State of Possession represents Edith de Born at mid-career. Her first novel, Gaëtan, was published in 1950; her last (of 18), The Negligent Daughter, in 1978. And yet, having read all three books, I have to say that de Born seems to have reached a high level of maturity with her very first book and maintained it with remarkable consistency throughout. One of her strongest advocates, the novelist and critic Francis King, once called Edith de Born “a literary sport.” But if she is a sport, it would be more appropriate to compare her with Roger Federer or Cal Ripken: she never played to the point of burn-out, always held something back for the next contest. If you’re looking for flash and high drama, keep looking: you won’t find them here.
The story in State of Possession is really the least important aspect of the book. Elisabeth Vandernoot, a Flemish nurse, is contacted by a lawyer. Another Belgian woman, now married to an Englishman and living in London, believes that Lionel, Elisabeth’s son, is actually the child she lost in the chaos of the evacuation from the German invasion of May 1940. Elisabeth is compelled to prove that she did, in fact, give birth to Lionel.
One might think this is a simple matter of producing a birth certificate. But birth certificates are comparatively recent innovations. In many countries and for many years, there were no birth certificates; instead, the parents reported the birth to local town hall or mairie, where it was recorded in a register, often days later. That’s not really the issue in this case, however. Here, neither party can produce definitive evidence — and in Elisabeth’s case, it’s for reasons that are best left to be discovered by reading the book.
A single mother and never married, Elisabeth works as a masseuse. She prefers to call herself an aesthetician because of the seamy connotations of the word masseuse. De Born illustrates the problems Elisabeth faced when she first set up practice:
One man had strutted in and looked her up and down, his face clearly proclaiming that she was not to his taste. “Are you the only woman working here?” he had inquired. “Yes, Monsieur.” For a moment he had hesitated; then, with a shrug, pushing back the hat he had not removed, “O.K. A massage,” unbuttoning his greatcoat. As he began to fumble with more buttons, she had quickly asked, “Have you a doctor’s recommendation” “A what — ?”
Now she attends patiently exclusively in their homes. They are all several cuts above her own station: a retired ambassador; a Vicomtesse. They respect her professionalism and discretion — but they also see her as a non-entity, “describing their ailments at the greatest possible length as though the fact of lying naked before her compelled them to go further and turn themselves inside out.” On the other hand seeing them intimately, in their lavish houses and apartments, she in turn is provided with “a glimpse of worlds beyond her reach, with the result that she felt suspended in mid-air, with no solid ground left under her feet.”
Elisabeth has aspirations for her son Lionel. Having lost its colony, Belgium no longer has the Congo to serve as “a springboard for the lower classes.” The only options for Lionel hinge upon his exam results: with honors, he might get a lifelong government job; otherwise, he will have to go elsewhere — to South America or Africa — and work his way up through some multinational firm. Yet without property of her own — aside from Lionel himself — Elisabeth is also looked down upon by the Peeters, the brusque Flemish family she rents her flat from. One of the pleasures of this book is de Born’s deft and subtle depiction of the intricate dances of social positioning that go on in a small and crowded country like Belgium.
State of Possession is set in Brussels, where de Born and her husband lived for over forty years after the end of World War Two. De Born was a perfect example of the kind of meta-European one finds in Brussels, where the European Commission, NATO, SWIFT, EUROCONTROL and other international organizations bring together people with strongly cosmopolitan sensibilities. Born in Vienna, which she left after the Anschluss, de Born moved to Paris, where she married Jacques Bisch, a French banker and worked with him in the Resistance during the war.
One of her jobs in the Resistance was translating messages to and from British intelligence services, and she credited that experience with teaching her how to write clearly and precisely in English while still managing to preserve essential nuances that didn’t have simple equivalents in the vocabulary and syntax of the other language. She learned well, as many critics like King noted that, “as with Conrad and Nabokov, one receives an impression of infinitely meticulous care in the shaping of every paragraph and even of every sentence.” King wrote,”It is in English that all her seventeen novels have been composed. I use the word ‘composed,’ rather than ‘written,’ advisedly, since, as with Conrad and Nabokov, one receives an impression of infinitely meticulous care in the shaping of every paragraph and even of every sentence.”
Many of the Brussels-based institutions operate on the basis of consensus, where different positions and interests have to be balanced and integrated through a careful, time-consuming and often frustrating process of negotiation. This fosters environments where extremes are actively discouraged and moderation is considered an essential quality for both success and survival. What matters most is not the outcome of any one deal but preserving the ability to make another deal tomorrow. The same spirit can be found in de Born’s work. Her books never find easy answers to the questions they raise. They also display an acute sense of history. As Francis King wrote of another de Born novel, State of Possession “gives the impression of the pasts of its characters receding in a long perspective.”
Despite the comparisons to Conrad and Nabokov, however, Edith de Born’s closest equivalent is probably a native English writer: Anita Brookner. Like Brookner, de Born wrote slight novels that seem to have the substance of tissue paper yet managed to cut like razors. Brookner herself tended to ward of the association. In 2007, she told The Spectator she had been rereading de Born, whom she considered “a completely forgotten precursor, both in style and subject matter” not of herself but of Sybille Bedford. “Of cosmopolitan background — her books are set in Austria, France and Belgium — she demonstrates an intriguing combination of rootlessness and good manners.” Brookner added dismissively, “These novels are long out of print and perhaps need not be revived.” In her 1987 Paris Review interview, however, Brookner said she very much enjoyed de Born, finding her “much more stoical and less sentimental than English writers.”
All of Edith de Born’s novels have been out of print for over forty years, but many of them can be purchased from used book shops for under $15. I note, though, that prices on Amazon are creeping into the stratosphere, so try searching on AddAll.com instead.
State of Possession, by Edith de Born London: Chapman & Hall Ltd., 1963
Maurice Sachs was a charmer. Jean Cocteau once warned their mutual friend, the poet Max Jacob, “Don’t trust Maurice. He’s a charmer. He would try to charm God Himself!” In writing his memoirs with utterly self-effacing candor, he managed to make his charm live on after him. Sachs wrote in the tradition of Rousseau, Stendhal, and André Gide, convinced that the greatest sin of all was hypocrisy. In the pages of his posthumously-published memoir, Witches’ Sabbath — being reissued this week from Spurl Editions — and its sequel The Hunt, Sachs admits to breaking most of the Commandments.
Though he rarely managed to complete the novels he started and few of his plays made it to the stage, Sachs knew everyone who was anyone in the world of French literature between the two world wars. Knew everyone, slept with many, stole from a few. Though a homosexual, he wasn’t averse to going to bed with a woman if it served a purpose. He also wasn’t averse to sleeping with the enemy. He seduced several German officers while living in occupied Paris and numerous members of the LVF (Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchévisme, a Nazi-friendly French military group) and Gestapo after moving to Hamburg in 1943. “My life has been nothing but one long complicity with the guilty,” he wrote. “I have always been on the side of the pariahs.”
Sachs’ grandmother had scandalized French society by leaving her husband to marry Jacques Bizet, the talented but erratic and spendthrift son of Georges Bizet, the composer of Carmen. Sachs idolized Jacques, but by the time they became close, Bizet was already bent on self-destruction. Maurice remembers Bizet playing around with a revolver one day. He “fired one bullet out the window to show me it was really loaded, and put the barrel in my mouth, right up against my palate. Then he put my forefinger on the trigger and said: ‘When you’ve had enough of life, that’s the way to kill yourself. It’s clean, and you don’t feel a thing.’” Not long after that, Bizet used the gun in exactly that way to take his life. Maurice was just sixteen.
Sachs’ grandfather was a wealthy diamond merchant, but Sachs’ parents managed to squander his legacy. When he was seventeen, Maurice had to arrange for his mother’s quick escape to England after she wrote her creditors a large check guaranteed to bounce. He disliked his family so much he fantasized in his memoir about the family he wished for: “My father comes in all muddy from foxhunting, my mother gets up from the piano where she has been singing a simple ballad.” He claimed the only things he inherited from his parents were his father’s laziness and his mother’s “lack of balance.”
His parents rid themselves of the responsibility to raise Maurice by sending him off to a boarding school. By his account, French boarding schools were just as much hotbeds of sadomasochism and homosexual as English ones. Maurice skirted the approaches of masters and upperclassmen but fell in love with a fellow student and appears to have accepted his sexual preference with remarkably little angst.
After leaving school, he set himself up in Paris with what he’d saved from his grandfather’s estate and dove headfirst into the city’s social and cultural life. “How good it felt to be twenty, in those days. This was the reign of gaiety and license,” he recalled. He met the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain and fell under the spell of his piety. Sponsored by Maritain and his wife, Sachs converted to Catholicism in 1925 and soon after entered a seminary to become a priest.
It was to be a short stay. Sachs put on his soutaine in January 1926; by the end of September, he had been ejected from the order. While enjoying a short vacation on the Riviera, he made the acquaintance of the American writer Glenway Westcott, who in turn introduced him to a handsome (and wealthy) teenager named Tom Pinkerton. Sachs fell madly in love with Pinkerton. Though Sachs maintained the relationship remained platonic, Pinkerton’s mother complained to the Bishop of Nice.
Sachs acknowledged that “I mistook an ephemeral enthusiasm for an eternal vocation.” He also confessed that he felt “a mixed delight” in the trappings of the church “that was not entirely pious.” He loved his soutaine, for example: “The black was becoming, and made me look slender.” He is also reported to have had his lined with pink silk crêpe du Chine.
He went from one institution to another. Leaving the seminary made him eligible for military service, and he was soon stationed with the French army of occupation along the Rhine in Germany. While his first job was monitoring latrines, he was soon put in charge of the officer’s library after a colonel found him reading Montesquieu at his post. About the only thing he took away from his time in the army was his lifelong friendship with the poet Max Jacob.
Back in Paris again, he indulged himself in the two vices he’d become acquainted with in the military: sex and drink. Though he claimed not to have known of their existence, he began frequenting Paris’s male brothels, including the Bains du Ballon d’Alsace, notorious as the scene of Marcel Proust’s more extreme sexual experiences. He also became a profligate drinker: “it was difficult, if not impossible, for me to sit down to a meal without having drunk about ten cocktails.”
Sachs rarely held back his passions. If Cocteau learned to be wary of Maurice’s charms, Sachs gave into his enchantment with the poet and artist completely: it was, he wrote, “total, immediate, and delicious.” “When we left this magician,” Sachs recalled, “I knew beyond all doubt that I was going to live only for him.” Cocteau’s response to Sachs was friendly but cautious.
He did, however, recommend the young man to Coco Chanel, who hired him to assemble a private library. Then “on the point of no longer counting her fortune,” Chanel gave him a monthly budget of 60,000 Francs and carte blanche in his commission. “I had no problem making a good living out of this sum,” Sachs wrote in something of an understatement. It’s unlikely that much of Chanel’s investment made it to her shelves. He took full advantage of her largesse:
I had an apartment, paintings, a car, a secretary, two servants, a masseur, expensive love affairs; I spent my nights in cabarets, my afternoons at the tailor’s, I bought books and bibelots, and this was perhaps the moment of my life when I enjoyed the highest degree of physical comfort. What young man would not have been intoxicated by so many absurd grandeurs which he believed to be the result of his personal genius?
By the time he’d exhausted Chanel’s good humor, however, he’d managed to convince other investors of his genius as well. Lucien Demotte hired Sachs to help assemble collections of French paintings that were shown in Paris and London. The pair then headed, artworks in hand, to New York, where Demotte owned a gallery on East 57th Street. Unfortunately, they landed in New York with perhaps a million dollars’ worth of merchandise which had little prospect of being sold. Sachs was able to hang onto Demotte’s coattails for a while, standing in as a groomsman when Demotte married the daughter of the Franco-American tycoon Felix Wildenstein in early 1931, but he soon had to fend for himself.
Louis Marcoussis, Giorgio de Chirico, Maurice Sachs and Moise Kisling at the Claridge Galleries, London, June 1929
He came up with a solution with the help of Harold Peat, director of a lecture tour agency. Impressed with Sachs’ good looks and suave manners, he agreed to take Sachs on as a lecturer. The only problem was: on what?
“What will you talk about?” “About art.” “There can’t be more than three hundred people who are interested in that. We need three thousand. Why not talk about politics?” “Because I don’t know anything about politics.” “Just read the morning papers, and that evening tell what you read in your own words.”
Two weeks later, Peat was selling his new client as “Maurice Sachs: Famous French Economist,” whose talks promised to “Train a Spotlight on the Secrets of Europe.” Sachs also found support for his new career in an admiring member of his early lectures. Gwladys Matthews, whose father was pastor of the largest Presbyterian congregation in Seattle, was an aspiring writer who wanted to get free of her family.
Sachs claimed he told her of his preference for men but said he was interested in gaining a wife for the sake of a future political career. He charmed Reverend Matthews with the sincerity of his passion: “I love your daughter,” he told Matthews. “If you do not give your consent to our marriage, I shall marry her all the same.” Regardless of who was fooling whom, Maurice and Gwladys were married in Seattle in June 1932, her father officiating.
In Witches’ Sabbath, Sachs referred to Seattle as “Morpheus,” which gives a clue to the prospects for the marriage. The couple honeymooned in the Adirondacks then returned to the West Coast, taking an apartment in San Francisco. It was there, in April 1934, that Gwladys filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion. “Brilliant Romance to End” read the Associated Press headline for the news. In fact, what would prove Maurice’s longest romantic involvement had begun – according to the divorce papers – in February 1933 he ran off with a young Californian he refers to in the book as Henry. As usual, Sachs was honest about his dishonesty: “I had married her like a madman; I left her like a coward,” he wrote.
Gwladys, by the way, later moved to Hollywood, worked as a screenwriter and married the pioneering photographer Ned Scott in 1936. Before his desertion, she also did Sachs the favor of translating his memoir, The Decade of Illusion: Paris 1918-1928, which Knopf published just weeks after Maurice took off with Henry.
The book, now long out of print, received good reviews. “A charming and delightfully kaleidoscopic parade,” wrote C. Norris Millington in The American Magazine of Art. “staged in the smart salons, attics, theatres, studios and by-ways of France.” Millington credited Sachs for his “dramatis personae”: “practically every well-known painter, composer, musician, poet, politician, dressmaker, critic, author, bookseller, art dealer, and publisher who has gravitated to Paris in the last ten years or so.” Others thought he took his personal Who’s Who too far, noting that his index listed 770 names, or roughly three names for every page.
Maurice and Henry took the advance for Decade of Illusion and bought berths on a cattle boat returning to Le Havre. Sachs returned to a family devasted by the Depression. “Nous n’avons rien” he wrote: “We have nothing left.” Sachs’ mother had suffered a heart attack; his Uncle Richard had committed suicide. Though Sachs’ most tolerant, if skeptical, supporter, André Gide, helped him get a job editing a new series for La Nouvelle Revue Française, the money wasn’t enough to support the two lovers and Maurice had to fill in as a desk clerk at the cheap hotel where they stayed. Sachs’ description of the hotel (which he calls the Hotel Saint-Joachim but was actually l’hôtel Saint-Yves) and its residents are some of the best passages in Witches Sabbath.
A man who stays in a hotel, far from his habitual milieu, inwardly liberated, rarely constrains himself. The employee sees him naked. In two years of the hotel business, I learned a great deal about human behavior. I have seen maniacs, debauchees, paragons of virtue, monsters of anger, the timorous, the greedy, and the generous; I have observed vanity and folly, dreadful aberrations, charming virtues, conduct full of inner distinction, and incredible abasement I have watched, and a horrible spectacle it was, thousands of individuals eat, whom it was my duty to watch as they did so (spaghetti dinners were always the worst). The toilet that doesn’t work, the bath that overflows, the bed in which, in spite of everything, a lady believes she has found a mischievous flea, oblige a curious participation in the intimacy of people whom you know too much about and whom you don’t know. The intimacy that no sympathy motivates is as painful as a promiscuity of the flesh.
