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The Rabbit’s Umbrella, by George Plimpton (1955)

Cover of the first US edition of The Roabbit's Umbrella

The rabbit with the umbrella in George Plimpton’s children’s book, The Rabbit’s Umbrella, is every bit as real as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny: that he might exist matters more than that he actually does. In this case, the rabbit, plus three robbers, shouting parrots, and a giant dog named Lump serve as bait to entice a boy to listen to Plimpton’s story, which is essentially a shaggy dog tale. To give him credit, though, there really is a shaggy dog in this tale:

Mr. Montague brings Lump home
Mr. Montague brings Lump home

The Rabbit’s Umbrella takes place in the town of Adams. And where is Adams? Well, “It’s simple enough to get to Adams once you find the station from which the train leaves.” The main industry of Adams is thimble-making, as is obvious from the sign at the edge of town.

Welcome to Adams
Welcome to Adams

Mr. Montague, who owns the thimble factory, wants only to make his wife and son happy, which is why he buys Lump the dog. He brings Lump home on the town’s one electric streetcar, which is the thing dearest to the heart of Doctor Trimble, the town’s world-traveled scientific expert (Expert in what? Never mind.).

Doctor Trimble
Doctor Trimble

The three robbers — Pease, Punch, and Mr. Bouncely — have one gun among them and plan to use it to steal great fortunes, starting with Mr. Montague’s.

The Three Robbers
The Three Robbers

Unfortunately, they haven’t quite got a clue just how to go about being robbers, so when they do manage to break into Mr. Montague’s house, the only thing they make off with is Lump. This leads to a high-speed chase by Doctor Trimble, Mr. Montague, and the town cop on the electric streetcar — which is probably the last thing you’d want to chase a gang of robbers in (Never mind again). But all ends happily, though the rabbit with the umbrella never does appear.

The rabbit with the umbrella
The rabbit with the umbrella

Still, the boy demands at the end of the book, “I want to know about the rabbit with the umbrella.” And so Plimpton explains:

You want to know about the rabbit with the umbrella. Doctor Trimble would be the one to explain it to you. He has not only seen the rabbits but also chipmunks with parasols and sun helmets and squirrels with small pianos in their houses, and he has seen the mice skate on the frozen lakes in winter. He has seen so many umbrella-carrying rabbits that if he were writing this epilogue it would be as long as the book itself. He told me once he had seen a whole field full of rabbits opening and shutting their umbrellas after a summer rainstorm, the drops shaken off sparkling like diamonds in the new sun. I have never seen one myself, though I think I saw one smelling a petunia when I was a boy your age, playing in my great-grandfather’s garden. But Doctor Trimble tells me the reason dogs roll their tongues out and laugh is that they recall suddenly how funny a rabbit looks, leaping through a hedgerow with an open umbrella bouncing above him.

… Life is full of mysteries, and it’s nice to have a mystery that is a rabbit with an umbrella.

Which is as good an explanation as anyone really needs.

George Plimpton wrote this book, inspired by The Twenty-One Balloons, the Newbery Medal-winning book by William Pène du Bois, then working as the art director for the The Paris Review. Plimpton’s amiably absurd narrative notwithstanding, it’s Pène du Bois’ illustrations that are really the star of the book. Plimpton imagined it as a bedtime story he might tell Lucas Matthiessen, the son of his The Paris Review co-founder Peter Matthiessen — although the Matthiessens had returned to the U.S. by the time the book was published.

After the book was accepted fr publication by Viking, Plimpton wrote his parents, forwarding the latest copy of The Paris Review and apologizing for the angry tone of its stories. “The contents, you’ll be glad to hear, are hardly reflections of my own character, which remains merry enough and full of hope and enthusiasm,” he assured them. He also predicted that, successful or not, The Rabbit’s Umbrella would not be considered “the product of a tormented mind.”

The Rabbit’s Umbrella is available in electronic formats on the Open Library: Link.

The Rabbit’s Umbrella, by George Plimpton
New York City: The Viking Press, 1955

The Bloater, by Rosemary Tonks (1968)

Cover of the first UK edition of The Bloater

The bloater of Rosemary Tonks’ title is an opera singer, and The Bloater itself is a bit like Così fan tutte updated for the Swinging Sixties. Min, married to George, who seems to have a bird on the side, is being pursued by the Bloater (he never gets a real name), while she contemplates if she wants Billy the musicologist as a friend or lover. Claudi, another one of Tonks’ older men of ambiguous European origin, flits in and out to offer advice and moral support in the role of Don Alfonso.

Meanwhile, her friend and co-worker Jenny wonders whether to sleep with the guitar player with the soulful eyes or the poet with the long brown hair. And in between we have sessions in the studio where Min, Jenny, and that clod Fred are setting a poem about Orestes to electronic music. So it’s all very hip, cool, and sophisticated — and yet nothing more than a bit of kissing actually goes on.

Tonks seems to have learned to tone down her wisecrackery from the relentless pace of her first novels Emir and Opium Fogs. As a narrator, Min is every bit as wise in her cracks as Tonks’ earlier authorial personae, but this time Tonks is in far better control:

Brahms is good for exercising, if you’re not in love; if you are in love of course, you will simply swoon off after the first knees bend. Beethoven has too many ups and downs, the music gets awkward and thrilling, and you strain your back and make grandiose plans which waste your brain for several hours afterwards.

Reviewing The Bloater in the TLS, Sarah Curtis showed how Tonks wrapped things up as neatly as the ending of a Mozart opera: “It all works out happily, with the unsuitable suitor rejected, husband fobbed off with a convenient lover, and even a little reference to ‘the moral dimension,’ so that the reader is not too outraged by all this mini-skirted flippancy.”

Yes, it’s lightweight. In the Birmingham Daily Post, Michael Billington called it “a slight, amusing, unpretentious book that passes an hour or two quite painlessly.” But there are times when we all need a bit of elegant comic relief. As Dominic Le Foe put it in the Illustrated London News: “If they still make hammocks, and if they still grow trees from which to suspend one, and if the sun ever shines again — given all those circumstances, with an optional cooling drink to hand, then The Bloater will pass a pleasant hour or two.”

You’ll have to rely on Interlibrary Loan to get a copy of The Bloater: there are no copies available for sale at the moment. Fortunately, there are almost 60 copies held in libraries worldwide, so all you need is a library card and a little patience.

The Bloater, by Rosemary Tonks
London: The Bodley Head, 1968

The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, by Gay Taylor and Malachi Whitaker (1937)

Ethel Firebrace
Ethel Firebrace

In The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, Malachi Whitaker and Gay Taylor offered the world a feminine match for H. H. Bashford’s really good man, Augustus Carp, Esq. Lost now to literary history, Ethel Firebrace was prolific novelist of the early 20th century, churning out dozens and dozens of works such as Clothed in White Samite, Ecstacy’s Debit, His for an Hour, and the thrilling wartime romance, An Airman for Averil. Firebrace followed in the footsteps of such industrious Victorian women writers as Margaret Oliphant and Eliza Lynn Linton. In fact, I half suspect that Whitaker and Taylor, who probably met at one of Charles Lahr’s literary evenings in London in the late 1920s, had skimmed Linton’s My Literary Life, which is one of the snippiest memoirs ever published.

I must caution, however, that unlike Augustus Carp, whose righteousness in all things stems from his utter blindness to the world around him, Ethel Firebrace maintains her moral superiority from her firm understanding that she is simply better than everyone else. It is not selfishness that prevents her from helping others but simply “a nature too finely tuned.” Unfortunately, though her family early recognized that little Ethel was too busy “thinking of higher things,” they failed to spare her “the sight of their toil-worn hands, dust-laden hair, and brows which bore the wrinkled imprint of perpetual household budgeting.” Consequently, “being a very sensitive child, this left a deeper mark upon me than they realised.”

Indeed, for Ethel, the world is divided between the sensitive and the insensitive — there being far too few of the former and far, far too many of the latter. When she marries and gives birth, she vows “at whatever cost, never to let this event repeat itself during my married life” and finds it difficult to forgive her daughter “the eternity of torture she had caused me.” How was it that women before her were able to bear so many children? “Cast-iron insensitiveness,” of course.

Fortunately for the reading public, however, Ethel found the inner strength to steel herself against her baby’s cries of hunger and other ill-considered attempts to distract her and focus on her great gift: writing. Starting with Jessica’s Secret, she works diligently at the coalface, wearing out four typewriters along the way, generating, by her own count, over five million words. By the time she begins her autobiography, she can state with confidence that “I do not think there can be many, well versed in book-lore, who are unacquainted with at least one of the works of Ethel Firebrace.” I feel some shame in admitting that until I read this book, I was one of the unenlightened minority.

For her many gifts to literature, she has received countless in return from her admirers, including “a leopard-skin rug, a transparent nightdress, twenty pounds of quince jelly, what turned out to be a very sick monkey, a fountain-pen, and a set of alleged performing fleas.” Beside the talents that God bestowed upon her, she attributes her success (“or very nearly all of it!”) to her habit of gargling after food. She suggests that the literary world can be divided infallibly between the garglers and the non-garglers. The non-garglers such as Mr. Aldous Huxley are destined to “spring up like toadstools, live as long, and disappear as ignominiously.” Needless to say, but “there are no garglers among modern poets.”

Cresset Press advertisement for The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace
Cresset Press advertisement for The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace

The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace is easily one of the rarest books I’ve featured on this site. There are just two copies available for sale — one for $600+ and one for almost $900. I was able to read it thanks to my British Library and a quick stop through London last month. It was hard to keep quiet at some points while reading it: while not quite as fine-tuned as Augustus Carp, Esq., The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace absolutely deserves rediscovery as a perfect little comic gem. In a fictional heaven somewhere, Ethel Firebrace and Augustus Carp, Esq. live together in sympathy, both confident in their superiority of character and intellect if slightly disappointed that the rest of existence will never fully appreciate their brilliance. Such is the cross the truly great must bear.

The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, written anonymously by Gay Taylor and Malachi Whitaker
London: The Cresset Press, 1937

The Well-Meaning Young Man, by Luise and Magdalen King-Hall (1930)

I decided to read The Well Meaning Young Man after stumbling across this passage:

Horatio Swann, the famous portrait painter, was at his wit’s end. Harry Ames, the well-known scene designer, was at his wit’s end. The Russian chauffeur, Boris, was lying upstairs under a neat check bedspread, in a bedroom of the inn, suffering from an overdose of cocaine. The only person who was enjoying himself was Gene Tunney the panther who, attached to the kitchen table by a stout chain, was guzzling his luncheon out of a wash-hand-basin. In the entrance hall of the inn, the Princess Vanda Fiorivanti stormed to and fro. Her tall, snake-like figure clad in a pair of seagreen pyjamas and a fur coat, quivered with rage. Her enormous, distraught yellow eyes, ringed with black lashes, appeared to swamp her emaciated white face. Her hair was like a crazy scarlet chrysanthemum and matched her scarlet mouth. Her general appearance at the moment closely resembled that of a vampire who had been carelessly buried without a stake in her heart, dug up again after some centuries, and was now giving vent to her feelings.

I am a sucker for over-the-top farces about the goings-on of silly rich people (viz. Five Days, The Ritz Carltons, Heart in a Hurricane, et al.), so this was enough to get me started.

The hero of The Well Meaning Young Man is not himself rich but he comes from a comfortable family. The younger son of Anglo-Irish gentry, Dan Cavanagh is already a failure. His father and mother (“a fine stand-up lump of a woman”) have shipped him off to join a family business in Sicily, thinking he had “a way with him” that “might be invaluable in charming intractable foreigners.” At the time he stumbles across the Princess and her entourage, however, he is trying to make his way there by foot, having squandered most of his travel budget with an old school chum in London. Dan is not the sharpest knife in the drawer: “He had not yet learnt to read except in the literal sense of the word,” and the authors esteem his handwriting “about one degree of culture superior to that of his valiant twelfth century ancestors, who came over to Ireland with Strongbow, and when occasion demanded, signed their names with an X.”

