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Soul Wounds, by Al Schak (1934)

Soul Wounds by Al Schak (1934)

I’m often asked how I find the books I write about. And no matter what I say, I know the only truthful answer is, “Serendipity.” It’s hard to look for something you don’t know about. Instead, you stumble across it. This is one reason I love a well-stocked used bookstore, particularly one that’s only loosely organized. I’m fortunate in living just down the road from one of the West’s hidden treasures, the Montana Valley Bookstore in Alberton. I’ve probably scoured its shelves at least twenty times over the years, but interesting things still pop up out of nowhere on every visit.

Most recently, I came across Soul Wounds, subtitled A Novel of the World War. That subtitle alone told me that it was published before world wars had to be numbered. But what intrigued me was the fact that it was published here in Missoula, Montana. This is not a hotbed of publishing and never was. The Missoulian Publishing Company devoted its energies to putting out the town’s newspaper and only rarely published books and then mostly local interest items. There was no information about the author and if there’d ever been a dustjacket, it was long gone. So this was an unknown quantity — but then, so was the very first neglected book I ever discovered, which was also a novel about World War One: W. V. Tilsley’s Other Ranks.

Like Other Ranks, Soul Wounds opens in media res. Hagen, an infantryman, is slogging through the mud and the dark as his company works its way up to take position in the front line of trenches just prior to an assault. It’s still winter, so this is one of the first American units to go into combat after America’s entry into the war. Aside from a few weeks’ stay in hospital to recover from a leg wound, Hagen will remain in or near the front lines almost continuously until the Armistice and take part in at least five major assaults.

The youngster in his company — still a teen and kept out of the brothels by the other men in his unit, Hagen will, by the end of the war, be considered one of the “old men,” one of the few from the original company to survive. He will endure shelling, gas attacks, relentless gunfire, and suicidal assaults across No Man’s Land, and even manage to overtake and capture a German machine gun nest.

Like many volunteers, Hagen comes to war with naive notions. Raised in a town on Flathead Lake in Montana, his one exposure to the military prior to joining up was when his mother sewed him a little soldier suit out of a cousin’s former uniform. Herrick, a poet who was living in Paris when the war broke out, tries to straighten him out: “You check your body, your mind, your soul, at the entrance, and you leave the check as a fee for admission. Once you get in you cannot get out.”

Herrick may have been a poet before the war, but there is no poetry in Soul Wounds. Schak writes in staccato, almost telegraphic prose:

A flash, a roar, beside him. His ears almost burst. The mud reeled as something pushed him over into it. There was a sting in his left knee, his forehead felt numb and heavy. He was faint. Another roar and flash, another, another, not so near him. A shot spat into the mud in front of him. His leg was burning. Shots struck, sput, sput, the parapet before him, flicked the mud near him. They’ll keep it up, he thought, and one of them’ll get me.

Only once does Hagen knowingly kill a man. In the final weeks of the war — not final to Hagen and his fellow Doughboys, for whom the Armistice comes as a surprise — he shoots a German who has come close enough to speak to him. By then, Hagen is numb with combat fatigue:

He did not think of it for a long time. Whether he was too utterly tired to fel anything, or whether the ceaseless horror and misery had calloused him, or whether he had become so dulled by the terrific pounding on his nerves and mind and body that he had lost some of the attributes of a human being, he never knew. He never found such questions entering his sickened mind. He was to completely overwhelmed by the front to wonder what was happening inside him.

When the war does end, however, the duty does not. Hagen’s unit is among the first Allied forces sent in to occupy the Rhineland. They spend months in a Germany town near Koblenz and Hagen is billeted with a German family. He sees the photo of a German soldier on the mantelpiece — an uncle killed in the war, he learns — and begins to see the human side of his former enemy while he awaits orders to return home.

Aside from the this final chapter about the initial occupation period after the war, there are many parallels between Other Ranks and Soul Wounds. Both focus on a single young infantryman, both stay tightly bound to the experience of being in the front lines, being in combat, with few and brief episodes of rest in the rear. Both are written in spare, artless prose. And both books are highly autobiographical with few nods to fiction aside from the change of names.

Al [Bernard Alfred] Schak was born in Minnesota in 1899 to Danish immigrant parents, one of five children. His family moved to Bigfork, Montana, when he was still young. He enlisted in the Montana National Guard in 1916, even though he was underage and slight of build, and was assigned to the 163rd Infantry Regiment. His older brother Walter also enlisted after the U.S. entered the war in 1917, and the two brothers sailed for France on the S. S. Leviathan in December 1917.

Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. and Al Schak, 1938
Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (L) and Al Schak, Missoula, Montana 1938.

Al served in the 163rd and later in the 26th Regiment under Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. He fought in six major engagements: Montidier, Cantigne, the Marne, St. Mihiel, the Argonne Forest, and the Meuse. He was wounded several times as well as missing in action, resulting in his mother twice being notified of his death in combat.

Sometime in the early fall of 1918, Al Schak felt the impulse to write a poem. As he later related, he borrowed a pencil, used the envelope of a letter from home, and wrote the following, which was published in the Literary Digest in October 1918:

NEAR NO MAN’S LAND

There wa’n’t no bugler there a-blowin’ taps;
The regimental chaplain, tho, was ‘round;
An’ I’m a tellin’ you as how I’m feelin’ blue,
‘Cause they put my rookie Buddy in the ground.

I showed ‘im how to do “right shoulder arms”
An’ told him all a doughboy oughta know;
We slept together, but to-day he sleeps
Near “No Man’s Land,” beneath the mud an’ snow.

He said ‘is ma an’ sister back at home
Kissed ‘im a dozen times in fond good-bys,
An’ when ‘e talked about ’em I could see .”
That look o’ longin’ shinin’ in his eyes.

I hate to think o’ how ‘is mother feels
— A mother’s loneliness is worse ‘n mine.
I’d write ‘is folks a letter, only that
This writin’ business ain’t much in my line.

I don’t know what to do when I’m off post.
My Buddy’s gone; an’ seems like all I know
I’d like to put a flower on ‘is grave
Near “No Man’s Land,” beneath the mud and snow.

Like Hagen, after the Armistice, Schak crossed into Germany and served with the occupation forces until he was repatriated in 1919. He had a difficult time adapting to civilian life at first and received relief from the Montana Veterans’ committee several times. He and his mother moved to Missoula around 1921 and he enrolled at the-then Montana State University (now University of Montana) as a special (i.e., not assigned to specific graduating class) student.

He seems to have thrived as a college student. He was the sports editor for the campus paper, The Sentinel, and published several stories in the university’s literary magazine, The Frontier. He joined the Sigma Phi Episilon fraternity and served as its chapter secretary. He graduated in 1924 with a degree in journalism.

Al Schak’s brother Walter was assigned as a motorcycle dispatch rider after the 163rd arrived in France, and he was wounded when a shell landed nearby as he was carrying orders just prior to the attack on Cantigny. Al Schak describes the incident in Soul Wounds:

It was late in the afternoon. The head of Hagen’s company was approaching a crossroads. A cloud of dust spurted out of the woods and a motorcycle with a sidecar zipped past the crossroads. It had not gone fifty yards past when a shell sent the driver hurtling into the field alongside the highway. Odds and ends of the machine flew up in a cloud of smoke and dust. The sidecar was obliterated.

In the novel, Hagen later learns that the motorcycle rider was his brother (also named Walter). Hagen is able to visit Walter at his field hospital, but his wounds are too severe and he dies and is buried in France. In reality, Walter Schak was returned to the U.S. and cared for in an Army hospital in Utah, but he died of complications in 1920 and was buried with honors in the town cemetery in Kalispell, Montana.

Al Schak worked as a reporter for the Missoulian after graduating from college, but he struggled with alcoholism and health problems — problems that would likely be diagnosed as symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder today. He worked for years on Soul Wounds (an apt euphemism for PTSD), which may have been published as a goodwill gesture by his old paper, for there appear to have been no reviews of it anywhere.

