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Trance by Appointment, by G. E. Trevelyan (1939)

I’m not sure what the point of this post is. There are seven copies of this book worldwide listed in WorldCat.org. There are none available for sale. If you want to read it, your best bet is to get a copy of amateurish scan I made of the British Library’s copy. There are few enough people who even read these posts in the first place. Given those odds, Lord knows whether anyone else will ever read Trance by Appointment.

Portrait of G. E. Trevelyan by Bassano (1937), courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery
Portrait of G. E. Trevelyan by Bassano (1937), courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery
I have begun research on the life and works of Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan for the MA program in Biography at the University of East Anglia (Go … um, I don’t actually know what the sports teams refer to themselves as … Anglers?). From what I have been able to discover so far, sometime in 1932 she rented a flat or a room in a flat on Lansdowne Road in Kensington that she shared with 3-4 other people and where she remained, steadily writing away, producing a total of eight novels, until a German bomb hit the place and she died of injuries a few months later. She appears to have had exactly what Virginia Woolf proposed as the prerequisites for an independent woman writer in “A Room of One’s Own”: a room of her own and five hundred a year. She didn’t write reviews. She didn’t go to country house weekends. She didn’t go to parties or join them. She sat and wrote what she wanted to write.

Publishers seemed interested in publishing what she wrote. Martin Secker published her first four books; Victor Gollancz her next three; George Harrap this last one. She got consistently favorable reviews, but perhaps it was more the cachet of the Trevelyan name (G. M., G. O., R. C., Sir Charles, et al.) that attracted them. In any case, none of them ever went to a second printing, let alone a reissue. I still have to get to the archives to track down the contractual correspondence, but the dearth of copies of any of her books today certainly suggests that no one was queuing up to reserve the latest G. E. Trevelyan novel at their local Boots Book Lover’s Library.

And so, Gertrude went out of her flat on Lansdowne Road on a stretcher in early October 1940 and disappeared. The Times and a few other papers published a few lines when she died of her injuries in early 1941 and that was it. She was buried in the cemetery up the road from her parents’ home in Bath, and from what I’ve seen in terms of coverage in English literary history and criticism, they might as well have buried all of her books with her. There is nothing. I’ve gone through all the surveys of the 20th century British novel they have here in the UEA library: nothing. I went through the biographies of her contemporaries (Bowen, Greene, Orwell, Waugh, Woolf, etc.) looking for mentions of her name: nothing. The one trace is in Barbara Pym’s A Very Private Eye: a single entry, dated 4 September 1933. “Reading Gertrude Trevelyan’s novel Hot-House. I desperately want to write an Oxford novel – but I must see first that my emotions are simmered down fairly well.” I’ve been checking with a number of academics specializing in British women novelists of the mid-20th century — which is something close to a minor industry — and get the email equivalent of blank stares. Not only is her work lost, but no one else appears to be looking for it.

This is not entirely true. Just last year, the academic publisher Routledge reissued the very novel Barbara Pym got all excited over: Hot-House. Not that you’d know by anything that Routledge’s website will tell you. What you have to look for is this gripping title: Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II, Volume II. This is one of a series of novels and other narratives of university life — meaning Oxford and Cambridge — edited by Dr. Anna Bogen. The series includes Neapolitan Ice (1928) by Renée Haynes (a classmate of Gertrude’s at Lady Margaret Hall), Rosy-Fingered Dawn (1934) by Rose Marie Hodgson, and other hard-to-find titles — companion texts to Bogen’s 2015 study, Women’s University Fiction, 1880–1945 (which doesn’t actually mention Trevelyan, by the way). The way in which Routledge has packaged and marketed these books is execrable — and I’m being as polite as I can. There are only two things in Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II, Volume II: Hot-House and a 10-page introduction by Bogen. And this is what the title page says:

Title page of the 2018 Routledge reissue of G. E. Trevelyan's Hot-House
Title page of the 2018 Routledge reissue of G. E. Trevelyan’s Hot-House

To be fair, if you click on the “Contents” tab of the Routledge page for Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II, Volume II, you will see the following: “Table of Contents: Volume 2. Hot-House (1933), Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan.” So, it’s not like Routledge is denying they’re reissued Hot-House: they just not particularly interested in telling anyone. If you’re dying to read it, by the way, be aware that the hardback edition will cost you £110.00, which may be why UEA doesn’t own a copy.

All of which is a tediously long preface to a discussion of Gertrude Trevelyan’s last and easiest rarest novel, Trance by Appointment. Trance tells a simple and sad story. Jean, the middle daughter of a working-class London family, is a psychic. As she grows, her family comes to recognize this talent and introduce her to Madame Eva, who runs a fortune-telling business from a basement flat in Bayswater. Eva, who encourages Jean to develop her skills, then introduces her to “the Professor,” Norman Mitch, an astrologer, who sees the commercial possibilities of a “trance by appointment” business run in a better part of town. In some ways, from this point forward the story will be familiar to anyone who’s read Tolstoy’s Kholstomer, usually translated as “Strider: The Story of a Horse” — or, if you’ve read Marx, the story of labor in the hands of capitalism. The resource is used up in a relentless quest for profit, then tossed aside in contempt.

In this case, the means of production are a little unusual. Trevelyan tells much of the story through Jean’s perspective, which means that though she has visions as early as when she’s strapped in a stroller and being wheeled along the street by her sister Joyce, it takes her a while to understand what’s happening.

“Where does it come from, Mum?”
“What, lovey?”
“The trees and things that come when it’s dark. When you lie and look hard, but you have to keep still as still or it goes. And the bubbles that’s all different colours and jumps about, where does it come from, Mum?”
“Stuff and nonsense. Is my water boiling yet?”

Gradually, the family comes to recognize that Jean has “the Sight,” but her mother caution, “It’s a precious gift to them that can keep their tongue still, but no good ever come to them that didn’t. You keep it quiet, my dearie, to yourself.” Jean tries at first to fit into the normal workday world, taking a job selling cigarettes from a little stand in the nearby Underground station. But the energy that bombards her from the thousands of souls that pass her every hour overwhelms her and she collapses. Mum takes Jean to Madame Eva, who’s happy to have “a nice, quiet, refined sort of girl to ‘elp her in the house and learn the business.”

And “Jean did love it, being at Madame Eva’s”: Eva takes the girl under her wing, shows her how to recognize the signs in a client’s expression, clothing, manners, and language that Eva relies on to produce the appearance of clairvoyance. “Remember this, though,” she advises, “everyone wants money, it doesn’t matter how much they’ve got. That’s always a safe one.” Fascinated by Eva’s use of the crystal ball, Jean reveals her ability to fall into a trance and see visions, and Eva begins to organize seances: rare occasions for which a much higher fee can be demanded.

This in turn attracts the attention of Eva’s friend, the astrologer. Trevelyan is a little too eager to let us know he’s not to be trusted: “Mr. Mitch was a bit fat, with a white face, and his hair was curly except that he oiled it down, and was starting to go bald on top, he brushed it across.” His manners are well-oiled, too — taking Jean’s hand, stroking it, murmuring, “My dear lady.” Soon, he’s talked Jean into marriage and sets her up in a West End studio — to “Get you further with the clee-an-tale.” He gives up reading the stars “to manage for Jean” and sets her on a schedule of frequent seances. He convinces Jean that the visions are communications from the dead — specifically his dear departed little sister, Daisy — and soon Jean imagines Daisy calling to her: “Jee-een, I want to talk to you, Jee-een.” Unfortunately for Norman’s plans, he also sleeps with his new wife, and with the predictable results. Two of them, in fact. And when Jean resists strapping on the seance harness again after the second child, Norman takes his anger out on her. “You can thank your Mum for that,” he snaps at his son after slapping Jean around. Although Jean continues to give readings — reluctantly, with ever greater hesitation, ever less appetite to fight or even care about her fee — Norman all but abandons her to strike out on his own again.

Most reviews of Trance by Appointment offered moderate praise. Edwin Muir, writing in The Listener, called the book “a sordid, pitiable little story, told with that cruel attention to detail which characterises Miss Trevelyan’s art.” Leonora Eyles, her most consistent advocate among critics, wrote in the Times Literary Supplement, “Once again Miss Trevelyan gives us an insight into human minds that is quite uncanny, and her Jean, though such an unusual character, is completely convincing.” The New Statesman’s John Mair, on the other hand, thought Trevelyan had wasted her time — and his: “Apart from her mediumistic talents Jean is a complete nonentity, and no writer could present her otherwise. A good novelist would never have made the attempt.”

I truly did not enjoy Trance by Appointment. It is a grim story, a story of a soul being ground down by an abusive husband and the relentless pressure to pay the rent and put food on the table. I found myself, like Jean, taking pleasure from the littlest things — yellow flower petals floating in a blue bowl or the solid, if at times ineffectual, goodness of Madame Eva.

But my respect for Gertrude Trevelyan’s talent and courage as a writer grew as it has with every one of her books I’ve read. This was a woman who grew up in a family with a prestigious name and a modest but comfortable fortune. She went to university when a tiny fraction of women did. She didn’t go out of her way to establish herself with her contemporaries or to seek celebrity. And in Trance by Appointment, as she did in her two previous books, William’s Wife and Theme with Variations, she collected material by listening, by taking in talk and attitudes and expressions while walking through the city, while riding on the bus or Underground, while standing in queues or waiting in shops, and then returned to her room in Kensington and put herself deeply, intently into a mind, a situation, a life completely different from hers.

Trevelyan’s Jean is not a specimen pinned to a piece of cardboard for disinterested examination by an omniscient narrator. She tells Jean’s story as if Jean’s sister, or Madame Eva, or Jean’s neighbor were trying to tell it, aided occasionally by Jean’s own awkward, imprecise attempts to explain what she sees. Maybe John Mair was partly right, that Jean’s is “an aimless and random mind.” Evidence of Jean’s exercise of free will are rare (but not wholly absent). But managing to tell this woman’s story and keep it utterly convincing, utterly coherent for over 260 pages is no small accomplishment as a writer. Name one other contemporary of Trevelyan — male or female — who took this kind of risk, who undertook this level of experimentation.

Gertrude Trevelyan (center) with the other contributors to Red Rags: Essays of Hate from Oxford, from The Bystander, 1 March 1933
Gertrude Trevelyan (center) with the other contributors to Red Rags: Essays of Hate from Oxford, from The Bystander, 1 March 1933

This is a picture of Trevelyan taken in 1933 to celebrate the publication of Red Rags: Essays of Hate from Oxford, a collection to which she contributed an essay attacking the complacency of “Garden Cities,” the new suburbs around London. Who would guess that the smallest person in the group, the one woman in the photo, would be capable of leaps of imagination that would put all the men around her to shame?

Trance by Appointment, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: George G. Harrap & Company, Ltd., 1939

Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock, by Neil Bell (1958)

The good cover of the otherwise bad Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock by Neil Bell
The good cover of the otherwise bad Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock by Neil Bell

Let me admit at the start that I bought this book because of its cover. Let me also admit that I only finished it because of what I paid for it.

In a recent class, we discussed Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey, and I raised a question I’ve asked in every class where I’ve studied Homer: how come we never hear about the bad Homers? I count myself among those who say that Homer’s epics came down through a tradition of oral literature, evolving through years and generations of orators, eventually captured in the texts we have now. But it’s safe to assume that there were fringe versions of the epics and less-than-sterling orators who recited them. And maybe if your town wasn’t on the hot orator circuit, you had to listen to the bad Homers. The ones whose renditions had less, shall we way, artistry about them? “What’s he talking about now?” “Genealogy stuff.” “Oh, Zeus! Not again with the genealogy!” “He likes his genealogy.” “Enough already with the genealogy! Get back to the war scenes!”

I mean no disrespect to Neil Bell as a hard-working, hugely prolific writer who put food on his family’s table and kept a roof over their heads. But had he been living back in ancient Greece, I suspect he would have been considered a bad Homer. I’ve read a few of his books now, and I can see a definite pattern of stylistic bad habits emerging.

One is that Neil Bell apparently thought there was no such a thing as a bad story. Characters in his book are constantly popping up and, within a page or two of being introduced, launching into a story. “Shall I tell you how I came by this pipe?” the man asks, and we’re off for the next five pages on the saga of the man, his unhappy childhood (all Neil Bell childhoods are unhappy), his troubled youth, his encounter with some fascinator of uncertain origin, some nasty scrape, perhaps a romantic entanglement, and somewhere in the midst of it all the gaining of a pipe.

Now, once in a while, once in a book, this thing can be delightful. The first few times I encountered it in one of Neil Bell’s books, I was reminded of the scene in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie where the soldier comes up to the women in the restaurant and says, “Let me tell you about a dream I had….” In the movie, the sheer brazen non sequitur-ness of it is stunning.