Even with this income, Sachs wrote, “There was almost no day when I knew exactly how we were going to eat that evening.” He admits to hanging around the bookstalls across the river from the Louvre for the purpose of stealing books. Cocteau later wrote that during this time, Sachs would stuff his pockets with toilet paper, rustling it so others thought his pockets were full of 1,000-Franc notes. “It gives me confidence,” Sachs told Cocteau.
Sachs’ way of coping with poverty disgusted some of his acquaintances. Marcel Jouhandeau, who later collaborated with the Nazis, claimed that it was his encounters with Sachs that led him to write a notorious article, “How I Became an Anti-Semite,” for the journal of the far-right party, Action Française.
Sachs was saved by the actor Pierre Fresnay, best known among English-speaking audiences for his role as the aristocratic Captain de Boeldieu in Jean Renoir’s 1937 film, La Grande Illusion. Fresnay encouraged him to write for the stage. Though most of Sachs’ attempts never reached completion, let alone the stage, his translation of the Terence Rattigan play, French Without Tears was a success. Fresnay enlisted Sachs to work as stage manager when he organized a run of plays performed on alternating nights in London’s West End in 1938. Sachs returned to Paris exhausted. It is here that Witches’ Sabbath ends. “I am leaving. I don’t know where I am going, where I shall go. To the East, if I have any luck.”
The Hunt ( La chasse à courre), Sachs’ last and incomplete memoir, picks up a two years later in May 1940, as the German Blitzkrieg was approaching Paris. Sachs had managed to attach himself to the staff of the government radio network and fled with it to the Third Republic’s final capital in Bordeaux. There, he first encountered the deceit, greed, and hypocrisy that would characterize much of French life under the Occupation. After a few weeks of sharing an over-priced bed in an overcrowded hotel, he returned to Paris.
There, he found the black market was already booming. “What was I going to do if not the black market?” he asked. Once again, Sachs relied on his charm and connections to work his way in. He became a specialist in moving jewelry and precious goods, often working on consignment. He lied and was lied to on a daily basis. “I was up to my neck in the very finest garbage,” he wrote.
And exceptional garbage it was. While rationing and deprivation was the rule for ordinary Parisians, with the right connections and enough money, the life of luxury rolled on: “the Chataigné … turned out a delectable lobster au beurre blanc, Philippe served the foie gras at the height of rationing, chocolate mousse, and meat without coupons, the Vieux Pont-Neuf, where they had cakes made with real cream, Gaffner served beefsteaks, Lola Tosch offered leg of lamb, et cetera….” It took a furious amount of wheeling and dealing to keep up this lifestyle, however, and Sachs’ accounts of his many transactions are both dizzying and mind-numbing.
After a point, however, the reader loses interest in knowing how much he took from the Duchesse d’Y or sold to the Comte de T.. Sachs came to feel the same way. “The fatigue, the boredom, yes, above all the boredom of these incessant transactions, the unreality, the roguery, the disgust I felt for myself and for others suddenly seized me by the throat,” he wrote. He teamed up with the ex-wife of one of his friends and retreated to the quiet of a village in Normandy.
In The Hunt, he refers to the woman as Pomme. In reality, she was Violette Le Duc, who later became famous for her memoir, La Bâtarde. Though they spent months together – continuing to keep up a steady black-marketing operation, only now in produce, meats and cheeses – it would be hard to tell from comparing their respective accounts. In The Hunt, Pomme is a pleasant companion with an absurd crush on him. In La Bâtarde, he is the brilliant, handsome, and talented Maurice Sachs – Le Duc refers to him by his full name at least 50% of the time. Sachs ultimately found her suffocating. Le Duc credits him with inspiring her to write:
Maurice said to me next day: “Your unhappy childhood is beginning to bore me to distraction. This afternoon you will take your basket, a pen, and an exercise book, and you will go and sit under an apple tree. Then you will write down all the things you tell me.”
That afternoon, Le Duc began to write what would become her first book, L’Asphyxie. If you are interested in a third version of this story, you can watch director Martin Provost’s 2013 film, Violette.
Maurice and Pomme were accompanied to Normandy with Karl-Heinz, a German Jewish orphan that Sachs took a notion to adopt. The Rothschild family had taken in a group of Jewish orphans ejected from Germany a few months before the outbreak of war in hopes of finding homes with good French families. One doubts two black marketeers hiding out in the country were quite what they had in mind. And Sachs’ treatment of Karl-Heinz demonstrated the dangers of boutique parenting.
Sachs was attracted by the twelve-year-old’s good looks, but as soon as the boy opened his mouth, he left his foster father with a longing to flee. Karl-Heinz was not interested in books or art or music. His ambition was to be a waiter. Sachs was glad to learn of an American Quaker organization that was arranging for orphans to be sent to families in the U.S. and soon Karl-Heinz was standing at the nearest train station, ticket in hand. “My burning love for Karl-Heinz had already been extinguished in the tepid waters,” Sachs confessed, happy to be rid of the boy’s “appealing mediocrity.”
Sachs returned to Paris and the 24×7 life of deal-making, but his luck in coming out on the profitable end of these increasingly complicated three-, four- and five-way transactions was on the wane. By the beginning of autumn 1942, he was looking for another way out.
In October 1942, Sachs finally headed East. To Hamburg. His rationale is unclear from The Hunt and none of the several biographies written since the 1960s have come up with a definitive answer, but the most likely reasons relate to lust and greed. Sachs was infatuated with the strong, self-confident blond Aryans he encountered in smart uniforms in Paris and saw a chance to carouse with more of them in the Fatherland. He also thought the Nazis would pay well for information supplied by a willing Frenchman operating inside the forced labor organization supplying thousands of workers for German factories.
Sachs managed to slip out of occupied France in November 1942, sleeping with his guide along the way. The final section of The Hunt is drawn from letters he sent back to Paris. At first, he found the experience of going to work with hundreds of other French workers tedious: several pages of The Hunt are devoted to cataloguing the character flaws and bad habits of Bretons, Gascons, and others. And “Need I add that they had never heard the word ‘conversation’ in their lives?” He was proud, however, of what he referred to as his “little Ministry of Internal Affairs.”
Sachs was in Hamburg when some of the cities’ most devastating bombing raids took place. “The city is really nothing more than a heap of charred rubble in which I still have a room without water, without electricity, almost without anything,” he wrote after one raid. Still he felt more at home than he had in occupied France. “No doubt about it, I adore this country: the only one where I find it easy to be happy, where I’m instinctively happy, as it were.” And there was no shortage of sexual partners: “There’s love for all through the town,” he reported almost giddily.
In June 1943, he wrote with excitement – and suspicious ambiguity – of getting a new job. “I am well paid, newly clothed, and well thought of,” he crowed. The job undoubtedly involved collaboration with the Gestapo, but it also provided him with opportunities to seduce young Frenchmen of the LVF and the occasional willing Nazi. He may not have known that at the age of 36, he was already being referred to as Maurice la tante — Maurice the aunt.
The Nazis were less susceptible to Sachs’ charm, however. In November 1943, he was arrested for his homosexual activities and sent to the Fuhlsbüttel prison. What happened to Sachs after this was for some years a mystery. When La chasse à courre was first published in Paris in 1947, it ended with a postscript added by the publisher stating Sachs’ whereabouts were unknown. Later, it was reported he had been lynched by inmates. Finally, a German reporter was able to confirm that in April 1945, Sachs and the other prisoners in Fuhlsbüttel were evacuated to avoid the approaching British Army and forced to march to another facility in Kiel. Walking through the snow without food, water, or proper clothing, many of the inmates died along the way. When Sachs and another prisoner failed to join the formation on the morning of April 14, 1945, they were shot in the head by a Belgian SS guard.
Le Sabbat (subtitled souvenirs d’une jeunesse orageuse — Memoirs of a Stormy Youth) caused “a considerable furor in literary and salon circles,” as Janet Flanner reported in a 1946 “Letter from Paris” in The New Yorker. One French reviewer described it as “The chronicle of a vicious drunk and pervert, whose struggles to refashion his life and regenerate his soul are blocked by a voluptuous pleasure in guilt and loathsomeness.” Even untranslated, the assessment of another reads like a seminarian’s list of venal and deadly sins: “Mal élevé, vicieux, orgueilleux, vaniteux, adonné aux pires excès, aux perversions les plus scandaleuses, homosexuel, renégat, mufle, il représente le point extrême de la jeunesse débauchée et cynique.” An American academic reviewer put it more bluntly: “Young Jew writes je as easily as Jean-Jacques.”
The book was first translated into English by Robin King in 1953 as Days of Wrath: Confessions of a Turbulent Youth. It’s a rendition best left forgotten. The TLS reviewer called the translation “slapdash” and “disfigured by an exasperating carelessness in the proof-reading.” And despite his claim that the book was of greater literary than documentary value, King also chose to bowdlerize the text. As Benedict Nicolson put it in his New Statesman review, “There can be no excuse” for King’s editorial decisions: “… reproducing parts of chapters, omitting a phrase here, a paragraph there, in so arbitrary a fashion that one is continuously driven back to the French text to discover what the author intended.”
Spurl Editions has wisely chosen to reissue the 1964 Richard Howard translation, titled Witches’ Sabbath, instead. At the time of its original publication, Anthony Powell called it “a near-classic of its kind.” Powell had an elegant way of describing Sachs’ elusive manner of dealing with facts. “Although one suspects there is little here that is not, within its context, true, the skill of the narrative makes truth almost beside the point.” Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick Modiano was so inspired by Sachs’ handling of the truth that he brought Sachs back to life as an aging and unrepentant collaborator in the first novel of his “Occupation trilogy,” La Place de l’Etoile (1968).
A year after Witches’ Sabbath, its sequel The Hunt, Richard Howard’s translation of La chasse à courre was also published by Stein and Day in the U.S. and Calder & Boyars in the U.K.. Although a much shorter and obviously incomplete book, Sachs’ charm was still on display. “There’s a racy, flaunted untrustworthiness about Sachs which keeps you on your guard just as surely as it keeps you reading,” David Williams wrote in The Daily Telegraph. The New Yorker, on the other hand, had the opposite of Robin King’s assessment, saying the book had far more documentary interest than literary merit.
Spurl Editions has done readers a great favor with its reissue of Witches’ Sabbath. At a time when people are looking for a good book to hunker down and enjoy, this is an excellent way to spend a few days while you’re barricaded behind your walls of toilet paper. You can order the book now from Spurl or from Amazon as of April 3.
When I picked up an old Panther paperback copy of Penelope Gilliatt’s novel One by One at Bookcase, a veritable treasure trove of old books near the cathedral in Carlisle just a few weeks ago, its cover blurb was already a bit too real: “London is once again an isolated, panic-stricken city … in the grip of a fearsome plague that has killed 10,000 by the third week of August.” Now, like Polly Talbot, Gilliatt’s protagonist, I am holed up in my home, advised to avoid venturing out in the interest of containing a new and dangerous virus — which made reading this book a particularly unsettling experience.
It’s impossible not to look for parallels between Gilliatt’s fictional epidemic and today’s COVID-19 pandemic. Polly’s husband Joe is a veterinarian, but he becomes involved early in the response to the mysterious illness that begins taking lives as Europe swelters in a July heatwave — first helping out in a laboratory, then as a lowly orderly in a make-shift morgue and finally seconded as a doctor in a London hospital as the numbers rise. Aware of its contagion potential, he insists that Polly — seven months pregnant — remain at home weeks before the government responds and takes steps to quarantine London from the rest of the UK.
Cover of Atheneum US hardback edition of One by One by Penelope Gilliatt
As in today’s crisis, the government is slow to act: “People were asked, but not ordered, to avoid travelling in and out of London.” Swimming pools are shut; the infected are isolated in their homes, food and supplies being brought to them by civil defense workers in protective gear. “For many days, far too many, no one in power grasped the danger because everyone was busy trying to find a scapegoat.” Before long, however, most of the city is shut down. Racketeers posing as undertakers take away corpses and set them alight with petrol in empty lots. As in time of the Black Death, survivors find themselves confronted by the overwhelming presence of death, but few are equipped with a faith to cope with it: “The difficulty of living without any system for thinking about dying was unacknowledged, and for that reason very acute.”
And as we are seeing now, some respond by grasping at war as an analogy. “In the emergency the right thing to do was to stir other people to a sense of outrage, to make a stink about it and hope it could be turned into the Armada or Dunkirk or anything but a biological affliction.” At the same time, those at a distance from the worst affected find it hard to break out of their everyday concerns. Over a few days before London is fully quarantined, Polly is able to visit her mother and her friends in the countryside. There, the discussion is not about the virus but about the scandalous public school careers of various MPs: “Our friend was always a great beater…. I should say he has beaten at least half the Cabinet.” The topic shifts then to speculation about closeted gays and unfaithful wives. The old boys express some sympathy for the PM’s wife and her series of ever-richer and fatter lovers: “I always think of Daphne like that, pressed out like a wafer by the great weight of men traveling over her, bumpetty bum, bumpetty bum.” When one finally turns to acknowledge Polly, he asks about the parties she must be missing.
“‘I shouldn’t think there are many,’ she said. ‘Too many of the guests are dead.'”
“It’s not on to mope,” the peer cautions her. As she approaches London on her return, she sees an orange glow in the distance. Burning corpses.
Cover of Secker & Warburg UK hardback edition of One by One by Penelope Gilliatt
In the novel’s final chapters, the focus shifts from the epidemic writ large to the individual stories of Polly and Joe and situations having little to do with the illness. Polly manages to get out of London to the safety of her mother-in-law’s house by the sea, but finds the potential for harm there — emotional from Joe’s mother and medical from her degenerative GP — far worse than anything in London. Meanwhile, the Press (Gilliatt uses the capital P to hammer home her point), having first made Joe into hero for his selfless hospital work, turn him into a pariah by digging up evidence of a teenage experiment with homosexuality.
It is in these pages that Gilliatt’s aim becomes clear: to skewer the Establishment (using the capital E with which it was hammered in the 1960s) for its complacency. She sees in how upper- and upper-middle class parents cared for their children — including their gay children — indicators of how these children (now the adults in charge) deal with the epidemic:
You never gave him a chance to get near you. You shoved him into a grey flannel suit and sent him to some prissy dame’s-school when he was six, you gave him a meringue or something when he had a good report and you saw that he had his castor oil and you took him to those god-awful mournful churches without even believing a word of it yourself; and that was it. Then you packed him off to boarding school for more of the same when he was eight. Eight. And it went on for ten more years.
In other words: pack them up and get them out of sight. Unfortunately, as is often the case with fiction, messages can get in the way of stories, and One by One ends with what The New York Times’ reviewer, Martin Levin, called a “climactic non sequitur.”
One can identify, in hindsight, which reviewers considered themselves part of the Establishment by their verdicts of the book. Writing for The Listener, Hilary Corke regretted that Gilliatt had chosen to mix good old fashioned science fiction with “social satire and commentary.” Marigold Johnson, the TLS reviewer and never one to blunt her arrows, found the book “Too much of a rag-bag of protest, comic observation, emotional analysis, fantasy and cleverness.” Anthony Burgess, whose own novels were often similar rag-bags, loved it: “If it had a fault, it was the best fault imaginable: more action and characters and ideas than the small space could carry.” Johnson did, however, credit Gilliatt for displaying a “passion and intelligence … far too rare and ambitious for one to wish that it had been written in any other way or to forget the impression it leaves.”
One of Penelope Gilliatt’s obituaries
One by One was Penelope Gilliatt’s first novel and though it’s also her shortest, its mix of sharp and strong set pieces of description and dialogue and hazy passages of internal monologues suggest that her fictional talents were better suited for the short story form. Although Gilliatt is primarily remembered now as a film critic, she left behind a considerable body of fiction, most of which can be found online at the Open Library (Link), including One by One. When Gilliatt died of alcoholism in 1993 at the age of 61, her friend lyricist and playwright Betty Comden, wrote, “What a glowing further career she might have had, and what beautiful, inventive, never-to-be-written pages this cleverest of all sausages [a bit of British slang Gilliatt often used] might have produced we will never know.” Were she alive today, however, she would also be among those at most risk in the face of our real-world epidemic.
