Mastowe is a miserable industrial town on the English coast. Life there, writes Kathleen Sully, “seemed to know no moderation”: in the summer, “everything became dehydrated”; “in the winter everything was wet and cold”; and even when frozen “Mastowe managed to be uncomfortably wet — wet walls, wet bedrooms, wet cellars, wet feet, wet overcoats, and spirits, damp perhaps elsewhere, were sogged and water-logged at Mastowe.”
And the most miserable being in Mastowe is little Celia Wick. With lice in her hair, a rip in her bloomers, locked out of her house for hours on a cold and rainy day, going to bed hungry because her mother is too busy arguing with her father for coming home drunk, trying to fall sleep on a filthy straw mattress. She escapes by flying out her bedroom window, floating down the streets, transporting herself to the sea to watch a magical show: “the shells gave out tiny musics and the pebbles captured the light of distant stars, and the waves, separate and personal for an instant, each broke upon the living sands, then merged into the mother sea again with contented sighs.”
Through the Wall is Kathleen Sully’s grimmest story. Celia’s father dies of tuberculosis; when her mother remarries, the new husband refuses to accept the child and she is given to a friend. Any happiness that might come her way is soon replaced by a new tragedy. At fifteen she hitch-hikes to London. We last see her being taken into a lay-by by a trucker.
Suddenly, the story jumps forward twenty years. The step-father who disowned her is tormented with guilt. He convinces himself that a woman in London who’s been sentenced to hang for murder is Celia and sends his nephew off to find her and seek her forgiveness. Reluctant at first, eventually the nephew leaves on a long and largely fruitless search that leads him through a series of London neighborhoods as hard and poor as Mastowe.
Through the Wall contains some of Sully’s strongest writing. As her first book, Canal in Moonlight suggests, she had more than a brushing acquaintance with the smells, the sounds, the sensations, and the desperation of poverty. The row houses with broken windows, a jake in the back, and underfed and dirty children playing in the street. The crowded pub full of people looking for an escape:
… the mixture of other sounds, the warmth of alcohol within, and the close-pressing bodies without, all added to the feeling of unreality and confusion.
A pair of feet tapped out the rhythm of the piano’s tune; two or three voices sang the words; glasses clinked; a man shouted, “Two beers”; a woman laughed with a full, unrestrained voice.
… A woman caught his eye, but her stare was vacant, unseeing; she raised a glass of gin to her mouth, drank, continued to stare, but her thoughts seemed far away.
A man rolled up his shirt-sleeve, and carefully explained something about a scar to a disinterested group of people who drew seriously on their cigarettes.
An old woman, black-hatted, stockinged, coated-and-scarfed, nodded her shriveled head as if counting the throng, and smiled secretly into a glass of stout every time she took a sip.
The power of Sully’s spare but evocative prose cannot disguise the awkward seam that joins the two parts of her story. Gradually, however, the real link between Celia and Rodney, the nephew searching for her, becomes apparent, and it has little to do with their practical circumstances. Through the Wall is ultimately a book about the possibility of spiritual survival in a relentlessly harsh world. I’m not sure I say that Sully fully realized what she attempted, but once again, she demonstrates a voice and vision that was unlike anyone else’s. My respect for her achievement grows with each book.
Through the Wall, by Kathleen Sully London: Peter Davies, 1957
A Breeze on a Lonely Road may be the most level-headed account of madness every written. Not that Trevor Greyson, Sully’s lonely bachelor solicitor is raving and frothing at the mouth mad. Trev has a very moderate, very English form of madness: for over thirty years, he steps into an alternate reality out on the moor: “On the moor he had many friends — all who came there. On the moor, he was not a greying and balding man of fifty: he was a supple youth whose voice rang with enthusiasm.”
On the moor, exciting things happened. On the moor, people were friendly: genuinely interested in him, genuinely please with his company. Unfortunately, “He had been escaping to the moor for many years and now it had become a greater reality than his waking live. It was his reality — so much that his work and daytime activities had become less and less important.”
The matter comes to a head during one of his mental trips to the moor when he comes across a group of badgers who have been killed. Dozens of their bodies lie scattered about. Trev finds this deeply perplexing: if this is his fantasy, as he understands it to be, then why would such a violent, evil act have taken place?
The experience leads him to reflect deeply on what it means for the moor to be part of his reality. He neglects his work to prepare a detailed map of the moor as he has experienced it. He compares it with real moors around England and finds no match, not even close. One night, as he is out with his friends on the moor, he asks them for their names, addresses, other details about their lives.
These are pointless questions, one of them, Edward, responds:
Telling you would mean nothing, and there is no name — no name that one could name though, if there were, how to get there? No map or chart could show the way but there is no map and, if there were, you would not be able to travel in that direction. Dear boy, do be content.
When Trev wakes, however, he writes down everything he can recall. He shuts his office and heads off to follow these clues.
None of them leads to anything definitive. It’s the wrong address, or no one by that name has ever lived there, or other details are off. Not just a bit off — wholly wrong in most cases. But still there are … resonances. He neither finds clear answers nor convincing disproof.
Concerned, his few acquaintances arrange for two psychiatrists to speak with Trev. And in a remarkably moderated depiction of psychiatrists at work, they bring Trev’s attention to possible connections between his moor experiences and his real life and leave it at that. No locking him away, no drugs, and no miracle cures.
In fact, they confirm what Edward had told him on the moor: “What you find out, prove or disprove will alter nothing except your attitude.” In Trev’s case, the most significant change is indeed one of attitude: from quietly and covertly sneaking away from his own day-to-day reality to a fantasy that makes him happy to deliberately making happiness part of his day-to-day reality. In the end, he’s still fifty, balding, and single and still responsible for what makes him happy: it’s a moderate sort of transformation, and all the more convincing as a result. In its own calm, softly comic way, A Breeze on a Lonely Road is one of the healthiest books I’ve read in a long time.
A Breeze on a Lonely Road, by Kathleen Sully London: Peter Davies, 1969
“It is impossible to stop reading Kathleen Sully, who takes a vice-like Ancient Mariner’s grip on your nerves and feelings,” wrote one reviewer of Burden of the Seed. I completely agree: but having finished the book, I feel like this Ancient Mariner took me on a wild goose chase.
Once again, Sully offers a story completely unlike anything before it. The book falls into three sections. In the first, we are introduced to Stephanas, a orphan boy living in the care of two elderly aunts quite unfit for the job. One day, Stephanas sneaks out the back gate of their garden, wanders into a poor neighborhood, is accosted by some local bullies, then latches onto Marge, a girl who rescues him by threatening the boys with a brick. Stephanas slides right into Marge’s family, sitting down to bread and drippings for tea. Soon, he becomes a daily visitor, helping with the washing up and bringing items from the large collection of antique china his aunts have inherited as offerings.
In this section, Stephanas seems a rather resilient kid, growing increasingly independent from his aunts as they grow less and less capable of taking care of him, let alone themselves. Their petty interferences drive away their one servant, who leaves them with a piece of her mind: “… they were completely mad. They ought to be shut away where they could do harm to none except themselves. And as for them having the charge of a poor innocent child! Words failed her.” Aunt Rose’s hearing begins to fail; Aunt Clara grows blinder each day. Merely fixing two meals a day becomes an ordeal, and Stephanas steals change from their purses to buy enough food to keep himself from starving. When Rose finds Clara dead, it takes Rose four days to comprehend the fact. It takes Stephanas five days to notice Clara’s absence.
Leap forward some years. Stephanas returns from college to open the aunt’s house and get it ready for sale. He seduces Marge, decides he’s not interested in her, fantasizes about Marge’s mother, then heads off into the world. He proceeds almost at random through a few unsuitable relationships, then sets his mind on marrying Edna, a headstrong farm girl he encounters in Somerset. Yet after he sleeps with her, he claims to be married already and unable to obtain a divorce. They settle into a cottage together, Edna has his child, and spend some happy years. One day Stephanas informs Edna that he had lied about being married. She takes their son and returns to her father’s farm. There is some tedious back-and-forth squabbling and negotiation, and they reach a truce.
Then the war (the Second World War, never mentioned in specific) breaks out. If Stephanas seemed to have an approach to relationships as odd as his name, his attitude towards military service is even harder to fathom. He considers going into hiding. He enlists. Then he decides to escape to Ireland and desert. Running into Marge on the way, he drags her along. Then he changes his mind. Then he returns to his unit and is shipped overseas. After years, he comes back to Somerset and there is more back-and-forth with Edna. He thinks he wants her back. She thinks she wants to marry a farmer. Oh, by the way, we learn that their child had somehow been killed in the war. Stephanas goes off on a walkabout to lose himself. Then he changes his mind. By which point it’s momentum alone that will keep a reader from giving up.
And by which point it becomes clear that Kathleen Sully somehow lost her way in the course of writing Burden of the Seed. What started as an emotionally compelling story, sort of Great Expectations brought forward sixty years, became a meander in search of a protagonist. Young Stephanas has spunk. Adult Stephanas is emotionally damaged and incapable of knowing his own mind for much more than a day or two at a time. Edna is the one level-headed character in the book, but you have to wonder why she doesn’t show Stephanas the door, which would have brought the book to a close around page 100. There is some good writing her, but Kathleen Sully’s assembly is too jury-rigged to stand the test of time. I have to give Burden of the Seed a solid “Justly Neglected” rating, I’m afraid.
Burden of the Seed, Kathleen Sully London: Peter Davies, 1958
Conner Rink Club Skate advertisement from Nicholson’s roller skating rink book
The 1880s saw a short-lived craze for roller skating in America. Operators opened up skating rinks in most major cities, and boosters like Thomas Nicholson of Boston tried to stimulate the trade by publishing tips to help rink operators pull in business with contests, spectacles, and prizes. Here are two suggestions that one hopes, for the animals’ sake, were never actually tried.
Fox Drive
If a fox can be procured, this attraction can be made extremely exciting. Before the evening for the drive the fox should be turned loose in the rink, and run about by a half dozen boys, so that the fox may become accustomed to the place. If this is not done, it is possible he would become stupefied with fear on the night of the Drive, and refuse to run at all, and thus render the Drive a failure, and a matter of regret to the Manager. Woven wire should be stretched about the rink so that the fox can not get to the audience. When all ready, turn two young men into the enclosure, and then turn the fox loose. If they fail to catch the fox in two minutes, let two other contestants try It for same time, and if they fail, still two other; and if they fail, then let all six try it, and if they are unable to catch the fox, the Manager will have provided a great deal of amusement without the expense of paying for the stipulated prize.