Twenty-seven years after the war, with France liberated and the French Army settling back into its pre-war routines, the paperwork for the award of the Croix de Guerre medal was located and Al Schak was finally decorated. The citation read in part,

Private Schak, still in his teens, came across a man from his unit shot in both hips and pulled him to cover. Unable to move him without help, he called to other members of the outfit. When they ignored him, he drew a .45 revolver and pointed it at the nearest men and told them to put the soldier on a litter and carry him back to comparative safety. Private Schak went with them, and when one of the litter bearers was killed, he grabbed one end of the litter and they took the wounded man to medical aid. He then rejoined his outfit and started forward through the bursting shells.

Headline from <em>Missoulian</em> article about Al Schak's death, November 15, 1945.
Headline from Missoulian article about Al Schak’s death, November 15, 1945.

He had little time to enjoy his belated recognition, however. During the night of November 14, 1945, a lit pipe he had forgotten in a living room chair caused a fire that destroyed his house. Firemen found his body in the kitchen. Luckily, his mother, who lived with him, was visiting a daughter in California. Al Schak was buried with military honors in Missoula, though his gravestone states a unit he never served with. He was 46.

Al Schak’s gravestone.

Soul Wounds, by Al Schak
Missoula, Montana: Missoulian Publishing Co., 1934

Via Bodenbach, by Ferenc Körmendi (1935)

via Bodenbach by Ference Körmendi

If you ever want to experience what it was like to take a train in Europe in the mid-1930s, read Via Bodenbach. Ferenc Körmendi wrote it as an experiment in the use of interior monologue, taking the reader, through the thoughts of George Kovacs, a Hungarian engineer, moment by moment, as he travels from Budapest to Berlin. We walk along the platform to the compartment he’s tipped the porter to hold. It’s an early train, going via Prague and Bodenbach, allowing him to reach Berlin in time for a good night’s sleep at a hotel. He wants to be fresh for his visit to the factory where the electrical device he’s invented will be manufactured. With any luck, this device will make his fortune.

He’s early, so early he regrets tipping the porter. Few passengers have boarded, there are plenty of compartments. He decides to get a paper, a German film magazine — something to read. When he returns to the compartment, there is a woman just settling in. “A girl, no Hungarian, quite pretty.” She apologizes in German for shutting the window (it’s cold). Not German, either, probably Czech. A boy enters, followed by an older gentleman. There is the settling of bags and overcoats, apologies in Hungarian, then in German. Everyone understands German? Yes, then they’ll stick with German.

The train begins to pull out of the station. “It’s moving. Daddy, the train’s moving,” the boy says excitedly. So, they’re father and son. “Dear little boy,” the woman says, “How well he behaves.” Oh, he’s not little: almost thirteen. Father prods the son to introduce himself. There are introductions all around. The Szabos. The woman is Alice Morek: yes, definitely Czech. “May we ask where you are going to?” says the father. “Podmokly,” she replies. He’s puzzled. “Bodenbach, you probably know it by that name.”

Bodenbach, Czechosolvakia, before World War Two.

On the one hand, this is all mundane, just minutiae. The chit-chat continues, gracious but not overly friendly. How many more pages of this? you may wonder. But Kovacs is suspicious, petty, insecure. Not pathologically, just … well, human. And so a low-keyed, superficially polite battle of the stags begins. The elder Szabo is bound to lose, of course. He and his son are changing trains in Prague. Kovacs will still be in the compartment with Alice Morek after they leave.

In the course of the next few hours, Kovacs subtly edges out Mr. Szabo. Alice agrees to dine with him in the restaurant car. They head down the corridor, edging past the first diners. A couple of aristocratic men who pass “at their distance of five hundred years’ exclusivity, aloof and distant.” Cross from one coach to the next:

Second-class coach corridor empty a compartment door half open smoke tall blonde woman in red slippers lying not sleeping alone sleeping all the way to Berlin I might have come along here too lazy it doesn’t matter now I’m not so badly off where I am empty compartment here they’ve already gone to the restaurant car two suit-cases in the rack another empty compartment lots of luggage the door opposite’s open cold wind it’s going to rain these have gone as well or there wasn’t anybody here oh yes there was luggage and newspapers on the seat a half compartment one man alone eating sandwiches on the table in front of him no need of railway food for poisoning another coach if it crumpled up the end of the train’s empty another empty compartment one suit-case on the rack he was eating from a plate his wife must have packed it another. .. .

They lunch, have coffee. She is friendly now, but not yet warm. But Kovacs slowly grows obsessed. Each bit of information she offers he places like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, trying to construct her story. On the way back from lunch, he forces her into an empty compartment, forces a kiss on her. He begins to think: maybe I will get off in Bodenbach, take her to a hotel, seduce her, run off with her.

What he’s considering is mad, of course, reckless, but now it’s like each thought follows the next faster and faster, like we’re descending a spiral staircase, picking up speed, until we’re running, taking terrible risks. Will Kovacs abandon his carefully planned journey, go flying out of his neat and comfortable life in pursuit of Alice Morek? She has given him no encouragement, even protests that his conduct was abusive. When he tells her he’s going to get off in Bodenbach, too, that he intends to run off with her, she protests: he’s mad, she wants nothing to do with him. But will he persist? We cringe as Kovacs keeps stepping closer and closer to disaster.

Via Bodenbach is something of a tour de force. On the surface, it’s an extraordinarily detailed and precise account of one man’s journey by train through three countries, from early morning to after midnight. Underneath, though, it’s a walk along a tightrope strung between a complacent life in Budapest and the prospect of a successful partnership in Berlin suddenly complicated by the presence of this woman, a beautiful, mysterious, and almost certainly inappropriate woman. Kovacs is not a sympathetic character, but that’s one of the reasons the narrative develops such compelling momentum: we know we wouldn’t be heartbroken if he goes tumbling off the rope and ends up a broken, bloody heap. A fascinating experiment — and a journey I’d be willing to take again.

(And yes, if you’re keeping score, this is the second Hungarian novel I’ve written about in which a man in a train meets a beautiful, mysterious, and almost certainly inappropriate woman (see Farewell My Heart, by Ferenc Molnar. Coincidence? Plagiaristic inspiration? A common trait among Ferencs? Who knows?)

Via Bodenbach, by Ferenc Körmendi
London: Chapman & Hall Ltd., 1935

January 6, from 365 Days, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain (1936)

Unemployed Crowd Benches of New York Parks as New Year Begins

Charlie huddled in the doorway, protected somewhat from the tugging wind; but when he saw the old lady approaching with her dog, he squared his shoulders and walked towards her with something of his old carelessness. He whispered: “It’ll be easier, the first time, to ask an old dame. It won’t be so shameful.” The old woman stopped and peered over her nose glasses at Charlie, surveying his wrecked shoes, his dirty reddened hands, his unshaven face. The terrier bitch stepped forward, dancing in the cold, and sniffed his trousers, making a whining sound.

All at once Charlie’s jauntiness vanished. The set speech which he had rehearsed in the doorway went out of his mind. He spoke rapidly in his terror: This was the first time he had ever begged. She must believe that, for God’s sake. He wasn’t a bum. He’d had a good job until just a few months ago. This was the first time, and he hadn’t eaten for almost two days. He was a man with self-respect and she must believe that. It was important. She must believe that, for God’s sake.

The old woman opened her bag. She dropped a dime into his palm.

Charlie sat on a bench in Washington Square, clutching the coin tightly, crushing with his heels clods of soiled and brittle snow. In a little while he would get up and buy something hot for his gnawing belly; but first he must sit here a little longer and adjust himself to shame. He rested his face against the iciness of the iron bench, hoping that nobody could guess his degradation by looking at him. He thought: “I sold out pretty cheap, didn’t I?”

William March only contributed two sketches to the story-a-day anthology 365 Days that Kay Boyle edited with her then-husband Laurence Vail and her friend Nina Conarain, but they are among the very best in the book. This one in particular is like a haiku of the Great Depression: brief, deft, perfect. It’s exactly reflective of the design and spirit of the anthology, which aimed to portray the year 1934 imaginatively through 300-word stories inspired by a particular news story headline from each day.