With her chauffeur incapacitated, the Princess hires Dan as a replacement, and he soon finds himself behind the wheel of a massive Pannonia-Svitza estate car, racing through the Black Forest towards Schloss Erlenburg, where American producer-tycoon Rex Guggenheim awaits the star of his new spectacle, “The Legend of St. Dorothea and the Heavenly Roses.” Unfortunately, by enlisting Dan, she also manages to hijack the narrative for the remainder of the book. What starts as a good-natured Bildungsroman with above-average comic writing swerves onto a side road and becomes mired in a seemingly endless opera buffa with all the fun and spontaneity as a Soviet rhythmic gymnastics demonstration. By the time poor Dan is spit out on the far side of the Alps, the comic spirit has been beaten out of us.

While The Well Meaning Young Man got waylaid with a narrative flat tire, I’m willing to give Magdalen King-Hall’s earlier solo attempt, with the intriguing title I Think I Remember, Being the Random Recollections of Sir Wickham Woolicomb, An Ordinary English Snob and Gentleman. I’m also a sucker for comic autobiographies of English snobs (viz. Lord Bellinger and the classic Augustus Carp, Esq.).

The Well Meaning Young Man is available on the Internet Archive (link).

The Well-Meaning Young Man, by Luise [Louise] and Magdalen King-Hall
New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1930

Opium Fogs, by Rosemary Tonks (1963)

Cover of "Opium Fogs" by Rosemary TonksThough Rosemary Tonks’ Emir includes Opium Fogs in its “by the same author” list and not vice-versa, it’s a safe bet that Opium Fogs was written second. On all counts — particularly form, style, and characterization — it’s the more successful book. What’s more, throughout the book there are signs of material from Emir being reused, reworked, and improved.

Emir’s character Toby Garnett, for example, a bookstore clerk “too intelligent to be out of work and too intelligent to work” is resurrected in the form of Gerard Plowman (a librarian this time), the lovesick protagonist of Opium Fogs. Tonks shifts gender, telling most of the story from Gerard’s perspective and giving secondary focus to Gabriella, the object of his infatuation. She also steps up her geometry, incorporating two romantic triangles that intersect with Gabriella and the unlikely figure of Dr. Bodo Swingler, another character of ambiguously European origin.

Tonks is far more successful in the playing the parlour game of cleverness than she was in Emir. The text fairly crackles with apt lines: Gerard is a man “for whom everyday life is the equivalent of sewing mailbags in prison.” Another character is “celebrated as an international nobody.” A group of undertakers looks “as if they read nothing but obituary notices, and dined exclusively on bread and water and soapflakes.” A man’s conversation “was as stimulating as being told the plot of a play by someone who hasn’t seen it.” And it’s full of helpful advice: “If you are out to borrow money or ask a favour, nothing puts your victim on guard more rapidly than laughing at his jokes and generally making yourself agreeable.” “There is no better entertainment, when you’re stone cold and bored to death, than watching someone park a motor-car. The effect is therapeutic, wonderfully reviving.”

Opium Fogs is also fascinating to read if you know something of Tonks’ story. Like Tonks, Gabriella “married and left England a moody little beauty of twenty-two;” she also spent “eighteen months in India, ten of them paralysed.” In Tonks’ case, her bout with polio left her with limited use of her right hand. When Gabriella walks, “one saw that she went slowly as though one leg was very tired.” Though Gerard fervently seeks to rekindle their romance, Gabriella has moved on from his adolescent notions of love and happiness: “For women like Gabriella it is quite simply the
second-rateness of adultery that makes it so difficult to swallow.” Still in recovery from her illness, she wants simply “… to live with the minimum of difficulty. Don’t you understand? I need a roof overhead, three meals a day, the company of people who mean nothing to me, and permission to be tired and ugly for days on end.”

On the other hand, Gerard embodies the spirit of the flâneur that one finds throughout Tonks’ poetry. In her poem, “The Flâneur and the Apocalypse,” she wrote,

For his inebriated tread, the whole of Europe
With its great streets full of air and shade,
Its students and cocottes,
And traffic, roughly caked with blood,
Is not enough.
The whole of Europe put to sleep
By music, coal-fires, snow, and café life,
And suffocated by hot fogs and poppies,
And rocked by lovers, like a chest of breath,
Is not, for the flâneur, drug strong enough.

The emotion that shines brightest throughout Opium Fogs is Tonks/Gerard’s love-hate relationship with the city of London. The book is full of passages that aspire to the energy of the “Michaelmas term lately over” opening of Bleak House:

The Metropolis was clad in mildew, alive with glittering ooze and great fever clouds.

It was the funeral couch of a buried Pharaoh who has been wrapped up like a black-shirted vegetable in mouldy linens, crepes, plasters and aprons, steeped in the preserving vinegar of ancient curses. And loaded with the cookery of dark cosmetics, surrealist lavas, enamels, and armoury as fragile as the metal blisters on the sides of roasted fish.

People shook hands as though they had them buried up to the shoulder in earth.

The air was foul as in a gambling den, where everything is greasy to the touch.

One heard the railways shaking their chains.

But not so far away the sky opened for an instant over the Thames, to dry streets of shiny platters where the rank mane of Neptune lay overnight.

An interesting black day began.

The “opium fogs” of the title captures both the atmosphere and addictive nature of London life. “After this city which is so dirty, so impossibly difficult to live in,” Tonks writes, “you could never bring yourself to respect another which made living easy.” In fact, it’s a shame that Lauren Elkins missed the opportunity to include Rosemary Tonks and Opium Fogs in her recent book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. Tonks’ authorial voice embodies “the ability to wander detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of society” that Wikipedia offers as the essence of the flâneur. And it would serve as a perfect dessert to follow an entrée of such heavy London seriousness as Doris Lessing’s novel from the year before, The Golden Notebook.

Opium Fogs is available in electronic formats on the Internet Archive (link).

Opium Fogs, by Rosemary Tonks
London: Putnam, 1963

Emir, by Rosemary Tonks (1963)

Cover of 'Emir' with photo of Rosemary Tonks by June Johnston
Cover of ‘Emir’ with photo of Rosemary Tonks by June Johnston

Rosemary Tonks’ first two novels, Emir and Opium Fogs were published within weeks of each other and TLS and other papers reviewed them together, so it’s hard to be sure which one was written first. But my bet is on Emir. If Opium Fogs is never less than eccentric, it is at least a finished work. Emir is just eccentric.

Having now had my hands on all of the six novels that Tonks published between 1963 and 1972, I can say that the ploy of Emir is, in rough terms, the plot of every one of Tonks’ novels: a young woman of definite opinions but indefinite sense of self is pursued by varied men of varied ages, is intrigued by one or more of them, and ends up with none. As Neil Astley makes clear in his introduction to his superb 2014 reissue of Tonks’ poems, Bedouin of the London Evening, Tonks’ heroines mirror many aspects of their creator’s own life and character.

Her father died of blackwater fever in Africa before she was born; she and her mother moved 14 times during the war; she spent years semi-abandoned in boarding schools; she married and moved to India and then Pakistan with him, suffering typhoid fever in in the first and polio in the second; lived briefly in Paris; and returned to live as something of a reluctant member of the arts-and-literature scene in London. Her poetry and then her novels attracted some attention in the 1960s, but she seems never to have been fully comfortable with her work or life during this period. Her mother’s death led to a spiritual crisis, and she went through a series of conversions before ending up, increasingly ill and reclusive, by the seaside in Bournemouth. Rediscovered in a 2009 BBC Radio 4 documentary [Can anyone provide a recording of it?], she died in 2014 just months before Astley’s Bloodaxe Books published her work for the first time in over 40 years.

In Emir, Tonks’ young woman, Houda Lawrence, is already suffering from the romantic equivalent of Groucho Marx’s quip that “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member”: “Even supposing she had been able to find someone of her own age who was attractive to her, she would at once have begun to watch him for the first mistake.” Though an aspiring poet who walks the streets of London, green notebook in hand, she finds herself “deaf to the joys of professional Bohemia: which is certain death.” And she is still struggling to get out from underneath the influence of a mother who wants her to surrender to her proper role as wife and helpmeet.

Her taste in men leads her to dance around the edges of an affair with Eugene, a man of “rioutous European pedigree” and impeccable taste in clothes. “An older woman encountering his glance — it was like being stared at by a violet — might have summed him up: ‘Untrustworthy to a degree. But worth it.'” Of his parentage, Tonks writes only that “there was a suggestion of a child being carried in and out of opera boxes.” Tonks is by far at her best in artful character assassination: “However long he waited, Eugene always managed to appear to be dismissing a waiter when she arrived.”

Her dialogue, however, makes one long for the gritty realism of Les Liaisons dangereuses:

“A poet must be one of civilization’s failures. You forget; it’s the mongrel who gets kicked.”

“I cannot harm you; because you are completely vulnerable. But if the way up a publisher’s staircarpet led over my heart, you would not hesitate to tread it.”

“My God. What a low estimate you have of my ambitions. The staircarpet of a great poet is the only walk I could take after the arrogance of the pavement.”

I haven’t made a definitive study of the subject, but I’ll go out on a limb here and postulate that no one not looking at a staircarpet ever used the word “staircarpet” in a conversation. Twice.

I confess to having spent more for a copy of Emir than for any book I’ve ever owned. It was the only copy I’ve seen come up for sale in the last couple of years. And I will offer as a service to other readers the assurance that this is a book you need not covet, particularly when the superior Opium Fogs is available free on the Internet Archive (link). As Charles puts it in his Sonofabook review, Tonks spends far too much time in the book “trying to score points in the parlour game of cleverness.”

Emir, by Rosemary Tonks
London: ADAM Books, 1963

Two Lost Novels

I love to page through old issues of The Saturday Review, the TLS, and other book reviews of the past for the advertisements as much as for the reviews. Browsing through old copies of the TLS online recently, I noticed the following in the lower left corner of a full-page Hutchinson’s ad from 7 September 1940:

Hutchinson's First Novels ad from September 1940

Two of the books sounded interesting: Geoffrey S. Garnier’s Bargasoles and Phyllis Livingstone’s In Our Metropolis. Of Bargasoles, one of the very few reviews I was able to locate, from The Cornishman of 19 December 1940, said:

One usually associates the name of Geoffrey S. Gamier with those delightful etchings which have brought him into the first line of artists. The combination of a successful artist and novelist is a rarity, but the artist is evident in the author, by his deft etching of words, as we are accustomed to the lightness of his work in the realm of art. Those who were fortunate enough to secure copies of the Newlyn harbour sports programmes have already sampled tile shrewd dry wit of the author, and the adventures of George and his colleagues through the pages of Bargasoles form a complete antidote to the dark hours of black-out and the harrowing thoughts of war. This humorous novel is written in entertaining and light-hearted manner which succeeds in making farcical situations convincing. One of the characters, a Chestertonian figure of gargantuan proportions and unfailing wit — is a brilliant example of original creativeness. Readers will look forward with eagerness to the next product of this fertile and versatile brain, of one who appears be our most promising local author.

Another review, from the Liverpool Daily Post, was more moderated: “Some thoroughly impossible but most amusing characters populate Mr. Geoffrey S. Garnier’s entertaining first novel, Bargasoles. It is completely ridiculous farcical comedy, which revolves around football pools and patent medicines in delightfully inconsequential manner.”