Pig Chase
Select for this attraction a pig weighing about one hundred pounds, but not so fat as to render him clumsy. Chase him around the rink five or six times of evenings after the rink closes, so that he may become accustomed to the floor and the lights. On the night for the Catch have the pig clipped and greased, and then turn him in the rink. Only two young men should be allowed to attempt to catch him at a chase. It should be stipulated in the “Catch” that when one contestant has hold of the pig that the other must stand aside until he either gets the pig in the basket which should be provided for him, at the judges’ feet, or gets away. A chase should be timed to two minutes. If the young men fail in this time to catch the pig, then two others try, and if they fail, two others; and if the six fail, then let all try. The pig is to be caught and carried to the basket, and laid in, and not thrown in.
“This attraction is very amusing, and will no doubt call for repetitions,” Nicholson adds. How jolly.
From Nicholson’s roller skating rink book, containing over sixty choice and novel attractions with full instructions to rink managers, by Thomas Nicholson, published by Nicholson & Bro., Richmond, Indiana, 1886. Available online at the Internet Archive: Link.
The Fractured Smile is a Feydeau comedy of infidelity, coincidences and missed connections transported to sixties England and a universe where Brownian motion has replaced Newtonian mechanics. Jess wakes to a phone call saying that her husband, George, has been spotting boarding a train to the seaside with his very attractive secretary. Jess throws on a dress, digs George’s revolver out of the attic, and dashes out of the house still wearing her bright red fuzzy slippers, with son David in tow, to give chase.
From this point on, the chain reactions take off, carried along by their own momentum. Except that Sully’s chain reactions have a unique characteristic. While each propels the story along, it also causes her characters — and the reader — to adapt to a shift in perspective. Piling into the first train compartment with any space, full of adrenaline and jealous rage, Jess gradually realizes that her compartment mates are not aloof and anonymous but a group of little people, elderly, alert, and considerate: “She looked around at their faces — they were pocket-sized angels in moth-balled reach-me-downs.”
Once at the coast, Jess quickly discovers how difficult it is to track down an unfaithful husband in a resort town full of hotels when his name really is Mr. Smith. Jess becomes separated from David and the gun. David meets up with a fearless local seven year-old named Rodge and the two of them meet up with a tenacious little dog they name Stray. Both Jess and George’s parents learn of her homicidally-minded flight to the coast and decide to team up and head off in pursuit.
Characters rush in and out of places with the manic energy of a farce on fast-forward. The two sets of in-laws, at distant ends of the financial and cultural spectrum, find they have far more in common than suspected. George eventually shifts from skulking husband to ally in the hunt for the lost boys. But in Sully’s physics, nothing that’s been upended can’t be upended again. Another accident, an angry word, and soon the in-laws are at battle again: “She could hear their querulous voices, her mother’s dominating all, as they quarrelled, heavily and bitterly, bringing up old wounds from the past, personal slights, imagined insults, broken promises — anything, anything at all so long as it could be hurled spitefully at the other.”
And as seems to be a rule in Sully’s universe, death is never too far off stage. Emotions tumble one after another like the balls in a bingo spinner, so love and loyalty and giddy delight can be followed a page or two later by fear, bitterness, and dread. As one might expect in a universe ruled by a healthy dose of randomness, some reactions shoot characters off into quite unexpected directions and some simply ricochet them right back where they came from. One thing’s for sure, though: when you start The Fractured Smile, you won’t be able to predict how things will turn out.
The Fractured Smile, by Kathleen Sully London: Peter Davies, 1965
The Italians mix their officers shrewdly. Some are very ferocious looking gentlemen with fast-growing beards and grenades exploding dramatically on their caps, while others are very old men in shirtsleeves, who have some difficulty in speaking. The shrewdness of this arrangement lies in the fact that the ferocious gentlemen invariably have hearts of gold, as they are eager to welcome the visitor to a land of historical monuments and ultra-modern turismo, while the old civilians, uninhibited by such consideration, plough patiently and indiscriminately through piles of luggage, murmuring to themselves, and finally signing suitcases with a flourish of such assurance that they might be Titians making their marks on their greatest achievements.
Peter Ustinov, 1962
Should an irregularity be discovered, however, the administrative excitement is surpassed in no other country that I know. In England, they know the rules, and fine you. In Italy they rush to read the rules, and each man interprets them according to his conception of power, humanism, Christianity, honour and expediency. While one will accuse you of an assault on the very roots of the young republic, another will admonish you in clerical cadences for your lack of faith in your fellow men, and a third will just shout. Eventually they will become more interested in each other than in you, and it is at a point when the conversation has turned into an evaluation of the Partisans’ resistance on the Adriatic coast that it is quite safe to leave, with your contraband, naturally.
The Spaniards are far less reassuring. The calm is not the calm of Heath Row, the calm of the hospital corridor—this is the austere reticence of the Inquisition. The procedure is akin to a ghostly pavane, danced in the shadows of a bleak, comfortless shack. No language but Spanish seems to be spoken and if you are unable to answer the questions, that is the first black mark against you. In an oppressive silence, the white-gloved official indicates with choreographic gestures the objects he wishes to examine. The mime is hypnotic. Prostrated by the sheer weight of the true faith, you demolish your careful packing, and lay bare the innermost secrets of your shaving kit. When the ordeal is over, you are shot a smile of unexpected playfulness, which you have not the confidence to answer, and an imperious hand waves you towards the mystery of the horizon. It requires a nerve of iron, and a deep faith in the things of the spirit, to import even an undeclared tin of condensed milk into the land of the Catholic kings….
As for the U.S., well, we are all cops and robbers, and Japanese torpedoes are approaching from all directions. The marines fix bayonets and charge through your personal belongings. You are innocent till you are proved innocent, and guilty till you are proved guilty. No time to think or make your excuses. The G-men are after you, and how d’you like New York? Get these guys out of here, and get the next lot in, and what’s in that vanity case? Is that a radio? British? How does it work? We’ve gotten some smaller ones and louder ones and why didn’t you declare it?
Here there are no rules. The smuggler must talk faster and louder than his interrogator, and show a healthy interest in the baseball scores. That, if nothing else, will prove his innocence.
From “A Young Smuggler’s Guide to the Customs,” by Peter Ustinov, in Vogue’s Gallery, a collection from the UK edition of Vogue, published in 1962. Vogue’s Gallery is available online in the Open Library. It’s a reminder of those days when expensively produced magazines such as Vogue, Holiday, and Horizon aimed up, not down. Ustinov’s bit of throw-away humor appears alongside essays and stories by Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Bowen, Kingsley Amis, John Gielgud, W. H. Auden, Lionel Trilling, Tennessee Williams, and Colette. Here, for example, is Auden on the subject of opera:
Whether or not you will like opera will depend, then, I think, upon how characteristic of human nature, and how important to understanding it properly, you believe wilfulness to be. If you think that, normally, emotions just happen to people and that only a few hysterics try to make them happen, or that most human conduct is dictated by the demands either of natural appetites and aversions or of reason, then you will find opera artificial and insincere.
If, on the other hand, you believe that human beings are most characteristically human, as contrasted with any other creature, when they are doing something just for the hell of it, or that all men are constantly adopting some emotion and defending it with the same intense energy as that with which the characters in a Shavian play adopt and defend some point of view (incidentally, Shaw, on his own admission, learned his trade by studying opera), then all the usual objections of the opera-hater—the unromantic physical appearance of the lovers, the improbability of the plots, the suspension of action while the singers get things off their chests, the palpably sham scenery, will seem to you not objections but positive advantages of the medium.
Interspersed with the prose are gorgeous black-and-white portrait photos of Henry Moore, Audrey Hepburn, John F. Kennedy, Igor Stravinsky, and Hermione Gingold taken by the likes of Irving Penn, Cecil Beaton, and Anthony Armstrong Jones (AKA Lord Snowden). Everyone is bright-eyed, good-looking, talented, well-paid, and, with the exception of Sammy Davis Jr., white. Vogue’s color bar may have been discreet, but it was there, nonetheless.
Rosemary Tonks is now known as the poet who disappeared, thanks to a 2009 BBC program (“The Poet Who Vanished”) and features in the Guardian, TLS, the London Review of Books, the Poetry Foundation and others following her death in May 2014 and the reissue that fall of Bedouin of the London Evening, a collection of her poems and selected prose. In truth, she didn’t disappear as much as take a deliberate decision to step away from the life of London and literature she’d led since the mid-1950s. She had health problems, became a devout Christian, and spent her last thirty years in Bournemouth having little or no contact with the large circle of writers, artists, and friends she had known. Sometime in late 1981, she retrieved most of her souvenirs and papers from storage in London and burned them in her garden incinerator. In the years before her death, she read only from the Bible.
The reissue of Bedouin of the London Evening has done much to restore Rosemary Tonks’ standing as an innovative and challenging poet of the sixties. Though praised when her two collections of poems were first published, her poetry is aggressive, edgy, unsettled. “Her poems matched the forceful personality, being rhetorically explosive, with more exclamation marks than anyone else used,” one of her contemporaries recalled. She was neither feminist nor conservative: more than anything, she was an individualist. Several observers have remarked that she most admired the spirit of the flâneur — “equal parts curiosity and laziness” — as embodied in the work of Balzac and Baudelaire:
The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define.
She was a creature of the city. As she writes in “Diary of a Rebel,”
For my fierce hot-blooded sulkiness I need the café – where old mats Of paper lace catch upon coatsleeves That are brilliant with the nap of idleness …And the cant of the meat-fly is eternal!
She told a Guardian interviewer in 1968 that she used to drive straight into the centre of London each morning, and then to a cafe south of Putney Bridge, where she had scrambled eggs. And the photo on the cover of Bedouin of the London Evening shows her at work at a sidewalk table, a large café-au-lait sitting beside a stack of books and papers. Bloodaxe Books is to be commended for taking advantage of ebook technology and included recordings of Tonks reading a dozen of her poems, along with an interview with Peter Orr, in the EPUB and Kindle versions.
Tonks’ work as a novelist, however, has yet to be rediscovered, for the simple reason that it’s almost impossible to get hold of one of her six novels. The cheapest copy goes for over $70, the dearest for over $400. And forget about finding Emir (1963) outside a couple handfuls of libraries worldwide (she disowned it, anyway). Thanks to the Public Library of India, however, you can find her first novel, Opium Fogs (1963), online in electronic formats.
With the help of my daughter and the University of Washington Library, I was able recently to read Tonks’ 1970 novel, A Way Out of Berkeley Square. At the time it came out, the book probably seemed too odd, too marginal to merit much consideration. “I’m thirty, and I’m stuck,” Tonks’ protagonist, Arabella, complains. Living with her father, romantically involved with a married man, and barely employed with the job of decorating some flats her father is renovating, she was neither the Victorian model of a spinster nor the Seventies’ vision of a woman taking charge of her own life. One reviewer dismissed Arabella as “30 on her driver’s license and 13 in her emotional development.”
