Wine costs so much a bottle, ready made. When you have once got over the effort of hospitality (if it is an effort) there is nothing to do but open the bottle and wait. But tea is different, especially tea among the poor. Sometimes it is an effort in itself to go and draw the water for it. Then there’s the teapot, and the cups, and the wondering how much or how little you can put in the teapot, the urging of the fire to boil the water; even the washing-up afterwards.
And when the tea is ready, there’s the terrible gratitude you feel towards the heat of it pouring down your poverty-cold mouth. It makes your whole frame fill with ambition to fight the beastliness of the world. And it is no false ambition. It gives you a fresh start without leaving a subtle injury behind. Also, you are filled with a more powerful and tenderer gratitude to the ones who make it for you. They know how you are feeling at the moment. Tea, like death, is a great leveller.
If And So Did I were to be published afresh today as the work of a woman in her late thirties with a number of well-received short story collections behind her, I have no doubt that it would be quite successful in its sales and critical reception. Thanks to Wild, Eat, Pray, Love, The Argonauts, The Liar’s Club, and dozens of other books, the world is ready–indeed, seems insatiable–for memoirs written by women with strong and distinctive voices.
Instead, when it was published in early 1939 in an England finding itself in a world of increasing uncertainty and dread, it received from an anonymous reviewer in The Spectator one of the most ruthless drubbings ever seen in print:
And So Did I (Jonathan Cape, 7s. 6d.) is a dangerous attempt to make new ground. It consists, apparently, in damp comments and scrappy reminiscences written at odd moments during her life in Yorkshire, and huddled together inconsequently into a full-size book. The result, from a conventional literary point of view, is worthless. Mrs. Malachi Whitaker has a certain talent for economical description; but her thoughts and feelings are dull. That she should find Ouspensky vain and pretentious, or admit that her own marriage was sordid, does not distinguish her intellect any more than her emotions. But presumably And So Did I is an attempt to exploit the personality of the author, even at the expense of deliberate literary faults…. Surely Mrs. Malachi Whitaker has been a little rash to attempt without artifice what, even had she used the greatest art, was likely to have failed.
This reviewer seemed to want Malachi Whitaker (the pen name adopted by the Yorkshire writer Marjorie Whitaker) to take her voice and personality and retreat to the silence and domestic matters that were a proper Englishwoman’s concerns. And if this was, in fact, his intent, then he should have been pleased with the results. Whitaker stopped writing almost entirely. She published just two more stories in the next ten years and, aside from the 1949 Selected Stories compiled from her previous four collections, never published another book. She died in 1976, noted in just a few brief obituaries. And thus was another fine woman writer effectively stifled.
Yet it’s hard to believe that Whitaker’s silence in print signified the stifling of her own spirit, for And So Did I is in its way one of the most original and vibrant spiritual autobiographies ever written. Whitaker took her title from a line in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: “And a thousand slimy things/Lived on; and so did I.” But it’s useful to read the lines that preceded it:
Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony.
The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I.
Early in the book, Whitaker writes, “For at last, I have time to take up my long-abandoned search for God and the Truth,” and this search is the thread that weaves, sometimes overtly but most of the time indirect and subtly, throughout this seemingly haphazard collage of memories and observations.
For Whitaker, the world of the spirit is never quite tangible. She envies Saul for the revelation that came to him on the road to Damascus: “Yes, lucky, lucky Saul, to have all responsibility taken from him! All that was left for him was to do as he was told, then he could be sure of eternal salvation.” No voice speaks to her from the clouds. Instead,
I can only sigh and pass on, because the Hound of Heaven and me seem to keep about the same distance apart, both lolloping along with our tongues out, downhill, and stopping at the same time for meals and so forth. I have never even felt his warm breath at my shoulder.
Church is no use in her search:
If I could find God in a church, I should be glad. But I cannot. I go often to sit in churches, both here and abroad, to think about faith and piety, and to be sorry that I possess neither. Now and then I see a good and lovely face, but it is mostly on a very old woman; and it makes me think there might be some consolation in age.
Perhaps I have no deep feelings at all, in the religious sense. I am glad to see young creatures, and leaves, and patterned beetles and snowflakes, and to savour the taste of each season. But life itself is difficult, full of unfinished ends and unfinished thoughts. I once went into Cologne Cathedral just as a service was starting, and saw a beautiful coloured show. The faces around me were moved by some deep feeling; and I stood, alone, frowningly curious but quite cold.
The abstractions of God, heaven, and eternal life can never quite compete with the intensity of the things and people she encounters every day. Her daughter pulling herself up by the back of the typewriter as Whitaker sits trying to write at it. A box of fresh peaches from a friend. A delicious meal at her sister’s, with new potatoes and mint, grilled plaice with parsley sauce, and a rice pudding cooked five hours in a slow oven. But she pulls against these temptations:
There is one part of me which greatly wants to be a good cook, but I suppress it. It is a kind of road to ruin. If I went along that road, I should look for God and the truth no more. My mind would be intent on flavours and sauces. I should have a garden full of herbs, and a quantity of fat friends. No, I’ll do it when I have to, but I will not make cooking my reason for being on earth.
Words are another temptation: “Reading flows in and out of my like breath,” she writes, a phrase I’d easily adopt as a motto. “It is something to keep my mind alive, as oxygen and–I have forgotten what else–keeps alive my body.” The books she reads populate her thoughts every bit as much as the people in her life. And the people, particularly her husband and their two adopted children, constantly draw her mind away from its attempts to escape to a more ethereal level:
Where am I? Here is my adopted son, reading the evening paper, one knee up and one knee down, his fair hair darkened on this side which is away from the light of evening. He has twisted round and shown me a hole in the seat of his trousers with an expression of great surprise. It is the first of what I suppose will be many. Baby is by now fast asleep in her cot. My husband is in London. So I suppose I should look at the living moment and find it doleful, but I don’t want to. There is a fire, and that is such good company.
Malachi Whitaker herself is such good company that whether or not one is in sympathy with her efforts to escape the mundane, And So Did I is never less than vivid and amiable. “I like to read what other people have written,” she writes, “in the hope that I can get a glimpse of the garden enclosed, through a tiny peephole”:
For I do believe that everybody owns the equivalent of a garden; a place inside themselves that they know has something really good in it; something from which they can give. But the flowers have a habit of turning to the rankest weeds during the transfer.
One can only conclude that for The Spectator’s reviewer, And So Did I turned to rankest weeds during the transfer–which undoubtedly was his fault and not Whitaker’s. As Philip Hensher has written, “Malachi Whitaker is not like other authors…. [I]t is inexplicable how English letters failed to find a place for a writer of such verve, colour, range and power.” “Life has been perfect in parts,” she writes at the end of And So Did I. And for my life, reading this book was one of those parts.
In 1984 Carcanet Press, a fine U.K. independent now based in Manchester, published a collection of Whitaker’s stories, The Crystal Fountain, edited by Joan Hart, another Yorkshire woman and writer of short stories, and followed it in 1987 with And So Did I. Paladin reissued it in paperback in 1990–the last time it was in print. However, with the recent release by Persephone Books of The Journey Home and Other Stories, edited by Hensher, there is a chance that And So Did I might see the light of day again.
And So Did I, by Malachi Whitaker London: Jonathan Cape, 1939 Manchester: Carcanet, 1987 London: Paladin, 1990
At St. Geronde: go to the Croix Blanche, the most execrable receptacle of filth, vermin, impudence, and imposition that ever exercised the patience, or wounded the feelings of a traveller. A withered hag, the daemon of beastliness, presides there. I laid, not rested, in a chamber over a stable, whose effluviae through the broken floor were the least offensive of the perfumes afforded by this hideous place. It could give me nothing but two stale eggs, for which I paid, exclusive of all other charges, 20/. Spain brought nothing to my eyes that equalled this sink, from which an English hog would turn with disgust.
Every year or so, I reach for one of Georges Simenon’s “straight” novels–those bitter human comedies, such as The Rules of the Game, that he turned out as regularly as his Maigrets, usually spending under two weeks in writing them. As I once wrote, these novels have something of the attractive bitterness of a glass of Campari. I wouldn’t drink one every night, but they have the same effect of bringing your senses to attention. They’re rarely more than 150 pages long, something you can read in a couple of days, and involve people getting knocked out of their comfort zone and into some unsettling predicament–sometimes life-threatening, always character-testing.
It’s reassuring to know there are enough of these romans durs to satisfy my appetite for as long as I can manage to keep reading–which led me to consider what other writers had a similar capacity to produce books in quantities and qualities likely to provide a near-lifetime supply. The easy answer, of course, is to look at genre writers: Barbara Cartland (romance), Isaac Asimov (SF), Erle Stanley Gardner (mystery), and many others wrote many dozens, if not hundreds, of books in the course of their careers, consciously aimed at feeding the hunger of their readers for a certain predictability of content and effect. I have a friend who’s read nothing but westerns by Louis L’Amour for over twenty years and still hasn’t read the same book twice. And there is the example of P. G. Wodehouse, who in his Jeeves, Psmith, and other effervescent comedies invented a genre of which he was the master and sole proprietor.
The label most commonly applied to writers who, like Simenon, produced many good but few great books, is middlebrow, but this is too often associated only with women (and those mostly English) writers such as Angela Thirkell. As with any spotlight, however, there are still more writers left in the shadows despite all the attention given by the middlebrow movement, particularly in academic circles, to a relative few.
One of these is Peter de Polnay. I’ve probably been vaguely aware of Peter de Polnay for years, since at least one of his books can be found on the shelves of just about every bookstore in England, but it wasn’t until recently that I actually read one — Blood and Water (1975). Blood and Water opens with a young and rather sheltered man, Claud Darnell, waking to find his father lying, eyes open and mouth agape, dead. The shock sends him into a sort of limbo: “On reaching the dead man’s bedroom it struck him that if he continued to shunt between their bedrooms the present situation would become endless; and he saw himself alone in the world going from one room to another with nobody to speak to.” What follows is a systematic peeling away of the layers of lies by which Claud had been insulated from the real world. These include the fact that his father was not his real father, that his mother was a former prostitute and current madam of a discreet house of pleasure in Cannes, and that the property he thought had been in the family for generations had been actually been the pay-off for blackmail.