But the sixth or tenth time it happens: Oy, vey!

Well, Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock is almost a babushka doll of these moments. We start with the story of how Frank Rawleigh got a job with Hamford’s [read Foyle’s] bookstore, rose through the ranks, married, and was living a comfortable life until one day he mysteriously disappeared.

Then we’re off on the story of how poor Mrs. Rawleigh copes with Frank being gone. A few months. A year. Years.

How she does it is with the aid of her live-in help and Jill-of-all-trades, Mrs. Paradock. When Frank’s money runs out, they have to find a way to make some more. They buy a chicken farm. Soon turns out they’ve been swindled (but not before getting a good long story about how the farm came to be up for sale).

So they try … well, I lost track along the way, but there was a massage parlor and a fortune-telling operation somewhere in there. Each involving oddball characters who wander in and sooner or later begin, “Let me tell you about a dream I had….”

Until one day, seven or eight years later, when Frank shows up at Mrs. Rawleigh’s door. Where has he been all this time?

“Let me tell you about that,” he begins. You need not hear the rest: it’s long, convoluted, and pointless. Nobody wants him around the place, anyway, and he’s out the door faster than leftover fish.

And the point of all this was …?

Oh, yes, and Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock both meet nice guys they decide to marry. Good for them.

But still, the point of all this was …? Besides a few hours killed in search of one?

And here we get to Neil Bell’s worst habit. Pointless stories are bad enough. Pointless commentary, though?

Now, there is nothing wrong with taking a detour or two along any narrative way to offer some interesting commentary. With some writers, the commentary is better than the story itself.

But what about when it’s not? What if it’s just a detour?

Let me offer just a small example of what I mean.

So Frank Rawleigh has returned. His wife sends him away to find a hotel for the night (this is not Odysseus and Penelope reunited at last). Now she waits with her new, good boyfriend (John, the doctor) for Frank to return and have “the big talk.”

“What time was it?” John asks (what time is Frank coming back):

“Nine sharp.”

“Ten minutes. Let’s drop it. Play me something.”

“What shall I play?”

“Something rollicking to clear the air. O by God no. He might hear you coming in. No, don’t play anything. Whatever it was it might be wrong. To him. We’ll read the evening papers. One can always escape into the news. I’ve often see men waiting to go into the theatre for a major operation poring over a newspaper. I suppose it’s the best way of escaping from one’s thought ever devised.”

The minutes dragged away. Neither knew what they were reading. Suddenly Ann said, “Here he is,” and a moment later the bell rang and presently Norma opened the door and Frank came in.

Now, no one ever keeps a stopwatch on a scene in a novel. There is no reason why Neil Bell couldn’t have cut right from Ann and John talking to Frank came in.

So why did he tell us that there were ten minutes to spare?

For no other reason than to mention this completely extraneous and irrelevant observation that reading a newspaper is a good way to kill time.

That’s it. There was utterly no other reason to put those words into this book. This was a thought that occurred to Neil Bell sometime in the writing of Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock, and by God he was going to work it in.

This sort of thing happens on stage when there’s an unexpected delay, when an actor is late walking on. If Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock were a play, the actors playing Ann and John might ad-lib a few lines to kill the time until the actor playing Frank walked on stage.

But this is a novel. Neil Bell is playwright, cast, and stage manager. He’s deliberately holding up Frank so John can say these pointless lines about reading a newspaper.

Nothing more. Not a colorful anecdote. Not a witty aside or pithy observation. He’s going to hold up the show just to tell us that reading a newspaper is a good way to kill time. And he’s going to actually make the reader kill time to do it.

“What’s he saying now?” “That reading a newspaper is a good way to take your mind off things.” “Enough with the newspapers! Get back to the freakin’ story!”

And this is why Neil Bell would have been one of the bad Homers.

Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock, by Neil Bell
London: Alvin Redman, 1958

Venus on Wheels, by Maurice Dekobra (1930) — For #1930Club

Cover of first US edition of Venus on Wheels by Maurice Dekobra

I decided to abuse the #1930club, this round of the semi-annual reading club organized by Kaggsy and Simon Thomas’, as an excuse to read something by Maurice Dekobra.

Dekobra was hugely successful — successful not just in his native France but among readers all over the world. He came up with his pen-name after seeing a snake-charmer’s act and he was something of a snake-charmer himself. His material was exotic, risky (or risqué and often both), quick-paced, and rarely more than an evening or two’s read. In a way, he made the same kind of appeal to wannabe sophisticates as Esquire later in the 1930s and Playboy in 1960s. You can see how Dekobra himself played this charade in his preface to the English edition of Venus on Wheels:

A philosopher once said, “The world is a great book, and one has merely read the first page when one has only lived in one’s native town.” I would add when one has only loved women of one nation.

“How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?” asked a popular Tin Pan Alley song from World War One. For some ex-doughboys, I suspect the answer was, “Keep feeding them Maurice Dekobra.”

Cover of US paperback reissue of Venus on Wheels by Maurice Dekobra

Many of Dekobra’s books take place in the mysterious East — India or China; the rest in Paris or on the Riviera. All of them involve sex. Or rather, broad, obvious, and leering hints at sex. Everyone keeps their clothes on. But Dekobra does not deny the existence of lust, infidelity, and prostitution — hell, he hammers away at the fact with Stakhanovite zeal. He knew the material would appeal to American readers in particular: “Americans are enchanted here in Paris to find no detectives in the hall, asking haughtily, ‘Is the lady with you your wife?'” he once told an interviewer.

The most admired figure in the book, Monsieur Maline, the grand old man, is respected not for his age and wisdom but for the 88 conquests he has detailed in his little green notebook: “To deceive one’s wife, well anybody can do that. To deceive her so that she has not the slightest suspicion, that is better. But to deceive her fifty-three times without her knowing, that is indeed high art. The work of a virtuoso … the Paganini of the Quai de Passy.” Dekobra has read just enough Freud to believe that sublimation is worse than its cure: “A little five to seven o’clock every now and then has its good points,” one his characters offers in the way of homeopathic advice.

Dekobra’s prostitutes do not have hearts of gold. They would, however, like to have pockets of gold. He spends a fair amount of space in Venus on Wheels defending the professionalism of his pros. What they do, one explains, takes skill:

“It is not enough to be just pretty. It is necessary to know your job.”

“How? Explain yourself, Pauloche. I am interested.”

“You’ve got to have the flair, the tact. You must know what men like. For example, if you are accosted by a sentimental man, puffed up with illusions, first drop a discreet tear, a mother in hospital, a consumptive little sister. Play the ‘Clair de lune’ of Werther until the fellow forks out for a nicely enamelled bedroom suite or pays your rent a month in advance. If, on the other hand, he is a degenerate who is looking for sensations, trot out the drugs. A pinch of cerebos sniffed gently up the nose, or a little Vittel syringed into the thigh. Then the fellow between a couple of pipes of opium (a little Virginia tobacco mixed with apricot jam) will write you a cheque and give you a pearl necklace, gurgling that life is a dream. That’s the way to succeed in business!”

Review of "Venus on Wheels" from Arts and Decoration magazine
Review of “Venus on Wheels” from Arts and Decoration magazine
To crank out books at Dekobra’s rate usually involves frequent recourse to some formula or other. In the case of Venus on Wheels, the formula is the three-act play — more specifically, the three-act structure of a farce by another French bard of infidelity, Georges Feydeau. Act One is set in the wee hours in a Paris bar run by Père Cassis, “an optimist with ogee-shaped [Viz. ogee on Wikipedia, for those like me who need to look it up.–Ed.] shoulders,” who “carries upon his epigastrum, in the shape of various trinkets, evidences of his peccadilloes which we does not expiate because the myrmidons of the Law have enrolled his as an informer.” I haven’t found the text of the French original, La Vénus à roulettes, to tell if the over-the-top lexicography is the fault of Dekobra or his English translator, Metcalfe Wood. There are a fair number of these “aren’t we clever?” wordplays in the book, such as when one of the prostitutes claims one of her competitors “dagged me with a pin.” That one I think we can safely dag on Metcalfe Wood.

A fair cross-section of the demi-monde, including some demimondaines, are wrapping up their nights when in walk two proper society ladies. We soon learn that one of them, Madame Lorande, has decided to carry out a social experiment. She wants to adopt another sort of lady and see if she can turn her into the legal type of working girl. To house her, feed her, re-clothe her, and train her in all the basic secretarial skills. Dutch readers would have been saved the trouble of reading most of the book from its translated title, Als Venus wordt een typiste (trans.: If Venus became a typist). Père Cassis quips, “Here, Madame, folks don’t generally come to lift women up — but rather to pick them up.” Still, one of the girls in the bar, Palouche (not, Dekobra tells us, one “who dispenses sensual pleasure like a Chicago pork-packing machine”), finds the idea interesting. Coming off a rough and unprofitable night, she agrees to the deal. End of Act One.

In Act Two, set in the respectable home of Madame Maline (Madame Lorande’s mother), characters wander in and out of the room where Palouche sits practicing typing. By the end of the act, at least three assignations involving at least four different married people have been arranged. And in Act Three, set in the flat shared by Palouche and her friend Lily, there’s as much coming and going as in Grand Central Station, but in the end I’m not sure anybody actually hootchied or cooed. There was, however, so much eyebrow-arching going on that Maurice Dekobra’s poor forehead must have been exhausted by the time he finished the book.

I’m sure that every other book written about for #1930club is far more substantive, far worthier, far less telling of its reader’s character flaws than Venus on Wheels. I betcha I had the most fun, though.

Santé!

Venus on Wheels is available free on the Internet Archive — but it’s a horrid scan, I’m afraid.

Venus on Wheels, by Maurice Dekobra
London: T. Werner Laurie Ltd., 1930

Fame, by May Sinclair (1930) – From #1930Club

Cover design of Fame, by May Sinclair, Number 13 in the Woburn Books series
Cover design of Fame, by May Sinclair, Number 13 in the Woburn Books series

As a change of pace, I thought I would join Kaggsy and Simon Thomas’ semiannual reading club, this time focused on the books of 1930 (#1930club).

To make things simple, I headed to The Times Literary Supplement archive and simply looked for the first work of fiction reviewed in the first issue of 1930. There, in the first column of page 10, under the title, “Woburn Books Again,” we find a list of titles starting with Fame by May Sinclair. As the review notes, Sinclair’s subject is “the literary fame of Liston Chamberlin, who ‘died for love of his own immortality.'” Having recently started a dissertation on the life of the forgotten novelist G. E. Trevelyan, I thought Fame seemed the perfect book for the occasion.

"Woburn Books Again," from the TLS January 2, 1930.
“Woburn Books Again,” from the TLS January 2, 1930.

It was a bit of a cheat, however. Fame is all of 40 pages long, really a long short story rather than a novel. Woburn Books was a series of books published by the London firm of Elkins Mathews and Marrot in 1928 and 1929 (meaning it was also a cheat, having only been reviewed and not published in 1930: I promise to stay after school and write another piece to make up for these sins). As John Krygier on Ohio Wesleyan University writes on his excellent website, A Series of Series, Woburn Books were perhaps cynically aimed at suckers. Advertisements for the series, which ran to a total of 18 books, use a tried-and-true baiting technique:

We are at once pleased and sorry to say that our WOBURN BOOKS are all out of print or greatly oversubscribed; so, if you covet one of these charming and inexpensive limited editions as a Christmas Gift, you will be wise to apply early to your Bookseller.

Which if literally true, of course, would have meant there was no point in applying to any bookseller. But what worked for Tom Sawyer and fence-painting seems to have worked for Woburn Books. Compared to most limited-run (530 copies, 500 of them for sale) books from 90 years ago, they’re still relatively easy to find and inexpensive. The list of Woburn Book authors included some still recognized names (G.K. Chesterton, D. H. Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson, Robert Graves, and Algernon Blackwood) and a few largely-forgotten ones (R. H. Mottram, Martin Armstrong, Stella Benson, Joseph Hergesheimer). In its review of the first set of Woburn Books, however, TLS made its opinion of the whole venture clear: “Here are three short stories, perhaps designed for invalids, since they are so light to hold and so clearly printed, besides having nothing to distress or agitate the mind in any of them.”

Fame is an entertaining story about a diligent biographer in quest of a subject who’s been equally diligent in trying to shape his reputation for posterity. If fame means posthumous celebrity, Sinclair’s narrator writes, “I’ve only known one man who really cared about it.” That man was Liston Chamberlin:

His passion was corroding in its very cleanness. It bit into him like pure acid and consumed him. You may say he died for love of his own immortality.