Garnier and his wife, the painter Jill Garnier, lived in Newlyn, near Penzance in Cornwall. Garnier had an interesting technique of showing depths and distance through the use of planes of flat shades — a technique that later contributed half the prints that cluttered up American offices in the 1980s. John Branfield’s short biography, Geoffrey and Jill Garnier: A Marriage of the Arts, was published in 2010 but appears to be out of print now. The 1962 edition of Who’s Who in Art credits Garnier with a second novel titled Murdering Mabel, but there is no other evidence I can find that this book ever existed. According to WorldCat.org, there are all of four copies of Bargasoles to be found in libraries.

The second book, In Our Metropolis, is nearly as rare: five copies held by libraries. The University of Pennsylvania holds the only copy in North America. The description from Hutchinson’s catalogue makes the book sound worth reading:

This is a delightful novel with a light, amusing touch which is always realistic. It portrays a few months of life as led by two stormy everyday Londoners, with all their vicissitudes and absurdities. The author, a keen student of psychology, has shown the value of trivial and apparently insignificant incidents as being of extreme importance in their effect on human relationship — particularly that most intriguing of all — Man and Woman.

It received, however, even less notice than Bargasoles. I located three reviews in the British Newspaper Archive, one of which consists of a whole nine words: “Another first novel which has a sophisticated modern setting.” The Tatler ran an only slightly longer item as an excuse to print Livingstone’s picture and note the quality of her connections by marriage:

Phyllis Livingstone, from <em>The Tatler</em>, 23 October 1940
Phyllis Livingstone, from The Tatler, 23 October 1940

A new publication of Hutchinson’s is called In Our Metropolis, written by Phyyllis Livingstone, who in private life is the wife of Captain David Livingston-Learmonth, R. A., a godson of Lord Willingdon, former Viceroy of India, now going to the Argentine and other South American countries on a Trade Mission. The book has a light touch that will be welcomed by many readers, and is the story of modern married life in London Society.

The third review, from the Liverpool Daily Post, was the most positive:

In Our Metropolis by Phyllis Livingstone (Hutchinson, 8s 6d) is a good deal better domestic comedy than its dust-cover would suggest. The story concerns a young married couple, their impecuniosities and other family troubles, their squabbles and reconciliations, and their involvement in a triangle situation which becomes gloriously muddled. The tale is told with an excellent balance of irony and sensibility, and a very satisfying ability to observe and record with freshness the elements of character. This is a first novel. A writer who can begin so entertainingly should go far.

I find no evidence that Livingstone did go any farther in her writing career, however.

Bargasoles and In Our Metropolis were #103 and #110, respectively, in Hutchinson’s First Novel Library, which ran from 1933 to 1951, publishing a total of 139 titles. John Krygier lists the full run, with a few gaps, on his Series of Series website. If anyone has more information about either novel, please let me know.

The Signpost, by E. Arnot Robertson (1943)

Ad for E. Arnot Robertson's The Signpost in The New York Herald Tribune, 9 January 1944

Macmillan splashed this ad for E. Arnot Robertson’s novel, The Signpost across the top half of page 13 on the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, consuming paper that British publishers struggling with wartime shortages would have coveted. A Book of the Month Club selection, The Signpost was expected to have good sales based on the popularity a decade earlier of Four Frightened People, and it seems to have done respectably well.
Cover of US edition of The Signpost
A month later, it was #7 on the Herald Tribune’s “What American is Reading” list, which surveyed 52 bookstores across the country, behind A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Lloyd Douglas’s Crucifixion epic The Robe. (“What America is Reading” offers a fascinating view of the American book market of the time, showing how many sales came from publisher’s stores (Scribners, Doubleday & Doran, Putnam’s) and department stores (Marshall Field in Chicago, Frederick & Nelson in Seattle, Woodward & Lothrop in Washington, D.C..)

The Signpost told of Tom Fairchild, an RAF pilot convalescing after being wounded, returns to Kildooey, a small fishing village in Donegal where he spent some happy summers as a boy. Getting from London to neutral Ireland seems impossible at first due to transportation restrictions and a closed border between Ulster and Ireland. A government clerk who conveniently turns out to be from Kildooey (it is fiction, after all) offers him a practical way past the latter problem, though:

“You go by Ulster, amn’t I telling you all this time?” said the clerk, irritable in his turn. “The frontier’s closed each night after six o’clock, mind, on the Ballinfaddy road.”

“Closed?”

“Closed. The guarda goes home then. Only a small road it is. There’s little traffic by day. Not worth keeping a man by night at the post.”

“So after six, you mean, I just go straight through?”

“Meaning that.”

Robertson dedicated the book “To the good friends I am about to lose in Eire.” The TLS reviewer wondered at this: “To lose through having written this book? But Miss Arnot Robertson would never have made friends of the kind of people who would take offence at The Signpost as another injustice to Ireland. Perhaps he missed the part where the RAF pilot sums up the Irish as “The kindest and most ruthless people, the most charming personally and the most stupid politically,” living in a land of “infinite leisure” which makes “poverty so bearable if inevitable.” Certainly one well-qualified critic, the Irish novelist Kate O’Brien, was less than impressed:

It is an Eire which I for one do not recognise, but it has the effect of toning down Miss Robertson’s customary assurance of judgement to a new speculativeness; it neutralises the well-known acidity and induces a warm, odd generosity. But, for all the author’s wit and goodwill, her beautiful village and crazy villagers are synthetic, straight out of a clever writer’s notebook. And, indeed, the two visiting strangers are synthetic also. I found the book entertaining in patches, but difficult to get through and impossible to believe in.

Despite its strong sales in the first lap, however, The Signpost failed to prove a winner in the long run and has been out of print for over 70 years now.

The Signpost, by E Arnot Robertson

Kate O’Brien

Marriage, Widowhood and After: Three Poems by Dorothy Livesay

Dorothy Livesay, around 1960
Dorothy Livesay, around 1960

Wedlock

Flesh binds us, makes us one
And yet in each alone
I hear the battle of the bone:
A thousand ancestors have won.

And we, so joined in flesh
Are prisoned yet
As soul alone must thresh
In body’s net;

And our two souls so left
Achieve no unity:
We are each one bereft and weeping inwardly.

Widow

No longer any man needs me
nor is the dark night of love
coupled

But the body is relentless, knows
its need
must satisfy itself without the seed
must shake in dreams, fly up the stairs
backwards.

In the open box in the attic
a head lies, set sideways.

This head for this body is severed.

The Unquiet Bed

The woman I am
is not what you see
I’m not just bones
and crockery

the woman I am
knew love and hate
hating the chains
that parents make

longing that love
might set men free
yet hold them fast
in loyalty

the woman I am
is not what you see
move over love
make room for me

Dorothy Livesay was attending a seminar in London in early 1959 when her husband Duncan died at their home in Vancouver, Canada. In her memoir, Journey with My Selves, she recalled how she learned of his death:

In the narrow hallway of the club was a rack for letters and a bulletin board. I barely glanced there when I noticed a thin blue envelope with my name on it. Tearing it open, I read, “Father passed away last night, February 12. Love, Peter.”

I stood in the hall, shaking. Instead of going upstairs to my room, I went outside again, stumbling along into the twilight street. The only words that would come to me were, “I’m free … I’m free …”

[After the funeral] … In one week’s time we sold the house on Grand Boulevard. I flew back, into the arms of London. There, at the end of 1959, I was heading for my fiftieth birthday. What lay ahead was a new life in Paris, with UNESCO. Then Lusaka.

I had had four hoods: childhood, girlhood, womanhood and motherhood. Now there were two more waiting: widowhood and selfhood.

“Wedlock” was written before Duncan’s death, “Widow” and “The Unquiet Bed” after.

Dorothy Livesay’s Collected Poems: the Two Seasons is available on the Open Library: Link.

No Goodness in the Worm, by Gay Taylor (1930)

Cover of first US edition of No Goodness in the Worm

I’ve been interested in reading No Goodness in the Worm ever since I read A Prison, A Paradise, the memoir in which Gay Taylor, writing under the pseudonym of Loran Hurnscot (compiled from what she saw as her two worst sins, sloth and rancour), recalled her obsession and affair with A. E. Coppard and the decades-long process of moving beyond it. Unfortunately, the book very rare and priced accordingly (the cheaper of the two copies currently available goes for $400). However, I stumbled across a copy for the relatively low price of about $100 last month and sprung for it.

I think it helps to read No Goodness in the Worm having A Prison, A Paradise in mind, because it reveals the extent to which Taylor was able to achieve a perspective on her experience through fiction that took her a much longer time to gain for herself in real life.

The story at the heart of both books starts with the marriage of Harold (Hal) Midgley Taylor and Ethelwynne (Gay) Stewart McDowall in 1920. “Both of us got a bad bargain,” Gay Taylor later wrote in A Prison, A Paradise. She hated housework, cooking, and most of the conventional “wifely duties.” He suffered from tuberculosis and a penchant for business ventures he had no ability to run. Their wedding night was a disaster. “Hell, the first night, is what a woman never forgives,” she later wrote. He went off to his mother’s house. She returned to the flat she shared with her friends Bee Blackburn and Pran Pyper.

Yet a few months later, all four decided to move to a village in Berkshire and founded, using Hal Taylor’s remaining savings, the Golden Cockerel Press with the questionable business model of publishing books of poetry and short stories “that could not expect to command great popularity or wide sales.” Combined with Hal Taylor’s ill health and the utter lack of experience on the part of all four, the press quickly headed for failure.

At the same time, the marriage was headed for failure as well. Taylor later summed up her husband’s attitude as, “Since happiness is not for me, it’s unbearable to me that anyone should have it.” Fortunately for the press but not the marriage, in stepped A. E. Coppard, a man of considerable charm and practical skills. He managed the press well enough to keep it alive until qualified hands came to the rescue. And he seduced Taylor.

For Taylor, it was a head-over-heels passion, one that consumed her body and soul and overruled any concerns about propriety. She and Coppard escaped to live in a little love nest some miles from the press. While caring for her husband as an ailing and frustrated man, she had no patience for his self-pity and half-hearted attempts to control her. She described his appeal as: “For heaven’s sake go back to being unhappy, and that will give me peace.” Unfortunately, Coppard proved a mixed blessing himself. “He goes itching after almost every woman he sees — he’s a miniature Frank Harris,” an acquaintance later told her.

In real life, Hal Taylor found escape from his misery by dying in March 1925. Taylor went on and off with Coppard for longer, until finally abandoning him after several years and several short-lived reconciliations. When she wrote No Goodness in the Worm, therefore, she had just a few years’ distance from the experience, and it’s easy for anyone who knows something of the story to find the parallels between the fiction and its source. Valentine in the novel is Gay; Humphrey, the husband, is Hal; Coppard is Francis Merryweather, although his skill is furniture making rather than writing; and Sikey and Jane are Taylor’s friends Bee and Pran. (Taylor came up with different names for all of them in A Prison, A Paradise as well.) Taylor changed a number of the practical aspects of the story: Humphrey’s only illness is emotional; the foursome and Francis/Coppard aren’t engaged in any business together, thriving or not.

Husband and wife are still miserable, though. “It’s an odd thing to find out that you’re married to your worst enemy,” Valentine tells her Sikey early in the book. The marriage “had never been a properly adult relation, a mature interchange between man and woman;” instead, she describes it as “a mutual propping association.” And when the impish and charming Francis comes into her life, “a golden haze” comes over Valentine’s “mental landscape,” and “some dimly prophetic part of her mind recognized that it would not life, nor Francis Merryweather be perceived as other human beings perceived him, until the whole drama of their relationship was nearing its close.” Humphrey’s response is only slightly less dysfunctional than Hal Taylor’s: “You’re free to have your little affairs; I’m not a slave-owner. But I won’t be let down in front of everybody and I won’t allow you to let me down.”