This is pretty close to her father’s estimation. He would have her be both the Victorian spinster, serving up a hot dinner and keeping a tidy home for him, and a go-getter, diving into the business of interior decoration with a profit-minded zeal. The one thing he can’t accept is what she is:
My father can’t bear ordinary life; a woman in a dirty cardigan with two pockets on the stomach misshapen by handkerchiefs makes him bristle up, the sight of a coarsely-patterned formica table with brown tea-cup rings on it and large yellow crumbs will cause him a temporary loss of personality, his ego buries itself in one of his shoes and leaves the rest of his body to look after itself, grey, inert.
“I’m out of the habit of taking action,” she thinks. “I don’t have a proper stake in life, in the world.” She definitely doesn’t care for a future of caring for her father for decades until he dies — and then having nothing to show for it. But she’s also skeptical that there is any pot of gold waiting at the end of the rainbow of marriage and/or career:
Inside the showroom I catch the eyes of various men and women, torpid and haggard as drug-addicts, as they turn over the endless fabrics. I have never actually seen a face with an expression on it in this showroom; blanks, and more blanks with dead eyes. The suffering is awful, and it goes on and on, like writing out “I must not say bloody” a hundred times at school, until you’re free to rejoin the mainstream of life.
Yet she wonders, “Shall I take this bit of life, because if I don’t I may not have any life at all?”
Her one lifeline is her brother, who has escaped from London to Karachi, where he is trying to find the distance and energy to make a start as a poet. They write each other nearly every day — he consoling her over their father’s domination, she cheering on his efforts to embrace his new surroundings and work on his writing. When his correspondence suddenly stops, she worries — then panics when she learns after a gap of weeks that he has contracted polio and is barely surviving with the help of his cook. (This parallels Tonks’ own experience of contracting typhoid and then polio while living in India early in the 1950s.)
The crisis kicks her out of her doldrums. Though still very much dependent upon him to arrange for her brother’s care and return to England, it’s Arabella who prods her complacent father and forces the action. In so doing, she discovers a capacity in herself she had not suspected: “I’ve found out that strength is silent; it doesn’t have to be talked about, proved, or borrowed from others. It isn’t even called strength, but action.”
It’s likely that The Way Out of Berkeley Square would have a more favorable reception today. A fair number of women (and men) are stuck living with their parents into their thirties with the decline in earning power and finding the experience demoralizing and emotionally stultifying. And Tonks’ prose is studded with little gems of description. Of her father’s car: “His new Bentley is fully automatic, has doors as heavy as safe doors from the Bank of England, and a steel body as wide as a ping-pong table. Inside you serve from one corner of it, while burning hot air and noisy stereophonic music try to draw off your attention, subdue, drown and kill you.” Of her married lover’s best talent: “Now there are some men who are so good at getting women across traffic that it’s a form of love-making, in which the woman is touched, protected, and lifted forward, until she reaches the opposite pavement in a state of mild delirium.” Kirkus’s reviewer called Tonks’ prose “A decorative style but it’s all parsley.” Well, if that’s parsley, I say bring it on.
The Way Out of Berkeley Square, by Rosemary Tonks London: The Bodley Head, 1970 Boston: Gambit, Incorporated, 1970
It was not only the well-known writers who had contributions to make; one is forever being surprised in Dublin by the high standard of knowledge displayed by ordinary citizens in any walk or on any level of life. I had many instances of this; as he pulled me a pint, a Dublin publican said to me on ‘Bloomsday’ 1962, when the Martello Tower was opened as a commemorative museum to James Joyce, ‘I wish Joyce had been alive now to finish the book. All that grand crowd up there at the Tower today, he could have polished them off.’ ‘There’s gravel in that,‘ I said. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ he said. ‘I sent some of them word last spring that there was a great old Dublin character by the name of Ted Keogh dying in one of the hospitals there. They took no notice. Oh there was a picture of him all right in one of the evening papers after his death, but not a word to say that he was the man on whom Joyce based that famous character, Blazes Boylan in Ulysses. Not a word. Just teetotal indifference.’ ‘You’ve read Ulysses?’ I asked. ‘I bought it in Miss Beach’s shop in Paris in 1928. The nice-looking edition with a white cover and blue letters. It was the only book in the window. A wonderful book that, especially for Dublin people. I think that for other people Joyce will always be a hard one to make out.’ Not that Irishmen in general are voracious readers of books. They are not. The late Dr Best of the National Library who appears in the library scenes in Ulysses told me he had never read the book. Yeats admitted to never having finished it. Bernard Shaw Wrote me that he had never had time to decipher Finnegans Wake. Synge did not read Yeats or Shaw. James Stephens and George Moore at first meeting were aware that each had not read the other’s work. ‘You and I,’ said George Moore to Dr Best, ‘can be very good friends without your having to read any of my books.’ And Joyce, writing to Miss Weaver, said, ‘I have not read a work of literature for years.’ All of a piece throughout. The truth is that the Irish are too fond of the spoken word to bother overmuch about the written word. ‘Architecture,’ said Caréme, the famous French chef, ‘is but another form of patisserie.’ In the same mood Irishmen tend to look on writing as just an architected kind of talk. Ireland’s best exports, in fact, are her talkers, and her best imports are listeners, and she usually manages to show a credit balance. Talk is a national industry, and always it is dramatic and colourful talk with the thrust-and-parry of debate in it.
Irish Literary Portraits collects the transcripts of nine programs produced and edited for BBC Radio by W. R. Rodgers, ex-Ulster Presbyterian clergyman, poet, and as Conor Cruise O’Brien puts it in his Introduction, the “one good listener” in a land of good talkers. “He would have made a good spy, in the sense of being able to find out an extraordinary amount about the people among whom he moved, but a very bad spy if required to report anything that could harm the people in question,” O’Brien.
Rodger’s oral portraits, assembled from dozens of recorded interviews with men and women who knew these writers, do not suffer, however, from any added gloss or rosy hues. One of the things Rodgers had to take great care with was the level of gossip, back-biting, and mutual denigration that was the warp and weft of Dublin’s cultural fabric. “A literary movement,” Rodgers quotes A. E. Russell, “consists of a half dozen writers living in the same city who cordially detest one another.” As O’Brien puts is, “Dublin’s malice is enjoyably present in these portraits, but the average level of malice is distinctly — and acceptably — lower than the average level of malice in Dublin talk.” “For a long-impoverished nation, with no rich urban heritage of culture, words were both portable and inexpensive, requiring only a mouth and an ear,” Rodgers writes of the tradition of talk in Ireland. And there’s no finer tribute to that tradition than his Irish Literary Portraits.
Irish Literary Portraits, edited by W. R. Rodgers New York: Taplinger Publishing, 1973
I don’t think it qualifies as a spoiler to say that the man on the roof in A Man on the Roof is a ghost. Specifically, he’s Wilfred Clough, late husband of Peony. Obsessed with stamp collecting while living, he returns to haunt — or rather, berate — his wife after she sells his collection.
Left with little after Wilfred’s death, Peony has moved in with Ada Frisby, a spinster and oldest friend. Though the two women find happiness in each other’s company, people make fun of their situation — their relationship, their age, their poverty. Even their landlady whispers behind their backs: “Ada-Boy” and “fat as a pig.”
Kathleen Sully’s inscription in my copy of “A Man on the Roof”But these old girls still have some spunk. Indeed, they constantly manage to bolster each other’s confidence. When Wilfred suddenly appears in their flat demanding that Peony retrieve his stamps: “I shall not go until you fetch them back.” “You must do as you please,” she replies. “It won’t affect us in the least.” And though Wilfred is further infuriated when he learns his coveted collection has gone for little more than three hundred pounds, Peony and Ada consider it more than enough to start a new chapter in their lives.
A Man on the Roof could have been made into a great little Ealing comedy had it been published a few years earlier. The ladies buy a junky old van, have it fitted with a couple of beds and a gas ring, and set out for a life on the road. Though hoping to leave Wilfred behind in the flat, he manages to latch onto them like a limpet. They have their share of misadventures, all accompanied with Wilfred’s grumpy commentary, and have a gay time.
And their dogged independence and bedrock optimism alters how they’re perceived. Instead of mocked for being too old, too fat, too poor, too ineffectual, people begin to see their better qualities:
But he did not see the wrinkles around her bird-like eyes, nor did he notice the grey amongst the soft brown hair which was cut in a modern cap of loose waves and curls. His did not see the strings showing her neck; he admired her hands because of the signs of toil.
He saw a small woman — remarkably fit and spry, sun-burnt and clean — no messy make-up or varnish, a gently smiling mouth — as sweet and modest as a young girl’s, slim, pretty legs –decidely pretty legs. And pretty knees — decidedly pretty knees. He saw a fine woman — a charming woman — and a woman who couldn’t be bribed or intimidated.
Even Wilfred starts to look at Peony differently. Her refusal to listen to his criticism or let his constant presence (he’s visible but immaterial, if that makes any sense) eventually wins his respect:
“I’m beginning to think that I wasted my life living all those years in that hole of a town. Why didn’t we come to live in the country?”
“I always wanted to live in the country,” said Peony.
“You should have forced my hand.”
“Easier said than done.”
“And to think of all the time and money I wasted on those stamps and what good did they do me or you?”
Farcical comedies are bit like wind-up toys: no matter how fast they run along at first, at a certain point it’s hard for them to keep going. The trick is wrap things up while there’s still some energy left. It should be easier to do with a ghost story: after all, ghosts can live happily ever after. In the case of A Man on the Roof, however, Kathleen Sully resorts to some cumbersome narrative machinery that takes most of the glow from what should be a sunny ending. (Tip to writers: if you find yourself introducing new characters in the last chapter — don’t.) Otherwise, A Man on the Roof is a bit of fun with no more substance than a champagne bubble.
A Man on the Roof, by Kathleen Sully London: Peter Davies, 1961
Edmund Naughton’s 1959 western, McCabe, is mainly mentioned as a footnote to Robert Altman’s first masterpiece, his 1971 film McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Reissued as a tie-in to the film when it came out, it’s been out of print for over three decades now and fetches some fairly steep prices. (My tip: the cheapest copies seem to be of the 1961 Oldham Press edition — the “Man’s Books” version, which bundles McCabe with two other macho titles in what appears to have been attempt to create a testosterone-rich alternative to Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.)
This is a real shame because it diminishes how much of Altman’s “revisionism” in his approach to the western movie derives from Naughton’s work. Superficially, McCabe follows a classic western formula: stranger comes town, a reputation as a gunslinger trailing behind him; he settles in and the town settles to him; then he is forced to decide whether to run and save his skin or stand his ground and take his chances. There’s a showdown scene as dangerous and gripping as the climax of High Noon.