As de Polnay’s Times obituary noted, he was “a cool and sometimes cynical observer of humanity at all levels (often the lowest),” and in Blood and Water the cynicism runs fast and far. If I had to sum up my impression in a short phrase, it would be “a poor man’s Simenon,” although de Polnay’s characters appear to be better acquainted with money and privilege. At the same time, however, he balks somewhat at going as far as Simenon. Claud manages to say relatively innocent, despite the revelations, and the story ends with him heading back to his beloved Sussex farm to live happily ever after, married to the sweet French ingenue he’s fallen in love with. Had Simenon written this story, Claud would have been more likely to end up as her pimp.
Born in Hungary to a well-placed family, de Polnay fought with his father, left home at an early age, roamed about for years that included a spells as a tram worker in Buenos Aires and a farmer in Kenya before ending up in Paris as the Germans invaded in 1940. He managed to escape to England, spending time in one of Franco’s jail along the way, and wrote his first best-seller, Death and Tomorrow (1945), about the experience. Although he wrote in English and was considered an English author, de Polnay returned to France after the war, set most of his novels in France, wrote numerous biographies of French figures from history, and died in Paris in 1984 at the age of 78.
Certainly Mr. de Polnay’s novel is as enjoyable as anything which appeared in the pre-Booker rush and far better written than any of them. So far as I know, he has never been awarded a literary prize of any description in his long writing career, although his work has been acclaimed by the great Anthony Burgess and laudatory comments are quoted from The Spectator and the Illustrated London News, whose perceptive novel reviewer often strikes me as one of the few in the business who does not actually hate novels. The most sickening aspect of it all is that Mr. de Polnay, whose appeal as a writer should embrace all educated and intelligent Englishmen, is tucked into a corner as if he were some bizarre minority taste while those who can only appeal to a bizarre minority taste are feted and lionised throughout the length and breadth of the land.
de Polnay currently lacks a Wikipedia entry and a complete list of his works doesn’t appear to have been assembled. Amazon reports 140 items under his name, but this number certainly includes some duplicates. On the other hand, by the 1970s his publishers were simply putting “Etc.” after listing a dozen or so of his novels. He also revisited the subject of Death and Tomorrow in a number of memoirs of the time of the German occupation of France and published several volumes of autobiography. Four of his novels, including Blood and Water, are available on the Open Library (link).
“Anybody who reads Mr. de Polnay will rejoice in the vitality of his imagination, the accuracy of his observation, the beautiful lucidity of his prose and the wisdom of his conclusion, but few, I fear, will ever be given the opportunity to learn about him,” concluded Waugh in his review of The Grey Sheep. Perhaps this post will encourage others to join those few.
Blood and Water, by Peter de Polnay London: W. H. Allen and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975
Nepenthe Festive cup Juice divine Nectar divine Ruddy mocha A man’s drink Lovable liquor Delicious mocha The magic drink This rich cordial Its stream divine The family drink The festive drink Coffee is our gold Nectar of all men The golden mocha This sweet nectar Celestial ambrosia The friendly drink The cheerful drink The essential drink The sweet draught The divine draught The grateful liquor The universal drink The American drink The amber beverage The convivial drink The universal thrill King of all perfumes The cup of happiness The soothing draught Ambrosia of the Gods The intellectual drink The aromatic draught The salutary beverage The good – fellow drink The drink of democracy The drink ever glorious Wakeful and civil drink The beverage of sobriety A psychological necessity The fighting man’s drink Loved and favored drink The symbol of hospitality This rare Arabian cordial Inspirer of men of letters The revolutionary beverage Triumphant stream of sable Grave and wholesome liquor The drink of the intellectuals A restorative of sparkling wit Its color is the seal of its purity The sober and wholesome drink Lovelier than a thousand kisses This honest and cheering beverage A wine which no sorrow can resist The symbol of human brotherhood At once a pleasure and a medicine The beverage of the friends of God The fire which consumes our griefs Gentle panacea of domestic troubles The autocrat of the breakfast table The beverage of the children of God- King of the American breakfast table Soothes you softly out of dull sobriety The cup that cheers but not inebriates Coffee, which makes the politician wise Its aroma is the pleasantest in all nature The sovereign drink of pleasure and health The indispensable beverage of strong nations The stream in which we wash away our sorrows Favored liquid which fills all my soul with delight The enchanting perfume that a zephyr has brought The delicious libation we pour on the altar of friendship This invigorating drink which drives sad care from the heart
Zigzagzip Cat o’nine tails whip The tender night To splintering applause.
I never see a stone
I never see a stone Without an inward groan And feel again the impact of my race. For should I chance to peer beneath Its smooth and granite face I see no other Than a brother Come crawling out with looping squirm, Wet, white and eyeless, fellow worm.
Confession
I know so well what I want to say, I even know some of the words And the rhymes that wait to translate it. And then I begin–and begin–and prevaricate– I hedge my course with blinded byways I tunnel under lighted highways I cannot say “this is how it is On the flood lit road” And thrust my pen ping into a reality; I buck or shy left, I suggest A graveyard fixed in night Rather than look an honest hour In the face, by broad daylight.
If you should die
If you should die I’d give my flesh For purpose of worms And ivory grow my bones And moss my hair
Until I grew desirable To death And you moved over And we shared the earth
I am so tired
I am so tired I do not think Sleep in death can rest me
So line my two eternal yards With softest moss Then lengths of bone won’t splinter As they toss Or pierce their wooden box To winter
Do not let the children Pass my way alone Lest these shaking bones Rattle out their fright At waking in the night
Anne Wilkinson was a Canadian poet whose first book first book wasn’t published until she was forty and only published one more before she died in 1961 at the age of fifty. Raised in a somewhat unconventional family and educated by her mother and in several Montessori-influenced schools, she struggled throughout her life between the pull of poetry and the demands of her life as a wife and mother. If a woman “acquires an interest,” she once wrote, “cultivates a talent outside husband, children and house, she automatically is subject to the qualms of divided loyalties.”
As Ingrid Ruthig writes in The Essential Anne Wilkinson, the only easily available collection of her work, Wilkinson’s poetry is “direct in approach, incisive, and unflinching,” something well illustrated in the above poems. Her lines are almost always short: “She did not dress/Except to wear/A word across her groin”, for example, is the opening to “La belle dame sans dormi.” Most of her poems are a page or so long; none is more than four to five.
And they were usually slow in gestation, as is suggested in “Confession” above. She wrote in one diary entry, “The pattern is irritatingly familiar. The first heaven flowing rush–this is it! A week later the desolation of knowing that this not only is not ‘it,’ but is atrocious, has no relation, except for the odd line, to poetry.” Yet she seems to have always had a clear idea of what she wanted to achieve in her poems–which was to avoid what she saw as the two flaws in much of the modern poetry she read. “Those who attempt the simple are thin to the vanishing point,” while most of the other “… are obscure, tortuous, and torturing.”
Cover of 1956 US edition of The Second Curtain “Life was simply not like a detective novel: motives were not clear, events had not a single cause, things did not wholly explain themselves,” Roy Fuller writes in The Second Curtain (1953), one of the three books in which he played an elegant series of changes on the conventions of the mystery novel.
In The Second Curtain, a second-rate writer, George Garner, divorced, living alone in London, and scrabbling along on the diminishing reputation of a decent first novel published a decade ago, is recruited into the role of amateur sleuth by the sister of a long-ago school chum with whom he’s kept up an intermittent correspondence. Widgery, the chum, head of a small factory in Lancashire that produces some sort of electrical components (Garner is never too clear about the details of the lives of the people he encounters), has disappeared. His sister thinks it may have something–a homosexual crush?–to do with a young man who came to work at the factory and then left suddenly just before Widgery’s own disappearance, and thinks the trails lead to London.
Within days, Widgery’s body is dragged from the Thames. Kershaw, a fellow manager from the factory also following up on the disappearance, is run down by a lorry in a London street. The police question Garner. He himself is at a loss to put the pieces together. He consoles himself in his ability to suppress these strange events into the routines in which he is more comfortable: “… whatever happens to oneself, however extraordinary or painful, becomes eventually commonplace and bearable.The empire of self constantly added to itself new wild tracts of territory which it was able to drain, plough, populate, and thus become once again an ordered, homogeneous entity.”
Cover of 1962 Penguin paperback edition of The Second CurtainIn keeping with the patterns of a conventional mystery, the odd events surrounding these deaths begin to intersect with other coincidences. Garner develops a crush on the secretary of the magnate offering to fund a new literary journal he wants Garner to edit. The secretary turns out to be living with Widgery’s young man–who himself turns out to have worked at the factory under an assumed name. The magnate appears to have, among his many business interests, some kind of speculation into a new line of electrical equipment.
Yet Garner fails to weave the threads into the answers that become apparent to the reader. “I’m very much afraid you haven’t got the right story,” he says at one point, only to have Fuller write, “Garner’s mind worked furiously: what was the right story?” Ironically, many of his thoughts about the explanations behind Widgery’s death dwell on the question of how he should approach things as a writer–and it also becomes apparent to the reader that Garner lacks the imagination to be much of a writer:
How could one get, if one wanted to, all this into a novel? The power behind the luxury, the figures and men and machines behind the power? Perrott’s desk had been empty, even of a pen. Perhaps he never wrote: a file was merely opened and put before him, and he then nodded or shook his head. Somewhere in other rooms of the building ingenious men sat in front of books on company law, ledger sheets, reports on technical processes, with trade-union leaders, secretaries of trade associations, spoke on the telephone to members of parliament for industrial divisions, factories on bypasses and coalfields, stockbrokers, authors of economic classics, bankers–but for Perrott everything was rendered down to the naked bones of a question. Shall we do this? And the cigar made its indication.