The outcome of this affair is, of course, predictable, foretold by the old verse apochryphally credited to William James:

Hogamus Higamus
Men are Polygamous
Higamus Hogamus
Women Monogamous

Valentine wants Francis, Francis only, Francis wholly, and Francis wants … oh, what’s this? This looks fun. “To anyone with a spark of sense, life is simply the opportunity for exquisite sensation,” he tells Valentine. Such is not the foundation of a stable or lost-lasting relationship. In the end, Valentine suffers intensely, suffers to the point of attempting suicide. Though she survives, she sees her future as one of long, slow, difficult recovery. And Francis gets married, has more affairs, sells lots of custom-made furniture, and disappears off into a golden haze.

Ironically, the most interesting relationships in the book are not between men and women but between Valentine and her friends. As the TLS reviewer put it, “The talk of the three young women together is crisp and amusing and natural, whatever the crisis they are facing.” Sikey is an independent-minded social scientist who treats going to bed with men as one step above laboratory experiments. Jane is more grounded, yet she also rejects convention, marrying a dying man to give his young daughter a step-mother and home.

Valentine’s real tragedy, it seems to me, is that she allows herself to forget how much she has going for herself compared to men. Indeed, it’s hard not to find some pretty powerful parallels to the state of women and men today:

It was a commonplace between them that since the war men had become almost unendurable; they were spoilt, bored, irresponsible; virtue had gone out of them…. [T]he twentieth century or war (they were never sure which) had given them a world of half-men to grow up among, half-men who mechanically aped emotions, or who, unable to bring contentment to one woman, would appease their own impotence or vanity by sniffing around among half a dozen or more, or who clung to breasts and skirts in the prolonged infantility of grown men unable to face the world that they had made.

It’s not surprising that some contemporary reviewers (see Frances Lamont Robbins below) took exception to this viewpoint. Despite the emergence of a whole generation of remarkable women writers and artists after the First World War, not everyone was prepared to see the sexual tables turn so completely. What is surprising is how many reviewers accepted and welcomed this perspective. Gay Taylor clearly revealed a need to reconsider the balance of power between men and women, and it’s sad that so little has changed in the 80 years since No Goodness in the Worm was written.

Other Reviews

Frances Lamont Robbins, in The Outlook, January 21, 1931

Things must be looking black for the men in England. There feminism is an anti-male movement. (Here it is only indirectly so.) If English feminism has a literature, this novel must represent its lowest point; for it is one of the rankest pieces of nonsense that this patient reviewer ever read. Such incredible, such dreadful men; indeed there is no goodness in these worms! And, by natural sequence, such incredible, dreadful women, too…. The writer of this novel has considerable feeling for rich words, and some narrative skill. But we do not think she meant her novel to be funny–unless she is a man.

Bernadine J. Scherman, in The Saturday Review of Literature, February 21, 1931

It is a great satisfaction–after reading the dozens of contrived and artificial novels that are dumped on the public every month—to come across at last a novel that reveals a soul. The author of No Goodness in the Worm may have had no such lofty purpose, but unconsciously or otherwise, she has achieved it…. Though the author never states a thesis, and writes her novel only as a personal story, still the impression remains that this is indeed the state of mind of most thinking English women of thirty or so.

After all the proportion of women to men in England before the war was about three t« one, and since then of course far greater. Women have had to become economically independent, and to this end, better educated and far more emancipated from families and tradition than before; while the flower of their own generation of men has been killed off. It is an abnormal state of affairs apparently affecting many of the younger English writers, and certainly admirably reflected in this first novel of Miss Taylor.

Guy Holt, in The Bookman, February 1931

… [I]n far too many years of haphazard reading I have not previously encountered just the point of view which Miss Taylor so ably expresses. I have read books written in bitterness against man; I have read books which were the product of defiance, or contempt, or pathological frigidity, but this springs from none of these. It is simply the work of one who, through her. characters, views man dispassionately and finds him, on the whole, dispensable. And that, I take it, is score one for the novel of 1931.

Marjorie Grant Cook, in The Times Literary Supplement, July 3, 1930

A sensitive and comely piece of work. No Goodness in the Worm is a first novel of exciting quality: one of those uncommon books whose first page is a good through which the reader enters a little world of other people’s lives and is lost for the time to his own….

When it comes to love scenes this writer thinks sometimes, unconsciously, in the phrases of Lawrence. For the rest she very definitely writes her own book, and the justice and wit of her expressions are constantly stimulating…. The talk of the three young women together is crisp and amusing and natural, whatever the crisis they are facing. A book that grows in strength as it nears its end makes a second novel by the same hand something to look forward to.

No Goodness in the Worm, by Gay Taylor
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1930
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930

Letters Home, arranged and edited by Mina Curtiss (1944)

Writing Home, a drawing by Pfc. John Fabian, USMC, from "Marines at War: Sketches and Paintings by Marines" (1943)
Writing Home, a drawing by Pfc. John Fabian, USMC, from “Marines at War: Sketches and Paintings by Marines” (1943)

Cover of Letters Home, edited by Mina CurtissI knew Mina Curtiss’s name as the collector and editor of the letters of Marcel Proust. Curtiss wrote of her experiences in tracking down Proust’s letters in her 1978 memoir, Other People’s Letters (which is, unfortunately, out of print again). But I was surprised to learn that during World War Two, she collected letters written by America G.I.s stationed all over the world and from all walks of life in the 1944 book, Letters Home.

I found the following review, by journalist and historian Gerald W. Johnson, in a small stack of brown and brittle old copies of the New York Herald Tribune weekly book review section that I bought from a dingy antique store in San Antonio back when we lived there. The review not only makes the book sound well worth rediscovering but itself captures some of things lost from that time (“It is my firm conviction that the boys were lying, but they lied like gentlemen, adding honor to the race”–a sentence no one could write today, for good and bad reasons).

The War — by the Boys Who Are Fighting It
by Gerald W. Johnson, New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, June 11, 1944, p.1.

An intelligent woman, an associate professor of English in Smith College, has selected out of some thousands about a hundred letters from forty-odd men in the fighting services, including the merchant marine, and presents them in a book as a picture of war from the enlisted man’s standpoint.

Incidentally, she presents a problem that floors the reviewer. It is a good book, yes. But what kind of a book? The answer is, every kind—and how are you to describe every kind of book in a single review? In some cases, several letters from one man are reproduced; but no man is given more than twenty-five pages. The result is that style, content, point of view, everything changes with each new section.” There are intensely religious sections and bawdy sections, sentimental sections and cynical sections, tender and tough; polished and semi-literate, comic and tragic. One vast field of literature, however, is missing altogether. There isn’t a phony section in the book. These men were writing, not for publication, but for the information of the people at home, and not many men write pretentiously to the crowd at home.

Not that the book is altogether a truthful record. Take, for example, the letters written to a certain Mrs. Roark, of Grover, N. C., by her six sons in the services. Every man of them swore up and down that he was in fine health and spirits with not a care in the world and Mom must stop worrying (the one who was in the Philippines died in a Japanese prison camp). It is my firm conviction that the boys were lying, but they lied like gentlemen, adding honor to the race.

It is evident, too, that the writers are more discreet than exact when they touch upon two subjects—the horrors of the battlefield and the recreations of the man-at-arms in his infrequent hours of ease. But who would have it otherwise? The people at home do not, and cannot, know at the same time either the comradeship or the fierce stimulation of an active campaign. Yet without these the perspective on both recreations and horrors must be all wrong.

The letters are all from the ranks. Letters from officers were excluded as reflecting too much the sophisticated point of view; the exceptions are a few airmen, a parachute trooper, an ensign or two and a lieutenant of ordnance, and each of these was chosen for a highly individual point of view.

I said there is not a phony letter in the collection, yet there is one composed entirely of the most stilted, threadbare clichés from all the Fourth of July orations ever made. Furthermore, it came from this country and was written by a woman to her husband. He was an oiler in the merchant marine and he had been on one of the early runs to Murmansk, before protection was well organized. That convoy lost nine out of eighteen ships. New he was off again, and his wife wrote him as if she were addressing a large and unintelligent audience. But before you finish that discharge of bombast you discover the truth–the woman was sick with fear, but she had been told she must write cheerful letters and she was going to be cheerful if it killed her. When you see that, it transmutes all the tinsel into gold.

How it feels to drive a tank for the first time; what one does standing watch on the bridge of a destroyer; how the “grease monkeys” (ground crew) sweat it out when their pilot comes back an hour late; how the Australian women stride; how it felt to be torpedoed off Algiers; how sorry the men in Italy are for those on Guadalcanal; what the soldiers think of strikers—all these are here and they are of the substance of war as it is.

The book is full of stunning remarks: “I have been in Jerusalem and was at the place where Christ was born. . .. I sure do wish I was in North Carolina where I was born.” “Heaven help them [the Japs] when all our forces are concentrated in the Pacific. They are going to need all His help and a hell of a lot more, too!” “I’m a Roosevelt man but sometimes I wonder why.” “Freedom? Maybe it’s more than freedom. I think it is for the fulfillment of all the dreams and sacrifices that we, the people make.”

If you are interested in a picture of the war as a whole, done with literary skill, by all means stick to the books of war correspondents, who are professional writers, much better at the trade than these men. But if your wish is to see the thing as it is, to comprehend the attitudes of the men who are fighting it, this will do more for you than the most brilliant productions of the professionals.

In Other People’s Letters, Curtiss recalled how Letters Home came to be:

The letters of Iowa soldiers [published in a daily column in the Des Moines Register and Tribune] stimulated me to make an anthology of enlisted men’s letters from all over the United States. (Officer’s letters predominated in similar anthologies.) I wrote a letter to two hundred and fifty newspapers asking them to publish a request to families of servicemen to send me their letters. Most of the city papers, as well as many small-town and village weeklies, cooperated. Within weeks I was swamped with contributions. In cartons, in outsized envelopes, in show boxes, or just in paper parcels came more hundreds of letters than even I with my obsessive curiosity could digest. But after I sampled one or two out of every batch it became clear that a collection of single letters would not reproduce or re-create the impact of my Iowa experience. I therefore chose thirty-six series of letters written from a man’s first day in the service to his latest and sometimes his last. Sixteen states and almost every branch of the armed services were represented.

Letters Home was published on D-Day and had a very good notice on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune Sunday book section. But the book failed to attract many readers, although excrepts from it continue to be published in textbooks and anthologies. Obviously my great interest in letters intended for someone is not widely shared. Even I, when the selection was finally made, felt smothered by other people’s letters and thought that never again would I want to read any that weren’t written to me.

Only three years later, Curtiss was in Paris hunting down Proust’s unpublished letters.

Letters Home, arranged and edited by Mina Curtiss
Boston: Little, Brown, 1944

As It Was in the Beginning, by G. E. Trevelyan (1934)

Cover of "As It Was in the Beginning"

The anonymous TLS reviewer described G. E. Trevelyan’s third novel, As It Was in the Beginning (1934) as “almost unreadable in its intensity.” Thumbing through the book after getting it in the mail last month, I could see that was an apt assessment, and somewhat dreaded the level of attention I would have to devote to it.

Thank God for airplanes. I have by now developed a reliable regime in which I strap myself into the seat and strap myself into a book and fairly successfully tune out the rest of the world for however long the flight takes. And so I took As It Was in the Beginning with me on a short work trip to Turkey this week. It proved a wise decision, particularly when we sat on the tarmac in Istanbul for several hours waiting for some mechanical work.