Yes. Immortality is a large order. And you can reckon the chances at a million to one against it. You and I and the rest of us have got our celebrity here and now, and we wouldn’t barter our solid chunk for such a ghost of an off-chance. He wouldn’t have sacrificed that millionth chance of his for anything you could offer him here and now.

Chamberlin is a rough-hewn novelist (“brutal before brutality became the fashion”) who, on his deathbed, asks Walter Furnival to write his biography. Furnival was a faithful and admiring friend, so Chamberlin probably assumed he would produce a suitably rose-hued portrait. Instead, Furnival is a bloodhound who follows every lead, who haunts for week and week places where Chamberlin lived, interviewing anyone and everyone he might have come in contact with. And whose radar sweeps relentlessly for sign of the biographer’s most prized target: letters. He keeps searching for bundles of letters from Chamberlin, becoming especially alert when he uncovers a failed romance in the writer’s past.

Ironically, the letters that play the biggest role — not just in the story but in shaping posterity’s view of Chamberlin — aren’t his letters. They are letters sent him by a woman who supported him emotionally and financially, who ruined her eyesight transcribing his sparrow-scratch handwriting, and who never lost hope that he would eventually return her love in kind. Fame offers useful proof that history does have its own way of bring the true shits in the world to some sort of justice.

Sinclair included Fame in her 1930 story collection Tales Told by Simpson and told at least one acquaintance she considered it her favorite story.

Fame (Woburn Book #13), by May Sinclair
London: Elkin Mathews & Marrot, 1929

The Memoirs of a Ghost, by G. W. Stonier (1947)

Cover of first UK edition of Memoirs of a Ghost by G. W. Stonier

One of the pleasures of being back in college after almost forty years is having access to a good university library. I first developed my love of neglected books from wandering through the stacks of Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington in Seattle, not looking for anything in particular, pulling down whatever seemed interesting. As I wrote in a piece for The Reader back in 2007, “It was as if I’d been stuck in prison for years and one someone had tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, ‘Look: the gates are open.'”

So I am back now to this long-lost habit. It’s a smaller library now, not quite so rich in its holdings, and clearly struggling as the digital divide saws its way through institutions such as this. But a sprinkling of orphans can still be found among the authorised editions and critical companions. One of the first to catch my eye was the elegant spine and lovely title of The Shadow Across the Page by G. W. Stonier — both title and author new to me. It was the book next to it I took home that day, however: The Memoirs of a Ghost.

“It seems a long while ago,” the book opens. “When the bombs came — a stick of them — there wasn’t much one could do.” This caught my interest immediately because I am now working on a dissertation about the utterly forgotten novelist, G. E. (Gertrude Eileen) Trevelyan, who herself became a victim of the Blitz when her flat in Kensington was hit in late 1940. Like Stonier’s narrator, she became a ghost — but has had no one to tell her story.

Despite its title, The Memoirs of a Ghost is not really a ghost story — though Stonier did write a few of those in his time. In his Guide to Supernatural Fiction, E. F. Bleiler found the book “unclear in intention. It is possible that the author is simply discussing problems of readjustment during and after the war.” I think Mark Valentine got it right in his Wormwoodiana article on the book: “Stonier’s book belongs in the sphere of modernist literature. The restless, allusive, splintered response to the city has qualities in common with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, for example, or Rhapsody on a Windy Night, with its nocturnal exploration of memory “through the spaces of the dark.”

In reality, The Memoirs of a Ghost is far more frightening than any ghost story I’ve ever read. This is scary at a visceral, existential level. This is about the horror of spending an eternity with yourself.

At first, death is unexpected but not quite unwelcome. There’s a certain novelty to the experience: “Death, death no doubt came quickly, crashing, crashing in an instant. Then again, with a flickering consciousness, as of tides that whip and recede, I rose to the outlines of darkness.” After crawling out from under the rubble, standing for a few moments watching the ruins alongside the firemen, then running to hide in the shadows of a nearby church as he realizes they cannot see him, he discovers he’s come into possession of a new talent: he can fly. He floats up above the city, seeing all its aspects of life, observing now with his invisible camera eye.

Soon, novelty is replaced by disorientation. People come and go, scenes come and go, one slipping into the other with no coherent relationship. It’s very much like a dream — but a relentless, unending dream. Writing dreams is not easy. The lack of coherence can leave reader and writer with the same sense of disorientation as Stonier’s narrator experiences: the sense of being adrift in a sea (or soup) of words. It’s a sense Stonier doesn’t always successfully avoid. There are moments when I found myself thinking, “But you could have written a dozen different things here and it wouldn’t have mattered — I’d still feel adrift.”

Whether by design or accident, however, a shape does emerge from these mists. The narrator finds himself going back to the moment of his death, searching for clues:

Again I am carrying the tea-tray across the room, the bomb is coming nearer, but this time with such a leisurely sweep and beauty that I have time to take note of every article on the tray, to observe the Eastern fowl, a sort of pheasant, on the saucer, to notice the little belch of steam which my movement across the room and abrupt halt have jerked out of the spout. The milk bottle has a chip at the base — if I’m not careful it will tip over…. I am not I, the room isn’t quite real, the bomb wailing melodiously in descent will never strike…. I don’t know whether I’m dreaming or not. Perhaps this is reality and all the rest invention. I don’t know…. Misere!

No matter how hard he tries to make sense of what has happened, it’s like working with dry sand. Nothing retains any form. Nothing lasts from one moment to the next:

Even as it was, my elaborate reconstructions of the daytime unravelled, crumbled away at night in terrors that reduced everything to a rubble of crushed identities, chaotic fragments, which in the morning might take hours to reinstate. The struggle between chaos and order — all chaos, any order — was unremitting

“I must try to define my predicament,” he tells himself. But eternity is just too big to fathom: it “staggers the mind so that one can’t take it in.” “Habit,” he concludes at one point, restricts “imagination to the experience of a lifetime.”

Stonier’s hell isn’t other people: it’s ourselves and nobody but ourselves.

What a bloody grim prospect.

Memoirs of a Ghost, by G. W. Stonier
London: Grey Walls Press, Ltd., 1947

On Wooden Wings, by Rosemary Tonks (1948)

Title page from On Wooden Wings by Rosemary Tonks (1948)
Title page from On Wooden Wings by Rosemary Tonks (1948)

Out of a perhaps questionable quest for completeness, I have been working my way Rosemary Tonks’ oeuvre. Tonks was perhaps one of the better-known of “forgotten” writers — “The Poet Who Vanished,” as a 2009 BBC Radio 4 documentary was titled. As John Hartley Williams wrote in a 1996 piece for The Poetry Review, “She wasn’t just a poet of the sixties — she was a true poet of any era.” According to Williams, Tonks “sent us strange messages from them, alive, fresh and surprising today.”

Fortunately, thanks to the efforts of Neil Astley, Tonks’ cousins and Bloodaxe Books, Tonks’ collected poetry — as well as a selection of her prose — was published shortly after her death in 2014 as Bedouin of the London Evening and is easily available. It’s also one of the rare cases where full advantage of e-publishing possibilities was taken, as the e-versions of the book include quite a number of audio recordings, including an interview from 1963. And having read all but Tonks’ last novel, The Halt During the Chase (1972), I would argue her poetry is far better than her prose.

The flying weather vane, from On Wooden Wings by Rosemary TonksBut I’m not one to give up for purely aesthetic reasons. And so I sought out not only Tonks’ rare adult novels but also her ultra-rare children’s books: On Wooden Wings (1948) and Wild Sea Goose (1951). There are, as far as I can determine, about a dozen copies of either book available worldwide. There are three copies of On Wooden Wings currently for sale, one of Wild Sea Goose. So order your copy now.

I took advantage of my British Library card and scanned in reading copies of both books on a recent visit to London (the same trip that netted me my scan of Kathleen Sully’s Not Tonight). Tonks was just 20 when On Wooden Wings was published, but she’d already had one of her stories, “Miss Bushman-Caldicott” — “the story of a very nice cow” — read on BBC’s Children’s Hour. All the same, On Wooden Wings is best classified as juvenilia.

Black Smith from On Wooden Wings, by Rosemary Tonks
Black Smith
The story is simple: a boy named Webster wanders out of his London house, meets some characters, has some adventures, and comes home. Think of it as Webster Meisters Wanderwoche. Except there is a considerable portion of fantasy certain to appeal to a young reader: a talking dog and talking cat; a good-natured tramp capable of devising whatever gadget the situation requires; and a wooden weather vane that transports Webster off to a magical land. To provide the necessary measure of suspense, there is a villain, one Black Smith, who happens to be a most dastardly blacksmith:

“Are you making shoes? or straightening them?” asked Webster.

Black Smith threw back his head and gave a guffaw of mirthless laughter.

“I’m making them crooked boy, crooked — twisted — and bent about!”

“Whatever for?”

“So that every horse that wears one of my shoes will hobble and fall, and every cart made with one of my wheels will run unevenly, always … ALWAYS!”

Knowing Tonks’ story and her adult work, one cannot read On Wooden Wings without looking for clues. In this case, one needn’t be overly Freudian to find them. Every one of Tonks’ novels features some irregular band of characters that provides, however haphazardly, a substitute for one’s own absent or unreliable family, and so does this one. Webster’s own family takes no notice of his departure. His new friends, on the other hand — every one of them an outcast — travel many miles to find him when the weather vane flies off with him, the tramp, and the dog.

And there are a few moments when we can see the wise-cracking Tonks of the novels — who could, at times, veer too far off course “trying to score points in the parlour game of cleverness,” as a blogger cleverer than I put it. One of Webster’s outcasts is Sebastian, a diminutive fellow who’s been rejected as a waiter. His worst sin, it turns out, was his failure to maintain the proper façade:

“I would write out the menus in English instead of in French, and of course everybody could read them!”

“But aren’t you supposed to read the menu?” asked Webster very surprised.

“Of course not. People can order anything they like, but when it comes to serving, we give them what we like. That is why all menus are in French, then nobody knows what they are getting.”

Still, I’m not sure these rare bits make the book as a whole worth reading, unless, as I say, you are a Tonks completist. If, however, you are one of that tiny band, please let me know. Cross your heart and swear to die you only talk like a digital pirate and I will be happy to pass along my amateurishly scanned PDF of the book.

On Wooden Wings, by Rosemary Tonks
London: John Murray, 1948

Life Comes to Seathorpe, by Neil Bell (1946)

Cover of first UK edition of Life Comes to Seathorpe by Neil Bell

I’m not sure how I managed to consider myself an expert in neglected books and remain ignorant of Neil Bell and his massive oeuvre until recently, but it was only the sight of the striking cover of one of his posthumous story collections, The Ninth Earl of Whitby in a local bookstore that led me to him. By the time Bell (born Stephen Henry Critten) published his autobiography, My Writing Life (1955), he’d racked up 75 titles, variously credited to Stephen Southwold, Miles, Stephen Green, S. H. Lambert, Paul Martens, and, of course, Bell.

As I’ve probably written here before, I’m from the “There must be a pony in there” school. While I’m suspicious of the quality standards of any author who can manage to write 75 books in the space of about 35 years (and would produce enough more before taking his life in 1964 that his publisher, Alvin Redman, was still issuing Neil Bell titles for nearly ten years after his death), I wasn’t really to dismiss Bell as a hack without some further investigation. My initial searching quickly revealed a few facts. None of Bell’s books is currently in print. He wrote all over the map: historical novels, mysteries, romances, family dramas, science fiction, and many, many tales of the supernatural. He started writing children’s stories, wrote hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, then stopped abruptly after getting married (more about this later).

One of the few relatively mentions of him in the Internet era can be found in a 2010 post on China Miéville’s website, where he quotes at length from what he describes (in to me irresistible terms) as “Neil Bell’s more-than-passingly strange Life Comes to Seathorpe.” Miéville mentioned the book again in a 2011 listicle for the Guardian and a 2012 interview on Weird Fiction Review, which led me to think it was as good a place as any to start.

In My Writing Life, Bell recounts that editor Douglas Jerrold told him that the first six chapters of Seathorpe “were the dullest he had ever read.” I didn’t share Jerrold’s opinion to that extreme, but there was a fair bit of wandering around in search of a plot. We start with Warren Passmore, upstanding member of the English gentry, and his story up to the point where he gets blown up on the Western Front and comes home an invalid, blinded and paraplegic, and decides himself unfit to continue as either husband or father.

