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Carrington: A Novel of the West, by Michael Straight (1960)

Cover of "Carrington" by Michael Straight

For an obscure novelist, Michael Whitney Straight (1916- 2004) had an extraordinary life and career. A member of a distinguished family, his maternal grandfather was William C. Whitney, Secretary of the US Navy in the late 1800s, his mother was Dorothy Whitney, the famous philanthropist and his father William (who died of Spanish Flu in 1918 when Michael was only two) was a noted investment banker. Michael’s brother Whitney was a Grand Prix driver and one of the few American pilots to fly in the Battle of Britain and his sister Beatrice was an Oscar-winning actress.

Michael studied at Cambridge University, England during the mid-1930s and while there, he joined the Communist Party, became an associate of the “Cambridge Five” ring of British spies, was recruited into the KGB as an agent. Straight, despite his surname, was a bisexual and while at Cambridge, he had a brief love affair with English undergraduate Anthony Blunt who spied for the Soviets for many years and who later became custodian of the Royal Family’s art collection.

In 1937, Straight returned to the US and got a job in the Department of the Interior and even served as President Roosevelt’s speech-writer. During this period, he secretly had regular meetings with a Soviet agent. In the Second World War, Straight served as a B-17 pilot and after the war, he took over as publisher of New Republic magazine. In 1963, while applying for a public service job in Washington DC, Straight confessed about his Communist past and his Cambridge connections- revelations that would indirectly lead to the exposure of Blunt (although that man wasn’t publicly unveiled as a spy until 1979). Straight was married three times and fathered eight children. Even in his choice of wives, he seemed able to make connections- his second wife Nina was the half-sister of Gore Vidal and stepsister of Jackie Onassis.

Somehow during all this, Straight found time to embark on a career as a novelist after he left his job at the New Republic in the late Fifties. This proved to be perhaps less fruitful than Straight hoped as his output was limited to only three novels, a small handful of non-fiction works and a two-volume memoir (one part of which was published posthumously). Regarding his novels, his third one, Happy and Hopeless (1979) was a romance set in the White House during the Kennedy Presidency, a book that Straight had to self-publish. The other two were, perhaps surprisingly, both historical novels, both set in the Old West during the Plains Wars between the US Army and the Native Americans, Carrington (1960) and A Very Small Remnant (1963).

Carrington is set in Wyoming in the winter of 1866 during the early years of the Plains Wars. The title character is a true-life person, Lt Colonel Henry B. Carrington who commanded Fort Phil Kearny during the war against Red Cloud of the Sioux Nation. Growing tensions and a series of clashes led to the infamous Fetterman Massacre on December 21, 1866 in which over eighty US soldiers were lured, four miles from the Fort, into an ambush by over 1,500 Sioux and the entire force, including its commander, Captain William J. Fetterman, was wiped out. Carrington was blamed for the disaster, largely due to his unpopularity with many of his men and the perceived timidity and reluctance that he displayed during his leadership at the Fort. A later court of inquiry cleared him but his reputation and his army career was in ruins.

The most striking thing about this novel is that, considering the time it was written (1960) and the colourful life of its author, its style is curiously old-fashioned. Straight remains highly respectful of the historical realities of the era in which the book is set. Many historical novels and films often reflect more about the times in which they were written or made than how much they reveal about the times in which they attempt to portray. Film Westerns like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and Little Big Man (1970) arguably tell us more about the cultural and political upheavals of the Sixties than they do about the actual West. And Michael Blake’s 1988 novel Dances With Wolves is more a reflection on late 20th century New Age’s embrace of Native American mysticism than a convincing portrayal of the Frontier Wars.

The novel portrays Carrington in a sympathetic light but not idealised nor in total favourable terms. The officer that emerges here is initially a quietly confident man but soon revealed to be strickened with in-securities and a high-strung sensitivity to criticism. It reminded me of the central character in James Salter’s 1956 novel The Hunters, now recognised as a minor classic and possibly the only novel of any literary merit to emerge from the Korean War. In Salter’s book, the leading character is a pilot who arrives at his Air-Force unit in Korea determined to make his mark. But his own inner vulnerabilities, combined with poor luck and his own in-ability to assert his place among others, prevent him from achieving the success he desires. As well as his own private demons, he has to contend with a living one, in the form of an arrogant, brash younger pilot who rapidly gains the popularity, tally of MiGs and favour with senior officers that the eludes the former.

In Straight’s novel, Colonel Carrington is an idealist, favourably disposed to the Indians. The novel illustrates his thoughts as he lies awake just before dawn:

The Indians, passing under the window. That broken-down chieftain, slumped like a sack of meal over his broken-down pony. A beggar in the land of his fathers. And we in the army are substantially to blame. What a succession of men we sent to meet with them, to make peace! Grattan, that Irish bully out of West Point, who touched off the raids by his brutality. Chivington, who butchered Black Kettle’s band, men, women, and children, in the name of the Almighty. And last year those two incompetents Connor and Cole, marching up the Powder River without a moment of study or preparation, and crawling back, defeated and half dead.

Carrington is confident he can bring about a successful and enduring peace treaty with the Sioux. Again the reader hears his inner thoughts, ‘I shall meet all the Chiefs at Laramie; meet them in a spirit of charity and godd-will; understanding in place of arrogance, resolution in place of bluster; they will respond. No more the wrathful shock of iron arms.’

Within the first handful of pages, the reader learns that not only is the Colonel a staunch idealist with a firm self-belief, he is also insufferably vain. ‘The West is no place for glory hunters. Magnanimity is needed there; and tact; skill in engineering; administrative ability; a knowledge of resources; yes, and a sense of history in representing the President before the Indian nations. All qualities that I bring to the command; there isn’t an officer in the regular Army as well qualified as I am to carry the flag into Indian country.’

The flowery workings of Carrington’s inner musings are soon brought down a peg or two once he arrives at Fort Kearny. The novel depicts the subsequent chain of events from a number of other character’s perspectives, including junior officers, NCOs, privates and officer’s wives (the latter also living at the Fort). Carrington’s confident demeanour slowly but steadily peels away as the novel progresses. His self-belief is fragile and is whittled away by the grumblings of his subordinates who prefer to hate the Indians and who long to fight them. Carrington wants to succeed, he wants to make a lasting peace with the Sioux. But he cannot cope with the unexpected, cannot adapt to unforeseen obstacles.

The succession of meetings with Chiefs of the Sioux, and later their rivals, the Cheyenne, produce no worthwhile gains. Discipline and morale at the Fort goes on the decline, while the rank-and-file’s hatred of the Indians steadily grows, threatening to explode. In one scene, an meagre Thanksgiving dinner is interrupted by the mental collapse of the Carrington family’s African-American servant Dennis:

In the kitchen, the banging grew louder and louder until it sounded as though the stove would break apart. ‘Not so loud, Dennis!’ they called, and when he kept on they peered through the kitchen door. The old man was kneeling by the stove and battering it with his head.

Carrington has the desire to control the events unfolding around him, but not the strength. The Colonel wants to control the river but is instead carried along by its currents. Like the pilot in The Hunters, Carrington ultimately has to face up to a more dynamic rival, in the form of newly arrived Captain Fetterman. The latter is younger, stronger, more determined, more flamboyant, a man who dominates whichever room he enters, an Alpha male that easily undermines Carrington’s unsteady authority. Fetterman soon gains the men’s respect and popularity while Carrington looks more isolated and out of his depth with each passing day. And Fetterman is spoiling for a fight:

Fetterman looked across the valley. He asked: ‘What lies beyond that ridge?’

‘Indians! Two thousand warriors, waiting for you!’

‘Please God,’ Fetterman said, ‘they won’t have to wait long!’

As I already mentioned, this novel’s style borrows from Westerns of the 1920s and 30s, with traits of ‘Hard-Boiled’ crime fiction thrown in. The dialogue between characters tends to be sparse and blunt in a modern-style. Yet in other parts of the novel, the windy inner-musings of some of the characters read like literature of the 19th century.

The fore-mentioned Fetterman Massacre is not depicted in the novel, the reader is instead shown its aftermath when Carrington leads a party to cautiously investigate what happened to Fetterman’s command.

An outcropping of grey boulders marked the northern end of the slope. Ten Indian ponies were sprawled around it; the snow was stained with the blood of scores of braves. There, Carrington judged, the infantry had paused- only to retreat again as the cavalry swept past. But four old soldiers who knew the folly of retreat and the two frontiersmen had settled among the boulders and fought on.

Against such fighters the Sioux had taken no chances upon any encounter in the world to come. The first of the frontiersmen lay over a rock, his eyes beside him, the second was pierced by a hundred arrows. Griffin’s tendons were sliced. Cullinane had no hands or feet. O’Gara’s chest had been ripped open and his heart taken; he stared past the Colonel with a wry smile.

Carrington was unable to stop Fetterman’s foolhardy rush into the ambush. Positioned at the edge of the battle, Carrington is frozen with in-decision. He could muse on his future remembrance in the annals of history, but Carrington could not think nor act on his feet in the harsh, fast-moving present.

The Native Americans, when they fight, fight back hard and without mercy. Yet the author, like the central character, is respectful to them. Sadly, the depiction of the Sioux and Cheyenne Chiefs at the various peace-talks is the least convincing aspect of the novel. Straight’s attempts at the Native’s dialogue reads like the standard mode of Indian Chief speech from any Western of the 40s or 50s. ‘White man speaks with forked tongue’ was about the only stock phrase missing.

Straight’s skills as a novelist were limited. In technical terms, there is nothing innovative about this novel. Indeed, for a novel written at the beginning of the Sixties, it is curiously derivative of the forms and recipes set by Westerns of prior decades. However it is an interesting portrait of a man clearly out of his depth, a self-glorifying idealist who planned for greatness but his own ego prevented his feet from being on the ground long enough to understand and adapt to the realities of what lay in front of him.

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

Carrington, by Michael Straight
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966

Stunning Portraits from Hungary, by Adrian and Marianne Stokes (1909)

An Engaged Couple (Misko and Maruska at Menguszfalva), by Marianne Stokes
An Engaged Couple (Misko and Maruska at Menguszfalva), by Marianne Stokes

My wife and I had the chance to spend a few days in Budapest recently, our first visit to Hungary. One afternoon, we visited the M?csarnok Kunsthalle museum, which includes an exhibit of works related to the discovery of Hungarian folk art and lore by artists, musicians, and writers in the early part of the 20th century. Among the items on display was the above portrait, taken from Hungary, written by the English landscape artist Adrian Stokes and featuring paintings made by Stokes and his wife Marianne during a long visit to the country in 1908.

Fortunately, the book is available on the Internet Archive (link), because copies of the original 1909 edition sell for upwards of $75 — which isn’t a horrible price for a book that features 75 gorgeous color prints of Hungarian landscapes by Stokes and portraits by his wife. With the exception of the sunset view of the Margit Bridge and Hungarian Parliament building below, Stokes’ landscapes do not leap off the page.

The Houses of Parliament and Margit Bridge, by Adrian Stokes
The Houses of Parliament and Margit Bridge, by Adrian Stokes

But it’s the portraits by Marianne Stokes that make the book so memorable. They reach back to the Flemish masters (particularly “Prayer for the Dead”) and reach forward to the modernist realism of Andrew Wyeth (“Slovak Girl in Sunday Attire”).