As It Was in the Beginning takes place entirely in the mind of Millicent — Lady Chesborough, widow of Lord Harold — as she lies in a nursing home bed in the last days before her death from the effects of a stroke. Childless, her only visitor is one of her late husband’s nieces. Nurses come in and go out, always adjusting her sheets, lifting her numb left arm as they do. Her thoughts dwell on Phil, the young man she took as a lover, who left her not long before.

This is a tour-de-force of stream of consciousness writing and construction. As Millicent lies in bed flowing in and out of consciousness, she revisits repeatedly certain moments from her life, rerunning these memories as one sometimes does in the same way as a bit of song gets caught in the head. The servant coming to her in the garden of the house at Chesborough, which she had turned into a rehabilitation hospital for wounded soldiers, with a small orange envelope bearing the message that Harold had been killed on the Western Front. Her sense of dread at that sight, combined with her fear that the young man she was tending to would sense her distress. Phil’s approaching her in the lounge of the hotel in Brighton where they met: if there hadn’t been that shelf under the table that forced her to turn herself sideways, facing the entrance, would they not have met?

At the same time, though, Trevelyan gradually and almost imperceptibly steps Millicent back through her life. She traces her affair with Phil from his leaving in anger over her refusal to purchase a new automobile to their road trips in his first one, their nights out in London as she scanned the faces in clubs and restaurants, wondering who took her for an old fool, to their first meeting there in Brighton. And though her longing for Phil and her self-recriminations — both for losing him and giving in to his dubious romancing — remain constants in her thoughts, we see her in the first years as a widow, in the claustrophobic world of Chesborough, where “I always felt I was something very small cowering inside a figure labelled The Squire’s Wife.” She leaves for London, where she can enjoy the freedom of anonymity:

It was like a tonic, sometimes, to stroll along the High Street in the sunshine and hardly be glanced at. And in a ‘bus one person is very much like another. I remember being grateful, even, to a ‘bus conductor, when he punched a ticket and pushed it at me, looking the other way. Just the right amount of notice. One must have a ticket: one exists. But not expected to be anything.

This view of life as older woman in London contrasts with that of the spinster in her first novel, Appius and Virginia: “Each year a little older, a little stouter or a little thinner, a little less quickly off the ‘bus … and the half compassionate, half contemptuous had of the conductor, grimy and none too gentle, as she clambers down the swaying steps on to the sliding pavement.”

But unlike Virginia Hutton, who sought ferociously to imprint her will upon another being, Millicent struggles throughout her life for a sense of identity. Much of the time, she feels herself “there, but not in the body: watching it from the outside and feeling responsible for it, without having it firmly in hand. Having to creep back in to pull the strings.” Looking at herself in a mirror as a newlywed, she thinks, “I’m much too small for this huge room…. Harold ought to have married somebody imposing.”

The one place she feels most at peace is in a London cinema, where she can be lose all sense of herself:

People aren’t people, they haven’t any faces. And all quite quiet, looking at the screen. They’ve left their anxieties outside in the street, in that big, glaring porch with the big posters. They’ve chained them up. Anxieties, waiting and hissing outside.

So many people. That’s why they come here you know. In here they needn’t be people. It’s dark in here, it’s dark in my room, I like my room. And I’m not separate. I don’t think I am, I’m part of the darkness, and the people who aren’t people. All part of the darkness.

I’m like anyone else. All alike and nothing, staring at the screen.

Some reasons why Millicent has such a fragile sense of self become clear as we go back into her youth and childhood. The only child of a country doctor, her main playmates are Dick and Hilda, children of the local Lord, who make it clear her invitations are at their bidding. Her first brush at romance ends before it even begins, with the young man barely aware of her presence. Her parents have little time to spend with her. Her tutor, Miss Cresset, has little patience for her needs: “Tell me a story.” “You’re old enough to tell them to yourself.” Only her Nanny, open and affectionate, notices the strange absence in Millicent’s life:

“It’s nice when there’s nobody here.”

“Why, there never is anybody here, is there? You’re a funny little thing. Don’t you want to have other little girls and boys to play with?”

“There’s only Dick and Hilda.”

“Well, don’t you want to have them?”

“No.”

And even earlier: “Nanny, why am I inside this?” “Inside what?” “Arms and legs and things. Why am I inside it? It’s nasty.” And on to her earliest sensations: “And want and full and nothing, and want and warm and nothing. And want and want and want and want. Alone and alone and alone.” Her only sense of security comes at the very beginning: “Back, back: sheltering darkness and safe, yielding warmth…. Strong, perpetual beat of the dark.”

I found Trevelyan’s handling of the final rush back through infancy, through birth, back to the womb surprisingly moving. She manages to convey quite effectively how enormous and intimidating the world can seem to a little thing, particularly without a strong maternal presence, without any base from which to look out at the world. As Millicent nears her birth, she also nears her death and her thoughts reach out in desperation for her lost lover, Phil. You know exactly where this story is going, yet Trevelyan makes it intense and unfamiliar.

One could see As It Was in the Beginning as something of a set piece, the kind of assignment a writer might give herself to test and hone her skills. But this is far more than that. Trevelyan builds a powerful sense of a woman whose life was a constant struggle to reassure herself of her own identity — a struggle she often lost. Considering that she did it within the narrow confines of a single room in a nursing home and in the span of perhaps a week or less, it’s a bravura performance. Having read five of Trevelyan’s novel now, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that she was the only English woman writer of her generation to pick up Virginia Woolf’s baton and run with it. And sadly, due to injuries suffered in a Blitz raid on London, she died barely a month before Woolf at the early age of 37 and was quickly and utterly forgotten. The time for her rightful recognition is long overdue.

Reviews

• Times Literary Supplement, 24 May 1934

Once again Miss Trevelyan has used her gifts of psychological insight and imagination to produce, in As It Was in the Beginning, a work of striking talent. And once again, as in Appius and Virginia and Hot House, she has written a book which is almost unreadable in its intensity, but which compels one to go on reading in spite of almost physical discomfort, by the admiration one feels for the author’s ingenuity and her uncanny insight into human beings….

Miss Trevelyan has here chosen a more everyday type of character than she did in the other two, but even so she has not yet produced anything universal: the agonies, the twists, the cravings of futile and hapless people still obsess her; she has a genius for suffering and such power in describing it that the reader feels worn out after a few chapters. Should Miss Trevelyan ever write of beauty and kindliness, using for purposes of stimulation the powers which she now employs to sear and suffocate her readers, it is hard to set limits to what she might achieve.

• Vernon Fane, “The Book World,” The Sphere, 2 June 1934

“Technically interesting” is the description of Miss G. E. Trevelyan’s As It Was in the Beginning (Seeker. 7s. 6d.). Life is laid bare by comments and reveries and the sustained delusions which precede death.” There is a dearth of verbs an abundance of full stops a fumbling at word patterns. Technical fiddlesticks Miss Trevelyan is suffering from an overdose of Gertrude Stein.

• Sheffield Independent, 21 May 1934

As her previous novels (Appius and Virginia and Hot House) showed, Miss G. E. Trevelyan cannot be classed as a conventional novelist, but the strange technique she has used in her latest book, As It Was in the Beginning, though extremely interesting, proves rather irritating. The book is a mass of comments by a woman of fifty who is dying in a nursing home. These comments, reveries and delusions cover her whole life, gradually working back to her birth.

• Aberdeen Press and Journal, 30 May 1934

To translate into unemotional print the disjointed memories of a nursing home patient re-living the past before “death’s kiss” is a technical feat of daring, for another’s experiences presented in this form can be so easily boring. The fact that Miss Trevelyan succeeds. remarkably well in sustaining interest is at once a tribute to her skill and the pathos of her tale, the tale of a woman grown too old for love, her passion for a, man younger than herself, desperate, vain resistance of the attacks of old age, and the shock of his ultimate desertion. Here is all the tragedy of ari ageing woman unwilling to give up what she never had in youth. Memories, memories, an unhappy marriage, a boy and girl fruitless friendship, childhood (particular effective word-building) birth, and birth and death unite — “light and blinding space, blank and boundless and without shadow: stark unending light.”

• The Tatler, 13 June 1934

… if you are fond of pointing out to people in distress that we all must like of the beds of our own making, then Miss G. E. Trevelyan’s new novel, As It Was in the Beginning, is not for you. You will find in her a ruthless destroyer of that optimism which, in reality, is either a desire to be left emotionally undisturbed, or a pretty shelving of all life’s ugliness and pain on God’s understanding of what is best for us after all…. Not a pleasant story, nor a happy one.

• Northern Whig and Belfast Post, 21 July 1934

The cleverness of it is indisputable, it is also effective in passages, yet one cannot agree that this method has perceptible advantages over that adhered to by most of the writers of fiction.

As It Was in the Beginning, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: Martin Secker, 1934

Angry Man’s Tale, by Peter de Polnay (1939)

Ad for Angry Man's Tale, by Peter de Polnay
Ad for Angry Man’s Tale, by Peter de Polnay in the 20 May 1939 issue of The Saturday Review

At a time when many first-time novelists bemourn publishers’ reluctance to back their works with advertisement, Alfred A. Knopf’s half-page ad for Peter de Polnay’s Angry Man’s Tale (1939) stands as righteous refutation. Look at that headline (perhaps not the best choice of font, Mr. Knopf): “Not the book of the year. Not even the book-of-the-month.” Talk about faint praise. Yet it seems as if Knopf’s motivation was that same simple urge that drives this site: “I like this book uncommonly well and want you to share my discovery.”

Angry Man’s Tale was taken from de Polnay’s experiences on the island of Mallorca, where he spent a few months after giving up his attempt to become a colonial gentleman farmer in Kenya. He fell in love with a party girl who took his money and tossed away his affection with contempt. This is a story of the jet set before the jet was invented, a group of pleasure-seekers dancing on the edge of a precipice — in this case, the Spanish Civil War. “I wonder what’s happening in the world,” one character speculates. One reviewer quoted by Knopf described de Polnay’s work as “a curious and effective blend of James M. Cain and Noel Coward,” which sounds pretty appealing to me.

Reviewing the book in The Saturday Review a week after Knopf’s ad appeared, Ben Ray Redman was a little more moderate in his estimation: “It is a competent, well-turned book rather than an impressive or an exciting one.” Redman did credit de Polnay for producing a book “written with an economy that is found more usually in French fiction than in English or American.” I admired the same quality in one of his later books, Blood and Water !975), back in April 2018, comparing it to George Simenon’s “straight” novels: short, spare, efficient, and utterly cynical.

Peter De Polnay and his dog Dodo, from the frontisface to his 1942 book, Death and Tomorrow
Peter de Polnay and his dog Dodo, from the frontisface to his 1942 book, Death and Tomorrow

The New York Times’ reviewer, Ralph Thompson, had similar mildly positive comments: it “ought to please those who like a taste of tartness now and then. It has wit, character and, for a first novel, which it is, fine polish.” He criticized de Polnay, though, for having “merely one idea, and that one … never fully developed or resolved.” The TLS gave it front billing in its “Novels of the Week” feature. R. D. Charques placed de Polnay squarely in the hard-boiled school: “He cultivates a studiously base way with emotion, though he is never done with it; he shies away from solemnity, which he seems to dread more than anything else in the world; he has no use for flowers of speech, no love of romantic epithets, no patience with long-drawn analysis of character or motive. Whether grave or gay, he is most obviously at home in a brisk and ribald flippancy of self-contemplation.”

