an enclave of Bohemia in northeast Iowa. “These people came to this place about forty years ago, mostly from the neighborhood of Písek, Tábor,” Dvorák wrote a friend in Prague. “All the poorest of the poor. And after great hardships and struggle, they are very well off here.” By the time Dvorák came to visit, the Czech emigrants had erected a fine church, St. Wenceslas’, and boasted a post office, park, and a ring of prosperous farms surrounding the town — although the Dvoráks still had to come by carriage from the nearest train station in Calmar.

View of Spillville, Iowa in 1905
View of Spillville, Iowa in 1905

Dvorák had been coaxed to Spillville by his secretary, Josef Kovarík, whose parents had settled there. He liked that Spillville wasn’t on the railroad: less noise to block out the birdsongs. The morning after the Dvorák arrived, Kova?ík’s mother spotted the composer walking around at 5 o’clock in the morning. Was anything wrong, she asked? No, he replied. It was just that for the first time in eight months since coming to America, he could hear the birds. Dvorák’s job as director of the National Conservatory of Music required him to take an apartment in Manhattan, where the noise of horse traffic, steam trains, ships, and crowds was a constant annoyance.

As Hampl rides in the backseat with Sorman’s daughter, she realizes how she’s shut herself off to the landscape. “Story is impatient with description, and therefore with landscape’s passive willingness to be framed into a picture.” “But now, passing through this spring farmland,” she observes, “the love of place creates a desire to pause for description.” Part of that, I think, is because the landscape around Spillville is rich but not overwhelming. I grew up in Seattle, where on any clear day you can look south as see Mt. Rainier looming massive and blueish-white. It is so much bigger than anything man will ever build, always reminding you that you are puny and short-lived.

Spillville, on the other hand, has under 400 inhabitants today and wasn’t bigger than that by more than a few dozen in 1893. Dvorák could easily walk from one end of town and back after breakfast, before settling down to compose. Although some claim he wrote his best-known symphony, No. 9, From the New World, in Spillville, that work was finished before he left New York. He did, however, write his popular melody “Humoresque,” a piano quintet (Opus 97), and his String Quartet No. 12, the American. He translated the song of the scarlet tanager he heard there into the scherzo of the quartet.

Hampl doesn’t try to analyze Dvorák’s work or extract more than is obvious from his experiences there. Though not a musician herself, she remembers from her piano lessons with Sister Mary Louis an essential lesson that any good musician has to learn:

“Count first, dear,” she urged. “Then work on feeling.”

Feeling was fine, feeling was indispensable — she granted that. Nothing wrong with feeling. But — this was her point — I had feeling. No need to work further on feeling.

Besides, she would say gently. always a reluctant corrector, there was no work to feeling. And music was work.

Not much beyond the compositions, long walks, and quiet evenings in the summer heat happened during Dvorák’s stay. There might have been some gossip about his oldest daughter Otýlie and one of the Indian men in town, but it died out once they left in September. Not much happens during Hampl and Sorman’s visit, either. They walk through St. Wenceslas, sit in the park with the Dvorák memorial, and tour the one showcase in town, the Bily Clocks museum, which occupies the first floor of the house the Dvoráks rented. The museum is filled with the elaborate wooden clock cases hand-carved by the bachelor brothers Frank and Joseph Bily over six decades. Then, like the Dvoráks , they head back up the highway to Calmar and home.

Barely 100 pages, Spillville is a pleasant trip to a small river town and the quiet that descends when the sound of the highway traffic falls away and there are just the crickets, the birds, and people softly talking.

Spillville, by Patricia Hampl
Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1987

The Least of These, by Celia Dale (1943)

Cover of first US edition of The Least of These by Celia Dale

Celia Dale is best known as an accomplished crime writer, winning, in fact, the Crime Writers’ Association Best Short Story of the Year award one year — but that’s a bit of a limiting label, similar to calling Georges Simenon an accomplished crime writer even if he’d never written a single Inspector Maigret policier. The police usually play a minor supporting role in the dozen or so “crime” novels she wrote from 1950 on. Instead, she focuses on what Eileen Dewhurst called the “atmosphere of understated menace pervading superficially normal lives.” In her last novel, Sheep’s Clothing (1988), for example, two women posing as social workers trick the old and slow out of their mattress-hidden fortunes — a story closer in mood to Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori than to something by P. D. James. She was at her best in noting what one reviewer called, “the minutely observed details of lower middle class life.”

These minutely observed details are at the heart of her first novel, The Least of These, which follows one lower middle class London family, the Sharps, through their experience of the Blitz. The widowed Mrs. Sharp would be certain to put the stress in that phrase on middle rather than lower. When they begin making their evening journey to sleep in their local Underground station, she notes that”there were not very many of the Sharp’s kind down there with them.” But she distrusts the Edwardian Baroque construction of their terrace house and loses what little faith she had in garden Anderson shelters after a near-hit almost kills a neighboring family.

The Least of These is really less a novel than a fictionalized account of life for ordinary Londoners during the Blitz. In early September, the first raids are more novelty than threat. “That Man’s here again,” a nightclub emcee announces as the sirens sound and the audience chuckles. Queenie, the middle daughter, rides along with a boyfriend, taking part in a Sunday caravan to see the damage from an early raid. “Slowly, foot by foot, the cars crawled nearer, and in every vehicle faces gaped at this inconceivable, this fantastic thing — a London shop, wrecked by a bomb. A bomb!”

As the raids continue, the disruptions they cause increase. “Travelling was queer, too, since the raids had started: you never knew where you would find yourself.” Buses are forced to detour through hitherto undisturbed neighborhoods, much to their consternation. “You would look out suddenly and find the bus lumbering diffidently down an avenue of villas, all shocked and shut away behind their outraged railings. Blocks begin to be pocked by ruins left by direct hits. The survivors “lowered their blinds and turned their eyes away, denying the unseemly.” Gaps appear in the assembly lines in factories. “Some of the workpeople were dead, some were in hospital; a few had packed it up and gone to relatives in the country.” Windows are boarded up. Tea is given up when a bomb strikes a water main. Still, they carry on as they can — “you cannot live without wages.”