Then we switch to Mark Passmore and his story up to the point where, having worked his way to to star reporter status on Fleet Street, heads to the sleepy Suffolk seaside town of Seathorpe to rest and try his hand at writing fiction. Seathorpe is an outpost of tradition resisting the tides of change, where “the indigenous plebians, from their most tender age, knew their places and kept to them.” Where no one had taken notice of things “since the Spanish Armada.” Wandering around the town, he spots a vision of loveliness and is overcome by “the conviction that he was going to marry the girl,” quits his newspaper job, buys a cottage, and settles down. So we appear safe to assume this is going to be a book about Mark Passmore and his romance with the vision.

We then get several chapters of Mark settling in and getting to know the various characters in town, learning the girl’s identity, arranging to spend time with her at the village fête. Then the vicar tosses a monkey wrench into the works with a little anecdote:

“But let me tell you. Cook discovered when she went to the pantry this morning a large pool of liquid on the floor. Quite a large pool. The pantry window was open. She did not think it was water. She said it did not feel like water. An odd remark, perhaps, but corroborated by the maid who presently wiped it up…. Quite an intriguing little mystery.”

So intriguing, in fact, that we soon see that Neil Bell intends to take us all down this narrative path for the rest of the book. The “life” that has come to Seathorpe is not the energetic and lovestruck young reporter but something far more sinister. More puddles are found — not like water. Marks are found in the sands — not like any known animal’s. A sheep is attacked and killed. The womenfolk grow concerned, the menfolk organize nightly watches. Sightings are reported: largish creatures, piglike by one account, crablike by another. Then an infant is found dead in his crib, which is soaked with the weird water-like substance.

Now, back when we were wandering around quaint old Seathorpe with young Mark Passmore, we listened as he had a visit with the town constable, who confided his great admiration for “rare books” — by which he meant books “their authors never before or afterwards did anything like … nor any other author.” The first of these he discovered was H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau. One of Well’s early — meaning science fiction — novels, about a mad scientist who takes over a remote island to experiment in creating new forms of life, part human, part animal.

Well, Mr. Bell is giving us a hint of where we’re going, but it’s not surprising that it might get missed. For Neil Bell — if Life Comes to Seathorpe is any proof — never met a detour that wasn’t worth taking. Actually, you don’t have to take Seathorpe as proof, as Bell himself provides it in his very discussion of the book in My Writing Life. After mentioning Jerrold’s assessment of the book’s first chapters, he then launches into a meditation upon how infrequently (or too frequently) intercourse occurs in marriage. A page and a half later, he writes, “To return to Douglas Jerrold and Life Comes to Seathorpe.” Jerrold told Bell that “the rest of the book was as good as anything Wells had done in that kind.” Bell bristles at the comparison. “I like to think that as a writer I am unique, in a class by myself. And this is true, for no-one writers, or can write, or could ever have written, my books.” Nevertheless, there are, let us say, more than a few Wells-like aspects to this one of Bell’s books.

There is, however, one obvious way in which Life Comes to Seathorpe is nothing like one of Wells’ science fiction novels. Those books were written before Wells had fallen in love with his opinions and are pretty trim. They’re plot and nothing but plot for the most part. Walter Allen was blunt in his review of the book in The Spectator: “Shall we say it’s the germ of an early Wells story stretched out to the length of 120,000 words?”

“How does Mr. Bell manage to spin it out to such length?” Allen asked. “By giving us his views on a number of things.” So, for example, when Bell lifts the veil off the mystery of the puddles through the device of Seathorpe’s own mad scientist’s journal, we are moving along through the preliminaries of the man’s life up to the point he began attempting to create life (using some form of electrolysis, it turns out) when we take a left and wander down a five page detour about the evils of flogging: “All men who flog are brutes; they are frequently beasts; and often filthy beasts.”

As Paul McGrane writes in a fascinating article, “The Pseudonymous Mr. Bell,” in the Autumn 2014 issue of The Book Collector, Bell’s novels “explore suicide, murder, mental and physical catastrophe, and nightmarish visions of the end of humanity.” This leads McGrane to wonder “if there are pointers in his private life to his obsessions.” In the case of flogging, there certainly was. During Bell’s own time in school, he witnessed the flogging of a ten year-old classmate by a schoolmaster. “It seared my mind forever…. All my work for years had been devoted to pillorying such beastliness,” Bell later wrote in an unpublished memoir. Having survived a harsh childhood and four years as a stretcher-bearer on the Western Front meant that Bell, as McGrane writes, “had no illusions about what human beings are capable of and, in his fiction, he set about describing it with a brutal honesty.”

On the other hand, Neil Bell could have benefited from applying the same brutal honesty to editing his own writing. That Life Comes to Seathorpe is a fascinating and “more-than-passingly strange” novel is undeniably. But so, unfortunately, is the fact that it’s not a particularly good one.

Life Comes to Seathorpe, by Neil Bell
London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1946

Not Tonight, by Kathleen Sully (1966)

Cover of 'Not Tonight' by Kathleen SullyNot Tonight brings me to the end of my journey through the oeuvre of the forgotten English novelist Kathleen Sully. After 16 other Sullys, most of its ingredients are familiar: a village on the southern coast of England; a woman of uncertain middle age; a robust young mother with an assortment of children by an assortment of fathers; various local characters with either low habits and good characters or high standards and petty ways.

Not Tonight was her twelfth book to be published in the space of eleven years, and it displays more than a few signs of creative fatigue. It’s more like a dinner thrown together on a weeknight from leftovers than a fully-conceived work. There’s as much running around, jumping in and out of bed, and mistaken appearances as a Feydeau farce without the discipline of a dramatic formula. Sully tosses in a fillip of incest to try to spice things up:

Inside the kitchen, large and untidy but surprisingly clean, Nadine pointed to the eldest child and said, “Terry’s his kid.”

“Oh,” said Hazel, innocently, “so he’s your brother?”

“Kind of — we both have the same father.”

“Terry had another mother?”

“I’m his mother,” said Nadine, pleased to get the worst news off her chest.

Sully’s earth-mother character, Nadine, has a heart big enough to embrace all souls and all sins, as long as they’re procreative. She introduces Hazel — the woman of uncertain middle age — to her live-in lover, Paddy:

“Well,” said Hazel, trying to shrug the whole thing off, “I suppose that one of these fine days, I shall be invited to a wedding?”

Nadine shook her head a trifle sadly.

“Or does he object to the children?”

“No, he likes the kids but his wife….”

Hazel stared — mouth open.

“They’re both religious,” said Nadine as if that explained all.

Unfortunately, too little of Nadine’s life-affirming energy conveys back to her creator, and we are left with a mishmash that fills without providing much in the way of nourishment. From what I’ve learned of Kathleen Sully’s life, it could well be that this book was posted off by a writer eager for another check to a publisher eager for something to print. It’s a slipshod, forgettable work. Its one saving grace is the fact that you’d be hard-pressed to find another English novel by a woman published in 1966 that came from as far out on the fringes of society.

Not Tonight, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1966

Gaëtan, or The Stock-Taking, by Edith de Born (1950)

“Gaëtan consists of a 100-page discussion between the wife and the mistress of a Frenchman who has been killed in a car accident,” wrote Julian Symons in his terse review of Edith de Born’s first novel. It’s an accurate description, but also a spoiler, for through much of the book, we only know we are eavesdropping on a conversation between Irina, Gaëtan’s Russian-born second wife, and Marie, his Swiss cousin. Gaëtan, a Frenchman of some high social standing — a brave officer in the First World War, a successful manufacturer, a covert agent of the Resistance in the Second — is gone now just a few months, and Irina has come to Marie’s villa outside Geneva to recuperate. From the very beginning, we know that there will be little relaxation during this visit, the two women’s first meeting.

As Irina takes her seat across from Marie by the fireplace, she takes in — and condemns — the decor. “The worst were the pictures. Boring landscapes, mountains and mountain lakes, displayed a depressing lack of personalisty and meagre craftsmanship in pretentious gilt frames.” She feels herself “caught in an unnatural and translucid atmosphere through which no sound could pierce.” But neither woman is on safe ground: “They took each other’s measure, appraised their mutual impressions, and both were disappointed.”

And indeed, what follows is a pause in limbo before the final judgments are passed. Over the course of the evening, their polite dialogue provides a poor disguise for what is really an interrogation. Mostly it is Marie doing the questioning. She is clearly offended that her fine well-born cousin married this short, plump Russian émigré, even if her family stood in the nobility before the Revolution. Marie notes that Irina still speaks with an accent, and “She doesn’t look youn either.” But Irina slips in a few pointed inquiries of her own, and she makes no apologies for being willing to humble herself to survive as an otherwise penniless refugee in Paris.

Irina has spent decades toiling in the backrooms of some of the most exclusive couturiers, and she has learned to appreciate both the skill involved in creating high fashion and the sweat:

I longed to be able to get away from the atmosphere of women dressing and undressing. At times the smell of their skin, their sweat, their scent, seemed to cling to me; I couldn’t get rid of it, I was nauseated by it, it stayed in my nostrils. Day in day out I watched them pitifully cheating their own selves. I heard them deliberately deny their most obvious imperfections. I saw them go through agonies of hidden pain in their desperate fight against ugliness or age. I listened to them, endeavouring to believe in the miracle expected from the new frock. That daily routine, perpetually repeated, had begun to get me down. Oh, that monstrous procession of wretched women!

Marie, on the other hand, has spent the same decades living in peace and comfort in her solid, dull villa on the slopes above Lake Geneva. She has servants to clean, feed, and care for her and money to pay for their service. Yet, as the stock-taking continues into the night, she begins to reveal the pain she has long kept hidden under the smooth surface of her own life. “Don’t try to tell me how happy, full, rich, and so on, the life of a single, independent woman can be. It is a tune I know by heart. I used to sing it to myself at first. Later I only sang it to other people.”

Part of a Chapman and Hall advertisement in the Times Literary Supplement from 1950
One contemporary reviewer wrote that Gaëtan is, “Good as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough.” I have to disagree. I think Gaëtan goes as far as it needs — and stops. In the end, it becomes clear that neither woman finds the need to pass judgment on the other. The real stock-taking is of the places into which men have put women. “All women form one chain-gang,” Marie tells Irina. “You cannot be in the company of a man, even though only on rare occasions, without incurring obligations.”

Edith de Born was the pen-name of Edith Bisch, who by the time that Gaëtan was published was living with her husband, Jacques Bisch, a French banker, in Brussels. Born Edith Ausch in Vienna in 1901, she had grown up in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, an experience she wrote about in a number of her novels, including a trilogy that traced her own journey: Schloss Felding (titled Felding Castle in the US) (1959); The House in Vienna (1959); and The Flat in Paris (1960). She is recorded as having played some role in the French Resistance during the Second World War, and she and her husband hosted Evelyn Waugh in their flat just around the corner from the royal palace in Brussels. I haven’t yet been able to learn why she chose to write in English or even why she began writing fiction after the war, but she went on to publish at least fifteen novels — all sadly now out of print — before her death in 1987.

Gaëtan, or The Stock-Taking, by Edith de Born
London: Chapman & Hall, 1950

Chapters 1 and 2 from In Our Metropolis, by Phyllis Livingstone (1940)

Ad from 1940 Times Literary Supplement

Back in March, I posted a short item about two forgotten novels I’d come across in an advertisement in the Times Literary Supplement. Neither received much attention and both quickly disappeared from sight.

I was interested in knowing more about both books, so when I had the chance to visit the British Library for a few hours recently, I requested copies of both and took advantage of the book scanners available in most of the library’s reading rooms to grab a few pages from each. The Library’s copyright policy restricts one to copying one chapter or 5% of a book. I stretched the allowance a bit and scanned in two chapters from each.

I wish I could say great things for both books, but of the chapters of Bargasoles I read, I can only say that Geoffrey S. Garnier was probably smart to stick with visual art. Bargasoles purports to be a comic novel, but the comedy might best be described as lumpy.

Let’s move on, shall we?

In Our Metropolis, however, is blissfully silly. It could have made a fun little B comedy movie starring one of those English actresses with a name like Nova Pilbeam or Enid Stamp-Taylor. It’s almost a parody of itself. Take the first lines of dialogue spoken in the book: “Sweetheart?” “Darling!” “Sherry?”

Elizabeth and Ralph Ware are sophisticated, funny, and broke. “Gentlemen in bowler hats queue up at the door all day,” she complains. Cooped up in their apartment all day, she longs for a little chatter, a little small talk from Ralph. He buries himself behind a newspaper. Frustrated, she strips naked in front of him. “Are you mad?” Ralph exclaims, concerned that their son might walk in. “I promise to conceal all the facts of life from him so that he can get all the information required from the lavatories at Eton,” she assures him.