Though he wrote dozens of novels, about a dozen works of biography and history, along with several volumes of autobiography, de Polnay gained neither lasting recognition as a serious writer nor enduring appreciation as an entertainer. In a Spectator review of de Polnay’s 1972 novel, The Grey Sheep, titled “On an under-valued triumph,” Auberon Waugh wrote:

Mr de Polnay’s novel is as enjoyable as anything which appeared in the pre-Booker rush and far better written than any of them. So far as I know, he has never been awarded a literary prize of any description in his long writing career, although his work has been acclaimed by the great Anthony Burgess and laudatory comments are quoted from The Spectator and the Illustrated London News, whose perceptive novel reviewer often strikes me as one of the few in the business who does not actually hate novels. The most sickening aspect of it all is that Mr de Polnay, whose appeal as a writer should embrace all educated and intelligent Englishmen, is tucked into a corner as if he were some bizarre minority taste while those who can only appeal to a bizarre minority taste are feted and lionised throughout the length and breadth of the land.

Anybody who reads Mr de Polnay will rejoice in the vitality of his imagination, the accuracy of his observation, the beautiful lucidity of his prose and the wisdom of his conclusion, but few, I fear, will ever be given the opportunity to learn about him.

I picked up several of de Polnay’s later novels in the bargain basement of a London bookstore last year. I will have to go dig them out.

Angry Man’s Tale, by Peter de Polnay
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939

“On the Floor” and the Mystery of Joan Jukes

Selected Modern Short Stories Volume 2

“But when I open the door I find someone has moved my chair.” Some hold that a proper short story should start midstream. Joan Jukes’ 1935 story, “On the Floor,” takes this advice to the extreme. Where are we? What was happening before he/she opened the door? Who is this narrator? The reader can only continue and hope the clues will be forthcoming.

Where are we? Within the first few sentences, we find out. As the title says, on the floor. Collapsed on the floor: “I am sitting on my right foot and it hurts. I must ease it, push it away, push hard! So! Now I am comfortable.”

How did we get here? Answered in the second paragraph: “Five minutes ago I set out from the study to fetch a letter from the dining-room….”

And the parenthetical comment that ends this sentence reveals not only who’s speaking but what is exceptional about her: “… (not in a spirit of pride or arrogance, for I never walk like that, but none the less hoping for the best. A letter is so easy to carry I can slip it in my shoulder straps or down my neck).” She is on the floor because “someone had moved the chair I steady up on three feet to the right, so it all came to nothing.”

That is pretty much all the action there is in “On the Floor”: a young woman who has severe difficulties in walking goes into the dining-room, slips when she reaches for a chair to steady herself on, falls to the floor, and lies there, helpless, until someone will come along and find her. Time now “will crawl past while I am sitting uncomfortably and impatiently on the floor.”

“On the Floor” is the earliest example of a disabled person as narrator I know of in English fiction, although I won’t claim to have any authority on this point. Her disability appears to have developed slowly but progressively. She remembers taking part in a dance performance as a child — although her mother stopped her just before going on stage: “‘You would keep the others back, dear,’ she said gently.” Until she was about twenty, though, “I was more or less like anybody else. I lived an ordinary life Nothing much happened to me. I was insignificant and commonplace, and just such another as the duller among my neighbours.”

Now, however, things are altogether different. “Everyone notices me. I am a sensation. In any assembly or any house I am the most important person, just as Dr Johnson was, and no one grudges me my pride of place.” Which also means that any mishap involving her is not a mishap but a catastrophe: “On an occasion like this I have sometimes tried to sing out for help in an unmistakably jaunty tone of voice to let everyone know at once that I am happy and carefree, I haven’t lost an eye or broken a leg, but this attempt has never been successful, because through closed doors my gay halloo seems to pierce like a shriek of agony. The long-dreaded has happened, they think, their worst fears are realized, and the helter-skelter is wilder than ever.”

“I am an invalid. I can’t walk. I have no other characteristics.” This label affixed, she loses all other aspects of identity: “That little invalid, you must have noticed her going past in her chair” “‘Oh, yes, I’ve often wondered who she was.” Even people who hated or disliked her in the past are free to ignore her now: “My enemies, base deserters, have left me in the lurch.”

“On the Floor” is such an honest, funny, and wise account of life with a disability that I have to wonder why it’s not better known, not widely anthologized. It was first published in New Stories, a short-lived magazine edited by Edward J. O’Brien, who founded the “Best Short Stories” annual anthologies of British and American stories, and O’Brien republished it in the 1935 edition (available on the Internet Archive: Link). It appeared again in 1938 in Penguin’s second volume of Selected Modern Short Stories.

That was the end of the story of this story until now. If Joan Jukes was the author’s real name, she appears never to have published again. From a cursory search of British genealogical sources, there doesn’t appear to have been a Joan Jukes who would have been within a realistic age range to be the author. And if “Joan Jukes” was a pseudonym, no one has come forward to match it with its rightful owner. Neither O’Brien nor Alan Steele, the editor of the Penguin collection, provided any biographical details.

So there the trail ends, and until someone can shed more light on it, the mystery of Joan Jukes remains unsolved. In the meantime, however, I enthusiastically invite you to enjoy this superb piece of writing. I have extracted the story from the 500+ pages of O’Brien’s anthology to make it easy:

“On the Floor” (in PDF format)

William’s Wife, by G. E. Trevelyan (1938)

Cover of first UK edition of "william's Wife"
William’s Wife is the natural history of a bag lady. Starting from the day of Jane Atkins’s wedding to grocer William Chirp, a widower in his late fifties, G. E. Trevelyan takes us step by step through her metamorphosis from an ordinary young woman in service (a good position, more of a lady’s companion) to a queer figure haunting the streets of London, bag in arm, scavenging for food and firewood.

In Jane’s case, the process is triggered by William’s tight-lipped parsimonious complacency and intolerance, but eventually becomes self-propelled. It all starts with a broken window cord: “‘The window cord’s gone, upstairs,’ she told William, watching him chip warily at the gaping mutton leg. ‘Eh? Ah?'” A week later, she raises the subject again:

“How about that window cord,” she said in a low, Sunday voice, straight forward into her collar. “Did you tell someone about it?”

“Cord? Eh?” He shut the gate behind them and they went on around the drive, still talking in low voices in case one of the neighbours should hear, or someone in the road.

“Yes,” she said. “What I told you. It’s gone in the lower sash.”

“Don’t want to open the lower sash.” He fitted his key in the door. “That don’t matter.”

Then there is the matter of her clothes. Two years after the wedding, Jane gingerly suggests that the few dresses that made up her trousseau are growing shabby:

And he wasn’t even looking round. Pointing with his pipe. “Waste not, want not.”

“I know, William, but it’s the best part of two years and….”

“Save something for a rainy day.”

He drew at his pipe for some minutes, then he looked round at her. “My poor wife….” He cleared his throat. “My first wife didn’t go spending on new gowns, not once in ten, no, fifteen years.” He put the pipe in his mouth and turned back to the fire.

Jane does have some small sum of her own, some twenty pounds saved from her wages. But this money now belongs to William, of course. Makes no difference to him: it’s all wastage.

And so Jane begins a slow, quiet campaign of guerrilla warfare, saving a few pennies from her weekly grocery allowance. It must be a small amount, for William carefully totals the bills. And then what she does accumulate must be spent with even greater care, as he would notice anything new. She resorts to having near-copies made of her old dresses.

Then William announces one day that he’s sold the shop and retiring. Now it is not just the money given for groceries that Jane has to safeguard, but her time as well. Each Tuesday, William stands at the door as she returns, questioning any deviation from her normal forty-five minutes. And once a day at four, if it’s not too wet, he goes out for a walk: “If she slipped upstairs at once she had half an hour for certain, if it didn’t come to rain, to do any little thing she wanted: to sew a bit of new frilling on a collar without him asking what she was doing, or turn out a drawer, or just stand, drumming on the window, and look out at the road….

It was the only bit of pleasure she got.

Even the outbreak of the Great War doesn’t alter William’s steadfast routine or his selfishness. Jane takes up knitting for the soldiers, which gives her the gift of an extra hour out of the house each week, but finds it hard to convince William to send a parcel to his son-in-law serving at the front:

“Socks, eh?” And then he began to chuckle. “He doesn’t want any socks. What does he want with socks? Socks? He’d smoke them!” He burst into a loud chuckle, knocking his pipe on the bar of the grate.

Smoke-them. Hu. Hu. Smoke-them.

Then one day, William catches a cold and within weeks is gone. And now we notice how much of him has infiltrated Jane’s thinking:

She saw Mrs. Peat out and shut the door after her and put up the chain. And that was the last, she hoped. Didn’t want any more coming round to help, poking their noses in, for that was all it meant. Minnie Hallett would have come there to sleep fast enough for the asking, and she wasn’t the only one either. Sooner be without: doing nothing but make work and there was enough to do as it was. Some might like it, but she didn’t. At a time like that you wanted to be quiet to yourself. Whoever would have thought.

Left with an annuity of two hundred pounds, Jane is free to buy new furniture for the house, to have someone in for repairs, to buy some new clothes. Instead, she decides the best way to be quiet to herself is to sell the house and move to something smaller and newer in a different town, closer to London. And to rent: “It made you shudder to think your money might be tied up in property like that, and no way to get at it.”

But she finds it harder to get rid of William’s old Victorian furniture. It seems such a shame: “good solid furniture that had years of wear in it yet, and twice the quality of what you could buy new: nasty rubbishy stuff, a lot of it, painted up to sell, and no wear or value in it.” And her new neighbors too forward, the new town less attractive than it seemed at first. She moves. And moves again. And again.

Each move takes her to a smaller space, but Jane just stacks up her furniture. Finally, she is living in a dank basement on a busy street, a place of too little account for anyone to notice. Which is fine with her: fewer eyes spying in and coveting her things. But even this is not enough, so she buys a large black shopping bag and begins to fill it with her best gloves and newest pair of stockings. Plus her umbrella and good scarf. And the spoons and forks. And the sack with her important papers. Can’t afford to have someone breaking in and taking them.

And she sets out each day to spot the very cheapest produce and meat. Shocked when she first comes across a stall selling odd bits of meat as cat food, she finds herself wandering in. “Not that that didn’t look good enough very often, as if anyone could have eaten it.” When a potato rolls off a greengrocer’s cart and lands at her feet, she picks up. “Waste not, want not, as my poor husband used to say.”

We experience the entirety of William’s Wife through Jane’s eyes, so we are slow to recognize her metamorphosis into a suspicious, miserly, and tight-lipped old woman until the process is irreversible. The ability of Oxford-educated Trevelyan to slip inside the mind, culture, and language of a woman of a different age and class is remarkable and utterly convincing. As with Theme with Variations, I found it as riveting as watching a car crash — or, in this case, a human crash. When I set the book down, I felt as if all the air has been sucked from my lungs. William’s Wife is a chapter of the human comedy that would have made Balzac proud.

William’s Wife, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1938

Undercurrent, by Barbara Jefferis (1953)

Cover of US edition of Undercurrent
When Miss Doxy, the spinster at center of Barbara Jefferis’ novel Undercurrent, sits down to breakfast in her boarding house dining room, she notices a strange man sitting at a table near the door. “They have so much,” she thinks. “So much money, so much power, so many people. They can change their man three times a day if it suits them.” As she travels by train to work this morning, she sees the man on the platform of a station along the way: “Clever to use a car and pick up the train two stations ahead of where she had caught it.”

She is being followed, of course. The reason is clear: her work involves the care of important documents, highly sensitive material related to a secret project underway at Duncan & Son, a consulting engineering firm. The consulting part is just a shell designed to hide the real work going on in the laboratory. Something of profound importance, more important than the atomic bomb itself.

Miss Doxy spends much of her time in reflection, remembering her happy times with her beloved Papa and her misery suffering the unjust torments of her hated mother. Papa was a talented and charming man, misunderstood by his wife. Only Miss Doxy — Blossom — understands and comforts him. He needs a lot of comforting, usually in the mornings after he goes off for one of his long nightly walks.