365 Days, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936

The Mechanical Angel, by Donald Friede (1948)

Publishing used to be a much different business, and no one could better attest to that than Donald Friede. After being kicked out of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, a job in the stockroom of Alfred A. Knopf convinced him that he wanted to be a publisher. The novelist Manuel Komroff (little read today) then hired him as his assistant in the production department of Boni & Liveright, t
one of the hot publishers of the early 1920s. Soon after, thanks to a small fortune from his father’s exclusive rights to sell Ford motorcars to Russia (until the Revolution, of course), he was able to walk into the office of Horace Liveright and buy his way into owning half the company. It entitled him, as he puts it, to “a ringside seat at a show that has never been equaled, and probably never will be: the literary explosion of the 1920s.”

And not just the literary. Still flush with his father’s cash, he bankrolled the avante-garde composer George Antheil, whom he’d met when the two of them were rushing to witness Charles Lindbergh’s landing at Le Bourget airfield after his successful solo crossing of the Atlantic (just a minor event in Friede’s frantic narrative). He brought Antheil and his wife back to New York, rented Carnegie Hall, and kept signing checks for the composer’s ever more grandiose notions (towering skyscraper backdrops, a real firehouse siren, a wind machine). The plan was for Antheil to debut for the American audience his Ballet Mechanique, debuted the previous season in Paris, along with his Jazz Symphony. Up to the last minute Antheil was coming up with new ideas and Friede was running around trying to materialize them.

The actual performance turned out to be one of the great disasters of musical history. With all the last-minute changes, the musicians were ill-rehearsed, the music too jarring for much of the audience, and then the wind machine ran amok and subjected the front rows to a minor hurricane. News of the fiasco devastated Antheil’s musical career for years. As Friede recalls,

He hated me so very much that a few years later, under a nom de plume, he wrote a detective story about me, in the opening pages of which he had the reader discover me dead in bed, a knife stuck in my back. In the balance of the book he managed to kill off my mother, my wife, and my brother, as well as a psychiatrist whom he had met through me. It was a very thorough job and had excellent cathartic results, as our present friendship proves.

Friede was able to turn his attention back to publishing. Boni & Liveright, along with other American publishers, were enjoying a moment almost never experienced since Gutenberg invented moveable type: “There were simply not enough books being printed to supply the demand.” Publishers were chasing after every writer worth his salt and more than a few who weren’t. Some of the worst books credited to Maxwell Bodenheim and Heywood Broun, for example, can be attributed to the desperation of publishers who would take anything of 40,000 words or more and slap it between a pair of boards.

Donald Friede, off in search of new manuscripts in the late 1920s.

But frenzied quest for manuscripts didn’t develop the best critical judgment. Fried turned down the rights to Charles Lindbergh’s memoir of his flight, We. “No thanks,” he said. “He’ll be forgotten in six months.” We went on to become one of the biggest bestsellers of the decade. He rushed to Paris to try to persuade James Joyce to give him the American rights to Ulysses. He felt he’d win over the author by presenting him with an exclusive American edition he’d had printed just for this meeting. Joyce opened the book, noted that the colophon page credited Friede as the copyright holder, and cooly dismissed him.

That was one of a string of missed opportunities that led Friede to wander out to Chicago to meet the bookseller Pascal (Pat) Covici, who was starting to create his own literary empire. The pair got to brainstorming and Friede returned to New York with plans to set up a new publishing house: Covici-Friede. Covici and his wife moved east, and soon a five-person company (Covici, Friede, their wives, and a stock clerk) was established on West Forty-Fifth Street. Unfortunately, what they lacked was a catalog. For 1928, they relied mostly on very expensive limited editions of tasteful erotica (sketches by Alexander King) and reissues of The Sweet Singer of Michigan by Mrs. Julia Moore, which Friede admits was “probably the worst volume of poetry ever written by anybody, anywhere.”

They courted Theodore Dreiser, passed on a thousand-page first novel called O Lost! that went to Scribner’s, fell into the masterful hands of Maxwell Perkins, and emerged two years later as Look Homeward, Angel. Slowly, they began to sign better books and better writers. Wyndham Lewis (when people still bought his books) and Joseph Moncure March’s boxing poem The Set-Up. Their breakthrough came when they bought the American rights to Radclyffe Hall’s then-revolutionary lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. Condemned as obscene in England, the book had to pass the scrutiny of the New York Court of Special Sessions, but the court ruled it acceptable and its scandalous reputation made it an instant bestseller.

Flush with pride in their critical judgments, they then listened in rapture as Ben Hecht laid out his ideas for the book that would be his magnum opus, certainly the greatest of the Great American Novels, to be titled Deliaga. As Hecht’s chapters dribbled in, however, his creative desperation was only surpassed by their dread that they’d bought an unpublishable heap of yecch. Having already sold hundreds of copies as pre-orders, they grabbed a Hecht short story that was lying around and talked him into padding it out to become A Jew in Love.

With the Great Depression now well upon them, Covici-Friede entered what Friede calls their “deadly serious, if-it-isn’t-proletarian-it-can’t-be-good phase.” And they had a good prospect for making headways with this line thanks to John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat and Of Mice and Men. Unfortunately, not good enough. Their creditors came knocking and Covici-Friede closed in 1938. Pat Covici moved over the Viking and signed Steinbeck’s next big novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Friede decided to try Hollywood.

At this point, a good editor would have told Donald Friede to wrap things up. The subtitle of The Mechanical Angel is, after all, “His adventures and enterprises in the glittering 1920s,” and here we are in the late 1930s, when glitter was still a scarce commodity outside the movies. Friede also entered a long period of wandering, short-lived enterprises, and marriages (including to the food writer M. F. K. Fisher in the late 1940s) — none of which he discusses here.

Instead, he pads out the book with a series of thematic chapters (I know you’re dying to read about his hobby of building radios) and what must bluntly be called old fart pontifications. The giddy fun of the crazy world of publishing, art, music, and drinking in the 1920s gets rehashed for its moral lessons and neither reader nor writer are the better for it. There are about 240 pages and 19 chapters in The Mechanical Angel. Stop at the end of Chapter 11 and you’ll thank me.

The Mechanical Angel, by Donald Friede
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948

Betty Swanwick, Artist and Subversive Novelist

Portrait of Betty Swanwick by Clive Gardiner (c.1948).

If Betty Swanwick is remembered today, it’s usually for her painting The Dream, which was used on the cover of the Genesis album Selling England by the Pound. And it’s as a painter she would probably prefer to be remembered, since she resigned from her long professorship at Goldsmith’s College School of Art in 1970 to pursue her unique style, a blend of traditional realism and somewhat exaggerated modernism.

Cover of Selling England by the Pound by Genesis, cover painting by Betty Swanwick.

But it would be an injustice not to celebrate her brief but distinctive career as a novelist. Whether she decided to write novels as a vehicle for her illustrations or as an outlet for her literary inclinations, between 1945 and 1958, Betty Swanwick wrote and illustrated three slim novels that gleefully subvert many of the tropes and conventions of the 19th century novels and more than deserve recognition themselves.

Born in 1915, the daughter of a professional draughtsman, Swanwick entered Goldsmith’s College at the young age of 15 and studied under two masters, Edward Bawden and Clive Gardiner. She fell into a long-term relationship with Gardiner, who helped get her a teaching position with Goldsmith’s after her graduation. It was a job she held for over thirty years, though she ultimately saw it as an obstacle to her own creative development.

Cover of The Cross Purposes (1945).

She supplemented her teaching income by taking on occasional illustration jobs for clients ranging from London Transport to Strand magazine and, less frequently, illustrating children’s books such as Marjorie Seymour’s Camille Cat, “the story of a cat who liked green figs far too well.” Perhaps she felt she could do just as good a job with the words as the illustrations, for in 1945, she published her first novel — or, more properly, novelette, as specified in its subtitle, since it’s just 64 pages long.

Esmeralda and the Reverend Randall.

The Cross Purposes opens in the manner of any good Victorian novel, with the Reverend Robert Randall and his sister Esmeralda traveling to take a vacant curacy in the prosperous town of Frogs Copping. The beautiful and eligible Esmeralda catches the eye of Frederick, son of Sir Edward Chalmers, the town’s most prominent nobleman, and everyone assumes that the Reverend Robert will pair up with Chalmers’ ward, the lovely Hermione Beauchampers.

