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Once Around the Sun, by Brooks Atkinson (1951)

January, by Don Freeman, from Once Around the Sun
January, by Don Freeman, from Once Around the Sun

January 5th

For seventeen years, seven days a week, Joe Berman has efficiently presided over his newsstand at the corner of Eighty-sixth Street and Broadway. He opens it before five in the morning. Mrs. Berman, wearing a smart hair-do and a Persian lamb coat, relieves him for an hour at breakfast and for two hours in the afternoon and wishes that he would take things easier. But with the exception of this interlude of relief, Joe is alert and on duty until six thirty. Today is one of his crudest days. The temperature is 16° and a freezing wind rushes wildly up the two blocks from the river. Joe has an electric heater that keeps his feet from freezing, but the front of the stand is open to the weather. He wears a Navy pea jacket and woolen cap and stands behind a pile of magazines. Although his customers suffer in the cold, Joe is smiling and business-like and makes no complaints. He is used to the weather. Having been outdoors for so many years, he is probably in more vigorous health than most New Yorkers. Piled high with newspapers and flanked with magazines, Joe’s stand radiates intelligence throughout the neighborhood. It is the university of Eighty-sixth Street.

Being a merchant Joe sells the comic books and squalid story magazines as well as the newspapers, reviews, and intellectual magazines; and he knows all of them, including the Russian, Yiddish, German, and French language papers. He carries and gives prominent display to the New Times, which is published in Moscow. If you are interested in ideas, art, politics, racing, or news, you can hardly get along without Joe, who has the information you need. In the morning and evening the stand is blocked by hurried customers. But it attracts browsers also. Three or four people seem to be loitering in front of it and looking over the stock any hour of the day. Joe is a quiet, soft-spoken man who talks pleasantly when he is spoken to and is a mine of information about the publishing business. Since he rarely leaves his corner, it is surprising that he knows so much in detail about the people and business methods of the local newspapers. He gives me more informed gossip about the Times than I get for myself.

January 15th

When a playwright becomes successful he settles down to a busy and fascinating life in the microcosm of Broadway. For Broadway is one of the best places in which to learn and practice the craft of playwrighting. Nearly a hundred new plays turn up here in the course of a season. Good and bad, they are worth studying. Moreover, Broadway is a compact, voluble community in which plays are fiercely searched, analyzed and discussed by a multitude of keen minds absorbed in the lore of the theater. Nothing in the writing or acting of a drama escapes the sharp eyes that Broadway turns on its own product. From the point of view of craftsmanship Broadway offers a stimulating course of instruction.

But a serious writer needs more than craftsmanship in the composition of a play. He needs material; he needs material sorely. He must draw on the experience of human beings—either his own or that of other people. In this respect Broadway is virtually destitute. It is an eccentric and closed community that has very little concrete information about the life of the world. It is dependent upon information and experience brought in from the outside. President Lowell of Harvard once explained how universities acquire so much learning: “The freshmen bring a little in and the
seniors take none out, so that it accumulates throughout the years,” he said.

Something of the same situation applies to Broadway. Young people bring their own experience to Broadway from all parts of the country and from all groups of society. But for the most part they are isolated from the normal experience of ordinary people as long as they isolate themselves on Broadway. For the creative writer this can be a fatal experience. He cannot write illuminating plays about life from seeing other plays or from listening to the gossip that sputters around Broadway. At some time or other he must renew his association with people. Even books are not primary sources. There is no substitute for people.

August 1st

Herman Melville was born at 6 Pearl Street on this day in 1819. At the age of thirty-two he finished the great American epic Moby Dick at his farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. A wild, terrible dance on the rim of chaos, it was, he said, ”broiled in hell-fire.” It gutted him and wrecked his health. It was also a complete publishing failure. Two years after he had finished this mighty work, all the plates and unsold copies were burned in the fire that destroyed the Harpers’ publishing plant. That was the final stroke of evil that killed the genius of Melville. He lived for forty more years like a ghost—a quiet, solitary man, walking in limbo, perhaps haunted by dreams more malefic than Captain Ahab’s obsession with the white whale. Nothing else he wrote found a public, and he was not wanted as a lecturer. In 1866 the man who had wrestled with the angry sea got a routine clerk job as a custom’s inspector and walked every morning down Gansevoort Street to an office at the waterside. For nineteen years he kept his blameless accounts as a petty bureaucrat and drew his stipend—a man damned by the indifference of other men, but denied the consolation of death. Finally death did deliver him in 1891 at 104 East Twenty-sixth Street. About a quarter of a century later America woke up to the grandeur of his achievement.

August 24th

Since New York is an ocean port the dog days have special significance. They are likely to bury us in a thick blanket of fog. Today is a case in point. Sirius is not visible this morning, nor is anything else. For the cool air from the sea moving into the heat of the city has made a dense fog that extends as far north as Westchester County. The sun comes up like a reddish gold disk. But the fog is so thick that I cannot see the river from the front windows and can hardly see across the street. Planes are grounded. Trains are late. Automobiles move slowly through a white blanket of nothingness. By midmorning the fog is gone. But the damp heat stands in the canyons of the streets. “It must be in the nineties,” a sweaty taxi driver remarks as he keeps his cab crawling through the choked and irritable jangle of Times Square. It is 85° on top of the Whitehall Building, where the temperature of New York is officially recorded. But it is probably 90° or more in the streets where New Yorkers have their being—sweaty and dirty and limp.

In the evening, I attend a theater performance in a tiny, airless auditorium near Washington Square. Little beads of sweat run down the faces of the actors. Sweat melts the starched collars of the men actors, who are impersonating elegant English society people, and the frocks of the actresses stick to their necks and shoulders. Sitting in shirt sleeves, the audience stares at them listlessly through the moist heat of a steaming auditorium. When I reach home at one in the morning the candles in the living room have flopped over in the heat and are resting their tired heads on the table.

December 2nd

“Foreigner” is a word I have come to dislike. It preserves ignorance and prejudices that are obsolete in the modern world, and draws distinctions between natives and outlanders that are not genuine. The word derives from the Latin foris which means “outside” — purely a geographical distinction that applies as logically to other towns and other states as to other nations. The word itself is legitimate; we need a word to express the idea of “outside” places. But all national cultures, like ours, preserve a number of primitive and tribal attitudes. Primitive people feared and distrusted outside groups of people. Like the American Indians, who fought tribal wars, primitive people regarded other people as their natural enemies, and fought them instinctively.

After living in the blinding glare of international events for a number of decades, we have learned many things that primitive people could not know. Through the sensitive instrument of the United Nations, we have access every day to the problems of other nations and can begin to understand the sources of international troubles. But the word “foreign” still carries with it implications of fear and distrust; and, in the bumptious American point of view, it also carries implications of inferiority. When I first went to work abroad, I felt humiliated to discover that I, too, was a foreigner. In the remote provinces of China I was, in fact, yang-kuei-tzu (“foreign devil”), or ta-pi-tzu (“big nose”). American ignorance of foreigners is not as primitive as that, but it is steeped in the ancient superstition that strangers are enemies and that unfamiliar ideas are vicious. We do not accept foreigners as individuals. This is a strange attitude for a country that, with the exception of a few thousand red Indians, is entirely composed of foreigners. No nation in the world has drawn so heavily on the rich human resources of foreign nations.

Cover of Once Around the Sun is the diary — or, more accurately, journal — that Brooks Atkinson kept during 1950. “Every year is packed with a treasure of ordinary experience. I think I shall keep a book of days to chronicle one year in the endless revolution of the universe — one human cycle in the myriad of cycles that reaches out an unimaginable distance into time, space, and poetry. Let me try to put together a microcosm of type, ink and paper — the small change of civilization.”

At the time, Atkinson had been the New York Times’ drama critic for a couple of years, after working as their correspondent in China during World War Two and in Moscow just after. He and his wife, Oriana (a novelist and travel writer), lived in an apartment on the Upper West Side and a country house in New England for summers and long weekends. Thus Once Around the Sun captures a very special civilization — that of Manhattan at a time when it sat atop American economic, cultural, and diplomatic power at a time when these were essentially unchallenged. Broadway was perhaps at its pinnacle, with mainstream theaters bursting with musicals, new talents such as Arthur Miller coming to the forefront, and Off-Broadway just beginning to establish its own place.

The Yankees under manager Casey Stengel were the powerhouse of baseball, with Joe DiMaggio and Yogi Berra on their roster, taking the World Series from the Phillies in four straight games. Manhattan was where all the major radio and TV networks had their studios, and where the leading newspapers and magazines were based. Cruise ships docking along the Hudson still brought more travelers to and from Europe than any airlines. The United Nations buildings were finishing construction, with the first employees moving in in August.

Once Around the Sun is endlessly readable, a perfect bedside book — undoubtedly better sampled from time to time than read straight through. Atkinson’s range is remarkable. A page or two after writing about Joe Berman’s newstand, he is telling us about the stars or the birds he sees stopping in a park on their way north or south or Thoreau’s call for simplicity (which he says applies more to New York than Walden because New York is “intricate, complex, and powerful.” And he offers a reminder of the spirit of liberal democracy that is so much under attack these days: “Never has there been a time of evil and violence on such a colossal scale. But these times bewail not I for one mighty reason: our allies and ourselves rose in defense of freedom at the time when the honor of the world was degraded.”

Once Around the Sun is available in electronic format on the Open Library (Link)

Once Around the Sun, by Brooks Atkinson
New York City: Harcourt, Brace and Company

Canaille, by Kathleen Sully (1956)

Cover of Canaille by Kathleen SullyIn his Observer review of Canaille, Kathleen Sully’s second book, John Wain wrote, “one never knows what she will do from one page to the next, only that it will probably be something surprising.” After reading over a dozen of Sully’s novels, I can say that truer words have rarely been written.