You can tell this book was published during the Phoney War. Hitler is part of Elizabeth and Ralph’s world, but he hasn’t yet become an existential threat. Asked if she’s been teaching their son geography, Elizabeth replies, “Geography went out when Hitler came in. What’s the good of learning anything about Central Europe with him nipping about in frantic fashion, changing the boundaries out of caprice every five minutes or so?”

I didn’t have time to read the whole book, but I can tell you that they all head off happily to India, well-paid position for Ralph in hand, leaving their creditors behind. What happens in between Chapter 2 and the end, I can’t say, but I have a feeling it matters less than whatever Elizabeth manages to come up with. If In Our Metropolis is at all successful as a comedy, I think it’s most due to her.

If you’re interested in the only sample available outside a handful of libraries, feel free to check out this PDF of Chapters 1 and 2.

In Our Metropolis, by Phyllis Livingstone
London and Melbourne: Hutchinson & Co., 1940

Businessmen as Lovers, by Rosemary Tonks (1969)

Cover of "Businessmen as Lovers"

Businessmen as Lovers was Rosemary Tonks’ fourth novel and, to be honest, the first in which she seems to relax and not be relentlessly straining to be clever. It’s her only novel not set in London: the whole story takes place on a train through France and an island off Italy, and perhaps the setting meant that it wasn’t only Tonks’ characters who were taking a bit of a holiday.

As with all of Tonks’ novels, the story is all about the game of love in various guises, but in this case, she introduces a new variation hinted at in her title. Of all the match-ups Tonks choreographs in her book, the most earnest is that between a British venture capitalist and a mysterious and handsome Iranian tycoon. At first, it’s the Iranian who seems constantly to be crossing paths with the Englishman, much to the latter’s consternation. But when he learns the Iranian’s identity, suddenly the tables are turned and he sets off in desperate pursuit. An observer explains the contest to Mimi, the narrator:

“There’ll be a terrific struggle in which each tries to put the other in the wrong. Then they’ll rest. And start all over again.”

“Who will win?”

“Chamoun. He’s got the Rolls.”

“I’m not so sure. Caroline says Killi says you’ve got to whack them over the head with a penis.”

“A Rolls is a penis.”

Of historical note, this may be the first appearance of the concept of the penis car in English literature.

Tonks also provides perhaps the first portrait of the businessman as diva. Killi, the international wheeler-dealer married to Caroline, Mimi’s best friend, descends upon his vacationing family by helicopter and spends his first day pouting over the failure of everyone to react to his arrival with wild joy.

And to round off these moods at such times he fails to communicate his arrangements or his preferences but expects you to know his mind since he knows it so well himself. He sits there in silence and gives the impression of being buried in sand. Or he uses mysterious phrases which have Caroline bewildered, such as “I leave people to draw their own conclusions,” or “You made it perfectly plain” about the way she greeted someone on the beach, probably a deck-chair boy to whom apparently she was able to indicated in a split second a great chunk of information unfavourable to Killi.

Since reading Tonks’ first and largely unsuccessful novel, Emir, I’ve had the sense that what she was trying to do was to recreate Così fan tutte in a 1960s British setting, and Businessmen as Lovers is no different. Although there’s not much infidelity going on here, there are plenty of pairings beyond Killi and his Iranian businessman. There’s a fine comic villian in the person of Dr. Purzelbaum, who uses mineral baths and massages as if he were trying to extract secrets from captured spies. There’s the charmingly eccentric host, Sir Rupert Monkhouse, who’s absent-mindedly allowing himself to be seduced by one of Tonks’ ambiguously European characters, Mrs. Voss, known to one and all as “The Prostitutess.”

But though she may have aimed for Mozart, what she hit was something closer to Wodehouse. Aside from its Italy setting, the goings-on in Businessmen as Lovers could just as easily be taking place just down the road from Blandings Castle. It’s really just a bit of holiday silliness. And for once, Tonks’ alter ego and narrator is not the most confused and unhappy person in the cast. Instead, she is blissfully in love with Beetle, a quiet Englishman happy with her company in the bedroom and out. Perhaps Tonks was giving herself, as well as her characters, a break.

Businessmen as Lovers, by Rosemary Tonks
London: The Bodley Head, Ltd., 1969

Actors and Directors: Two Anecdotes from Letters from an Actor, by William Redfield (1967)

Ralph Richardson and Bail Dean
Ralph Richardson and Bail Dean

Ralph Richardson and Basil Dean

Some thirty years ago, Richardson was rehearsing a play directed by Basil Dean. The latter was the last of the old-time directors on the British side of the Atlantic. By “old-time,” I mean abusive, cruel, sarcastic, and contemptuous of actors. His American equivalent, albeit far younger, would be Jed Harris. Mr. Harris, however, has changed. So far as I know, Mr. Dean never did. Richardson was an important actor at the time but not yet a film star nor one of the classic theatre’s leading lights. In this particular production, it had been decided to open “cold,” which means no tour of the provinces and no previews before the opening performance. Throughout the rehearsal period. Dean was nasty and autocratic with most of his actors, but left Richardson strictly alone. In fact, practically no conversation, pleasant or otherwise, passed between them. “Good morning, Mr. Richardson”; “Good morning, Mr. Dean”; “Good night, Mr. Richardson”; “Good night, Mr. Dean” was about the long and short of it. The night before the play opened, the cast performed a dress rehearsal with only Basil Dean out front. He stopped the performance quite often, either to change entrances and exits, lighting and cues for the stage manager, or merely to abuse the skills and talent of one actor or another. Late in the evening — midnight or thereabouts — Richardson made an exit which Dean considered important. He stopped the performance and asked the stage manager to bring Mr. Richardson back on stage. A moment later, Richardson stood soberly before the footlights.

Dean rose from his seat and ambled down the center aisle. When he reached the first row, he spoke softly. “Mr. Richardson,” he said, “do you think it possible that at some moment between now and tomorrow evening you could learn to leave the stage like a gentleman?”

Richardson gazed blandly back at his director and then all but murmured, “Yes. I believe I could.” He thereupon turned away, left the stage, continued on past the wings, the dressing rooms, the stage doorman, the alleyway, took a taxi for the railroad station, a train to his country home, told his wife what had taken place, instructed her not to call him to the phone for any purpose, and never opened in the play. For several days, his telephone rang hourly, but only Mrs. Richardson heard the pleadings, cajolements, blandishments, and inducements offered by producers, playwright, and fellow actors. It would seem perhaps cruel to deprive one’s innocent colleagues of employment, but
if the play had been really good they would have gotten someone else. In any case, they didn’t. The play closed before it opened, and Dean’s directorial charisma sustained a smarting blow. Richardson—single-handed—caused what amounted to a silent revolution in the treatment of English actors by directors.

George Stevens and Method Acting

Only at the Actors Studio (granted its drawbacks and parochialism) can the actor ask question on question with impunity. Only there can he seriously explore the mysteries of his craft without being looked on as a neurotic pariah…. [T]he Studio remains a house of questions and stands, therefore, as an oasis in the lip-cracking desert of pay your dues and take your orders and grab the money and run for the cat-house…. I cannot say that I have stopped asking questions, but I have certainly stopped believing that honesty is the best policy. Because it isn’t. Not when directors are kings.

Good directors understand all this, of course, though they don’t often say so out loud. Good film directors understand exactly the reverse, and they are quite correct. During the filming of The Greatest Story Ever Told, George Stevens (a really excellent film director) was queried by an actor as to “motivation.” “Young man,” he said, “while you were resting yesterday, I went up in those hills over there and I shot a lot of sequences with a herd of cattle. Not one of those cattle asked me a question about motivation and, believe you me, they did just fine.”

Letters from an Actor, by William Redfield (1967)

In 1964, Sir John Gielgud convinced Richard Burton to star in a Broadway production of Hamlet. Still smoking hot from his big-screen romance with Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra, Burton was looking to solidify his street cred as a serious actor after a few Hollywood duds. Gielgud’s motivation is a little less clear, as gradually becomes clear to the rest of the cast and crew.

In any case, they shook hands and with Alex Cohen as producer, Gielgud began assembling a stellar cast: Hume Cronyn as Polonius, Alfred Drake as Claudius, a young John Cullum as Laertes, and an impressive list of veteran character actors such as Barnard Hughes, George Voskovec, Eileen Herlie, Kit Culkin (father of Macaulay et al.), and Linda Marsh. As Guildenstern, he picked William Redfield. Though just 37 at the time, Redfield already had thirty years’ experience in radio, TV, film, and theatre.

Gielgud took the cast up to Toronto in late January 1964 to begin rehearsals. Redfield began providing a running account of the process through a series of letters to his friend, Bob Mills, back in New York, and these are the letters collected in Letters from an Actor. It was nearly a month into rehearsals before Redfield hit his stride, moving from notes scratched on cocktail napkins to what eventually became at-times epic narratives of the daily/nightly goings-on on and off stage.

From the very beginning, there was a certain tension — mostly artistic — that pervaded the production. Gielgud was the epitome of the subtle and refined school of acting, perhaps the great master of underplay. And by this point, he had decades of Hamlet under this belt. As Redfield notes, “He remembers, bone-wisely, all the forty-plus years of playing Shakespearean roles; of directing his fellow actors in those roles; of observing Ralph Richardson rehearsing and playing this part, Laurence Olivier that one … and on through every degree of accomplishment and competence.”

Burton, on the other hand, was part of the postwar, naturalistic school of British actors and possessed of a sometimes volcanic temperament. Burton was direct. “As a tank is direct. Throw what mortar you will, a tank keeps coming until it is annihilated. I can imagine him fighting with a severe head wound,” writes Redfield. “I can picture him with an arm chopped off fighting fiercely with what remains.”

The two men almost never exchanged angry words over the production. Gielgud was far too ephemeral for that. On top of his feather touch as a director, he also chose to take set and costume to an understated extreme. The set was nothing but a barest collection of furniture and towering abstract planes painted black. Instead of period costume, the actors appeared in street clothes. “Since he is dealing with a great play and an electric star,” Redfield surmises, “he gambles that the rest of us can be efficient enough to meet our challenges without the help of fur and flugelhorns; that we can be kings without crowns, soldiers without epaulets.” In Redfield’s case, Guildenstern looks as if he could have strolled in from an insurance office down the street.

If there was anything Gielgud stressed, it was verbal delivery. He knew the play backwards and forwards and would hone in on the smallest things in an actor’s lines. “Not ‘the’ — ‘the‘” he stresses to Redfield at one point. This drives Redfield nuts, for all his admiration for Gielgud, because at the same time he continues to ignore the actor’s plea that Burton is completely mangling the speech following the the line. After one performance during the play’s preview run in Boston, he tells Phil Coolidge, who plays the Captain, “Coolidge, it’s a charming
performance, but get yourself a hat. I couldn’t tell you why, but you’re nothing without a hat.” When the play finally opened on Broadway, Peggy Cass (raise your hand if you know her name from To Tell the Truth) offered Redfield a summary of the situation: “No direction for this show. Everyone was left to strike out on his own. Hume Cronyn got a triple.”

William Redfield was perhaps the ideal reporter for this beat. He had a big enough part to be in the midst of much of the action on stage and a small enough one to have plenty of time to observe. Indeed he’d realized early in his career that he’d never be a star. When he was 17, a friend told him, “You do not have a star’s temperament. You are not a killer. A star must be a killer. You will be one of the best actors in the country but you will never be a star no matter how many times you are billed above the title.”

He also had a healthy respect for just how tough the business of acting is:

The theatre is more ruthless than a factory, more expensive than a newspaper, and more closely watched than a shoe-shine boy. The theatre’s product is fearfully expensive; the theatre’s guarantee of employment is nil; the theatre’s competition is savage; the theatre’s employer’s are gamblers with the odds a good eight to one against them. Do you think the actors don’t know this? In fact, you will not meet a more tough-gutted and realistic group of people professionally speaking during your lifetime than actors. Why? Because when a play fails, Armaggedon is upon us. It even costs money to cart the scenery away.

Show me a working actor and I will show you a man with a cement stomach.

One reason the production has gone down in history is that it was perhaps the earliest example of the kind of stage-to-screen bridges one now sees in things like streamed performances from the Met. A group of television producers approached Alex Cohen and convinced him to allow a live performance to be filmed in a new process called “Electronovision.” The resulting “Theatrofilm” was shown in thousands of movie theaters around the U.S. and grossed a healthy $4,000,000. You can see it yourself on YouTube. But none of the profits benefited the actors. Redfield writes bitterly, “The financial details of this venture involved a mass screwing of the acting company so excruciatingly delicious that only a separate letter could do the tale justice.”