This passage illustrates just the sort of meta-fictional tricks that Fuller plays throughout The Second Curtain. Fuller, who had a successful career as a London solicitor and was involved with substantial commercial matters, knows very well what goes on behind Perrott’s clean desk, while to Garner it is just something of a blur. And he manages to convey this to the reader in a few strokes while leaving Garner in his muddled reality.
In the end, Garner can only write to Widgery’s sister that, “The more I think about the whole affair, the more I feel that it all lies in the realm of accident and coincidence.” And he himself can only sense that “The alien machine into which he had accidentally dropped from his own harmless world had thrown him out again, broken, with scarcely any damage or interruption to its purposive wheels.” Yet Fuller also makes it clear that Widgery and Kershaw’s deaths are quite directly and deliberately linked to a ruthless and objective calculation of gain and loss made by the magnate, Perrot.
The Second Curtain was the second of three meta-mysteries Roy Fuller wrote. With My Little Eye (1948) puts a magistrate’s son in the role of the ad-hoc detective and plays a somewhat less elegant set of changes on what Fuller calls “the fantasy of conspiracy and crime.” Julian Symons included it on his 1957 list of the 100 best crime and mystery novels. Fantasy and Fugue (1956) is Fuller’s most cerebral mystery, taking place in the head of a man who wakes up one morning convinced that he has committed a murder. The three books were collected by Carcanet Press in 1988 in Crime Omnibus and deserve a place on the shelf alongside Graham Greene’s “entertainments” such as Our Man in Havana.
The Second Curtain, by Roy Fuller London: Derek Verschoyle, 1953
W. R. Rodgers at the BBC“In Ireland why a man becomes a poet is a question not to be asked,” writes Darcy O’Brien in W. R. Rodgers (1970), his fine memoir of the poet from the Bucknell University Press Irish Writers Series. Yet unlike the typical Irish poet, Rodgers did not really discover the poetry in himself until he was nearing the age of thirty and busy with his life as a Presbyterian minister in Loughgall, a town outside Belfast in County Armagh in Northern Ireland. Born, raised, and educated in Belfast, Rodgers was familiar with the sectarian conflicts that simmered and surged throughout his lifetime. “Everything in Belfast had two sides,” he wrote in his 1955 radio piece, “The Return Room”: “Even the walls of Belfast took sides.” “In Belfast,” O’Brien quotes Churchill, “they do everything but eat the bodies.”
Rodgers had been inspired when, in his late twenties, he began to read the work of contemporary poets such as W. H. Auden. And in his early poems one can detect certain threads in subject and diction that could be traced back to Auden:
Escape (1940)
The roads of Europe are running away from the war, Running fast over the mined bridge and past the men Waiting there, with watch, ready to maim and arrest them, And strong overhead the long snorings of the planes’ tracks Are stretching like rafters from end to end of their power. Turn back, you who want to escape or want to forget The ruin of all your regards. You will be more free At the thoughtless centre of slaughter than you would be Standing chained to the telephone-end while the world cracks.
Rodgers’ world was not one that celebrated poetry, however. As he once wrote in an unsigned article in the Belfast magazine, The Bell, “[The Ulsterman] would like to have eloquence. But he suspects and hates eloquence that has no bone of logic in it. It seems to him glib, spineless, and insincere.” After he published his first collection, Awake! and Other Poems (1941), Rodgers’ father cautioned him, “I wouldn’t tell anybody. They’ll think you are wasting your time.”
Rodgers had a clear-eyed understanding of his position in the community, which he never fully settled into. As he wrote in a late unpublished essay quoted in O’Brien’s book,
A rural community is a close and intricate wickerwork of human relationships and functions. Each person born into it, or brought into it, is given a pertinent role to fill and is always identified with this role. The role I was called to fill was that of parson and, being young, I found it a formidable one. Old men, full of worldly experience, farmers who never hesitated to advise me on practical matters, would at once defer to me, as sons to a father, when it came to other-worldly matters and spiritual crises. Not that they were impressed by my personal authority; authority for them resided in the role and office which I happened to occupy … I realised that I, as an individual, did not matter, and this in a way was a relief to me as well as an instruction. I do not know how one would carry the problems of a community if one were only oneself. The danger, of course–and this goes for all men who fill a public role and wear a public mask, parson or politician–the danger is that a man may end by confusing the office with himself. If this happens he becomes simply a mask, an empty shell, a private bore in public and a public bore in private.
The pull of poetry was difficult for Rodgers to resist. Unhappy in the constraints of his position in the conservative Protestant community of Loughgall and caught in a difficult marriage to a woman doctor who struggled with schizophrenia, he reached out by letters to other writers in Ireland and England and took long trips to Dublin that were escapes into the world of literature and long conversations over Guinness and whiskey. When his friend and fellow poet Louis MacNeice helped arrange a job with the BBC, Rodgers resigned from his ministry and moved to England.
At the BBC, he worked on a series of portraits of Irish writers, using a sound mosaic technique that was pioneering at the time but is now a staple of many radio documentaries. These were later collected and published after his death in Irish Literary Portraits (1973). Rodgers found his niche among the hard-drinking and ever-talking community of writers such as Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan. As O’Brien writes, “Rodgers’s drinking was an extraordinary thing to behold. He was never ostentatious about it. He drank as he did everything else, quietly and sacramentally, glass upon glass in steady unmeasured procession, his talk dilating along with his arteries and filling the room like the smoke from his pipe.” He established a place among his peers so successfully that in 1951, after the death of George Bernard Shaw, they elected him to the empty seat in the Irish Academy of Letters.
Though he generally avoided verse, a strong touch of the lyric shines throughout Rodgers’ poetry. It’s a shame that no recordings of his reading are available online, because one can well imagine how fine his words would sound, as in this opening from “The Net”:
Quick, woman, in your net Catch the silver I fling! O I am deep in your debt, Draw tight, skin-tight, the string, And rake the silver in. No fisher ever yet Drew such a cunning ring.
And he could create images as deft and elegant as a piece by Mozart:
The Fountains
Suddenly all the fountains in the park Opened smoothly their umbrellas of water, Yet there was none but me to miss or mark Their peacock show, and so I moved away Uneasily, like one who at a play Finds himself all along, and will not stay.
Though he never returned to live in Ireland, its memories and spirit never left him. And he maintained a strong sense of connection to the church even after leaving it. He wrote a sequence of poems based on the last days of Jesus, Resurrection, which includes the following:
It is always the women who are the Watchers And keepers of life: they guard our exits And our entrances. They are both tomb and womb, End and beginning. Bitterly they bring forth And bitterly take back the light they gave. The last to leave and still the first to come, They circle us like sleep or like the grave. Earth is their element, and it it lies The seed and silence of the lighted skies, The seasons with their fall and slow uprise, Man with his sight and militant surmise. It is always the women who are the Watchers And Wakeners.
Rodgers was never a prolific poet, and he struggled increasingly with writer’s block as he entered his fifties. In his introduction to Collected Poems (1971), available on the Open Library (link), Dan Davin recalls how Rodgers promised for years to provide a poem, to be titled “Epilogue,” for a collection Davin was editing:
Indeed I have been working at the Epilogue…. But I have been frustrated, distracted, tormented and halted by trouble with landlord and solicitors–and the domestic reverberations of it….
Later
Working on it both excites and depresses me, and I realize that to write about it is like opening an old wound, which is Ireland.
Later
I have not ignored or neglected the Epilogue. I’m writing some good stuff for it, only it takes a lot of architecting…. An incidental, but exacting, bother is that once I get into the Epilogue it starts other hares in my mind and I tend to fly off in pursuit of them and have to remind myself that I haven’t the time and that they’ll run another day.
Still later
I feel like a robin that has got mixed up in a badminton match.
In the end, “Epilogue” was never completed. Davin included the fragments he was able to assemble from Rodgers’ papers as an appendix to Collected Poems. In them, Rodgers offers perhaps a clue to his reticence:
Patient in graveyards, used to thinking long And walking short, remembering what My careful father told me–“If ever, son, You have to go anywhere and have to Run, never go! It’s unlucky.”
Rodger was saved briefly from his predicament when he was offered a temporary position on the faculty of Pitzer College in Claremont, California. There, he relied on recordings of his BBC shows to fill up most of his lectures on Irish writers, enjoyed the California sun, and despised the produce, which he considered “flavorless.” During his second year at Pitzer, he was told that his contract would not be renewed, and while on a trip to England that year, he fell ill and operated on to remove a cancerous tumor from his bowels. When he was well enough to return to California, he was able to get another position at nearby Cal Poly Pomona. In the fall of 1968, however, he found himself unable to eat and he was hospitalized again.
As a part-time employee with no health insurance, he was admitted to the Los Angeles County General Hospital. “He would not, of course, have been in such a place had he been in England or in Northern Ireland, nor even in the Republic of Ireland,” O’Brien writes in his memoir. “He had to be in America to end his life in a ward crowded with the oppressed: blacks, Mexican-Americans, and W. R. Rodgers. … [B]eing the man he was, he would sooner have died among wretches than rich men.” At his funeral service in Claremont, one of his colleagues at Pitzer, Bert Meyers, read a poem in tribute:
I know a candle of a man whose voice, meandering in a flame, could make the shadows on the wall listen to what he said.
He’s done. You’d need a broom to arouse him now. All things burn, writhe, shrink, dissolve, or drift away. Some men are words that warm a room.
In March of 1969, Rodger’s family and a few of his friends returned with his body to Loughgall, where his body was interred in the graveyard of Cloveneden Church.
R. V. CassillA few years ago, Orin Cassill, son of novelist and short story writer R. V. Cassill, contacted me after I began writing about the pulp novels his father wrote back in the 1950s and early 1960s. At the time, he was working to reissue some of his father’s novels and short story collections–a project that has now resulted in the publication of two dozen books, including a previously unreleased novel, Jack Horner in Love and War. It’s a tribute to the possibilities of today’s publication mechanism (as well as some smart copyright management). Recently, Orin agreed to do a short interview to catch up on the reissue of his father’s work and to plug a few of his own candidates for rediscovery.