The Garlic Seller, by Marianne Stokes
The Garlic Seller, by Marianne Stokes
Slovak Girl in Sunday Attire, by Marianne Stokes
Slovak Girl in Sunday Attire, by Marianne Stokes
The Bridal Veil, by Marianne Stokes
The Bridal Veil, by Marianne Stokes
Prayer for the Dead, by Marianne Stokes
Prayer for the Dead, by Marianne Stokes

The Stokes found many of the rural Hungarian people they encountered very reluctant to be painted. Adrian writes that men would head off the road and into the fields if they saw him setting up his easel. When Marianne offered payment for agreeing to pose, villagers would say they didn’t need the money as their relatives in America sent cash on a regular basis. One of the exceptions (though still reluctant) was Misko, a young boy they met in Vazsecz (now Važec, Slovakia):

Misko, by Marianne Stokes
Misko, by Marianne Stokes

Among my wife’s models was a boy named Misko — a dear little fellow nine or ten years old. Babyhood seemed still to linger about his eyes and mouth, but in spirit he was a labourer and a politician, as the red feather in his hat proclaimed him. Misko was amiable when not asked to sit. He underwent the martyrdom of posing twice, but nothing would induce him to come again. He willingly consented, however, to be our guide for four or five miles over the hills to the Black Vag, where we were going for a day’s fishing, and a gallant little cavalier he was! He spread branches and leaves in wet places for my wife to walk over, and offered his help at every difficulty on her path. At lunch, when we had given him a share of our cold chicken, he remained quietly at a little distance until he had unwrapped his own food, consisting of bread and a thick piece of bacon. He then cut the best part out of the middle of the bacon and came to offer it to us. My wife found it a joy to be with him, and I was able to proceed with my fishing without feeling that she was neglected.

Hungary, painted by Adrian & Marianne Stokes, described by Adrian Stokes
London: Adam and Charles Black, 1909

New Years, 1948 (Boston: Washington and Dover Streets), from Hello, Darkness, by L. E. Sissman (1978)

Cover of

Three Stanzas from “New Years, 1948

TWO
‘“Well, happy birthday,” Sally Sayward says,
Endowing me invisibly with bays,
Each leaf to mark a year. “Now, go away,”
She tells me, twenty, but, near-man, I stay
To press my case with passive rhetoric
Where deeds are needed. Nonetheless, her quick
Rejection is retracted. By degrees,
I talk my way down to my bony knees
And kneel and squat and sit beside her, where
My drinkless hand can infiltrate her hair
And fathom her resistance. Soon her square
Mouth may traverse to meet my mouth, and then,
Our crossed stars nodding, we’ll be off again.

FOUR
I’m taking Sally Sayward out to lunch.
Inside the Union — say, this place has changed
Since I last ate here; look at all those wild
Magenta murals on the walls — all eyes
Lock onto us, the hunter and his prey
Brought back alive, if only for a day,
A date, a lunch, a showing-up of all
The bucks and stags stuffed in that musty hall.
We march abreast, my hand dressed on her arm.
My eyes right on her onionskin disdain,
Toward the serving line, where old colleens
Stand and deliver soup, slaw, salad greens,
Lamb patties, peas, beets, coffee, brick ice cream.
This round room has changed, too; it’s lavender.
Sashed with long draperies in jungle green.
Look — there’s a blood-red change booth with a brass
Wicket enclosing money and a man.
We step up to get nickels. The change man
Becomes my father. Recognition. Up
Goes the gold wicket, bang!, and out he shouts —
Face lit with flame, no doubt a trick of the
Sensational decor — “No, no, no, no!”
Dream ends. Escapement of small hours resumes.

FIVE
Doze, wake, and entertain those sawed-off dreams
That spring on you at morning, when all things
Distort and shiver; men on stilted legs
Mutate into short blobs, and blots explode
Into thin alphabets of wiry stars;
Simples turn double, petals form whole heads
Of leaves like cabbages, perspectives go
Back to beginnings like a Chirico,
And you fall down the fun-house chute of sleep,
And land, awake, in trouble, on the street
Of dreams, where every door turns you away
To face the undeclared but actual day.

Louis Edward Sissman was born in Detroit 91 years ago today. When he was 37, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and he spent the next ten years anticipating death. After the first three years, he was well enough acquainted with it to title his first collection of poems Dying: An Introduction. In the title poem from that collection, he recalls walking out of the clinic after first receiving the news:

Outside, although November by the clock.
Has a thick smell of spring,
And everything —
The low clouds lit
Fluorescent green by city lights;
The molten, hissing stream
Of white car lights, cooling
To red and vanishing;
The leaves.
Still running from last summer, chattering
Across the pocked concrete;
The wind in trees;
The ones and twos.
The twos and threes
Of college girls.
Each shining in the dark.
Each carrying
A book or books.
Each laughing to her friend
At such a night in fall;
The two-and-twos
Of boys and girls who lean
Together in an A and softly walk
Slowly from lamp to lamp,
Alternatively lit
And nighted; Autumn Street,
Astonishingly named, a rivulet
Of asphalt twisting up and back
To some spring out of sight — and everything
Recalls one fall
Twenty-one years ago, when I,
A freshman, opening
A green door just across the river.
Found the source
Of spring in that warm night.
Surprised the force
That sent me on my way
And set me down
Today. Tonight. Through my
Invisible new veil
Of finity, I see
November’s world —
Low scud, slick street, three giggling girls —
As, oddly, not as sombre
As December,
But as green
As anything:
As spring.

Cover of Scattered ReturnsIn a scene in Mad Men, Don Draper is shown in his den reading Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency. If we’d seen the same scene shot ten years later, Draper would have been reading Dying: An Introduction. Sissman was a copywriter himself, though most of his time was spent in Boston rather than New York. But he is perhaps the ultimate bard of the Mad Men generation, who wrote of dinners at Luchow’s, beautiful young socialites, and men in Dacron-and-worsted suits who found themselves up late at night wondering, “Is that all it is?”:

Men past 40
Get up nights
And look out at
City lights.
Wondering where they
Made the wrong
Turn, and why life
Is so long.

And Draper would appreciate Sissman’s sense of humor, which is summed up by the poem he included in his second collection, Scattered Returns (1969): “Upon Finding Dying: An Introduction, by L. E. Sissman, Remaindered at 1s.”

Happy New Year, everyone.

Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L. E. Sissman, edited by Peter Davison
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978

Island in Moonlight, by Kathleen Sully (1970)

Cover of With this, I reach the end of this year’s longest exploration, that into the oeuvre of the utterly forgotten novelist, Kathleen Sully. There is one more of her 17 novels I haven’t read, but the one copy of Not Tonight that was available five months ago has since been snatched up. You have to check WorldCat.org to find a library copy. Mind you, that goes for Island in Moonlight, too.

Island in Moonlight takes Sully further afield than any of her other books. In this case, to a nameless island one presumes is in Greece but which bears only slight resemblance to any actual location. The island was once visited in his youth by Alex Mundle, a successful British businessman. Recently blinded by some unspecified accident (yes, there is no shortage of backstory ellipsis), Mundle has decided to return to the island, which he remembers as some sort of idyllic oasis, and retire from life.

Pell, his chauffeur, who accompanies Mundle to the island, sees it differently:

The place did not look prosperous. It rather reminded me of a middle-west ghost town, and as wind-blown. The faces which peered at us out of the darkness were ghostlike, too — white, dark-eyed and swathed with black shawls.

Arriving in the off-season, they find the only place still serving food is a fly-blown cafe by the harbor front known as Hot Dog Joe’s (a name I’m sure never occurred to any Greek restaurateur). Blind and unable to speak the local language (also unspecified), Mundle still manages to locate a caretaker, a penniless British writer, rents a cold, bare house in the village, and settles down. He spends most of his time teaching himself to play the accordion, but his money quickly earns him some kind of status as the local big man.

His money soon attracts the same kind of attention as a fresh piece of meat on a hot day, and Mundle’s idyll turns pear-shaped. A trio of sharks by the names of Dickie, Mame, and Beth swoops in and performs an efficient scavenging job, leaving Mundle near-broke and homeless. In the end, he is the town joke, earning a few coins playing at Hot Dog Joe’s each night.

I could go into more details. Sully tosses in characters and narrative threads until the book begins to resemble a pile of pick-up sticks. It would take more effort to pull the important ones than is worth the bother. I wish I could say that this, Sully’s penultimate novel, shows her nearing the end of her writing career on an upswing, but I honestly found it something of an aimless mess.

While the story in Dear Wolf, reviewed recently, was frivolous, it at least had some aspirations to form. One reviewer compared Sully to a Sunday painter, and on this particular Sunday, she seems to have been in quite a rush, dabbing her colors onto her canvas without much consideration of proportion or design. I’m not sure what the moral is here: pride goeth before the fall? But I will say that her ability to propel a narrative forward was demonstrated once again. I wasn’t sure where the story was going, but it sure hurtled forward at a mean clip.

I am still intrigued to know more of Sully’s story. What got her started writing — and what led her to stop? What were her influences, or was she entirely self-taught? Where did her polymorphous perspectives on sexuality, the world of the spirit, and social structures come from? What did she think of her early critical success and her slow fade from notice, even as she continued to publish? If anyone can offer a clue to any of this, please contact me.

Island in Moonlight, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1970

Lou Gehrig’s Last Christmas, from Christmas with Ed Sullivan (1959)

Cover of

Dear Ed,

Lou died on June 2, 1941. He was unmercifully young — only thirty-eight.

Our last Christmas together was in 1940, and to keep Lou occupied I held open house at our home in Riverdale, as I frequently did that last year of his life. He was not bedridden at the time, and he never knew that his illness was fatal. He used to come downstairs and sit and talk gaily to our friends, assuring them that he was well on the road to recovery. Every time he said it, my heart skipped a beat.

Lou’s greatest joy that Christmas was the arrival of a group of youngsters of whom he was in charge as a New York City Parole Commissioner. He had been appointed to that position by the late Mayor La Guardia. Mr. La Guardia realized that keeping Lou busy with youngsters would occupy many empty moments he might spend brooding about his illness. To me it has always seemed a measure of Mayor La Guardia’s stature and understanding that he appointed Lou for a ten year term. I don’t know of anything that did more for Lou’s morale.

Lou Gehrig being sworn in as New York City Parole Commissioner by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, 1939
Lou Gehrig being sworn in as New York City Parole Commissioner by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, 1939

Many of the boys in Lou’s charge were once tough characters. When they first came to see him, I thought we were being invaded by the Dead End Kids. But by the time Lou finished talking to them, he had begun to jolt some of the toughness and bitterness out of them. He understood their problems because he had been raised in the same type of neighborhood as most of them.

Sitting around the Christmas tree that holiday eve, Lou talked about the meaning of Christmas. I thought it was a miracle that he was able to interest these boys with a religious theme, but then Lou could charm a bird out of a tree. As each boy left that night, he handed Lou a small present. There were tears in Lou’s eyes as he accepted their gifts, because he knew the sacrifices the boys had made to remember him.

After they had left, Lou talked proudly about the boys, and I could sense his feeHng of achievement.

Then he started to talk about baseball, as he often did when we were alone. He recalled the time the New York Yankees went to the Orient for a post-season tour. I had gone along with him. It was a triumphal tour, and in Tokyo Lou won the last game with a home run in the tenth inning.

“Remember Christmas in Singapore, Eleanor?” he asked suddenly. “The time you learned that your fearless baseball hero husband was a complete coward?”

We laughed as he recalled it, and we sat there talking about our trip. Actually, Lou was anything but a coward. But he was referring to a Christmas day in Singapore when we were standing in front of tlhe hotel. Lou’s face had suddenly become ashen, as if he had seen a ghost over my shoulder. I turned around and saw a snake charmer pick up a flute. As he played, the most awful-looking cobra came up out of a basket and did a hideous shivering dance—twisting and writhing in the air.

Lou took one horrified look and bolted into the hotel. “If I had been that fast on the base paths,” he said to me as we sat talking about it years later, “I’d have broken Ty Cobb’s record for stolen bases.”

Lou became very tired. As I watched his pain-wracked body climb the stairs, I knew I would soon lose him. I did, of course, but I have the memories.

Eleanor Gehrig

Christmas with Ed Sullivan is a collection of Christmas short stories by authors such as Ring Lardner, Christopher Morley, Pearl Buck, and Alexander Wollcott, interspersed with letters from celebrities of the time sharing Christmas memories with the columnist and variety show host. Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstein II, Gene Tunney, Ted Williams, Edith Piaf, Dinah Shore, and others recall happy times from childhood. James Cagney and James Garner tell stories of visiting soldiers and sick children. Clark Gable, Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, and Moira Shearer remember Christmases spent on the road far from home. In Perry Como’s case, it was a lonely Christmas night spent in a diner in Cleveland:

The first thing I noticed there was that the people sitting at the tables were alone. No couples. Just single, lonely people like myself. By that time, I was feeling so sorry for myself and each one of them, I didn’t feel like eating. After a few moments I felt someone tap me on my shoulder. It was the waiter standing, pad in hand, waiting patiently for my order. He didn’t look much happier than I did and I thought of his having to work right through Christmas Day. Just to make him feel better, I ordered a bowl of soup.