Sadly, Letters from an Actor was William Redfield’s only venture into print, aside from a collaboration with his friend, Wally Cox, on Mr. Peepers: A Sort of Novel (1955), a spin-off from Cox’s television series of the same name. He carried on with a busy career as a character actor until dying of leukemia at the age of 49 in 1976. You can get a small but superb example of his work in this clip from Elaine May’s 1971 film, A New Leaf, in which he tries to tell Walter Matthau’s character he’s broke:

You can find electronic formats of Letters from an Actor on the Open Library: Link.

Letters from an Actor, by William Redfield
New York City: Viking, 1967

The Long Sunday, by Peter Fletcher (1958)

Church, prayer, going to Sunday services and weekday evening meetings remains the center of life for some families and communities. One hundred years ago, they were the frameworks of the rituals and values of many English people, particularly those of the class of shopkeepers and lesser professions. Each denomination and sect identified itself through its practices and principles.

As Peter Fletcher shows in his memoir, The Long Sunday, the Wesleyan Chapel in their East Coast seaside town was the center of his family’s lives, the measure by which they judged themselves and their neighbors. His parents’ commitment to faithful attendance, service in countless supporting chores, and application of the church’s strictures to control their children and condemn their neighbors was the one point on which they could agree. They were united in their ability to place their brethren in precise order of damnation or salvation. They knew “who was making eyes at whom, who was being married, who was expected to die, who was prosperous, who was running for bankruptcy, who was suspected of secret drinking, card-playing and other vices.”

This was even easier when it came to other Christian churches. “I could have prepared a seating-plan of Heaven — this is where my concentric circles first come in — showing exactly where the members of the several denominations, from Salvationists to Roman Catholics, would find themselves in relation to the Great White Throne.” “Without the slightest hesitation I could have decided to whom to distribute harps and haloes, and who would be fortunate to secure ‘standing room only’ on the edge of the outer darkness.”

In all other matters, Peter realized as he grew, their primary function was to serve the other as “a catalyst precipitating resentment.” His father was to blame for all his mother’s disappointments, and vice-versa. “The one thing they had in common was their religion.” They projected their expectations onto their children, and in his zealous quest to please them by achieving all possible prizes for service, rote learning, and generally pious demeanor, Peter acknowledges that “By the time I had reached the age of fourteen I was an unsufferably self-righteous little prig.”

At that point, however, his attitude began to change, and it was primarily due to his own quiet, careful observation of the adults in the congregation. He began to notice the discrepancies between what people did and said in church and what they did after. “For reasons best known to themselves the adults were by common consent playing, and thoroughly enjoying, a highly dramatic game of ‘let’s pretend.'”

That didn’t prevent him, though, from throwing himself headlong into throng when an Evangelistic Campaign pitched its tent in town. “I was one of those into whose hands this great enterprise had been committed. I was on the inside, looking out.” He goes to all the meetings, and vies with the best of them when it came to profess his sins and ask for redemption: “the longer one person went on the longer would the others be likely to go on when their turn came. So once a prayer meeting got under way there was no telling when it would stop.”

Growing up in an environment go strenuously concerned with following the straight and narrow path did mean that certain aspects of Peter’s upbringing were neglected. Here, for example, is the sum of his father’s attempt to explain the facts of life:

“That’s a tom-cat, but it has been cut.”
“I didn’t notice anything wrong with it.”
“Of course you didn’t. I said it’s been cut.”
His tone of voice indicated that the word, ‘cut,” had some special significance, but I hadn’t the remotest idea what it was; so after a pause, I said, Oh, has it?”
My father asked:
“You know what I mean, don’t you?”
I answered, “No.”
“Well, if you don’t know what I mean, I can’t tell you!” My father replied, and relapsed into morose silence. And that was the beginning and the end of all the parental instruction I ever received into the mysteries of procreation.

It is only when Peter enlists in the Royal Ordinance Corps several months after the start of the war in 1914 that he is able to step free of the pressure to “play along” with the rituals of his family and the church. Being treated as an anonymous and presumably incompetent recruit comes as something of a relief. And when a big, coarse, hard-drinking Welshman in his unit shows some kindness to him after Peter passes out on the parade ground, he realizes that the man is treating him in a more truly Christian manner than anything he had experienced in nearly twenty years’ daily life in the Wesleyan Church: “I have given up the religious which is nothing but the exception, extraction, exaltation, ecstasy, or it has given me up. I possess nothing but the everyday.”

The Long Sunday is a remarkable effort to understand a time, a place, and a way of making sense of the world that Fletcher himself has moved on from without ever giving the sense that he is trying to reject it or undermine it by revealing its flaws. Whatever flaws he can now recognize in his parents, their rituals and beliefs, and their efforts to pass them along to him, he is less interested in passing judgment than in achieving some perspective and balance in his understanding. And in that regard, The Long Sunday is a model of a clear-eyed but deeply sympathetic approach to revisiting one’s past.

Peter Fletcher went on to become a psychologist, working for many years in the London Clinic for Religious Psychology and writing a series of guides aimed at common readers such as Mastering Life, Mastering your nerves (1939), Emotional Conflict (1958), and Understanding Your Emotional Problems (1968).

The Long Sunday, by Peter Fletcher
London: Faber & Faber, 1958

The Fire Escape, by Susan Kale (1960)

The paperback editions of The Fire Escape trumpet its message: “The tragic, unvarnished story of a prostitute.” Which is a bit like plastering the banner line, “The Story of a Cockroach” across the cover of The Metamorphosis: yes, well, I guess you could say it is, but that’s actually missing the point in a pretty big way.

Just what is The Fire Escape about, then, you ask? Boy, you’ve got me there.

It purports to be the autobiography of the youngest daughter of a curate, a woman never quite at ease in any situation for long, and positively antsy when it comes to any of the conventions of English middle class life shortly after the First World War. Shipped off to a boarding school, she befriends Norah, a day girl, and soon they are happily playing “Torture,” taking turns tying each other up. One day she does the job so successfully that Norah’s mother rushes in with a pair of scissors to cut the cord before the victim strangles.

Moved to a school for clergy daughters only, she quickly forms a secret society, “The Red Lamp,” with a new friend, Polly, and initiate a third member by locking her in a cupboard. Yet when she comes across a dog savaging a rabbit to death, she wonders, “Was I really so cowardly that I was going to maintain an acquiescent silence my whole life?”

Sent to a teacher’s college by her parents, she quits and signs up for an art school instead, then plays truant from that, finds a landlady willing to give her the use of an empty attic to live in, and takes up day work as a cleaning woman. When her father considers resigning his living out of shame, Susan up and takes off for Dublin with a boy from school, both mad over Yeats’s poetry. Running into the poet in the street, she recites the whole of “Sailing to Byzantium” and he invites them to watch a rehearsal of his play, The Cat and the Moon at the Abbey Theatre (which puts this incident, if true, in 1931).

Rescued and brought home from Dublin, she soon returns to the attic, accessible by the fire escape of the title. Putting the kettle on, she is startled when an old man enters from the floor below. He quietly sits on the sofa and watches her, occasionally speaking in a language she cannot understand. At some point, she learns his name: Alek Nauss.

Alek Nauss. Susan Kale. You see where the story goes from erratic to weird?

Over the next decade, Susan returns from time to time to the attic and has odd conversations with Alek. These she imbues with profound significance, though she manages to convey almost none of it to the reader. She falls in love with a puppeteer and wanders around southern England with him, often sleeping in the fields. He takes up with another woman and she gets a job scraping away excess lead from toy soldiers fresh from the molds. Ten hours a day for twenty seven shillings a week. Like the other women there, she merely endures it. “They endured the utter futility, the wretchedness of spending their days in scraping lead; the prostitution of their lives, in fact.”

She takes up with a poet, marries and has a son by him, then they divorce and she is forced to give the boy away to a relative. She goes through jobs and men and flats at a dizzying pace. She models for an artist, “a very ugly man.” Soon she and the artist are playing “torture” again, grown-up style. Except it’s all very British in its perversity:

One night, he suspended me by my ankles in a doorway. It was difficult because he didn’t want either to spoil the paintwork in his flat or to break my neck. It took more time than such things bearably can. We woke up to the insanity of our behavior simultaneously and didn’t meet again. He was sensitive.

Eighty-seven or so jobs later, she wanders out of a cafe and, while posting a letter, is approached by a man. “Are you doing anything tonight?” he asks. “What do you want?” “I wondered if you’d like to come to a show.” She repeats the question. “I’m game for anything,” he answers. Moments later, she agrees to sleep with him for two pounds, and suddenly she’s discovered her eighty-eighth job.

This being England in the late 1940s, setting oneself up as a prostitute involves a fair amount of subterfuge and thick swathes of middle class hypocrisy. She works mostly off ads posted in tobacconists: “Miss Domina Brand: Psychologist. Will Solve Your Problems Big or Small.” “Surely it’s wrong to put ‘Miss,’ isn’t it?” she asks. “Yes, but that’s what’ll convince them it’s not a real psychologist,” a helpful newsagent advises her.

Though a fair variety of fetishes are played out in her flats over the next decade, the one prevailing sense throughout this period is of dreariness. Susan Kale’s account of life in postwar London may capture its grey, tedious, tired attempts to keep up appearances better than any of the Kitchen Sink school plays and novels.

In the end, she gives up, worried she is running out of time. Or at least, so it appears. Because in the final pages, we return once again to the attic–now mostly a pile of rubble with a bit of the fire escape still clinging to its side. Alek Nauss is gone, dead years ago.

Is this meant as a metaphor for herself? What started as a secret place, a place where she could escape from her parents’ conventions, now just a ruin, “a broken-backed, disfigured space”? It’s difficult to tell but even more difficult to care, for by this point, the reader is likely exhausted from what has been nearly two hundred pages of “this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened” narrative that rarely offers more than a paragraph or two respite from Susan Kale’s relentless restlessness.

It is perhaps most interesting as a dramatic contrast to just about any other Englishwoman’s account of the same period. Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark undoubtedly knew of women like Susan Kale in their time, but they made sure to steer clear of their acquaintance. If there is any comparison one might draw, it is with the equally-forgotten Kathleen Sully’s early novels, particularly Canal in the Moonlight, with their odd mixes of grim poverty, black humor, and cruel fate. If any man picked up a paperback copy of The Fire Escape looking for a thrill, he would certainly have been disappointed, if not eagerly looking for the nearest bottle or narcotic instead.

The First Escape, by Susan Kale

London: Putnam, 1960

Blitz Writing: Night Shift and It Was Different at the Time, by Inez Holden (2019)

Cover of Blitz Writing

As a rule, I don’t cover in print books on this site: the fact that a book is in print is proof that it may be underappreciated, but it’s certainly not forgotten. However, I have to make an exception in the case of the Handheld Press’s recent release of two of Inez Holden’s three books about life in Britain during World War Two in Blitz Writing: Night Shift and It Was Different at the Time.

I wrote about Holden’s other war book, There’s No Story There, back in August of 2018. I owe Kate Macdonald, the owner of Handheld Press, for passing along a PDF of a well-worn copy of the book that she in turn got from Kristin Bluemel, and these two women are responsible for bringing Blitz Writing to print. Bluemel’s introduction is invaluable not just for putting these two books in the context of writings about the war but also for providing the only available overview of Holden’s life and work to be published this century.

Although Night Shift is a novel and It Was Different at the Time nonfiction, the two books are related by more than just time. As with There’s No Story There, the real strength and connective tissue of the books is Holden’s finely-tuned ear. Whether her dialogue is invented or recorded — probably a mix of both — Holden was expert at capturing a whole person in their words. Whether it’s a long recollection by Mabs, one of the factory workers in Night Shift that’s almost a one-act play about battling Romeos, or just a line or two, Holden’s gift for exposition via dialogue is exceptional.

Holden and her friend Felicity visit an art show, for example, that turns out to be an attempt to market some kind of fuzzy-minded mysticism. As they attempt to escape, one of the cult members, referred to as “Norfolk-jacket,” swoops upon them. “Is there anything you ladies would like me to explain?” Felicity mutters an excuse about being late for an appointment, but Norfolk-jacket plows ahead with a sales pitch that would please any die-hard Scientologist: “Yes, yes, I shall be happy to tell you everything about the real meaning of life. Every Tuesday at half-past two we have lectures on the great and only truth…. Not so much a lecture, you understand, as a social, when Cosmic Wisdom is given to guest free, gratis.” Nothing quite sells profound revelation of the mysteries of the universe as packaging it in the form of tea socials.