Canaille (French for vulgar, roguish, blackguard) collects two novellas, “For What We Receive” and “The Weeping and The Laughter.” Neither is the least bit like the other, and while “For What We Receive” is a bit in the vein of Canal in Moonlight, Sully’s first novel, and Through the Wall, which followed a year later: life among the hardscrabble poor of industrial England, the bread-and-drippings set. Although she occasionally descends into “we were poor but honest” sentimentality, Sully never softens her edges. “For pity’s sake use your snot-rag, Nat” is the opening line, and personal hygiene is no one’s strong suit in this book.

Nat is Nathan Mellowe, a likeable but clumsy and slow lad working in a garage. The six Mellowes live in a shack at the edge of town, Mr Mellowes being a farm laborer whose primary skill is shoveling. Nat and the rest of the Mellowes come to the rescue of Beryl, the garage’s pretty typist, when she is left in the family way by a Yank lothario passing through town, and he and Beryl wind up married merely to provide her with a semblance of propriety when the baby arrives. A few more bumps along the road of their life and, with the help of family, co-workers, and neighbors, something more grows from their Platonic relationship. “For What We Receive” might well be subtitled, “It Take a Village to Make a Marriage.”

“The Weeping and The Laughter,” on the other hand, might be described as a nightmare within a dream about a nightmare, and even that isn’t close to being accurate. It opens in a hospital ward, where an elderly woman with her leg in a cast is furiously writing out an account of a dream. It it, she escapes in the night from a hellish boarding house, perhaps a brothel, and encounters an equally mysterious man as she stands on a bridge contemplating suicide. “I learnt to get out of myself: I used to flow through the top of my head, go to the window, jump off into space and fly about like and owl,” she tells him.

She then relates how she married a Scottish fisherman and lived with him and his mother in a rough stone cottage by the sea. Winter sets in, the mother dies, and she is sitting there by the fireside, knitting the man’s socks “and hating it with all the hate I had.” Then she is the woman of the house in a fine city residence, surrounded by convivial friends, when she floats away again:

Sitting, sitting, sitting, and eventually thinking nothing, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, feeling nothing but a sense of smug possession.

The bell must have clanged on, noting each hour of each day, week, month and year. The community must have gone about its business of waking, working, eating and sleeping. There must have been merry-making, and mourning, too; and there must have been accidents, blood must have flowed and music must have set young feet dancing and gay hearts beating, yet I was aware of nothing until some time, I have no notion of when, the bell stopped.

Then she is a slum mother of nine thin, hungry children, worried about lice and scabs and where the next meal will come from. Then she is in a train station, watching other people in a mirror. “One face interested me more than the others, although it was a caricature of a face.” She discovers the face is hers. She takes a train to a remote seaside village where she rents a caravan near the beach and wanders about, trying to unravel her dreams. A neighbor, a beachcomber living in a shack (shades of A Man Talking to Seagulls) recites Ernest Dowson’s poem, “They Are Not Long”:

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate;
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses,
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

“It isn’t true,” she tells him. “Every desire, every smile, every hateful thought, all leave their mark and are carried by us to where next we go.”

Where next we go is into a Somerset town, where Mr. Upforde, a draper, lives with his wife and their three daughters, Vera, Grace, and Lennie. Vera is lovely, Grace homely and awkward, Lennie rather peculiar, not quite all there. Mr Upforde dotes on Vera, ignores Lennie, and shuns Grace to the point where she cuts herself just to get some attention. We follow the girls through several decades and several alternate narratives, winding up in a seaside cottage where the three women, all spinsters now, sit in a fetid bath of bitterness and recrimination.

Somehow Sully manages to tie all these odd, diverse, and loose threads together in the end. It is all as convincing and unreal as a nightmare. Reviewing the book for the Guardian, Norman Shrapnel summed it up well:

A woman’s day-dreaming has, as it were, its bluff called and is transposed into real life. Where does the one end and the other begin? The writer seems to be suggesting that the boundary is subtly confusing and yet vital to disentangle, which is rather like scrambling all the eggs and then telling us to count our chickens. But again she has the power, and it is an unanswerable one, of being able to carry us with her into her fantasies.

The TLS reviewer of Canaille described Sully as “a Sunday writer,” adapting the phrase, “Sunday painter.” I think this is a fair assessment of Sully’s talent. On the one hand, she was unschooled, unstylish, sometimes incorrect in her usage (e.g., disinterested to mean uninterested). But that lack of schooling also allowed her tremendous imaginative and narrative freedom, to a degree comparable only with that of Doris Lessing and J. G. Ballard in her generation of English novelists.

(As an aside, one possible reason Sully was largely neglected even when her books were in print is the erratic quality of her dust jacket designs. When I first received Canaille, between the French title and the coarse yet artistically affected figures on the cover, I thought it would turn out to be a story set on the waterfront in Marseilles. Even Gollancz’s simple but garish canary yellow covers are better than this.)

Canaille, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1956

Canaille

Red Salvia!, from The Tribulations of a Baronet, by Timothy Eden (1933)

Blue Salvia with a few red intruders

He turns his attention to the head gardener, who has been hovering in the background. They go through the houses — orchids, gardenias — a whole house full of these — a purple lasiandra climbing against a grey wall, the cool malmaisons, where he picks himself a button-hole, cherry-pie, verbena, sweet-scented geranium, and so out to the herbaceous border, his chief pride. He walks slowly, shoulders back, head high, constantly stopping to admire an effect. “But you can’t see the beauty of that, of course! I shall never be able to teach you. One can never teach anybody anything.”

In the border a small plant, flowerless as yet, is poking its head above the earth. He sees it at once and points at it with his stick. “What’s this? I’m sure I never told you to put this in.”

“Salvia, Sir William.”

“It may be salvia, but it’s not my salvia.”

“No, Sir William. There was a new kind recommended to me and I thought you might like to try it.”

“What colour is it?”

“I think it’s …”

“You think! Don’t you know?”

“Yes, Sir William. It’s red.”

“Red!” Sir William drops his voice to pronounce the word as if it were some awful mystery.

“Red!” He turns round to appeal for sympathy and, finding no one, looks up and takes the sky for confidant. “Red!” he says appalled to the passing clouds, “Red in a blue border!”

And he turns at last to the gardener: “How long have you been with me, Wilson?”

“Two years. Sir William.”

“Two years! About a record, I should think. During the whole of that time have you ever seen a red flower in this border?”

“No, Sir William.”

“No. Do you know why? Because I don’t like red. Because I won’t have that bloody colour here. I would as soon have you! And I’ll put you there next time. I’ll bury you there myself, if I see another red flower. Salvia Blue-beard. Do you understand? Blue-beard. So called, because it is blue! Take that thing out at once. You’re a nice man, Wilson, and love your wife as you should and go to church and all that sort of thing, and perhaps you’re the best gardener I have had, but you’re certainly the biggest fool. However, one has to put up with knaves or fools in this world. Which do you like best? . . . Red! Good God!”

He goes into another house, to enjoy more scents and sweetness, but here . . . horror . . . what are these things in pots? What are these THINGS IN POTS?

To us there may seem to be little wrong with them. We have seen better, perhaps. They appear to be somewhat stunted. Somewhat stunted indeed! They are wretched, they are deformed, they are miserable. And these are the flowers from which he was hoping great things, to whose beauty he had been looking forward, which to-morrow he was expecting proudly to display to an admiring rival, these these—these abortions! And they dare to shame him in his own greenhouse, to call themselves his flowers, to be second-rate, to be failures, to be rubbish in his garden! This time words, even his words, are inadequate. He is silent. But his eyes pop out of his head, his cheeks are suffused with crimson, and he dances in delirium like a dervish. Then there is a yell and up goes his stick. Crash! With one sweep five flower-pots are sent flying off the stand. Crash, crash, crash!

He waxes warm with the exercise. There were dozens of these flowers, row upon row of them, and petals and leaves and lumps of earth and fragments of pottery whizz and volley in all directions; till at last the stands are bare save for a confused litter, and he strides over the debris on the floor, out of breath, exhausted, spuffling and snorting, a purple devil of destruction, followed by a white-faced, trembling gardener.

From The Tribulations of a Baronet, by Timothy Eden (1933). Available on the Internet Archive: (Link).

The Tribulations of a Baronet, by Timothy Eden (1933)

Cover of the Spredden Press reissue of The Tribulations of a BaronetI first mentioned The Tribulations of a Baronet in a post derived from an article titled “Out of Print” from the TLS in 1961. At the time, I wrote that it “appears to be a bit like Joe Gould’s Secret, another masterful portrait of a man of great promise and much disappointment.”

Having since read Tribulations, I would now say it resembles Joe Gould’s Secret in another way: it’s also one of the best short biographies of the 20th century. In both books there is wonderful writing, unforgettable characterization, and — most exceptionally — an amazing combination of surgical dispassion and aching empathy.

Not that the two men had much in common. Sir William Eden was 7th Baronet of Auckland and 5th Baronet of Maryland, magistrate of County Durham, lord of Windlestone Hall, and father of future Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, while Gould was a Bowery denizen who claimed to be writing the greatest work of history while, in fact, he was just a little more colorful than the next panhandler. Joe Gould made promises he could never live up to. William Eden never lived up to the promises made for him by his birthright.