The soup was cold when it arrived, and I began to push it aside, but when I glanced up and saw the waiter’s sad expression, I ate all of the soup, feeling that Cleveland was farther from home by the minute.

That night in the restaurant was the lowest point in my life. I sat there staring at the empty soup bowl and made a resolution I’ve never broken. No matter how much we would ever need money again, I promised myself, I wouldn’t spend another Christmas away from my wife and children. It is the one holiday when no person should be alone. You either share Christmas with people you love, or it turns into the longest, most meaningless day of the year.

Here’s hoping you’re sharing this Christmas with people you love: it’s always better than cold soup in Cleveland.

Christmas with Ed Sullivan
New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1959

Dear Wolf, by Kathleen Sully (1967)

Cover of
Nob Caldar, the wolf in Kathleen Sully’s Dear Wolf, could be the hero of a 1950s R&B song — the Dominoes’s “Sixty Minute Man” or anything by Bo Diddley (“A young girl’s wish and an old woman’s dream”). He’s the local lovin’ man, who manages to bed at least a dozen different women in the course of the novel’s 2-3 week span.

It ain’t because of his good looks. He’s hairy, pot-bellied, hovering around forty, rarely wearing clean clothes, and never with more than a pound or two to his name. He lives out beyond the town in a caravan so filthy that even his most ardent lover wouldn’t come near it. He’s not the slightest bit interested in settling down (“Women, they’re all the same: they want to own you lock, stock and barrel”). And he has to send off postal orders each week to support the three children he’s had by different women.

Nob — yep, it’s that obvious — is the satyr as comic relief. Half the time he gets a woman in bed, he ends up scurrying out the window and scrambling to find his pants in the dark. He gets chased by dog, man, and angry mob. He’s sent running out of the village, half-naked and wearing a chastity belt the blacksmith has constructed to keep his amorous inclinations in check. Yet somehow he keeps finding a soft spot in the next woman’s heart.

Dear Wolf is by far the least substantial of Kathleen Sully’s novels, a bit of farce that takes about an hour and a half to read and sticks with you about as long after. Not one worth looking for.

Dear Wolf, by Kathleen Sully

London: Peter Davies, 1967

Two Thousand Million Man-Power, by G. E. Trevelyan

Cover of Two Thousand Million Man-Power

After reading G. E. (Gertrude Eileen, for the record) Trevelyan’s fascinating Appius and Virginia back in September, I became intrigued to learn more about her life and work.

And soon discovered there really wasn’t much — at least within the confines of the Internet — to be discovered. She was born in Bath, grew up in Reading, attended Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, was the first woman to win the Newdigate Prize for poetry, moved to London, pursued a career as a writer, was injured in the Blitz in October 1940 and died four months later.

She wrote eight novels in the space of seven years, all apparently quite different in subject and approach. Of these, only one — her second novel, Hot-House (1933), based on her Oxford experience — is in print. Not that you’d know it. The book was reissued in 2017 with the exciting title, Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II: Volume II, part of a series edited by Anna Bogen. Of the rest, less than twenty used copies are available for sale, most of them going for over $100. Her last book, Trance By Appointment (1939), is not to be found outside a dozen libraries scattered around the world. Even the book covered here, Two Thousand Million Man-Power (1937), no copies available for sale, so I must include a link to its WorldCat.org listing.

I hate to use blurb-speak, but if I had to sum up Two Thousand Million Man-Power in one line, it would be “John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. meets Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road in London between the world wars.” The book is both about how a man and woman — in this case, Katherine, a school teacher, and Robert, a chemist (as in scientist, not pharmacist) — meet, share their dreams, then watch as those dreams are slowly eroded by the relentless friction of everyday life. And it’s about the swirl of events going on in the world around them, many of which make not the slightest impact, a few of which slam into them like a car spun out of control.

The Dos Passos connection comes from Trevelyan’s frequent use of a motif resembling the “Newsreel” feature in U.S.A., the last volume of which appeared the year before Two Thousand Million Man-Power was published. Trevelyan peppers her text with snatches of news of the world, using the technique almost like the chorus in a Greek tragedy. Thus, when Katherine suggests she and Robert have a child because “We could afford it now” and “Things are improving everywhere,” the news provides the evidence:

The successful trials of R.100 were completed. A Dutch scientist was working out a scheme for the production of artificial rain. A Beam wireless service was opened between England and Japan. A pilot flew over six thousand miles of African jungle to carry anti-hydrophobia serum to a missionary. Agricultural machines in France were grading and marking eggs at the rate of a hundred and twenty a minute. Escalators were speeding up, the biggest building in the Empire was in course of construction at Olympia, Katherine and Robert were in their white-enamelled kitchen one Sunday afternoon, washing the tea-things in instantaneous hot water and hanging them to dry in an electrically heated rack.

Like Yates’ Frank and April Wheeler, Robert and Katherine see themselves as superior to most of their neighbors and co-workers — at least at first. They meet in a League of Nations debate (Katherine envisions the League’s headquarters as a glowing “Temple of Justice” on the shores of Lake Geneva). Having been dissuaded by his father from pursuing an academic career, Robert works in the lab of the Cupid Cosmetics Company Ltd. but labors away in his room at night, trying to discover “the precise mathematical formula for the nature of Time.” Katherine disdains the mundane worries of her fellow teachers (rumors the London City Council will let married teachers go) and lovingly darns Robert’s socks at night, knowing he’s engaged in an effort of profound significance.

As they become more deeply involved, though, that business of married teachers becomes more relevant. Katherine cannot bring a man to her room. Robert’s landlady keeps close track of the frequency and duration of Katherine’s visits. They spend endless hours walking up and down along the Thames. Trevelyan shows a keen awareness of how public and private mores and spaces conspired against single people:

Every twenty yards or so, where a tree overhung the pavement, or at the farthest point between two street lamps, they passed a couple pressed against the wall or pushed into a gateway. Some of the couples were speaking in low voices and some were quite quiet. As she passed them Katherine would draw away from Robert, just a little and without meaning to: just a very slightly wider strip of pavement between them. He came near again, not noticing. “They’re like us,” he said. “Nowhere to go.”

They marry eventually — secretly at first, to avoid losing their rooms and Katherine losing her job. But Robert invents a new formula for a make-up remover and the royalties allow them to rent a small house in the suburbs, complete with hired furniture, wireless, and vacuum cleaner. Of course, being out in the suburbs has its disadvantages, so soon they buy a car on installment as well.

And if you know anything about 20th century history, you know what comes next:

In the last week of September the bank rate rose to six per cent; the Stock Exchange closed for two days; England went off the gold standard. On the first of October Robert lost his job.

Robert joins the army of unemployed, and one by one the appliances, then the car, and finally the house go away and they find themselves trapped together in a dismal pair of rooms, with nothing to do but scour the job notices, write ever-more-desperate letters of application, and grow more frustrated with each other. Katherine takes a job at a sad girls school run out of a Bayswater house and allows her contempt for Robert’s failures to show more openly. Each day he brushes off his one last threadbare suit and heads into the city with a few pence in his pocket; each day he comes home defeated.

He knew he had to get a job, because of Kath. Kath couldn’t go on, he couldn’t go on letting Kath. He plodded along with his eyes on the windows, hair-cut and small tailors, Apprentice wanted, Smart Lad to learn. He knew there was a job somewhere, and he had to find it. He turned a corner and came face to face across the street with a slab of house-high hoardings, Bovo for Bonny Bairns, and a grinning crane-top in a gap between roofs. He knew suddenly with certainty that he would never get a job. He stopped short and read it over, Bovo for Bonny Bairns. It meant nothing to him and the crane meant nothing, and it meant nothing that a dingy house or two had been pulled down and hoardings were up house-high along the site. But when he had first seen the five-foot blue letters on the red ground, and the slanting crane-head and a yard or so of tiles on the next roof, he had known he would never get a job.

It takes sixteen months for Robert to find a job, by which point he hovers just short of suicide. Trevelyan’s depiction of the grim ordeal of unemployment rivals anything in the first half of Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. And Trevelyan shares Orwell’s cynical assessment of capitalism’s effects on the individual. “They might always have been like that, he a coward and she not really caring about anything, but they hadn’t known it,” Robert thinks. “That was what the machine had done to them, shown them one another. Each had seen the other as something the machine didn’t want.”

It would be interesting to take a closer look at the parallels between Trevelyan’s work and Orwell’s. The powers of capitalism — abetted by the opium of consumerism — depicted in Two Thousand Million Man-Power are every bit as relentless and dehumanizing as anything in Nineteen Eighty-Four. When their fortunes take a turn again for the better, Katherine grows harder and colder (her hair in “tight, metallic waves”), like a well-tempered piece of machinery. Robert, on the other hand, edges closer and closer to insanity:

When he thinks about it, he can see the rims of his glasses, he tries to push the glasses further on so that he can’t see the rims; he finds he can always see them; now he has once seen them he can’t stop seeing them: he is conscious of seeing everything through the small round portholes of his glasses, as if he were seeing it through the end of a tunnel; he can always see the frame edging the picture. It gets on his nerves, always seeing the rims: he blinks, and the blink becomes a habit; he frowns, and stretches his brown and frowns, trying to drag the frame further on.

In the end, his only way to survive is to surrender: “There’d been a time when he used to believe in things, and in Kath, and in himself, and now he didn’t believe in anything.”

I’m no expert in British literature, but it seems to me that Two Thousand Million Man-Power could well be seen as the closest counterpart to The Grapes of Wrath one could find among British novels of the Thirties. It carries a powerful punch in both social and psychological terms. It could easily bookend Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s social history of 1930s Britain, The Long Week-End — only the title would have to be changed to The Seemingly Endless Week. And it serves as another demonstration of the need to rescue G. E. Trevelyan’s work from the slough of neglect where it’s lain for the last eighty years.

Two Thousand Million Man-Power, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: Victor Gollancz, 1937

Heart in a Hurricane, by Charles G. Shaw (1927)

Cover of Heart in a Hurricane
Charles G. Shaw’s 1927 novel Heart in a Hurricane has a great deal in common with Fillmore Hyde’s The Ritz Carltons from the same year. They’re both grounded in comic stereotypes of the idle rich — specifically, the idle rich of Manhattan in the midst of the Roaring Twenties. Almost every character wears a top hat, white tie, and tails, or plus-fours, or an evening gown. If anyone appears in tweed, you can bet they’re not quite our type, no matter what their other qualities might be. The Ritz Carltons features illustrations by Rea Irvin, inventor of the New Yorker’s signature character, Eustace Tilley; Heart in a Hurricane features illustrations by Ralph Barton, whose work graced New Yorker covers nearly as often as Irvin’s and Peter Arno’s in the Twenties.

Rupert and DorisAnd both books are less novels than strings of episodes that don’t so much conclude as stop. In the case of Heart in a Hurricane, the episodes revolve around the unsuccessful romantic encounters of an idle rich young man named Rupert Twombley. We first spot Rupert alone in his box at the Opera, munching away at a bag of peanuts while listening to Siegfried and watching the crowd:

To Rupert’s immediate left sat the Q. Maynard-Lents, an over-ripe couple who had with them Creighton Bloat, 3rd. and his very latest bride, Juliette Goslyn — looking like nothing so much as an advertisement for listerine, one of the Archer boys, and Ulysses W. Schmonk — lord of linoleum; while just beyond, in the Paisley’s box, borrowed by the Leslie Dennings, were, in addition to the latter, little Estelle Tennis and four odd bachelors who at once recalled the Elm City Quartet. Further along was Mrs. de Haven Shattuck, commonly known as “Duckie,” having as guests the Rill twins (who had not merely fallen asleep but were snoring sonorously), as well as a cousin from Bernardsville who had been stone deaf for the last seven years…. Also present were the Beverley Something Joneses, just back from Jekyll Island, the Tackwit girls and two adolescent bond salesmen, the Willie Clayducks with H. I. H. Prince Nuga (who understood not a word of English), old Mrs. Bass, still wondering whether she would every marry off her unfortunate duaghter — Fern, Aggie Larchmont, as gorgeous as an Arabian night and twice as unreal, the Julian Gorlocks, Otto Kahn bowing in every direction, Cyril Hatch, the de Rinkleys, and Fuzzy Dilworth, who was said to possess the most beautiful toes on Long Island.