But then a bomb hits the house next door to Mrs. Sharp’s eldest daughter Effie, her husband and children. “And in the timeless nightmare of a second, the Davises and Effie heard the bones of their house groaning and crunching above them … grinding and crumbling and sifting and interlocking” until the sounds fall away and dust falls like silent snow. As so Mrs. Sharp decides they’re best off spending their nights in the Underground.

Latecomers, the Sharps find “no corners vacant, no merciful angled wall against which to build, sured that your back is guarded and unspied upon;” “All the angles and crannies were taken, old women sat there in stockinged feet, men lounged with newspapers, babies slept.” I’m no Blitz scholar, but The Least of These struck me as perhaps the most vivid account of what it’s like to shelter night after night on the platforms and stairways of an Underground station. As many of us are learning in this pandemic, people can adapt remarkably quickly to radical changes in circumstances if it means survival. Indeed, the abnormal soon becomes normal through habit:

On the Sunday some of the families left their children down there all day to make sure of keeping their places at night. The platforms and corridors filled up earlier than before, and there were more people, squashing tight together along the walls, voluable and busy and determined to live at least this night in safety. Children squalled and ran under the yellow light, like waxen animated dolls; old men, grey and threadbare as their clothes, hunched themselves between raucous mothers wearing pinafores beneath their shabby overcoats. Youths in jackets as loud as their laughter, slick as their slick hair, thrust and lounged about the corridors; the girls giggled together, prinking their Woolworth jewellry above their tight trousers. For as night followed night a sort of uniform had been evolved among the glamour girls of the tube stations — the full battlement of war-paint, jewellry, high heels, curled coiffures, all bravely worn and yielding not a fraction to the exigencies of death and its avoidance; and with it all, trousers, the sole acknowledgment of war’s existence.

People sheltering in the Elephant and Castle Underground station during the Blitz
People sheltering in the Elephant and Castle Underground station during the Blitz

Some take advantages of the changes. One of the Sharp girls, Reenie, gets involved with a gang that stops lorries along deserted roads and steals cigarettes and other rationed items. Prostitutes find it easier to set up trade in the remnants of ruined houses. Soon, “everything, everyone” is different. Queenie finds she “could hardly remember what their lives were like before the raids started. Cinemas, clothes, dances, fun, the scores of people bound up in that existence who had vanished utterly.” She imagines that even the German aircrews flying overhead each night growing bored with the routine, happy to head home “over the Channel, eating sandwiches, emptying their flasks of coffee, while down below the brittle crust of London is broken in a new place….”

The Least of These suffers some of the typical faults of a first novel. The narrative arc is a flat straight line running from early September 1940 to some months later with barely a diversion. We start with the Sharps and we follow along with them through a relentless chronology to an ending in which Dale, according to one reviewer, J. C. Trewin, “outdoes Elizabethan tragedy in a last paragraph which disposes of the entire dramatis personae in less than a dozen lines.”

But Dale was already demonstrating her remarkable talent for observation — for observing the fine telling details of individuals, their dress, manners, and thoughts; and for observing people in numbers, their simplicity and stupidity. She almost certainly spent just as many nights on the cold, crowded platform of a tube station, huddled close to hundreds of strangers, hearing the coughs, whispers, and snores, smelling the urine from the little boys whose tired mothers usher them to the edge of the platform (“‘At’s what it’s for, ain’t it?”), trying to shut out the glare of the lights overhead. And she knew the Sharps, or people like them, their fears and ambitions and favorite comforts. It’s this knowledge that makes The Least of These such a compelling book. It takes a crisis such as we’re experiencing now to remind us how universal some isolated and specific stories can be.

The Least of These, by Celia Dale
London: Hurst & Blackett Ltd., 1943
New York: Macmillan & Company, 1944

A Pin’s Fee, by Peter de Polnay (1947)

Cover of <em>A Pin's Fee</em>. Design by Margaret de Polnay, 1947.
Cover of A Pin’s Fee. Design by Margaret de Polnay, 1947.

I’ve probably seen Peter de Polnay’s name on the spine of books as long as I’ve been going to used bookstores, but it was only two years ago that I actually read one of his books — a relatively late novel, Blood and Water (1975). In my post, I compared de Polnay to Simenon’s “straight” novels, the ones without Inspector Maigret, which are often about the most mundane individuals finding themselves in extreme situations — on the run, committing murder, being blackmailed. Having read several more de Polnays, I’d moderate that comparison slightly. While de Polnay’s characters are every bit as unexceptional as Simenon’s, their situations tend to be more awkward than extreme, more uncomfortable than unendurable. Kind of like our situations now, if you’re lucky enough to only have to tolerate being locked down during this pandemic.

Peter de Polnay wrote nearly 100 books in the space of 40-some years and it’s pretty much a given that anyone who writes 100 books will produce a fair amount of justly neglected ones. The odds on there being a masterpiece or three among the 100 are long; but it’s a lead-pipe cinch that some of them are dreck. If anyone ever bothered to read through the entire de Polnay oeuvre, he or she didn’t bother to make their notes available, so there is no easy way to know in advance where any title you might pick up might fall on the masterpiece-to-dreck spectrum. Martin Black grabbed de Polnay’s 33rd novel, The Run of the Night, for example, and found it “not a good book…. The prose is wooden and clunky, the characters are uninspired and uninteresting.” When B.S. Johnson reviewed the novel back in 1963, he was equally blunt: “On almost every page of The Run of Night there are faults of sentence construction, punctuation, or grammar, this is the kind of novel which reads as though it was never revised (let alone proof-read)….”

I confess I chose to read A Pin’s Fee for no other reason than its cover. That bold color-blocked design — by de Polnay’s first wife Margaret — must have radiated when it sat on display tables back in 1947. It’s far more vibrant than anything else that would have sat in the fiction section, like something by Esphyr Slobodkina or Matisse in his papercut period.

The cover is by far the liveliest thing in this novel, which largely takes place in a grey, battered London still recovering from the war. Intact houses often look out on the rubble of bombed ones; when a character hears thunder from a sudden storm, he instinctly waits for the sound of sirens and collapsing buildings to follow. A few scenes take place in settings of great elegance — a cocktail party in a suite at Claridge’s — but more are in squalid flats, dingy pubs and sordid private clubs.