Editor: How did you come to decide to undertake the republication of a substantial portion of your father’s novels and short story collections?
I knew that people were publishing and re-publishing books as ebooks on Amazon and had been thinking about looking into it for a couple years.
In 2014, we were contacted by Open Road Media about re-publishing five of my father’s books (3 novels and 2 short-story collections).
After they published those, my brother Jesse and I looked into the process and realized it was relatively easy to create and publish an ebook directly, so he published several more of the novels and also my mother’s book on Twins which she had originally published in the 1980s.
Last year I discovered that Amazon was also offering POD (print-on-demand) paperbacks as well as ebook versions. Although ebooks seem to be the wave of the future, this interested me as I still prefer to read a physical book rather than an ebook.
Did the rise of electronic publishing make the process any easier?
Definitely. Without the option of ebooks and print-on-demand books, we would have had to go the old-fashioned route of printing, warehousing, marketing, distributing, etc. which would have been far too expensive and complicated.
With electronic publishing there are still some costs involved in scanning and proofreading, etc. but the costs are much smaller than the traditional publishing model.
Republishing through the electronic platforms essentially puts a book ‘back in print’ indefinitely.
Previously, if someone wanted to read one of his books, they would have to find an old copy on Amazon or eBay or go to the library.
Now they are (or will be) conveniently available in one place.
It was also fun designing new covers for the books. We have used a number of my mother’s paintings for several covers and are using several of my father’s paintings as covers for the old “paperback originals.”
Were there any challenges you ran into getting the rights to reissue the works you have?
No. Luckily my mother had spent a lot of time and effort renewing all the copyrights back in the 1980s.
What has been the response from readers so far? Would you say that he’s being rediscovered by people who had known his work in the past or that’s it’s more of a new audience?
It’s hard to say exactly. Amazon only provides sales figures based on country, so unless someone leaves a review we can’t tell who they are.
There have been several sales internationally but mostly in the U.S.
I would guess that many of the sales so far are to people who might recognize the name from the past. Open Road Media has done some promotion through their website, so that may be reaching newer audiences.
For me personally, republishing all the books has been very educational since there are books (mostly the earlier ones) that I never read, and the ones that I have read I hadn’t read in quite a while.
Are there any more plans to reissue other books?
We are still finishing up the last of the 1950s paperbacks – hopefully that will be completed soon.
My goal is to get everything republished by his 100th birthday in May 2019.
We are also putting together a book of his artwork. He was a painter as well as a writer and produced a large body of oil and watercolor paintings, drawings, and sculptures during his life. A small portion of it has been displayed at various times, but putting a portion of it together in a book will be rewarding.
Did the fact that your father was a writer make an impression on you as a kid? Was it intimidating or inspirational or just what your dad did when he went off to work?
A little of both. I wrote some fiction and poetry in high school and college and was editor of the literary magazine at Boston College my senior year, although I didn’t continue writing after graduation.
A remarkable number of fine writers passed through your father’s classes in the years that he taught at Iowa, Purdue, and Brown. Are there any you think deserve the same kind of republishing and rediscovery as your father? Or any personal favorites you’d like to recommend to other fans of neglected books?
All of them, really! As you know, not every ‘neglected’ book is a classic, but lots of them are interesting enough to be made available, even if the prospective audience is small.
I have such hopes for The Intellectual Lover and other Stories, a collection of short stories written by David Freedman, a Romanian Jew who emigrated to the U.S. as a toddler, proved a prodigy at chess, and, after graduating from City College, became one of the most successful writers of jokes, sketches, and other material for comedians such as Eddie Cantor. Herman Wouk was one of many young Jewish writers in New York who spent time in Freedman’s laugh factory.
His family and friends considered that Freedman had frittered away his talent on the lucrative but not particularly respected business of churning out comic material, which the combined demands of radio and vaudeville were consuming in record quantities. And so, after Freedman died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of just 38, they collected a few of the short stories he’d written over the years and got them published by Harper and Row in 1940 with an introduction by Freedman’s friend, the writer and fellow Romanian emigre, Konrad Bercovici.
Bercovici’s introduction is by far the best part of the book. He describes the unique intimacy that existed between Freedman and his father, both lovers of chess, music, and literature, and shows how Freedman became something of a victim of his own success. Once he proved capable of coming up with apt material on demand, demand simply grew and grew until he worked himself into an early grave.
The stories, however, are another thing. They read like the work of someone who spent too many hours shut up in a library with one too many copies of Walter Pater, John Ruskin, or William Morris. In the title story, for example, the “Intellectual Lover” becomes incapable of not transforming the real women he sees into his Platonic ideal:
I began to notice for the first time, in women who I had known for years, certain features which I was confident belonged to that other girl. It became a habitual pastime with me to reconstruct her out of this one’s waist-line, that one’s eyes, the third one’s next, the fourth one’s arms, and the fifth one’s mouth.
She became a standard by which I analyzed, classified, and measured girls. I looked at women not to see them, but to see how they compared with her, with the standard. And as I observed new and more striking female traits in various women, I added them to this standard until it became an embodiment of all the attractive features and characteristics of all the women I knew.
It doesn’t take much of this to make me run to open a window and let some fresh air in. I will spare you the pain of an extract from the relentless Italian-American dialect of another story, “I Am He.” Let’s just-a say-a a beeg “Mamma Mia!” and leave it at that.
My apologies to those friends and family who still cherish Mr. Freedman’s memory, but I have to rate this the most justly neglected book I’ve come across in a long time. Sorry, but thats-a my opinion. If you’re desperate to prove me wrong, you can read the book in e-book formats for free at the Open Library (link).
The Intellectual Lover and Other Stories, by David Freedman New York: Harper and Row, 1940
There’s a sure-fire way to improve your chances of having your work ignored by English-reading audiences: Be Canadian.
Even if your work is published in the U.S. and gets enthusiastic reviews, you have a better chance of joining the ranks of Richard B. Wright than those of the few exceptions to the rule, such as Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. Wright’s death back in February 2017 was remarked with appreciative tributes in most of the major Canadian magazines and papers, but not even in the New York Times in the U.S.. One of Wright’s last novels, Clara Callan (2003), did enjoy good sales in the U.S. and is still in print, but the fact remains that he’s far more likely to be confused with the author of Native Son than recognized for his own work.
I’m no expert on the whole of Wright’s oeuvre, but it’s hard for me to believe that he ever topped his first book, The Weekend Man (1971), which has to be one of the best novels written in English in the 1970s. Technically, it’s still in print: at least, Amazon still has one new copy of the 2003 paperback reprint in stock.
The Weekend Man sits side-by-side with another underappreciated Seventies classic, Joseph Heller’s Something Happened (1974). Both Wright’s Wes Wakeham and Heller’s Bob Slocum are men of a kind that now seems almost as archaic as Bertie Wooster: white, white collar, ambitious but not inspired, sexist, unfaithful, and generally out of touch with the world around them–ironically, because it is, after all, a world made by and for men like them. “I have managed my own life rather badly,” Wakeham says at one point. Bob Slocum would certainly second that emotion.
“What is a weekend man, you ask?” Wakeham tells his readers. “A weekend man is a person who has abandoned the present in favour of the past or the future.” Wes has separated from his wife. He’s insecure about his career in the publishing house where he works. He watches a lot of television–and these were the days when you got seven or eight channels at best, and many of the empty spots were filled with old movies. So Wes tends to compare people to old movie stars. Wes’s father-in-law is “a dead ringer for Jack Oakie.” A woman “looks as happy as June Allyson” (watch any of the dozen or so movies from the 1950s where Allyson’s job consists almost exclusively of looking adoringly at her hard-working husband, or her wedding band, or both).
Wes is a case study in slow death by distraction: “If the truth were known, nothing much happens to most of us during the course of our daily passage. It has to be said. Unless we are test pilots or movie stars, most of us are likely to wake up tomorrow morning to the same ordinary flatness of our lives. This is not really such a bad thing. It is probably better than fighting off a sabre-tooth tiger at the entrance to the cave. But we weekend men never leave well enough alone. First off we must cast about for a diversion. A diversion is anything that removes us from the ordinary present.”
Unfortunately, his options are limited. The truly ambitious ones involve too much risk. A little affair on the side is good for amusement, but overwhelming passion has to be avoided. And it’s tough to kiss off the career and pursue painting or some other crazy notion when you have people depending upon your paycheck. He’s paid for an expensive German telescope to study the stars and sent for a brochure on short-story writing. But “None of these things is as good as television. At the same time, he isn’t ready to follow his father’s advice and “submit to the numbness of the daily passage.”
And so he finds himself with “a wild howling in the soul” as he sits in his apartment, feet up on the coffee table, watching yet another old movie. If he needed a theme song, it would probably be Peggy Lee’s hit from the year before: “Is That All There Is?”
There are no great revelations in The Weekend Man. And though Wes Wakeham seems, in one way, an artifact of a distant past (and the Seventies do often seem like a far more distant past), in other ways he’s like a lot of men–smart enough to catch most of the cultural references, not smart enough to take the risk of committing to something or someone no matter where it may lead. And spending a lot of nights with their feet up on the coffee table.
The Weekend Man, by Richard B. Wright Toronto: Macmillan, 1970
Digging for Mrs. Miller (1941) illustrates how, in the right hands, simple, undramatic, and limpid prose can have a stunning impact. Originally published as Post D in England, Digging for Mrs. Miller is John Strachey’s thinly-fictionalized account of his experiences working as an air raid warden during the most intense months of the Blitz in autumn 1940.
Strachey, who had been one of the most active members of the radical left in England in the 1930s, became a warden somewhat by accident. After one raid in September 1940, he came home to find his house roped off because of a nearby delayed-action bomb. Unable to sleep there, he bunked at the air raid post down the street, helping out with a few tasks to justify his place, and a few days later, he enrolled as an unpaid and part-time warden. His uniform was just a pair of overalls and a steel helmet. His equipment consisted of a flashlight (which had to be used sparingly in the blackout), a gas mask, some bandages, and a note pad.