If you get a chuckle from this sort of thing, rest assured — it’s a feature of every chapter.

It’s no wonder that Shaw’s good friend F. Scott Fitzgerald offered some gentle criticism of the book:

My reason for the long delay is the unusual one. That, owing to a review I’d read, I didn’t approach “Heart in a Hurricane” with high expectations. I’m happy to say that I was absolutely wrong. It is a damn good piece of humorous writing from end to end — much better than anything of its sort I’ve read in years. The character is quite clear — clearest, if I may say so, when his tastes are least exhaustively cataloged…. I wish you’d try something with a plot, or an interrelation between two or more characters, running through the whole book. Episodes held together an “idea,” in its fragilest sense, don’t give the opportunity for workmanship or for really effective effects. I take the liberty of saying this because there is so much talent and humor and discernment in the book as a whole. [The full letter is available on Slate.]

Heart in a Hurricane was Charles G. Shaw’s first and last novel. After it, Shaw returned to his first profession, art, where he achieved success as an abstract painter, designer, and sculptor. One of his rare attempts as authorship after Heart in a Hurricane was the innovative children’s book, It Looked Like Spilt Milk (1947). His 1937 painting, Wrigley, now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, shows that Andy Warhol was not the first to see the artistic possibilities in commercial packaging. Shaw died in 1974.

Wrigleys, by Charles G. Shaw, 1937
Wrigleys, by Charles G. Shaw (1937)

The Ritz Carltons, by Fillmore Hyde (1927)

Cover of The Ritz CarltonsRemember when it was still possible to make fun of rich people? Like Thurston Howell III and his wife, Lovey, on Gilligan’s Island? Or the silly, spoiled heiresses in High Society and My Man Godfrey? Well, if you’re nostalgic for a time when the idle rich were valid objects of ridicule instead of reality TV stars, The Ritz Carltons was written for you.

For Fillmore Hyde, the more money a family has, the more it must struggle with the slightest of problems. Which limousine to take? Will the first chauffeur be available to drive us to Long Island (because really the second one wouldn’t do)? Or what to do on your summer vacation:

The problem of where to go for the summer is a grave one to people of wealth and social prominence. The majority of mankind may take it lightly, but the rich cannot; from somewhere they must find strength to solve the perplexing question; and they do — noblesse oblige.

The Ritz Carltons, of course, faced it squarely.

Labelled as a novel, The Ritz Carltons is nothing more than a series of sketches. Actually, it could have worked well as the basis of a sitcom, especially back in the early days of TV when they had fifteen-minute shows — because there isn’t more than fifteen minutes of material in any of the chapters. And its humor has just that reliable formulaic ring you could count on from sitcoms.

In this case, the formula depends on a catalyst and predictable reagent. The reagent is Mrs. Ritz Carlton, whose response to the slightest hint of stress is complete physical collapse. As in the episode in which their daughter, Ritza announces her engagement to Parker House, just graduating from Harvard. The happy parents rush to Cambridge to witness their son-in-law-to-be’s commencement.

“Why isn’t he dressed like the rest?” asked Ritz, noticing that the ornament of Parker’s gown was of a different color from that of the others.

Ritza didn’t know.

The Fates were soon to make it plain. A speech was made, and the new graduates were asked to come forward to receive their diplomas. Parker House was the first in line — and the fateful words, Summa cum Laude, came down the wind from the dais.

“Good God!” exclaimed Ritz as the truth swept over him. “The fellow’s a grind!”

On his left, Mrs. Carlton collapsed silently into the arms of the secretary.

And each episode ends with the doctor rushing in from stage left to aid the prostrate woman.

The Prostrate Mrs. Carlton
The Prostrate Mrs. Carlton

Come to think of it, The Ritz Carltons has a pretty strong misogynistic streak in it, too.

Well, you don’t look to a formulaic sitcom for subtlety — just a few cheap laughs. To help forget the fact that the rich today are not sources of comic relief but soulless blood-sucking vampires.

The Ritz Carltons, by Fillmore Hyde with illustrations by Rea Irvin
New York: Macy-Masius, 1927

All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s, by Hugh Edwards (1933)

First UK edition of A couple of months ago, I wrote about a TLS piece from 1961 (“Out of Print”) that discussed what led to one book being neglected and another discovered. What I didn’t realize at the time was the connection between this article and the subsequent reissue of a book that’s been mentioned on numerous occasions as an unjustly neglected minor classic: All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s (1933).

In his introduction to the 1963 reissue of the book, Ian Fleming wrote:

… the sequence of events leading up to the republication of this forgotten little book … would not have occurred had I not, as a matter of course, read a leading article which appeared in The Times Literary Supplement of April i4th, 1961, titled “Out of Print.”

Several times since Jonathan Cape became my own publishers I have urged them to reprint my choice among “lost 5 books” this short novel by the shadowy, unsung Hugh Edwards, and now, fortified by The Times Literary Supplement, I returned to the attack. The reply was unexpected. Yes, they would do it if I would write an introduction.

When the book first appeared in 1933, James Agate, reviewing in the Daily Express, wrote, “The word ‘masterpiece’ is over-used, and one is wise to be shy of it. But I will maintain that here is probably a little masterpiece and certainly a tour de force. So far as my reading goes, it is the best long story or short novel since Conrad.” Despite this and over enthusiastic reviews, the book took years to sell out its initial run of 1500 copies and a 1937 republication of 3000 copies took a full seven years to sell out. There was a further Forces edition issued in 1943. And even with Fleming’s introduction and name on the cover, the 1963 Jonathan Cape edition did not lead to any further publications.

All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s is a bit like one night out of The Decameron or The Canterbury Tales. It’s the story of a group of people sitting around a fire one evening listening to another telling them a story. In this case, the group is Mr Cluny Stanyhurst, a ne’er-do-well younger son, his sixteen year-old mistress Lucy, and a French abbé exiled by the Revolution. The abbé introduces the tale:

There was a great ship, my daughter — a noble ship the boast of the merchants that once, on a wild coast, in wild weather, foundered. Some of the passengers and crew escaped, and came, destitute, ashore. Some many perished in the seas. That was a desolate, strange, wicked strand, forbidden, by reason of unusual currents and whirlpools, very powerful in their action, and weather, and cruel rocks, and continuous heavy surges, and breakers rolling and thundering, to ships. And here the vessel struck, and was broken, and went down. She was called the Blanchefleur.

He then brings in Thomas Pigeon, a young sailor, the sole survivor of the shipwreck, who proceeds to tell of the shipwreck somewhere along the coast of what is now Namibia, and how hunger, disease, and attacks by native people whittle the small band of survivors down to just two — Thomas and a young girl, also named Lucy. They encounter further hardships and, in the end, Thomas buries Lucy in the African sands.

Thomas’s story is a strong straightforward narrative, the sort of thing you take in one long gulp. And on that count, you can argue a place for All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s alongside Treasure Island or The Call of the Wild.

Cover of 1963 reissue of Except.

Remember that Lucy is described as Stanyhurst’s sixteen year-old mistress. We learn that he first met Lucy at the age of fourteen, when she was the mistress of his uncle, Lord Cluny, and that he eventually steals the girl away from him. At the start of the evening, before the abbé and the sailor make their appearances, Mr Stanyhurst comes upon Lucy in her boudoir:

Taking a fondant between unblemished teeth, the girl went, crunching the frozen honey, to a couch upholstered in pale silk, on which she swung her pliant young body in a careless abandon, that, lifting the slippers upon the chair while she lounged, not only exposed slender silken legs, and buckled garters, but white glimpses of seducing bare skin beneath the sprawled skirt, Lucy with a writhing stretch of her body, arched the supple back, and deliberately pulled by this movement the little breasts out of the bodice.

To my eyes, this is just slightly more sophisticated than a letter in Penthouse. And the girl is sixteen. Perhaps to James Agate and Ian Fleming (who displayed a seriously misogynistic streak in the Bond books), this seemed delightful. To me, the father of a teenage daughter about the same age as Lucy when I first read the book, it’s creepy. No matter how elegantly the topic might be introduced into a book, looking past it and appreciating a good story on its own merits is a bit like trying to watch a movie while the fire alarm is going off in the theater.

When Marghanita Laski reviewed the 1963 reissue for the TLS, she wrote, “It has been said that women dream of the ideal husband, men of the ideal mistress; and if so this is a man’s dream.” To which I can only add, Touché! Sorry, James and Ian — I have to put All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s in the Justly Neglected pile.

All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s, by Hugh Edwards
London: Jonathan Cape, 1933

Jesus Be a Fence Around Me, by the Soul Stirrers (1961)

Cover of Jesus Be a Fence Around Me (1961)

I want to go off piste for a moment to talk about my second love. About the same time I became interested in discovering neglected books, I also started to read and listen to ever-expanding circles of music. I think it was Peter Guralnick’s Feel Like Going Home that hooked me, but it could just as well have been Tony Heilbut’s The Gospel Sound. Pretty soon I was spending almost as many hours in used record stores as in used book stores — maybe more, thanks to a classmate who tipped me off to the hack of taping albums and reselling them.

One of the earliest revelations to come from these explorations was Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers. Guralnick, Heilbut, Robert Christgau, Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Charlie Gillett, and others of the first generation of great pop music writers all performed a great service to their readers by opening up our ears and knocking down so many self-imposed barriers. Guralnick got me past my abhorrence of “Behind Closed Doors” and forced me to take a serious listen to Charlie Rich and recognize the unique fusion of country, gospel, and cool jazz represented in his work, which never really sat comfortably inside the walls of any particular genre. And Heilbut got me to listen to gospel without the visceral desire to escape I still carried from having been forced to sit through a Billy Graham revival.

By now, Sam Cooke’s stature as one of the greatest voices in American music is well established, but in the late 1970s, he was just some dead singer who had a tune or two in regular rotation on oldies stations. So when I first bought the Specialty Records collection of the Soul Stirrers’ greatest hits, I was stunned to hear how Cooke’s voice float in, over, and around the melody in songs such as “Touch the Hem of His Garment” and “Mean Old World.” To then compare these tracks to Cooke’s RCA greatest hits album was a shock: where did the soul go? I had to take Charlie Gillett’s word and really go scouring to find an old 45 copy of “A Change is Gonna Come” to accept that Cooke hadn’t completely sold out when he went pop. It’s hard now to believe that such a seminal recording wasn’t something you could find wherever you went: RCA didn’t even consider it worth putting on their own Cooke greatest hits album.

Fast forward to the early 1980s, when I had bought and listened to most of what Guralnick and others had written about was getting into less well-known artists and the less well-known work of well-known artists — things like Roy Orbison’s MGM albums or Little Junior Parker’s Mercury albums. One of my finds from this time was Jesus Be a Fence Around Me, the one album the Soul Stirrers released on Sam Cooke’s SAR records label, but without Cooke as lead. I gave it one listen, shrugged it off as a half-filled glass, and moved on.

I rarely buy music these days, having collected too many lifetimes’ worth already, but I recently sprung for Joy In My Soul: The Complete SAR Recordings, a compilation of the Soul Stirrer’s SAR album and singles released a few years ago by ABKCO. Coming back to the tracks that appeared on Jesus Be a Fence with a fresh set of ears, I found myself appreciating the music on its own merits. While it’s true that no one could ever replace Sam Cooke, there was a dynamic in the group with Johnnie Taylor as the new lead tenor. It’s more of a group of equals, which lets you appreciate the ensemble work, particularly the deft accompaniment of guitarists LeRoy Crume and Clifton “Clif” White. White has cited Count Basie’s legendary guitarist Freddie Green as an influence, and his playing provides the same subtle, solid, swinging foundation to this music.