Yet, writing just seven years after High Noon, Naughton is far less looking back at the traditions of the western than anticipating much of what came in the next 10-15 years, in films and, to a lesser extent, in novels. Naughton’s protagonist, John McCabe, is closer to an anti-hero like Catch-22’s Yossarian than Marshal Will Kane. Though a dead-eye shot who’s adapted his Colt to fire without a trigger, he has only killed one man and him mostly by accident. He lives mostly as a traveling gambler but reminds himself that he was chased off a riverboat as a greenhorn amateur. He tries to be fair to the Chinese and Indians in the little mining town of Presbyterian Church where he decides to set up a saloon and, later, a whorehouse.
And he is far ahead of his time in his attitude towards women — or at least towards Mrs. Miller, who arrives and takes over the job of running McCabe’s whorehouse. Though the two are partners in business and, fairly regularly, in bed, McCabe understands that he cannot take their relationship for granted:
McCabe was sensitive about being noticed in her room. He took care, thought, to be discreet, to attend to business, and there were nights when he didn’t want to go over there.
Those were the nights when he knew she would like there smoking naked on the bed with the wicks down in the kerosene lamps; and, if he came, she would look at him with eyes like violet stones in cold water — as if he were to blame for the man she had sold herself to that evening.
McCabe also exhibits a degree of emotion intelligence that’s still pretty rare in most male characters. He struggles with Mrs. Miller’s dispassionate approach to their nights together. Though frustrated that she quickly sees that he is close to illiterate and far less trustworthy with figures, he wishes they could share more than just a physical intimacy: “All my like I been walking around with a block of ice inside me, Constance, and I don’t hardly get the sawdust brushed off before you got me back in the icehouse.”
Naughton’s view of good and evil is a far cry from High Noon, too. McCabe is a gambler, a schemer, a coward and, when pressed, a killer. Rev. Elliott, who has erected the church that gives Presbyterian Church its name, is bitter, bigoted, and anti-social: he would prefer that the rest of the town disappeared. When gunmen arrive to face off with McCabe, they are there as stooges of a distant corporation, carrying out a business transaction:
Snake River Mining Company can’t afford you: can’t afford a man it can’t buy out. Know that? Never tolerate that. Can afford Sheehan, damned fop they sent to you last week: margin of corruption it allows for in its budget. Company calculated the cost of Presbyterian Church; who collects doesn’t matter. More corrupt people are, easier they can be controlled; company can always send them to jail when they get to be a nuisance.
… At any rate, McCabe, they can’t afford you around. Bad example. Pile all these mountains on you, if they have to; so people thereabouts will believe it, if they deny you ever existed.
Naughton may have been the only writer of westerns to have learned more from George Orwell than Zane Grey — although one English reviewer cited a different influence, dismissing the book as the “Latest example of the neo-Freudian intellectual death-wishful Westerns.” Suffice it to say that McCabe merits more than just footnote status in reference to a much better known movie. It’s original, innovative, and as gripping as any thriller. And, as one reviewer put it, “You don’t have to like westerns to like this one.”
McCabe, by Edmund Naughton New York: Macmillan, 1959
Kathleen Sully uses death as punctuation in A Man Talking to Seagulls, a tale of one day in the life of Dundeston, a resort somewhere on the east coast of England. She opens the day with the body of a young woman washed up on the beach. Scratcher, a vagrant living in a shack on the beach, “a man of little account to anybody — even himself,” is the first to find her and, it seems, the only one to take any note of her death. “Where is she?” he asks the seagulls as he feeds them.
She must be somewhere; she can’t be nowhere. A person is a person the same as a gull’s a gull. And a soul’s a soul: indestructible, quite — quite indestructible, everlasting, for ever and ever. The good Lord said it was so — is so. The body holds the soul — holds us.
The police come quickly and take the body away and Dundeston carries on with its day. The man who rents the beach chairs begins setting them up. The man with the donkeys brings them out to await a new batch of riders. The cockle seller lights up his stove and raises the awning on his stand. The day-trippers start flowing in from the bus stand and train station. The people staying in holiday bungalows awake and breakfast.
In one of the bungalows, two young people away for a secret weekend begin arguing. He loses his temper and throws a vase at her head. She collapses. He tries to rouse her. Finding no sign of life, he decides he must dispose of the body. “Val won’t be missed — yet,” he thinks. “When she was missed — and who would miss her apart from her landlady and a few casual friends — would she be traced?” He stashes the body in a shed and heads into town for breakfast.
This disregard for the value of a life threads throughout A Man Talking to Seagulls like a motif in a minor chord: never too long, never too loud, but persistent and unsettling. To the young and healthy, it’s an irrelevance. To the middle aged trying to get through another day, it’s an annoyance. And to an old woman quietly nipping from the bottle of gin in the family picnic basket, it’s a disturbing inevitability:
Her youth was long past, yet she found it difficult to accept the fact that she was old — really old. But her weak and trembly legs insisted upon it; her gnarled and blue-roped hands proclaimed it; only the oldest of human flesh was as crepe-like and yellowed as her own.
And a little while after having these thoughts, as she sleeps in her beach chair, death makes its second appearance of the day. “What can we do with her out here — how will we get her home?” is her daughter’s first reaction. She is still at the annoyance stage.
Sully manages to squeeze a cast of dozens into the space of barely 160 pages. They weave in and out, crossing paths or missing each other entirely. Val, the girl with the cracked skull, comes to, finds herself wrapped up in a canvas cloth in the shed, susses the situation, manages to slip out, and heads for the first train out of town. Her would-be murderer wanders the town trying to decide between finding a shovel and a discreet bush to bury her behind and attempting to toss her body into the sea that night. He meets a creepy old man in a isolated mansion at the edge of the town and is left with the distinct impression that the old man may have buried a body or two himself.
But he never meets with any sense of regret until death makes its last visit of the day. Wandering along the beach, he comes across another body:
For an instant he knew that he beheld a husk — that the man was elsewhere — and that life was life and could not be denied or extinguished — ever. The body was merely a shack.
The instant passed and all knowledge of it: all he knew afterwards was that he had felt something to stupendous to comprehend.
After reading six of Kathleen Sully’s seventeen novels, I think I can see two themes emerging in her work: life is chaotic and rarely comprehensible; and death is inevitable and never more than a breath away. A Man Talking to Seagulls is an apt example of how she managed to weave both themes into a single composition almost Simenon-ian in its grim efficiency.
A Man Talking to Seagulls, by Kathleen Sully London: Peter Davies, 1959
Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Daniel Wintle MC, or A. D. Wintle for short, was one of the great characters of the 20th century, a genuine war hero, egoist, eccentric, and defender of all things gentlemanly. He died before finishing his autobiography, but when his friend Alastair Revie condensed the million-some words of manuscript that Wintle left behind him into under 300 pages, he was sure to keep Wintle’s chosen title: The Last Englishman (1968). I’m sure Wintle would have held that there was nothing the least bit presumptuous about it.
This is the book I wanted to write about, but unfortunately, copies fetch anywhere from $300 to $2,000 — too rich for my peasant blood. So I had to make do with what I could find and afford: Wintle’s 1961 novel, The Club, which can be had (at the moment) for as little as 64 cents. Although calling it a novel vastly exaggerates the book’s substance. It’s more of a will-o’the-wisp in hardback form.
It is not one of the leading clubs. It is The Leading Club itself. It is the standard club on which all other clubs leading or following would wish it to be supposed that they themselves are modelled.
It is “The Club,” and as such it is known, not only to taxi-drivers and other persons in equally specialized professions, but also to all members of all clubs or would-be clubs.
The Club claims to be a history of The Club assembled by a group of distinguished editors, but it is in fact merely a collection of old warhorses of anecdotes told by Sir Milner Gibbard, Baronet, of Blandwich Place in the County of Wessex, the member of over fifty years’ standing proposed as their expert source — although Sir Milner’s first reaction is to dismiss the idea outright: “‘No!’ he snapped. ‘Absolutely out of the question,’ he added, no doubt with the intention of making his intention crystal-clear.”
“The trouble is … the great trouble is, that I don’t know anything about it.”
The editors are confused.
“You talk as if I had been here for five thousand years instead of fifty,” he explains.
After a fair amount of fruitless negotiations, one of the editors suddenly realizes the problem. “He paused, then raised his voice and spoke very slowly and very clearly: ‘We were asking … I mean to say, that I was asking you to write us a History of The Club.”
“The Club!” he exclaims. “Good God, I thought you said The Flood.”
This gives you an idea of the tone (and content) of the rest of the book. Just imagine Spike Milligan in the role of Sir Milner and you’ll find you’re reading a collection of never-performed skits from The Goon Show.
And just what exactly is wrong with that? I hear you ask. My point precisely, sir!
None of the four novels by Kathleen Sully I’ve read so far is anything quite like the others, but I feel safe in saying that Skrine is the most unlike the rest. In fact, in his TLS review, Arthur-Calder Marshall observed that Sully’s critical reputation (back when she had one) would have been higher if she’d had the stamina to rewrite the same novel over and over, like Ivy Compton-Burnett. Instead, he wrote,
Each of her novels, like those of Miss Muriel Spark, is original in the sense of being not merely unlike those of other authors but also unlike her other novels. Each demands from the reader an approach without preconceptions; each erects the standards by which the author wishes this particular book to be judged. There is no Sullyland, but there is a Sully world, as yet as ill-defined in her eight novels as the maps of the early cosmographers. It is being filled in piece by non-continguous piece.
From what I have been able to learn, Sully’s novels were set in southern England in a time somewhere between the early 1950s and the late 1960s. Skrine, however, while set in the same area, takes place in a time after most of the population and signs of civilization in England — and the rest of the world, we must assume — has been wiped out by some worldwide holocaust. Nuclear war? Plague? One cannot tell. “Surface earthquakes” is the most we are told. Survivors band together in scattered farms or the startings of small walled towns. Others roam the landscape, living by their wits and ability to overpower those like them.
As Skrine opens, the title character, has just killed a woman for a pack of cigarettes. He finds just one cigarette — desiccated or ersatz — left in the pack. No matches on her. And his lighter long out of fluid. He moves on.
A lone wanderer, Skrine is a stranger, looked at with suspicion and fear by anyone he encounters. And his memory is haunted by people — an old woman, a man, a child. Are they people he killed? “These people don’t exist — except in my brain. I must rid myself of them.” “I’ll be the boss,” he tells himself. “I’ll banish these apparitions for once and all time.”
But after he swims across a wide river — the Thames? — and collapses on the far shore, his imagination kicks in again. He sees a boy watching him. He cannot recall killing a child. Had he stolen food from him? “Children had been abandoned or deliberately lost and there had been rumours of cannabalism and the rumour hadn’t surprised Skrine or troubled him in those days — at least, not much.”