Through her reflections and her interactions with people at work, Jefferis gradually and deftly reveals Miss Doxy as profoundly disturbed — a functional but deeply traumatized schizophrenic. While showing us the world through her strident and conspiracy-filled eyes, Jefferis also gives us glimpses of the mundane realities of which her grasp is quickly slipping.

Undercurrent is a lean, efficient novel, a tight and satisfying entertainment — barely 150 pages, and hardly a word out of place from start to finish. This may be explained by the fact that Jefferis wrote the book — her first — in the space of three weeks to compete for a prize offered by the Sydney Morning Herald for the best unpublished novel. She shared the award but was unable to find an Australian publisher interested in the book. So she contacted publishers in the U.K. and U.S. and sold the book to J.M. Dent in London and William Sloane Associates in New York. Dent published the book with its original title, Contango Day, which is a term used on the London and Sydney stock exchanges for second day before payment of a contango debt — a debt incurred from paying a higher futures price for a commodity than it ends up selling at (its spot price) — is due. As much as the title might offer an analogy for Miss Doxy’s situation, I’d have to say Sloane made the right choice in changing.

Undercurrent, by Barbara Jefferis
New York: William Sloane Associates, 1953
As Contango Day
London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1953

Quiet Street, by Michael Ossorgin [Mikhail Osorgin] (1930)

Cover of first US edition of "Quiet Street"
I’ve been saving Mikhail Osorgin’s novel, Quiet Street, for a quiet break. There is something about a good, thick Russian book — things like Anna Karenina, Life and Fate, or Konstantin Paustovsky’s autobiography — that demand you set aside distractions and carve out hours to let it take over your life, and I could tell that Quiet Street was one of these. Full of characters, full of emotions, full of life, abuzz with bullets as well as bees.

Quiet Street is the story of the Russian Revolution as told through the flotsam that was swept up in its currents. No one in this book is in charge. Even the opportunistic ex-soldier who works his way up to a position of influence with the Bolsheviks ultimately finds himself merely a tool, valued only for his skill and efficiency in shooting the victims sent to him in the basement of the Lubyanka by those signing the letters.

We all know this story. Anyone who is good, innocent, or just plain unlucky will end up dead, broken, scarred, in prison, or exiled. Such knowledge is enough to put some readers off even reading a Russian book. Titles like Life and Fate appear to promise great, grey monoliths of suffering, appealing only to masochists. I confess to feeling some dread at picking up Quiet Street, but only because I knew it would involve getting to know and care about characters and then watch them suffer and be abused.

Like Stolnikov, the handsome young university student who rushes to enlist in the first patriotic frenzy after the outbreak of war in 1914. A good officer, considerate of his men, he steps out of a dugout and is blasted by a stray artillery shell that strikes his trench. His arms and limbs are amputated at a field station, he is evacuated to a Moscow hospital where he soon becomes universally referred to as “The Trunk.” The staff trains him to carry out a few trivial tasks with the aid of a stick held in his mouth. “The doctors said: ‘A miracle. Just look at him. There’s nature for you!'”

For Osorgin, though, nature is a force more powerful and elusive than any man-made constructs encountered in this book. The comings and goings of the swallows, the nightly journeys of the mice living under the floorboards of the house on Sivtsev Vrazhek in Moscow that provides the epicenter of Quiet Street are just as important as those of any of its human inhabitants. “It’s possible that the world of humans, with all its happenings and all its personal joys and sorrows, is overestimated, and that it all leads to very little in reality,” Stolnikov cautions a young woman who visits him.

Man’s small place in the world is a central theme in Quiet Street. As the Bolsheviks spar with the White Russians and others, Osorgin recognizes the real victor: “In the summer of 1919 Moscow was conquered by rats.” The rats harbor lice, and the lice introduces typhus, and soon characters are being comandeered into burial brigades at mass graves outside Moscow. The owner of the house in Sivtsev Vrazhek, an ornithologist, gives the swallows and other small birds he studies a greater place in his scheme of things:

“It is all the same to the swallows what people are quarreling about, who is fighting against whom and who comes out on top. One to-day, another to-morrow, and so all over again…. Now the swallows have laws of their own,a nd their laws are eternal. And these laws are of much greater importance than any of our making. We still know very little about them; so much yet remains to be discovered.”

Of all nature’s forces, none is greater than death. Osorgin’s death is not blind but subtle in its logic, capable of patience and restraint when required. As the ornithologist’s wife lays in her deathbed,

Death stood at the bedside and listened to the old lady’s moan, then withdrew to a corner. It had been keeping watch for over a month at the bedside of Tanyusha’s grandmother, shielding her from all the attractions of life and preparing her for admission into the void. When the night nurse fell asleep Death would hand the old lady her drink, cover her up with the blanket and wink at her fondly. And, not recognizing Death, the old lady would say to it in her weak little voice, “Thank you, dear one; thank you so much!”

And when the old lady went to sleep Death would yield to an impulse to play impish tricks: fling off the blanket, pinch the old lady in her side and stop up her mouth with the palm of its bony hand to impeded her breathing. And it would laugh quietly, chuckling and displaying its black teeth.

Death is everywhere in the book, in the form of old age, war, revolution, famine, disease, and the arbitrary exercise of power. Yet some of Osorgin’s characters manage to maintain a remarkable obliviousness to its presence:

It needed the deeply ingrained mentality of the civilian and the profound ignorance of the research student to enable Vassya to go on standing there quite calmly, without even noticing the bullets whizzing past. Nobody stopped him; and it did not enter his head that he was being shot at from the whole length of the street.

The one fate Osorgin spared his characters was exile. That he saved for himself. The gist of his story can be found in Lesley Chamberlain’s book, Lenin’s Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia. Cosmopolitan (he worked as a correspondent in Italy for years), progressive (he converted to Judaism when he married his second wife, Rachel, daughter of the Zionist Ahad Ha’am, more interested in art and nature than politics, Osorgin was just the sort of minor member of the intelligentsia Lenin found most irritating.

Ignored in the chaos following the October Revolution, Osorgin then found refuge in running a cooperative used bookstore with Nikolai Berdyaev and like-minded intellectuals. The bookstore provided both practical and moral support to its community, offering much-needed cash for their books and a refuge of rationality in the midst of the madness swirling outside. The ornithologist takes advantages of such a bookstore to get money for food and wood in the winter of 1920. Soon, however, Lenin found time to return to his favorite irritants. Osorgin was arrested and found himself in the same Lubyanka basement his characters refer to as “The Ship of Death.” He was exiled rather than shot, ending up in Kazan before being returned to Moscow for medical reasons. Within weeks of his return, his name appeared on a list of 160-some intellectuals that was presented for Lenin’s approval, and loaded on a steamer headed for Germany and permanent exile. He and his wife eventually settled outside Paris, publishing two novels that were translated into English, Quiet Street and My Sister’s Story (1931), before his death in 1942.

Chamberlain writes that Quiet Street is undermined by Osorgin’s nostalgia for pre-Revolutionary Russia, but I think this is a misreading. I doubt that Osorgin considered any particular regime superior to another. For him, all man’s constructions were like the house on Sivtsev Vrashek, more vulnerable to destruction by rust, worms, mold, and weather than by war or conspiracy. Osorgin was greatly influenced by the writings of the Stoics, particularly the Meditations , and it’s hard to believe that in writing Quiet Street he didn’t keep in mind Marcus Aurelius’s injunction: “Soon you will have forgotten the world, and soon the world will have forgotten you.”

Quiet Street, by Michael Ossorgin [Mikhail Osorgin]
New York: The Dial Press, 1930

Theme with Variations, by G. E. Trevelyan (1938)

Cover of first UK edition of Theme with Variations
“Samuel Smith was the best part of thirty before anyone told him he was a wage-slave.” With opening sentence of Theme with Variations, G. E. Trevelyan tells her readers they’re not in typical British women’s middlebrow territory anymore. This is not a book about tea parties or sitting rooms: this is book simmering with anger about how society entraps its people. If Helen Ashton hadn’t taken the title with her own novel a year before, Trevelyan might well have called it People in Cages, for she presents us with three specimens, each trapped in its own cage. The bars are made of economic circumstances, class prejudices, social mores, fear, and, yes, simple bad luck, but they rule out any possibility of escape and freedom as effectively as those made of steel.

Samuel Smith is a working man, working since the age of eleven, and happy to have a secure place as a mover with a London haulage company. Married to a good woman, he’s content with his lot, happy to enjoy a pint at weekend with the lads down at the Green Anchor. When he ruptures himself lifting a marble table, however, his lot becomes frighteningly precarious, all too dependent on his employer’s good will and solvency. His age and injury keep him out of the Great War, but as times get hard in the late Twenties, his situation grows more tenuous. And then he finds that his old circle of chums is becoming transformed into a group of resentful and desperate men prepared to take violent measures to express their anger with poverty and unemployment.

Frances Jones is a fairly dim eighteen year-old girl who agrees to marry an older dentist, a man named Garstin, who takes a shine for her. Garstin sets her up in a new house in a new development on the outskirts of London, so new that there isn’t even a paved road in front, and leaves her there, isolated and alone. Having got the wooing and romancing part over, his demands on her are few: have dinner ready, keep the house clean, be pretty and silent on rare social occasions. Frances, on the other hand, has few emotional or practical resources to bring to her cause, and so she sits, day after day, having little to do other than phone for groceries and read movie magazines and romance novels. “I’m going to get out and do something,” she tells herself. “Somethink oughter be done.” Instead, the years roll by, Garstin grows even less interested in her, and she begins to suffer what we would now recognize as agoraphobia.

Perhaps saddest of Trevelyan’s three trapped specimens is Evie Robinson, a bright girl held back by her family’s mutual enabling society. Evie’s younger sister, Maisie, suffers from some unnamed disability — something physical but also somewhat mental — that draws in all the family’s energies. Evie’s mother hovers at the edge of breakdown over Maisie’s daily crises. The mother’s dramas send father running to the solitude of his den. And they both look to Evie to take over the burden of caring for and amusing Maisie:

“Must give a had with your sister, you know …”

“Can’t run about like the rest of you children and all that …”

“Your mother gets done-up …”

“Up to all of us to lend a hand.”

He bent down to light a match at the dining-room fire and stood up again to draw on his pipe.

“That’s right, be a good girl. Don’t forget to shut the door behind you.”

Unlike Frances, however, Evie has the spunk to plan her escape: “Tell you what I’m going to do, soon’s I’m old enough I’m going to go away and do something. I’m going to have a job, like Lillian Smith’s sister.”

And she does, through a series of decisions beginning years ahead of reaching the age of employment, tricking her distracted parents into agreeing to her taking a secretarial track at school, working hard to reach the head of her class, gaining a spot as an office girl in a local business, cramming for the civil service exam. Her dream inspires her through the most difficult times:

Another eighteen months at home. But it wasn’t too long, after all, to revise her matric subjects, and then do the new ones after she got Muriel’s books in July. Because there was hardly any time to work at home now. Maisie was learning to walk with crutches. Round and round the room with Evie. And then she got tired and started to cry and had to be tucked up and read to. She was fifteen now, she oughtn’t to cry, it was just stupid, but what could you expect with everyone treating her like a kid. And of course her being so small and having a lisp made you feel she was younger than she was. And Mummy going on like that, as if she were a kid of ten. “Poor wee pet, Evie will play a game with Maisie. Evie will work the magic lantern so that Maisie’s only got to lie still and look. Does it give my little girlie a headache? Then Evie will read her a nice story, to make it go away. Oh, for goodness sake, Evie, you’ve always got something else to do when you’re wanted.”

But it was only eighteen months, only fifteen months, only a year. — And then I’m going to get out, out, I’m going to get out!