Nothing in a Swanwick novel ever turns out quite as planned, though. Hermione is beautiful, cruel, and conniving and more than happy to lure the Reverend into matrimony, but she is no match for her governess, Miss Whistle:

Miss Whistle, mark you, was a woman of shrewd perception and quick ideas, and, being of an uneasy age, seized the possibility of being a respectable married woman with both hands. What more could a plain, intelligent woman require than a plain, egotistical husband with settled means? It was a very good and manageable catch, thought Miss Whistle to herself whilst saying her prayers at night.

Soon, two engagements are announced, and Hermione departs to the Continent in search of wealthier fish. Sir Edward plans a betrothal ball that sets his “noseholes quivering with lively anticipation.” Swanwick knows how to draw her story to an end according to the formula: “There now only remains the winding up of this story to universal satisfaction and cosmic gratification.” This doesn’t, however, mean that everyone lives happily ever after.

The double wedding.

Swanwick is too much a realist to risk going into details about what happens after the dual wedding. She sides with Sir Edward, who would be just as happy to see the vision of the two couples at the altar in the lavishly decorated church prolonged indefinitely, “until the whole of them, the bridal party and all, were slowly consumed by death, standing up in a breathless trance in the Floral Chapel.”

Paddy Rossmore’s catalogue raisonné, Betty Swanwick: Artist and Visionary, lists few works between The Cross Purposes and her next novel, Hoodwinked (1957). Rossmore notes that this is more likely due to the fact that she concentrated on teaching and commercial work and the latter, held by the Society of Illustrators and Artists, was discarded in the course of moves and reorganizations. In any case, when she turned to fiction again, it was to revisit the theme of matrimonial mismatches — but this time brought up to current day and with even more subversive twists.

Cover of Hoodwinked (1957).

Cora Fox and Madeleine Mudie are old friends with a common problem: uncooperative children. Cora’s older daughters, Laurel, Flora, and Philippa are mad about jazz and are only interested in improvising and jitterbugging. Her youngest, Gemma, is the loveliest and most conventional in her attitudes … aside from her penchant for lying and cheating. Madeleine’s son, Castor, is handsome, of age, and an ideal candidate to be matched and married off … aside from his disinterest in everything except designing womens’ wear. The solution in obvious to both women.

Mr. Fox’s suicide.

And its urgency increases when Gemma arrives home, having been expelled from her boarding school for egregious cheating. The shadow it casts upon the family name leads Mr. Fox to take his life in front of Gemma (Swanwick illustrates the scene in case we have trouble picturing it). Gemma sighs with relief at the sight of her dead father. “Phew! Well, that is that,” she says, “very coolly fanning the smoke fumes from her eyes.” Castor and Gem are hastily brought together in hopes of kindling sparks.

Madeleine, Cora, Castor, and Gemma.

Unfortunately, Castor prefers older women. Cora, to be specific. While he goes through the motions to please his mother, he insinuates himself into Cora’s companionship, and finds her love-starved and not entirely unwilling. At the same time, an enormously wealthy and utterly socially inappropriate Indian Rajah buys the estate next door to the Foxes. Gemma may have cheated on a fair number of her subjects, but arithmetic was not one of them. You can see where Swanwick is going. All it takes is the sudden death of the distraught Madeleine to remove the remaining obstacle.

Cover of Beauty and the Burglar (1958).

A year later, Arthur Barker Ltd. published her third novel, Beauty and the Burglar, while kicked the Victorian matrimonial formula to the curb for good. Once again, an eligible pair — this time, the ward Palma Purre and the earnest reformer Bernard Follow — are brought together through the machinations of guardians and parents with the aim of achieving a quick and socially profitable match. Palma is not entirely unwilling, but Bernard’s feet are so rooted in the 19th century that it’s hard for her not to get a bit exasperated. “It is to be hoped that we shall see a good deal of each other in the future,” he tells her.

I would find it satisfying to develop you in other ways also: of course, it goes without saying that we refer to the higher ways. There will be much gratification from these services that I am more than willing to render you. Whenever I am free from tours and lectures, I shall endeavour to see you and train you for the proper purpose in life.

Luckily for Palma, one night a cat burglar named Rowland Swagger sneaks into her bedroom to steal her jewelry. Instead, he falls instantly for Palma — and she for him — and the two abscond to his hideout, which happens to be a school where he is teaching a new generation to carry on his dishonorable profession. Rowland proudly shows Palma around his Royal Academy of Crime, allowing her to observe classes ranging from safecracking to the art of proper coshing.

Coshing class.

Rather than taking exception to Rowland’s criminal enterprise, Palma is inspired by its educational potential and proposes to deliver a lecture to the students on the “Art of the Golden Section,” aided by an attractive and scantily clad model. The lecture gets a tremendous response and before we know it, the R.A.C. begins transforming into the G.C.C. — the Golden College of Culture. All ends happily at the altar again, or rather the bridge, as Rowland and Palma and Bernard and the thoroughly inappropriate Melba find themselves before an old sea dog named Captain Blott.

Betty Swanwick, around 1958.

John Betjeman found Swanwick’s novels “Strange, startling, funny, and with a weird beauty.” Other reviewers struggled to categorize her books, drawing on everyone from Jane Austen and Wilkie Collins to David Garnett and Damon Runyon in hopes of finding a familiar point of reference. Angela Milne probably described them best by writing that they were “small and funny in the way [Daisy Ashford’s juvenile comic novel] The Young Visiters was funny” — but “not unintentionally so.” In fact, she argued, everything Swanwick did “points roundly to its adulthood.” And it would be wrong to dismiss these three little novels as pastiches. If anything, I’d say they looked forward, not back, towards 1960s satires of long-standing British traditions such as Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War! and Lindsay Anderson’s If…. Swanwick was not just saying that those Victorian tropes were dead but standing in front of their grave and saying a derisive, “Good riddance.”

Betty Swanwick died in 1989 from complications due to cancer. None of her novels has ever been reissued, but several can be had for under $50 if you’re interested. They’re lovely little packages of subversive fun.

Three novels by Betty Swanwick:
The Cross Purposes (1945)
Published by Editions Poetry London

Hoodwinked (1957) and Beauty and the Burglar (1958)
Published by Arthur Barker Ltd.

Farewell My Heart, by Ferenc Molnar (1945)

I found a copy of Ferenc Molnar’s little novel Farewell My Heart in Ravenswood Used Books while visiting Chicago recently. It was the sort of book that’s easy to miss on a shelf: no dust jacket, the spine broken and its lettering faded. For me, though, sitting between familiar titles by Vilhelm Moberg and Toni Morrison, it was an orphan crying out for a closer look. I recognized Molnar’s name but only knew him as a dramatist (Liliom, later made into the musical Carousel, among others). I soon found more than enough reasons to buy it: its size (8″x5″, just about the ideal for a book that’s pleasant to hold AND read; the nostalgic disclaimer “ABOUT THE APPEARANCE OF BOOKS IN WARTIME” on the colophon page; and a couple of opening lines that guaranteed I’d want to go on:

“Religion?” The Italian officer in the Fascist uniform asked, holding my passport in his hand.

The train had been standing at the border station between Switzerland and Italy for a long time.

Wherever this story was going to go, I was willing to follow.

And did. However, let me disclose up front that though I thoroughly enjoyed Farewell My Heart, it cannot be held up as anything more than an entertaining minor novel. In fact, it reminded me of those times when I’ve been in the mood to see a movie and taken whatever happened to be showing without being too discriminating — and been rewarded by something unexpected and memorable if not quite a masterpiece. Many years ago, I had to quickly shepherd some younger cousins out of my grandparents’ house to get them away from a family meltdown. I took them to the nearest multiplex and into the next available showing — Breaking Away. I don’t know what they thought of it, but for me it was not only far better than sitting through a screaming match but a movie I’ve been fond of ever since.