At the same time, though, Johnnie Taylor’s singing on several of the tracks is as magical as Cooke’s on the Specialty classics, if in his own way. What I noticed, particularly on “Stand By Me Father,” was how Taylor played with pacing almost as a contrast to Cooke’s use of melisma. This is really a stand-out tune, the type of performance and recording that rises above its category and time and deserves to be heard as simply a great piece of music.

In his biography of Cooke, Dream Boogie, Peter Guralnick writes that Cooke and his partner and fellow producer J. W. Alexander seriously considered turning it into a pop single:

It was a lover’s cry for help, an almost heartbroken admission of vulnerability, but, of course, it was not a lover, it was the Lord who was there to provide inspiration and support. None of the other three songs carried the weight, ambiguity, or emotional complexity of “Stand By Me Father”: two further collaborations between Sam and J.W. (“Wade in the Water” and “He’s Been a Shelter”) were vehicles for Paul Foster; the last (“I’m Thankful”) was a kind of sentimental recitation for Johnnie of all the things for which to be grateful, written by new Stirrers baritone Richard Gibbs. But, Sam and Alex were agreed, “Stand By Me Father,” if done right, had the potential to break both pop and gospel.

Guralnick writes that these aspirations were undermined by Taylor’s calls out to Jesus in the recording, but I find it hard to believe that pop fans could have overlooked the Biblical references to Samson, Philistines, Daniel in the lion’s den, etc.. It’s still significant, however, that “Stand By Me Father” was the very first single released under the SAR label.

“Stand By Me Father,” SAR Records SAR-101

The whole ABKCO set is well worth a listen, with plenty of tracks that show black gospel in a transition, moving from the very successful vocal group style that brought the Soul Stirrers, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, and others to the top of their charts and even occasionally broke into the R&B charts and presaging the sound of soul music. The lead track puts a fine strolling rhythm on the standard, “I Am a Pilgrim,” simply by introducing a contraction (“I’m a Pilgrim”). “I Love the Lord” gives Paul Foster a chance to show of his strong pipes over a backing arrangement that could have come straight out of Cooke’s pop catalogue. And though I refuse to take the Staple Singers’ version of “Wade in the Water” from its permanent place in my personal pop Pantheon, I have to admit that the Soul Stirrers’ version is a contender.

Joy In My Soul: The Complete SAR Recordings includes an excellent set of liner notes by R&B expert Bill Dahl.

The Last Blue Sea, by David Forrest (1959)

Cover of first edition of David Forrest was the pen-name of Australian writer, academic and historian David Denholm (1924-1997). Among his numerous works of non-fiction, including an acclaimed history, The Colonial Australians about the early white settlement of the country, were a few novels. The Last Blue Sea, published in 1959, was his first. The book drew considerably praise and attention when released in Australia and the US. However, the novel went out of print by the early 1970s and was then largely forgotten. Penguin Books Australia published a reprint in
1985 but the book has remained off the shelves since.

Forrest, a veteran himself of WW2, fought with the 59th Battalion of the Australian Army in New Guinea in 1943. That unit, although it had fought as a regular formation in the First World War, had been down-graded to a part-time reservist (militia) unit during the inter-war years. When the Second World War began, the 59th was re-assembled as a militia force. During the war, such militia units, comprised of conscripts and a smaller number of part-time reservists, formed a large part of the Australian army after 1942.

During the war, there was considerable animosity between the militia units and the men of the AIF (Australian Imperial Force), the latter comprising the volunteers who enlisted in the early part of the war. With some justification, the AIF units regarded themselves as better-trained, more professional and more motivated than the Militia men, whom the former nick-named “Chockos” i.e., chocolate soldiers who always melted under fire. There was no doubt that some militia formations deserved their poor reputations, especially those that remained garrisoned in Australia and were rife with in-discipline, desertions and poor morale. Yet some militia units performed remarkably well in the New Guinea Campaign, most famously at Kokoda in 1942. One can say “remarkably” considering the often poor training, lack of equipment and indifferent leadership many militia units were burdened with (some men arrived in New Guinea literally never having fired a rifle before).

With this background in mind, Forrest’s novel depicts a Militia unit—the 83rd battalion—in the campaign in eastern New Guinea in 1943 as US and Australian forces advance northwards, slowly pushing back the Japanese. The story is told from the viewpoints of a number of characters, including the battalion’s senior officers. But the primary focus is on one platoon and, in particular, on one of its’ sections comprising a Corporal and eight privates.

If the novel has any main characters, they would be two privates, 19-year-old Ron Fisher, a Bren-gunner and 26-year-old Robert “the Admiral” Nelson, a former schoolteacher and now an Owen (Australian-made sub-machine-gun) gunner. Nelson, the oldest of the section, has the fatherly role of the group. Yet even he, with his worldly wisdom, appears in awe of Fisher, an enigmatic figure, mature far beyond his years and whose background is only hinted at but indicates that he survived a tough childhood and is now a man that understands life more than many men twice his age.

The platoon engages the Japanese in the steaming, thickly forested steep slopes of New Guinea. The enemy, under-supplied and starving, fight desperately and with suicidal courage. In this struggle, there is no quarter, the enemy is never examined close-up, he remains a distant, hated figure. The militia men have to endure the taunts and insults from their AIF cousins. As the platoon advances through a ruined town, watching them are some AIF commandoes who snort with contempt “any battle they start, we have to finish.” The army is on a race against time, not just against the enemy but against the jungle and its climate. The campaign must be won before too many men succumb to malaria and before their rotting uniforms literally fall from their bodies.

The potential weaknesses of the militia is personified in one soldier of the section, private “Nervous” Lincoln who deserts early in the campaign but is caught and returned to his unit. He nearly makes it through to the very end of the advance before succumbing to his fear. To modern eyes, this might redeem him but as far as his comrades are concerned, “they would remember all their lives that Lincoln was not with them.” A major theme of the novel is the meaning to human existence that can be discovered by the endurance of hardship and danger. The Pacific Ocean (the “last blue sea” of the title) becomes a symbol as it slowly, tantalisingly becomes nearer as the exhausted soldiers advance through the jungle against the surviving enemy. A symbol of promise, of peace, of a just reward for hardship, sacrifice and duty. As the novel progresses, it becomes apparent that faint-hearted types like Lincoln were the exception, not the rule. “Their uniforms were rotting and falling apart, but their weapons were spotlessly clean.”

The novel explores the inner musings of the characters. In this, it anticipates such a device employed in the 1998 war movie The Thin Red Line although Forrest’s novel is not as dreamily lyrical as that film. Like all war novels published prior to the 1970s, there is a curious lack of coarse language, a reflection of the need to satisfy censors of the day. One critic did suggest that the novel’s depiction of Australian soldiers lacked the cheeky humour that they were known for, saying the Aussies in this novel are “way too serious and philosophical” in their manner. That might be unfair, given that these half-trained soldiers had been sent to one of the harshest terrains of the war against one of the most fanatical enemies, so a sombre mood might be understandable. In one later scene, Nelson, now a walking wounded case, is sent back to the rear accompanied by a younger injured soldier. The two crippled men have to climb a forested mountain, through clinging mud and steaming rain, their wounds crawling with infection. Seeing that the younger man’s will and strength is failing, Nelson saves him by goading him, “Didn’t you have to fight for anything, Jonesy? Was life just dished out to you on a silver plate?”

In another scene during the long trek back, Nelson says to Jones, “You can make this mountain mean something. I climbed a mountain once. When I was your age. And then I wasted the next seven years. You see, I should have gone on and climbed the next mountain. Only when I was over the first one, I sat down. I had to come to New Guinea to wake up to myself ….”

The Last Blue Sea remains curiously little-known in Australia, despite the lavish attention bestowed on this nation’s military history. It is one Australian novel that deserves a fresh audience.

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

The Last Blue Sea, by David Forrest
Melbourne: Heinemann, 1959

A Letter from My Father, edited by Page Smith (1976)

Cover of A Letter from My Father
“It was my father’s strange conceit to write me a letter, the writing of which extended over a period of more than thirty years, and which, ultimately, reached ten thousand pages in length, a total of over two and a half million words,” Page Smith writes in his introduction to this book, which should be considered as artifact more than work of literature. The letter’s length was only one of its unique features: “Much of it was devoted to an account of his sexual adventures, related in very explicit detail.”

Smith, a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, received the letter along with a handful of his father’s belongings, in several boxes and trunks delivered to his house in Santa Cruz, California after his father’s death in 1968. Although Smith’s father had mentioned the work to his son, he’d never hinted at its volume or its depth of erotic material. So when Smith first began reading through the stacks of papers, he was quickly put off.

Few children want to know anything about their parents’ sexual lives and the contrast between Smith and his father was particularly stark. Smith married the one and only woman he’d ever fallen in love with and stayed faithful to her until the day he died (she died two days later). Smith’s father had been married three times and, if the letter is an accurate account, had slept with hundreds, perhaps thousands of women. Smith acknowledged his own attitudes towards sex as conventional. His father had been fascinated by all variations of sex and experienced many of them repeatedly.

And so Smith’s first inclination was to leave the boxes in his barn and put the thing out of his mind. As a historian, he wasn’t comfortable with the idea of burning the lot. “There was some prospective historical-sociological-psychological significance to it,” he thought. Eventually, an editor at Little, Brown encouraged him to try shaping the material into a publishable format. An unabridged version would have run to 15-20 costly volumes and held appeal for only a handful of research libraries. In the end, the version published by William Morrow in 1976 represented about seven percent of the total.

“My father failed by virtually every standard that the average American regards as important,” Smith writes in his introduction. “He was an absent husband, a nothing father, an inadequate provider, a repeated business failure. In one area only was he an unqualified success — in bed, in sexual exploits.” If W. Ward Smith had any special talent, it seems to have been his appearance. He was a strikingly handsome man. “Women followed him with their eyes. Some looked discreetly, guardedly. Others stared openly.” Once, when Smith was dining with his father and their wives in a San Francisco restaurant, an attractive woman came up to their table, threw her arms around Ward Smith, and kissed him, whispering, “You’re beautiful” in his ear. She was a complete stranger.

He was also attractive to men, in the sense that he seemed to exude confidence, to be the type of man other men wanted to be around and imitate. It made him highly effective as a fund-raiser. Early in his business career, he got involved in various drives to raise funds for charitable causes in Philadelphia, and this brought him into contact with some of the wealthiest men in America, including John D. Rockefeller, Jr.. His reputation followed him to New York, where he became active in the Republican Party and organized fund-raisers in support of Allied war causes. In one drive, he placed a coffin with an effigy of the Kaiser in a rented hall and people paid a dollar each to drive a nail into it.

Coming from a middle-class family in upstate New York, Ward Smith got a leg up in society by marrying Ellen Page, daughter of a wealthy Baltimore businessman. The two were completely unsuitable. She came into the marriage a virgin, a classic example of the sheltered Southern belle. Ward, on the other hand, followed wherever his erection led him. He referred to Ellen as a “Vestal Virgin” and himself as “Prancing Pan.” They had two sons, quickly settled into separate routines, she in suburban New Jersey and he in a Manhattan apartment, free to carry on his affairs unencumbered. She divorced him after ten years.

Despite his appearances, Ward Smith was destined for failure as a businessman. His charm, intelligence, and capacity for hard work were undermined by his unquenchable appetite for sex. He would sleep with his colleagues’ wives and girlfriends, he would bring women into his office after hours for sex, he would step away from party and fund-raising dinners to have a quickie in any convenient corner. After working on Nathan Miller’s successful 1920 campaign for Governor of New York, he was fired when Miller began to distrust Smith’s handling of funds.

It was only the first in a string of rise-and-fall cycles for Ward Smith. According to Page Smith, detailed accounts of his father’s successful and unsuccessful business ventures come second only to descriptions of his couplings. One month he might be hosting dinner for dozens of friends in an expensive Manhattan restaurant, the next playing a trick on a telephone operator to get his nickel back after making a call. He ran an oil company, dealt in Florida real estate, manufactured twine, tried his hand at dairy farming, even made a killing one time buying and selling truckloads of beach sand. In the end, he became almost wholly reliant on the income made by his adoring third wife, a successful fashion designer.