At a fancy dinner party in November 1938, a Nazi emissary of some middle rank says of German intervention in the Spanish Civil War on the side of Franco, “No, he has — I mean our Fuehrer has — absolutely no interest in Spain. He will be glad to withdraw the few thousand of broken-down troops. The Fuehrer just sent them there for the sake of Mussolini’s blue eyes. Of course he thinks it good practice for our airmen.” To which Holden observes, “This was the first time we had heared anyone speaking of killing civilians from the air as being ‘good practice.'” “For the sake of his blue eyes,” by the way is an expression one hears from Dutch and German speakers, a way of saying “It’s nothing, just some trivial thing.” Holden manages to peel back the informality of a bit of dinner party chat and reveal the cold-blooded murder running beneath it.

To give you some idea of the service that Handheld Press has performed in issuing Blitz Writing, I will bring your attention to the fact that used copies of Night Shift and It Was Different at the Time have been unavailable at any price for years, and only a few copies of either are available through libraries. WorldCat tells us that there are a total of 23 copies held worldwide of Night Shift and only 13 copies of It Was Different at the Time. Neither book was ever reprinted or reissued until now. This is what saving neglected books looks like, folks. Keep up the good work, Kate!

Journey Through a Lighted Room, by Margaret Parton (1973)

Cover of 'Journey Through a Lighted Room'

I knew I was going to like Margaret Parton’s memoir, Journey Through a Lighted Room, on page two, when she writes of reflecting upon a Quaker meeting while “wandering aimlessly about the garden with a vodka and tonic in hand.”

This is the story of a woman who wasn’t ashamed by the fact that she liked a good drink, a good book, a good meal, a good piece of music, a good conversation, and a good fuck. She made her way in the working world, had an abortion she never regretted, married twice and divorced once, fell and stayed in love with a married man through two decades, raised a son and watched him die of leukemia, cared for a mother suffering from dementia, struggled with her weight, and generally held her own through lows and highs that I suspect any contemporary woman could relate to. Indeed, it’s a little surprising that Journey Through a Lighted Room isn’t better known and still in print, because the book is as fresh and frank as if Parton were telling it to us here and now.

Parton grew up in exceptional circumstances. Her mother, Mary Field Parton, was a successful writer and social activist who worked with Clarence Darrow and edited Mother Jones’ autobiography. Her father, Lemuel Parton, was a reported whose column, “Who’s News Today,” was syndicated in hundreds of newpapers across the US in the 1930s and 1940s. Her aunt, Sara Bard Field, campaigned for women’s suffrage and married Charles Erskine Scott Wood, whose resume included everything from graduating from West Point and fighting Indians in the West to defending Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman in court to painting and writing for socialist magazines. There was never a time when she wasn’t in the midst of talented, opinionated, and famous people. At the age of 14, she wrote in her journal,

Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Thompson, a historian named Mr. Woodward [C. Vann Woodward] and his wfie, the reformed burglar Jack Black, and Mr. and Mrs. E. B. White were here. A very amusing evening, during which Sinclair Lewis rose from the table and carried his plate of roast beef over to the desk where I was eating alone because there wasn’t enough room for me at the big table; he sat down on the floor beside me and fed his roast beef to Tiggy and talked about cats.

Of the same evening, Margaret’s mother wrote in her diary, “Dinner party ruined by lovable but drunk Red Lewis.”

Mary and Lemuel Parton married when they both had established themselves in their careers, and though they were devoted to Margaret, their only child, they were utterly absorbed with each other. “It’s almost as hard for a child to grow up in the presence of an extremely happy marriage as it is to grow up in an unhappy home,” someone who knew her parents later observed to Margaret.

It was also hard from Margaret to establish her own identity when she was surrounded by such accomplished people. After graduating from Swarthmore, she bounced through a series of low-level jobs — writing news items for radio and spending a year as a fact-checker at The New Yorker. Feeling somewhat suffocated working in her parents’ world in New York City, she moved to San Francisco, where for two years she got to experience life as an independent adult. Though she wrote a humorous account of the time in Laughter on the Hill (1945), she admits in Journey that she left some of the more painful aspects out — particularly being abandoned by a man who got her pregnant and having, with almost no money to spare, to locate a doctor willing to give her an abortion.

When her father died in 1943, she returned to New York and worked as a newspaper reporter. Her time in San Francisco earned her an assignment to return there in 1945 to cover the conference leading to the formation of the United Nations. This, in turn, led to an assignment to Japan, the start of nearly seven years spent as a reporter in the Far East and India, where she covered events like the partition and the assassination of Gandhi. She also married Eric Britter, a British correspondent, and gave birth to their son, whom she named Lemuel, after her father.

The marriage was shaky from the start, however, and in September 1952, she took her son and returned to the U.S., moving in with her mother in Palisades, north of New York City. There, she “quickly discovered the facts of life for the single woman in the suburbs: almost total exclusion from the social life of the community.” Slowly, she won some writing jobs, and in 1954, was assigned to cover the first trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard for the murder of his wife. Parton’s coverage stood out and was soon being used by papers throughout the U.S..

This raised her visibility significantly and eventually led to an offer to work as an editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, at the time perhaps the most popular woman’s magazine in America. Having worked for years in the male-dominated field of newspaper reporting, she struggled to conform to the conservative, traditional conventions of the Journal:

From the Goulds came a constant pressure for IDEAS. From Beatrice: “I do hope your suggestions will be COMPELLING!” From Bruce: “We are always in need of good Big Ideas, such as ‘The Ten Richest Women,’ ‘The World’s Most Famous Jewels,’ and ‘The Ten Best-Dressed Women.'” That memo really amused me. Those were Big Ideas?

Though she was able to slip in occasional pieces of serious fiction and reporting, these were rare and hardly what the Journal’s readers wanted. “… [I]n the same issue we ran a superior story by Rebecca West and in the homemaking department an offer of a Bible quilt pattern; there were 3,200 requests for the pattern and one letter commenting on the Rebecca West story.”

In the late 1950s, she ran into an old acquaintance from Japan, former Navy Commander Alfred Hussey, a lawyer who’d served on General MacArthur’s staff and was one of the principal authors of the Japanese constitution, and they married in 1963 after his divorce from his first wife. His health began to fail soon afterward, however, and he died in 1964.

Around the same time, her mother began suffering from dementia, and though Margaret tried for months to care for her at home, she eventually had to put her into the first of a series of nursing homes. She then spent her days sorting through over fifty years of her parent’s papers and belongings, getting their house ready for sale, and visiting her mother: “the hours with her were agonizing and my heart broke with pity each time I saw her, particularly at the contrast with the self-assured, dynamic woman who emerged each day from the diary pages I was reading.” She also cared for her neighbor, Muriel Snow, widow of the writer Edgar Snow, in the terminal stage of cancer, holding Muriel’s hand as she screamed, “Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Help Me Die!”

The one bright spot in this time was her son, Lemuel, who emerged from a long period of adolescent isolation and depression and was building a circle of friends and a reputation as a tennis instructor. She was particularly vulnerable, therefore, when Lem suddenly fell ill. After he was hospitalized, a doctor came to tell her that Lem was suffering from an aggressive form of leukemia. “‘How long?’ I managed to ask. ‘Around four weeks,’ he said.”

Left alone after Lem’s death, she often considered suicide. “Some nights, alone and swept by storms of grief, I would stare at Lem’s .22, and twice I loaded it and held the muzzle in my mouth. Several times I poured sleeping pills into my hand and waited to find out what I would decide.” In the end, she simply carried on and found some sense of peace: “I no longer worry about being hopelessly out of step with current intellectual and literary movements, and simply accept myself as someone who is absorbed in unfashionable thoughts about love, truth, and the continuity of time.”

Margaret Parton continued to work after publishing Journey Through a Lighted Room, writing for Woman’s Day and other magazines, preparing a biography of her mother, and organizing the collection of papers now held by the University of Oregon Library. She helped establish the historical committee for her community of Palisades. She died in 1981.

Journey Through a Lighted Room is available in electronic formats on the Open Library: Link.

Journey Through a Lighted Room, by Margaret Parton
New York City: The Viking Press, 1973

The Mere Living, by B. Bergson Spiro (Betty Miller) (1933)

Cover of first US edition of 'The Mere Living'

Had The Mere Living not been largely forgotten by now, it would undoubtedly be saddled with an unshakeable and unfavorable comparison to Virginia Wolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. For both are circadian novels (taking place within the space of a single day) set in London and both really heavily on the use of a stream of consciousness narrative told through multiple characters. The Mere Living was the first novel by B. (for Betty) Bergson Spiro, who would publish the rest of her books under her married name, Betty Miller.

Two of Miller’s later novels are now in print: Farewell, Leicester Square (1941) has been reissued by Persephone Books and On the Side of the Angels (1945) by Capuchin Classics. The Mere Living, on the other hand, disappeared soon after publication and there are currently just two copies available for purchase.

One clue to the nature of The Mere Living can be found in the author’s maiden name, for she was a close relative of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who was best known at the time for his theory of time. Bergson argued that there were essentially two different times: clock time, the regular, rhythmic, linearly progressing dimension measured by the clock; and time as experienced by individuals, which in our perceptions can speed up or slow down based on factors that may have nothing to do with the ticking of the clock.

The Mere Living is, in one way, an illustration of Bergson’s theory, as the author takes through one day in four progressive stages — Breakfast Time; Lunch Time; Tea Time; and Dinner Time — but at widely different paces as experienced by the four members of the Sullivan family: Henry, the husband and father; Mary, the wife and mother; Nancy, the daughter (19); and Paul, the son (17). So, as an example, as Henry, Paul, and Nancy rush out and into the whirl of the morning rush hour at the end of the Breakfast Time section, Mary feels “an air of release, of pleasure in her solitude,” and quietly tends to the bulbs in her window pots.

Spiro was, without a doubt, aware of and perhaps somewhat inspired by Mrs. Dalloway, but it would be both unfair and not particularly illuminating to compare the two books. For Spiro’s title reveals her major theme, which I’d argue is not only the experience of time framed in the space of a day but also time framed in the space of a life(time). All four Sullivans wake up and go to sleep in the same house and the same beds. One can safely assume that much of their next day will be very much like this one — full of rituals, tasks, chores, and obligations.

On the other hand, in each of their days is a sign of a profound change to come, all of them changes that will put their lives on a different course. Paul becomes aware of his infatuation with a fellow student, Richard, the first sense that this is where his need for physical and emotional connection will take him. Nancy meets Oliver, the married man she has been seeing, in his apartment, his wife being out of town, and realizes she is ready to sleep with him. Henry, having gone into an import/export business with a somewhat mysterious man with Continental connections, begins to understand that he is probably being swindled. And most omninously, Mary’s physician connects her sharp, intermittent attacks of pain and anxiety to a lump in her breast.

By sending her characters out into a busy London day, Spiro is provided with numerous opportunities to show the varieties of time that can be experienced in modern life, such as the hurry-up-and-wait world of the subway:

Along the passage. Hurry, hurry. Quick pattering of many feet. But the train had already gone. Too late. It had gone. Low vacant tunnel. Too late. Aimlessly, they walk up and down, their steps sounding in the shallow silence. In the self-conscious silence. Up and down. Or stare at the advertisements on the in-curling walls. Seen ’em before, anyway. Up and down. Damn the train, was it never coming?

Or the new time-refuges of the cafe, the pub, and the cinema: “But here, for three hours, is a new time, self-sufficient, unrelated: the march of actual time artificially broken, and synthetically replaced, dream-potent.”

Miller took her title from a line from Browning’s “Saul”: “How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ/All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!” And The Mere Living vibrates with energy generated from a world filled with other people. For Miller, the “blooming, buzzing confusion” that William James called the infant’s impression of the world is part and parcel of modern life for old as well as young. Not that this energy is all positive and productive. On the dust jacket of the U.S. edition of The Mere Living, Miller described her own challenges in writing the book:

Virginia Woolf has said that it is impossible to write without “a room of one’s own.” The Mere Living was written, for the most part, in a corner of the sitting room, with the wireless giving forth its eloquence, and my father, mother, sister and two brothers all tirelessly discussing their particular interests in life at the moment.