De Polnay moved easily in high society and low. He’d been raised in luxury, waited on by servants and governnesses, and he’d slept in flea-ridden flophouses. He’d been a hobo, tram-driver and store clerk in Argentina, maneuvered through the black marketing networks in occupied Paris, and seen the birth of his son announced in the “Court Circular” column in The Times. He’d gambled in the Casino at Monte Carlo, winning and losing a fortune, and by the time he was writing this book, just hitting his stride as a prolific middlebrow author, with sales and reviews respectable enough to assure an income high enough for summers on the Riviera and occasional lunches at the Savoy.

Cover of A Pin's Fee by Peter de Polnay
The cover of this cheap Harold Hill & Son reissue of A Pin’s Fee has nothing to do with the actual story.

I found reading A Pin’s Fee a bit like watching a good B-movie from the Forties or Fifties. I went along as much for the period details, the interiors and exteriors, the lighting and costumes, as for the writing and story. I half suspect that De Polnay himself wasn’t sure where he was headed when he started. The story could have been about a father with a scandalous past or intrigue with a nearby country neighbor, but it ended up being about entanglement with a woman with a mysterious history, thrice-divorced … perhaps a high-priced prostitute? He was a good 40 pages into a 200-page book before he grabbed a narrative line and ran with it.

De Polnay takes his title from a line in Hamlet (Act I, Scene 4). Hamlet scoffs at the notion he should fear approaching the ghost of his father: “I do not set my life at a pin’s fee/And for my soul/what can it do to that/Being a thing immortal as itself?” Pins being one of the first mass-produced articles of Shakespeare’s day, “a pin’s fee” was another way of saying “not worth much.” Despite the fact that de Polnay’s leading character Nigel has enough of a stock portfolio to keep him in a country house and write an occasional book review or exhibition catalogue piece, he walks through his life as if it’s worth little more than a pin’s fee. While it makes him a less than compelling protagonist, it serves him well as an observer of the swank and the skids.

Cover of 1970 reissue of A Pin's Fee
This 1970 Howard Baker reissue cover is slightly more accurate. The lead character does frequent the British Museum Reading Room.

De Polnay is at his best depicting the desperation of people trying to hold onto their comfortable lives, as in this Kensington hotel filled with what he calls “evacuees from Menton” — Menton being the French Riviera resort that catered to people of a certain age and income, accustomed to good but not showy food and discreet help and able to afford a room in a respectable full-board hotel:

Not one young face, and while he waited for his food he looked first at this face, then at that, and since the food was slow in arriving he had examined every face by the time a waitress, with a melancholy squint, brought his soup. All those faces were the faces of usurers. They hung on to life, counting every second, hating every second, but none the less each new second was a second to add to the hoard.

“All those faces were the faces of usurers.” Such intermittent flashes of brutal cynicism shine like gems in the ashpile. On the other hand, it’s also some of the better passages that also betray the sloppiness of de Polnay’s prose:

He got in and found an empty compartment, but as he settled down in a corner seat he noticed that a small elderly woman was with him, nevertheless. She was huddled up in the corner, her hair was grey and she was full of angry misery. She looked at him and began to hate him. She hated him openly and conspicuously, and he couldn’t get on with The Time but had to glance at her at regular intervals: as though to be on the alert in order to duck swiftly when the hatred attacked him. She had a pale, saintly face with was swollen with hatred. Her bag, resting on her knees, was shiny black, and because her eyes were black, too, he had the irresponsible fancy that today she was wearing black eyes to match her bag.

There are several things right and wrong here. The last sentence, cut down by at least five words, should come right after “her hair was grey,” etc.. Her “face swollen with hatred” should follow. The paragraph should end with Nigel’s discomfort. The image of the old woman in the corner beaming hatred at Nigel is great, but the clunkiness of the prose diffuses its intensity.

I spent a good amount of my most recent lockdown Sunday reading A Pin’s Fee, and it was one of the more relaxing things I’ve done since this mess started. De Polnay could tell a good story even when it wasn’t clear to me — or, I think, to him — where it was going. While he was no master of prose style, he had a sure hand when it came to flawed people and their haunts. If anything, I closed the book with a renewed enthusiasm to venture further in the vast expanse of Peter de Polnay’s oeuvre.

A Pin’s Fee, by Peter de Polnay
London: Hutchinson & Co., 1947
London: Harold Hill & Son, 1948
London: Howard Baker, 1970

Development, by Bryher (1920)

Cover of first US edition of Development

This is my contribution to the #1920Club, a unique collective reading event organized by Kaggsy and Simon Thomas. I offered some less-than-well-known candidates last week, but I deliberately saved this one for myself.

Development was the first novel published by Bryher, pen-name of Annie Winifred Ellerman. It was the first of three loosely-fictionalized autobiographical novels, followed by Two Selves (1923), which was first published by Contact Editions, the Paris-based press established by Robert McAlmon and West (1925). All three of the books are virtually unattainable in first edition, but the University of Wisconsin Press did reissue the first two books as Two Novels: Development and Two Selves, edited by Joanne Winning, back in 2000.

Development takes Nancy — Bryher’s fictional self — from her earliest conscious memories at the age of three or so to her first visit to the Scilly Isles around the age of 17. The Scillies were deeply important to Bryher, to the point that she took the name of one of the isles as her pseudonym, and the remote wildness of the Scillies seems to have motivated her to reject many of the customs and values of the conventional world she’d been raised in.

Bryher was one of Dorothy Richardson’s closest and most loyal friends, and Richardson’s Pilgrimage, which was itself (to some extent) a fictional autobiography, was clearly an inspiration. As in Pilgrimage, the story is told through the stream of the lead character’s consciousness, but in Bryher’s case, there’s a certain stiffness to the stream, if that makes any sense. Pilgrimage radiates such a vibrant sense of living in the world; in Development, on the other hand, the world is seen through a very literary/rational sensibility. And, frankly, one perhaps a little too satisfied with its own opinions — something it was refreshing to see is not unique to young men.

Perhaps this is because Bryher felt she had been born the wrong gender. As she once wrote her long-time lover, the American poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), “I am quite justified in pleading I ought to be a boy—I am just a girl by accident.” At a very young age, Nancy finds herself thinking, “Her one regret was that she was a girl.” When many little girls wish for dolls, Nancy dreams of owning a pocket-knife. She longs to be a sailor, imagines stowing away on a ship when she turns fourteen: “Why was she born with a boy’s heart when she might not go to sea?”