And he had sex whenever and wherever he could. I confess that I skimmed much of this material as it is numbingly relentless at points, but the number and variety of locations involved alone are phenomenal: hotels, subways, parks, restaurants, nightclubs, trains, buses, cars, offices, staircases, closets, phone booths, women’s and men’s rooms, bordellos, ferry boats — there might even have been a church pew or two. The paperback edition of A Letter From My Father advertises the book as “A Classic of Erotic Literature.” In reality, it’s probably more effective than saltpeter in killing any erotic spirit. Reading the book reminded me of the time when I was eight and ate an entire bag of Red Whips: fifty years later, even the smell of Red Whips makes me nauseous.

On top of this, the reader has to confront the fact that Ward Smith was a pretty nasty piece of work when it came to his attitudes towards Jews, blacks, and Fascists. He always made it a point to comment if a woman he slept with was a Jewess, believing he had the power to release a craven eroticism stifled by their husbands. He despised FDR, referring to him as “Franklinstein,” and was an enthusiastic supporter of the isolationist America First movement. Writing in 1943, with a son serving in the U.S. Army in Europe, he describes “Herr Hitler” as “a true German patriot seeking only what he considers best for his people” and Mussolini “likewise a true Italian patriot.” After the war, he applauds the addition of air conditioning to the New York-Baltimore train, but complains that a quarter of the passengers are blacks.

Ward Smith’s account of his life ends in 1947. Or, as his son puts it, “The letter did not end; it stopped.” It’s hard to imagine any reader regretting this. Page Smith’s judgment on his father’s life is that it “seemed to me singularly futile and depressing,” and one can only agree. If there is any value to A Letter From My Father, it is only as a glimpse at the underbelly of American history. “Sex, power, money, and politics — all that is certainly thoroughly American and thoroughly human if not especially admirable,” Smith acknowledges. And for Page Smith himself, editing the letter allowed him to achieve some sense of reconciliation with his father. Which certainly gives the work value at a personal level. But outside the intimate circle of father and son, it can only be considered a curiosity.

A Letter From My Father: The Strange, Intimate Correspondence of W. Ward Smith to His Son, edited by Page Smith
New York: Morrow, 1976

A Walk in the Sun, by Harry Brown (1944)

A Walk in the Sun was a slim war novel first published in 1944 which generated considerable hype and attention upon its initial release, followed closely by a successful film version. Yet, despite the praise of many reviewers and the conviction that this was a major work of war fiction, the book was soon forgotten. Perhaps it was obscured by the euphoria surrounding the end of the Second World War or more likely, it was elbowed aside by the spate of more self-important ‘big’ war novels that emerged in the United States in the post-war era.

Harry Brown (1917-1986) was an American writer & poet who achieved a measure of success in the post-war era. Born in Maine and educated at Harvard, Brown had works of poetry published in 1941 after winning several poetry awards, including the Shelley Prize in 1939. Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbour, Brown enlisted in the military in July 1941, serving in the US Army Engineers Corps. After the United States joined the war, the army put Brown’s writing skills to use by assigning him to the staff of Yank Magazine in 1942, a job he held until the end of hostilities.

After the war, Brown turned to writing as a full-time profession. By the early 1960s, he had produced four novels, a play, several collections of verse and he had written several Hollywood screenplays and had collaborated on a number of others. His play A Sound of Hunting (1946) was later filmed in 1952 as Eight Iron Men while his 1960 novel The Stars in their Courses inspired the 1966 John Wayne Western El Dorado. Screenplays that Brown worked on included The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and Ocean’s 11 (1960) and he was co-recipient of an Oscar for best screenplay for A Place in the Sun (1951).

A Walk in the Sun was Brown’s first novel, a work he wrote during his spare time while working for Yank. Released in 1944, the novel was an instant success, receiving much praise and it was serialised in Liberty Magazine that same year, expanding its audience. A film version was released the following year, directed by Lewis Milestone (of All Quiet on the Western Front fame). Critics received the novel warmly upon its initial release, the New York Times calling it the “best novel of the war.” Yet the novel quickly slid into obscurity during the next few years, as did, albeit to a lesser extent, the accompanying film version.

In just a few short years, the United States had advanced from an isolationist country ravaged by the Great Depression into an industrial and military super-power. Among the intelligentsia of the US, the final vestiges of the cultural cringe (inferiority complex) towards Europe were being eradicated as American artists and writers now felt able and emboldened to take their place on the world stage. For the American literacy scene, an event as momentous as the Second World War demanded a great and important novel, a new War & Peace for the 20th century. When Brown’s novel appeared in 1944, for a brief moment critics thought that the great American war novel had already arrived. Yet the post-war years saw a steady succession of WW2 novels, all generating attention and impressive sales, all of them big and long (some might say bloated and over-long). The war-novel “boom,” that lasted a decade and a half after 1945, began with Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions which both appeared in 1948, followed by Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny and James Jones’ From Here to Eternity (both 1951). Bringing up the rear came other (as popular albeit less-regarded) novels such as Leon Uris’ Battle Cry (1953), Anton Myrer’s The Big War (1957) and David MacCuish’s now-forgotten Do Not Go Gentle (1960). Brown’s book was simply swamped by this crowd of “big” war novels.

Looking back after nearly three-quarters of a century, it appears that while Brown’s little novel was perhaps over-praised upon its release, it is also true that it had been unjustly neglected in the decades since. The novel begins at the sharp end, in the early dawn, a landing barge carrying a platoon of GIs is approaching the coast of Italy. The novel is intentionally vague on the details- there is no mention of a date, or the exact location, there is no backdrop to the story, nor any explanation of the wider campaign of which this little group is a part of. As the novel begins, the platoon CO Lieutenant Rand has just been wounded in the head by shrapnel from a nearby shell, a freak casualty from one of the few shots the enemy has fired. The senior Sergeant, Halverson, is now in charge. Shortly after landing on the beach, Halverson leaves his men to go find the Company Captain but never returns, a victim of an enemy machine-gun nest. Command now falls to Sergeant Porter, a job he does not want.

The rest of the novel follows the shrinking platoon as it advances inland. Most of the men are veterans, having seen action in North Africa and Sicily. Some are already war-weary and one man will be claimed by combat fatigue before the morning is out. The novel is a simple one, the time span it covers is only half a day from dawn to early afternoon. No locations are mentioned, as far as the reader knows, it is just somewhere on the Italian coast. No context is supplied, the dwindling platoon seems to be on their own, marching inland towards an enemy-held farmhouse. The ending is ambiguous, there is no neat conclusion. It is like the author has simply taken a neat slice from the progress of one day in the life of an infantry unit in a combat zone. Only the reader has the benefit of hindsight, knowing that this is merely the first morning of what will be a very long and bloody campaign of which few of the platoon, if such a rate of attrition continues, will see the end of.

The style is straightforward and unpretentious. After the lengthy and self-important novels mentioned above, the simplicity of this little work seems refreshing. The characters in Brown’s novel only concern themselves with the present. There is no sentimentalising about memories of home, no musing on the deeper meaning of the conflict, no debates on the wider implications of what they do. As British regulars used to say in the Great War, these men are “‘ere coz they’re ‘ere.” There is certainly the influence of Hemingway but I would argue that Brown’s novel has more in common with the “Hard-Boiled” crime novels of the Thirties with its direct simplicity and its bluntness that nonetheless avoids explicit detail. A contemporary review in the Nation argued that Brown’s novel owed more to the short stories of James Thurber rather than Hemingway, as the novel does not have the righteous anger of the latter. That argument is valid, Brown’s characters may gripe and grumble but they do not rage against their fate. Like the characters in Thurber’s works, the members of the platoon are ordinary, decent men caught up in un-usual (or in this case, extreme) circumstances. Despite being a tiny fragment of a vast machine, they retain their identity as individuals. Despite the untidy confusion of war and the unjust randomness of who dies and who survives, these men remain compelled to keep going.

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

A Walk in the Sun, by Harry Brown
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944

Inez Holden: A Memoir, by Anthony Powell

Inez Holden, from a sketch by Augustus John
Inez Holden, from a sketch by Augustus John

From London Magazine, Oct/Nov 1974, Vol. 14 No. 4, a remembrance of Inez Holden, author of There’s No Story There, reviewed here in August:

Inez Holden died on 30 May this year. She had been unwell for some little time, but her death was unexpectedly sudden. I never had what might be called a day-to-day friendship with her, but, on and off, we knew each other for a long time. In spite of that, if asked conversationally what she was like, I could not attempt to do so by saying: “She was a little like so-and-so.” Inez was not really at all like any other woman I have ever met. One side of her always contradicted the other. In a strange way it was herself, rather than her books, that marked her out. Her novels, like her talk, full of wit and original ideas, never quite came off. They lacked construction. She was author of Sweet Charlatan, Born Old: Died Young, To the Boating, The Adults, and some others. She also wrote short stories, and documentary pieces. Some of the stories were transposed into C. K. Ogden’s Basic English in a volume called Death in High Society [online at Ogden’s Basic English].

I think it must have been as far back as 1927 that Evelyn Waugh, after a visit to Duckworth’s (the publishing firm where I then worked), suggested we should lunch together at The Gargoyle, a club he had recently joined. I had never been there. It had not been going for more than a year or two, and was in principle a night-club, though one of a very respectable order; frequented to some extent by the intelligentsia, even if Constant Lambert complained that the dance-floor on Saturday nights was crowded with “the two hundred nastiest people in Chiswick.” Waugh and I came on Inez Holden on the way there, or, more probably, found her already lingering at The Gargoyle. I had heard Waugh speak of her before, without myself forming a very clear picture. A clear picture, as I have said, was not at all easy to form. Even now I feel some diffidence in presenting this scrap of reminiscence, because there is so much about Inez that I have never known.

The three of us lunched together under the large picture by Matisse that hung in the dining-room, and gave the club a certain distinction. I think almost certainly Waugh, with his usual generosity, paid for Inez’s luncheon, although this was far from one of his affluent periods. Afterwards I was put up for the club, of which I remained a member for some years. It would have been logical for Waugh to put me up, Inez to second me, but I have an idea the process was vice versa. If so, I can find no reason for this, especially as she had never before set eyes on me. At that time Inez was very pretty. Those who knew her only after some glandular condition had sadly altered her appearance could not guess her earlier “consumptive charm.” (to quote Constant Lambert again), a then fashionable type of beauty, which — as it turned out quite unjustifiably since her health was not failing — led to Inez being known in some circles (the Sitwells and Willie Walton, I suspect) as “Gallopers.”

With regard to solidly ascertainable fact, books of reference show Beatrice Inez Lisett Holden as born 21 November 1903 (a fairly typical Scorpio, it might be judged) into the younger branch of a landowning Derbyshire family. Her father had been for a few years in the Indian cavalry; her mother (nee Paget) was reputed to have had some fame as an Edwardian beauty. Inez’s own references to her family background consistently suggested early unhappiness; domestic shadows fell from wholesale neglect, and regrettable behaviour on the part of both parents. Her political opinions reflected a sharp reaction (shown even in the early novels) against the hardness and selfishness of Edwardian smart life. At the same time, Inez herself never lost all trace of this Edwardian stigmata, revealed not so much in her outward appearance (which could be dishevelled), as in the way she regarded certain things….

Her first novel, Sweet Charlatan, was published by Duckworth’s. Inez was not introduced there by myself — nor, I think, Waugh — in fact, I felt professional reservations about the book’s chances…. Inez turned the heat on Thomas Balston, the moving spirit in Duckworth’s, and he accepted Sweet Charlatan, not a very good novel, for publication. Balston, a bachelor in his late forties, authority on Staffordshire figures and the paintings of John Martin, was not at all used to young ladies of the Inez type. He fell. I don’t think it would be going to far to say that for a short time she made hay of him.

During the immediate years before World War II, Inez had a flat in Albany Street, just around the corner from where my wife and I lived. We used to see a certain amount of her. This was the period of her practical interest in politics, stimulated probably in the first instance by the Spanish Civil War. At this time she would talk a lot about Peter Spencer (by then Viscount Churchill; like Evan Tredegar twice married in face of contrary tastes, but, in contrast, an impoverished viscount, rather than a rich one), and I remember Inez describing a Trafalgar Square meeting, where, she and Lord Churchill both on the rostrum, Left Wing sympathizers threw half-a-crowns on to the platform. “They’d have been quite easy to keep,” Inez said.