One by One, by Penelope Gilliatt London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1965 New York: Atheneum, 1965
This is a sad book: a daughter’s memoir of her mother’s prolonged and painful death from cancer over the span of four years. It’s an even sadder book when you know what came after it.
Betsey Barton was born in comfort and grew up in luxury. Her father, pioneering advertising man Bruce Barton, didn’t invent the concept of boosterism, but he certainly refined it. His 1925 bestseller, The Man Nobody Knows, gave aspiring American capitalists a “Get Out of Purgatory” card by assuring them that Jesus — “the world’s greatest business executive” — wanted them to get rich. As a founder of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBDO), still one of the world’s leading ad agencies, he came up with brand names and slogans that are woven into our vernacular: General Motors; General Electric; and Betty Crocker, to mention a few. Barton went on to become a prominent Republican congressman representing Manhattan and advocating the Isolationist cause at the start of World War Two. During the run for his third term as President, FDR loved to mock Barton and fellow Isolationists Joe Martin and Hamilton Fish III with his phrase “Martin, Barton, and Fish” (to the rhythm of “Winken, Blinken, and Nod”), but his mockery had little effect on Barton’s wealth or social standing.
Betsey Barton (left), from Town and Country magazine, 15 July 1934
Barton’s only daughter Betsey was in the spotlight from the time she had her coming-out ball. Her picture appeared regularly in newspaper society sections and the pages of slick upscale magazines. In 1934, not long after being photographed for Town & Country, Betsey was severely injured in an automobile accident. Her back was broken and she was left paralyzed from the waist down. Three years later, while spending a winter holiday with her family outside Phoenix, the ambulance carrying her to a hospital for routine physical therapy went off the road, compounding her existing injuries and leaving her with severe nerve damage.
Photo of Betsey Barton from 26 February 1937 Pittsburgh Post Gazette
At first, Betsey and her parents hoped she would recovery her ability to walk, but after years of expensive and unsuccessful treatments, they came to accept that her condition was irreversible. As she experienced just how many challenges everyday life put in the path of a disabled person — even one with all the advantages of money and position — Betsey became an advocate with a cause. And when the first American servicemen began to return from combat with similar injuries, she became a writer as well. Her first book, And Now to Live Again (1944), was a call for these men not to lose hope.
Though she described herself as a nonprofessional, Betsey Barton wrote with the credibility of someone who’d been through the same experience. Her message was simple: in losing one life — a life free of injuries — these men had won a new one, a life “that in many delicate and tender ways is a far better one.” She recognized her readers would be skeptical. “Had I read this years ago when first I lost the use of my legs I would have thrown down the book in disgust,” she admitted. She offered herself as an example of both the potential for rehabilitation and its many opportunities for setbacks. “I have done all the wrong things and made all the mistakes it is possible to make and still survive.” But she also addressed the practical considerations of the handicapped: “Going into restaurants, going into subways, going out to dinner … become monstrous affairs demanding will power and planning and concentration.”
After the war, she continued to take an active role in the cause of the disabled and made frequent visits to military hospitals to talk with and support G.I.s undergoing rehabilitation. She turned these experiences into fictional form with her 1948 novel, The Long Walk. Set in an Army hospital, the story focuses on the “difficult” patients — the men who resist rehabilitation, sunk in their hopelessness and self-pity. Barton placed herself in the story in the person of Janet, a wheelchair-bound young woman whose presence is intended — but with mixed results — to boost the mens’ morale. While most reviews were complimentary, one British critic noted a weakness that runs through much of her writing: “The country which Miss Barton explores with so much sympathy and understanding is entirely that of the mind, and its physical setting is negligible.”
Around the time The Long Walk was published, Betsey’s mother was diagnosed with colon cancer. Having relied heavily on her mother’s support through years of therapy, the news hit Betsey with exceptional force. As Love is Deep is the diary of Esther Barton’s long and ultimately unsuccessful battle with cancer and her daughter’s even longer struggle to come to terms with her mother’s death.
When she returned to New York City to be with her mother, Betsey wrote, “I was met by a stranger. A nervous, thin woman with what appeared to be suddenly whitened hair greeted me in the library.” The woman she had left “well and strong and full of life” was now shaking and hesitant. And worst of all for her daughter, she wanted to be left alone. “Mothers don’t ask to be left alone very often. They are the available members of the human race,” Betsey noted, frustrated at being unable to reciprocate the support she’d been given. Even when the two women sit together, Betsey finds herself “filled with a sense of desolation” at her mother’s silence.
This separation becomes a major theme in their relationship and a primary source of the feelings Betsey struggles with after her mother’s death: “So I stood outside her, as I was to do so often in months to come, filled with admiration at her ability to continue on with life as it had always been, terrified at the lack of communication.” Ironically, another accident ensured that Betsey could not be with her mother at the end. When Esther Barton died in November 1951, Betsey herself was laying in a hospital room, having slipped in her bathroom and fractured her left thigh. She was unable to attend the funeral.
The Arizona desert had by then become the Barton’s second home and the setting becomes Betsey’s spiritual refuge over the following years. It also became a practical refuge when the family’s home in Foxboro, Massachussetts — the home she grew up in, a small Colonial cottage expanded through numerous additions — was condemned and had to be demolished. Esther Barton had lavished years of collecting on the house’s furnishings and Betsey now watched “all the lovely things within it” being dispersed to scattered family and friends. “The house could be looked upon as a symbol of a time of life and through tears I could come finally to accept that what I missed was the fact that the time of life was over, must be over, for all of us.” In the desert, she found “a different kind of thinking” as she looks out on the long vistas towards the mountains: “Relationships, too, perhaps, are different because they exist within these lovely dimensions.”
As her mother was dying, Betsey channeled some of her energies into a second novel, The Shadow of the Bridge (1950), set in an exclusive New England girls’ boarding school. There is no mention of this in As Love is Deep, but it’s perhaps significant that one of the two main characters in the novel, Alida, is haunted by the memory of her mother, who died when the girl was still a child. While novelist Sterling North thought the book was “a beautifully organized, exquisitely told story, enriched by a real mastery of abnormal psychology,” most critics were much harsher. “This story of adolescent anguish is clearly written, with earnest intensity, but it casts little light upon ancient trials and the intensity itself is of such an unrelievedly banal order that it is something of an embarrassment,” Gertrude Buckman wrote in The New York Times. “There is freshness neither in the writing nor in the conception or drawing of characters or situation.”
Even though As Love is Deep is just 144 pages long, it took Betsey Barton seven years to write. Though she claims to reach some sense of what we casually refer to as “closure” — “the present was returned to me at last” — there is an underlying and unresolved conflict evident throughout. Early in the book, she writes,
I have given up the idea of working on myself, lost faith in it, since I have learned that will power, no matter how faithfuly applied, cannot restore my ability to walk. At one time I had thought that, despite all medical dictums, my force of will could cure me. Now I know differently. My interest in esoteric knowledge has not waned. It is only that I have suffered the disillusionment of not being able to bring about a miraculous healing of myself.
Both And Now to Live Again and As Love is Deep are filled with calls to find peace and perspective in love, beauty, and spiritual matters. “If we look at it right,” she argues, “even when we are doing what seems like nothing but the drudgery of physical exercise, we are working with divine tools, sacred tools, following the holy laws that will lead us out of disease into ease.” Yet one senses that Betsey Barton was herself never fully convinced. Her own physical challenges rarely allowed themselves to be ignored for long.
On the morning of Thursday, 13 December 1962, readers of The Los Angeles Times were greeted with a headline announcing Betsey Barton’s death. The morning before, Betsey’s live-in nurse found her floating face up in the pool outside her house in the hills above Bel-Air. Her wheelchair lay at the bottom of the dead end. Tracks in the lawn and deck indicated Betsey had wheeled herself up to and into the pool. The watch on her wrist read 4:40 AM. The police reported that acquaintances said that Betsey had been despondent over her increasing health problems. Though no note was found, the death was ruled a suicide. Her father funded a fellowship in his daughter’s name, administered by the World Rehabilitation Fund, to support the work of rehabilitation therapists and clinics in Third World countries and provide hope even though Betsey Barton ultimately lost hers.
As Love is Deep, by Betsey Barton New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1957
After enjoying the headlong narrative sprint that is Eileen Winncroft’s first novel, Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! (1938), I took advantage of a recent visit to the British Library to scan the first few chapters of her second (and last), Angels in Ealing. I enjoyed reading them on the train home so much that I went ahead and purchased the one and only copy I could find for sale.
Winncroft — Henrietta Pryke Franckeiss Macloughlin in real life or Martha Blount in the pages of The Daily Express — must have gained tremendous self-confidence from her first foray into fiction, for in Angels in Ealing her omniscience doesn’t even draw the line at wandering through the mind of God himself (or the Most Beautiful One or the Holy One as he (it?) is referred to here). What sets this plot in motion is the Holy One’s exasperation at one particular resident of Ealing, Mr. Plantagent Jones. “I have been watching him for nearly forty-five years. And during that time he has never really tried once to behave properly,” he complains. “It has got to stop.” So, he dispatches the Archangel Michael to attend to it.
Jones — Plaggy to his wife and friends — is speeding down the Great West Road with his “under-nourished, under-exercised but very optimistic” nineteen-year-old new secretary, Vera, sitting next to him, on their way back from an afternoon drive in Surrey. Working with little more than the Holy One’s typically vague commission, Michael, at a loss what to do, sends down a great bolt of light into their path. In the resulting crash, Vera’s head is sheared off but Plaggy survives. Vera finds herself floating above the damage but soon loses interest: “she found she could move herself up and down as though in flight, and so she moved off in search of amusement.” Plaggy, however, is pulled from the wreck and soon finds himself on trial for manslaughter. When he pleads that he was only reacting to “the mighty finger of God” reaching down from the heavens, he is ruled insane and sent off to an asylum.
Relying on an act of God to kick off a story is always risky. In the real world, acts of God — or force majeure to use the contractual term — are often followed up by a great deal of cleaning up and fixing up: not exactly the sort of thing that allows a story to arc toward a climax. In the case of Angels in Ealing, the problem is compounded by the fact that the leading characters, Plaggy and his faithful wife Nellie, are so utterly conventional. Plaggy, the author notes, supports his wife “because everyone did support their wives unless they were cads. And he deceived her because he had no one else to deceive except himself, and being English deceit of some kind was essential to keep up appearances.” Though he goes off his head with a divine vision and Nellie soon finds herself in demand in high society as a fortune-teller, unusual spices rarely make up for bland base ingredients. Even Plaggy’s escape from the asylum is possibly the least exciting in all of fiction: after helping to open the front gate one day, he simply walks out and keeps going.
To liven things up, Winncroft introduces a counterplot involving something she had firsthand experience with: a Fleet Street reporter. In this case, it’s a very good-looking young man with a very well-respected family name — Prosper Haines, only son of a milk millionaire. Unfortunately, Prosper fails to make up through enthusiasm what he lacks in basic intelligence. His chief assets, in the eyes of his editors, are “his name and his connections and very often his photograph.” Without resort to divine intervention, the author puts him in the wrong corner of a love triangle, torn between the good-hearted but middle-class Joy and the empty-hearted but ever-to-stylish Julia. Winncroft devotes several chapters to the machinations among this trio, but clever asides aside, she manages to make them even less interesting than Plaggy and Nellie.
Ironically, it’s the eternally nineteen-year-old Vera who ends up experiencing the only substantial character development in the book. She devotes years to floating through most the the great homes of England, finding the inhabitants full of themselves but the interiors rich in thoughts and dreams: “Thoughts that had sunk deep into walls and dreams so strong and tenacious that they hung like a mist in the corners.” Finally, she looks in on her own family and decides to intervene. Although she manages to rescue her sister from the “horror and greed” of her parents, Vera discovers limits to her heavenly powers. She manages to coax a few neighbors over to have tea with her mother and make sure “that her father fell on something fairly soft when he did fall on his way home from the pub,” she is at a loss with her brother Henry:
He was so frightened of everything that she just couldn’t get hold of him at all. He was frightened of living and frightened of dying. Frightened of holding a job and frightened of losing it. Frightened of drinking too much and frightened of drinking too little and being thought a fool by someone else. Frightened of knowing nothing and far more frightened of finding out something. Just an ordinary normal half well-, half ill-, and half-developed young man, but with all the cunning of his kind to avoid knowing it.
This passage suggests where Winncroft’s real growth as a writer lay between Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! and Angels in Ealing. Gone is the relentless string of “And…. And…. And…” sentences. Where she uses repetition, she uses it sparingly and with good effect. And there are more than a few surgically-precise cuts into the hearts, minds and pretensions of English society of the late 1930s.
Sadly, Angels in Ealing marks the end of Eileen Winncroft’s career in fiction. One can’t blame her for the unlucky timing of the novel’s publication. The war hadn’t gone on long enough in November 1939 for readers to have a healthy appetite for escape. Angels in Ealing did get a second printing, but soon disappeared from the shelves for good — and if WorldCat.org is accurate, there are fewer than a dozen copies of the book now to be found in libraries worldwide. A sad fate for a writer whose work is highly readable and certainly not lacking in satiric insights — or ambition.
Other Opinions
• Kate O’Brien, The Spectator, 5 January 1940
Angels in Ealing is another book which ought to entertain a good many people, if they can put up with, or skip, certain unlucky whimsicalities about God and the angels and their direction of suburban destinies. Leaving Heaven right out of it, Miss Winncroft had a good idea, and could have made it just as lightly entertaining, and kept in all her best jokes — some of which are better than you expect. But even as it stands this is an odd, lively little story of strange events in the lives of a middle-aged couple in Ealing.
• Frank Swinnerton, The Observer, 3 December 1939
Angels in Ealing is both more serious and more flippant. Those not offended by its arch glimpses of Heaven will find that in spite of poor invention and occasional descent into girlishness the tale has a sort of quicksilver charm…. Miss Winncroft has much talent, many scathing perceptions, and often a beautifully light touch. When she gives her mind to invention she will write a good novel.
• J.S. The Times, 24 November 1939
Angels in Ealing is a slighter and more fantastic work than Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent, and one is inclined to support that this was the earlier piece. Yet a straggling plot and artificial premises cannot conceal the original twists of this author’s mind…. Her comments on her people are often shrewd; her invention runs to a scene in which a Continental dictator has his fortune told; and her inconsequences have at least the merit of keeping the reader awake. What makes Miss Winncroft particularly engaging, however is the fact that she is never self-important.
• R. D. Charques, The Times Literary Supplement, 2 December 1939
A previous novel by Miss Winncroft was welcomed as a shrewdly entertaining piece of work. It is difficult to know what to say of this present venture save that it is a tangle of apparent inconsequence. Evidently humourous in intention, its occasional jocosities have a disarming flatness, while the element of fantasy signifies everything or nothing. Frankly this seems a rhymeless and reasonless essay in fiction.
• Time and Tide, December 1939
Miss Winncroft’s unusual novel can be read as an inconsequent gay review not pretending to rhyme or reason, or as an unorthodox morality play covering with a sparkling cloak of wit and satire a severe criticism of man’s selfishness and self-importance. In either case it makes an excellent entertainment of real originality.
• James Agate, Daily Express, 25 November 1939
This is as trenchant and witty as the first…. This is a brilliant novel which says more in half a page than most best-sellers say in 300.
Angels in Ealing, by Eileen Winncroft London: Constable & Company Ltd., 1939
In a just world, Princess Tulip Murphy would have a place in America’s honorary royalty alongside Emperor Norton, King Kong, and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. In the course of the fifteen years or so when her updates, as faithfully reported by Virginia Faulkner, appeared regularly in Town & Country magazine, Princess Murphy was America’s leading royal. She boasted genuine red-white-and-blue blood: her grandmother was “the first white woman to be called ‘Madam’ west of Rock Island, Illinois” and her husband, “Brick-a-minute” Murphy, reveals in the heat of a barroom brawl that he is descended from a long line of Irish kings. In true American do-it-yourself fashion, Princess Tulip assembles these ingredients into an invitation into the finest circles of international society.