Little of Nancy’s knowledge of boys comes from first-hand experience. The only child of an enormously wealthy father — Sir John Ellerman, Bryher’s father, owned shipping lines and newspapers and was likely one of the richest men in Edwardian England — Nancy rarely have the opportunity to play with others. “Henceforth, her games should be shared with her elephant, a safer and quieter companion” than a girl she encounters one day in front of her house in Cornwall. She also learns about the world through books written for boys, especially the historical novels of G. A. Henty. Although Bryher never mentions the novelist, it’s clear that her first inspiration is Henty’s 1887 novel, The Young Carthaginian, A Story of the Time of Hannibal. Nancy begins to write her first novel: “Hanno was a Carthaginian boy. He was nine years old. He was very glad because he was going on his first campaign” — taking her hero’s name from one of Henty’s leading characters. The allure of Carthage fades, however, when she sees the actual remains of the city “a darkness of mud, a greyishness that held no violet about it, set with a few bleak stones.”

Cover of the U. of Wisconsin edition of Two Novel: Development and Two Selves, by Bryher

If Bryher/Nancy is sure she was meant to be a boy, she’s equally sure she was meant to be a writer. Even more frequent than her dreams of the sea are those of writing a book. One reason that language has such importance for Nancy is that she is a synesthetic. As she grows, her associations between words and colors grows more intense — “until her whole vocabulary became a palette of colours, luminous gold, a flushed rose, tones neither sapphire nor violet, but the shade of southern water.” This sensation extends even to letters: “Seven letters were white, C, G, Q, S, T, O, and U; three of the others were black, D, E, and I. W was crimson; H, M, and Y were various shades of gold and primrose.” Because of Nancy’s fascination with language, Development is as much as anything a bibliomemoir — long before anyone was tossing that word around. We follow along as she falls in love with Shakespeare, partly for his poetry, mostly for his history, dislikes Keats, gorges herself in the lush exoticism of Salammbô. The third and final section of Development, “Transition,” is a catalogue of the reading of her late teens, each book leading her towards the one she is preparing to write. Fortunately, when she does put pen to paper, she sticks to original material: “The intervals of her reading Nancy filled with her own manuscript, wrought neither of imagination nor remembered stories but of the one experience she knew from end to end — herself.”

Before this last burst of the intellectual development in her late teens, however, Nancy has to endure her middle passage: boarding school, or as Bryher un-subtly titles this section, “Bondage.” Like Bryher, Nancy is sent relatively late to a girl’s school, joining the Fourth Year and quickly being progressed to the Fifth. Her two years, though, seem an eternity. A decade before Antonia White’s Frost in May, fifty years ahead of Deschooling Society, Bryher was scathing in her criticism of mass education. Downwood — the fictional equivalent of Queenswood, the school Bryher attended — is a typically grim English boarding school, “one of the coldest, bleakest places she had seen, with open windows, worn-out carpets, and a mass of white paint inside, and outside a long weedy lawn and a few flower-pots.” While slightly more comfortable than Dicken’s Dotheboys Hall, Downwood is hardly better in its approach to instruction. Rote learning, repetition, memorization, and progress in locked step are the hallmarks of its regime, compounded by ruthless conformity. Nancy learns never to mention she has travelled widely. Having never really known other children, she finds them more like cattle. “For the first time the spirit of the crowd — an oppressed thing in turn oppressing, judge of outward aspect only, blind to the finer shades, with the strength of the sloth,
the ferocity of a brute — weighed her and weighed her distrustfully.” The effect of being in class is deadening: “Not a girl was idle, joyfully idle; not a mind was interested; not a thought was alert.”

Cover of first UK edition of Development by Bryher

As much as we sympathize with Nancy, there is a certain superiority in her views towards her classmates that’s hard to like. She pities them “the poverty of their monotonous restricted thought.” Indeed, as much as I enjoyed Development, I found it undermined by a deep-seated solipsism. For great stretches of the book, it really does seem as if no one else exists. At one point as she recounts Nancy’s experiences around the Mediterranean, for example, Bryher writes, “Unshaken from her Italian allegiance, Nancy left, one January morning, for Algiers.” Nancy is at this stage around the age of 10 or 11. Nancy didn’t leave for Algiers — she most certainly went along as one of a party led by her mother or father or both. Ditto for the visits to Egypt, Greece, Italy, France, Spain, etc.. Did Nancy have a governness? A tutor? Apparently not. In reference to her own parents, the words “mother” and “father” appear just three times each. Looking back, I see I had much the same impression about Bryher’s much-later non-fictional memoir: “The Heart to Artemis is remarkably depersonalized. If Bryher were to take a Myers-Briggs test, I’m pretty sure she would prove to be an NT. We learn a great deal about her thoughts and very little about her feelings. For a life so full of experiences, it’s almost creepily dispassionate.”

Development was in some ways Bryher’s most successful novel. Published in both England and the U.S., it went into second printings. One reason was the controversy stirred up by her account of Downwood. After publishing an article titled “Cramped School Girls” that summarized Bryher’s descriptions of the school, The Daily Mail solicited “the opinions of our readers, particularly those who have attended such schools as are the subject of Miss Bryher’s outspoken criticism.” Over the next few days, numerous women wrote in. One girl said “To pass examinations was the main object at my school. The rules were particularly stupid.” A former teacher said she had led “the cramped life of a nun,” though she felt the experience of the war meant that many were coming back “with a far more human outlook.” A Miss Cowdroy, principal of Crouch End School, however, thought that schools like Downwood had become “as extinct as the dodo. Every modern school aims at complete self-development and self-expression.” One father supported Bryher, writing that “Parents need to insist upon the reform of the mid-Victorian system,” while Avery H. Forbes, a teacher with 38 years’ experience argued somewhat ironically that “girls are far better taught than are boys of the same age.”