… During the war, she worked in a factory (operating the house-cinema, I believe), and I don’t think it was until the war that she became friends with George Orwell…. It was also during the war that Inez became friends with H. G. Wells. Wells lent her the garage flat in the mews at the end of the garden of his Regent’s Park house. There Inez lived for eighteen months. When visiting her Orwell me Wells, of whose writings he was a great admirer. Indeed my own rather reluctant readings of several Wells novels are entirely owed to Orwell pressure. For some reason, in spite of this liking for his books, Orwell irritated the writer himself; provoking Wells’s immortal comment, already on record: “Read my early works, you shit.”

After the war Inez lived for years in a flat in George Street, off Baker Street…. A compulsive newspaper reader and TV viewer, she would become obsessed by subjects the papers were running — say, sex-change or computer dating — and talk of these without cease throughout a whole luncheon or dinner…. Later Inez left George Street, moved to Lower Belgrave Street, where she would sometimes be seen about in the neighbourhood dressed in stray adjuncts of military uniform. One recalls that Miss Virginia Jenkinson was reported in the Double Daily Despatch gossip column as having a “penchant for wearing fancy dress in the day-time.” I last heard from Inez a couple of years ago. She wrote: “My own memory, I think, is phenomenal — really like the horse Clever Hans. Do you know about him? He could answer almost any question but he did have to tap it out with his hoof.”

The King of the Barbareens, by Janet Hitchman (1960)

Cover of Peacock edition of The King of the Barbareens
The King of the Barbareens is a memoir of a childhood spent as a bit of jetsam tossed about in the social welfare system that existed in England in the early part of the 20th century. Apart from an impression of watching an Armistice parade at the age of two, Janet Hitchman’s first memories are of living with Gran and Granfer Sparkes in their little house at the end of the “loke” in a village outside Norfolk.

“Another one of your grandchildren, Mrs. Sparkes,” people would ask when seeing the child for the first time. “No, no relation of mine. None whatever.” She slept in a tiny old cot next to Gran and Granfer’s bed, with no bed clothes and just a piece of flannel for warmth. All she knew was that Gran Sparkes had promised her dying mother that the child could stay with her.

Elsie May Fields — the name Janet Hitchman found on her birth certificate — had been born in July 1916 to Margaret Ames, a seamstress. Her father’s name was left blank. On the back was penciled “Frederick Burrows, deceased 27.9.1916.” Doing a little digging on a genealogical site, I learned one reason why little Elsie was given up to the care of others. Burrows had been killed while serving on the Western Front. Her mother was a widow with two children and had clearly had an affair with Burrows several years after her husband’s death. What family Elsie might have had didn’t want to claim a soldier’s bastard as their own.

Over the next fifteen years, Elsie was carried along through an almost random series of arrangements. When a lump behind her ear was diagnosed as a mastoid, she was taken into a hospital where the treatment and recovery, in the days before antibiotics, was long and painful. Brought back to the Sparkes, she was quickly taken away again when a social worker decided the conditions in their home were too filthy for a child, and placed in the care of a widow:

As we sat at tea I brought forward a problem that had worried me since we met.

“What shall I call you?” I asked.

“What did you call Mrs. Everett?”

“Aunt Ada; but I’d rather call you Mummy.”

“Thass all right. I er bin called a thing or two in my time. Mum’s better than most of ’em.”

Then one day, when Elsie was about nine, Mum came in and said, “Elsie you’re going away tomorrow.” The girl was transferred to Gimingham Hall, where a Mrs Huntly and a small staff cared for a home full of elderly women, “all a bit ‘gone’ in the head.” As an adult, Hitchman concluded it was a private mental home and her transfer was probably a mistake. There were 25 “inmates,” several troubled teenage girls, and one other girl close to Elsie’s age. After her initial shock at seeing the women in the home rocking back and forth in their chairs or polishing a single piece of silver for hours on end, she accommodated to her new home. The inmates were gentle with her, Mrs Huntley a bit too concerned about heaven and hell but generally kind. The one thing that most disturbed her were the “pig-killing screams” that some of the women made when it came time to be bathed. “It will be all right,” one of the women on the staff told her. “It is only noise.”

“It give me a pain.”

“You mustn’t let it. It is only noise. You’ll hear worse and louder before you die.”

“There isn’t any worse noise that someone afraid.”

“All the noise of Hitler’s bombardment has not shaken me in this opinion,” Hitchman added.

Once again, the current picked up Elsie and carried her along to another foster home, and then to the Thomas Anguish Hospital School of Housecraft for Girls in Norwich, a charity home for teenage girls. Elsie found the home “a very happy place,” and the women in charge encouraged her to pursue her love for writing: “Once when turning out the box room Miss Hayhurst had unearthed a pile of obsolete hand bills, advertising some long-forgotten church bazaar. She met me on the landing and said: ‘Would you like these, Elsie: you can write on the backs.’ I have never in my life received a present that gave me so much pleasure.”

Despite, this, though, Elsie had a strong rebellious streak, and one day was called into the office and informed she would be moved to one of Dr. Barnardo’s homes. “‘Barnardo’s,’ I gasped, ‘but that’s a reformatory.'” The Barnardo Home outside Norwich she was sent to was, in fact, a very well-run and progressive institution for its time. “It ran like clockwork; it was magnificent,” Hitchman writes. “I loathed it.”

At thirteen, a veteran of a dozen different placements, Elsie was perhaps too independent a spirit to benefit from the safe, clean, and very efficient environment, which primarily aimed at rescuing children from the most desperate conditions of poverty and neglect. “At Barnardo’s drawing breath was our only freedom; and then it had to be drawn silently.” She was given free access to books and had time to find a quiet corner and read, and she devoured what the home could supply. It was then that Elsie decided to change her name to Janet after reading Jane Eyre. She would later write a biography of Dr. Thomas Barnardo, They Carried the Sword (1966).

After three years at Barnardo’s, Janet was taken to a boarding house in London to study for the civil service exam. The plan was for her to become a postal clerk. She rebelled again, however, and found herself, at the age of seventeen, fending for herself. She took a place in a hostel for young women and got a job in the shipping department at Debenham’. But the cost of room and board — meager to begin with — left her with almost nothing. She slept most of her time off sleeping: it was her cheapest option. “I suppose it sounds a shocking thing for a seventeen year-old girl to spend all her spare time asleep; but there it is; I was waiting for something to happen, enduring the dust and noise of the dispatch room in a kind of coma, until somebody noticed I was quietly dying.”

Janet Hitchman, 1968
Janet Hitchman, 1968
Fortunately, a move to another department, one with windows, and a raise in pay saved her, and she began to explore London — at least as much as she could with just three shillings a week in pocket money. She moved on from the store to a series of seamstress jobs and ended up, almost by accident, as the stage manager for a small but lively theater company. That led to meeting a young designer, Michael Hitchman, marriage, a child, divorce, and surviving unhappily as a domestic. “The great thing is not to be dependent on other people,” she writes near the end of the book, in what could stand as the orphan’s motto.

The King of the Barbareens leaves Hitchman at the age of forty. “Life has been much easier since I faced the fact that I am not a very nice or likeable person,” she writes. Religion, in the form of a Quaker community, has provided some consolation. And she has finally achieved her ambition of earning a living as a writer.

Hitchman went on to write for The Observer and other papers. She wrote a number of plays and radio productions for the BBC, the Barnardo biography, and in 1968 a novel, Meeting for Burial, based on several people she knew from the Quaker community in Norwich. Her best known book was Such a Strange Lady (1976), the first major biography of Dorothy Sayers, which received generally favorable reviews despite Hitchman’s not being given access to Sayers’ private papers. She died in Norwich in 1980.

“Time and again throughout my childhood,” Hitchman writes in her memoir, “I had heard people shrug off my orphan state with the words, ‘Well, what you’ve never had, you can’t miss.’ There was never a greater fallacy.” “I wanted relations, people I could call mine by right, not courtesy.” While rich in the variety of characters Hitchman recalls, The King of the Barbareens is a powerful account of what it’s like to be truly alone and powerless in the world.

The King of the Barbareens, by Janet Hitchman
London: Putnam, 1960

Signed With Their Honour, by James Aldridge (1942)

Cover of Signed With Their HonourJames Aldridge (1918- 2015) was an Australian journalist and war correspondent who covered the Second World War in Greece, Crete and North Africa 1940-1941. Signed With Their Honour was his first novel.

Aldridge enjoyed a period of considerable success in the late-war to post-war period and his biggest-selling novel was The Diplomat published in 1949. In the early post-war era, Aldridge was one of Australia’s most successful novelists in international terms. Yet by the early 1960s, his prestige was on the decline with his novels receiving increasingly poor or indifferent reviews and afterwards Aldridge devoted most of his writing to producing work for children or young adults. By the time of his death in 2015, none of his works were still in print and Aldridge’s writing was virtually forgotten (when he died in London three years ago, none of the Australian media even bothered to notice).

Aldridge chose a variety of settings for his novels. Early works such as Signed With Their Honour and The Sea Eagle (1944) were set in the Second World War, The Diplomat was a political drama set in the Azerbaijan Revolution in Iran, The Hunter (1950) portrayed fur hunters in Canada’s north, The Last Exile (1962) was set in the Suez Crisis and A Captive in the Land (1962) was a Cold War drama. A common thread among his novels is the conflict between an individual’s desires, morals and conscience and his obligations, demands and duty to the state and its political structures.

Signed With Their Honour was one of Aldridge’s more durable works, remaining in print off and on until the 1980s unlike many of his other novels. Set in Greece and later in Crete, it depicts the British Royal Air-Force and its participation in the Italian invasion of Greece in 1940, followed by the German invasion in early 1941. Although the author was Australian, the novel’s central character, a young pilot named Quayle, is English. One of his fellow pilots is Australian but is only a minor character. Whether Aldridge chose this device to help improve potential sales in the UK is unclear.

The title of the novel is a line from a Stephen Spender poem ‘The Truly Great’, a work that celebrates the individual that seeks greatness, glory and achievement even if the price is a life cut short. Aldridge no doubt considered the line apt for a novel about fighter pilots in wartime. This novel depicts the pilots of a British fighter squadron equipped with out-dated Gloster Gladiator biplanes, isolated in the heat and dust of Greece with few supplies and facing a powerful enemy invasion. The novel is closely based on the exploits of a real-life unit, No 80 Squadron, which fought in Greece during that campaign and, despite possessing out-dated biplanes, inflicted heavy losses on their Italian and later, their German opponents.

For a wartime novel, there is a surprisingly bitter tone which possibly reflects the feelings of many towards Britain’s role in the Greek and Cretan campaigns which ended in defeat. Characters in the novel complain about the too-little supplies they have been given, the indifferent Allied leadership, the false promises and hopes given to the Greek people and the in-adequacy of their equipment, being allocated old biplanes while fleets of more modern fighter-planes sit on airfields back in England.

The central character Quayle develops a relationship with a Greek girl and his feelings towards her and the longings of his inner self, combined with his bitterness of the Allied bunglings of the war around him, leads him to consider desertion. But his conscience and sense of duty in the fight against Fascism compel him to remain in the air.

The novel received considerable attention when it was first published in the US and the UK, earning some positive reviews and it became a best seller in both countries. Not all reviews were positive, Time Magazine dismissed it as ‘clumsy fiction’ for example. But the novel received a lot of attention. Rank Studios in Britain purchased the film rights and in 1943 embarked on production of a film version. However the project was abandoned after three Gladiator biplanes were written off in accidental crashes and the funding dried up.

The novel owes a big debt to Ernst Hemingway and the master’s obvious influence was pointed out by the book’s more negative critics. But despite its’ flaws, I believe this novel deserves to be better known still today. It vividly portrays aerial combat and the sights and smells of the Greek campaign. And, unlike his later works, it moves along at a smart pace and doesn’t allow itself to become bogged down in the details. Aldridge’s later novels, although perhaps more ambitious, became bloated in their own self-importance. Even his 1944 follow-up to Signed With Their Honour, the novel The Sea Eagle, about Australian soldiers trapped behind enemy lines in German-occupied Crete, now looks rather dated and pretentious with its heavy-handed symbolism and references to Greek mythology. This novel is slimmer, easier to digest and deals with a subject that obviously fired the author’s imagination without stretching his writing abilities too thin.