At first, she does resort to a little blackmail ease her way in. A month or two working as a chambermaid in an exclusive Riviera hotel and some spying into the diaries and doings of the various millionaires and noblemen and -women staying there, a few suggestions about the potential damage of a tip or two to the gossip sheets, and soon she has a string of invitations to the finest watering holes in Europe. “Before the afternoon was over, they understood that my friendship was indispensable and my social position was assured.”
From here, we travel along through My Hey-Day on Princess Tulip’s seemingly neverending round-the-world tour: from Scandanavia to India via Russia; from Egypt to Hollywood; from the 1939 World’s Fair to the supposed site of the Garden of Eden in Iraq. All along the way, we meet a hodge-podge of personalities:
… an unfrocked monk from Athos; a Rumanian gun-runner; a stranded Anazc ventriloquist; a Macedonian pimp; a honey-bee salesman from Hymettis; Raymond Duncan; a two-headed brown-and-white goat; and twenty-seven Levantine streetwalkers — to say nothing of a wandering band of Russian wolf-boys….
We also meet such nobility as Lady Crystal Scum, the Bedad of Nawab, Lord Beastie of Kelp, Grand Duke Slavko (the Nero of the Neva and author of What to Do Till the Dictator Comes), and the ex-King of Jugo-ourway.
Princess Tulip Murphy, shown signing her contract for My Hey-Day
If the changing scenery and cast are not enough, we can also enjoy Princess Tulip’s ever-evolving wardrobe:
I was wearing a taffeta middy bloud with a halter of passementerie; an accordion-pleated backless sarong; stout, hand-twisted fondant-colored ski shoes (ideal for dry weather); and a jaunty parka made of the skins of dozens and dozens of elves from the Irish Free State.
In circles where quick-wittedness was considered a prime virtue, Virginia Faulkner had one of the fastest tongues in the business. Gossip columnists like Walter Winchell and Sidney Skolsky often reported one of her sarcastic quips. On an over-exposed actress: “She had established herself in the public eye, ear and hair.” On a particularly ghastly Hollywood actress’s palace: “The decoration was not so much period as exclamation point.” She delighted in the public’s appetite for dished dirt and was not averse to inventing some of her own to keep things lively. Of a scandal involving an actress on Broadway, she remarked: “There have been conflicting stories — all mine.”
Faulkner was often in demand to supply rapid-fire comic dialogue for Broadway shows, radio, and the movies, but at times her tastes went beyond the conventional limits. It’s unlikely that Winchell or anyone else would have quoted Princess Tulip’s report from Russia:
I want to go on record that no matter what you hear about Russia their beauty parlors are most economical. You can get a shampoo, wave, massage, facial, manicure, and abortion all for about seven rubles ha’penny.
In his 1962 book, The Image, the historian Daniel Boorstin defined a celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.” In My Hey-Day, however, Faulkner/Tulip portray a world in which everyone sought to make their knownness ever more splendid in its isolation. “If you don’t already know who someone is, why on earth would you want to meet him?” Princess Tulip asks. “I have never been introduced to most of my intimate friends.” She admires the standards of Baroness Burper, who never consented to set foot in an establishment which did not boast at least one heated moat.
Even Princess Tulip could not be unaware of the great events unfolding outside the heated moats of high society. She acknowledges at several points what she refers to as “the unpleasantness” which was making travel in Europe ever more difficult. In keeping with the American pioneer spirit, however, she devised ways to accommodate the new circumstances — wearing, for example, a specially-designed frock which, “with a little manipulation can be converted into an air-raid shelt, with room for one other, or a good book and three square meals, if you are the cool, practical type.” War and the rumors of war were driving the International Set to taken extreme measures: “Many of my oldest friends can now count their yachts on the fingers of one hand.” Others are closing their apartments as … gasp! … “moving into their homes!”
My Hey-Day was published in 1940 and you might think the fall of France would have brought Princess Tulip’s adventures to an end. There remain, however, uncollected and out of print, a further half-dozen or so of the princess’s stories that Faulkner published in Town & Country over the course of the war and after. This material is crying out to be assembled with My Hey-Day into the complete memoirs of Princess Tulip. It would be a work that deserves a place on the shelf next to Augustus Carp, Esq., The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, and Lord Bellinger: An Autobiography.
My Hey-Day: Or, the Crack-up of the International Set, by Princess Tulip Murphy as told to Virginia Faulkner New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1940
If we were to trust Virginia Faulkner, the “Lost Generation” had no desire to be found. In The Barbarians (1935), her account of the Bohemian life of expats and war veterans set in Paris and on the Riviera in 1922, to be “disoriented, wandering, directionless” was more fun than having to be tied down to any particular plan. The Barbarians — a loose cluster of creative types — painters, a sculptor, a writer, a pianist, and a gigolo — value independence over all:
Because their work was concerned with the forms of things, they had little time to bother with problems of behavior when in the presence of substance. They possessed great singleness of purpose, and because they found simplicity in all that they most admired they tried to regulate their lives as simply as possible. What they disliked they avoided or ignored, or pretended was non-existent. Life all students of reality, they were experts at make-believe. Like all people who must live intensively, they were sometimes cruel and impatient. Like all specialists, they had a good many blind spots.
This sounds remarkably insightful coming from a writer who was all of 22 when The Barbarians, but bear in mind that Faulkner was nine years old in 1922 and had spent less than a year in Europe, mostly attending a tony girls’ finishing school in Rome. So, there’s far more in this book one has to attribute to precocious powers — of either observation or imagination or probably both. “Tauchnitz had taken the place of experience,” Faulkner writes of one particularly naïve young woman, but it might have truer for the author herself than she might like to admit.
Faulkner later wrote scripts for Fred Allen’s radio show and dialogue for Hollywood comedies, and her talent for rapid-fire conversation in an absurdist vein takes center stage in much of The Barbarians.
“There are so many things to think about. For instance, did it ever occur to you that there are an equal number of hands and feet in the world — at least to start with?”
“And the thumb is the strongest of the fingers?” said Phip helpfully.
“And monkeys have knuckles,” contributed Beppo. “At least, I think they do. Funny how you never associate a monkey with a knuckle.”
“And if we didn’t have fingernails, what would we scratch with?” said Marie.
“Do you suppose if we weren’t subject to itching we’d have fingernails?” inquired Andreas.
“Pulling off the fingernails was a medieval form of torture,” said Sarkesso.
“The Chinese take great pride in long fingernails,” said Lise valiantly.
“And short feet.”
“And many a foot is not twelve inches long.”
“And there is a kind of worm called the inch-worm.”
“And it is very hard to tell one end of worm from the other.”
“Can worms back up?”
This provoked quite a long discussion which ended by Lise and Beppo going out to get some worms….
Faulkner also tries her hand at romantic farce involving mistaken identities and hiding under beds à la Feydeau and proves herself a quick study. The Barbarians collectively foil Baroness Von Schanzburg’s attempt to arrange a marriage between her daughter and a passing American millionaire (“An income for herself from the son-in-law was not essential but would be acceptable,” she muses) and spirit her off to their Left Bank suite of garrets.
With no apparent talent aside from looking beautiful, she’s soon convinced by a ne’er-do-well to join him selling fake native artworks to tourists in the middle of the Sahara. Faulkner may have taken a page from Evelyn Waugh’s just-published A Handful of Dust in that the girl finds herself held prisoner by an especially sadistic local trader. Unlike Waugh’s Tony Last, however, several Barbarians come to the rescue, and the comic crew rides laughing into the sunset.
When it came time for The Barbarians to be published, however, it was Faulkner herself who was the butt of jokes. As the story came out in May 1935 when the New York Supreme Court granted her an annulment, one night two months before Faulkner had been entertaining friends, including Tallulah Bankhead, at her hotel. As more drinks were poured, the party flowed out of the hotel and into one or more nightclubs, until at 3 A.M. the next morning, she was standing up in front of the Justice of the Peace of Harrison, New York pledging to love, honor, and obey one Everett Weil, whom reports identified as a “cotton converter,” whatever that is/was. Hours later, Faulkner awoke, finally sober, to find Weil bringing her breakfast in bed. Faulkner, who was likely gay and in any case in no mood to get hitched, fled the scene and began a frantic search for the fastest route to an annulment. A few papers picked up the story in March, but when the court ruling came out on 15 May 1935, The New York Daily News gleefully put its best headliner writer to work:
Headline from The New York Daily News story on Virginia Faulkner’s short-lived marriage
“Fifteen Scotch highballs preceding a dawn elopement mystified Virginia Faulkner so thoroughly that she didn’t know what was happening until the blissfully happy bridegroom, Everett V. Weil, revived her with a platter of scrambled eggs of his own making in his apartment at 42 W. 74th St. Then she fled,” the article opened. You can hear the copy writer chuckling as he went to town on this story. “He Scrambles, She Scrams,” quipped a subheading. It ended with testimony from her application: “All she remembers of the honeymoon’s final chapter, she deposed, was that the bridgegroom gave her his card and phone number as she was leaving his apartment, and said: ‘Call me up some time.'” Not even Faulkner ever managed to come up with a story quite as wild as that.
The Barbarians, by Virginia Faulkner New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935
From a letter to the Editor, Manchester Guardian, 19 November 1998
For over three decades, P. G. Wodehouse had stiff competition for the shillings of English readers looking for a good comic novel: Joan Butler. At the rate of roughly one a year, Stanley Paul published over thirty of Butler’s novels. Few of them were considered worthy of review by most of the major magazines and newspapers, but that didn’t stop readers from buying them in the thousands and sometimes tens of thousands. They are now — every last one of them — out of print.
Given the zeal with which the work of English women novelists from the interwar period has been rediscovered and celebrated in recent years, you might wonder how it is that the work of Joan Butler has been so utterly neglected. The answer is simple: she was a he. As the Daily Mail announced in early 1960, Joan Butler was the pseudonym of the writer Robert William Alexander, who was born near Dublin in 1905 and who died in British Columbia in 1979. Although Alexander published a handful of novels, some with science fiction themes, under his own name, he primarily worked as Joan Butler.
From Daily Mail, 31 October 1961, page 2
I’m still waiting for the cheap copy of one of Butler’s novels I bought recently to arrive, but in the meantime, I thought it worth splurging on a cavalcade of the covers from about two-thirds of Mr. Alexander’s total Butler production. So, over the lips, past the gums, look out stomach here it comes:
When I spotted the yellow1 spine with the title Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! and the name of Eileen Winncroft below it while browsing through the shelves here at UEA, I knew I had spotted a live one: rare, audacious, and somehow overlooked in the sometimes cultish fervor for novels by British women from the 1930s. That title alone is a bundle of potential psycho-sexual-social interpretations, and I knew I would have to read the book to see just which direction Eileen Winncroft took it.
Now, some readers might stop at the second sentence: “‘Breakfast, poops,’ he murmured in a homosexual Oxford accent.” We’re obviously in comic territory, but not everyone would find the joke funny today. Winncroft might have considered herself a sophisticate — and her narrator Forest is quite open-minded when it comes to heterosexual love — but when it comes to gay men and women, her humour sinks to the level of Benny Hill:
“Do stop stroking each other; you look like a couple of pansies.”
But she only made them worse and they picked dog daisies and stuck them behind each other’s ears and smacked each other’s bottom and called each other darling and behaved in a manner in which young men do in that pretty pub so near the Green Park.
Sean is a poet and would-be writer, while Forest is a mother and bread-winning writer. It’s Forest who worries about being able to buy her daughter new Wellies while Sean spends hours sunning himself in a deck chair, épuisé et fatigué. Be a Gent is, at least at the start, a comedy of role reversals. “Never in her wildest dreams did she think of Sean as a husband… She felt too much of a gent to need a husband then.” The problem at the root of their marriage, in fact, is that Forest sees Sean as an object: “… much as he despised his long, slender body it had at least got him a wife, whereas his inspired brain had not even got him enough to eat.”
That doesn’t stop Forest from turning out newspapers articles for pregenant women on “how much your husband could help in these last few tiring months.” For Forest is in her last few tiring months as the novel opens. And when the household is increased with a healthy baby boy (Robin), the population is quickly rebalanced by a sickly adult man as Sean — at his mother’s expense — is sent away to a sanitorium in Switzerland. Leaving Forest alone to manage affairs.
I use the word affairs with tongue firmly in cheek. Not only does Forest have to pop up to London and make the rounds of Fleet Street in search of freelance writing gigs, she also has to sort out childcare, lodging, food, finances, and transportation. To this extent, Be a Gent is utterly up-to-date. It may, in fact, be the best account of life as a freelancer written before the phrase “gig economy” lit up some sadistic capitalist’s brain. More than a few writers will recognize the editors Forest has to deal with:
“I adore the article you had in the so-and-so yesterday. Now, that is exactly the kind of thing I want. Why don’t you give me that kind of thing instead of this kind of thing.” Picking up her last article for them and curling up their lips at it.
Outside the practical realm, Be a Gent is about a game of musical chairs, with Forest the player and a series of men the chairs — once she’s got rid of Sean through a divorce pulled off like a rabbit from a hat. There is Charles, the unfailingly charming and reliably caddish man about town. Martin, the magnificent doctor who proves to have a different girl for … well, several days of the week. An enormously wealthy Frenchman smitten with Forest — but she with him? Not so much. It all ends like these games do: the music stops and the player plops down on the chair that happens to be within reach. It doesn’t really matter which man Forest ends up with.
Winncroft admits that none of her characters, including Forest, are particularly admirable. “The next story I write will be about quite different people. Really nice normal people.” But since she only knows one at the moment, she invites her readers to send “names and addresses of any others you know so that I can have a few minutes’ talk with them and get a complete picture of them for the story.”
Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! is a little needle of a tale about surviving as an independent woman wrapped up in so many layers of fluff I suspect almost no one felt the barb when it came out. Neither Forest nor Winncroft took herself seriously enough to brood over anything. And the prose speeds the reader along in endless strings of conjunctions:
And then Susan got affected…. And that, of course, opened the heavens…. And while all this fun was going on…. And, of course, Forest accepted…. And the pretty girl he loved…. And Forest returned home…. And every week she tried not to see Martin….
It’s not all like this, but I counted strings of sentences starting with “And …” running on for as much as two pages. Winncroft set a high standard for breathlessness in her prose.
To her credit, she was writing something of an ironic self-portrait. Eileen Winncroft was, in fact, a pseudonym of a pseudonym. To the millions of readers of the Daily Express, she was Martha Blount, one of a trio of women’s page columnists — along with Anne Edwards and Eve Perrick — masterminded by Lord Beaverbrook and all taking their names from friends of the poet Alexander Pope. A few years before Be a Gent came out, Martha Blount provided regular updates during and after her pregnancy. In real life, Martha Blount was Mrs. Neil Macloughlin (her second husband) and their son — known to the Daily Express as Simon Blount — Shaun Macloughlin went on to become a writer of radio dramas for the BBC and, more recently, to found the English Through Drama program. And Mrs. Macloughlin was the former Mrs. Franckeiss and, in the beginning, Henrietta Pryke from Sussex. It took a good hour digging through genealogical databases to unravel that thread.
As Eileen Winncroft, she went on to write a second novel, Angels in Ealing (1939), with a very different tone entirely — a story involving a real angel and a real divine power. Then, over a decade later, she collaborated with a German woman, Else Wendel, in writing Hausfrau at War (1957), a memoir of life in Germany during the Second World War.
Hutchinson catalogue listing for I Am Going to Have a Baby
As Martha Blount, she appears to have had a deal with Hutchinson in 1937 to write a book based on her Daily Express columns to be titled “I am Going to Have a Baby.” The book was announced in Hutchinson’s catalogue with the promise that it would contain “advice on matters which, if overlooked, may be disastrous.” Unfortunately, the book appears never to have been published: not even the British Library has it. Now we know the reason for World War Two. Much later, in the 1960s, Martha Blount finally offered her advice to mothers in a little paperback titled, A Time for Joy (1968). Tandem Paperbacks gave it far less hoopla than “I am Going to Have a Baby,” despite the fact that the former appears to have been largely based on the latter.