William’s grandfather, Sir Frederick Eden, was a scholar and advocate for social justice. His father, also Sir William, was a sober and pious man who watched six of his eleven children die, leaving his second son, William, as the eldest surviving heir. William had been a dashing soldier, a cornet in the 8th Hussars, a daring traveler on the Grand Tour, and had developed a great love of art, becoming something of a fine touch with watercolors himself. Heir to a large fortune, the seat of an old county family, and a title, William was arguably among the most privileged men in the world. Unfortunately, as Timothy — his son — writes,

Thus he was induced neither by poverty nor obscurity of birth, nor by timidity — for he was physically and morally fearless — nor by the slightest vestige of self-discipline, to restrain the exuberance of his feelings. Nature had showered upon him with an uncontrolled hand her gifts and her curses alike, and without control he received them all, and without control he expended them.

Sir William Eden, Master of the Hunt
Sir William Eden, Master of the Hunt
As Master of the Durham Hunt, he was the model of the modern major horseman: “The neatest figure on a horse I have ever seen,” another Master told Timothy years after his father’s death. But he expected his fellow huntsmen to keep to the same rigid standards or risk banishment. As a father, “he could not endure, for long, even the presence of his own children.” “Their casual irresponsibility irritated him,” and he fled the house whenever they returned from school in numbers. The one lesson he drilled them on was that of natural born superiority: “Walk as if you had bought the earth!” he proclaimed.

When unhappy with the portrait of his wife that James McNeill Whistler painted on contract, he handed a Whistler a check for a hundred guineas, which he considered a fair price for something “the size of a note.” Whistler, whose self-esteem rivaled Eden’s, responded with a snarky note. Eden offered to pay 150 guineas instead. Whistler then declared that the painting was no longer for sale. The two rams proceeded to batter away at each other, taking their dispute to the press and then to the courts in Paris. Although Eden won the suit in the end, Whistler had the last word, publishing his own tract, The Baronet and the Butterfly, skewering the knight with his own pride. “Nobless Abuse!” announced the epigraph of Whistler’s diatribe. And he eventually destroyed the painting.

Sir William’s extreme cankerousness alone is the stuff of a fascinating portrait, but there is such wonderful writing here that I must have highlighted something on every third page of this book. This opening of a chapter entitled, “The Garden of Eden,” for example, could have come from Waugh or Wodehouse:

It is six o’clock in the morning. A dove in the sycamore outside the window gurgles in delicious satisfaction. A butterfly, mysteriously detached from its fellows on the wall-paper, flutters once and disappears into the pattern. A sheep bleats, a thrush pours out its song like a cascade, the triumphant light of summer bursts through the curtains, and William Eden awakes to another bloody day.

For a long time he lies and considers the hideousness of life; the treachery of friends, the frustration of endeavour, the futility, the hopelessness of it all.

One of his great passions was for his garden. His views on gardens were as iconoclastic as his views on politics, religion, riding, shooting — well, pretty much everything. “I have come to the conclusion that it is flowers that ruin a garden,” he once wrote in an article for the Saturday Review. If his gardeners erred the least bit in carrying out his instructions, he would erupt in fury. “I’ll bury you there myself, if I see another red flower!” he raged at one. Yet, at the same time, he considered the whole exercise ultimately futile. “All this that I have done, the trees, the grass, the flowers, all this beautiful place, second to none in England, what will become of it after my death? Thrown away, wasted, on a young man with an eye-glass who thinks of nothing but hunting and polo ponies!”

In his last years, he grew only more embittered and irritable:

… no member of his family is free from offence. All, in his eyes, are conspiring and plotting against him, and he sees himself isolated, with his back to the wall, surrounded by treachery and deceit but determined to hold his own against everything and everybody, to make his enemies his footstool.

When war broke out in August of 1914, he blamed every side and tolerated none. “Don’t you go giving your money to those damned refugees!” he warned his servants and tenants. Weakened and confined to a wheelchair, he makes one last attempt to shoot and misses. Take away the guns, he instructs his gillie. “And never let me see them again!” A few months later, an old friend came to break the news that his eldest son had been killed on the Western Front. When he died in early 1915, a notebook was found at his bedside. The last entry read, “The worm of the world hath eaten out my heart.”

“Great men, whatever they may think of the world, realise that they are of it and that they must work in it, with it and through it,” Timothy writes near the end of the book. “If they are refreshed and refined by nectar and ambrosia, it is from the world that they must draw their basic nourishment of food and water.” And it is here, he concludes, that his father failed. “He had no opinion of the human heart.” In another age, he might have flourished. “In spite of these grave defects, partly because of them, such a man might have made a magnificent despot in the sixteenth century.”

The Tribulations of a Baronet was first published by Macmillan in 1933. It fell out of print for the next sixty years, until Gillian Dickinson reissued it from the Spredden Press, an independent press specializing in books about Durham and Northumberland (including the Spredden Northern Classics series), in 1993. Dickinson died in 2002 and the book has been out of print ever since.

The Tribulations of a Baronet, by Timothy (later Sir Timothy) Eden
London: Macmillan, 1933

Complete eTexts of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage Now Available

Dorothy Richardson (rear, first on right) Dorothy at school in Putney, c. 1890 (from the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Room, Yale University)
Dorothy Richardson (rear, first on right) Dorothy at school in Putney, c. 1890 (from the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Room, Yale University)

As faithful readers of this site (both of them) know, I devoted nearly two months’ reading and writing back in 2016 to Dorothy Richardson’s 13-volume masterpiece, Pilgrimage, and it remains perhaps the most profoundly revealing experience in by reading life. I personally think that all self-respecting adult males should be required to read Pilgrimage, as it will immerse them as no other text into the world as seen through a woman’s eyes. As Richardson wrote in the Foreword to the 1938 J. M. Dent edition of the first 12 volumes,

… the present writer, proposing at this moment to write a novel and looking round for a contemporary pattern, was faced with the choice between following one of her regiments and attempting to produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism….

In 1913, the opening pages of the attempted chronicle became the first chapter of ‘Pilgrimage,’ written to the accompaniment of a sense of being upon a fresh pathway, an adventure so searching and, sometimes, so joyous as to produce a longing for participation; not quite the some as a longing for publication, whose possibility, indeed, as the book grew, receded to vanishing point.

At the start of this year, I noted that the J. M. Dent 1938 edition of Pilgrimage was available in electronic formats on the Internet Archive (Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4). If you wanted to read the posthumously assembled thirteen novel, March Moonlight, however, you had to locate the 1967 Dent 4-volume set or the Virago Modern Classics paperback set.

Jens Sadowski wrote me recently, however, that thanks to the hard work of the volunteers of Distributed Proofreaders Canada, all thirteen volumes are now available not just in electronic format, but with fully-corrected texts. The first six books are available on Project Gutenberg:

  1. Pointed Roofs
  2. Backwater
  3. Honeycomb
  4. The Tunnel
  5. Interim
  6. Deadlock

The remaining seven books are available on the Faded Page, a Canadian public domain text site:

  1. Revolving Lights
  2. The Trap
  3. Oberland
  4. Dawn’s Left Hand
  5. Clear Horizon
  6. Dimple Hill
  7. March Moonlight

To paraphrase Charles Ives, When you read strong feminine fiction like this, sit up and USE YOUR EYES LIKE A MAN!

“To my Daughter on her Birthday,” from Yorkshire Lyrics, collected by John Hartley

To My Daughter on Her Birthday

To my Daughter on her Birthday

Darling child, to thee I owe,
More than others here will know;
Thou hast cheered my weary days,
With thy coy and winsome ways.
When my heart has been most sad,
Smile of thine has made me glad;
In return, I wish for thee,
Health and sweet felicity.
May thy future days be blest,
With all things the world deems best.
If perchance the day should come,
Thou does leave thy childhood’s home;
Bound by earth’s most sacred ties,
With responsibilities,
In another’s life to share,
Wedded joys and worldly care;
May thy partner worthy prove,–
Richest in thy constant love.
Strong in faith and honour, just,–
With brave heart on which to trust.
One, to whom when troubles come,
And the days grow burdensome,
Thou canst fly, with confidence
In his love’s plenipotence.
And if when some years have flown,
Sons and daughters of your own
Bless your union, may they be
Wellsprings of pure joy to thee.
And when age shall line thy brow,
And thy step is weak and slow,–
And the end of life draws near
May’st thou meet it without fear;
Undismayed with earth’s alarms,–
Sleeping,–to wake in Jesus’ arms.

From Yorkshire Lyrics, Poems written in the Dialect as Spoken in the West Riding of Yorkshire. To which are added a Selection of Fugitive Verses not in the Dialect, by John Hartley (1898). Available on the Internet Archive (Link).

Happy birthday, Alice. Love, Dad.

Luxury Cruise, by Joseph Bennett (1962)

Cover of Luxury Cruise by Joseph BennettReading Luxury Cruise is a bit like thumbing through issues of Holiday magazine, the glossy travel magazine of the 1950s. The look, the ads, the content — they all spell “M,000,000,000Ney.” The passengers aboard the Olympic have paid at least $14,000 each for their berths on this round-the-world cruise. That’s over $120,000 in today’s dollars, so this is a ship of very rich fools.

Some of them are spending new and plentiful Texas oil money. Some of them are more carefully doling out the remains of very old money. Others seem to be riding along on a supply of cash seemingly capable of endless replenishment. These are the boys “perpetually arrested at the sportcoat stage”: “They were genial, restless children, careful never to get too drunk, and their toys were sailing yachts and expensive motorcars and airplanes, and stocks and bonds and oil wells and gold mines, and whole ocean-going liners.”

Of the new money men, some are desperately trying to make their way into the old money circles the only way they know how: with cash. So the Seth Carsons of Dallas open up the pipelines and let the champagne and caviar flow. The Aldriches, Van Gouverneurs, and Ashcrofts drink and eat it all up and, as you can predict, leave tipsy, full, and disdainful of the Carson’s lack of subtlety.