Night after night, he would sit at an upstairs window in the house that served as the post for his sector–an area of perhaps 6-8 square blocks. The house belonged to his neighbor, Miss Sterling, who was also the head of Post D. Night after night, he would hear–and then see–the German bombers coming over London. And when a high explosive or incendiary bomb fell, he and the other wardens would run to locate the site, see if anyone was injured, and coordinate the work of the firemen, stretcher bearers, rescue workers, and the rest of the team that quickly appeared on the scene.
One of Strachey’s first realizations was how much working as a warden did for his own morale:
The main trouble of being a pure civilian during a prolonged air bombardment is that as such one’s only duty is to seek and to maintain one’s own, and one’s companions’, safety. And this is inevitably demoralizing. The instant that an individual is given even the simplest objective function, and becomes a member of an organized (and uniformed, this is notoriously important) group, the whole burden of deciding whether or not on any particular occasion to seek his or her own safety is automatically removed. While one is functionless one is continually irritated by such questions as, “Isn’t it really very silly to stay upstairs (or to go out) in this degree of Blitz?” The instant the individual has become a warden, ambulance driver, member of the auxiliary fire service, rescue and demolition squads, or stretcher-bearer, this question is, nine times out of ten, settled for him or her.
Though I’ve read several history books that dealt with the Blitz, Digging for Mrs. Miller was the first thing that really conveyed the sense of what it was like. Contrary to the impression one gets, the bombing was not on the level of the massive Allied raids against Germany. The Luftwaffe knocked out buildings more often than whole blocks, and Strachey’s team more often responded to single bombs than to wide scale destruction.
On occasion, though, a single large high explosive bomb could destroy the better part of a block. Strachey devotes 48 pages–nearly one third of the book–to “The Big Bomb,” a chapter detailing the hours of scrambling around and digging through the enormous piles of rubble left after a particularly large bomb exploded near their post. Hour after hour, working with no light and soaked with rain, he and other men tunneled their way in to locate victims, hauling away endless baskets full of rubble. In one case, it took the rescuers over 26 hours to reach a young woman buried under a small mountain of debris.
Strachey left the warden service at the end of 1940, when he joined the R.A.F.. Though he eventually wrote over a dozen works of political philosophy and advocacy, I suspect this short, simple tale is his finest legacy as a writer. It’s certainly one of the best books dealing with World War Two I’ve ever read.
Digging for Mrs. Miller, by John Strachey New York: Random House, 1941
Jessica Mitford describes Faces of Philip: A Memoir of Philip Toynbee as “A record of events, not purporting to be a complete history, but treating of such matters as come within the personal knowledge of the writer, or are obtained from certain particular sources of information.” With such a qualification, one can excuse the fact that this book is likely to have been of more interest to those who knew Mitford and Toynbee that anyone who might read it then or now.
Philip Toynbee was the son of Arnold Toynbee, the best-known English historian of his time, whose magnum opus, A Study of History, is probably read today by barely more people than read any of his son’s books (all of them now out of print). He and Mitford became friends in the Thirties, when she married Esmond Romilly, with whom Toynbee was working as an anti-fascist activist. Mitford and Romilly moved to the U. S. in the late 1930s and she was stuck there when the war broke out. Romilly joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and was shot down on a mission over Germany and Mitford later married an American, Robert Treuhaft, and became an American citizen herself. Toynbee wrecked his first marriage and married again himself. Through it all, he and Mitford remained friends, writing each other often, seeing each other less often.
As Mitford makes clear without saying it outright, for much of his adult life Toynbee was an alcoholic and perhaps a manic depressive, given to such stunts as stripping to the nude while being returned to his Army unit after a riotous bender in town. But they shared a common sense of affection and fun, as reflected in Toynbee’s letter to Mitford in the late 1970s:
Believe it or not, I’ve just been asked to write your Times obituary. In some ways I see that this is tremendously one up on you–unless, of course, you’ve also been asked to write mine. On the other hand, it does give me a good deal of freedom, doesn’t it: I mean either you’ll never read it, or you’ll read it From Beyond where all is forgiven in every conceivable direction.
All love – and please don’t croak before I get this obit done. Drive carefully for next month or so.
Faces of Philip did offer Mitford the opportunity to pay tribute to Toynbee’s own magnum opus, a series of experimental novels in verse known as “Pantaloon.” Four volumes were published in the 1960s: Pantaloon (1961); Two Brothers (1964); A Learned City (1966); Views from a Lake (1968). As Mitford writes, “These have a small but devoted readership of fellow-poets and critics, some of whom discussed the series in their obituary articles.”
She provides a healthy sample of these assessments of “Pantaloon.” Patrick Leigh Fermor called it a “far-too-little-known, many volumed, and extremely brilliant narrative poem. Far more than a poetical feat of self-mockery, it is a most precious and perceptive documentation of a certain kind of growing-up, with all the problems, trends, dogmatic attractions and revolts to which the restless youth of the middle and late Thirties were prone.” To Stephen Spender, Pantaloon reflects Toynbee’s “serious, religious, ribald, self-mocking attitude to life. His friends will remember him as a poignant and moving personality who lived his life almost as if he were the ironically self-viewing hero of a fiction written by himself.”
Robert Nye, a champion of the experimental in literature, considered it “a remarkable achievement, perhaps a masterpiece…. It strikes me as one of the last authentic works of the spirit of modernism. After Toynbee’s death, Nye wrote that it was “one of the most important landmarks of post-war fiction in England. To re-read the individual volumes consecutively is to realise that here, at last, we have something that can be mentioned in the same breath as A la Recherche.”
In a review of Two Brothers, V. S. Pritchett wrote: “Another important reason for Mr Toynbee’s success is that he has hit on the right subject: the Grand Tour. This cannot fail in the hands of a restless, fervent .and cultivated writer who responds to the gay, the comic and the intense . . . Mr Toynbee has done a very fine thing.” Even The Times’ anonymous obituary writer described it as “A formidable achievement. Even now it is difficult to evaluate it confidently–passages of apparent rambling are juxtaposed with areas of intensely concentrated verbal experience–but it is never less than highly interesting.”
Despite this acclaim, “Pantaloon” has never been reissued and has now been out of print for 50 years. Mitford does mention that as someone who made his living as a book reviewer for most of the 1950s and 1960s, Toynbee took the reception of his own books with ironic humor. “There is only one review worth getting,” he once said. “The one that simply says ‘This is the Best Book Ever Written.'”
A brief excerpt from “The Third Day,” the third chapter in Pantaloon:
Once, in another age or life, I was standing on the moving-staircase, Going down. Wheels and unseen chains were rattling And feet were scraped on the metal slats of the steps. Warm air was blown in our faces, A warm wind breathed up the shaft From the intricate dark mole-run of the Underground. The blown air reeked of rubber and sparks And a mild municipal disinfectant; Of fagged-out breath and hasty scent, Warm bodies and clothes. I welcomed the old smell of a London lifetime.
I have always thought of him as Mr. Eliot. When I went to London I ran into people who referred to him as Tom Eliot: I soon realised this did not always mean that they had met him. I saw him many times, so often indeed that it seemed to me that ifyou had your being in central London you could not not see him, for he was part of it. I sat opposite him in tube trains. I saw him in theatres, I stood behind him in a queue to buy stamps at Holborn Post Office, I saw him in restaurants in Soho, I recall I was once in the lift with him at Notting Hill underground station. In 1938 and 1939 I went on occasion at lunchtime to a pub called The Friend at Hand behind Russell Square tube station for the express purpose of seeing Mr Eliot come into the saloon bar, carrying his rolled umbrella and wearing his gent’s city clothes and black trilby hat. Without speaking a word to anyone, he would drink his double whisky before going to his lunch engagement.
The Friend at Hand pub today
Towards the end of the Fifties, at a late-night party at the Savoy Hotel I saw him dancing with his young wife. And soon after this I met him. He invited me to have tea with him in his office at Faber’s, for I was thinking of writing a book on Wyndham Lewis, who had recently died. He was very cordial and gracious. He had known Lewis from the time he first arrived in England, and Lewis had told me with some pride that Mr. Eliot went round to his flat every Thursday evening to read to him, for these were the years of Lewis’s blindness. 1 was after information. Mr. Eliot was an amiable sphinx. “You know,” he said, “I never felt I really knew Lewis.” That was all he would vouchsafe. It was a wonderfully baffling meeting.
In his memoir, As I Walked Down New Grub Street (1981), English novelist and critic Walter Allen offers a set of recollections that is perhaps a little closer to popcorn than steak in terms of substance. Not that Allen was not a solid and serious writer. Raised in a lower middle class household in Birmingham, his roots were more in the factories and mines than in the quads or cricket fields. Unable to win an Oxford scholarship, he had to settle for one to his hometown university, and forever after chafed against the innate bias in favor of Oxbridge held by much of the English literary establishment of his time.
Graduating in the midst of the Depression, Allen fought against the tide and insisted in making his way as a working writer. Although he eventually took academic jobs to keep from starving, but the time of the Second World War, he had made it to London. There, as a long-time member of the staff of The New Statesman as well as a novelist in his own right, he came to know many of the best writers of his generation, including L. P. Hartley, Joyce Cary, and Graham Greene. Greene was the best-known of them, and Allen was at first a bit of an imitator. He was fascinated by Greene’s exotic travels and his obsession with sin–although Malcolm Muggeridge once cautioned Allen, “Where Graham is, sin stops.”