Bryher responded with a letter to the editor, rejecting Miss Cowdroy’s argument and suggesting that schools like Downwood weren’t becoming extinct fast enough. She spread the fault widely if evenly: “I blame the parents. It is their duty to insist that a suitable and healthy education should be given to their children…. I blame the teachers. They should insist on freedom of life and thought…. I blame the children themselves. They should fight for an education that will fit them for their future life….” The Mail, however, gave the last word to Miss Angela Brazil from Coventry, who said she’d received letters from hundreds of schoolgirls, most of whom wrote of the “gorgeous fun” they had at school. Despite Miss Brazil’s optimism, though, sadly too many of Bryher’s criticisms of Downwood remain valid for our schools a hundred years later.

Development, by Bryher
London: Constable, 1920
New York: Macmillan, 1920

Hot-House, by G. E. Trevelyan (1933)

Title page from G. E. Trevelyan's Hot-House

In a biographical sketch, G. E. (Gertrude Eileen) Trevelyan wrote of her time at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford: “Did not: play hockey, act, row, take part in debates, political or literary, contribute to the Isis or attend cocoa parties, herein failing to conform to the social standards commonly required of women students.” If we go by Hot-House, her fictional account of one young woman’s three years at Oxford, it’s clear she didn’t think much of those standards. Trevelyan said her chief accomplishments at Oxford were developing “smoker’s throat and a taste for misanthrophic reflection.”

Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan from the Oxford Chronicle, June 17, 1927
Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan from the Oxford Chronicle, June 17, 1927

She didn’t omit mention of her winning the 1927 Newdigate Prize for English verse — the first ever by a woman. The novelty of the award led to the story being picked up by wire services and reprinted in newspapers worldwide — in everything from The Daily Mail to The St. Louis Daily Livestock Reporter to The Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser. Trevelyan was presented the prize at the Encaenia ceremony, following the award of degrees honoris causa to Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander during the First World War, Field Marshal Viscount Edmund Allenby, who freed the Middle East from the Ottoman Turks, and Etienne Gilson, a French philosopher. The day before, there had been a total eclipse of the sun, the first visible in England since 1724, and most of the male students at Oxford had taken the event as an excuse to leave early. “This,” The Oxford Times asserted, “doubtless explained the presence in the gallery of many undergraduettes in their quaint hats.” Trevelyan herself chocked up the publicity surrounding her award to astonishment at “evident revolutionary tendencies at work in the University.” The fact that the University Council had decided, just two weeks prior, to limit the number of women students to 620 suggests it wasn’t much of a revolution.

Trevelyan made her analogy for Oxford’s women’s colleges clear on her title page, including a definition from Chamber’s Dictionary: “Hot-house: a house kept hot for the rearing of tender plants.” Anyone who’s ever been in a hot-house knows that in addition to providing an benign environments for growing plants, their warm, humid atmospheres can also be suffocating. This certainly seems to have been Trevelyan’s view of her own school. From reading Hot-House, one gets the impression that what Queen Anne’s College — Trevelyan’s fictional stand-in for Lady Margaret Hall — fostered was not learning or personal growth but gossip and relentless surveillance. Everyone seems to keep track of everyone else. When Mina, the impressionable young woman at the center of Trevelyan’s story, runs down the hall in her pajamas and collapses in a hysterical fit outside the door of a fellow student, it’s all anyone talks about the next day.

In the servant’s hall: “Lyin’ on the floor, she was, all rolled in an eiderdown. Cryin’ somethin’ cruel.”

In the kitchen: “Did you hear that? How one of the maids saw a stewdent rolling on the floor in New Building corridor and screamin’ fit to bring the house down?”

In the Common Room: “Yes, in the New Building corridor. On Sunday night.”

In the Senior Common Room: “What’s this story about Cook wandering round the passages at night?”

One thing I admire about Trevelyan’s work is that in every one of her books, she dives into the deep end and really submerges herself in her subject. In the case of Hot-House, this means she brings the reader into the walls of Queen Anne College and keeps us trapped inside its claustrophic atmosphere without a break for almost 400 pages. The book opens as Wilheminia Delacroix Cook — Mina — a new first-year student, rides along Parks Road, returning to her room after having tea with Alec, a friend of her brother. We follow like a camera as she weaves through the streets, past Keble, across the Broad, by the Bodleian Library and into the gates of Queen Anne. The college presents a predatory image: “Crouched, throwing out wings, like tentacles, along side the road and away, at hidden angles, towards the river.” It grabs Mina into these tentacles and this is the last time we get a breath of fresh air for the next three years.

Trevelyan could be accused of over-egging her cake. Mina is immature even by undergraduate standards, impressionable, obsessive, and given to exaggeration and excessive rumination. Her emotional amp goes all the way to 11. The grim old heads in the Senior Common Room take her measure early on: “Rather unbalanced, you know. Nerves and so on. Not quite the right thing for the college, perhaps.” Mina is quickly swept up in the first weeks’ welcoming activities:

What a rush. Lectures, and all the things you had to get for your room, and so many Third Years and Second Years asking you to cocoa. (And why did they call it cocoa? It never was cocoa. And they always made some joke about its being something else. Was that why? And people always popping in and out. So exhausting.

Mina’s college career careens through a series of crises, most of her invention and fueled by her desire to impress everyone by the intensity of her responses. At first, this seems to be the persona she’s chosen to take with her fellow First Termers — the family, as she calls them. When her mother falls ill early in the term, she announces, “Dears, Mina may have to desert her family soon”: “I must. It’s absolutely indicated. I must go and stroke the lamb’s head.” Anyone who’s been in a high school drama club will recognize the type immediately.

Postcard view of Lady Margaret Hall

The problem, though, is that Mina buys her own act. She quickly latches onto her tutor, Mlle. Claude Morlaix, a no-nonsense woman with little time or sympathy for her student’s desperate need for approval and, worse, affection. By the middle of the second term, classmates are murmuring behind her back: “Mina seems frightfully keen on her, doesn’t she?” To them, she refers to Morlaix as “the lamb,” tenderly but also slightly dismissively. Unfortunately, she uses the same language in her own thoughts, becomes convinced that it is Morlaix, not she, who’s the dependent. To make matters even worse, Mina has a competitor — Erica, a recent graduate. Morlaix and Erica share a flat outside of college and similar attitudes towards its environment: “It’s rather awful living in. So many people and none of them real.” When Morlaix suffers an eye infection and is out of action for weeks, Mina assumes the role of savior. “One must, simply must, rescue the lamb somehow. One couldn’t … absolutely and definitely could not … simply abandon the unfortunate infant to that … that woman.” Morlaix, of course, has no interest in being saved, especially not by some high-strung undergraduate.