1The UEA Library has the second printing, which had a simpler, all-yellow binding. For those of you keeping track.
Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent, by Eileen Winncroft (pseudonym of Henrietta Macloughlin) London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1938
Once in a while, you luck across a book where something as simple and unique as the narrator’s voice hooks you from the start. This was my experience with Josephine Carson’s Drives My Green Age. Twelve year old Chris, an orphan living with her Aunt Merle and Uncle Ed in Morning Springs, Kansas somewhere in the early years of the Depression, has an eye and a voice that reminded me of Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. I didn’t really have the time this week to read something discretionary in the midst of all my assigned texts, but by page four, I knew I was going to have to surrender a good chunk of my day to this book. It was this description of Merle and Ed, sitting on their front porch on a late summer evening: “They spoke dryly and softly once or twice like the sleepless in their beds at night.”
Chris has been living with Merle and Ed for years. Her father died when she was five, “leaving nothing behind worth knowing.” Her mother, who Merle described as an aristocrat with long fingers and pale cheeks, had died in childbirth. It’s a story Merle often retells, but for Chris, “It had lost one fine layer after another in my slowly billowing life until it was now the kind of story that did not speak of my mother or of me, but only of its teller.”
Drives My Green Age is about a year in Chris’ life, a year bookended by the arrival and departure of Miss Evelyn Bryan, the new schoolteacher in Morning Springs. Miss Bryan is the most glamorous thing ever to happen to the town: well-dressed, well-travelled and well-off enough to drive her own shiny new Packard. “I think she’s going to be beautiful. You know, kind of dressed up and swanky,” Chris tells a friend. Aunt Merle pulls off a coup by winning Miss Bryan as a boarder before the woman even arrives in town, though it means relocating her own bedroom and forcing Uncle Ed — old, heavy, and in poor health — to face the nightly ordeal of climbing upstairs. Chris despairs of the consequences: “Do not kill me for a season of fame, for a Packard car parked in the front of the house, for a celebrated guest,” she imagines Ed thinking. But “Uncle Ed, I remember, was as silent as the ground.”
When Miss Bryan finally arrives and Chris gets to know her — “in small bearable parcels, a bit each day until my eyes grew bolder” — she discovers the new teacher has an almost animal-like disinterest in her pupils:
I said in my other voice:
Now I look into your eyes.
And I looked into her eyes. I had seen them before on harmless little snakes, those eyes which were faintly pushed from behind and which extended far out to the sides of her face. They were large and not more than half open, and they moved slothfully, staring most of the time. I had wanted them to be flower eyes or wasp eyes, but they were inactive and did not even bother to look away from me.
The only real interest Miss Bryan shows is, ironically, animal-like: specifically, in the nightly company of a handsome young farmer named Lou Frizzell. Chris spies Lou slipping through the window to Miss Bryan’s bedroom. While Miss Bryan continues to allow the local bank manager to pay court and take her to town celebrations, she welcomes Lou’s night-time visits on a regular basis. Chris’ idealistic sensibilities are shocked, particularly when Aunt Merle fails to take any notice of the scandal brewing in her own house. Drives My Green Age is a coming of age novel, a book about the complexities one begins to see in the passage from childhood to what Aunt Merle calls “addylescence,” but it’s satisfyingly subtle in the lessons that come from a year living in the same house with Miss Bryan. In a way, what Chris learns is to hold a bit of the same disinterest for herself. When, come summer, Miss Bryan takes off in her Packard, Chris thinks, “Who cares?”:
And nothing answered me. There was the last of her, skimming off the edge of my sight, off the edge of our world. She was gone, utterly gone.
“She is gone,” I said, aloud again.
Josephine Carson in 1957
Josephine Carson was thirty-eight when she published Drives My Green Age. Born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she’d seen her family’s fortune lost in the Wall Street crash, seen her parents lose themselves in alcoholism, lived in New York and L.A., and held a dozen different jobs when her mother came to her and said, “I know you’ve been trying to write. I can’t afford to help you here, but if we went to Mexico for a year, I could support you.” As Carson later recalled:
[I]t was wonderful! My mother had just come out of her alcoholism. We had been in Mexico almost a year when we got word that my father had died. We returned to the States. My father left me an income. That was when I was not only able to stop being employed for a while, but able to begin taking myself seriously as an independent adult and pursue life more on my own terms. I bought a house and that gave me a tremendous sense of being grown up. The income my father left me gave me time to write. I was in my early thirties by then.
Carson went on to write two more novels, a collection of short stories, and a collection of oral histories, Silent voices: the Southern Negro woman today (1969). She also taught writing at Bennington, San Francisco State, and UC Berkeley. She died in 2002 at the age of 83.
It’s clear from Drives My Green Age that Carson had been observing and recording long before she started writing. Even though this was her first novel, it’s full of observations, stored up over many years, of how people talk and act and react. And how they sit on porches — like Uncle Ed, “huge and cool and wanting nothing in the world.”
When Virginia Faulkner published her first novel, Friends and Romans, she was 21 and managed to sound like 41. Or 37, to be more precise. Faulkner narrates this wise-cracking romance through the voice of Marie Manfred, just past 37 and taking a hiatus from her busy career as the world’s greatest concert pianist. To get away from the world, her manager finds a villa in the Alban Hills outside of Rome. She is also trying to get away from the publicity generated by a tell-all biography, Gaudy Calliope, written by a former lover. The Romans she encounters are all confused by the book’s title: they all associate it with the muse of poetry, when it’s actually a jab at her piano-playing style, suggesting it’s akin to a bunch of steam-powered locomotive whistles.
Virginia Faulkner, 1935Of course, in declaring, like Garbo, that she wants to “be alone,” Marie is inviting half the civilized world to descend upon her. First to arrive is her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Hamilton Cotter Frewitt, wife — or shall we say, soon-to-be ex-wife — of the British military attaché. She brings in tow her current lover, Count Gustaf (Tavo) von Keinlohe, a garden variety fortune-hunting gigolo and, as it turns out, also a former lover of Marie’s. The international set of 1934 ( whose crack-up Faulkner would later recount, through the memoirs of her comic creation, Princess Tulip Murphy, in a little comic masterpiece from 1940 titled My Hey-Day), it turns out, is a close, and often tight, little community.
Lunch with another acquaintance, the Principessa Colosini, leads to an introduction to the Principessa’s younger brother, the dashing and devastatingly handsome Don Ricardo dei Retti. Sparks fly. Animal magnetism takes its effect. He whisks Marie off to a quiet dinner in his discreet seaside villa. Unfortunately, on her way back, Marie discovers that Don Ricardo is more than vaguely connected with Mussolini: he is, in fact, on the hit list of the still-active Fascist resistance movement. They would, so to speak, like to put him at #1 with a bullet.
Danger, however, only adds to Don Ricardo’s allure. A week or two of entanglements, interrupted by periodic calls to vague affairs of government (eventually explained when it’s revealed that Don Ricardo is, in fact, Mussolini’s chief of intelligence), ensues. Marie is convinced that this is the man worth abandoning her career for. Only to run into the very chauvinistic side of Italian raffinatezza: as … come se dice? … a woman with una storia, Marie would be perfect as a mistress. As a wife … eh, non così tanto. As Marie tells herself early in the book, “Most men regard women as the hunter regards the game — precious and exciting during the chase, but after the kill one begins to look for blemishes in the pelt.”
Less than a year after publishing Friends and Romans, Faulkner followed with a second novel, The Barbarians (1935) — but a comparison of the two books suggests that Barbarians was probably the first to be written. There are numerous references to “the Barbarians” — a loose-knit collection of artists and musicians in Paris — throughout Friends and Romans and Marie and Tavo are prominent characters in the book. I shall have to read and report back soon.
At the time she wrote the two books, the sum total of Faulkner’s international experience was a year at Miss Moxley’s finishing school in Rome and a bit of time in London, Paris, and the Riviera after that. Yet she managed to come off as sophisticated and worldly wise as one of the queens of the international set, Daisy Fellowes (and a far better writer). No wonder she was soon writing for America’s poshest magazine, Town and Country, and trading quips at the Algonquin Round Table not long after. A rival to Dorothy Parker, she left her mark on Broadway and in Hollywood as well, but unlike Parker, she pulled herself out of a downward spiral somewhere in the early 1950s and returned home to Lincoln, Nebraska, where she became a key member of the staff of Prairie Schooner and the University of Nebraska Press. She died in September 1980 while watching Monday Night Football. Definitely a life overdue for recognition.
Friends and Romans, by Virginia Faulkner New York: Simon and Schuster, 1934
Financial Times has the best two opening sentences I’ve read in a long time:
William Longfellow Wollacombe, the Royal Academician, an upright figure with whiskers and the face of a statesman, a man of great truth and purpose you would have said, endowed this world somewhat bountifully with children. Indeed, he was a shade careless about it, not sufficiently distinguishing between his own field and his neighbour’s with the result that the stern visage which has now gone out of fashion stamped itself rather freely on the new age, though with diminishing incisiveness.
The wonderfully vague sense that adultery and bastardry are rather like atmospheric phenomena that take place beyond one’s control conveyed here sets the tone perfectly for the comic clash at this book’s core. If the painter Wollacombe floats through his world blithely unaware of his impact on it, he is positively razor-sharp compared to his poetess wife, Ella, sometimes referred to as “Love-in-the-Mist.” On her brief and infrequent passes through the family’s home in Kensington, she is apt to stumble into one of the many children rambling unsupervised around the place, say “I seem to know you,” and then call out indefinitely, “Give him a penny!” before passing out again.
There are, in fact, thirteen Wollacombe children, bearing artistic names such as Leonardo, Perugino, Rubens, Ingres, Veronese, Gentile, and Lippi and even more artistic manners: “They wrote, painted, made sculpture or played instruments from birth.” They gather like birds when they need to eat, descend upon unwitting grocers, taking away whatever foods strike their fancy, and signing off on hugely marked-up bills against their father’s account. Fortunately, Wollacombe is among the great artistic successes of the Victorian age: “He painted Cows. No gallery in England was complete without a number of Wollacombe Cows; no private house without one or two reproductions.”
One Wollacombe, however, is the odd number in this baker’s dozen: Titian. When his mother asks, “And what are you going to be when you grow up? Painter? Poet? Sculptor? Musician?” he snaps back, “None of that nonsense for me. I’m going into business!” Financial Times, in other words, is a fable about an ant in a world filled with grasshoppers. Unlike his siblings, Titian’s soul aches for order, and he insists on being sent away to boarding school. Fraser passes over this period with an observation some might find applicable to the current Conservative government:
We do not want to follow Titian through his schooldays: nothing could be duller. He used, later, to say that his schooldays were the happiest of his life. Men do say that. It shows they ceased to develop a short time after they left.
Titian takes all the pennies given by his mother and deposits them fastidiously in a Post Office account. And when, after leaving school, he rises quickly through the ranks of a commercial firm (his specialty is collecting outstanding debts), and is recruited by Kettering, the era’s grand financier, his father bids him a bitter farewell: “I can’t say I’m sorry you’re going. I never thought any one of mine would have sunk so low.”
Financial Times perfectly illustrates the principle that tragedy is the flipside of comedy (and vice versa). We laugh at the continual discord between upright Titian and the rest of the Wollacombe tribe. They accept him with a breadth of mind, a tolerance for all types, even a sort of affection — “rather like the affection of a scientist for some example of Neanderthal Man.” To him, though, their tolerance merely proved them utterly lacking in principle. To Leonardo et al., Titian is sad but comic figure. To the author, however, he is ultimately a tragic figure — for it’s clear from the start whose side Fraser’s on.
Despite the fact that Fraser was an accomplished and knighted administrator and civil servant, his greatest passion was for spiritual matters, especially the possibility of transcendence, of passing from this world to another realm of immortality and beauty. He saw art as one of the means by which we can build bridges between the two worlds, and so he has no choice but to take Titian through to a final judgment in the court of immortality. In Fraser’s hands, of course, it’s a kangaroo court, and it’s painful thing to witness. Painful and sadly, from an artistic standpoint, unsuccessful. Good comedy is its own reward. In Financial Times Fraser manages to earn a fortune and fritter it away trying to make a philosophical point. “There is little left to record,” he writes on page 200 — which is where he should have stopped writing. And if you take up Financial Times — which I highly recommend — I would advise you to make the editorial choice Fraser failed to. You won’t miss what you miss.
Other Reviews
• Viola Garvin, The Evening Standard
It sparkles with laughter and mischief; heaves hugely with a deeper mirth at the eternal comedy; gravely considers the temporal world and its mad affairs; pities both the sad and sick, both sinful and sorry, though with an aloof, measured tenderness in proportion to the larger issues. Above all, being afraid neither of beauty nor ugliness, but taking experience for the enriching thing it is, not afraid either of life or death.
• Kate O’Brien, The Spectator
Because Mr. Fraser writes at speed, keeps up his design of excess, overstatement and satire, sustains in all directions, pro and con his hero, a sense of non-reality, and presents a crowd of amusingly mythical figures, formal, grotesque, decorative and theatrically-lighted—his inverted theme, which might have been merely a statement, untenable, as an effect of fireworks, develops into a sustained amusement, imperfect and uneven, but well worth reading, and containing much that is colourful and out of the common. Hit or miss anyway, it is non-pedestrian, and aims at being an entertainment.
Financial Times, by Ronald Fraser London: Jonathan Cape, 1942
This is not a book: it’s an open wound. In a prefatory note, Ewart Milne calls Time Stopped “the story of the narrator’s life as seen in retrospect after the death of this wife.” The problem is Milne’s life stopped when his wife Thelma died of breast cancer in 1964.
Milne, an Irishman who began writing after a decade working as a merchant seaman, took up residence in England in 1942. He came from Ireland through the help of John Betjeman, whom Milne contacted after being told he had been targeted for assassination by the Nazis for his vocal support of the English cause. He was assigned as a land manager at Assington Hall in Suffolk, where a school for refugee children. There he met and became involved with Thelma Dobson, a married woman whose husband was serving in the Royal Air Force. He writes in the book’s first poem:
That summer of forty-five The war in Europe all over and done And the airmen soldiers from the war returning You going to meet your first husband Then we three speaking together
“And I begged him not to be hurt/We had not deceived him,” Milne continues. To a man who seems to have worn his principles on his chest — couriering medical supplies to the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, speaking out against the Nazis in Ireland, encouraging the work of other writers — this proves to be a significant factor in what follows.
Denis Dobson agreed to let Thelma separate, after which — at least as recounted here — she began her affair with Milne. Denis then went along with her application for divorce and Thelma and Milne married in 1947. She came from a family of moderate wealth and supported Milne’s writing, which brought in little money. Never part of any particular school, considered something of an outcast in Ireland and an outsider in England, he never managed to connect himself with either literary establishment: “The English see I am not English/To the Irish I am Anglo” he writes in Time Stopped.
In the early 1950s, Milne got acquainted with the young Irish writer and balladeer Patrick Galvin and encouraged his work. They collaborated on several pieces for literary magazines and spent a great deal of time together. And, as Milne later learned, Galvin spent a great deal of time with Milne’s wife Thelma. In 1962, thinking perhaps that he would be warmly welcomed back by his native country, Milne returned to live in Dublin. Resentment is a long-burning fuel, and Milne’s rejection of Ireland during the war lingered in the minds of some of his old colleagues. Few doors were opened to him.
To make matters worse, Thelma was diagnosed with breast cancer. Milne was slow at first to react to the news: “You reproach me dead that I did not see/The gravity of your illness.” He tries to defend himself posthumously: “Love I laid my palm on your breast twenty years ago/Saying truly I suspected some evil inside there.’
Already devastated by Thelma’s death, Milne was knocked down again with news that he seems to have taken just as hard. He learns that Thelma had been supporting Patrick Galvin financially, even buying half the printing of his 1960 collection, Christ in London, from its publisher, Linden Press. He learns that the two had been carrying on an affair, practically under his nose, for years.