He also made friends with a loose set of writers that is sometimes referred to as the Birmingham Group. Although Allen was the stand-out survivor of the lot, the best known of the group was his close friend, the novelist John Hampson, author of Saturday Night at the Greyhound. Hampson introduced him to W. H. Auden, whom Allen came to know as Wystan. Allen recounts how Auden contrived to get Hampson married:
He had married Erika, Thomas Mann’s daughter, in order to provide her with a British passport. It somehow seemed typical of him that the woman he had done this service for should have been the daughter of the most illustrious of living novelists. He persuaded John, who was homosexual, that he should marry Erika Mann’s friend Therese Giehse, an actress and a very fine one, later associated with Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble and at this time running an anti-Nazi cabaret in Zurich for which Auden wrote some satirical sketches. Hampson asked me what I thought of Wystan’s suggestion. He was obviously wistfully attracted by its romantic appeal. I suppose I said all the conventional things; I advised caution; later, he might discover he wasn’t homosexual, fall in love with a woman and want to marry in a real sense. Now I see my advice as comic: Hampson was ten years older than I and knew incomparably more of life. He listened to me and said: “Wystan says, ‘What are buggers for?'” I knew I was defeated. Put in that form, Auden’s appeal, I realised, was irresistible.
Following the civil ceremony near Victoria Station, the wedding party retired to a nearby pub:
Well, John and Therese were married in the eyes of Sir William Joynson-Hicks, the Home Secretary, if not in God’s. Wystan chivvied us down the stairs. In the street he said: “We all need a drink”and led the way to a large mock-Tudor pub on the other side of the High Street. We seated ourselves in an empty lounge. The barmaid came, and “Large brandies all round,” Wystan ordered. When she brought them, “Is there a piano here?” he demanded. “Yes, sir,” she said, “but you can’t play it.” This made Wystan very indignant. “Who is to stop me?” he wanted to know. The girl answered: “It’s Mr.____. He’s dead. He’s in there.” She pointed to the billiard room. Led by Auden, we rose and went into the billiard room. There was a coffin on the billiard table. An occasion when Wystan was not allowed to play Hymns Ancient and Modern.
As I Walked Down New Grub Street, by Walter Allen William Heinemann Ltd., 1981
In the last summer of my mother’s life, I was sitting with her on the little lawn of her cottage in Sussex, when she said suddenly, “I feel it is wrong to repine as life goes on, for I can always say to myself, ‘I, too, have lives in Arcadia.”
She must have seen that I was wondering to what part of her life she referred, for she could look back to many delightful and remarkable experiences.
She put her hand on mine. “I mean the five years with your father, and the further nine summers I spent with his mother, at La Celle St. Cloud.”
So opens the first volume of Marie Belloc Lowndes’ memoirs, in which she recalls the uniquely gracious and intimate world that her grandmother created in her modest country home in a village less than ten miles from the center of Paris. It all began in 1867, when two friends, both pioneering English women’s’ rights advocates, Bessie Parkes and Barbara Bodichon, reunited in Paris. Bodichon was recovering from a fever contracted while living in Algiers with her husband, Dr. Eugène Bodichon, a prominent physician. Concerned at her friend’s condition, Parkes sought a place in the country where they could relax and get away from the stagnant summer air in Paris.
She came across a flyer advertising a chalet for rent in La Celle St. Cloud offered by a Madame Belloc. Madame Belloc was Louise Swanton Belloc, daughter of James Swanton, an Irish officer who had served in the armies of both King Louis XVI and Napoleon, and widow of the recently deceased painter Jean-Hilaire Belloc. She was also the leading advocate of English literature in France. She produced a steady stream of translations of Dickens, George Eliot, Sir Walter Scott, and others, and her network of acquaintances included many of the most famous writers of both countries. The chalet was on the grounds of a small tract where she lived with her son Louis and a frequent visitor, Adelaide De Montgolfier, daughter of the famous balloonist Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier.
Louis Belloc had been a busy and successful official in the Paris city government, but at some time in his late twenties, he collapsed from overwork or perhaps a stroke and was now living as an invalid with his mother. At the time that Bessie Parkes came to stay with the Bellocs, this model of Victorian rectitude, independence, and industry probably had no intention of remaining more than a few weeks.
But some kind of profound intimacy was sparked between Bessie and Madame Belloc, and soon after, between Bessie and Louis. When the two Englishwomen returned to Paris, Bessie had promised to come back to La Celle St. Cloud in the autumn. And she confided to Barbara, “I want you to know of a certain decision I have made! I have made up my mind to marry Louis Belloc.” Louis had not, in fact, asked her. “Such an idea, I feel sure, has never crossed his mind…. But he will do so when I stay with them this autumn.”
Barbara and Bessie’s family argued strongly against the marriage. They found it hard to conceive how a woman with such drive, responsible to dozens of initiatives to improve the lives of women and the working poor in England, could suddenly tie herself down to a sick man living on a tiny French estate. But an entry from her diary, written just two months after her wedding, offers a clue to the emptiness that the love of the Bellocs filled in Bessie:
How utterly my life has changed! In the old days it was always astonishing to me that with so many elements which should have made for real happiness–intelligence, great interest in literature, sufficient money, and the highest principles–my mother’s house was so lacking, at any rate where I was concerned, in real happiness….
How strange that Barbara should think I ever feel lonely! There have been times in my life when I have felt painfully alone, but never since the fortunate day when she and I settled into the chalet last spring. I remember feeling that evening as if I had stepped into a new dimension, and in that dimension I have, thank God, dwelt ever since, with increasing joy and peace.
Within a year of marrying Louis, Bessie gave birth to a daughter–Marie–and two years later, to a son, Hilaire. The couple had little time to celebrate Hilaire’s birth, because the Franco-Prussian War had begun a week before, and less than two months later, the family had to flee to England ahead of the imminent siege of Paris. Mademoiselle Montgolfier, however, remained, and her letters, along with those of Louis’ sisters, all of whom stayed throughout the long and difficult siege, demonstrate the kind of strength and dedication in the face of hardships that seems to have been given in exceptional degree to some people in that era.
When the Bellocs returned to La Celle St. Cloud after the armistice, they found that Prussian troops had looted the estate, leaving much of it damaged and uninhabitable. But Madame Belloc and Bessie plunged into the business of restoration, and within a few months were able to live there again. Their relief was short-lived, however. One day in August 1872, Louis collapsed, and he died just a few hours later. As Bessie wrote to Barbara afterward, “I had an angel of goodness by my side for five years. From the time he uttered his marriage vows, giving his whole self to me as he did then, I never had cause to regard him other than with the exceeding reverence which ended in exceeding love, which made me hold so lightly all the real difficulties of a life to which I was never blind.”
Marie and Hilaire Belloc would become two of the most prolific English writers of their generation. When she began to write her memoirs, Marie had seen, for the third time in her life, German troops invading her first home. Even though I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia was written in the time of the Blitzkrieg and the Blitz, it is very much a book of the century before. This is not to imply that it is stiff or outdated in any way. Instead, it is marked throughout by a sincerity of emotion that we have grown too jaded to trust and, hence, that seems antique. But as Elizabeth Bowen wrote when it first came out, “It is a book in a thousand, for it conveys the character of a group of people, at once civilized and original, and the atmosphere of an unusual place.”
Marie Belloc-Lowndes wrote three more volumes of memoirs: Where Love and Friendship Dwelt (1943); The Merry Wives of Westminster (1946); A Passing World (1948). I am nearing the end of Love and Friendship and can report that it maintains the same warm and intelligent spirit as I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia. Despite wartime printing limitations, Macmillans in the U. K. managed to put out a handsome set of volumes that are as pleasant to hold and read as anything I’ve come across. I started reading the series with the U. S. edition published by Dodd, Mead, but I liked the Macmillan editions so much I bought another copy just to keep.
I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia, by Marie Belloc-Lowndes London: Macmillan, 1941
Ann Farrer, from the “Ingenues” section of The Spotlight, Autumn 1939
Reading Jessica Mitford’s memoir of the critic, novelist, and poet Philip Toynbee, The Faces of Philip (1984), I stumbled across a mention of a book that turns out not only to be neglected but (at the moment) unattainable outside a couple dozen libraries: Ann Farrer’s 1966 memoir of her struggles with depression and the relatively ineffective attempts of a series of Freudian psychiatrists to help her with it, If Hopes Were Dupes, published under the pseudonym of Catherine York. A cousin of the famous Mitford sisters, Ann Farrer was known to her family as “Idden.” She became a moderately successful actress in London and married a fellow actor, David Horne, and together they ran a small theatre company in the 1940s and 1950s.
Mitford writes:
As background: Unknown to me (for I was in America at the time), Ann suffered the almost unimaginable torture of a severe nervous breakdown. Later, she wrote a book about the experience: If Hopes Were Dupes, published in July 1966. My sisters and I thought it the best book on this dire subject we had ever read. I was confident that it would be embraced by a large general readership for its intrinsic excellence, and by fellow sufferers for the light it shed on a shared malady.
These expectations did not materialize. Nancy, who thought very highly of If Hopes Were Dupes, faulted the title as too obscure. (It comes from a poem by Arthur Hugh Clough: “Tf hopes were dupes, fears may be liars.” Andrew Devonshire misheard this line as: “If hopes were dukes, peers may be liars.”) [Deborah Mitford, Andrew’s wife, wrote of the book years later, “This is by my first cousin, Ann Farrer, who wrote this sorrowful account of her nervous breakdown and total dependence on her psychoanalyst. It would send a shiver down any spine.”] She thought a title more directly describing the subject would have made for better sales. I happened to be in London a few months after Ann’s book was published. To my extreme disappointment, it seemed to have sunk without a trace.
Longing to revive it, I sent a copy to Philip, asking if he could review it in The Observer. As I had hoped, it struck an instant responsive chord; he liked it enormously, but explained that it was against The Observer policy to give a full-scale review to a book that had been out for some time [A policy shared by most book reviews and a major reason why many good books never stand a chance to be noticed–Ed.]. He would try to sneak in something under “Shorter Notices.” He wrote to Ann (28 October 1966): “I thought it extremely well done–dreadfully vivid . . . Decca tells me I was once sick on your floor. Quite enough to start anybody off on a neurosis! With best wishes, Philip.”
The Shorter Notice (The Observer, I December 1966) heaped praise: ‘She emerged from the darkness at last. Her courageous return to those appalling shadows will be read with great benefit by all lonely sufferers from mental and nervous affliction.