After stumbling on in a delirium of hunger, he comes across a group outside a walled town burying four bodies — three adults and a child. He edges up, watches, then cries out, “This child is alive.” Taken into the town, he is hailed as a healer. Some sort of illness is taking its toll, and the inhabitants flock to him to be cured. The mayor holds a council and it is decided to let Skrine stay.
At this point, the narrative shifts. Within a few days, Skrine discerns that the arrangements of power are more complex than he first thought. The real power is held by Jervis, a short, nasty, and brutish man who took over the town with the help of a small band of men armed with guns. Do the guns really work? No one has the appetite to find out. A few of the original inhabitants murmur about taking control back. Jervis recognizes the value of an ambiguous opposition and gives them just enough rope to keep muttering behind his back. He cultivates Skrine as an ally — also recognizing that Skrine sees himself as a loner and idealist, and hence probably not capable of organizing any viable resistance.
Skrinecould be read as a parable for the use of power in the age of Twitter. Jervis warns the people of the threat of attacks from other towns to the south. In reality, he wants to take their remnants of running machinery and supplies. In response to his threats, Skrine and others mutter their objections — but no one makes any over gesture of opposition. And Jervis has his trolls among the small population, raising charges against Skrine: Theft! Rape! Murder!
If a parable, then Skrine offers little hope for us today. Fear may be a negative force, but in the right hands it can be extremely effective, especially when it gathers an influential minority to its cause. A reviewer in the Catholic Herald called Skrine “an absolutely remorseless, post-Apocalypse novel, uncompromisingly bleak.” It is all those things — and also impossible to put down. One wonders how Kathleen Sully — then a mother of three teenagers — found a way to such dark emotions and then translated them so powerfully to the page. And one also has to wonder: how is it that Lord of the Flies has sold in the millions and is taught in classrooms around the world, while Skrine has vanished so successfully that not even a single copy appears to be available for sale?
Skrine, by Kathleen Sully London: Peter Davies, 1960
I’m not sure I can reprint the entirety of Julia Strachey’s one New Yorker piece, “Can’t You Get Me Out of Here,” which I mentioned in my post on Strachey’s autobiography (posthumously edited by Frances Partridge), without running afoul of someone’s copyright, but I can’t resist sharing its sublime opening:
My father, whose failing eyesight prevents him from reading to himself any more, sometimes invites me to tackle our English daily newspapers with him, and to read the interesting bits aloud. The procedure goes like this: I read out one of the headlines: “‘”UNFORGETTABLE!” SAYS THE QUEEN.'” I pause. No protest, so I continue: “‘The the Queen called unforgettable ended in twenty-one gun salutes, glistening eyes, prolonged handshakes, and that happy sense of well-being –‘”
“Pass on!” interrupts my father sharply. “Next!”
I try another headline. “‘SAILORS VANISH IN CANVAS BOAT.'”
“Pass on!” says my father at once.
I try again. “‘BURIED WALLS RIDDLE. Experts are baffled by the discovery of two six-foot-wide concrete walls below the pavements in Finchley Road –‘”
“Pass!” shouts my father. I look desperately for something else. I try heading after heading.
“‘THE GREATEST LIAR,'” I proclaim, and read, “‘A man went to the psychiatrist and told him –‘”
“Pass away!” barks my father.
I turn the page.
“‘COLD STORE BEAUTIES.'” I pause a moment. Then read, “‘Mean of the lilies on view–‘”
“Pass!”
” … umm … er … well, how about ‘MR. GAITSKILL HITS BACK. In an attempt to rescue the Socialist Part–‘”
“Pass on!”
And so we seem to go on all through the paper — Pass! Pass away! Pass along! Pass!
And these words of command from my father have so hypnotized me that I have fallen now into the habit of organizing my entire life to the administrative rhythm of these commands.
Thus, seated at our country kitchen table: “No more beans to be got out of these pods — Pass along. Washing up next.”
Or, in the sitting room” “That’s just about all I can bear to read in the parish magazine today — Pass away. — Out into the square now to find old Mr. Field and ask him to mow the lawn.”
But most often it pops up to keep my thoughts in order. To prevent them coming round full circle too often and that sort of thing. Pass! Pass away! Pass on!
“Can’t You Get Me Out of Here?” can be found online in the collection Stories from the New Yorker, 1950-1960. Now pass on and get to reading the whole thing!
Julia Strachey is hardly forgotten. In 2009, Persephone Books reissued her 1932 novel Cheerful Weather for the Wedding with a cover featuring “Girl Reading,” a gorgeous painting by Harold Knight, and way back in 1978, Cheerful was reissued along with her 1951 novel The Man on the Pier (using her preferred title, An Integrated Man) as a Penguin Modern Classic.
But neither can she qualify as a major figure in English literature, even within the narrower limits of the mid-20th century. She wrote an occasional short story and some undistinguished poetry but went through years with little or no writing to show for it. So there have to be other reasons to recommend reading a book about her life. Fortunately, there are plenty. Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey is a perfect illustration of how, in the right hands, an unpromising assortment of materials — autobiographical fragments, letters written by both women, an occasional editorial note — can be combined to create a stunningly powerful book.
Julia Strachey, age five, taken in IndiaFrances Partridge (then Marshall) first met Julia Strachey in 1909. Frances was nine, Julia eight, and they were in the same class at a girl’s day school outside London. By that time, Julia’s life had already been subject to a fair amount of disruption, and the situation never changed all that much thereafter. Born in India in 1901, her father Oliver, was the sixth child and third son of Sir Richard Strachey and older brother of a charter member of the Bloomsbury set, Lytton Strachey. Her mother, Ruby, was a Swiss-German beauty whose scandalous reputation was well established by the time she married the far more conventional Oliver.
The first few years in India would always hold a sunny place in her memories. Her mother was devoted to her, her father tender, their servants kind, and odd creatures — snakes, frogs, birds — wandered through its spaces. There were moments of innocent comedy as little Julia began to explore her world:
One day I wandered into a vast apartment, or so it seemed to me, next door to the dining room and normally out of bounds. As I entered I beheld to my surprise, at the far end on a kind of platform, my papa, usually so elegant in his stiff white drill suit and solar topee — standing now, a new colour (a brilliant crayfish pick) in the middle of a sort of local monsoon, with torrents of water descending in needle sprays upon his head. I had never seen him in the altogether before — didn’t even take in that that was what it was, and the scene was so unexpected that I must have stood there gaping, no doubt with the door wide open into the central dining room; at any rate I heard shouts from under the waters telling me to go out again and shut the door.
In reality, however, Oliver was profoundly unhappy. His musical aspirations had to make way for a profession. A brilliant man (he worked as a cryptographer for the British Army in both world wars), he was dissatisfied with his work. And he soon discovered that Ruby’s reputation was well deserved. When she became pregnant with another man’s child, they hastily decamped from India: Ruby to the continent, Oliver with Julia to England. They divorced soon after. (Years later, encountering Ruby in France, Oliver exclaimed, “Why, Ruby, you’ve done very well. You’ve had five children by four men, haven’t you?””By five men, Oliver,” she replied, “but don’t tell George.”
Oliver deposited Julia with an elderly aunt little interested in her care, who turned her over to a very old and very deaf Scots nanny who resented the imposition. She spent much of the next few years trying to amuse herself in the large dark house on the edge of Bloomsbury:
In the silent blackness of those teardrenched hours in bed, I would hear the clip-clop, clip-clop of the horses bringing their hansom cabs along the road outside, would hear them emerging little by little from an immense distance, and (after passing our house) retreating again little by little into a further immense distance in the other direction, thus giving me an audible statement of the incalculable remoteness of the vast Unintelligible Beyond lying all around my bedroom and the house.
Then, in 1911, Oliver married Ray Costelloe, whose mother, Mary, had married the art historian Bernard Berenson. Mary Berenson was one of the three children of Richard Pearsall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith, wealthy Americans active in the Quaker movement who had moved to England in the 1880s. Mary’s brother was the writer Logan Pearsall Smith. Her sister Alys was Bertrand Russell’s first wife. Oliver and Ray had no time for Julia, so soon after their wedding they deposited her with Logan and Alys (now separated from Russell):
Beside me towered two gigantic and handsome ladies who beamed me a welcome. I saw they were no longer young but in their middle years, because of the pepper-and-salt in their hair, and also a certain rigid stoutness, and loosening of jaw-lines. But I saw also that they were as radiantly healthy, brilliantly blooming and resplendently coloured and fleshed as the summer hollyhocks standing up beside the garden door.
All these prestigious connections had little to offer in the way of consolation for a lonely little girl who understood she was an awkward addition to their household. Logan Pearsall Smith was a manic depressive, “engulfed in a lack of interest in the living world so absolute that I was shocked. Deeply shaken.” Alys (known as Aunty Loo) took primary responsibility for Julia’s care, but she had a unique approach to the task. Aunty Loo was an Edwardian example of the kind of extreme altruism that Larissa MacFarquhar studies in her book, Strangers Drowning. She had an array of charitable causes she sustained and was constantly raiding the drawers in the house for clothing to donate. She also supplied her own needs from the piles her charities amassed:
The dresses that Aunt Loo subtracted from the American mercy parcels for wearing herself would, of course, have been taken over from someone maybe half, or maybe double her size. And it was perhaps to hide the imponderables of the fit of all these frocks of varying sizes that she was in the habit of adding, on top of any frock that she had selected for herself, a number of loose tippets, ‘Berthas’, tucked capes, frilled jackets, ‘Dolmans’ and the like. It was August, and today Aunt Loo’s assorted jackets were of thin cottony stuff. On top of all, and always taking pride of place, it was her custom to slip on a white embroidered muslin affair of broderie anglaise — whose wide sleeves easily accommodated all the other sleeves crowded within.
This last item, Julia learns, had previously been Bertrand Russell’s christening robe.
Aunty Loo also approached the world with a certain severe simplicity that Julia came to understand acted as a harsh barrier underlying any of the superficial warmth of her concern for the child. “I always feel so bad — so awfully sorry — that I can never be really fond of thee,” she once confessed to Julia. “I mean that I can’t give thee the love that thee’s own mother would have given. It’s awful that I can never give thee proper affection.” This sincere, if thoughtless, confession had the emotional impact of a sledgehammer. “It was one of those moments when suddenly a chasm opens under one’s feet, an earthquake,” Julia recalled. “I saw that I was left standing on the wrong side of it, that my home, so to speak, lay crumbled away in ruins upon the further unreachable part.”
No wonder that, as Partridge put it, Julia had “a vision of herself as entangled in a web of intransigent practical circumstances created by what she liked to think of as a hostile Cosmos.” And there is plenty of evidence here and in Partridge’s diaries that Julia suffered from a form of manic depression herself. A beautiful, effervescent young woman, she was considered brilliant company. She partied, drank, traveled, had country house weekends and affairs with the Bright Young Things and the Bloomsbury set, to both of which her pedigree offered automatic membership. She tried college, gave up after one term, tried studying art, did a bit of modeling, tried her hand at writing. She took none of it too seriously.