Emlen Boyne and his wife — also of Dallas — are along for the ride simply because it seems like the sort of thing you do when you’re rich. So Em drinks a little too much on the first night out, talks a little too loud, enjoys himself more than he should. And earns the same sort of dismissal as Seth Carson — or so it seems. Coarse and boorish, the old money murmurs to each other. “They were generous, impulsive, simple people — peasants grown rich in the vast lottery of America, and they must be tolerated.” But behind the comments there is a lingering sense of having encountered something that had been bred out of them generations back: “a directness, a vigor, a cunning and yet an understanding and sincerity which was rare enough in their circles — Porcellian, for instance, at Harvard, or Brooks in New York.”

Joseph Bennett, the author, scion of the Pittsburgh steel Bennetts, Princeton ’43, Lieutenant (j.g.) (US Navy) in World War Two, partner of Wellington and Co., was familiar with both sides in this drama: the old money he grew up among and the new money he invested their remaining cash in. But he was also familiar with both sides of his own creation. He could undoubtedly have afforded a cabin on the Olympic, and he aspired to be the playwright, too. His senior thesis on Baudelaire was published by the Princeton University Press the year after his graduation and his seed money had helped establish the Hudson Review after the war.

Though Bennett knew his characters well, however, he apparently didn’t know what to do with them. There is much drinking, much talking, much commenting by some on the faults of others, many details noted that one can only assume are both accurate and precisely placed. There is a drunk stumbling by accident into a woman’s cabin and possibly committing a rape (but almost certainly not). There is the loss of a million-dollar necklace that could possibly be a theft (and most certainly is). There is an Italian count who plasters himself in make up and old Ike Shawley of Osage, Oklahoma, one of the original oil barons, spending his final days withering away on the sun deck. There are brassy broads who relish their booze and their boys and Main Line heiresses who would be happy if sex stayed next to sewing machine the way it does in the dictionary.

What there isn’t is, well, a point. Why bring these people together and why roll out their antics for us to observe? The plot lines of the probably-wasn’t rape and the definitely-was theft play themselves out three-fourths of the way through the book. What follows is a bit like watching the actors shuffle around on stage, still in character, for another twenty minutes after the play is over. Faultless scenery, costumes, and mannerisms can never compensate for the lack of any compelling drama or comedy. Bennett most certainly knew his material. He just didn’t know what to do with it.

Bennett died of leukemia at the age of 50 in 1973. From the records of his papers, held in the Princeton University Library, he appears to have written, or at least started, a half dozen other novels besides Luxury Cruise. With titles such as “Sons of Rich Men” and “Trevor and Townshend Fortunes,” they suggest Bennett might have produced something quite striking on the subject of American wealth if he’d lived longer.

Luxury Cruise is available in electronic format from the Open Library (link).

Luxury Cruise, by Joseph Bennett
New York: George Braziller, 1962

Appius and Virginia, by G. E. Trevelyan (1933)

Cover of Appius and VirginiaI’ll admit that I bought G. E. Trevelyan’s novel, Appius and Virginia, on the briefest of descriptions: “A story of a spinster who raises an ape in isolation in hopes of turning him into a man.” It seemed to promise another His Monkey Wife, John Collier’s sublime account of … well, as the title says. And, indeed, one of the consistent criticisms made of Appius and Virginia is that it’s not another His Monkey Wife.

Once I began reading, however, several things became clear. First, this is a riveting story. Taking in a few pages before turning over for the night, I ended up staying up for fifty pages and finished the book the next day. As Leonora Eyles wrote when she reviewed the book for the TLS on its first publication, “There are times when it is painful to go on reading, but impossible to shirk it….” Second, if there is anything comedic about Appius and Virginia, it’s only in the sense that Balzac used the term “comedy.”

There is nothing farcical here. Instead, this is the tragedy of two souls utterly incapable of understanding each other. Virginia Hutton, a single woman deep into spinsterhood, decides to undertake an experiment. She purchases an infant orangutan she christens Appius and raises him in complete isolation, treating him in every way as if he was a human child: “If it succeeded she would indeed have achieved something. She would have created a human being out of purely animal material, have forced evolution to cover in a few years stages which unaided it would have taken aeons to pass….”

The price of failure, however, is absolute: “… if this experiment failed her existence would no longer be justified in her own sight.” The alternative to throwing herself completely into the experiment is continuing to living in her single woman’s club in Earl’s Court, “Each year a little older, a little stouter or a little thinner, a little less quickly off the bus”: “an existence subdued and rounded and worn smooth by the little comforts and habits of her warm nonentity.”

And so as the book opens, we find Virginia sitting in the nursery of the cottage to which she has taken Appius, watching him sleep in the crib. Each time he attempts to burrow into his blanket, she commands, “Head out!” Night after night, through relentless repetition, she will teach Appius to sleep like a human. This is the sum of her technique. Caring for Appius, keeping the house, tending to the yard and garden, avoiding in every way possible not only any contact between Appius and any other ape but also any disclosure of the experiment to any other human being.

Gradually — very gradually — her efforts produce some effects. She gets Appius to say her name: “Ma-ma.” She manages to train him to feed himself with a spoon. Through years of daily training, she teaches him to read.

Or so she assumes. In fact, Appius merely learns to recognize the pictures in the lesson book and to produce the sounds he has come to know that “Ma-ma” will make as Virginia reads and repeats the text to him. Nearly none it reflects the cognition she thinks is going on. Instead, Trevelyan shows how very different is Appius’s understanding of his world compared to Virginia’s. One night, he watches a thunderstorm from his nursery window:

Blackness. Big moving things. Big still things. Big black things. Stillness, whiteness, dazzle.

White lights shooting: bright blades cleaving the black branches. Big silent things swaying and shiverying. Big moving things rotating: bending, sinking, swaying, crouching under the light.

Dazzle, giddiness. Blackness, brightness. Round and round, down and down.

In the first few years, Virginia seems impervious to the effects of her constant physical and mental toil: “The constant excitement, the unrelaxed tension, the unwavering hope, intermittently fed by minute signs, that before long he would communicate with and understand her, these not only sustained her through each day; she flourished upon them.” Appius, on the other hand, does not understand the pictures, does not understand the meaning of the sounds he has learned to make, does not understand the sounds that “Ma-ma” makes. “What was she saying now? He’d better repeat it, or she’d shake him, and then he’d be jerked right up into the nursery so suddenly that he wouldn’t be able to get back again for a long time.”

Appius’ progress slows, of course, and the years of constant work wear Virginia down. The kitchen grows black with filth, dust accumulates everywhere, the garden goes to weed. Virginia spends hours reading to Appius and the ape is happy to sit, comfortable and half asleep, in her arms, one hand on hers. “They had discovered the perfect relationship,” Virginia thinks. “Darling child, you can’t know how lonely mama was before she had you.” But of course, Appius truly can’t know how lonely mama was. Neither can Virginia understand that Appius has learned nothing more than to reproduce desired actions and sounds.

One could read Appius and Virginia as an allegory for marriage or the relationships between men and women in general. Indeed, one could argue that Trevelyan demonstrates that understanding may be secondary or even completely dispensable in a relationship. In reality, the only thing Appius and Virginia share is coexistence. In Virginia’s case, though, this is preferable to the invisible nonexistence of an aging single woman in the city. Which is why Appius and Virginia may be one of the most powerful stories about loneliness ever written.

Appius and Virginia, by G. E. Trevelyan
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1933

“Stepping out in these streets,” by Linards Tauns from Contemporary Latvian Poetry (1984)

Riga Street in the 1970s

Stepping out in these streets

Stepping out in these streets
Is like drifting away in the rivers’ sweep.

In a shop window, pots of paint on display,
But my glance strays past them to former days:
Tarred old roofs, and fences painted a long time ago
And I with paint-stained hands, and tar on my toes,
Roamed as I pleased
with blissful contentment and ease
In a world that was apple-green.
My uncle in the Salvation Army
Pounded his drums at every rally;
I smeared them all over with paint,
And when he set out to proclaim
the end of the world, he looked pained
Since the world and its mischiefs are ever reborn.
But I meant no harm —
In a world that was green
I was green and speckled and happy as happy can be,
All the colors blended and fused into light for me.

Stepping out in these streets
Is like drifting away in the rivers’ sweep.

From Contemporary Latvian poetry, edited by Inara Cedrins
, available on the Open Library (Link).

Passage from the Red Sea, by Zofia Romanowicz (1962)

Zofia and Kazimierz Romanowicz in front of the Galerie Lambert in 1962, from the Archiwum Emigracji, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka, Toru?, Poland
Zofia and Kazimierz Romanowicz in front of the Galerie Lambert in 1962

This post belongs in an as-yet uncreated category called “Scarcer than Hens’ Teeth.”

According to AddAll.com, there are exactly two copies of Passage Through the Red Sea available for sale, the cheapest starting at over $700. If you can read French, you can find more copies, including one autographed by the author, for $15-25. For those with access to a university library, WorldCat.org reports several dozen copies available in the U.S. and elsewhere, including one at the high school library in Chinook, Montana, in case you’re passing through there.

So I will not claim to have read this book, but I think it’s worthwhile on occasion to bring a little attention to truly, madly, deeply neglected books while there’s still a chance.

Zofia Romanowiczowa, to use her proper Polish surname, the author of Passage Through the Red Sea, was seventeen when the Germans invaded her country. Arrested by the Gestapo in early 1941 for aiding the resistance movement, she spent most of the rest of the war in a series of prisons and concentration camps, ending in the Flossenbürg subcamp of Neu-Rohlau in Bohemia. She and a friend escaped during an evacuation march and she was eventually able to make contact with the Red Cross and be taken into the American Zone.