After much angst and many scenes in which the various college choruses — the family, the faculty, the kitchen help — comment on her histrionics, Mina moves on to another obsession: Professor Ferrand, a quiet English tutor recently widowed and perhaps a bit careless of his appearance. She becomes convinced she is destined to be his helpmate, an illusion he unknowingly fosters through simply being polite. When even he finds it necessary to disabuse her of any interest in having another wife, a classmate asks what she plans to do: “Do, my lamb? But … but as if that … as if that made just any difference. As if it did. In any case … absolutely in any case … there’s … there’s the edge. And one just has to jump.” Unfortunately, by this point, near the end of the Third Year, no one has much time for Mina’s melodrama. “Oh, yes, of course. Yes, I see,” the classmate replied, puzzled.

Although things are less claustrophobic in universities now — Lady Margaret Hall has been coed for decades — the artificial and self-contained nature of college life still presents adaptation challenges after graduation, particularly for anyone who stays in a dorm or fraternity/sorority house the whole time. We can recognize the despair Mina feels at the prospect of going down. “But it’s got … just got … to go on. All this. The college. It can’t just stop.” “We’re all going down, aren’t we?” a classmate replies. “It can’t make very much difference.” But to Mina, leaving school is not moving forward. For her, it’s “complete, utter, dissolution….”

By this point in the book, we feel as if we’ve spent the full three years locked in a cramped and overheated college room. The final section of Hot-House — “Bedding Out” — takes us a year or so later. Mina’s classmates are out in the world: teaching, working in a store, worried about the practical tasks of daily life. But also writing to and about Mina. Though out of school, her way of dealing with things hasn’t changed. She tracks down Alec in South Africa and pursues him, convinced the “lamb” needs her care. Rejected, she selects another object and follows him to South America. And so on. I needn’t say how the story ends.

After 380-plus pages inside Queen Anne’s College, however, “Bedding Out” seems, as Coleridge said in his famous comparison of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, like stepping from “a stuffy, hot sick-room, and Fielding to an open lawn on a breezy day.” Had the whole book been like this, I would consider Hot-House one of the better English novels of its time. But the truth is that pages 1 through 384 are in dire need of an editor.

Trevelyan’s greatest strength is her willingness to go into her fictional experiments completely. When she commits to a setting, a viewpoint, a cast of characters, she gives it her all. Sometimes, as in the case of William’s Wife and Appius and Virginia, this risk-taking pays off in stunning returns. In the case of Hot-House, I suspect some readers would feel short-changed. It’s true, as Anna Bogen has written, that Trevelyan’s treatment of Mina “wrests from the reader an uncanny mix of irony and empathy.” We can feel for her while also thinking her ridiculous.

But Trevelyan also makes some unwise choices. At the macroscopic level, the book needs to be cut ruthlessly. There is no need to dissect, re-dissect, and re-re-dissect every little crisis in Mina’s hyper-crisis-filled three years at college. The narrative falls into a predictable pattern one wearies of. At a microscopic level, there are things like Mina’s italics-laden thoughts and dialogue: a little of this goes a long way, n’est-ce pas? Worse that this — unforgivable, really — is Trevelyan’s attempt to capture the accent of Irma Lupo, a Brazilian woman loosely attached to the faculty of Queen Anne’s. One comes to dread the character’s appearance — partly because she’s used as a caustic, eating away at the fabric of just about every relationship in the school, but mostly because of sentences like this: “Eet ees a week since I meet ‘er…. I wondaired eef you know eef she ees eel?” It’s as bad as anything out of Uncle Remus Tales or any other execrable dialogue fiction from the turn of the 20th Century.

The novelist Barbara Pym read Hot-House when the book first came out, while still a student at St. Hilda’s College in Oxford. “Reading Gertrude Trevelyan’s novel Hot-House,” she wrote in her diary. “I desperately want to write an Oxford novel – but I must see first that my emotions are simmered down fairly well.” A bit of simmering down would have helped Hot-House: inside this book is are 250 pages of a terrific novel. Would that Trevelyan’s editors at Martin Secker had handed back her manuscript with a single instruction: “Distill.”

Good luck on finding a copy of the first edition of Hot-House. I didn’t even bother to link to AddAll.com because there’s nothing there. The title links to WorldCat.org, but there are just eleven library copies listed. You can, however, purchase it from the academic publisher Routledge. What you have to look for is this gripping title: Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II, Volume II, edited by Dr. Anna Bogen. Act now and you can get it for the low, low sale price of $148, or as the folks at Routledge should call it, “our direct-to-shredder rate,” since fewer and fewer institutions have the appetite for such prices and no individual readers have the stomach for this nonsense.

Other Reviews

• Leonora Eyles, Times Literary Supplement

Miss G. E. Trevelyan, as she showed in her first novel, Appius and Virginia, is undeniably a writer with an unusual gift of psychological penetration. This is displayed to the full in Hot-House, yet we doubt if any but specialists will persevere to the end of it. A psychoanalyst may read it as he would a case book, and the principals and staff of girls’ school and women’s colleges should read it as a matter of duty. But it is doubtful if many of the readers will be able to stand this “listening-in” to a neurotic girl’s thoughts and babblings, or bear the stifling monotony of the style — cleverly enough designed as it is to show the suffocating atmosphere of Miss Trevelyan’s college….

Only a deep concern about modern youth and its tendencies could drive a reader through the book from cover to cover, for it is not so much a novel as a social document and may well be laid aside with a sense of disquiet. Can Youth — sheltered Youth — really become so unbalanced, so morbid, so stifled as this. Is Oxford such a forcing-ground for pettiness and neurosis?

• Britannia and Eve

A clever book and also very difficult to read. The prose here, instead of being hurdy-gurdy, is a series of gasps and wriggles…. The principal character, a girl called Mina, has no discoverable purpose or power of reasoning, and is hard to distinguish from a lunatic.