Farewell My Heart is about the unexpected, too. Its unnamed narrator is a fifty-something Hungarian journalist, a Jew who’s managed to shift some money to America without losing it in the Crash — enough to qualify for that rare and coveted object, an American visa. As he travels from Budapest, “At every border the poor, underpaid passport officials had started with that same strange expression at the American visa. As if it were some foreign coin which, though it had no value in their own country, they felt was very valuable.”

His train stops at Lausanne and a young red-haired woman boards and takes the seat next to him. She is also Hungarian, he learns, a twenty-year-old named Edith, and has a ticket on the same ship leaving Genoa for New York. She is pretty — but, he is quick to tell us, “let’s be absolutely frank, she was conventionally pretty — and let’s be even franker, there was something in her character, in her appearance, in her look, in her voice, that was reminiscent of the typical Budapest streetwalker.”

Edith soon abandons him for a Finnish diplomat — younger, more confident, better dressed than the narrator — until their itineraries diverge and she takes up again with the journalist. This pattern will be repeated on board the ship to America, in the cheap hotel they take rooms in upon arrival in New York, and over their first months in the new country.

The narrator is a cautious man, careful with his money and his health, having already been diagnosed as having a weak heart. He avoids leading Edith to think he has any interest in her other than as a companion, and when she decides to latch onto a young Hungarian dancer and go with him to try their luck in Hollywood, he offers her only a little money and encouragement. Not long after, he suffers a heart attack and while rehabilitating, meets and marries a gentle American woman closer to his age.

Married, eligible for citizenship, financially secure, he is in a perfect position to live out a life of quiet and moderation. And then Edith returns. And Molnar reminds us of one of the reasons we read fiction: to follow as people make terrible, foolhardy, self-destructive choices. Choices most of us wouldn’t be dumb or daring enough to take. And in this case, for no reason at all, for nothing more than the feeling the narrator had when Edith first sat beside him in that Swiss train compartment:

And still, when she sat down beside me and said softly, “It’s cold,” and pushed closer to me, and her shoulder and hip touched me, I felt unerringly that we two belonged to each other for all that remained of life. This was a fearful new element in my experience, this suddenly born thought which had taken possession of me with such overwhelming force, for no reason at all.

Farewell My Heart will take you just an evening or two to read. If you happen across it on a shelf someday, do pick it up. But if not, there are other good books a few inches further along.

Farewell My Heart, by Ference Molnar, translated by Elinor Rice
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945

The Midst of Life, by Mina Curtiss (1933)

Advertisement for The Midst of Life by Mina Curtiss.

The Midst of Life is subtitled “A Romance,” but knowing a bit about Mina Curtiss, I read it assuming it was a work of nonfiction. I was surprised, then, to discover than Houghton Mifflin marketed it as a novel, for aside from the change of a name or two, this is drawn directly from Curtiss’s life. Born into a wealthy and cultured Jewish family (her younger brother Lincoln rates a 700-page biography by Martin Duberman), she grew up in Boston and graduated from Smith College, where she taught French for over ten years. When she was 30, she married Henry Tomlinson Curtiss, an heir to the Spaulding sporting goods fortune, but Curtiss, who had suffered from lung problems all his life, died suddenly of pneumonia after less than two years of marriage.

“Why shouldn’t I write to you, dead as well as alive,” she asks on the first of June, 1932. The Midst of Life is a widow’s attempt to process her husband’s death. “Of course, I shall write to you — every day. I shall tell you everything, everything you would want to know.”

Mina Curtiss, 1933. Photo by Carl Van Vechten.

Though she says, “I shall write you to remind you in your other world of the simple happiness of this one, its casualness and its excitement,” we soon realize that the one being reminded in Curtiss herself. While she and Henry were married, they wrote each other every day when apart. The act of writing to a ghost is preferable, she admits, to her initial ways of coping with his loss. “At first, I fancied you were in the next room, that accidentally you had left it just before I entered. Then I used to expect to meet you in the street.” She once felt an almost irresistable impulse to stab a man in the street simply for his expression of utter indifference to her pain.

And so, she writes every day, or nearly every day. Not like a wife sharing her day with her husband — such conversations tend to be more about exchanging information than emotions. She shares her impressions and, inevitably, the memories they trigger. Henry was a great lover of gardens, so we hear about the day lilies and delphinium, about the tomatoes and squash in the large gardens around their country home in the Berkshires and her joy or disappointment in their growth. The two of them were avid riders, so we read of the moments when Mina is able to lose all sense of herself in a gallop and of her sadness at having to put down her aging stallion Sandy.

As the summer moves into August, Mina finds herself sifting through her memories of Henry’s last days. Struck down in a New York hotel, he lies struggling to breathe, too frail to be moved to a hospital, his doctors holding out little hope for recovery. For years, she has taken some comfort from believing that his last word to her was “Beautiful.” But as she examines her memories closer, she realizes that what he actually said just before losing consciousness was, “Go away. Leave me alone.” And Mina finds this not the devastating rejection she has feared. “Leave me alone,” was right, she decides. “Man is born into the world alone, he leaves it alone, and in a way he lives in it alone, too.”

In her last letter, on the 10th of October, as the frost comes and forces her to harvest the last fruits and vegetables from the garden, Mina recalls a conversation she had with Henry early in their relationship. He is driving her to the station so she can catch a train back to Smith when he notices her glancing nervously at her watch. “Why do you do that?” he asks. If she misses one train, she can catch another. “Aren’t you happy here and now?” And that, she concludes, is the only way in which she can hold onto something of the love they shared: by concentrating on the moments of happiness she still has the opportunity to experience, even without him.

If Mina Curtiss was able to publish these letters by calling The Midst of Life a novel, so be it. As readers we might do well to think of it as a novel, too. For there are things here that are almost too intimate to be shared with strangers. A fine and touching book.

The Midst of Life, by Mina Curtiss
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933

The Darkened Room, by Hilde Spiel (1961)

The Darkened Room by Hilde Spiel (1961)

“Europe is nothin’ on earth but a great big auction, that’s all it is, that bunch of old worn-out places, it’s just a big firesale, the whole rutten thing.” Hilde Spiel quotes this line from Tennessee Williams’ play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as an epigraph to her novel The Darkened Room (1961), about a group of Europeans who’ve washed up in Manhattan as jetsam from the firesale known as World War Two. Lele, the narrator, is a young Latvian woman whose parents were victims of the war: her father shot by the Soviets as a member of the intelligentsia (he ran Riga’s water system), her mother dead of starvation, one of the thousands abandoned by their Nazi captors in the final weeks before surrender. Seduced by an Italian in a displaced persons camp, she arrives in New York with a toddler son and an introduction to Mrs. Langendorf, an Austrian Jewess now working in New York as a psychiatrist.

Lele soon learns that Mrs. Langendorf may not have official credentials as a therapist, but she is a master of messing with people’s heads, and she moves on to work as housekeeper for Lisa, another expat Austrian Jewess. Lisa’s background is even murkier than Mrs. Langendorf’s. She spent the war in Rome as — even the relatively naive Lele figures this out — the mistress of a black marketeer. Her closets are full of designer Italian outfits, expensive paintings, priceless figurines and objets d’art. She escaped punishment when the Allies liberated the city by entrapping a well-meaning Army captain, Jeff, into marriage and is now installed in her apartment as the queen bee of a hive of fellow Central European refugees.

Lisa is neither beautiful nor friendly but somehow she manages to keep all around her in thrall, hosting parties paid for by selling off odds and ends of her Italian booty. She spends days huddled in her bedroom “like the oyster in its shell, surrounded by her scent bottles and her jewelled monocle and her books and her birds and her indecent Pompeian pictures, while she supped from her Louis Seize table and cowered on her gold-shot bedcover or lain in her pink sheets.”

Lisa seems to be, for Spiel, the embodiment of the decay and death of the culture of pre-war Europe, the world of cafes, liberal humanism, and carefree decadence. She draws in people with her intensity, but as Lele ultimately discovers, it’s an intensity fueled by heroin and an increasing fear that she is irrelevant in this new world. Lele comes across a note on which Lisa has scribbled, “Vivre? Nos valets le feront pour nous.” [Live? Our valets will do it for us.] As her physical and mental condition deteriorates, she still hosts her parties, but now she is less the maîtresse d’salon than a “somewhat deranged invalid who must be humoured and flattered, and whose odd behaviour must be glossed over with a lot of small talk.”