She settled in Paris, where she met and married Kazimierz Romanowicz, owner of a bookstore and publishing company, Libella, serving the expatriate audience. The two became leaders in the Polish cultural community, founding the Galerie Lambert, an exhibition and performance space. She continued to write, eventually publishing a dozen novels, of which Passage Through the Red Sea is the only one to have been translated into English.

The English translation, by Virgilia Peterson (whose bilious memoir, A Matter of Life and Death, I discussed here back in 2007), was published as a Kurt and Helen Wolff book by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1962. It recently relatively few reviews (the New York Times passed it up) and soon disappeared. But here are a couple of the reviews that did appear:

• Kirkus Reviews:

It would be quite just to call this odd, repellent little book a strangely powerful novel. The narrator (we are not told her name or anything else which is not absolutely necessary) spent her adolescence in a concentration camp. While there she was kept alive, and also permanently crippled emotionally, by her love for and dependence upon an older girl named Lucile, who was married to Paul, who died in another camp. The narrator loved and still loves Paul, too, in much the same tortured, adolescent way. After their liberation, after Lucile has abandoned her, the narrator takes a rather crass (her opinion of him) lover named Philippe. When the book opens, years later, Lucile is coming halfway around the world in answer to the narrator’s desperate letters. Lucile, the narrator’s “”salvation””, is quickly attracted by Philippe, her “”doom””. When the narrator murders them both it is “”so that she (Lucile) would cease not being Lucile.”” It is a very sick and often moving portrait of a warped soul whose only reality lies in the dead dreams of a childhood ruined by war. The main fault to find is technical: the book is all self-analysis and private symbolism, repetitious to the point of fetishism: the tense drama of the actual events is present by implication only. But after all, that is precisely the narrator’s tragic condition.

• The New Yorker:

A strange, sorrowing short novel that deals with the reunion of two women — the nameless narrator and Lucile, who is somewhat older — some years after their release from a Nazi concentration camp. The narrator discovers that Lucile, whose help she needs and has always needed, has become an empty, posturing copy of her former self, and for a horrifying reason: in prison, the narrator, through her own dependence and frailty, has permanently drained Lucile, leaving only a husk. This nightmarish plot is accentuated by an oblique, dreamlike narrative (there is almost no dialogue), written in a chanting, doubling-back-on-itself prose, which may or may not be the author’s style but which is nevertheless just right.

• Elizabeth Cade in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

This beautifully written memoir of a Polish girl’s imprisonment in a Nazi slave labor camp, her intense bond with another woman, and their respective adjustments to freedom takes a unique place in contemporary writing. It touches, in a new and two-sided approach, the questions which have concerned the existentialist school of thought: personal integrity and the usage of freedom.

The narrator is still a young and idealistic girl when she is deported. In the camp she meets an old school pal, Lucile, who becomes her friend, protector, and above all, the guardian of her self-respect. “Let go” is Lucile’s motto, whenever her younger friend is about to give up wht last vestige of human dignity and sink to an animal level in the despair brought on by hunder and physical suffering. It is Lucile’s belief that survival must not be bought at any cost.

Freedom seemed to justify such moral strength. They “cherished the image of freedom as a higher and more just form of existence … a paradise of perfection where the lion and the lamb would lie down together, where everything would be given back to everyone.” When confronted with the realities of the world, in which compromise seems to be the accepted modus vivendi, both women take different paths in utilizing their hardwon survival.

The novel switches with flashbacks to the camp days to its locale in post-war Paris, winding up in a dramatic climax. Brilliantly translated by Virgilia Peterson, this is a fascinating exploration of human relationships and values.

• Polly Saunders in The Newport News Daily News:

For those of us who never spent time in a concentration camp this intense novel might seem to be an exaggerated account of morbid emotions. If we sharpen our imaginations, however, we can appreciate it as a small masterpiece written by a survivor of just such an inferno.

… Lucile was the elder of the two. She had been the younger girl’s only reason for being. “Lucile had known more about me than I knew about myself and sometimes, thanks to her, there came to life in me whole worlds the existence of which, until now, I had not suspected.”

This attachment is so powerful that it carries over into her present life in Paris. She still needs Lucile’s support and nostalgically recalls their camp days (despite their horrors) when she basked in her warm protection and love. The anticipated reunion finally takes place and there is utterly crushing disillusionment when she finds a changed Lucile. Lucile’s strength now lies in her ability to forget the past. She is interested only in wrenching from her present life whatever pleasures present themselves. References to their former life are taboo. Meantime, her worshipper practically dissolves in her disappointment.

The writing is intense. Sentences are long and repetitious and, for this reason, often monotonous. The story is depressing, but it is powerful in its turbulent outpouring from a young girl’s heart.

The best source on Zofia Romanowicz is a 2016 article by Alice-Catherine Carls from World Literature Today blog titled “The Renaissance of Zofia Romanowicz,” which includes a link to four poems newly translated into English.

Lying, from Life Questions of High School Boys (1908)

From the cover of Life Questions of High School Boy
From the cover of Life Questions of High School Boys

Perhaps no other moral quality affects so profoundly the stability of social institutions as that of truthfulness, including under that term both accuracy of statement and fidelity in carrying out agreements. Among business men on the stock exchange and boards of trade, transactions involving hundreds of thousands of dollars are frequently closed by merely a sign or a nod or a word, and the broker making the contract would never think of violating it or of pretending to misunderstand. The interests of business compel absolute fidelity to the agreement.

And yet people are often found ready to advocate trickery and inaccuracy in statements. Until late years it was popularly supposed that a good part of the business of a diplomat was to deceive the ruler of the state where he was resident; and at the present time in polite society we hear many exaggerated statements on minor matters, made for the sake of increasing the pleasantness of social intercourse, that are lightly excused as “society lies,” “white lies,” etc.. It is desirable that every person define clearly to himself just what he understands by telling the truth or telling a lie, and that he follow unswervingly the principle which he adopts.

  • Is a general justified in deceiving the enemy?
  • Is one of the great evils of war the encouragement of deceit?
  • Is an exaggerated statement of a society lady as to her pleasure in seeing a guest, which deceives no one, a lie?
  • Ought a ball player to let the umpire make a mistake in his favor?
  • Is it wrong for a catcher to draw the ball so as to deceive the umpire as to whether it crossed the plate? Why?

Probably no reputation contributes more to the success of a merchant or of a business man of any kind that that of never misrepresenting his goods and never failing to keep his agreements. Probably no reputation contributes more to the success of a lawyer along many lines of practice than that of absolute trustworthiness, and yet many lawyers seek to acquire the reputation of winning cases even by means of trickery and deceit.

  • Do we fully trust any person whom we have every caught deceiving us?
  • Do such methods pay?
  • Are such methods right, looked at from the point of view of the good of society?
  • Is there any greater blemish on the reputation of Napoleon than that of being a habitual liar?
  • Can the political boss afford to deceive?
  • What is the loss and gain to the pupil in presenting to the teacher a forged excuse for absence?

From Life Questions of High School Boys, by Jeremiah Whipple Jenks, published by the New York Young Men’s Christian Association, 1908. Available on the Internet Archive (Link).

A Distant Summer: Three Narratives, by Renzo Rosso (1962)

Cover of US edition of A Distant Summer by Renzo Rosso

A Distant Summer collects three long stories: “A Distant Summer,” “The Bait,” and “A Brief Trip Into the Heart of Germany.” Saturday Review’s reviewer tried to sum them up cleverly as “a scene erotic, a scene exotic, a scene psychotic,” but like most pat descriptions of a book, left a largely inaccurate summation of its true qualities.

Each story offers a snapshot of Italian life during and just after the Second World War. In “A Distant Summer,” set in the late summer of 1943, a seventeen year-old boy awakens to the complexity of adult life. Staying with his mother in a fine resort hotel at the foot of the Alps, he, like the other residents, is trapped in a sort of limbo. Mussolini has been removed from power by King Victor Emmanuel III and Marshal Badoglio named Prime Minister, but there are rumors that German divisions are preparing to come through the passes and take over control. Uncertain and fearful, they cling to the hotel as a refuge, sitting

… from morn to dusk on benches in the same square or around a clump of pines in the park or at tables in the bar. And these places might have been borders of the world or confines of a leper settlement, for no one crossed them, preferring extenuating boredom at the hotel to excursions and even simple walks in the lovely surroundings, lest these interrupted the reassuring sense of closeness to other besieged ones.

In his idleness, the boy becomes fixated on the only lone woman staying at the hotel, Signora Borghi, waiting with a young son while her husband, an Air Force pilot, is stuck with his unit. His adolescent reverie is broken when a tall, dark, well-dressed man, Signor Rangoni, arrives. He is an unashamed slacker: “I suffer from a rare and costly disease,” he says, “It costs me a fortune to have this disease till the end of the war.” But he and Signora Borghi are quickly attracted. In the course of an evening or two, the boy spies them walking off together into the evening shadows after dinner, and when he follows, see Rangoni pressing her up against a wall, her legs wrapped around him.

The boy’s anger, jealousy, and confusion are further compounded when the husband arrives. The boy is infatuated with the image of the dashing and heroic pilot, and emotionally sides with him until he overhears him say to his wife, “I hope one day someone will write me an anonymous letter and tell me. I’ll kill you and you know why now, I’ll beat you black and blue.” Exposed to aspects of the relations between men and women he had never encountered, the boy is left feeling something of a stranger in his own world.