The revelation sent Milne into a fugue from which he emerged, over 18 months later, with Time Stopped. Every poem in the book is untitled, every poem is dated: 28 Nov 1964; 11 March 1965; 15 Jan 1966. This is, in effect, Milne’s journal, but he rearranged the entries, interspersed with short prose “Intermissions,” to show “my growth of understanding.” The result is powerful, painful, and at times almost unreadable. “This is my life since you left me alone/This rack this torture.” It can seem, at times, as if we’re on that rack with Milne. And as with any torture, one only wants it to stop.
This is one of several problems with Time Stopped. Coming from a minor poet and an even smaller press, Time Stopped received few reviews, but those all spotted its core shortcoming. “The subject matter is painful,” wrote C. B. Cox in The Spectator, “and, I think, beyond Milne’s ability to control in language.” Fellow Irishman P. J. Kavanagh gave him partial credit: “The attempt seems to me admirable — it is one of the things verse is for — but, alas, I cannot say it is successful. The pain stays with Mr. Milne and refuses to change into poetry.” I don’t know if Milne did any editing on his poems beyond their sequencing, but this often reads like 160-plus pages of raw material crying out to be rewritten down to a dozen or so good poems. You know what some of the themes are going to be. How do I live without you? I hate you for abandoning me. How do you like your blue-eyed girl Mr Death? Be prepared to see them repeated over and over and over.
But the more subtle problems stem from Milne’s blind spots. In its obituary for Milne, The Times described Time Stopped as a “harrowing elegy … written in the agonized recognition of her infidelity to him, revealed only after her death.” The following week, the paper printed a letter from Douglas Cleverdon, a former BBC producer, who wrote that the comment “deserves a footnote”:
His own lechery was notorious. To my wife’s astonishment, he made a pass at her within 10 minutes of their first meeting; and I vividly recall his indignation and sense of ill-usage when he complained to me that, in his sixties, nubile young women actually rejected his amorous approaches. He attributed this to the selfishness of the younger generation.
The hostility of Cleverdon’s letter and The Times’ decision to print it, stirred up a kerfuffle that was noted by papers on both sides of the Atlantic. T. E. Utley, the obituaries editor, justified printing the letter: “In the obituary we revealed a fact about his wife, which was very damaging; people wrote to say that he was totally awful, and justice seemed to be required.” When Cleverdon was asked to comment, he did clarify that he hadn’t seen Milne in over 20 years, but “I never liked him very much: He was conceited and absolutely shaken that girls wouldn’t lie down in front of him. But then you know what these elderly Irish poets are like.”
Perhaps the relationship between Milne and Thelma Dobson was chaste until they asked for Denis Dobson’s consent, but if it was true what other people said of Milne (and here I am assuming that T. E. Utley didn’t use “people say” in the way Trump does), then his reaction to his wife’s affair with Galvin is melodramatic and unjust to say the least:
Oh women women women Charismatic the womaniser approaches Pretended feminist matey-like says ‘Be emancipated love come to bed What of it what of that husband of yours You are free woman come to bed’ And you fall for it every time bang flat on your backs
So Thelma was just a sucker for a smooth operator — just like all women? Knowing Milne’s history, one has to wonder who was the womanizer he had in mind: Galvin or himself? Milne undermines his own righteous indignation in revealing at times, perhaps thoughtlessly, his own inclinations:
Do you remember • together sawing the fallen branches I joked and said I’d like to make love to your daughter When she grew older We weren’t married then Your daughter was a small child And you answered gaily that we would all go wild When once the war was over And everyone be free to love And no one be hurt at all As you were not by what I said
I confess that I almost stopped reading at this point. Time Stopped has been described as confessional poetry, but usually confessional poets are actually conscious of the things they’re confessing to. I may be guilty of 2020 vision in looking at these lines from 1965, but one cannot deny that there’s a certain hypocrisy at work here — one that becomes even more apparent from the extent to which Milne turns Galvin into his bête noire:
Spawn of monstrous mouth Thief of the world Treachery is his name
Flatters friendlike • takes his friend’s wife Flatters his friend’s wife • takes her purse Take her body from her husband’s bed to his own
“May he burn for his fooling you/May he burn and double burn.” The Times was not alone in describing Time Stopped as Milne’s reaction to his wife’s infidelity, but if one actually reads the book, it’s hard not to see it just as much as his reaction to Galvin’s betrayal of his friendship with Milne. Thelma comes across as a dupe, not a willful adulteress. Galvin, on the other hand, is a snake with two apples: offering love to Thelma, friendship and trust to Milne.
Galvin’s acceptance of Thelma’s financial support is nearly as infuriating to Milne as his seduction:
And for his pseudo-aiding me He got payment of handouts from you Over and over he got paid Till your handouts became a habit to you Became his way of life.
Which begs the question, of course: hadn’t they become a habit to Milne, too? Milne was a strenuous writer of letters to the editor, to numerous editors and on all sorts of topics, and in the years after Thelma’s death, their frequency and pitch both increased. In the same year that the book was published, Milne wrote a letter to The Times dismissing the protest of several young poets who burned a stack of poetry books outside the Arts Council’s offices in St. James Square. “Some of us elder poets,” he intoned, saw the Council’s embrace “as the kiss of death.” He concluded haughtily that “Poetry is its own reward. If it isn’t I suggest they try another trade….” It is, of course, so much easier for poetry to offer its own rewards when aided by a wife’s independent wealth — most of which, by the way, Thelma passed along to Milne.
I came across Time Stopped when engaged in one of my favorite games: browsing in the stacks of a well-stocked library and taking out and flipping through any odd volume that catches my eye. I didn’t know Ewart Milne or his work when I opened the book, but you can’t read more than a poem or two from it without recognizing its extraordinary character. Milne obviously intended Time Stopped to be published and read, but it has much more of the feel of a diary never meant to be shared: it is raw, awkwardly shaped, and both honest and self-deceiving in the way we all are when we try to be candid. It may not be literature — but unforgettable it most certainly is.
[As a footnote, I should say that Milne introduced the • character in these poems as a way of indicating a slight pause, rather like a rest character in written music. In some ways, this might represent the poet’s most useful contribution to literature: it’s a device I would welcome to further use.]
Time Stopped, by Ewart Milne London: Plow Poems, 1967
I started a habit of posting covers and short notes about neglected books on Twitter and Instagram last year. One of the books I featured recently was Marian Spitzer’s tribute to a legendary vaudeville theatre, The Palace (1969). I read in one of the reviews of the book that Spitzer had been a publicist for the Palace in its heyday, which piqued my curiosity and led me to do a little more research. From her Wikipedia entry, I learned that she had written several books before The Palace as well as a number of short stories, and this led me to go looking for her fiction. It wasn’t a long search: her 1924 novel, Who Would be Free, which is available on the Internet Archive.
Marian Spitzer, from the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, 7 September 1923
Spitzer was just 25 when the book was published, but she was already a veteran writer. She’d started as a publicist for the King-Bee Hive vaudeville agency when she was just 18, then switched to become a reporter for The New York Globe. By age 21, she was being invited to speak before journalism groups. One of the apparent benefits of her time as a publicity agent was developing a not-inconsiderable knack for self-promotion. She claimed she wrote the book only because publisher Horace Liveright asked her to. It was a promise she did her best to avoid. She later explained her approach to writing:
My method is this: When evening comes I may or may not have a date. Say, for sake of argument, I haven’t. I call up all the theaters where I think I make be able to graft a free ticket. Say, then, that I get turned down everywhere. Then I telephone all my friends and ask what they’re doing. They;re all doing something that they don’t want interrupted, say. Then I look around the place for a book that I haven’t read. If it’s just my luck that there isn’t, I take a last try at the theaters.
By then, if I fail again, I’ve exhausted all my resources for getting out of working. So I write.
Who Would be Free has, I suspect, substantially autobiographical elements. Like Spitzer herself, her heroine Eleanor Hoffman was born into a family of upper-middle-class German Jews living on the Upper West Side, the “Our Crowd” that Stephen Birmingham wrote about in his 1977 book. In the books’s opening chapter, she and her sister Muriel are being confirmed in a ceremony in a wealthy synagogue, alongside young men headed for Princeton and Yale. Comfortable in their place, her parents look down on Gentiles and recently-immigrated Jews from Eastern Europe. Eleanor’s mother, in particular, worries endlessly about protecting her family’s status by finding proper husbands for her daughters. Only when pushed to exasperation does she allow a word like meschugah slip into her conversation.
Who Would be Free stays true to its title: this is the story of an escape. After a classmate slips her a copy of Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, Eleanor loses faith not only in her religion but in her parents’ ability to consider her best interests. “In Jewish families, especially among the kind I come from,” she tells a Gentile friend, “you’re a prisoner to your parents, not only until you marry, but forever after, and the only satisfaction you can get is to have children of your own, and make prisoners of them.” She rejects marriage as an escape route: “That was marriage. She would belong to him. Then she wouldn’t belong to herself any more.”
After a blow-up with her mother, Eleanor storms out of the family apartment and moves in with a friend. Although she initially feels the pull of home, a few uncomfortable family dinners (“Frantic pleas, agonized wailings, extravagant promises. Threats of suicide, too.”) are enough to steel her resolve. It helps that she gets a lucky break and lands a job as a graphic designer with a theatrical producer. She quickly falls in love — with her work:
She was utterly happy. The life in and around the theater was exactly what she wanted, her idea of a dream come true. Just to be there, to listen to the plans for the new season, to chatter idly with the people who dawdled in and out of the Kalbfleisch office, to read the script of a new play and hear a discussion of who would be the best person to get for the star part, to be consulted occasionally by the art director on a point of scenic technicality or a matter of lights, that was heaven. She loved her job, she loved the strange, half-made people who were connected with her job, she loved her mode of living.
And then she falls in love with a man — a writer, a cynic … and a Gentile. The attraction is mutual. She admires his mind, he adores her spirit of independence. Best of all, they share the same tastes: “‘It’s pretty good to like the same things,’ he said blithely. ‘but when you find someone who hates the same things you do, it’s incomparable.'” But Eleanor has already learned one lesson in love: it can be survived. “[S]he had lost him, and she had wanted to die. But after a while she had recovered. She would always recover.” Having lived through the death of her fiancée, killed in combat in France, she decides (to steal a title from Marjorie Hillis), to live alone and like it: “She had to be footloose, spiritually as well as actually,” even if that comes at the price of loneliness.
I went to see Greta Gerwig’s film of Little Women just after finishing Who Would be Free and it was tempting to draw parallels between the two stories, even to try to sell Spitzer’s book as “Little Women in Manhattan”: sisters, a war, marriage as an economic proposition, the difficulty of a woman finding a place for herself outside of marriage. Unlike Jo March, however, Eleanor Hoffman sees both marriage and her family as prisons. Much as she feels a strong bond with her sister Muriel, just a year younger and alongside throughout school and synagogue, Eleanor sees her as victim, a prisoner happy to be locked in by husband and children for the rest of her life.
In an interview after the book was published, Spitzer said, “There are seven or eight reasons why I’m not married,” the first being “that no man has ever asked me to marry him.” In reality, she was already involved with another writer, Harlan Thompson. The two would marry less than a year later, have two sons, work together in New York and Hollywood, and from all accounts spend four happy decades together until Thompson’s death in 1966. Spitzer continued to write and publish fiction for another ten years — a novel (now extremely rare) called A Hungry Young Lady (1930) and short stories such as “Out Where the Blues Begin” (from The Saturday Evening Post, July 15, 1933). In the late 1940s, she contracted tuberculosis and was bedridden for over a year, an experience she recounted in I Took It Lying Down (1951). Her final book, drawing heavily on her time as a publicity agent, was The Palace (1969). She died in 1983.
Who Would be Free, by Marian Spitzer New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924
Portrait of Richard Kostelanetz by Leonid DroznerAmong the eye-opening/mind-opening experiences of my undergraduate days was discovering the marvelous world of experimental fiction. As with many other adolescent American males, Kurt Vonnegut was my gateway to this genre-bending genre, Donald Barthelme my first mainstream exemplar. The Fiction Collective had just opened its doors a couple of years earlier; Paul Metcalf had just published his farewell to traditional narrative in his collage, Apalache. One of my guides was a book I picked up somewhere in late 1976: Richard Kostelanetz’s anthology, Breakthrough Fictioneers (1973) — which remains, in my view, the best single compilation some forty years later.
I was delighted, therefore, when Richard agreed to let me share the following essay, originally intended for David Madden’s Rediscoveries II, in which writers ranging from Alfred Appel to Richard Yates recommended favorite books worth bringing back into print. Richard’s recommendations exceeded Madden’s quota, so this list didn’t see print back in 1988. It is, however, available in Person of Letters, a 2013 collection of his literary essays, and will also be included in the forthcoming Unfamiliar Appreciations.
IDENTIFYING MORE EXPERIMENTAL FICTION (1988)
An invitation from David Madden proposed that I rediscover a single neglected book title for a symposium he was editing. In reply I proposed to “do best by you if I wrote about several works of experimental fiction from the late 1960s.” He replied, “The concept of the book is that fiction writers write about their one book of fiction that needs rediscovery, rather than an article about several.” I tell him that his requirement of only one title falsifies my sense of what needs to be rediscovered now. He responded with a contract offering me fifty dollars and serial rights, nonetheless insisting that I should “focus on only one book of each writer invited to contribute: 40 writers, 40 rediscovered books.” He continues, “One essay that discussed a good number of writers, without focusing on one, would scatter the focus of our book.”
Well, my friend Madden should have remembered what I think about limitations, especially when they inhibit convictions of importance; and he should have remembered as well my own efforts, in editing anthologies, to transcend any sense of lockstep and perfunctory uniformity.
Since he sent me a contract (but wasn’t paying me enough to ensure that I play by his rules), he got the essay that, given his purposes, I thought he should have, dealing with many 1960s fictions that made radical discoveries. I offered a plethora of titles that were published in what now appears to have been the most fertile time for profoundly innovative literature in this country. (If only we knew then how unique those times were!)
Madden’s letters conjured the vision of publishers reissuing the books we rediscovered; but since he was talking about single volumes, I thought to propose a gigantic book as an addition to the Library of America, or some avant-garde equivalent (perhaps on computer disc), that would include within a single set of covers, notwithstanding differences in format and design, the following thirteen books of masterful innovative fiction:
Frederic Tuten’s The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971), which mixes paragraphs of conventional historical narrative with fictitious incidents such as Greta Garbo propositioning Mao, and such extrinsic material as verbatim (but unidentified) quotations from a variety of literary sources (e.g., Jack London’s The Iron Heel, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, Marx-Engels on the origins of the family and Lord knows what else). It’s all very erudite and subtly funny.
Emmett Williams’s Sweethearts (1967), in which the title word is subject to sequential typographic variations that, as you turn its pages in Hebraic sequence, evoke a heterosexual relationship, introducing the possibility, still scarcely explored, of writing visual fiction with minimal verbal material. (A shorter fiction on the same theme is Norman H. Pritchard’s brilliant “Hoom” [1970], published in Ishmael Reed’s 19 Necromancers from Now (1970). Here two-page spreads filled entirely with “sh” are punctuated by a progressively increasing number of spreads with other kind of wordless typographical arrangements.)
Richard Horn’s Encyclopedia (1969), in which alphabetized notations (filled with cross-references worth following) weave an ambiguous fiction about human interrelatonships, paradoxically disordering by reordering and thus forcing the reader to pursue his or her own path in experiencing the fiction. (Why haven’t we heard from this author again? He seemed too sophisticated to be a one-shot. Someone once suggested Horn’s name might be a pseudonym for Gilbert Sorrentino, who worked as an editor at Horn’s publisher around that time; but Sorrentino’s own novels are not quite so good.)
Richard Hefter and Martin Stephen Moskof’s Shufflebook (1971), ostensibly a juvenile composed of a pack of cards, one side of which contains “and the [name of an animal],” while the other side has just verbs. The sequence of possible combinations is nearly infinite, and merely for approaching that concept in a book of fiction Shufflebook, notwithstanding its slick and trivial contents, is valuable. (Another novel-on-cards from this period that should have appeared as a book [and still could] is Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots [1970], photos of which came in my mail once every fortnight. As the herd of shoes is seen in various settings, they become the anthropomorphic protagonist of an extended narrative.)