Of the few notices that If Hopes Were Dupes earned, not all were as positive. Sid Chaplin gave it a mixed review:
Catherine York gives a narrow, intense and often muddled account of the depression that propelled her to five psychoanalysts or psychiatrists in turn. The better part of the book is about the male consultants, to whom she ‘transferred’, for the most part with singularly distressing effects. The end is muted, but there is some hope in the full line from which the title is taken: ‘If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars’. The case history is necessarily incomplete, but it seems significant that Catherine York is a failed career woman, an unlucky actress with a hus- band evidently prospering in the same line of business. Fame is the spur, but it often draws only blood. Not only young Tolstoy could cry: ‘I felt the need to be known and loved of all the world; to name my name.’ The hope sustains a lot of us. It died in Catherine York. Yet none of the experts seemed to discern this. It caught my imagination on the raw. I have a feeling that the failed actress has the makings of a first-rate writer, once she learns to look outwards. That at least is some- thing to settle for.
Ten years later, after David Horne’s death in 1970, Farrer retired to Jordans, a Quaker hostel in Buckinghamshire. She began to write poetry, which Jessica Mitford shared with Toynbee. Toynbee and Farrer struck up a correspondence that Mitford quotes from extensively in The Faces of Philip. Among these are the following, in which Toynbee offers sober advice that every writer should take note of:
[12 August 1980:] Believe me, dear Ann, I know those kind of feelings and have often experienced them in the past . . . In fact I have never written anything which was so much a projection of my inmost self that I regarded an attack on it as an attack on me. Nor do I believe that the process of creation is of this kind: there is always a necessary and inevitable distancing of the writer, painter etc from his work. The idea of pouring out one’s heart straight onto the paper is, I believe, a romantic illusion; and rather a dangerous one . . .
In the course of writing Pantaloon I had just such feelings of absolute rightness, glorious confidence, only to discover later that these feelings had utterly misled me. Sometimes I wrote for as much as six months as if inspired; then found that I had to scrap almost every word of what I had done and start all over again. This is one of the very hard facts about trying to write: nearly always it is a matter of hard slogging and constant revision, rather than the Muse suddenly touching one’s shoulder or receiving one’s words direct from heaven.
[15 October 1980:] I think that when one writes burningly out of one’s own experience, still filled with the overflowing emotions of real life, one usually misses one’s aim. Who wrote about ’emotion recollected in tranquillity’? Anyway, I’m sure that in nearly all cases there has to be a real pause, a taking stock, however unconscious, a distancing . . . Then the emotions are still there all right, but they are just far enough away for one to be able to marshall them; order them about; then alter the whole emphasis of them for the sake of the poem. After all, a poem is always an artifact; indeed an artifice. Put another way, if the bleeding wounds still show then I think there is something wrong. (Except in very very rare cases).
If Hopes Were Dupes, by Catherine York London: Hutchinson, 1966
I have a mild fascination with unreadable books. Mild because I often lack the courage or persistence to take them on, fascination because I often have the nagging sense that I should. By “unreadable,” I don’t mean truly unreadable, like the book of Pi to the millionth digit or whatever length it is, but dauntingly difficult–the sort of book that refuses to fit itself to the molds that make books accessible. Finnegans Wake is perhaps the best known unreadable book, but there are also books like Gaddis’ JR, 725 pages of dialogue with no attribution to its speakers, or Leon Forrest’s 1138-page novel Divine Days, or John Hargraves’ nearly 900-page novel in verse, Summer Time Ends.
At a mere 320 pages, Nigel Balchin’sLord, I Was Afraid is unreadable not because of length but because of sheer oddity. It is a 320 page play. Balchin’s publisher, Collins, waved off most potential readers with this fly-leaf warning:
This is not a Nigel Balchin novel in the ordinary sense. In fact it cannot be described technically as a novel at all. The subject is one on which the author has meditated and worked for ten years—the subject of his own generation, its nature, its faults, virtues, and direction if any. To say what he has to say Mr. Balchin has composed a kind of super-play, using the devices of the theatre on a scale that transcends the possibilities of any theatre.
Although Balchin provides stage directions and scene-settings along with his dialogue, he certainly never expected any director to follow them. Otherwise, he would have asked set designers to mimic everything from train stations and air raid shelters to mass rallies and the summit of Mount Ararat just before the next great flood, in a production that would easily require a cast of a hundred or more and take something like ten hours to perform.
I picked up my copy of Lord, I Was Afraid at the Strand Book Store while in New York City some years ago. Balchin’s name was, of course, familiar to me–his novels such as The Small Back Room, Darkness Falls from the Air, A Way through the Wood, and Mine Own Executioner often pop up on lists of neglected books–but not this title. The price–$5.50–was so low that I bought the book without taking much notice of its contents. When I did, I thought, “Well, I’ll probably never read this,” and shelved it away in the basement.
When I came across it again while looking for something else recently, I felt my fascination stirring again and thought, “Well, what the hell? If I don’t read and post about this book, who else will?” And here we are.
Balchin’s title comes from Matthew Chapter 25, where Jesus tells the parable of the landowner who gave his servants money before leaving on a long trip–five talents to one, two talents to another, one talent to a third. When the man returns, the last servant says to him, “Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed; And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine.”
Nigel Balchin, 1944Lord, I Was Afraid is, in a way, Balchin’s parable of his own generation, the one too young to fight in World War One and a bit older than the average man in uniform in World War Two. It was also an upper-middle-class generation: his boys went to public schools, his girls hovered in limbo–too wealthy to work, not wealthy enough to be independent of potential husbands or public opinion. As his core set of seven characters–four men and three women–sit atop Mount Ararat at the play’s end, Balchin passes judgment on his kind through the voice of Methuselah: “A race that cannot accept death, but merely refuses life. A race that carries snobbery so far that it prefers to die in its own company rather than to live in any other; and which carries conceit and self-esteem so far that it would rather make nothing than make a mistake.” Or, as the voice of one character’s conscience puts it earlier in the play, “The same old mistrust of everybody else, crowned by a complete mistrust of yourself.”
In his excellent essay on Balchin, “The Effective Intelligence of Nigel Balchin”, Clive James described Lord, I Was Afraid as “the kind of art-conscious, angst-ridden Forties novel that really belongs to the Thirties.” And in many ways, the strongest sections of the book are those set in the Thirties, when Balchin’s characters encounter the anger of organized labor and the unemployed (echoes of Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier), the rise of Mosley-like British fascism, religious zealotry (including a scene with a talking burning bush), and the ennui of endless, pointless cocktail parties:
The guests of Sheila and Raymond Murray have extracted the pleasure from three hundred cigarettes, but have not troubled to take with them a thick, blue haze and loaded ash-trays. Of some ten pounds worth of alcohol there remains enough to dirty three dozen glasses; a slight smell; and a sticky patch on the rug where that inimitable droll Punch Hopkins has spilt a glass of Martini.
Our point in time-space is the point at which the room is no longer habitable but is inhabited; at which the desire to move is rather a desire to be still in another place; at which the desire to smoke is merely the desire not to smoke, and at which the present discomfort of being too hot can only be replaced by the prospective discomfort of being too cold.
Yet Balchin’s treatment of the war and its aftermath is also rich in fantastic imagination. He sets one scene with his leading characters in the role of Roman legionnaires bewildered by the behavior of the savages they encounter in their conquest of Briton. It’s streaked with anger and bitterness, as in the scene where propagandists from the Ministry of Defence give a slide-show talk to women in a munitions factory, showing them the results of their work (“We were unfortunately unable to photograph these–er–men until some time after one of this factory’s mines had exploded beneath them as they sat at a meal: But there is little doubt that they are Germans.” And there are moments of absurdist comedy, as in a scene where a zoo is set up in Hyde Park to allow American G.I.s to examine the British public in its native habitat–and vice versa.
Perhaps the funniest moment in the book is the opening scene of the play’s last act, “1947–(i.e., Onward),” set in a department store run by the now-ruling Labour Party and constrained by rationing, lowered expectations, and lingering destruction:
ANNE (entering the lift): Woollen dresses, please.
LIFT GIRL: Woolen dresses, silk dresses, addresses, redresses, third floor new building.
ANNE (making to get out): Oh, I’m sorry. Where is the new building?
LIFT GIRL: It isn’t built yet.
On the other hand, the writing becomes strident and monotonous in an over-long scene set as an episode of The Brains Trust radio program, in which a series of stereotypes (Business Man, Politician, Socialist, Priest, Artist) offer their views of how the world should work. As stilted as their visions sound, there is little that Balchin’s characters can offer as an alternative.
Which points to the artistic problem that undermines the ultimate power of Lord, I Was Afraid. As a Fascist tells one of Balchin’s characters in a scene from the Thirties, “You would have a world without wonder–without imagination–without glorious madness–without fury and noise and colour. And then you wonder why the world rejects you and turns to me.” Balchin and his characters reject all the various dogmas they encounter over the decades and Balchin rejects their lack of beliefs in turn–which leaves us in the end with … what? One by one, in the final scene, they plunge into the rising waters, in a futile attempt to swim to the Ark slowly disappearing on the horizon. Nihilism is perhaps the weakest of all foundations to build a work of art upon.
Lord, I Was Afraid, by Nigel Balchin London: Collins, 1947
I’ve reached the point where I’m no longer surprised to find that even after decades of looking for neglected books, I can still stumble across completely unfamiliar books and authors. A perfect example is P. B. (short for Patricia Barnes) Abercrombie, who wrote about eight novels, most of them comedies, between the early 1950s and the early 1970s. Angus Wilson once called her “the most interesting of our young women novelists,” and one reviewer called her 1959 novel, The Little Difference, “As enjoyable as a glass of champagne in the middle of a sunny morning when you ought to be working” (which ranks among the nicest things any reviewer has ever written about a book). All of her books were critical, if not financial successes, but even before her last novel, The Brou-Ha-Ha (1972), was published, her name was being mentioned in “what ever happened to” lists, and today, she has no mention in Wikipedia and rates a single unreviewed entry on Goodreads.