Somewhere around mid-1926, she met Stephen Tomlin, whom Partridge recalls as “a brilliantly talented, neurotic young sculptor, who dented the hearts or minds, or both, of most people who met him.” Julia fell for him. He … well, leaned for her. There was an attraction, but he was also bisexual and involved with a number of men, among them the painter Duncan Grant (who was living with Virginia Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell).
They married in 1927. At this point, Julia takes a turn, as the autobiography that Strachey began writing in the 1960s came to an end, leaving Partridge to work with letters, diary entries (mostly her own) and a half-dozen autobiographical pieces written in the 1950s. The record of this period is fragmentary. As Partridge writes,
It is impossible to be certain when the first cracks in the marriage began to appear, but by early 1930 problems seem to have been acute. The main root of the trouble lay in Tommy’s manic-depressive character. When in a depressive bout he drank heavily, and this in turn led to uncontrolled infidelity, followed by agonising guilt. Julia reacted by finding attraction elsewhere There were two attempts to solve their difficulties by temporary separation.
Duncan Grant’s illustration for the cover of Cheerful Weather for the WeddingThe one bright spot at this time was Julia’s finishing Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, which was published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1932, complete with a jacket illustration by Duncan Grant. Many of the circumstances in the novel, which takes place on a wedding day during which a woman perhaps not unlike Julia realizes she is marrying the wrong man but goes ahead with it anyway, were drawn from her own wedding day. She later told Partridge “that marrying Tommy was one of the things of which she was most ashamed.” “She was never really in love with Tommy,” Partridge observes: “She was desperately lonely.”
By early 1934, Julia had decided to make the break permanent. She went with Frances and Ralph Partridge on a long visit to Portugal and returned to a single flat in London. She spent much of the next few years making a circuit of her friends’ houses and estates: at the Guinness (brewery) estate outside Dublin; Pakenham Hall, where she saw Anthony Powell woo his future wife, Lady Violet Pakenham; Glengariff Castle with Solly Zuckerman; and many visits to Ham Spray, the Wiltshire house that Lytton Strachey left to Ralph Partridge. Just counting up the entries in the indices of Frances Partridge’s diaries, it appears that Julia made over sixty visits to Ham Spray just between 1939 and the early 1960s.
Julia Strachey in the late 1930sShe also had a few flings, mostly with younger men. She and Philip Toynbee ran off to France for a holiday. He was 21. She was 36. It lasted under two months. A year later, she fell for another artist (heterosexual this time), the painter Lawrence Gowing. He was easy going, full of good humor, and absolutely committed to his work. Julia found his focus something of a novelty:
The first time I visited Lawrence’s studio I found him crouched on all fours on the handsome red plush carpet, another present from his grandmother. Beside him were paintbrushes of every size, palettes, cans oflinseed oil and tubes of paint. A half-finished canvas was laid out on the floor in front of his knees. One could see he was short-sighted by the way he seemed to be putting the colours on the canvas with the end of his long finely-pointed nose, instead of with his brushes. I at once saw that his absorption in his work was total. He was lost to the world. It was a sight I was never to forget.
They soon began living together. Though they discussed marriage, it was Julia who demurred. By the time they did marry, in 1952, their relationship was already something of an odd compromise. Lawrence took a post with an art college in Newcastle. Julia could only bear the dreariness of Newcastle for a few months at a time. He was attracted to some of his students. She increasingly worried about her age, her place as a writer, her place as a woman. And she was increasingly suffering what we can see as clear signs of depression or perhaps bi-polar disease. In Partridge’s view, her situation is captured by these lines from An Integrated Man: “She seemed to be shrieking to be released. He was looking at an animal in a trap, crying out to be saved.”
Despite Lawrence’s roving eye, they found a certain comfort in each other’s company. Julia got a job she enjoyed, working as a reader in a publishing house and they took a country cottage a half hour or so from Ham Spray. She published several pieces, including a story titled “Can’t You Get Me Out of Here,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 1960.
I won’t attempt to summarize this piece, more essay than story, but it’s unlike anything that would have appeared in the magazine at that time — free-wheeling, absurd, imaginative, comic, yet packing a devastating emotional force. Strachey takes a bizarre incident from one of her trips to Italy, in which a tree frog leapt from an arbor into a tureen of spaghetti sauce sitting on her table, was fished out with a ladle, and then hopped off, disoriented, into the nearby bushes. “I am a tree frog myself,” she writes:
And I can confirm that it is indeed a brash curiosity about queer-looking-things-far-glimpsed that starts a tree frog’s nervous speckled legs to twitch. I know it all –the lunatic leap out from the scaffolding into space, the brief whiz through colored airs, then the landing down in the dark, among yielding, treacherous, slithering things…..
But for me it is the spectacle of the very Distances themselves, Long Distances (not negligible Distances), that intoxicates. Or to put it another way, the spectacle of Differences that acts like strong drink and causes the green-speckled legs to twitch.
Later in the piece, she and Lawrence, back in England, have to take Popsy, a friend’s dog, to a kennel for a short stay. Having had the run of a farm, cavorting among the cattle as Julia took her for a last walk, Popsy reacts in shock and panic when the gate of the kennel pen is shut in her face:
At any rate her old, familiar, beautiful life was over. She had been deserted by the ones she loved; she had been betrayed into the hands of these strangers, to live out the rest of her days in this rotten few inches of earth. That’s anyway, how it was to her.
As for me, I felt, as I lay in bed that night, as if a meat axe had been thrown into my soul and was sticking there, undislodgeable. In no time I was out of the scaffolding and down in the darkness inside the old spaghetti tureen.
One cannot miss the parallels between Julia’s abandonment by her parents and Popsy’s being left at the kennel.
Julia Strachey outside Ham Spray, 1964From this point forward, the signs of Julia’s decline became too obvious for Partridge to ignore. In 1962, she agrees to stay with Julia while Lawrence is away with Jenny, the woman he eventually comes to live with. “On the eve of setting out for three weeks married life with Julia. I’m very well aware of the difficulties and sadness that lie ahead, and also full of humility and uncertainty about my appointed task.” When Julia complains, “I can’t live alone,” Partridge confides in her diary, “What is my responsibility towards her, as her oldest friend? I am selfishly wondering, and so far my answer is: I’ll do everything I possibly can, short of giving up my independent solitary life.” (Ralph Partridge had died of a sudden heart attack in 1960.)
In 1964, not long after the death of Frances’ only son, they travel together to Rome. Frances is always alert for Julia suddenly veering off course, concerned that neither her prescription drugs nor the Italian wine are helping. In her diary entries, Frances is constantly switching between friend and caretaker: enjoying her company, ushering her out of awkward situations. A year later, after a dinner together, Frances writes with relief, “She is, after all, the person with whom I am most at ease, the oldest of my friends.” By 1970, Frances is noting that Julia “is coherent one moment, muddled the next.” Their friendship strains, breaks. Julia “flounced out of my flat banging the door and saying we are constitutionally unfit to get along with each other.” Two years without contact follow, until Frances extends an olive branch and invites Julia to dinner again. Their friendship resumes.
By early 1974, however, the reprise is at an end. “Julia has suddenly lurched into old age and it’s a distressing spectacle,” Frances writes. In July, after a phone call full of “inspissated gloom,” she cries out to her diary: “Oh Julia, Julia, Julia, Julia!” Over the next months, more pleas for help, followed by recriminations and accusations. In December, another call: “I wonder if you’d have a moment. I’ve been feeling suicidal. The doctor doesn’t send my pills and my sink’s full of dirty washing up and I have no food in the house.” Frances rebels — if only to herself: “F (silently): No. No. No.”
A year or so later, suffering from the flu and losing energy, Julia writes in a last diary fragment, “My fear is that I shall lose the only interest I still have in staying alive — namely the desire to get some of my past life materialised in my writing. But my memories — even the most vital and precious — seem to be fading also, like the daylight.” To which Frances adds, “To further this aim of Julia’s, and at the same time show her quality as a writer and a human being, has been the purpose of this book.”
Julia Strachey died in 1979. Frances Partridge died in 2004, just short of the age of 104, having published the last volume of her diaries three years before. It seems unlikely that another book like Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey will ever be published. Julia and Frances knew each other for seventy years, at their best and worst of times and had the capacity to write about their experiences with honesty, intelligence, and more than a little humor. Frances loved Julia but struggled to tolerate, let alone understand, the effects of her mental illness. Would any of us do better? Neither woman will ever rank among the major figures of their time. Yet in this book they managed to create one of the finest English autobiographies. It’s been reissued several times by Penguin, most recently by Phoenix in 2001. It richly deserves to be brought back again — and this time, for good.
Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey by Herself and Frances Partridge London: Victor Gollancz, 1983
I wrote about Frank Laskier’s fictionalized autobiography, Log Book, over six years ago, but it wasn’t until recently that I had the chance to read My Name is Frank, the collection of BBC broadcast talks that brought him to fame. Even slighter in length than Log Book, My Name is Frank still manages to carry a powerful message after over seventy-five years.
In the spring of 1941, a small crew led by BBC reporter Terence de Marney toured some of the ports most badly damaged in the Blitz. They spent an afternoon at the Seamen’s Home in Liverpool, where they met numerous merchant seamen just ashore from Atlantic convoys under constant attack by German U-boats. De Marney decided it would be a good source of material and returned soon after, spending six weeks as an ordinary resident, collecting stories. But when he sat down with Frank Laskier, who was at the home waiting for an artificial foot to replace the one shot off when the German raider Komoran attacked and sank his ship, de Marney realized he’d found a perfect personality for radio.
Over the next few weeks, de Marney sat down with Laskier and recorded around a dozen talks, all roughly 10 to 15 minutes long. The first of these, broadcast on 5 October 1941, recounted his experience of being sunk, spending two days on a raft with nine other survivors, being rescued by a Spanish steamer and then transferred to a Royal Navy cruiser. “I am a sailor, an Englishman, and my first name is Frank,” Laskier begins. “I am quite an ordinary sort of individual — all we sailors are,” he continues in the matter-of-fact tone that characterizes the entire book.
You can hear a recording of the original broadcast, released as a 78 RPM single on His Master’s Voice, on YouTube:
I highly recommend taking the time to listen to it all. For a story about violence, survival, and suffering, there is no extraneous dramatization. Instead, there is a sense of calm resolution and, most remarkably, a tenderness rarely found in a man’s account of war. I can’t listen to the last two minutes without tearing up.