Ed Sanders’s Shards of God (1970), which is filled with obscenity at its stylistically finest. Not unlike Tuten, Sanders reinvents history, so that, say, the ghost of Che Guevara really wants nooky, or a bourgeois lady consorts with hippies in order to collect “tool drool.” (The first word in the title incidentally means heaps of cowdung and the last word announces the underlying theme of sustained blasphemy.)
Kenneth Gangemi’s Olt (1969), which portrays in exquisitely measured sentences the pathology of a man unable to regard one thing as more important than another. Also, by making his sentences so complete that each can stand apart from any paragraph, Gangemi revealed a possibility for minimal fiction composed of autonomous sentences.
William Melvin Kelley’s Dunfords Travels Everywhere(1970), which is stylistically the most innovative fiction of a once-promising novelist less visible later.
G. F. Gravenson’s The Sweetmeat Saga (1971), in which the disappearance of pop music stars named Sweetmeat, brother and sister famous since their youth, are portrayed in fragments splayed rectilinearly across the manuscript pages, its language drawing upon the elliptical style of wire services and its typography upon typewriters (so that the manuscript itself had to be photocopied for definitive publication).
Duane Michals’s Sequences (1970), which contains stories told entirely in wordless photographs. My own favorite has always been “The Lost Shoe,” whose first image shows a deserted urban street on which a man, seen only from behind, is walking away from the camera and up the street. In the second frame he drops on the pavement a blurred object that in the third frame is seen to be a lady’s shoe. This frame, as well as the next two, suggest that he departs up the street in a great hurry. In the sixth frame the man is nowhere to be seen while the shoe is mysteriously on fire. The realism of the photographs starkly contrasts with the mysteriousnes of the plot, while large changes between frames accent the absolute immobility of the camera. For this last reason the authorial perspective is, to my senses, as Chekhovian as both the work’s title and its passive acceptance of something inexplicably forbidding. Although “The Lost Shoe” begins as a photographic sequence, its ultimate impact is decidedly fictional.
Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing (1972), which resembles Michals in making the page itself the basic narrative unit; however, instead of photographs, Federman uses language shaped into a wide variety of one-page visual typewritten forms that, like The Sweetmeat Saga, had to be offset directly for publication (and are likewise fundamentally about the possibilities of arraying typewritten words on 8 1/2″ by 11″ pages, in the historic era just before computer-assisted printing!). Through these set-pieces, which reveal an unfaltering capacity for formal invention, Federman weaves several sustained preoccupations, including the narrator’s immigration to America, his poverty here, his obsessive memories, his parsimonious passion for noodles. No other “novel” looks like Federman’s contemporary reworking of Kafka’s Amerika, which was written fifty years before; yet no other in this selection is quite so rich in traditional sorts of “content.” (Mention of Federman would be incomplete without acknowledging his bilingual masterpiece, Take It or Leave It [1976], which is likewise about coming to America. However, because this text entwines two languages, it should be available on audiocassettes in addition to its initial form as print, thus putting to shame all those cassette bowdlerizations of pop books that were themselves bowdlerized before ever getting into print!
Madeline Gins’s Word Rain (1969), which by now is commonly regarded as the most extreme example of self-reflexive fiction. Steve Katz, writing recently in Michigan Quarterly Review, characterized it as “a playful, serene book that puts self-reflexivity to rest forever.” The first sign of this book’s unusual concerns and its equally rare humor is its extended subtitle: “(or A Discursive Introduction to the Philosophical Investigations to G,R,E,T,A,G,A,R,B,O, It Says”; a second is the incorporation of several concerns indigenous to other books on this list—special languages, expressive design, extrinsically imposed forms. “The saddest thing is that I have to use words,” announces Gins’s narrator, not only echoing the opening sentence of Ford Madox Ford’s fictional study of human opacity, The Good Soldier (1915), but also exemplifying that Gertrude Steinian paradox of using language to reveal both the limitations of language and the reading process.
Rather than developed in any step-by-step way, this last theme of linguistic opacity is reiterated in every section of Word Rain suggesting that the indicatively unpaginated book is best read in snatches as opposed to straight through. (The same advice can be tendered to anyone facing Finnegans Wake.) That style that is also the book’s subject is revealed through a variety of opaque styles, one of which is a classic example of verbal elegance entwined with incomprehensibility:
Each word on the page seemed ossified. The word face was a stone. The word guess was a flint. The words a, the, in, by, up, it, were pebbles. The word laughter was marble. Run was cartilage. Shelf was bone. Talk was an oak board. See was made of quartz. The word refrigerator was enameled. The word attention was concrete. The word iron was iron. The word help was wrought-iron. The word old was crag. The word touch was brick. The word read was mica and I was granite.
I have read this passage aloud dozens of times in the course of lectures, and have never ceased to marvel at its purity.
In the pages of Word Rain are numerous inventive displays of printed material: lists of unrelated words with dots between them, whole sides filled mostly with dashes where words might otherwise be, pseudo-logical proofs, passages in which the more mundane expressions are crossed out, an appendix of “some of the words (temporary definitions) not included,” even a photographed hand holding both sides of a printed page, and a concluding page of print-over-print that reads at its bottom: “This page contains every word in the book.” Though Word Rain suffers from a peril of its theme—a linguistic resistance that prevents most readers from discovering its purposes and from entering its imaginative world—it will always be an American classic to me.
Frank Kuenstler’s Lens (1964, and thus slightly earlier that the other books mentioned here), which is the most sustained example I know of prose acoherence (which is the literary analogue of musical atonality), not only from word to word but at times also from letter to letter:
This opening line establishes a style that is sustained to similar widths for 81 pages, each with type ten inches high. Only recently did I become aware of this book, which contains the sort of audacious innovation we associate with the American imagination at its finest.
Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days (1967 is a book-length ironic fiction about an exhibition full of objects similar to his famous early sculpture of a soft hamburger, all placed into a Lower East Side store a few years before—the book bearing as much resemblance to its subject as those objects did to what they purport to represent. (Why Oldenburg spends so much time with world-famous sculpture and the like, when he could become a great avant-garde writer, utterly mystifies me.)
OTHER TITLES TOWARD A SECOND VOLUME (OR COMPUTER DISC):
John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968), which represents the apex of his career as an experimental fictioner.
Nicholas Delbanco’s Consider Sappho Burning (1969); ditto.
Steve Katz’s The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (1967); ditto.
Ron Sukenick’s The Death of the Novel (1968); ditto.
Kenneth King’s uncollected prose (which a small press run by me has been trying to put into print for years now, in spite of persistent neglects and scandals at funding agencies)
YET OTHER TITLES TOWARD A THIRD WHATEVER:
Willard Bain’s Informed Sources (1969), Frederick Barthelme’s Rangoon (1971), Stanley Berne’s The Unconscious Victorious (1969), Marvin Cohen’s A Self-Devoted Friend (1967), S. Foster Damon’s The Moulton Tragedy (1970), Wally Depew’s Once (1971), Irvin Faust’s The Steagle (1967), Dick Higgins’s A Book About Love & War & Death (1972), Harry Mathews’s Tlooth (1966), Edward Ruscha’s Crackers (1969), Lucas Samaras’s Samaras Album (1971), Eugene Wildman’s Nuclear Love (1972), Arlene Zekowski’s Seasons of the Mind (1969).
TOWARD A FOURTH:
Three anthologies that should be credited with efforts to establish taste, rather than exploit reputations previously established: Jerry Bowles’s This Book Is a Movie (1971), Eugene Wildman’s Experiments in Prose (1969), and my own Future’s Fictions (1971).
Canadian addenda are worth including, if you consider, as I still do, Anglophone Canadian literature to be a neglected zone within American English-language literature: bp Nichol’s Two Novels (1969) and Chris Scott’s Bartleby (1971), in addition to M. Vaughn-James’s Elephant (1970) and The Projector (1971), both of which by now seem to be precursors for the more accomplished visual-verbal fictions of Paul Zelevansky (an American).
By the late 1980s [and even two decades later], I look back upon these books and thus this period of 1966 to 1972 as a time when a developing avant-garde fortunately found publishing channels. Nearly all of these titles came from profit-making publishers, in sum reminding us that, even though manuscripts for similarly innovative books of fiction exist today, we don’t see them as often from either commercial houses or those smaller publishers dependent upon grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. At a time when mediocrity (of different kinds) prevails, it is salutary to remember what had been and thus could be done.
This essay is the best I can do for you now, David, contributing to your theme of rediscovering lost fiction without succumbing to your unnecessary requirements for uniformity. Should the conventions of your Rediscoveries II require you to attribute this baker’s dozen to a single author, consider the Great Avant-God who teaches at the University of Skies (and, alas, does not seem to be around much anymore).
Peter Nelson-King wrote recently to pass along “a few interesting rarities”:
I was quite struck by Crown of Flowers and Sweet Bobby, the only two novels by the economist Joel Kurtzman. Written in the late 60’s and early 70’s, both are tragedies with surreal aspects. The first uses an arresting, diaristic technique to chronicle the voyage of a group of hippie outsiders to an uninhabited island off the California coast, with harsh results. The second is set in a state mental institution, and was based on the author’s own experiences working in that environment. Both novels have highly concentrated, poetic prose, and are terribly sad. They definitely deserve to be rediscovered, but their author seems to have made no effort to get them back into print.
Editor: Of Sweet Bobby, Kirkus Reviews wrote, “Despite simplistic Freudianisms, the author does succeed against nearly impossible odds in wresting some sympathy for his tortured bully protagonist, but so what? Everybody knows the world’s a dirty place, war and poverty ain’t fun, and the only thing sweet about Bobby is the title of this book.” In The New York Times, Martin Levin wrote more generously, “The measure of Joel Kurtzman’s achievement is not to show us how much of a monster his hero is, but how much of a human being. Beneath the crazy violence is a residue of humanity that comes to view in the course of the novel.”
In a similar vein and era is A Useless Day by Janine Bregeon. The short novel depicts a day in the life of a middle-aged wife and mother who, suffocating under depression and anxiety, refuses to get out of bed. Wrapped tight in her internal fears and rages, she flounders, lashes out at her family, and struggles with the meaning of it all, but she and the reader eventually come to a realization, and the novel ends on a higher, but still sober, note. It appears to be the only novel by Bregeon, a mysterious French artist, at least the only one translated into English, and it’s been out of print since about 1970.
Editor: I like this remark from the NY Times’ anonymous reviewer: “This is the fever chart of a midget nervous breakdown experienced by a young housewife in the south of France. (I know the jacket features a lubricious nude. Forget it. Grove would stick a nude Nokomis on a reprint of ‘Hiawatha.’)” Can I get an Amen, my fellow Grove bookshoppers from the 1970s?
You might also enjoy the work of Elaine Kraf, a never-famous New York writer who published 4 novels between 1969 and 1979, none of which sold at all, before vanishing from the literary scene. All are portraits of women in states of psychological distress, and having read her first (I Am Clarence) and her last (The Princess of 72nd Street) I can safely say she’s a great unheralded talent. The latter is the only book to get reprinted, by the Dalkey Archive, though I don’t know if anybody noticed.
Cover of first edition of Ninety Double Martinis by Thomas Hinde. Cover Design by Victor Reinganum
Ninety Double Martinis may be the best J. G. Ballard book that Ballard never wrote. It’s full of wonderfully Ballardian details: the regular noise and lights of airline flights taking off and landing nearby; a motorway jammed with commute traffic at all hours, drivers staring ahead with deadened expressions, as if in trances; a brightly-lit shopping center where cashiers wait but shoppers who aren’t there; anonymous men of violent intent lurking in shadows. The road accident on the motorway that never seems to be cleared away could come from Crash. The block of flats in High Rise could be just a little past the shopping center. A sense of nightmarish, random threats pervades its pages.
Thomas Hinde is likely the least known well-regarded novelist of the Amis/Sillitoe/Murdoch generation. He wrote 15 novels, most of them critically praised, but somehow never managed to get the same level of recognition as his contemporaries. Valancourt Books brought two of Hinde’s novels — Mr Nicholas, his first, from 1952, and The Day the Call Came from 1964 — back to print in recent years, but most of his books never saw second printings, let alone reissues. In terms of academic attention, his work at best gets “honorable mention”-type consideration, which usually indicates that the researcher thought it was worth mention but not actually worth reading. Even for myself, though I’ve owned a copy of Hinde’s “British academic in America” novel, High (1969) since the late 1970s, I haven’t yet read it. Though I could probably rattle off a half-dozen of Hinde’s titles, it was a genuine surprise when I saw the title of Ninety Double Martinis on the spine of a red-backed book next to the seven or eight Hinde titles in the UEA library recently. For the title alone I felt I had to read the book.
For the first twenty or so pages, Ninety Double Martinis seems to be about Mullin, a miserable teacher in a dreary New Town school who rents a room from a nasty landlady and has a crush on the cute young school secretary. Aircraft headed for exotic destinations pass over every few minutes, rattling the dishes — “another ninety double martinis,” Mullin thinks when he hears them. Mullin is one of what Isabel Quigley called Hinde’s usual antiheroes: “limp, lost, but basically sympathetic, tormented by loneliness, jealousy, and a feeling of pointlessness….”
Then, in the middle of a rainy Saturday night, Jill, the secretary, knocks on Mullin’s door. “You must come,” she tells him. Throwing on a coat, he follows, and from then on, we follow the pair through an increasingly irrational and violent landscape. They drink coffees in a brightly-lit cafe and watch as seven or eight attack dogs, “with long Alsatian jaws” trot by, followed by “uniformed figures, with low caps and dark faces.” They run to evade these men, but then the explosion comes — or, not so much an explosion as “a bright, hot breath.” They take a pram from a department store display and load it up with food and other supplies, as if they were going to hole up somewhere for weeks. Then they’re running through an enormous office, empty in the afterhours:
He imagined how strange it would seem to the men who came here in the day time. Their papers deranged, blood on their swivel chairs. They’d talk about it all day. They’d go home and tell their wives. They’d look forward all day to telling them, and their wives, watching television, would wish they’d do it more quickly so that they could concentrate on what was real and moving in the eye of the boy. And they’d notice the way their wives weren’t really listening…
On they flee, into a bowling alley where a loudspeaker blares, “Ticket number six seven three report to the control room,” and the apparently casual bowlers suddenly rally, as if by command, and begin pursuing Jill and Mullin. They escape by crawling through the machinery at the end of a lane and find themselves in a vast multi-story machine room overseen by a man in a white coat who watches one particular dial with rapt attention. More strange rooms and unaccountable threats follow until they are thrown into a pitch-black cell. There, lying on her mackintosh laid out on a cold stone floor, they make love — which is probably the most unbelievable incident in the whole book but which I will forever cherish for what is easily the most English line of dialogue ever written: “‘I’ve loved you for months,’ he said. ‘Ever since mark reading last Michaelmas half term.'”
Reviewing the book for The Listener, Jocelyn Brooke described Ninety Double Martinis as “by Kafka out of Sapper,” and that’s a pretty accurate way to describe the book’s strange mix of absurdist malevolence and slam-bam action. I was reminded a bit of G. W. Stonier’s The Memoirs of a Ghost, which I wrote about back in October: both books clearly take place in an alternate, slightly hallunicinatory parallel universe, where things appear normal yet nothing makes sense. Unlike Stonier’s nightmare, however, Hinde’s never gives the reader a chance to stop and take stock: violence and death are always pressing in, forcing things forward. I got the sense that had Hinde set his mind to write a James Bond-like thriller, it would have been a crackerjack one.