Hilde Spiel, around 1961.

The Darkened Room has a certain morbid fascination perhaps not dissimilar to that exercised by Lisa over her circle of followers. Hilde Spiel’s motivation for writing the book, however, are perplexing. Spiel, like Mrs. Langendorf an Austrian Jew with some experience in psychological research, won the Julius Reich Prize for outstanding Austrian literature with her first novel, Kati auf der Brücke, in 1933 but emigrated to England in 1936. There, she married Peter de Mendelssohn, a descendent of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, and became a naturalized British citizen.

After the war, she lived in England but spent increasing amounts of time in Austria, ultimately settling again in Vienna. She published a number of books in English as well as German. She never lived in the U.S., aside from a few visits. So why write this book that is such a condemnation of the European culture that she clearly embraced again? Looking around Lisa’s bedroom after her death, Lele thinks,

Europe, with its vice and its wisdom, its horror and its fascination, its cruelty and its refinement, was, like the evening sun, sinking down beneath the horizon. At last I was shaking free from the beautiful monster which had eaten my father and mother and pursued me across the ocean to lure me back, to ensnare me with the help of its rarest and most bewildering spectres.

Spiel appends a postscript in the voice of Paul Bothe, a popular German novelist who has become a permanent resident of the U.S. Bothe visits Lele and Jeff, now married and living happily and quietly in San Francisco. “By all outward appearances,” he writes, “they are two delightful people, typical of the artless, uncomplicated youth of the United States.” Wondering how the two could have been caught up in Lisa’s death spiral, he has to admit that, “As far as can be seen, there are no traces of it left.”

This is an odd conclusion to a very odd novel. In making the somewhat innocent Lele her narrator, Hilde Spiel draws us in as effectively as Lisa does her coterie, but then she buries the rotting old corpse of Europe and sends Lele, Jeff, and little Mario off to sunny California and a life that could come straight out of an ad in a 1949 issue of Saturday Evening Post. One wonders if she wrote The Darkened Room — in English, not German, by the way — in the old world comfort of the chalet in Saint Wolfgang im Salzkammergut that Wikipedia tells us she owned from 1955 on. It reads almost like an exorcism, yet after writing it, Spiel seems to have been content to reside in the lap of the evil spirits she had cast out.

The Darkened Room, by Hilde Spiel
London: Methuen, 1961

Lost Heritage, by Bruno Frank (1937)

Lost Heritage by Bruno Frank

A young man wanders along the streets of a Czech border town in the late evening looking for a place to stay. His clothes are dirty and torn from walking through the forest. When he finally locates a wretched little inn, the landlord treats his brusquely: just another one of those Jews sneaking away from the Nazis. He gives the man a tiny and dirty attic room.

When he opens the man’s passport to note down his details, however, he gasps. The man is Prince Ludwig Saxe-Camburg, a member of one of Germany’s oldest noble dynasties. This is not the sort of person to come wandering out of the woods from Germany.

In Lost Heritage (UK title Closed Frontiers), Bruno Frank illustrates the disruptive, destructive effects of Nazism in Germany by taking as his subject a man we would think exemplifies the solidity of the German establishment. Although the Kaiser has abdicated and the right of the German nobility to own and rule over their principalities and duchies has been ended, The Saxe-Camburgs are still the wealthiest and most respected family in their region and the trappings of the feudal culture are still respected by most of the family’s former subjects.

Ludwig is an aesthete. After flitting through subjects in university like a butterfly, he lands on art history through the influence of a revered professor and throws himself into cataloging the works of Goya. The growing influence of the Nazi Party is peripheral noise in his world. But then the professor is ejected from the university for suggesting that an etching by Dürer is not a symbolic forecast of the rise of Adolf Hitler. Prince Ludwig’s older brother is appointed to a high regional post in Ernst Röhm’s Sturmabteilung (SA). Hitler becomes Chancellor. The campus becomes an incubator for angry, zealous young men full of hatred for Jews and intellectuals.

Prince Ludwig moves to Berlin and makes contacts with a few anti-Nazi acquaintances: former professors, journalists, a few retired Army officers. They begin meeting secretly in his apartment to plan ways to resist, possibly overthrow Hitler. In a matter of weeks, however, the Gestapo surprise the men and take them prisoner.

Ludwig is tortured strictly through sleep deprivation, but from the prison’s hallways he can hear his fellow conspirators being beaten. When he is about to collapse from exhaustion, policemen enter his cell, hand him clothes to wear, take him out to a waiting car. Ludwig is certain he’s being taken out to be shot.

Bruno Frank takes Ludwig through three phases in his experience of Nazism in Germany: his late awakening and amateurish attempt at resistance; a desperate and mostly futile effort to sneak back into Germany and rescue his colleagues; and his flight and gradual transformation into that ubiquitous and miserable character of the 1930s, the German refugee. The story moves at a tremendous pace: events develop swiftly, Ludwig finds (or puts) himself into numerous cliffhanger-type situations.

I was greatly reminded of Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel The Oppermanns. Although the Oppermanns are Jews and the Saxe-Camburgs Aryans, they both start in positions of comfort and privilege and dismiss the warning signs, are slow to recognize the horror of Nazism until it’s overwhelmed them and made them its victims. Both books are gripping reads, the kind you drink in in hundred-page gulps.

But they’re also about Nazism in Germany in its early stages as a regime. The war and the Holocaust are still in the future. There are concentration camps and round-ups of troublesome elements, but the beatings of Jews and Communists, the smashing and looting of Jewish shops, and accumulating restrictions on academic, intellectual, commercial, and private life still seem random aberrations rather than parts of a deliberate plan. And for me at least, persecutions are not of anonymous millions but of the friends and associates of characters we have come to know and thus more intimate and frightening.

Though a man who does not see himself as a hero, Prince Ludwig reveals himself to be a man of character, loyalty, and when it counts most, physical courage. And he is, ultimately, a survivor, a man who finds a capacity to carry on even after losing everything that he had. I started Lost Heritage uncertain of where Bruno Frank was headed and finished it thoroughly satisfied. A pretty gripping movie could be made from this book.

The English edition of the book, Closed Frontiers, is available on the Internet Archive: link.

Lost Heritage, by Bruno Frank, translated by Cyrus Brooks
New York: Viking, 1937
Closed Frontiers

London: Macmillan, 1937

A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding, by Sylvia Wright (1969)

Publishing is almost as notorious for its misleading packaging as the recording business. We may never know what Doubleday’s remit to the Paul Bacon design studio was for Sylvia Wright’s A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding, but the vaguely romantic cover that was supplied in response represents in not the slightest way the book’s contents. For one thing, this is not a novel but a collection of three novellas. And three novellas that in no way resemble the sort of narrative a fan of Georgette Heyer or Anya Seton might expect.

Sylvia Wright doesn’t even pretend to know how to write such a book: “How do you make fiction?” she asks in the opening line of “Fathers and Mothers,” her opening novella. After contemplating fiction’s components — information, characters, plot — she confesses within a page or so, “I cannot grasp this craft.” And in the subsequent 180-some pages of the book, she makes no attempt to.

Although one can detect the influence of Nouveau Roman at some points, Virginia Woolf at others, there is no deliberate imitation here. In fact, it would be easier to place A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding in the context of the wave of American experimental fiction just then making itself known in the work of Donald Barthelme, William Gass, Robert Coover, and others. Except even that suggestion is misleading, since Wright’s career as a fiction writer (well, even though she claimed not to grasp the craft, it’s the most convenient label we have at hand) was too brief to allow any sort of network of influences to form. None of the three pieces in A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding were published previously and this is her only work of fiction.