Although it doesn’t quite match the quality of “A Distant Summer,” “The Bait,” which tells about how a charismatic young figure in the local Communist movement manipulates an admiring boy into becoming his accomplice, is certainly the better of the two remaining stories. “A Brief Trip Into the Heart of Germany,” about an encounter between a war crimes investigator and a former concentration camp guard, comes off less convincing.

“A Distant Summer” seems a perfect candidate for filming, rather an Italian counterpart to L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Beween: a story in which a boy is given a glimpse into the existence of sex as a force quite separate from any notions he might have of love or romance. The scenes are well-shaped, focused, precisely and efficiently sequenced, the prose — translated by Archibald Colquhoun — clean, exact, and specific. As the TLS reviewer wrote, “Signor Rosso can draw the pith of a man or a situation in a few words; he seems to have no tricks and an apparently transparent style, and all he says, with such brevity and such lack of elaboration, strikes one as piercingly accurate.”

A Distant Summer is available in electronic format on the Open Library (Link).

A Distant Summer: Three Narratives, by Renzo Rosso, translated by Archibald Colquhoun
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1962

Published in the U.K. as:

The Bait and Other Stories
London: Secker & Warburg, 1962

“The Anatomy of Literary Survival,” from the TLS, 1985

In a piece titled “Paperback reprints: the anatomy of literary survival,” Nigel Cross analyzes how a relatively few books manage to survive past their first print runs, and his diagnosis runs true to my experience in over forty years of studying neglected books:

While much that is in print is not literature, all literature is in print. This is the assumption behind most teaching and research in English literature….

Literary survival, then, amounts to rather more than the critical selection of the fittest. It is, above all, a publishing process involving advisers and editors, reviewers and readers, promotion and marketing, and — sooner or later — reprinting. If a book misses out at the reprint stage, through bad luck or a bad publisher, it dies….

If the first stage in the decay of a literary reputation is to fall out of print, the second, and usually terminal, stage is to disappear from the standard reference books. Of Orwell’s Tribune list [his article “The Good Bad Book” (November 2, 1945)], Leonard Merrick, J. D. Beresford and W. L. George vanished long ago. Barry Pain has managed a line or two as a cockney writer, but was dropped from Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature. Only May Sinclair has staged a small recovery. Her entry in the Companion reads, “Her novels … were largely forgotten until their revival (by Virago) in the 1980s.”

The fate of Merrick and Beresford demonstrates that a normal prerequisite for an author’s survival in print is not only quality but quantity. It is useless, from posterity’s point of view, to be the author of nineteen passable novels and only one good one. If the good novel seems to be a fluke, it will go the way of the rest. The same holds true for the writer of only one or two good books and no bad ones.

Source: The Times Literary Supplement, Friday, September 27, 1985, p.1067; Issue 4303.

The Man Next Door, by Emanuel Litvinoff (1968)

Cover of the first U.S. edition of The Man Next Door

With English anti-Semitism a matter of headline news, the time is perfect for some quick-witted publisher to reissue Emanuel Litvinoff’s second novel, The Man Next Door, which is a case study of how hate can turn a proper Englishman into a seething cauldron of antagonism and violence. Litvinoff does operate on the level of a prankster in the high school chemistry lab in a way, as he deliberately sets a catalyst — a Jewish couple with a Holocaust refugee mother-in-law — next to a highly combustible substance.

Even before David and Sylvia Winston (originally Weinstein) move into the empty house next door, Harold Bollam is an unstable compound. A mid-level manager in International Utilities, back in London after a long stretch in West Africa, Harold is having trouble adapting. “Forty-five was too old to change,” he thinks at one point. Younger men are beginning to rise above him. His wife Edna has failed him by getting older, too. And everything is slipping away from him:

The country had gone mad for gimmicks. Young smart alecks were getting in everywhere. Long-haired pop-singers bought up the stately homes, public opinion media were in the hands of queers and sensation-mongers who made England look cheap in the eyes of the world. Cheap, indeed, when black college boys became prime ministers of ridiculous “independent” states, dined with the Queen and lectured the British on the what’s-what of democracy.

Harold looks back wistfully to living in a country “where blacks were regarded as getting above themselves if they put a pair of boots on their naked feet.”

Like most objects of hatred, the Winstons don’t actually have to do anything to arouse Harold’s anger. They simply have to be. To be younger and better looking, have a pretty daughter, have a better car, have newer, nicer furniture. And in any case, it isn’t Harold who harbors a grudge: it’s them, even if they haven’t the guts to admit it. “Only the Jews hoarded their grievances, maintaining a cold, exclusive conspiracy against the world.”

As the story progresses, Harold’s ability to bottle up his resentments behind the exterior of a dignified, bowler-hatted gentleman erodes. He gets drunk, begins ranting in a pub about women, minorities, Jews, the bosses, goes to a prostitute, insults Edna. When he runs into Sylvia Winston on Regent Street, he offers her a ride home, then corners her into having dinner with him, then attempts to force himself upon her.

Yet Litvinoff somehow manages to keep the reader from utterly despising Harold. His pain, his fear, his loss of self is too palpable, too raw to see him as simply a demon. Alone in his living room, “He had a queer notion that if he went over and looked in the mirror now it would offer no image but that of an empty room.” And as his hatred consumes him and leads him to even more violence, Harold is still left with a tiny core of decency that cannot be erased.

“The British answer to Portnoy’s Complaint” Martin Levin wrote in his New York Times review — possibly one of the most inaccurate comparisons ever made by a critic. There is little funny and nothing sexy about The Man Next Door. More than anything, this is a book about how resentment builds to a boiling point when a person feels that youth, power, success, and even just self-esteem is being taken away and there is nothing to do but get angrier and angrier. And a book about how fear is the base emotion for an oppressor. It’s a book that’s relevant in the U.K, in the U.S., and in any other country where a once-secure majority feels itself losing control.

The Man Next Door is available in electronic formats on the Open Library (Link).

The Man Next Door, by Emanuel Litvinoff
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1968

“Out of Print,” from the Times Literary Supplement, 14 April 1961

Banner of 14 April 1961 Times Literary Supplement

An uncredited leader titled “Out of Print” published in the April 14, 1961 issue of the Times Literary Supplement opens with the announcement that Christopher Burney’s Solitary Confinement (1952) was being reissued in a new edition by Macmillan: “It seems possible that the period of hibernation may have done it no harm. At least the book’s depth and range of reference are more evident than before: that richness which is there to be dug into not only by ordinary readers but by philosophers, psychologists, priests who want to see their ideas tested by an intelligent and sensitive individual in an extreme state.”

“But how often are books raised from the dead in this way?” the writer goes on to ask. In the noise of the marketplace, many books have “only a short time in which to sell or die — sometimes as little as three months.” It is much easier, he argues, “to think of works which stupidly petered out and are now only known to a handful of devotees,” and he offers the following examples:

• The Bridge in the Jungle (1929, first English pub. 1938), by B. Traven

In 1961, the ever-mysterious B. Traven had largely been forgotten, but he is solidly in the canon now. All of his novels and story collections set in Mexico are available under Rowman & Littlefield’s Ivan R. Dees imprint, and most of his other books are in print as well. Some people consider The Bridge in the Jungle Traven’s best novel, almost a parable about the insensitivity of capitalism to the plight of the people it impacts, summed up by the bridge without railings set up by a mining company that allows a little boy to fall to his death in the alligator-filled river below.

• Land Without Heroes (1948), by G. F. Green

Someone might have been inspired by this article, because Land Without Heroes was reissued by Four Square in 1963. Although it’s been out of print ever since, Green’s 1952 novel, In the Making was reissued in 2012 as a Penguin Modern Classic. The TLS greeted that event with an article by Peter Parker, who wrote, “Of those writers who were well known in their day but have since sunk almost without trace, few have lain buried deeper in the thick silt of ‘lost’ twentieth-century authors than G. F. Green.” Of Land, the Spectator’s reviewer compared Green to D. H. Lawrence and wrote, “The stories are all tragic—frustration, squalor, unemployment, disappointment and murder are their themes—and they are told, like Mr. Henry Green’s Living, in a sparse language which here sometimes touches on stringiness. No attempt is ever made to jerk the emotions by a false situation. A writer of Mr. Green’s integrity, whatever his limitations, must deserve our respect and admiration.”

• The Tribulations of a Baronet (1933), by Sir Timothy Eden

Dedicated “To all those who are interested rather in character than in names, in failure than success, in beauty than progress,” this portrait of Sir William Eden. “Here was a man who, with every encouragement from nature and from circumstance, should surely have set his mark upon the world. And yet he failed to so do.” This failure, Sir Timothy argues, “should be at least as interesting and as instructure as the successes of more limited and more commonplace personalities.” In a way, Tribulations appears to be a bit like Joe Gould’s Secret, another masterful portrait of a man of great promise and much disappointment. Certainly Sir William seems to have idled at difficult: “It is not easy to understand how a terrible tornado of oaths, screams, gesticulations and flying sticks can be seriously prompted by a barking dog,” the author admits, although he excuses this behavior because Sir William was “too eager for suffering, too susceptible to beauty, too easily unbalanced by opposition and obstruction, by noise and ugliness” — or in the words of a great Ben Vaughn song, “Too Sensitive for This World.” Tribulations is available in electronic format on the Internet Archive (Link).

• Of Love And Hunger (1947), by Julian Maclaren-Ross

Depicted in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time as X. Trapnel, gregarious bohemian novelist, Maclaren-Ross’ name was known from decades while his books remained out of print. In the last decade, however, he seems to have been safely restored to the canon of 20th century British literature. In an overview of Maclaren-Ross’s work in The Guardian, DJ Taylor wrote that Of Love And Hunger “has a queerly provisional quality, full of staccato scene-setting, telescoped descriptions (‘Rain’d almost stopped. Sun made a white rim on the edge of a cloud’) and nervy dialogue that looks as if it was written more or less on the hoof.”