And in some ways, he might have been better off to write a more conventional thriller, because I got the feeling that having tossed him characters into an absurdist nightmare, he was at something of a loss for how to bring their story to a close. The easiest answer, of course, is to kill everyone off. The second easiest is to pull a Bobby Ewing and have Mullins wake up muttering something about a terrible nightmare. Hinde did a little of both and not enough of either: the last 5-10 pages are the weakest when they needed to be the strongest to bring off the tour de force effect successfully. But for the first 120-plus pages, it’s the next best thing to a good J. G. Ballard book. I’m pretty sure that I was the first person to crack open the UEA’s copy of Ninety Double Martinis since whoever inserted the magnetic anti-theft strip back in the 1980s and probably the first person to actually read the book, which is a sad statement. Ninety Double Martinis might be a bit imperfect, but it sure was fast and furious.
Ninety Double Martinis, by Thomas Hinde London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1963
Peter Laurence writes to recommend Isabel Scott Rorick’s Mr. and Mrs. Cugat (1940), a collection of comic sketches about Mr. and Mrs. George Cugat, a happily if comically married couple that was a huge best-seller in its time. For a book about a couple with no children it managed to spawn an impressive number of offspring: Hollywood filmed it as Are Husbands Necessary? starring Ray Milland and Betty Fields in 1942; CBS broadcast it on radio as My Favorite Husband with Lucille Ball and Richard Denning from 1948 to 1951; CBS then put it on television as the landmark sitcom I Love Lucy from 1951 to 1957; and finally, CBS milked the cow one more time, running My Favorite Husband for two-and-a-half seasons on television with Barry Nelson and Joan Caulfield.
I recognized Mr. and Mrs. Cugat when Peter recommended it, but had assumed that it was about Latin bandleader Xavier Cugat and one of his five wives. Instead, George Cugat is Fourth Vice President of the Tri-State Bank in some nameless Ohio city and Mary Elizabeth (Liz) is his superficially addle-brained (but ultimately smarter) wife. Rorick structures the book around phrases from the traditional wedding vows (“… to have and to hold …”, “… for richer or poorer …”), but this is still just a collection of anecdotes. Unlike in I Love Lucy, however, George is the comic goat just as often as Liz. This synopsis of one of the episodes gives a taste of that:
The year that the big annual social function, the Bal Masque of the Coronet, turned to an African version, Mrs. Cugat wasn’t a bit astonished that Mr. Cugat put off getting his costume to the last minute. But she was certainly surprised when he turned up in a complete suit of armor, completely cock-eyed, and managed to steal the show — and also to set himself on fire inside his iron suit.
Lobby card from Are Husbands Necessary? Mr. and Mrs. Cugat is out of print, except from print-on-demand publishers, but you can read it for free from the Open Library (Link), along with its 1945 sequel, Outside Eden
CAUTION! Any person or persons who attempt to recognize their own sordid idiosyncracies in any character in this book are warned that anything they say will be used in evidence against them.
This disclaimer may be the best thing in this book. On the other hand, my knowledge of the who’s who (or who slept with who) of the glitterati of the 1920s (and 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s) may be too inadequate to have recognized — let alone understood — most of the inside jokes that are probably peppered throughout.
Daisy Fellowes was a portmanteau of connections. In her day, she may have been the best-connected person on the planet. If there are six degrees of separation between me and Kevin Bacon, there were probably no more than four between Daisy Fellowes and my grandfather. Just read the string of labels that opens her Wikipedia biography: “prominent French socialite, acclaimed beauty, minor novelist and poet, Paris Editor of American Harper’s Bazaar, fashion icon, and an heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune.” Every one of those subordinate clauses by itself is more that most of us can claim. She packed six of them into her life. But then she did have plenty of hooks to hang them from, carrying around a name that would have taken up a sheet of paper by itself: Marguerite Severine Philippine de Broglie Ducasez Fellowes, Duchess de Gluecksbierg. Daisy Fellowes on her yacht c.1930
She was the kind of character who provides an irresistible rabbit-hole for even a well-intentioned writer. Thus, Ladislas Farago, when ostensibly writing about her daughter Jacqueline in his history of World War Two espionage, The Game of Foxes, veers off course for a quick swing around the isle of Daisy:
The Prince was killed in 1918, the year Jacqueline was born. His young widow, a ravishing and poignant figure in the deep mourning that was fashionable at that time, then married the Hon. Reginald Fellowes, a tall, dark, dashing British banker, younger son of the second Lord de Ramsey. From then on, she commuted between her palace in Neuilly-sur-Seine, her spacious Villa Zoriade on the Riviera, and Donnington Hall in Berkshire, once the residence of Beau Brummel, now decorated with Daisy’s magnificent collection of eighteenth-century furniture. She lived so sumptuously that even the walls of her boathouse on the Cote d’Azur were lined with drawings by Giovanni Tiepolo, the great painter of Venetian baroque whose frescoes adorn the Doge’s Palace. With apartments also in Belgravia and Tangier, she was always on the move, allegedly to dodge taxes on the vast Singer fortune.
Daisy Fellowes de Broglie Ducasez, acclaimed as the world’s best-dressed woman, was the outstanding hostess of her age, more devastatingly smart and witty than beautiful. She entertained prodigiously at her many homes and aboard her 250-foot yacht, the Sister Anne. Her circle of friends included not only such blue-blooded fixtures of high society as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Lady Castlerosse, Lady Diana Cooper, Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley, and the Aga Khan, but also Somerset Maugham, the great ballet master Serge Lifar, Coco Chanel, Cecil Beaton, Yvonne Printemps, and Sacha Guitry.
Her name pops up in letters, memoirs, and biographies of everyone from Gertrude Stein and Colette to Erté and Chanel to the Duchess of Windsor and Pamela Digby Churchill Harriman (to name another portmanteau of the famous and rich). And there is always some juicy tidbit about her to be shared:
Daring Dos, Marie Trasko:
• “According to her hairdresser, she had her hair done as much as ten times in one day.”
The Power of Style, Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins:
• “Seeing a group of girls playing in a park, she asked the nurse watching them, ‘Whose lovely little children are those?’ To which the nurse replied, ‘Yours, Madame.’
Too brief a treat: the letters of Truman Capote, edited by Gerald Clarke:
• “Daisy Fellowes (her face lifted for the fourth time — the Doctors say no more).”
October Blood, Francine du Plessix Gray (novel):
• “Daisy Fellowes, who always wore identical bracelets of diamones and rubies on each wrist (she ordered two of each because she loathed asymmetry).”
Second Son: An Autobiography, David Herbert:
• [Daisy on her daughters]: “The eldest, Emmeline, is like my first husband only a great deal more masculine; the second, Isabelle, is like me without guts; [and] the third, Jacqueline, was the result of a horrible man called Lischmann ….”
I confess that I bought Cats in the Isle of Man for its title alone, hoping for something quirky and unjustly forgotten. Instead, I found the book quippy and probably not worth what a used copy will cost you. It starts as the story of Claudia and John, twin children of an American Singer-like heiress and a handsome but feckless Polish prince. John is dropped off early in the journey, however, only to reappear briefly in the midst of World War One and then be killed in combat. Instead, the story becomes focused on Claudia and her consistently poor taste in men.
Claudia see her father and handsome and resolute, “a terribly just and severe judge.” Instead, he is feckless, a man who “dreaded being alone and would do anything to keep his friends about him, from the time he awoke in the morning to his last minute of consciousness.” Her first crush is on the debonair Felix, who quickly proves to be just another impoverished nobleman in search of an American fortune. She marries Count Robert for his “knack, which came from long practice, of asking questions about the futile things that women are interested in, and appearing to appreciate their answers, while all the time his gentle mind was wandering in other spheres.”
The Count takes her off to his castle in the countryside and makes her a near-prisoner in its bleak rooms, unchanged in their decor for the last eleven generations. Later on, with Robert conveniently dead and the fog of war putting her world in a comforting soft focus, Claudia meets and falls in love again with Felix. They pledge to spend the rest of their lives together. But once a shit, always a shit, Claudia learns in the end, and Daisy Fellowes draws the final curtain on her story.
Cover design from the Lincoln Mac Veagh edition of Cats in the Isle of Man (1929)
I got the strong impression Cats in the Isle of Man that Daisy Fellowes would have been terrific fun as a conversationalist. There are some amusing asides and observations tossed off in the course of the book. Count Robert worries that Claudia, “being half American, could not be entirely civilised.” The most sought-after prostitute in Paris is sought after by men not for her beauty or sexual prowess but simply because she “had a trick of looking at him with her brown eyes all the time he was speaking, and she never interrupted.” Sadly, these are bits of tinsel hung off an otherwise unremarkable frame. Claudia is a cipher and her story not worth telling. But the book did allow her to add “minor novelist” to her CV, so I guess it served its primary purpose.
File this “Justly Neglected” and run: You got a hair-dresser to get to!
Cats in the Ilse of Man, by Daisy Fellowes New York: The Dial Press/Lincoln Mac Veagh, 1929
Elizabeth Seeber’s signature in her copy of Appius and Virginia
I often wonder about the people whose names I find written in copies of old books I buy, but I rarely do anything more. But I was so impressed by G. E. Trevelyan’sAppius and Virginia when I reread it recently that I began to wonder who would have bought it. My copy — the U. S. edition published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in New York in 1933 — is signed, “Elizabeth Seeber, 10 Mitchell Pl.”
Who was Elizabeth Seeber? Well, I did a little rooting around the Internet and learned that she was a single woman every bit as courageous and independent as Trevelyan herself. Born into a German-American dairy-farming family living near Canajoharie in upstate New York in 1881, she worked for several years before entering Smith College in 1905. After graduating three years later, she went to work as a teacher of math and German at East Orange High School in New Jersey that fall. She switched to the New York City public school system a year or two later, first at Flushing High School and later at Newtown, and remained a teacher for most of the next forty years.
Even before the U. S. entered World War One, she helped organized fundraisers for displaced French and Belgian civilians. Then in the fall of 1917, as U. S. troops began shipping out for France, a group of Smith alumnae decided to organize a volunteer unit to provide moral support near the frontline. Equipped with field kitchen equipment and other gear to allow them to provide refreshments, a few hours’ respite, and entertainment to troops on their short relief periods while serving on the front lines. When the first group of ten women sailed for France in the spring of 1918, Seeber was among them.
The women spent several months in Paris making their administrative and logistical arrangements, and then the first group left for the front. Seeber was their unofficial correspondent. In August she wrote,
. . . One day in June Mr. Chesley, the regional director, came into our station and said he wanted a strong person with strong nerves to go to a city as near the front as women work. He looked at me and I began to pack up. I knew the minute I saw the house that that was where I belonged. It is an adorable house facing the Marne, with a little walled-in rose garden front and back. The back one has pretty green lattice work over the brick wall and lots of ramblers vining over it. Of course, in the center there is a rose tree and a garden seat and table. Think what that meant to the men right in from the trenches!
How the boys did love that house!
They came in sometimes as early as six in the morning — boys who had been at the batteries all night — and they were there as late as they dared stay at night. I think perhaps they loved the kitchen best of all. They said the only thing they didn’t like about it was that it made them homesick. They are so glad to see an American and sometimes look and look at you as if you couldn’t be real. You would never doubt for one moment that the work was worthwhile if you could have spent just one day with me there. We knew of course that the offensive was coming and one day the boys said their leave was up at five instead of nine because they had to be back ready for action. I’ve never heard such a frightful murderous roar as the artillery made— the sky was just one glare of light….
I’m helping at the canteen here and visiting the hospital and taking lemonade to all the wards, and so forth. It’s rather wearing, but the patients do like to have us come. There are no women nurses, and while the care is excellent, men apparently do not care to get on quite without women. They are the very bravest chaps I’ve ever seen. They don’t want to hear a word about the “hero stuff,” so I just put on my freshest summer dress and white shoes, and smile and talk merrily when I have all I can do to keep the tears back.
“I have all sorts of plans,” she confided. “There is scarcely a pane of glass in the house, the spaces are filled in with that thick, oiled cloth the French use, but before winter something will have to be done.”
She sent a second letter in early September:
Two weeks ago I rushed into Paris to hunt up furnishings for our house and was most successful in getting an order from the Y. and in finding the things I wanted. Amy Ferris helped in the buying of curtains, — windows have to be curtained to keep in the light at night, — and they are lovely. Since then Jean and I have worked almost day and night making huge curtains, valences, cushions, table covers, and simple lamp shades — the result is almost the prettiest house in France, we think. The men like it immensely because it looks so American.
I also hunted up an ice cream freezer and a gas oven so we can easily make ice cream and pies. I don’t suppose you can realize the devotion of the ordinary American boy to pie — it’s touching…. Almost all our men are eating at French messes and miss really American food. One day some of the officers were longing for ice cream, and we said, “All right, get the ice and salt, furnish a man to grind it, and you shall have it.” In an hour’s time it was all done and a cake besides, and they were as happy as boys. We let them all lick the dasher and hang around while things were being done, and one of them said, “Well, for one hour Sherman was wrong!
Even after Armistice was declared on November 11th, the Smith women stayed busy. Seeber wrote late in that month,
When the Second Division was brought out of the lines they began giving them passes to Chalons and all at once we were simply swamped with boys — their first day off in eight or nine months, and they stood in line sometimes more than an hour just to get to the counter in our little store; there was never a murmur. Luck was with us for with the arrival of the hordes came a carload of supplies. For two days our two men were unloading it, leaving Jean and me to do everything — tend store at the maddest rate you ever saw — I can beat any cash girl at Childs’ now — make and serve hot chocolate and try to keep the house in some sort of order.
The first day the boys had 24-hour passes and of course they couldn’t all find places to sleep, so we let them have the lower floor of our house and there 35 or 40 of them slept on the floor, with no blankets, but quite as cheerful as could be. They had to leave town at 7 A. M., so Jean and I arose at 5:30 to get breakfast for them — hot chocolate, bread and butter and jam with seconds all around. Before we finished we had fed about 70.
When the American Army moved in as part of the occupation forces along the Rhine in late 1918, the Smith College canteen was integrated with a larger YMCA organization assigned to support the 3rd Division, and Seeber remained there until it was disbanded in July 1919.
She returned to New York City and resumed teaching at Newtown High School in the fall of 1919. Aside from several sabbaticals, she remained there for the next 28 years. In the mid-1920s she enrolled as a graduate student in education at Columbia, but appears not to have finished that course.
In the May 1931 edition of the German Quarterly, Henry Holt and Company announced two new texts for teaching German coming out the next month. The second was Klein Heini, edited by Seeber — a new edition “prepared especially for young American students.” The book was a young adult novel written by Richard Hennings with the original title of Klein Heini: ein Grossstadtjunge (“Little Heini: a Big City Boy”). The book must have done well enough, because Seeber renewed her copyrights again in the late 1950s.
In 1933, she wrote the Smith Alumnae Quarterly that she was taking a sabbatical year (after over 20 years of teaching) and “can’t decide whether to buy a tiny house in the country and provide for my old age, or to go forth on the Seven Seas. In the next update, we learn what she decided: “Elizabeth Seeber has bought a place in Kent (Ct.) where she has been spending her sabbatical.” She remained an active Smith alumna for many years. Her name pops up in the New York Times ever so often — the first time in 1915, the last in the late 1940s — as the organizer of fundraisers by the Smith Club in Manhattan and hostess of teas for dignitaries such as Mrs. Dwight Morrow.
We know from her inscription that by 1933 she was living at 10 Mitchell Place, and from census reports we know she had an apartment to herself. She was still living there, according to the three-sentence obituary that ran in the New York Times in June 1964. The Times managed to get one fact wrong in that brief piece, stating that “Miss Seeber served with the American Red Cross in France throughout World War I”–the sort of thing that gets passed along by a friend or relative filling in gaps from whatever comments Elizabeth herself might have made over the years.
In Appius and Virginia, Trevelyan’s spinster, Virginia Hutton, worries about becoming a useless old woman living out her days in a women’s hotel in London:
She would go back to Earl’s Court and her bed-sitting-room – gas fire and griller, separate meters; to her consumption of novels from the lending library; her bus rides to the confectioner’s; her nightly sipping of conversation and coffee in the lounge: to middle-age in a ladies’ residential club. Each year a little older, a little stouter or a little thinner, a little less quickly off the bus.
It’s clear this was something Elizabeth Seeber probably never worried about.
I will have to look into my books’ previous owners more often.