Sylvia Wright was not a naïf, though. Soon after graduating from Bryn Mawr, she learned about both novel-writing and publishing when she and her mother worked with Mark Saxton to turn the 2300-page manuscript left by her father, Austin Tappan Wright, into publishable form. Though its bulk (over 1,000 pages even after editing) put off many readers, Islandia (1942) became, and remains, a cult favorite, a blend of utopianism, fantasy, romance, and what today we’d call steampunk.

Sylvia Wright
Sylvia Wright, 1969.

She translated that experience into a job on the staff of Harpers Bazaar, eventually earning her own monthly column of humorous observations on life. A couple dozen of these were collected and published in 1955 as Get Away From Me With Those Christmas Gifts. Many have titles like, “My Kitchen Hates Me” and “How to Make Chicken Liver Pate Once.” But one piece has worked its way into our vocabulary: “The Death of Lady Mondegreen.”

In it, Wright recalls learning a Scottish ballad, “The Bonnie Earl O’ Moray,” as a child. In particular, she memorized the lines, “They have slain the Earl o’ Moray/And Lady Mondegreen.” Only, in the balland, that last phrase is actually “And layd him on the green.” “I saw it all clearly,” she wrote:

The Earl had yellow curly hair and a yellow beard and of course wore a kilt. He was lying in a forest clearing with an arrow in his heart. Lady Mondegreen lay at his side, her long, dark-brown curls spread out over the moss. She wore a dark-green dress embroidered with light-green leaves outlined in gold.

“It made me cry,” she writes. When she did finally learn the correct wording, she clung defiantly to her version. It was better. And this led her to champion her invention: the mondegreen. For Wright, mondegreens are not errors. They are portals into other worlds:

If you lay yourself open to mondegreens, you must be valiant. The world, blowing near, will assail you with a thousand bright and strange images. Nothing like them has ever been seen before, and who knows what lost and lovely things may not come streaming in with them? But there is always the possibility that they may engulf you and that you will go wandering down a horn into a mondegreen underworld from which you can never escape.

Wright got her mondegreens from poetry, newspapers, and advertisements. Popular music lyrics have been a rich source for them, even when many of us didn’t know they had a name. And Wright was right in viewing them as transformative. A mondegreen, for example, turns Jimi Hendrix’s ode to LSD, “‘Cuse Me While I Kiss the Sky,” into a celebration of homosexual love: “‘Cuse Me While I Kiss This Guy.”

And perhaps the notion of mondegreens is a clue to understand what Sylvia Wright is doing in A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding. In the first novella, “Fathers and Mothers,” the reader can reconstruct a straightforward story: a Greek mother and father are sharing an apartment in Boston with their son, his American wife — the narrator, but only sometimes — and their infant grandson. The father is suffering from lung cancer. They have come to America to get the best medical care. After months of treatment, the father dies. The family returns to Athens for his funeral.

But that’s what’s happening in the background. In the foreground, the thing that attracts Wright’s attention is how her in-laws (in real life she was married to a Greek man, so presumably this is somewhat autobiographical) deal with their new world. Part of that new world is cancer and sickness and too many hours in the hospital. Another part is America is another part. They are Greek. At home, they can glance out their apartment and see the Acropolis. Ancient Greece and modern Greece are intertwined.

So naturally, one would expect similar things in America. “Have there been preserved here some of the songs and stories of the old Indians, so that one can get a sense of their rhythms, their sonorities?” the mother-in-law asks. A natural question. Except that even today, most Americans would be stumped to indicate any aspect of the culture of our indigenous peoples that hasn’t been processed through Longfellow, the Boy Scouts, and Hollywood. All we know is the transformed version.

The mother-in-law, in particular, is the transformative agent in this family. When not at the hospital, the father-in-law spends most of his time lying limp on the couch. The mother-in-law is the one questioning norms, pushing for routines to be changed, not being satisfied by the status quo. “Now, if this were a story,” Wright observes, “a real story instead of whatever it is, then this could be interpreted and the story shaped to advance through the interpretation.” And those interpretations “would serve the delicious purpose of turning the mother into the villain.”

But which is the truth? The interpretations — the mondegreens — or “the information,” as Wright refers to one of her elements of fiction? The tension between the two alternatives runs like a motif through all three novellas. In the second, “Dans le Vrai” [In truth], the “story” is about the narrator’s visit to her sister and nephew in upstate New York. It’s the late 1950s or early 1960s: the great Federal interstate highway system is in the midst of being built. The characters go to see a section under construction nearby, a great excavated gash through the countryside.

Then, suddenly, the narrator announces, we’re in a new story, a story within a story called “The Thruway.” Or is the narrator the story?

I am the Thruway. I live in a new world in which I must stretch myself to touch, to contain immeasurably unexpected combinations. I will link discrepancies. No, I will be discrepancies, encompass contradiction, and out of that compute what meanings — what secrets — out of what snail-like and dreary settled pasts will now freshly dart what pleasures in rooms without shapes, corners, of dimensions I cannot now imagine. Ah, yes, I will be reconciled — No, not be reconciled, never be reconciled, that will be the strength — but action — one’s life will be —

Following Sylvia Wright through her fictions is like watching someone trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces have the same color but just ever-so-slightly different shapes. She takes a piece of “the information,” places it against reality, sees where it fits … but also where it doesn’t. And so she sets that piece down and tries another. Which way does the mondegreen work? Which represents truth? The piece or the rest of the puzzle?

If this makes A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding sound maddening … well, it is. But only in the sense that Sylvia Wright refuses to accept the simple solutions. She is every bit as perceptive into the gestures and mannerisms and pretences of individual characters as Virginia Woolf or George Eliot, and there are plenty of moments of just the sort of pleasure one gets from reading about the interactions of human beings in more conventional fiction.

But she also reminds me in some ways of one of the most challenging and frustrating writers that ever lived, Dorothy Richardson, who puts such extraordinary effort into trying to get her impressions right — and yet always adds, “Yes, but there’s still something more.” Despite its extraordinarily odd title, A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding may be the best work of fiction I’ve read this year.

Sylvia Wright died of cancer in 1981 at the age of 64. She published no other books after this, though she left an unfinished biography of her great aunt Melusina Fay Peirce, wife of the philopher and mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce.

Oh, and a shark-infested rice pudding is the punchline of a joke. You’ll have to read to book to get it.

A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding, by Sylvia Wright
Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1969

Red Rose: A Novel Based on the Life of Emma Goldman (“Red Emma”), by Ethel Mannin (1941)

Emma Goldman in a mug shot taken when she was wrongly implicated in the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. (Emma Goldman Papers)
Emma Goldman in a mug shot taken when she was wrongly implicated in the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. (Emma Goldman Papers)

This is a guest post by Joanna Pocock.

I can’t imagine many biographical novels about anarchists begin with the subject lying in bed as a child, hand between thighs, pleasuring herself. But Ethel Mannin’s Red Rose (1941), a fictionalised biography of the Russian Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman (1869-1940) does just that. Goldman’s childhood crush, a teenage boy called Petrushka, looked after the family’s ‘horses, and tended the sheep and cows in the field. Petrushka was tall and strong; quiet and gentle,’ Mannin writes. She then describes a game the young Emma played with him in which he,

lifted her up and suddenly flung her above his head, catching her as she fell and pressing her against him as she slid to the ground, so that she knew the body smell of his shirt and the animal smell of his coat, the warmth of his strong hard body, and the grip of his rough gentle hands. …there was no fear in this excitement, it was pure ecstasy.

Then Mannin paints this scene:

And it came again in the warm dark secrecy of the nights, so that childish hands pressed down between the remembering thighs in an attempt to recapture the sensation, and the darkness would be alive with Petrushka’s brown smiling face, the smell of horses, cattle, sweat, and the fields. Petrushka became her last thought on falling asleep and her first on waking.

Throughout her life, Goldman had an active sex life and many lovers. In her younger years she was in a ménage a trois with her soul mate, the anarchist and writer Alexander Berkman, and an artist who lived with the couple. They were not lovers for long, but their deep spiritual and political union lasted for the rest of their lives. As she aged, Goldman felt increasingly bitter about the uneven opportunities for men and women on what we would now call ‘the dating scene’. Berkman (the fictional Sasha in the book) had fallen in love with 20-year-old Emmy (Elsa in the book) whom he’d met in a café in Berlin when he was 52.