The response to the first broadcast was beyond any expectations. BBC not only broadcast the rest of Laskier’s recordings with de Marney but London publisher Allen & Unwin arranged to release them as a book, with an introduction by noted sea writer William McFee a foreword by BBC staffer Eldon Moore. The U.S. rights were bought by Norton, and the book sold well in both countries.
Laskier returned to sea after receiving his artificial foot and survived two more sinkings, but the demand for his material led to a further contract from Allen & Unwin and Scribner’s for his autobiography, Log Book, which they released in 1942. Laskier was then hired by the British Council to do a tour of Canada and the U.S., giving talks in support of the Allied cause. He married an American woman, settled in a town up the Hudson valley from New York City, and began a second career as a writer. He published sea stories in Collier’s and other magazines and a novel, Unseen Harbor, in 1947. He died in July 1949 when a car he was riding in veered off the road and struck a tree. In 1954, John Harris, author of The Sea Shall Not Have Them, edited a second novel Laskier was working on when he died, and it was released as Siren Sea.
My Name is Frank, by Frank Laskier London: George Allen & Unwin, 1942
Mrs. Todd in the garden with the frontispiece from The Country of Pointed Firs
After Reading The Country of the Pointed Firs
She was the one who lived up country Half in the woods on a rain-washed road With a well not near and a barn too far And the fields ledgy and full of stones That the crows cawed over and liked to walk in And the hill and the hollow thick with fern And in the swamp the cattails and rushes.
It was next to living in a town of birds But she had hens and a row of bee hives. When her mother died, and her girl, and Joel, She told the bees so they’d not fly away And hung black flags on the doors of the hives Though they’d always go when they could to the woods Or swarm on Sunday when she was at meeting. For each who went she had told the bees.
Change and loss was what the brook cried That she heard in the night — but she kept snug With crow-wood for kindling, and the sun shone good Through the tops of the pines, and her plants Didn’t fail her, and the rosebush always bloomed By the gnawed fencepost — what the horse had done When they had a horse and a cow and a dog.
O there had been many, and now was there none? Lost at sea, they said, her son gone to sea Lost at sea they said. But if he wasn’t And if he’d come back — so she’d stay till he came Or whether or not. Change and loss was what the brook cried That she heard in the night when the clock whirred.
But when the fog from the southbank came through the firs Till the air was like something made of cobwebs, Thin as a cobweb, helpless as shadows Swept here and there as the sea gulls mewed, O then it seemed it was all one day And no one gone and no one crossed over Or when the rain gurgled in the eave spout Or the wind walked on the roof like a boy.
Change and loss was what the brook cried That she heard in the night when the clock whirred Just before it clanged out its twelve heavy strokes In the thick of the stillness, black as a crow, But no scritching now with a scrawny great crackling, And the rain not trickling, nothing to hark to, Not even the tree at the north chamber window.
Till she routed it, horse and foot, Thinking of walking to town through pastures When the wood thrushes wept their notes And the most was thick on the cobbled stones With the heron wading among the hummocks Of the pursy meadow that went down to the sea.
And she had knitting and folks to visit, Preserves to make, and cream tartar biscuit, She knew where was elocamp, coltsfoot, lobelia, And she’d make a good mess up for all as could use it, And go to the well and let down the bucket And see the sky there and herself in it As the wind threw itself about in the bushes and shouted And another day fresh as a cedar started.
This was one of Jean Garrigue’s last poems, published posthumously in her last collection, Studies for an Actress and Other Poems. The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) was Sarah Orne Jewett’s most successful novel. Jewett tells the story of a woman novelist who travels to Maine to find peace and quiet and finish a book. She stays with and becomes fascinated with Mrs. Todd, the woman she boards with, a herbalist and the spiritual heart of her rural community.
Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into the low end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-brier and sweet-mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence known with all the rest. Being a very large person, her full skirts brushed and bent almost every slender stalk that her feet missed. You could always tell when she was stepping about there, even when you were half awake in the morning, and learned to know, in the course of a few weeks’ experience, in exactly which corner of the garden she might be.
And, like the bear, Mrs. Todd carries with her “a loneliness you noticed in her that you saw in none of the other animals”:
It is not often given in a noisy world to come to the places of great grief and silence. An absolute, archaic grief possessed this countrywoman; she seemed like a renewal of some historic soul, with her sorrows and the remoteness of a daily life busied with rustic simplicities and the scents of primeval herbs.
As Upton writes, in Garrigue’s poem, “The sense of community oscillates with isolation.” The same sense carries through The Animal Hotel and, indeed, seems to have through the later works of Garrigue’s other inspiration, Josephine Herbst.
“Once a bear kept a small inn for animals. Not many, just a mole or so, a chipmunk, a cat, several birds, a sheep and a deer. Wasps and bees, also inhabitants, didn’t count because they were innumerable.” Jean Garrigue’s 1966 novella, The Animal Hotel seems at first to be just a charming children’s story. The bear is a marvelous host, a diligent housekeeper who reminds the cat to keep its fish heads in a neat pile and the deer not to leave a trail of grass in the living room. She fixes wonderful meals of seeds and berries and each night they entertain each other with stories.
During the day, they wander through the fields and forest nearby, “traveling the way a brook does, by the path of least resistance”:
True enough, it took them like the brook longer to get wherever they wanted to go, but again, what of it? Every brook may feel that its destiny magically and magnetically draws it to some distant river but does the attraction of that looming end oblige it to get there by that shortest distance, a straight line? No. The sense of other destiny is there all the way, in every flat or round stone the brook trips over, under every bush, tree or moss-ledged wall the brook passes by, and so it was with these beasts when they went out on their rambles. Every moment of divaricating, very desultory direction they took was as significant to them, as bewitching and surprising as whatever it was they thought would be awaiting them.
But soon the simple tale of the happy life led by this rag-tag clan reveals a deeper layer underneath. There a loneliness in the bear unlike the other animals. The mole was blind, “didn’t care and had never known better.” But the bear “seemed to have renounced society.”
When hoof prints appear in the forest, the animals grow concerned. Too big, too nervous, too powerful to be trusted in their household. The bear goes out to look for him, so shoo him off. But then she stays away most of the day and then she disappears entirely. Each beast begins to feel “that the great days were over and their queen gone,” and to wonder if it is now time to move on.
Then, “after days and days, a very little packet of eternity,” she returns. Bedraggled, thin, with a thick leather collar around her neck and a chain dangling from the collar. The animals brew up a pot of tea and set to nursing her back to health.
When she recovers, she tells the animals not just of how she fell in love with the horse and went with him to the land of men but of the great career she had had many years before, performing in the greatest of circuses with another horse. And just as she had escaped from the circus to build a refuge deep in the forest, so she fled again this second time. Their special world restored to the animal hotel, they can look forward to the good times going on and on and on. “Would they not go on, and forever?”
At just under 100 pages and published by a small and then-new New York firm, the Eakins Press, The Animal Hotel went virtually unnoticed. In one of its very few reviews, Denis Donoghue wrote in The New York Review of Books that Garrigue’s writing had “a Book of Hours simplicity”:
Something of this quality is audible in The Animal Hotel. But the most important thing is that she knows her powers, she knows what she can do. If you want to write fabulous prose, the best bet is to compose a fable; to get the genre right before trying to get everything else right. Miss Garrigue has done this. So she is free to turn her pretty phrases, to speak of “the curl and curlycue of her voice,” giving the language its head: “Not me, I replied, for I saw what I knew and knew what I had to do and threw up the cards, every one, all the trumps of them and the trumpets, the trumpery too, and the triumphs.”
This is Miss Garrigue’s way of restoring the magic, by writing a book of charms, making the sentences charming.
In a short memoir of the early days of the Paris Review, George Plimpton claimed that The Animal Hotel was inspired by Garrigue’s experiences living at the Hotel Helvétia and its proprietors, Monsieur and Madame Jordan, who were generous and understanding hosts. Garrigue strung a clothesline across her room to allow a group of finches to reside with her. Not surprisingly, when Plimpton was offered to take the room over after she’d left, he found it “filled with sticks, stones, moss, seeds, wings, thistles, parts of dandelions, parts of pigeon’s eggs and snail whorls, etc.”
Josephine Herbst and Jean Garrigue clowning at Herbst’s Erwinna, PA house, 1957But there should be no mystery about the inspiration behind The Animal Hotel. “For Josephine Herbst” reads the dedication. By the time the book was published, Herbst and Garrigue were no longer lovers, but they were still involved in others lives. And they had spent much of the 1950s in a relationship that centered around the busy circle of people that swirled around Herbst’s somewhat ramshackle country house near Erwinna, Pennsylvania.
When I think of Josie as she was in her later years — or rather, as she appeared — I see a vital woman surrounded by a circle of eager admirers, somewhat after the manner of the classic fairy tale in which a maternal figure has taken shelter deep in the heart of an enchanted forest surrounded by swarms of little people on whom she is really dependent but who are also under her spell. In the story the unorthodox household is occasionally menaced — someone is wounded or lost or word drifts in on the lips of animals about trouble in neighboring territories or from remnants of the past — but on the whole it is a safe and sufficient unit, mysteriously enveloped in a kind of protective charm. There actually was such a fable written about Erwinna, by Jean, a prose novella, The Animal Hotel, first published in the periodical New World Writing in 1956. The saga of a country lodging run by an amiable but elusive Bear whose “past was more complicated than anybody could guess” had its origin, more or less, in fact, for as the 1950s progressed, the house in Erwinna was becoming a stopping place for a group of young men and women just beginning to make their marks on the world, and Josie was very much the star…. Through their eyes the idea of Erwinna as a place of fellowship and creativity not just aloof from but superior to the world’s demands was magically reborn.
One of these young women, Jane Mayhall, later wrote that Herbst “made one feel that life was a kind of involved continuity”: “Reassurances and advisos toward attention to immediate events.” But like Garrigue’s bear, “she did suggest that there were realities beyond the moment.” As Langer shows, one of Herbst’s painful realities was Garrigue’s constant affairs and dalliances with other women and men, which by the time The Animal Hotel was published had left her lonely and forgotten.
Josephine Herbst died of cancer in early 1969; Jean Garrigue died of Hodgkin’s disease almost exactly three years later. In her last collection of poems, Studies for an Actress and Other Poems, Garrigue included a tribute to Herbst in a poem entitled, “In Memory”:
You did not doubt that you were beloved And by good strangers, friends to you Bearing the promised language. Yet skeptic you could doubt Out of a full heart Who tried to beat the game
And did so, again, again, And raised us leaves of hope by that For something simple like a natural thing, for something large, essential, driving hard Against the stupors of too much gone wrong. And by your intensity Of flame against the dark (You beat up flame, You beat it up against the dark)
Gave us greater want To change the heart to change the life Changing our lives in the light that is changing But which has no future, no yesterday.