• E. J. Scovell, Time and Tide

Hot-House has merit as art, but it is bad, because it is unbalanced, social criticism. It is a very well disciplined book. The deterioration of Mina Cook through her nine terms at Oxford is carefully and subtly observed, and for all the monotony of the narrative, which gives one a mistaken sense of repetition, there is no waste in the recording of it; indeed, the author has preserved so devotedly the unities of place and of subject that the novel is a little like a scientific monograph on some subject studied in deliberate isolation….

Miss Trevelyan could reply to this that Hot-House is not sociology at all. It is satire, and no one (except the victim) asks to be fair; it is art, which has to select and simplify and exaggerate…. But it is all rather dull. The stifling evenness of temperature makes it heavy reading, and that evenness is through all the book; for even the characters that escape from the hothouse seem to exist chiefly in their reaction to it. Any story is likely to become wearing too, when almost all its events and emotions are moonshine, existing only in the character’s imagination: and this is true of Hot-House.

• The Guardian

Where this novel falls into the hands of an Oxford man his first instinct will be to say, “I told you so.” … The book itself is written with quite remarkable skill. The heroine is one of those girls whom one calls “vague.” She thinks and speaks with the utmost incoherence. She is extraordinarily suggestible; and in the course of three years of uneventful college life she succeeds in erecting out of nothing, and brooding over and living through, a full half-dozen of emotional crises. It is an uncomfortable novel, as all really successful studies of hysteria are likely to be.

• The Sydney Sunday Sun and Guardian

G. E. Trevelyan has been so determined to give us a minutely detailed picture of life in an Oxford women’s college that the result is rather like looking at a collection of insects through a microscope. This would be endurable if the microscope were properly in focus, or the insects were at all interesting, but the author adjusts it at such a distorted angle that the mind of the normal person revolts from it. There are, moreover, running through the book sly, faint suggestions of a type of perversion not usually discussed much except by the ultra modern, and irritatingly enough, the suggestions are never sufficiently definite for us to know whether the author really intends them or whether it is our own nasty minds at work.

Hot-House, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: Martin Secker, 1933

Some Candidates for the #1920Club

Next week, folks around the world will be taking part in a unique collective reading event: #1920Club, the next installment of a semi-annual celebration organized some five years ago by Karen (Kaggsy) and Simon Thomas. The rules are simple: sometime during the week of 13-19 April, read a book published in 1920 and write something about it.

You can see an example of the diverse titles and perspectives that come together under this umbrella from the very first such event, the #1924Club.

There were some truly canonical books published in 1920: The Age of Innocence; Main Street; This Side of Paradise; Women in Love; Chéri; R.U.R.; Three Exemplary Novels by Miguel de Unamuno.

But every time I go into the university library and wander down the aisles of English and American literature, I have to wonder: Does the world really need yet another bit of writing about Edith Wharton or D. H. Lawrence or F. Scott Fitzgerald? These writers are like those hotels with 10,000 reviews on Tripadvisor. Checking today, the current count on Goodreads for The Age of Innocence stands at 134,391 ratings and 6,378 reviews. Stop. Just stop. Will yet one more opinion make any difference?

I don’t pretend that every book I write about on this site is a masterpiece. I hope no one feels obligated to read anything I’ve featured here. But I do try to shine a little light on the things that few or none have read and written about for years, often decades. That, in its own humble way, seems to be adding something original to the world.

I want to encourage you to do the same. Go off-piste, as they say in skiing. Read and write about something from 1920 that no one else will. Maybe it’ll just be ho-hum, no life-changer, maybe too flawed to recommend to anyone else. Some books are neglected for good reasons, and you will do the reading public the service of warning them off. Maybe it’ll surprise you: who knew Elisabeth Sanxay Holding wrote straight fiction before she got into writing mysteries? Tell the English reading public about Polish novelist Zofja Nakowska’s first major novel, Kobiety (Women). Do you agree with Orlo Williams that Storm Jameson’s first novel, The Happy Highways, is just full of “Talk, talk, talk”? Is Stephen Hudson the English Marcel Proust? Chances are good that you’ll be the first, or at least one of the very few, to have traveled down that piste in many, many seasons. Every rediscovered masterpiece has to have its first rediscovery.

So here are a selection of long-forgotten titles from 1920 you might consider exploring as your contribution to the #1920Club. In most cases, you can find the book on the Internet Archive for free and easy downloading. I highly recommend downloading a PDF version rather than Text, EPUB or Kindle: these are usually unedited OCR’d versions with many, many errors. As I explained in this post from 2018, a PDF version, a good PDF viewer, and a nice-sized tablet computer are all you need to have a reading experience that’s the next best thing to holding the actual book in your hands.

Cover of Invincible Minnie by Elisabeth Sanxay Holdin

• Invincible Minnie, by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

Her first novel, about a tenacious if unlikeable woman. “She is a short, plump, dowdy little woman … stupid, unsympathetic, unimaginative; but somehow she always had her own way…. If Invincible. Minnie had been written by a man instead of a woman he would probably have been lynched before this. … [But] there was no doubt after the second page that the book would prove utterly captivating, for there Mr. Peterson is described as having a ‘long yellow moustache, standing out fiercely like a cat’s;’ and reading on a matter of two or three pages, we encountered that ‘ridiculously coy old skeleton,’ the Defoe horse. It is inconceivable that a person capable of immortalizing horses and moustaches at a stroke could fail to do superlatively well with human beings.” — Constance Murray Greene, The Bookman “The book is firm and muscular, ripe and complete. No first novel of such intellectual or creative energy has appeared in this country for some time.” — William Curtis in Town and Country.