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

Signed with Their Honour, by James Aldridge
London: Michael Joseph, 1942

“The City Cosmic,” by Roy Ivan Johnson, from The Fourth Watch

The City Cosmic

This morning
The lure of the street
Entangled my feet
And I walked … and walked … and walked …

I turned into the narrowest streets, I breathed the smoke of the factories, I smelled the reek and rot of the tenements;
I passed by ancient spacious lawns and piles of masonry century-old, the pride of the city fathers;
I walked through parks and down the singing boulevards …
And I discovered what a cosmic thing a city is.

Dirt….
Congestion…
A heap of rubbish…

Blocks and stones and buildings;
White granitoid, smoked gray, like second-day collars of respectability;
Whistle-topped, grim-eyed factories;
The air, heavy with the aroma of coal-tar gas and the packing-house;
A network of wires and rails;
Bill-boards, the sign of the dollar.

Squares of artificial landscape called parks and gardens;
A sea of roofs and chimneys…
Houses … and houses … and houses …
Time’s driftwood packed together by the force of the tide!
And that is the city:
A huge mass of Material,
Looped and bound by the oily-black ribbon of the boulevards green-selvedged in the spring.

The people
Are not the city.
They infest the city, as rats and roaches the driftwood left high on the bank —
Or they build the city, as a beaver builds its dam, bit by bit.
Yet, the people and the city are very much alike.
They are like two mirrors, each reflecting the other,
For those who do not make the city are made by the city.

At dusk
The smoky-bright,
Soft-calling night
Led me again through streets … and streets … and streets…

I mingled with late-shopping crowds, I rubbed against the clay-crusted garments of laborers, I watched the rush for clinging-space on a Main Street car;

I heard the drone of the beggar in the doorway with his pencils and shoestrings, I met women in brilliant coats — with painted cheeks ghost-white, I caught the innocent laugh of whirling youth from a flashing car;

I noted the unblinking eyes of the hypnotized throng of cinema-worshippers pouring in and out past the shrieking posters flaming red and yellow;

I listened to the incessant colloquy of the city’s victims and creators rising like the shrill hum of a steel-cutting wheel;

I passed into the quieter and poorer streets and saw the ill-clad mothers of children, born and unborn, taking the early spring air of a front doorstep overlooking the pavement, and as I passed they looked at me with eyes unfearing and curious;

I glimpsed half-way down a dim deserted street a figure that slunk, thief-like, into the mouth of
an alley;

I walked upon the boulevard and saw through the windows of the rich the luxury of wealth;

I turned into the park — and there was love, twin-souled, ecstatic, gripping with twining fingers the edge of Passion;

And I sat upon a smooth-worn bench and gazed with new understanding at the evening star….
And I thought what a cosmic thing the population of a city is.

Souls….
Souls that harbor ignorance and are cramped in the cage their ignorance has built;
Helpless souls,
That sit on doorsteps and breathe the smell of refuse;
Dust-dwelling souls,
Whose wings have atrophied;
Striving, struggling, suffering souls,
Toiling in the net;
Strong, soaring souls,
That seek the sunlight in the open ;
Souls that murmur, and tired-eyed souls that are mute;
Souls of youth, wild-flowered, tossing their wind-tangled hair!
And that is the population of a city:

Souls … souls …
House-huddled souls …
Bound to the earth by soiled pink ropes of clay …
Bound by earth to earth …
Bound … bound …

From The Fourth Watch: A Book of Poems, by Roy Ivan Johnson
Boston: The Cornhill Company, 1920

Available on the Internet Archive: Link.

The Unspeakable Scot, by T. W. H. Crosland (1902)

Insulting a Scotchman

“This book is for Englishmen,” T. W. H. Crosland writes in his introduction to The Unspeakable Scotsman. “It is also in the nature of a broad hint for Scotchmen,” he adds, and the hint is a none-too-subtle invitation to back in their place, which Crosland defines as intrinsically inferior to that of any Englishman. He was, at least, honest about his position from the very start: “My qualification to bestow broad hints upon the politest and most intellectual of the peoples is that I possess a large fund of contempt for the Scottish character. Also I had the misfortune to be born on a day which is marked, sadly enough, in the calendars ‘BURNS DIED.'”

T. W. H. Crosland
T. W. H. Crosland
Although Thomas William Hodgson Crosland was at one point in his literary career rumored to be a candidate for Poet Laureate, he seems to have spent most of his time looking for saddles to become a bur under. He sided with Lord Alfred Douglas against Oscar Wilde, then against Wilde’s friend and defender Robbie Ross, and was one both sides of different libel cases in his time. At some point not long after Wilde’s death, Crosland took the notion to become what at best might be called an ironic racist. The Unspeakable Scotsman was his first venture into what, luckily, has remained his exclusive genre.

In chapter 9, “The Scot as Biographer,” for example, Crosland offers his view of Scots sentimentality with the bark on:

There are three Scotch books of biography, all published, I believe, within the last six years, which invariably raise my gorge. One of them is Margaret Ogilvy by Dr. J. M. Barrie [Crosland thought it funny to refer to all Scotsmen as “Doctor’], the second is J. M. Barrie and his Books by Dr. J. A. Hammerton, and the third is In Memory of W. V. by Dr. William Canton….

Margaret Ogilvy appears to have gone into no end of editions. It is an account of the character and sayings of Dr. J. M. Barrie’s mother, viewed in the light of Dr. Barrie’s own “literaryness.” I have no hesitation in pronouncing it to be one ofthe most snobbish books that has issued from the press any time this hundred years. It begins snobbishly, it goes on snobbishly, and it ends snobbishly. Offered to the reading public as a piece of fictional sentiment, it would still have been open to the charge of mawkishness. Offered unblushingly as a transcript from the life, and for the perusal of all who care to purchase, deplorable is the mildest epithet one can justly apply to it.

As to In Memory of W. V., Crosland writes, “I am constrained to confine myself to quotation. Comment would be altogether too painful.” One of his samples comes from Canton’s account of the funeral of his daughter W. V. (Winifred Vida):

We laid her to rest in Highgate Cemetery on the 18th…. At the funeral not only did the sun shine on the coffin, but in the grave itself there was light. All during the service, which was conducted by her friend, Dr. Robertson Nicoll, a robin, I am told, sat close to the grave; she would have liked that. When I went up next day the bees were busy among her flowers, and that too would have been to her liking.

Ironically, Crosland’s judgment of In Memory of W. V. echoes nothing more than Oscar Wilde’s remark on The Old Curiosity Shop: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” I think most parents would find it hard to see the joke in this.

Finally, he returns to attack J. M. Barrie, this time through his assessment of J. A. Hammerton’s J. M. Barrie and his Books, perhaps the earliest survey of Barrie’s work, written by a self-professed devoted admirer and “brither Scot”: Even as Dr. Archer has discovered in Paradise Lost an inexhaustible mine of the pure gold of poetry, so have I found in Dr. J. A. Hammerton’s J. M. Barrie and his Books an inexhaustible fund of the pure gold of Scotch opinion not only as to Dr. Barrie, but also as to other matters.”

Hammerton’s great sin, it appears, is in expressing an immoderate level of admiration for Barrie:

The main distinction of Nottingham journalism lies in the fact that it is associated with the name of Mr. J. M. Barrie…. To-day the so-called “Press House” is a tavern a few yards removed from the “Frying Pan,” and there penny-a-liners and half-fledged reporters drink beer and fancy themselves full-blown journalists, carrying down the traditions of Billy Kirker and that bright Bohemian band. But there are no Barries among them.

To which Crosland quips, “Nottingham, evidently, is in a parlous way.” Crosland, evidently, considered this quite witty.

The TLS took its own revenge upon Crosland by assigning its review to a gentleman with the fine Scots-Irish name of Gerald FitzGerald Campbell. Campbell found the book not a wee bit amusing:

We have all seen a child work itself into a fit of temper. We know how it screams and kicks, how it makes ugly faces and calls ugly names, how it beats its elders with puny, ineffective fist. The spectacle is not edifying; the feeling it excites is one of shame-faced pity — shame for poor human nature, pity for the individual child. The child itself knows that it is doing an unlovely thing. But it knows, too, that for the moment it has achieved notoriety and become the central figure of its little world. So it is with Mr. T. W. H. Crosland, the author of The Unspeakable Scotsman…. At first one hopes that the whole thing may be an elaborate joke, slightly ponderous and wholly personal, but still pardonable in a wearer of the cap and bells. But very shortly it appears that Mr. Crosland mistakes rudeness for wit, because he is furiously angry with anything that has the remotest connection with Scotland.

FitzGerald Campbell may simply have fueled Crosland’s fury, for he followed The Unspeakable Scotsman with the equally denigratory The Wild Irishman (1905), which contains such double-barrelled insults as, “I suppose that next to the Scotch, the Irish are out and out the dirtiest people on the earth.” Crosland was so comfortable in the role of racist that he also put out The Abounding American (1907) and The Fine Old Hebrew Gentleman (1922), in which he informed the reader that, “the most popular living ‘Ebrew gentleman is one Charlie Chaplin.”

When W. Sorley Brown wrote a hagiographic 490-page biography, The Life and Genius of T. W. H. Crosland (1928) following Crosland’s death in 1924, one reviewer wrote of Crosland, “Posterity may confirm the verdict that he was one of the great literary figures of his time, but, even on his eulogist’s admissions, few men have ever been so venomous and mean.”

Fortunately, posterity hasn’t.

The Unspeakable Scot, by T. H. W. Crosland
London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1908

Shade of Eden, by Kathleen Sully (1960)

Cover of Shade of Eden by Kathleen Sully

I wrote in my post on Kathleen Sully’s Canaille that she was an unstudied novelist — sometimes clumsy in her prose and style but also free of many of the conventions of more mainstream writers. In Shade of Eden, she amply demonstrates that one set of conventions she felt free to ignore was that of sexuality. Without using any of the terms, she introduces homosexuality, lesbianism, even polyamory into her story — and shows no concern with any of it. If any moral principle applies for Sully, it is simply that love is better expressed than frustrated.

To demonstrate, she plays out a set of variations on this theme. There are Bette and Eddie, married some years and with a young son, Sandy, who have reached the stage where each realizes the other is not the perfect match. There are the Patchetts, married longer and irrevocably entrenched in mutual contempt. There is Cliff, brought into the situation by Eddie in hopes of putting Bette’s fidelity to the test. There is Patsy, an old friend of Jean Patchett’s who proves to be carrying a torch for her. And there is Miss Hinks, one of Patsy’s co-workers at the local department store, for whom any opportunities for love have passed by.

These characters she weaves in and out as if performing a series of chemical experiments: how will she react with him (or her)? Some reactions are almost lethal. Others fizzle without effect. And some produce surprising results. Bette, Eddie, Cliff, and Sandy prove a better combination than any other set of twos or threes:

They existed in unity. Their blood — each felt its pulsing — seemed to flow round their circle, into and out of each, one stream through four hearts; their thoughts were all the same colour and texture; their spirit was one. Four souls had found a rent in the fabric around Eden and had crept in past the bearer of the flaming sword.

“Or had the bearer looked the other way?” This is the real world, after all, and specifically England in the 1950s. This delicate construction must collapse, of course, and not all the pieces will get picked up. Finding and expressing love does not guarantee lasting results. It’s just as likely to turn out like that stuff you squirt into a flat tire to get to the nearest gas station.

Shade of Eden proves once again that if Kathleen Sully has been forgotten by English literary history, it may well have been because she was something that English literature hadn’t seen for centuries: a naïf. Wikipedia states that “naïve art does not necessarily evince a distinct cultural context or tradition. Naïve art is recognized, and often imitated, for its childlike simplicity and frankness.” Although this was written about visual art, it may offer the best way of understanding Kathleen Sully’s remarkable oeuvre.

Shade of Eden, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1960