We can’t help but root for her to succeed. But the best bars are always the invisible ones. For all her practical preparations, Evie has failed to consider that the only way to emotionally escape from her family is to reject them completely. These are not people to made do with an occasional visit or postcard.

Theme with Variations has the narrative power of a vortex. Trevelyan draws us deeper and deeper into each character’s thoughts, showing how little things — a book thrown across a room, an item in the newspaper, one pint too many — can have the effect of cutting us off from options, from the sense of having control over our own lines, until all the escape routes seem to be cut off forever. I started reading it after dinner on Friday, stayed up till 2 A.M., and finished it by noon Saturday, and was haunted by its claustrophobic atmosphere for days after.

I have to link to WorldCat.org for Theme with Variations because there are literally no copies of this book currently for sale. I’m afraid I bought the last one, and there appear to be only six library copies worldwide. And so it may be destined to remain utterly unknown and neglected, like virtually all of G. E. Trevelyan’s work. But I won’t give up yet: look for posts on three more Trevelyan novels in the coming weeks.

Theme with Variations, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1938

Ragged Regiment, by George Marion (1981)

Cover of UK paperback edition of Ragged Regiment
Since the Fifties, there have been plenty of junk or ‘Pulp’ novels depicting the Second World War from American and, to a lesser degree, British & Australian authors. (Yes, even Australia had pulp war novelists. Owen Gibson was one writer who, during the Fifties, churned out about 25 slim novels about Aussies in WW2. Totally forgotten now, his books are so rare that even the National Library doesn’t have copies of all of them).

Written purely for entertainment value with no literary pretensions whatsoever, these novels were easily digestible, usually churned out by hacks and often adhered to a routine recipe. That meant loads of action, rendered in a blunt, easily digestible manner along with a compulsory lurid sex scene or two. For the American types, the characters usually comprised the stock GI squad encountered in many a novel or Hollywood film- the wise-cracking New Yorker, the rich kid from Boston with a chip on his shoulder, the tall Texan farm-boy, the loud-talking Italian, the brooding Native American who grew up on a reservation etc.

The majority did not survive past their first print-run. Amidst the mediocrity, an occasional better example would emerge, usually when a writer tried just that little bit harder or dared to stray from the standard rules of the genre. One which stayed in my memory when I read it when I was at high school in the early 80s was The Glory Jumpers (1961) by Delano Stagg which stood out from fellow Pulp novels by the author’s attempt to realistically depict combat rather than the blood-and-guts battle-porn that lesser writers indulged in. I recently tracked down a copy and re-read it. Despite my advanced age, I was still impressed with it. It is certainly no great work of literature but it has the flavour of realism and after doing a little research on the net, I discovered that Delano Stagg was a pseudonym of two authors who actually served in WW2. The book features a similar scenario to Spielberg’s movie “Saving Private Ryan”: an outnumbered group of Americans has to defend a Norman village from an overwhelming force of Germans. Yet, despite the blood-and-thunder of the film, I found Stagg’s novel more convincing and more believable in its portrayal of battle. In the latter, not every G..I is an expert marksman, there is no hand-to-hand fighting (in modern warfare, enemy soldiers seldom get that close) and most casualties are caused by artillery.

Inspired by my re-discovery of Stagg’s little novel, I dug out another forgotten war novel from my youth: Ragged Regiment (1981) by George Marion. I first read this when I was 17, only six years after this novel was published. My original copy was lost so when I say “dug out,” I meant hunting down another paperback copy on eBay. I wish I could explain my fascination with obscure war fiction and why it has grown in the past ten years. Perhaps I like the idea that at least some-one is reading the labours of some long-forgotten author. Or maybe its resentment that some real gems of the genre have been allowed to lie neglected in dusty obscurity while a few famous (and in my opinion, over-rated) examples like All Quiet on the Western Front have never been out of print.

George Marion Cole (1927-2008) was an engineer and lawyer who lived most of his life in Seattle. Drafted into the US army in 1945, he arrived in Europe after VE Day and he spent a period in post-war Germany as a soldier in the Allied forces of occupation. During this time, he learnt to speak fluent German and developed an enthusiasm for the art and literature of that nation. Marion was also a keen writer and he wrote five manuscripts but only one — Ragged Regiment — was published.

Let’s get one thing clear. Ragged Regiment is not a great novel. In a literary sense, the writing is competent but routine. But to be fair to the author, I doubt Marion intended it to be. There is nothing pretentious or even ambitious about this novel. The only literary reference is the title: the phrase “Ragged Regiment” appears in Shakespeare via the character Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1. Having been published in 1981, Marion’s novel appeared long after the classic Pulp era of the 40s and 50s. Indeed, the late author might have been offended by my suggestion that his book has any link to that genre at all. But in my opinion, it bears similarities through its straightforward, unpretentious style and the ease of its consumption by the reader. However, Marion’s novel retains an interest for me because of its down-to-earth naturalism. That is the point at which this novel parts company with most Pulp war novels, through its focus on the everyday mundane life of a frontline soldier.

When one thinks about most of the popular portrayals of WW2, be it HBO’s Band of Brothers or screen games like Call of Duty, the focus has been on the men at the sharpest tip of the sharp end. Any and every battle is furious, relentless, bloody and vital. Everybody fights hard and many do not survive.

What makes Ragged Regiment stand out from this crowd is that it takes the opposite approach. The characters in the novel are rear echelon US army engineers who have spent the latter half of 1944 pulling non-combat duty in France, repairing roads and building bridges behind the lines. The central character, PFC Stan Nilson, has had a soft existence, running a PX store at a rear-line base. At the beginning of the Ardennes Offensive (the so-called “Battle of the Bulge“) in the freezing cold of December 1944, the regiment’s sheltered life comes to an abrupt end when they are sent into the lines to serve as riflemen.

Had this been a standard war novel of the Pulp era, or if it was the scenario of a more recent war movie, the regiment would end up fighting some epic, costly battle, having to defend a vital position such as a bridge or crossroads, which would escalate into a bloody finale. Alas, any reader expecting such from this novel is going to be disappointed. The engineers are assigned a sector to hold but it is on the fringes of the main battle. There is no grand attack by the enemy, no massed armour, no hordes of German infantry. This is a quieter sector that appears frozen by stalemate. The Germans do not launch major assaults; instead they probe the US lines, sending out patrols or occasional raiding parties. Deaths do occur — quite frequently but in a random fashion: a mortar round or sniper shot, a case of frost-bite, an accident, a friendly-fire incident. The engineers have no idea of what is happening in other sectors and simply have to do their best to survive and to hold the line.

What I like about this novel is its unstated quality which greatly enhances its’ realism. Instead of epic battles, we get to see the mundane concerns of the frontline soldier, where the cold, damp and lack of sleep are as dangerous enemies as the Germans. The novel devotes a lot of space to the simple problems a soldier encounters everyday- how to stay warm, how to keep your feet dry, how to rig up adequate communications, how to rotate shifts in the lines so everyone gets an equal chance at sleep. The novel shows vividly how fatigue can wear down a soldier’s reserves of strength as much as actual combat. One exhausted soldier, ordered to pull a second shift in the lines before he has had any rest, draws his rifle at his hated platoon sergeant and is barely restrained in time by some of his buddies.

Close encounters with the enemy are rare. Stan Nilson only has one such meeting and he kills his opponent in a very un-heroic, un-Hollywood fashion, shooting the German in the back. Even that is a Pyrrhic victory as the German has already killed two of Nilson’s friends beforehand. After that incident:

For the next three nights Stan went about his duties in a state of mental and physical numbness. He thought about Andy and the young German whose body he had riddled with half a drum of slugs. The images in his mind were at times clear and vivid, at other moments distant and misty. But always they were there. He shunned conversation and avoided company. It irritated him to see a hint of laughter or pleasure in the other men. Somehow it reminded him of what he was not and never again could be.

The severe stress of existing in a war zone is portrayed well but the novel also highlights the vital relief a soldier can derive from even a simple pleasure, like finally getting some hot water to shave in:

Stan knelt down beside the helmet, grabbed what was left of his bar of soap and began lathering his face. His concentration on the excruciating sense of pleasure flowing into his skin from the hot water was total and absolute. If he ever saw a bathtub again, he would soak in it forever.

Despite its lack of any artistic merit, the low-key restraint of this war novel marks it out as unusual, making a refreshing alternative to the more bombastic depictions of warfare that we normally receive.

This is a guest post generously contributed by Peter Hill ([email protected]).

Ragged Regiment, by George Marion
New York: Tower Books
London: Star Books

A Family Failure, by Renate Rasp (1970)

Cover of Kuno, the son in Renate Rasp’s novel, A Family Failure, wishes he could be as lucky as Gregor Samsa. When Gregor was transformed into a monstrous cockroach, at least his family had the decency to reject him. Kuno’s family — specifically his stepfather (who prefers to be referred to as “Uncle Felix”) — wants to keep him AND turn him into a monster. It is Uncle’s plan to transform Kuno into a tree.

“Needless to say everyone can choose the way he wants to live. Man is born free,” Uncle tells Kuno. At that moment, Kuno was free to learn how to grasp things with tongs because Uncle Felix has cut his hands off. This is in preparation for his arms being shaped into branches.

This distresses Kuno’s mother, who invited Mr. Pettkola, the artificial limb manufacturer’s agent, to the house to discuss providing Kuno with artificial hands. But Kuno is too smart to let his mother off that easily. Better that she continue to watch “the sight of my tongs, the swellings of my stumps.”

Uncle Felix’s plan is meticulous, full of intermediate steps, requiring years to be carried out. “We’ll have to change your diet. No meat, no sausages, no butter. Your mother knows it. Only vegetable fats, a lot of vegetables and water, above all water, more and more water.” Uncle knows just how to manipulate the boy’s emotions: “If this littel sacrifice is too much for you say so at once, then I’ll know where I stand, and we can spare ourselves a lot of trouble before we even start.” Becoming a tree is a matter of family pride. Uncle Felix certainly isn’t undertaking all this trouble for himself. This is a joint endeavor. “You do understand,” he tells Kuno, “that there must be no disagreements between us all, not now.”

One day, Uncle rousts Kuno early. Standing him in the kitchen, he carefully wraps the boy’s legs in wire to hold them together. He wraps bandages over the eyes until no light penetrates. “Six months from now, and you’ll be able to stand the sun without any bandages. Hours of it. You won’t be able to see any more.” He fills the boy’s ears with wax. Kuno is ready to begin practicing being a tree.

As grim as the slow, calculating mutilation of Kuno is to read, one cannot help be aware that, writing in the late 1960s, as a prosperous West Germany was leaving its Nazi past behind, Renate Rasp’s story was not realism but satire of the most savage order. The older generation destroying its young by forcing them into an absurdly unnatural mold. The mother as representative of the accommodators: “She wants to exonerate uncle. He has done what he could, like a father.” If there has been a failure, it is Kuno’s, in failing to shape himself to Uncle’s ideals. These were painful themes from the country’s recent past.

The German title of A Family Failure was Ein ungeratener Sohn, which roughly translates to “An unruly son.” At no point in this book does anyone — not neighbors, not passing acquaintances, not men from the shops — question what Uncle is doing. True, his methods might be a little severe, but then it’s clear that Kuno is not always trying his hardest.

The satire of A Family Failure/Ein ungeratener Sohn may have been too much at the time for readers to take, but the book remains just as neglected in Germany as with English readers. It begs to be rediscovered, for it’s one of the most powerful and unforgettable parables of the dangers of an older generation taking too much control in shaping the destiny of a younger one.

A Family Failure, by Renate Rasp, translated from the German by Eva Figes
New York: The Orion Press, 1970