I picked out Fido Couchant (published in the U.S. by Doubleday under the title The Grasshopper Heart) from a display of Victor Gollancz books in the window of one of the few used bookstores still doing business on Charing Cross Road. When it was published, the Illustrated London News described it as “a modern comedy of the best kind, involving two marriages and the interplay of infidelity and basic love.” The two couples are Bea and Darcy, childless and living a somewhat glamorous life in London, and Emma and Stanley, both university educated but living in a grim coastal town on Stanley’s meager wages as a librarian. Bea scurries around town running errands for her mysterious boss, Mr. Finger, whose business always seems to have a faintly illicit air about it, and squeezing in a casual affair here and there. But when Darcy convinces himself that he has fallen in love with Emma, both couples’ cosy complacency is upset.
On one hand, it’s very sophisticated and as effervescent as champagne, but there are recurring reminders that one doesn’t have to probe too far below the surface to hit a grim, hard layer underlying all the fun. Stanley–who “had become used to the natural deference which many people pay to a handsome appearance,” becomes infatuated with a local teenage girl. He isolates himself from his wife, haunts the local coffee bar where the girl hangs out, and goes to the girl’s home one night and comes close to assaulting her. And though Bea dismisses her own flings with a flick of the wrist, her whole sense of security crumbles when she suspects that Darcy has fallen out of love with her.
In the depths of her misery, however, she sees a reminder that puts her problems in perspective:
“And I have to get on a bus, go down to the office, then to the Piccadilly … buy coffee on the way home … in spite of my suffering,” she thought, feeling that self-pity was entirely justified. At that moment, however, she suddenly saw the object upon which her eyes had been unseeingly fixed. The figure descending the hill haltingly before her was one she had seen before: that of an old man, his splayed crutches blocking the narrow pavement, his single leg painfully thumping along in halting, awkward strides. As the word suffering entered her mind she was looking at the threadbare seat of his trousers upon which was roughly pinned the empty trouser-leg. She was suddenly overcome by a sense of the luxury of a sheltered existence. The margin of her own security was not perhaps very wide: her own ability to support herself, the possibility of a little legacy, the generosity of friends. But it was spacious compared to some–perhaps to most. With a pang, as though she was going to have to leave it, she thought of her own pretty house, of the narrow, warmly carpeted stairs. For him, probably, it would be a matter of luck or cunning, when he returned to the squat grey building behind the spiked railings, to get the warm corner of an institution room, its cream-painted walls and ceiling stained an ochre colour, soot flakes caught in the wrinkled paintwork.
Signature of Patricia Abercrombie on title page of “Fido Couchant”Considering how silly the title of Fido Couchant (which refers to the neighborhood mutt who lusts after Stanley and Emma’s purebred French poodle), there is something reassuring to know that there is a solid backbone beneath P. B. Abercrombie’s adulterous fun. I look forward to discovering more of her work.
You can get a sample of it in her short story, “Dear Mr. Peterhouse,” which leads off the 1955 collection, Pick of Today’s Short Stories, Volume 6, edited by John Pudney, and is available on the Internet Archive (link).
Fido Couchant, by P. B. Abercrombie London: Victor Gollancz, 1961
It’s something of a guilty pleasure to come across a children’s book that doesn’t exactly seem to have been written with children in mind. Take The Rat, by G. M. A. (George Mottram Arthur) Hewett, the first in a series of “Animal Autobiographies” published by Adam and Charles Black in the early 1900s.
I give due credit to the Reverend Hewett, an Anglican priest who spent his life on the staff of Winchester College, Oxford–first as house master and finally as college chaplain–between 1878 and his death in 1927. Though his narrator, Samuel H. T. (the H. is for the one paw he lost, the T. to that half of tail he lost to a cat), speaks with the graceful and moderated tone of the gentry (“I cannot help feeling that I am a good fellow and a keen sportsman”), he does not pretend to be more than vermin in the eyes of his readers. And he’s willing to acknowledge that there are a few aspects in which rats lack something in refinement:
… fathers count for very little among us. Very few rats ever see their father, and a good thing too, for he is just as likely as not to eat one of his own children if food is scarce, and sometimes his wife helps him. Just fancy how you would feel if your dad strolled into the nursery or schoolroom one day, with his hands in his pockets, whistling a cheerful tune, and then, when you all ran up to him, hoping to be taken out for a nice safe walk, suddenly seized and devoured the tenderest and juiciest of you!
On the other hand, rats do treat the death of their own with a delicacy that can serve as instruction to Samuel H. T.’s young human readers:
We hardly ever use the word dead if we can possibly avoid it. It is too horrid, and so common and vulgar, too. You can always distinguish a really well-bred rat by the way in which he describes an accident. ‘Where’s Jimmy to-day?” asks somebody. “Feeding the hungry” is a nice answer when somebody has gobbled him up. “How’s your wife to-day?” he asks somebody else. “Dancing in the pig-sty” would mean “Caught by the leg in a trap.” “Singing in the larder” is a way of saying “Squeaking in a cage.” “Lying down with a bad pain in her back” can mean either “Killed by a stick” or “Nipped by a dog,” though we generally call the latter accident “Playing with the puppy.” You see, we are hardly ever ill, so that there is very little chance of people failing to understand. Perhaps you could now tell me how to say prettily and politely that your sister was dangling in the air with a noose round her neck, or that Billy was squashed quite flat under a large stone. Mind you make him quite flat. I could do that easily. I must tell you my answer: “Playing at being a pancake.” Now you make a better and politer answer if you can.
Indeed, Hewett’s rat doesn’t just teach his readers about manners: he instructs them in an admirable school of philosophy built around the uncertainties inherent in the life of a rat:
What a lot of “perhapses”! I love perhapses: they are so much nicer than knowing for certain. That is partly the reason why it seems to me that a tramp ought to be a happier man than you. You know all about your breakfast to-morrow: porridge, bacon and eggs, muffins and strawberry jam, coffee or tea—you can hardly put “perhaps” in once. But very often the whole of a tramp’s breakfast is “perhaps”; and although I am very fond of perhapses, I should not care to have nothing else for breakfast, however nicely it was cooked, unless they put an awful lot of sauce and trimmings round the side. And a rat is better off still. He never says anything without beginning with “Perhaps.” His whole life is so very perhapsy, though he can generally find something to eat, if only he is alive to eat it. We are really very particular about our food, when we have the chance of being particular, but if it comes to the worst there is hardly anything that will not do, until something nicer turns up.
Five other “animal autobiographies” were published A & C Black after The Rat:
Each book features twelve beautiful color illustrations but appears to have had a different illustrator. The ones in The Rat appear to be signed by an “S. Bagnot De La Berg,” but I can’t find a record of an artist with this name. Hewett must have been quite the jolly old sport, as his other work available on the Internet Archive, The Pedagogue at Play, features a frontispiece photo of himself sitting up in the snow, skies cattywampus in front of him. “There may be many spills” while skiing downhill, he cautions his reader. “I have had as many as fifteen in twenty minutes; not trifling stoppages, but good honest rollings in the snow.”
Animal Autobiographies: The Rat, by G. M. A. Hewett London: Alan and Charles Black, 1904
That afternoon when everything stopped at four o’clock the houses suddenly looked old as fossils cold in the rigid sunlight transfixed from prehistoric time.
Sound raved up in spate from College Green, released from utterance for there was now no more to be said: released from laughter for there would be no more quips.
Faces were floating blind facades shuttered upon nothingness, sense and spirit having slipped apart for ever; and the dreaming trams went reeling by me fleeing to their last termini, for now there would be no going and returning, no returning at evening with flowers from the mountains, for all the ragged streamers of roads from Dublin were blowing out upon a wind of death to nowhere.
But the cyclists in College Green kept up their mesmeric cycling moved by a tic of to and fro called living. And through all that heaving, maggot-seething superfluous spume of a city, young women in telephone booths were ringing up their lovers not knowing that from four o’clock that afternoon love had been discontinued.
from The New British Poets, edited by Denys Val Baker London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1945
This is a short Irish novel which deals entirely with private life; it is a middle-aged woman’s most subtle and sensuous and intelligent study of her relationship with her husband. I found it haunting at the time and I am still haunted by its stillness and rich cadences and powerful distinctions between levels of feeling, but I have only ever met two other people who have read it and they are both writers. It does not read like a first novel and has some of the hallmarks of a Bergman movie. The author, I later learnt, was 84 when it was published. She published only one other novel.
Toibin inspired several bloggers to locate the book, and you can find their assessments here: The Mookse and the Gripse; Just William’s Luck; and Pechorin’s Journal. Price published poems and short stories in English and Irish literary magazines from the 1940s through the 1980s, but seems never to have gained much recognition aside from an entry in an encyclopedia of Irish literature.
This reviewer seemed to want 
Every year or so, I reach for one of 
As Ingrid Ruthig writes in 
Rodgers had a clear-eyed understanding of his position in the community, which he never fully settled into. As he wrote in a late unpublished essay quoted in O’Brien’s book,
I have such hopes for 
There’s a sure-fire way to improve your chances of having your work ignored by English-reading audiences: Be Canadian.
In his memoir, 
I have a mild fascination with unreadable books. Mild because I often lack the courage or persistence to take them on, fascination because I often have the nagging sense that I should. By “unreadable,” I don’t mean truly unreadable, like the book of Pi to the millionth digit or whatever length it is, but dauntingly difficult–the sort of book that refuses to fit itself to the molds that make books accessible. 
I’ve reached the point where I’m no longer surprised to find that even after decades of looking for neglected books, I can still stumble across completely unfamiliar books and authors. A perfect example is P. B. (short for Patricia Barnes) Abercrombie, who wrote about eight novels, most of them comedies, between the early 1950s and the early 1970s. Angus Wilson once called her “the most interesting of our young women novelists,” and one reviewer called her 1959 novel, 