Considering that Bergson Spiro was just 22 when she published The Mere Living, she displays, in her treatment of Mary’s examination by her physician, remarkable insight to the perspectives of much more mature women and men. She also demonstrates a clear understanding of the common practice of doctors benignly deceiving their patients:

“Well, Mrs. Sullivan, it’s more or less as I thought. There’s nothing serious to worry about.” Deliberately, he spoke the words: and waited for the change of expression that he knew, the upward, dawning smile, eager, humble, grateful, released. It was one of his hardest moments. The penalty he had to bear, the physician’s, the priest’s, for assuming the responsibility created by that necessity for mother-trust which persists in all grown-up children who fear the dark … his duty being, as he had come to see it, to keep the frightened and ignorant man-child or woman-child from that elemental fear, his duty being to reassure, to inspire comfort and confidence as well as physical relief, for as long a period as possible in these children who came to him with awed confidence in his silent knowledge, in the shining toys, the knives, the lancets, the colored drugs, the mysterious paraphernalia …

When Mary is reunited with her family in the last section, Dinner Time, she draws some comfort from the knowledge that, whatever happens, her children will carry on a part of her: “They glance at me with the living flame of their eyes. To me they owe that flame.” Though family can seem a straitjacket to the two young people eager to break away and discover their own lives, it is also one of their time refuges, like the cafe or cinema: “At nightfall, they returned, acquiescent, to the household of common existence, mutually dependent, interrelated; resigning, in the common purpose that held them about this table, the divergent demands of each separate-striving personality.”

And after the evening time with the family, each person heads to the last essential refuge of sleep. For Mr. Sullivan, it frees him from the deepening fear that he is about to be ruined:

Gradually, sleep-warmth lapped, vague and mollifying and blind. It deprived him increasingly of knowledge of his own body.

Dying away into an easeful warmth of non-being…. He no longer felt his hands. Soft drunken pillow.

Body was darkening and darkening, all knowledge of himself was going, he was escaping at last….

One reviewer attributed the success of The Mere Living to “the extraordinary keenness of its author’s sense-perceptions and her impulsive (but often effective) tyranny over words.” The passage above, with the repetition of warmth, of knowledge, the repetition of short drumming phrases, the synesthesia of “drunken pillow,” all work to achieve a convincing sense of falling asleep. The book is full of such deft descriptions. If there are occasional moments of awkward characterization, these are quickly left behind in the tremendous current of time that runs throughout The Mere Living. When I finished Robert Hillyer’s perfect novel, My Heart for Hostage, I was a bit afraid that it would be hard to find something to maintain its high standard. In its own unique way, The Mere Living certainly does.

The Mere Living, by B. Bergson Spiro (Betty Miller)
London: Victor Gollancz, 1933
New York: Frederick Stokes, 1933

My Heart for Hostage, by Robert Hillyer (1942)

Cover of 'My Heart for Hostage'

I feel a little trepidation in writing about My Heart for Hostage. It may be the closest thing to a perfect book that I’ve come across in nearly 13 years of working on this site. It’s so good that early in reading it, I felt a frisson of fear that Robert Hillyer would not be able to sustain its quality, that the style, the story, or the narrative voice would give way and leave me frustrated and disappointed. Instead, I feel it’s I who will end up letting this book down.

My Heart for Hostage is the story of a romance doomed from the start — but not for the reason you might think at first. Edward Reynolds, freshly discharged from the U.S. Army after time in combat on the Western Front and afterward as a courier for the U.S. delegation at the Peace Conference, meets Germaine, a beautiful 19 year-old girl from Nantes enjoying her first freedom in Paris. Strongly attracted to each other from the start, they are soon sleeping together in what both take at first as nothing but a fling. Edward, son of a fine New England family, talks of marriage but Germaine brushes him off.

They encounter a variety of early American expats, including a dowager still carrying a torch for Edward’s father and a flamboyant painter proud of his notoriety as a décadent. They escape to Brittany, where they spent an idyllic few late summer weeks swimming and sailing off a small fishing village, and Germaine finally admits she could marry Edward. When the first storm of autumn arrives, they return to Paris to plan for their marriage and the trip back to Edward’s home in the U.S..

In Paris, however, single incident sparks Edward’s simmering sense of jealousy, and it all blows up. Edward is hospitalized, and when he recovers, he travels to Nantes to locate Germaine. He finds her about to wed an older man to whom she had been promised by her parents years before, and he quickly flees, taking the first passage to the U.S. he can book. There, on board, he meets a fellow ex-officer who reveals a few facts that transform his entire understanding of Germaine — indeed, that reveal to Edward how little he understands people at all.

My Heart for Hostage could be written off as just another American in Paris story, but everything about this book takes it to a level that puts everything else in this genre in the shade (with perhaps the exception of Henry James’ The Ambassadors, a peak I haven’t attempted myself). From his social status, upbringing, education, and experience, Hillyer was already encountering France with considerable sophistication, but what’s refreshing here is his insistence on bringing things back to an immediate and personal level:

The trouble was, he said, that people in America who pose generally had some goal in view; they wanted to impress some advantageous person to get on in the world. Whereas in France, people just posed for the fun of it.

No, she decided, people in France who posed also had some goal in view; but the goal was just to show off. You see, the French wanted to puff themselves up in their own eyes by making other people notice them, even if they had to behave very queerly like the silly artists on the Boulevard St. Michel. Americans wanted to overreach other people. If a Frenchman were posing, he’d look seriously in a mirror to see if he were acting the part properly; an American would wink at his reflection to show he was not fooling himself at any rate. Sometimes Americans seemed to her much more mature than the French. But in love they are very banal. “Take, for example, yourself, Edouard. You never believe at the right time and you always doubt at the wrong time. Isn’t that true?”

Edward had been thinking that she knew altogether too much about Americans in love. “I don’t know,” he said, and suddenly buried his face in his hands.

“But you do know,” she persisted, “because you never really trust me. You will never believe if we live together in joy until our death. That doubt will poison whatever you think of me — oh, even at our best times together — and it will bite, drop by drop, like acid into you, into your deep nature, until all you will have to say to me will be Bonjour, cherie, and Cherie, dors bien.”

Robert Hillyer 1942
Robert Hillyer 1942
Just how much of My Heart for Hostage is autobiographical is hard to tell. Like Edward Reynolds, Robert Hillyer served in the U.S. Army during World War One and remained on active duty after the war, working like Edward as a courier for the Peace Conference. Like his more famous Harvard classmates e.e. cummings, John Dos Passos, and Malcolm Cowley, he came to France first as a volunteer ambulance driver, and became, like Edward, fluent in French. And like Edward, he returned to the U.S. in late 1919. Edward’s story ends on board the freighter taking him home; Hillyer became a professor of English at Harvard. Best known as a poet, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1934 for his Collected Verse.

Hillyer wrote My Heart for Hostage, the second of his two novels, at a distance of over twenty years from his time in Paris and in the midst of another World War. From its dust jacket illustration, one can imagine that My Heart for Hostage was being aimed by Random House for a sentimental, mainly female audience, but in reality, this is a book that would have appealed to G.I.s if they’d made it past the title page. Hillyer’s soldiers carry some scars with them they little understand and can’t control. They find relief in sex and drink, and feel a distance between themselves and the folks back home they can’t quite express. And they have a sense that the only true relationships have to be founded on trust — which, unfortunately, their experiences have shown to be something not given lightly. But I suspect that few G.I.s ever got their hands on My Heart for Hostage, and so it soon slipped into obscurity: too late for the veterans of WWI, too early for the veterans of WWII. I hope it will not take another war for it to be rediscovered.

I’ve covered plenty of books well-deserving of rediscovery on this site. But if it’s not going too far out onto a limb, I have to say that My Heart for Hostage is perhaps the closest thing to a neglected masterpiece I’ve come across. I cannot recommend it too highly. There are less than a dozen copies available for sale at the moment: Grab a copy now!

My Heart for Hostage, by Robert Hillyer
New York: Random House, 1942

Linked in the Lutheran Underworld, from Direction North, by John Sykes (1967)

Cover of first US edition of Direction NorthIt is not that I am a particularly avid drinker, but one partial to a glass of beer or a glass or two of wine with a meal, and then a lift at the start of the evening—apart from specific drinking occasions; but since I came to Finland I have been goaded almost to a Finn’s method of dispatching the glass, or usually it’s the bottle, put before him, by the difficulty of getting the fancied nip at the place and moment when I fancied it. And with the difficulty has gone such disapproval ranged against one’s request for help.

“Can I have a beer, please? Oh, not without food? Well, I’ll have some ham. Oh, not here at all? I can have milk? Oh, thanks. In the restaurant opposite? Yes, thanks. Yes, I like milk, and sour milk too. No, I have nothing against milk. I’m being quite serious. Some food, I agree, tastes as good with it. . . .”

“. . . Oh here you don’t serve beer at the bar? Only spirits at the bar, but beer at the tables? Beer is allowed when one starts one’s lunch? . . .”

“. . . Oh, I see, if I am in such a hurry — for a drink, that is” (I’d been waiting for twenty minutes) — “I ought to have gone to a higher grade of restaurant? Oh! . . .”

“. . But there isn’t a bar anywhere! I’ve looked already down a dozen streets. No, I don’t want a meal. You see, in this weather I get so cold, I need a shot of cognac. No, I don’t want an illicit bottle. I’d settle for a beer if there was a pub in sight. …”

“. . . Here is my passport, so I can order what I like? It’s not recorded in a book, in the case of a foreigner? So I’ll have three bottles of Fundador, your number 3985, and a bottle of 4497, and some 6413, yes, two bottles, and how about 2022 for an akvavit? You have no views upon it? No, it’s not for a name day. No, I am not buying it for a Finnish citizen. You see, it is such a walk to get here, and the hours are awkward, and it’s all so difficult, I’m just buying it, to have, to offer to people, to have an occasional drink by myself. Oh dear!” — for the square-faced matron, an officer of the government at the government store wielding this monopoly, with Finns along the counter whispering their orders then waiting while the details were recorded in their individual books, then popping the liquor into an attache case or some such dissimulating carrier, felt, she felt that my attitude was wrong. I can’t say why, but I suppose I didn’t show that I knew it to be devil’s milk. The need was proffered but not the guilt.

So I called on the painter hoping for a sherry, and the chance of again looking at his paintings that were slashed as though the vibrant colors had themselves at that point torn the canvas, but of course all his opened bottles were empty. And as I saw him about to open a whisky and remembered what that in particular did to him, as the need to drain it would speed up, I cried out that I was on the wagon, and he checked himself and his wife brought coffee (and his gestures, I noted, as with other Finns, while handling the bottle had been underlined as though this were the momentous side to life) and after some moments we could talk again as usual. I slipped away back to the Suusanens. It was second-best to sip sherry alone—from bottles hidden in my suitcase and wrapped in woollies against a telltale clink—but no one here understood the sipping. Mrs. Suusanen disliked liquor in the home, bar the little she imported. So I secretly drank, as the girls smoked, and as Aarne toned down his record playing, and as Marjatta perhaps had once hidden her love of crime beneath the pillows. We were linked in the Lutheran underworld.

Direction North: A View of Finland is an unusual sort of travel book. John Sykes was a Quaker who volunteered to serve as an ambulance driver with the Finns during the Winter War with the Soviets. One night, a doctor pointed at one of the wounded soldiers in his ambulance and remarked that the man — a working class labor organizer — had it in him to become Prime Minister of Finland one day. Sykes looked at the man and felt an immediate connection, one that stayed with him years after the war. And so he undertook to locate the man when he had some time to spend in Finland on the way back from a visit to the Soviet Union.

He finds the man, Pekka Suusanen, now a manager in a large textile factory in Tampere, and moves into a room in the Sussanen’s apartment. Despite the family’s hospitality, it’s something of an awkward situation because, well, as Sykes puts it, Suusanens always seem to be longing for time to be alone and seek’ “as Finns seemed to do, the kernel within the kernel of his thoughts.” For Finns, the ideal vacation would be “to find a retreat where at least for a fortnight no other human would intrude his presence. There would only be you there, and God. God would wrap you about with his silence. . . .”

“You have to get used to silence in Finland,” he writes. “It is a major part of social communion.”

Sykes — whose somewhat effusive prose style is evident in the passage above — does manage to divine some of the underlying tensions in Finnish society in the 1960s. Even with the country’s prosperity and the elevation of men like Pekka into the establishment, there are deep-set rifts — between labor, with its Communist roots, and capital, between the Finns and the Swede-Finns who still hold the old money and the old ties to the Swedish nobility. They all seem to culminate in Pekka’s resistance against the idea of accepting the gift of a house by the lake — every Finn’s dream, as Sykes sees it — from his company.

The contrast between Sykes’ open and spontaneous manner and Pekka’s dogged stolidity also provides Direction North with a certain comic air. Pekka often reminded me of my father-in-law, who used to greet visitors with, “I hope you have a hotel and restaurant for yourselves tonight.” There’s an occasional sense that Pekka plays up his grimness just to get a rise out of Sykes.

Things in Finland have probably changed since 1967, but Direction North can be enjoyed as an oddball bit of human comedy even if you never plan to go there.

Direction North is available in electronic formats on the Open Library: Link.

Direction North: A View of Finland, by John Sykes
Philadelphia and New York: Chilton Books, 1967