“Bikka’s rats are large, fierce and tenacious. They find rich pickings in the garbage of the extravagant Bikka poor which nourishes bodies and whets appetites for yet more. Only the boldest or most foolhardy of the Bikka cats ever stalk one, so they go from strength to strength; feared and shunned or abhorred and ignored.”
The opening lines of Kathleen Sully’s first novel, Canal in Moonlight, make it clear that the reader is well past even the territory of the “kitchen sink realism” of the Angry Young Men. This is the lavatory pan (toilet bowl for us Americans) realism. Indeed, one of the early crises in the book is the loss of the one and only lavatory pan at number 65, Bikka Road, home of Horace and Belle Hoppe and their sixteen children.
The Hoppes live along a former industrial canal, “now disused … a problem to the local authorities, a forbidden place of muddy excitement to small boys, and a dump for rubbish.” And, as the story develops, for junky old cars, broken furniture, and other unwanted problems.
“Canal in Moonlight” may be a romantic image, but there is nothing remotely romantic in this book. The Hoppes have far too many children to care for or even reliably keep track of. Belle is a former prostitute wed years ago to Horace, considered of “abnormal or subnormal intelligence” by his family. An utter stranger, he had walked up to her on the stroll one evening and proposed marriage. She had accepted. “Whether she had ever loved her even she did not know, but her respect for his respect of her was beyond measure, and she had never overcome her surprise at being asked, nor did she ever come to the dregs of her happiness arising out of it; her cup of happiness was ever full.”
So this is a family living in filth and degradation, totally dependent on the tiny allowance Horace receives from his wealthy brother (clearly to keep him at a safe distance), despised by their neighbors, never more than an accident away from complete disaster. Yet Belle considers herself near constant bliss. And despite the fact that Horace “had a strange, detached, unpractical and at times wholly stupid attitude towards all that his parents held important,” we soon come to realize that he is far closer to a holy innocent than a shiftless idiot. Indeed, when he feels compelled to provide Belle with the slight relief of a day’s outing to the seaside, he goes right out, secures a job as a delivery boy, and quickly pulls in some generous tips for his exceptional service and courtesy.
Such are the paradoxes that fill Canal in Moonlight. The Hoppe house may be crawling with children, not to mention the pregnant goat in the living room and the decrepit old horse in the front yard, but there burns a steady flame of … well, call it as you like — goodness, joy, or love. Meanwhile, next door at the house of the “good” Dyppes (surely Sully meant something by this Hoppe/Dyppe parallel), an air of bitterness and resentment prevails — and proves only a veneer covering a far more profound sickness at its core.
There’s no doubt that Sully was aiming for something that proved somewhat beyond her reach. As in the two other books I’ve read so far (Merrily to the Grave and A Look at the Tadpoles), she likes to work with a cast of dozens (a dozen and half just with the Hoppes) and as one might expect with a first novel, a few of them seem to have no particular purpose or quickly get lost in the hub-bub of her narrative. Some of her detours in telling the tale prove dead ends.
But as most of the book’s first reviewers recognized, there is a remarkable and original perspective on view for the first time in Canal in Moonlight. From those first lines, you know the narrative arc can only be headed in a downward direction. Bad things are going to befall the Hoppes, and they prove to be very, very bad things. And yet … well, it’s a bit hard to explain, but none of them manage to snuff out the little flame that each of the Hoppes somehow manages to keep alive. “So quiet, my soul, relent thy bitterness, garner thy strength,” Horace thinks as he briefly contemplates suicide near the very end of the book. “Who knows what struggle yet awaits us….”
Kathleen Sully was forty-five, a housewife and mother of three in Weston-super-Mare when Canal in Moonlight was published. No Angry Young Man, she, nor a heady young woman such as Doris Lessing or Iris Murdoch. But neither was Canal in Moonlight a safe bit of middlebrow comedy or Regency romance. And I think this was part of the problem that dogged her throughout her next fifteen years and sixteen novels. Those whom the gods would forget they first set outside any the limit of the known labels and categories.
This is so evident in the cognitive dissonance expressed by many of her reviewers:
• John Davenport, The Observer
Canal by Moonlight is a first novel. It is very odd. I don’t quite honestly, know what to make of it. I do know that I couldn’t put it down; or rather, that I dropped it like a hot brick, again and again, only to pick it up once more…. A short, phosphorescent insomniac’s white night.
• Douglas Hewitt, The Guardian
It would be difficult to find a greater contrast than between the work of the astute Mr Powell [a fair number of the reviews discussed Anthony Powell’s The Acceptance World alongside Sully’s book] and Kathleen Sully’s first novel, Canal in Moonlight, which is, in its own way, just as distinctive a performance. The brief notations with which a reviewer indicates to the potential reader that he will have met this kind of thing before and that this is a good or bad specimen of the type will not do for this novel. It bears all the marks — good and bad — of proceeding from a markedly idiosyncratic individual vision.
• Angela Milne, The Sketch
But no summary can give a clue to its quality; for here the ordinary standards of happiness and virtue are challenged and, through a sort of Chorus in the form of the spinster next door, Kathleen Sully puts forward a philosophy that binds these beautifully-written pages into a work of war. “She is a good mother,” the spinster says of Belle; and in that paradox lies the essence of a book that you may hate to read, yet will be glad to have read. It is a first novel for which “promise” is a mild word.
• Elizabeth Bowen, The Tatler
Bizarre? A nightmare prose-poem, a lyric nightmare? How shall one describe Canal in Moonlight?…. A well-nigh witchcraft quality in Miss Sully’s art makes what is barely possible seen probably — and, as in an Elizabethan play, violence goes hand-in-hand with purity.
• Vernon Fane, The Sphere
Canal in Moonlight is short and it is misleadingly simple. It is also dramatic, violent and unexpectedly tender in turn. This is Miss Kathleen Sully’s first novel and I know of no exact category into which it can be fitted, except perhaps that of books that are very well worth reading.
• The New Yorker
A curious piece of work — awkward, spontaneous, honest, and as real as the dream that wakes one suddenly in the middle of the night.
• John Betjeman, The Daily Telegraph
Kathleen Sully is above all things a born writer. This explains the mystery of her being able to hold one from her very first sentence to her last.
• Julian Symons, TLS
From the dramatic moments of these stunted lives Miss Sully has made comedy; but this raw, strange, imperfect novel is notable also for its awarenes that human dignity can endure through wretchedness and filth.
• Isabel Quigley, The Spectator
It is difficult to describe the extraordinary power of Canal in Moonlight. Among the rest of the week’s novels it sits about as cosily as an esquimo in an espresso bar. For it is a true primitive, something preciously rare among novelists, with the ruthlessness, the ferocious exactitude of observation that implies; an exactitude that may even make things look unfamiliar, so used have we grown to the layers upon layers with which our normal experience is overgrown…. To say it is a slum story of seduction, murders, suicide and desolation, conveys nothing. To say the house in it stinks of goats, blood seeps under the garage door for a child to bounce his ball in, and the warehouse rats are as big as cats, gives an impression of plain squalor. And squalor is far from being the final mood. This impressive book is, even more impressively, a first novel. I cannot for the life of me imagine what Miss Sully’s second will be like, for this one reads like a single, compact, and unrepeatable phenomenon.
For me, three novels have not quite been enough to form a coherent view of Kathleen Sully’s work. But Canal in Moonlight was certainly a unique book in 1955 and remains so from a distance of 63 years, and provides proof enough that her utter neglect in British literary history is inexcusable, if explainable. I have half a Hoppe-ful of her other books on order. The exploration continues.
Canal in Moonlight, by Kathleen Sully London: Peter Davies, 1955
Jack kills the giant, from Jack the giant killer: a hero celebrated by ancient historians (1820)
Back in the days when the average lifespan was about 40 years, children’s books could be pretty brutal. Take the story of Jack the giant killer, which now we almost exclusively see in its vegan variant, Jack and the Beanstalk. Here is a sample of some of the violence to be found in the pages of 19th century English and American versions of the story. The illustration above, which could easily date from the 17th century, comes from Jack the giant killer: a hero celebrated by ancient historians, by John Rush Golby, John Lee, and William Marshall Craig, published in 1820 (all links are to the titles in the Internet Archive.)
Jack and the giant, from The history of Jack the giant killer (1830-1835?)
Jack fools the giant, from The History of Jack the Giant Killer (date unknown)
We know, of course, that the giant was a bad guy, but today’s accounts shy away from the details of his crimes. In The history of Jack the giant killer, published by Walker and Sons of Otley, we learn that the giant (of Welsh origin this time) was a less than adequate host. As we see above, the giant, having invited Jack to spend the night in his castle, sneaks into the bedroom in the middle of the night to hack Jack into tiny bits. Fortunately, cunning Jack has put a log in his place and watches the attack from behind a column.
Jack and the Two Giants, from The history of Jack the giant killer (1860)
In many of the 19th century accounts, there are more than one giant. Sometimes there are several. Above, from The history of Jack the Giant-Killer by W. S. Fortey, we see Jack subduing two giants at once.
The two-headed giant, from Jack the giant killer (1843?)
Sometimes, the giants had two and even three heads. In this version. from Percival Leigh’s Jack the giant killer, the giant hails from Scotland.
Jack and the giant, from Jack the giant killer (between 1865 and 1889)
In later versions of the story, the giant grows less gruesome and more human. In the illustration above, from Jack the giant killer, published by George Routledge and Sons, Jack looks a right little prig while the giant could well take his place in a Biblical setting by Michelangelo or Rembrandt.
Jack kills the giant, from Jack the giant killer (1870?)
The taste for blood remained well into the second half of the century, though, as in this illustration of Jack with his nine-pound pickaxe from the McLoughlin Brother’s gore-packed Jack the giant killer from around 1870.
Jack wails on the giant, from Favourite Fairy Tales (1861)
Or this illustration, from John Corner’s Favourite Fairy Tales, of Jack wailing with Stakhanovite fervor on a particularly hideous giant’s head.
Grecian Jack and the Pre-Raphaelite Giant, from The Old Fairy Tales Retold (1870)
Still, the overwhelming trend was towards a kinder, gentler Jack and giant — as in the above illustration from James Mason’s revisionist The Old Fairy Tales Retold, where Jack is quite Grecian in his figure while the giant seems merely a troubled, if plus-sized, pre-Raphaelite soul.
By the time Andrew Lang and Kate Wiggins got their hands on them, is it any wonder the last bits of blood lust were wrung from this tale?
Mastowe is a miserable industrial town on the English coast. Life there, writes Kathleen Sully, “seemed to know no moderation”: in the summer, “everything became dehydrated”; “in the winter everything was wet and cold”; and even when frozen “Mastowe managed to be uncomfortably wet — wet walls, wet bedrooms, wet cellars, wet feet, wet overcoats, and spirits, damp perhaps elsewhere, were sogged and water-logged at Mastowe.”