• Nightmare (1932), by Lynn Brock

Lynn Brock was a prolific English writer of mysteries best known for his series featuring the detective, Colonel Gore, some of which will be reissued in The Deductions of Colonel Gore as part of Collins’ Detective Club Crime Classics in 2019. When Nightmare was first published in 1932, the TLS reviewer wrote, “Here is a thriller that ought to have been written by Poe. Every now and again Mr. Brock lives in the nightmare he has created by the trigonometry of detective fiction, and gives you a vivid glimpse of it that startles you into a gasp not only of horror but also of fervent admiration. Full justice to his subtle insight into character and contrasts of character could be done only by revealing the secrets of his plot, which is not permissible…. There is genius in Mr. Brock’s power of charging a moment with noises, colour and feeling until it seems more real than life.”

• Rudder Grange (1879), by Frank Stockton

Most Americans who took high school English will recognize Stockon’s name from his story, “The Lady or the Tiger?” Rudder Grange is a dead-pan comedy about a married couple living on a canal boat, and contemporary readers liked it so much that Stockton wrote two sequels, Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories (1891) and Pomona’s Travels (1894). Many of Stockton’s books are in print, but they’re also all in the public domain, so you can find them on Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. Personally, I prefer Stockton’s desert island comedy, The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine, which repeatedly demonstrates that the two middle-aged women of the title, put up as comic figures, are more resilient than the bright young gentleman who shares their fate: “I soon perceived that it would have been difficult to find two more valuable assistants in the bailing of a boat than Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine. They were evidently used to work, and were able to accommodate themselves to the unusual circumstances in which they were placed.”

The Undesired, by Kathleen Sully (1961)

Cover of The Undesired by Kathleen Sully

Having now read a full dozen of Kathleen Sully’s 17 books, I’m beginning to see the outlines of her moral universe. Though it’s rich in comic circumstances and peopled more by the good than the evil, there is never more than a razor’s edge separating life from death, never more than a chance accident separating life’s winners from its losers. The Undesired is an object lesson in how to survive in her world — and how not to.

Stanley Chubb is one of the losers. A meek little man, he is so little noticed when retiring after thirty years in the same government office that a co-worker mumbles “See you Monday, Chub” as he leaves. He is as alone in the world as one can be: “… he was an old man without close friends or relatives — a lone man at the end of his life and usefulness, traveling in a train to a small flat in a nondescript street. He had done nothing worth recounting; he had see nothing worth remembering. He was nothing — a speck in the universe, less than a speck — merely a point in space.” Faced with a future in which he will simply “moulder away as if he had never been born,” he decides he must “blast this world wide open.”

He heads into the West Country and picks a little resort village on the coast to settle in, taking a decrepit cottage without electricity or running water and pledging to engage with the people there instead of receding into the background as he’s done all his life. Soon after, another retiree, the erect and tweedy Agnes Strathers — universally called “Horse” behind her back — shows up and demands to know if the cottage is for sale. She, too, is one of the undesired: “unlucky enough to feel alone in the world, unwanted, unlovely, unloved.”

Sully weaves Stanley, Agnes, and the growing circle of people they become involved with through an intricate choreography of encounters, misunderstandings, and accidents, but the real story here is far simpler than that. The Undesired is about nothing more than learning to survive by reaching out to the people around us — for help and to help.

But Sully will not let her readers be lulled by the soft glow of a happy ending. Just as the book closes, she draws our attention to another solitary visitor, a plain, grey nameless woman like Agnes, and leaves us with a grim reminder that we are never more than a step or two from death’s grasp. I recommend reading The Undesired in a warm place: a cold and bitter draft runs through this book.

The Undesired, by Kathleen Sully

London: Peter Davies, 1961

Horizontal Image, by Kathleen Sully (1968)

Cover of Horizontal Image by Kathleen Sully

Kathleen Sully was 58 when Horizontal Image was published. Liddy Creemer, her protagonist, is perhaps ten years younger. Her husband Tim is a good man: faithful, a good provider. Her daughter Olive is married to the also faithful Jeff. Together, they are visiting the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey when Liddy looks into a mirror set horizontal to the ground and sees “a visage of eighty years old.” It shocks her so much she reels, thinking, “My life has gone: I’m old — nearly dead.”

I’m not sure the phrase “mid-life crisis” was being used in 1968, but I’m pretty confident it wasn’t being applied to women. Reading Horizontal Image, I was often struck by how Kathleen Sully’s perspectives on the situation of women was far ahead of its time. Here, for example, is a short discussion between Liddy and her daughter:

“It’s my opinion that a woman can’t be a good mother and a career girl at the same time.”

“That’s right, Olive: you are beginning to see the problem. Husbands ought to share in the beginning and –”

“If any father ever took his responsibilities seriously, it’s Tim. He still does.”

“He takes the pleasure of his children — I’m talking about dirty diapers, feeding, cooking, cleaning, nursing and minding in those first years. A father should share the work and so allow the mother to continue to earn so that she may always be independent financially. And so that she can enjoy the children, too.”

“He takes the pleasure of his children” — that’s a fine (meaning, well-put) distinction. As a stereotypical housewife of her time, Liddy recognizes the steep economic uphill climb she faces if she wants to be independent: no skills worthy of easy employment; housekeeping and cooking skills sufficient to please a husband but not to work in either capacity professionally; no access to money without her husband’s permission. When she does decide to leave home and trying living on her own, Liddy has no other option but to pawn her jewelry, none of which is of any great worth.

Once on her own, when Liddy decides to explore the possibility of relationships with men other than Tim, she soon realizes that they all come with drawbacks of some type. One seeks sex but really wants a housekeeper; another is a fine companion in the day but an utter loss at night. Considering that Horizontal Image hinges on a woman’s negative self-image, it’s men who are seen in the worst light. Sully often offers up corrective asides to set the reader straight: John Downe was boyish in the manner meant when grown men are called boyish. Real boys are not at all like boyish men: they tend to be mischievous with a cruel streak, their energy is directed nowhere or anywhere, their innocence is a surface quality masking a furtive probing towards adult feelings.”

Liddy ends up in Sicily, where she manages to scrape out a way of surviving, but not before putting out a call for cash to avoid being put out on the street. She sends it in parallel to the three men — including her husband Tim — she thinks may still be prepared to help. The response is surprising and leads to a hectic and comic ending. But the reality of being female in a world run by men is never far, as an encounter on the steps of a Sicilian church reminds her:

She sat there, grey and old, dressed in dusty black — black cotton dress, black shoes and stockings, black shawl — all as old as herself and as worn. Her grey hair was drawn harshly back from her wrinkled brow and her nobbled, veined hands hung loosely over her skinny knees.

Liddy had been preparing to enter the church. The woman’s eyes caught hers and held them: not so much because they begged but by the surprise, amazement and envy in them. Liddy wore a simple pale cream dress, sleeveless, with a cream cardigan slung loosely over her shoulders.

The woman summed it all up in one simple gesture: with her left hand she indicated her own wretched attire — her own self — then moved the hand towards Liddy’s immaculate outfit and well-fed person. They looked into each other’s eyes — Liddy’s cool English ones and her near-black anguished ones. They were sisters: it was neither fair nor equal.

Horizontal Image is no Golden Notebook, but it certainly is proof that feminism was, by the late 1960s, penetrating deeply into the sensibility of English women — including that of a 58 year-old housewife and mother of three well into her second decade as a novelist.

Horizontal Image, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1968

Horizontal Image

Small Talk at Wreyland, by Cecil Torr (1918, 1921, 1923)

Wreyland Manor in 1910
Wreyland Manor in 1910

One day in December 1916, Cecil Torr, a lifelong bachelor and amateur scholar, an expert in Roman and Greek history and author of books on Hannibal and ancient ships, began keeping notes on items of interest about the people and land around his family home, Wreyland Manor, on the edge of the village of Lustleigh in Dartmoor. “Down here, when any of the older natives die, I hear people lamenting that so much local knowledge has died with them, and saying that they should have written things down.”

The scope of his note-keeping quickly got out of hand. “I meant to keep to local matters,” he apologized, “but have gone much further than I meant.” And thank God for that. As the book’s original reviewer in the TLS wrote, “An analysis of the first few pages reveals: the value of local memory; … his parents, grandparents and kinsfolk; heaven; faith and works; infectious disease; weather-lore; singing birds; rooks; weather lore again; homely remedies for illness; open windows; the may-dew on the young barley.”

And thus what might have been a minor and justly forgotten bit of Dartmoor folklore became Small Talk at Wreyland, one of the great bedside companions of English literature. After getting the first volume together for printing in a private edition he planned to share with a few of his friends, Torr was contacted by S. C. Roberts, one of the editors at the Cambridge University Press, who’d been show the book by J. B. Peace, the firm’s chief printer, and asked if he was interested in having the book published. Torr agreed and when the book came out in the summer of 1918, it was soon being celebrated as offering a welcome relief from the constant drone of war news. “We feel that we have been invited to Wreyland and are sitting with him over the fire,” wrote one reviewer.

Torr, his father, and his grandfather had all been university-educated, well-traveled, and omnivorous in their appetites for knowledge of all types. Torr often draws upon what seems to have been a substantial library as well as a great supply of family letters and diaries, so that his “small talk” embraces large as well as small topics. A few pages into the book, we learn about the ritual of scrubbing the high altar in St. Peter’s Basilica on Maundy Thursday:

The dignitaries of the church come down in procession, each one carrying a candle and a mop; and they throw oil and wine upon the altar, and then begin to scrub. I was close by, and noticed how differently they all did it. Some evidently thought it symbolical, and merely waved their mops across the altar, hardly touching it. And others would scrub hard, and then put their heads down and look carefully through their spectacles to see what they had done, and then go on scrubbing again till they were satisfied that they had done their bit.