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

• In the Mountains, by Elizabeth von Arnim

First published anonymously, which is why some von Arnim fans may not be familiar with it. The diary of a woman as she sits in an isolated chalet in the Swiss Alps. “The opening confession of a woman broken by some disappointment in love … lead one to expect a series of admirable, sometimes profound, reflections of the usual introspective order.” Instead, “a mind well stored with generous knowledge of human nature, both sore and soft with painful memories, and, above all, with a sweet and racy humour which lights up every page…. Poignant, rich in comedy, lit by that rare sense of humour which almost touches tears, while behidn the hearts and minds so vivivdly drawn stands the unintentional revelation of the writer’s personality, setting the little tale in an atmosphere which deserves the adjective already used — inspiring.” — TLS

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

Rockwell Kent and Son from Wilderness by Rockwell Kent
Rockwell Kent and Son. Illustration from Wilderness
• Wilderness, Rockwell Kent

The story of the artist’s six-month stay, with just his nine-year-old son for company, on Fox Island in Resurrection Bay, Alaska, profusely illustrated with drawings by Ken and his son. “It is not only a narrative of a simple and natural life in these days of a complex civilization, but it is a frank revelation of the ideas, thoughts, aspirations, and conceptions of an unusually artistic temperament.” — em>The Bookman

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

• The People of the Ruins, by Edward Shanks

A time travel story. The hero is projected from the General Strike of 1924 into the future. The ability to use technology has been lost incomptence of later generations. Progress has been replaced by a surrender to decay and entropy. A former Army artilleryman, the hero enlisted by the Speaker, the Ruler of England, to aid in the civil war with the Chairman of Bradford and the President of Wales. ‘To appreciate the story the reader must follow it in the same gusto for adventure, and he will be repaid with a very pleasant entertainment.”–Orlo Williams in the TLS

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

• Hagar’s Hoard, by George Kibbe Turner

Set in Memphis during the city’s battle with an epidemic of yellow fever in 1878, about a miser trying to protect his material wealth against an invisible killer:

And now, near and far away, across the town, the light of the Fever fires came out again, like evil flowers blossoming in the night. Not lighted in early all the cases now. As time went by, they gave that idea up. But now there were so many deaths everywhere, only an occasional fire, lighted here and there, made a great lot in the town.

“Before Hagar’s Hoard was twenty-one pages old I knew I was in the grip of a conqueror. Mr. George Kibbe Turner may be a new writer but he is already a master. Just that handful of pages, and my nerves were crawling with the secret and unconjectured fear that came to Memphis in ’78.” — W. Newton Douglas in The Sketch. Warning: in keeping with the fashion of the time, some characters make prolific use of the N-word.

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

• Happy Highways, Storm Jameson

Orlo Williams’ review in the TLS really sells this one: “We cannot help feeling glad for the sake of Mr. [sic] Storm Jameson that he has got The Happy Highways off his chest. It must be a great relief to have discharged so much matter into the form of a novel…. Talk, talk, talk — this long book is a deluge of talk on every controversial subject in modern society, which makes the brain reel long before the end…. He seems to be writing down a flood of memories, lest he should forget them, for the satisfaction of his own soul…. When Joy, Mick and Margaret are just a little bit older, they will realize that there is a great deal of difference between being young and being extremely young. Extreme youth must rant and rage and tear the world to bits, without the world’s being harmed or benefited thereby. It all blows away like the spindrift cast up by the storm.”

In her autobiography, Journey from the North, Jameson wrote that the book only had two readers she knew of: an American convict and John Galsworthy. Galsworthy wrote her editor, Charles Evans: “This authoress has done what none of the other torrential novelists of the last ten years has achieved — given us a convincing (if not picture, at least) summary of the effervescence, discontent, revolt, and unrest of youth; the heartache and beating of wings. I should like to meet her. She must have seen and felt things…. To an old-fashioned brute like me, of course, the lack of form and line and the plethora of talk and philosophy pass a little stubbornly down the throat and stick a little in the gizzard, but the stuff is undeniable, and does not give me the hollow windy feeling I get from a German novel….”

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

Cover of recent edition of Kobiety

• Kobiety (Women); a novel of Polish life, by Zofja Rygier Nakowska

“This very unusual book reveals the secret springs of all human life.” Well, that might be setting the bar a bit too high. “To read it after a long course of the mediocre, superficial writing through which a reviewer, in the course of his duty, must wade is like emerging from the subway and drawing pure air into the lungs.” Uncredited critic, New York Times The TLS was more measured in its assessment: “The book is indeed surprisingly uneven; subtle and extravagant, balanced and preposterous in turn, always stifling in its moral atmosphere, yet redeemed by a malicious sort of candour which endows the heroine herself with something akin to probity and extorts for her a certain respect.”

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

• The Romantic Woman, by Mary Borden

The story of a failed marriage between the daughter of a Chicago millionaire and an English nobleman (in contrast to Borden’s own long and successful marriage to Sir Edward Spear). New York Times: “Where its author has been most successful is in the atmosphere of dull discontent, of poignant disillusion, which she evokes throughout. She gives a depressing picture of the utter cynicism of the English high society into which her heroine falls, against which she sets with telling effect the rawness and childishness of the ultra rich set of Chicago. There are neat characterizations, epigrammatic bits of phrasing and some passages written with unblushing frankness — in fact, for frankness concerning things usually veiled or ignored in conventional conversation the book stands high even in this age of audacity in thought and language.”

Available at the Internet Archive: Link.

• Richard Kurt, by Stephen Hudson

Stephen Hudson’s novels, according to his own Wikipedia entry, “are now almost entirely forgotten.” Hudson was the pseudonym of Sydney Schiff, who was one of the first Englishmen to celebrate the work of Marcel Proust. Schiff took over translation duties from the ailing C. K. Scott Moncrief and was responsible for the translation of Time Regained that most English readers who made it that far through In Search of Lost Time will have read. He hosted a famous 1922 party at which Proust was introduced to James Joyce, an event celebrated in Richard Davenport-Hines’ 2006 book, A Night at the Majestic: Proust and the Great Modernist Party of 1922.

If the following, from The Nation, is accurate, Hudson/Schiff was clearly influenced by Proust in his own fiction: “Mr. Hudson is quite unconscious of the noisy and dazzling things that fill the day and die; he addresses himself with infinite quietude and patience to study and record the permanent foundations of human nature. Richard Kurt is very coolly and closely written, very exact and unemphatic, and quite long…. We are given indirectly, and wholly through Richard’s perceptions, presentations of his father and of his wife, that are astonishingly penetrating in vision and concrete in effect…. Rarely as a riper first novel appeared. It is solidly founded in its observation, built with a serene sureness of touch, careless of vain graces, disdainful of all appeal save that of its inner veracity.” (Note: published in the U.K. in 1919, in the U.S. in 1920)

Available at the Internet Archive: Link.

I’m keeping my own selection for #1920Club a secret — until next week. Happy reading.