A page later, he shares a remark one of his “thoroughgoing Protestant” neighbors made upon being told of Cecil’s visit to Rome and seeing the Pope: “Well now, maister, what be he like? I reckon he be a proper tiger to fight,” considering the Pope the Devil’s agent on earth.

Further on, he shares his mother’s recollection of one of the last duels held in the area: “It was a quarrel of two retired officers over facts which they could easily have verified. They had both got the facts wrong, and each was right in disbelieving what the other said; but neither of them would allow his veracity to be impugned, and they settled the matter in this fashion at five o’clock next morning.” The two men settled the argument with brutal finality: they both died.

“Cecil Torr on Scilly,” an uncredited photo from the Dartmoor Archive
He was particularly fond of the work of one of his great uncles, the Reverend William Davy, who spent most of his adult life writing an enormous twenty-six volume System of Divinity, then went on at the age of eighty to produce a three-volume set of “improved” extracts (you can find one volume online in the Internet Archive (link)). In a work of such length, one might expect an occasional detour to be found, such as the following diatribe on the evils of drinking tea: “the immeasurable use of that too fashionable and pernicious plant, which weakens the stomach, unbraces the nerves, and drains the very vitals of our national wealth; to which nevertheless our children are as early and as carefully enured, from the very breast, as if the daily use of it were an indispensable duty which they owed to God and their country.” No wonder England never managed to establish an empire.

And there is no end of the talk of the people of Lustleigh and the surrounding countryside, which Torr considered the most beautiful in England. Looking at her garden one summer afternoon, one neighbor remarked, “I were just a-wonderin’ if Heaven be so very much better ‘an this: ’cause, aless it were, I don’t know as I’d care for the change.” Another assures him about the best way to forecast the weather: “If the signboard of the Punch Bowl creaked upon its hinges, and the smoke blew down at Treleaven’s corner, rain was sure to follow, let the quicksilver be high or low.”

Small Talk at Wreyland was not a best-seller by any means, but its reputation as a book of great variety, charm, and humor spread, and Torr was soon invited to put together another. Small Talk at Wreyland Second Series was published in 1921 and the Third Series volume in 1923. The later volumes are just as good as the first. In Series Three, for example, Torr offers a short disquisition on the subject of haloes:

Saints and angels had round haloes, but other people had to be content with square or oblong haloes while they were alive. I do not know why this was so, or what a halo really was whether it was a thing like a rainbow which always faces you, or whether it was a flat and rigid thing which you saw obliquely when the wearer turned aside: the Old Masters have depicted it both ways. For want of higher authority I draw my own conclusions from such things as Toto Maidalchini says: namely, that saint Cassian, being puzzled, scratched his head, and thereby put his halo all awry; or that saints Pancras and Sebastian went bathing in one of the rivers of Paradise, and then sat upon the river bank while their haloes were drying in the sun.

If there is a book heaven, I have a feeling Cecil Torr is sporting his own halo there.

A selection from the three books was published as an Oxford University Press paperback in 1979, but aside from the usual print-on-demand suspects, you’ll have to make do with the electronic versions (Internet Library Series One (link), Series Two (link) and Series Three (link)) or one of the many used copies you can find for as little as one buck online (AddAll.com).

“Upon her Play being returned to her, stained with Claret,” by Mary Leapor (1746)

Wine stain on book

Upon her Play being returned to her, stained with Claret

Welcome, dear Wanderer, once more!
Thrice welcome to thy native Cell!
Within this peaceful humble Door
Let Thou and I contented dwell!

But say, O whither haft thou rang’d?
Why dost thou blush a Crimson Hue?
Thy fair Complexion’s greatly chang’d:
Why, I can scarce believe ’tis you.

Then tell, my Son, O tell me, Where
Didst thou contract this sottish Dye?
You kept ill Company, I fear,
When distant from your Parent’s Eye.

Was it for This, O graceless Child!
Was it for This, you learn’d to spell?
Thy Face and Credit both are spoil’d:
Go drown thyself in yonder Well.

I wonder how thy Time was spent:
No News (alas!) hadst thou to bring.
Hast thou not climb’d the Monument ?
Nor seen the Lions, nor the King ?

But now I’ll keep you here secure :
No more you view the smoky Sky :
The Court was never made (I’m sure)
For Idiots, like Thee and I.

From Poems Upon Several Occasions by the late Mrs. Leapor, of Brackley, in Northamptonshire, in two volumes printed by J. Roberts of Warwick Lane, London, 1751. Available in the Internet Library (Volume 1 and Volume 2).

The daughter of a gardener, Mary Leapor worked as a maid and was entirely self-taught. Yet she took to writing naturally and when she was dying of measles at the age of 24, asked her friend Bridget Freemantle, a rector’s daughter, to undertake a subscription to publish a collection of her poems and other writings with the aim of providing her aging father some money for his last years. It’s thanks to the success of Bridget’s enterprise that we can read Mary’s work today.

As Bridget writes in the introduction to the collection, Mary made no great claim for her poems:

She always call’d it being idle, and indulging her whimsical Humour, when she was employed in writing the humorous Parts of her Poems; and nothing could pique her more than Peoples imagining she took a great deal of Pains, or spent a great deal of Time, in such Composure; or that she set much Value upon them.

She told me, that most of them were wrote when cross Accidents happen’d to disturb her, purely to divert her Thoughts from dwelling upon what was disagreeable; and that it generally had the intended Effect, by putting her in a good Humour.

The play that was returned with the claret stain was the manuscript of her magnum opus, a play set in ancient Rome titled The Unhappy Father. Bridget also informs us that “Mrs. Leapor’s whole Library consisted of about sixteen or seventeen single Volumes, among which were Part of Mr. Pope’s Works, Dryden’s Fables, some Volumes of Plays, etc..”

There’s No Story There, by Inez Holden (1944)

Women workers training at a Royal Ordnance Factory, 1943
Women workers training at a Royal Ordnance Factory, 1943

I keep lists of books to find, to buy, to read, and three titles that have been on all of them for years are Inez Holden’s wartime memoirs/novels: Night Shift (1941); There’s No Story There (1944); and It Was Different At The Time (1945). When my friend Kate Macdonald recently announced that her Handheld Press would be issuing Night Shift and It Was Different At The Time in a single volume, Blitz Writing, edited by Kristin Bluemel in 2019, I was thrilled. Seeing my reaction, Kate very generously offered to send me a PDF copy of There’s No Story There that Kristin has been using for courses for years.

In her own post on There’s No Story There, Kate writes that this is “both a story and not a story” because it is essentially nothing more than a slice of time in the life of a secret munitions factory in Yorkshire and the lives of its workers, without a definitely beginning or end, which is certainly true. But anyone who’s worked in a high security situation knows, one of the easiest ways to spot one is by its deliberate efforts to maintain a low profile. “There’s no story there … move along” is the kind of thing a security guard might say as he quietly suggests you’d best move along. “Security is the foundation of the whole thing,” the chief of security tells the plant manager.

There’s No Story There is set in what was undoubtedly a Royal Ordnance Factory or its private equivalent run by ICI Nobel, one of the massive facilities, usually located well away from population centers and favored bombing targets, at which artillery shells and aerial bombs were manufactured. These facilities were literally powder kegs, where extraordinary precautions were taken to prevent sparks or anything else that might trigger an explosion that would very likely set off others and result in the whole facility being blown out of existence. No wonder such an accident is never far from workers’ minds: “Now supposing there was a ‘blow’ here … Another part of my consciousness would be taken clean away from me…. Maybe I wouldn’t even remember leaving the hostel this morning…. There would be a parting in my memory as if a zip fastener had been ripped back and then got stuck suddenly….”

Holden may have taken some inspiration from Henry Green’s superb factory novel, Living (1929), because she uses a similar approach, scanning through the minds of a variety of the men and women working at the munitions plant. Julian, the Dunkirk survivor who transports shells from one shed to another; Mrs. Karslake, the hyper-officious functionary whose chief task is arranging for film showings to keep workers’ minds from the fact that they are never more than a second from obliteration; Ysabette Jones, the schizophrenic who boasts of her Group Captain boyfriend who “knows German, Italian, Spanish and all those already.” Holden’s proxy is probably the observer, Geoffrey Dutton, who lurks on the edge of the scene, obsessively recording conversations in his notebook. Only Geoffrey notices that the male and female workers “shared the same table, the same food, and the same fatigue — yet the conversation of the women and the men was completely isolated, on from the other.”

It would explain both the exceptional accuracy of the book and its essential shapelessness. The plant, its workers hostel, its operations and the interactions of the people are all artificial, temporary, full of privileges unknown elsewhere in England (Ham! Fruit!), and always on edge, one ear cocked for the possibility of an explosion. “There’s no story there, one can’t know it all. How can one? — with thirty thousand workers, some brave, some sad, some stupid, some clever, and others just kind of comical,” one young woman writes home. Although her letter would most certainly have been censored by someone in the Security office. These places would, after all, have run much more smoothly if they didn’t have to use people. And that tension between the desire to dehumanize the process and the unsuppressible insistence of people to be human provides the energy that makes There’s No Story There such a fascinating read.

Kate is considering issuing There’s No Story There if the reprint of Blitz Writing does well. So keep an eye peeled for when Blitz Writing comes out next summer!

There’s No Story There, by Inez Holden
London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1944