They were together until he died by suicide in June 1936. Mannin describes this as a thorn in Goldman’s side: ‘A man could age and lose his looks,’ she writes channelling the voice and mind of Goldman, ‘and still command the passionate love of the young and beautiful; it was not easy for a woman. Her business was not to desire but to be desired, and when her desirability was ended her desires were expected to die automatically—and the tragedy was that they didn’t. No one thought it wrong for a middle-aged man to desire a young girl, but everyone was horrified if a middle-aged woman showed other than a maternal interest in a young man.’

Mannin is sympathetic to Goldman’s desire not just for a fairer world but for a fairer playing field for women. A committed socialist and feminist herself, Mannin was also no stranger to love affairs. Like Goldman, she came from humble means; her father was a postal worker and her mother was a farmer’s daughter. Born in 1900, she supported the anarchist cause and fought for sexual liberation. In between her two failed marriages, she had affairs with W. B. Yeats and Bertrand Russell. Part of the pleasure of reading Red Rose, is the satisfaction of reading the life of a complex and politically driven woman as constructed and shaped by a female author who one senses has a strong kinship with her subject.

From the cover page of Red Rose.

The first two thirds of Red Rose feel more like a straightforward biography than a work of fiction because in these segments Mannin is basing her novel closely on Goldman’s autobiography Living My Life, which ends in 1928 – twelve years before Goldman’s death. The latter part of Red Rose had no memoir to rely on. Those final years of Goldman’s life needed to be ‘reconstructed from various sources—including imagination’, Mannin tells us in her short introduction. ‘And it is precisely that part of her life which I have had to reconstruct which has most interested me as a novelist, and which she urged I must “one day” write.’ This explains the tonal shift in the final third of the book which is imbued with a stronger imaginative power and a more novelistic sweep.

The two women met in the late 1930s when they were working on behalf of Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (SIA) – the anti-fascist faction fighting against General Franco’s Spanish Nationalists. There is no historical documentation of their meeting, but there is one photo of them, from 1937, when Goldman came to Britain to speak at a London meeting in support of the Spanish Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT).

Ethel Mannin chairing a meeting in support of the Spanish anarchist CNT-FAI, with James McGovern, MP, (left) and Emma Goldman (right). Friends’ House, London, February 1937.

In the photo, we see Emma Goldman, aged 69, standing, shoulders back, delivering one of her fiery speeches. Ethel Mannin, hair pulled back severely would have been 38 in this photo – she looks off to the distance, wearing a serious expression. James McGovern, an MP, is furiously making notes. A year after this photo was taken, Emma Goldman would die from a stroke suffered in Toronto. Her body was allowed back into the US and she was buried in Chicago.

Goldman’s many affairs and two failed marriages feature prominently in Red Rose. Her second marriage was to the Welsh Miner James Colton (Jim Evans in Red Rose) is mentioned only three times in Goldman’s memoir, whereas Mannin brings in her novelist’s eye to this episode turning it onto a somewhat bittersweet affair. There was never any hint of a sexual relationship between the couple, and Mannin describes how after the registry office wedding, ‘When the marriage was affected,’ Emma ‘was impatient to get away. She realised that it meant disappointing Evans, and to “compensate” him she slipped him a ten shilling note on the station platform, urging him to “treat” himself and one or two of “the boys” to the pictures.’ There is a sense in Mannin’s description that the fictional James Colton, was in some ways humiliated or at the very least disappointed by Goldman’s perfunctory approach to their union. As an anarchist himself, he was committed to the cause and felt honoured to be able to do something for the famous Emma Goldman, but Mannin writes, ‘He stood there, troubled, confused, fingering the note she had forced upon him, overriding his bewildered objections.’ It’s in moments like these, when Mannin inhabits the interior world of her characters, that Red Rose fully comes alive.

Goldman’s life, according to Mannin, was one of passion and struggle. She was incarcerated for inciting a riot but only served several short prison sentences. Most of her struggles centred around money: she never had enough of it and was often hungry and homeless. In order to feed herself and to fund her travels and lectures to spread the anarchist message, Goldman took on whatever work she could. As a young woman, she worked making corsets and then in a glove factory. She trained and practiced as a nurse, set up a massage parlour and had two failed attempts at running an ice cream shop. She had a go at being a street prostitute on 14th Street in New York which ended in ignominy. The gentleman who took her for a drink noticed that she was not cut out for the job. He took pity on her, and after buying her a drink, gave her ten dollars for the trouble it took her to put on a fancy frock.

Much of Goldman’s energy is taken up with fund raising, which Mannin, as a self-made woman describes with a profound understanding. Reading Red Rose is a glimpse into the life of Goldman and into the mind of Mannin. The novel doesn’t completely work as a piece of fiction, and yet, it does re-imagine how a life can be documented and how pushing the boundaries of imagination are crucial to creating a successful work of fiction – even one that sticks so close to biography. In feminist politics there is always a sense of a trajectory, of history moving with the times, but what we see here is not history as a passive inevitability progressing from one idea to the next but a sense that history can be shaped and created by women with the aim of a fairer world. It is the fact that Ethel Mannin took on such a vital and important subject and had the courage to fill in the gaps of Goldman’s life with her own imaginings that makes Red Rose such an important work in the library of women’s – and the world’s – struggles.

Red Rose: A Novel Based on the Life of Emma Goldman (“Red Emma”), by Ethel Mannin
London: Jarrolds, 1941

Joanna PocockJoanna Pocock is a British-Canadian writer currently living in London. Her work of creative non-fiction, Surrender: The Call of the American West, won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize in 2018 and was published in 2019 by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and House of Anansi Press (US).

The Colours of the Night, by Catherine Ross (1962)

The Colours of the Night by Catherine Ross (Betty Beaty)

The colours of the night in Catherine Ross’s title aren’t romantic in the least. They’re the colors of the signal flares fired from the control tower of RAF Tormartin to confirm that the bombers coming back after a raid are friendly and not Luftwaffe attackers. This is just one of the many details that led numerous reviewers to call The Colours of the Night the most accurate and authentic account of life on an RAF bomber base during World War Two written from a woman’s point of view .

Virginia Bennett, the novel’s narrator, is a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force stationed at an RAF Lancaster bomber base near Lincoln, assigned to the base motor pool. Lincolnshire, with its broad, fairly flat countryside and proximity to the North Sea coast, was, with East Anglia and North Yorkshire, dotted with RAF — and later, U.S. 8th Air Force — airfields from which the Allies launched the bombing raids on occupied Europe, Germany, and Italy that represented the longest single campaign of the Western front.

It was also the deadliest. To quote the Imperial War Museum, “During the whole war, 51% of aircrew were killed on operations, 12% were killed or wounded in non-operational accidents and 13% became prisoners of war or evaders. Only 24% survived the war unscathed.” An aircrew member was committed to fly thirty operational missions before he could be released to other less dangerous duties.

71 Squadron, the unit Bennett supports, flies twelve Lancasters, each manned with a crew of seven. Given a typical operational year (and the novel is set over the winter of 1942 to 1943, perhaps the most typical year for Bomber Command), she knows, most of the flying members of the current would be gone. “There’d be a 71 Squadron, of course, but of entirely new faces. It was a fact like the day of the week, or the month of the year. You accepted that fact.”

A fact that is only notional to Bennett until she finds herself falling in love with Flight Lieutenant Colin Craig. The two meet by accident — literally, as she is the first to arrive on the scene after Craig’s Lancaster goes skidding off the runway and into a muddy verge. He, of course, is handsome, cool, and instantly attractive. But she is cute, clever, and just stand-offish enough to attract his attention as well.

Their romance is considered fraternization between commissioned and other ranks and prohibited by regulations, so after a few bouts of flirting turns into something more serious, they have to resort to various subterfuges to spend time together — the most important being to ensure they’re never seen together. To further complicate matters, Virginia is an object of earnest interest by her motor pool section chief and Colin by the lieutenant in charge of the WAAFs at the base.

But the real complication is the fact of those statistics. As she senses that Colin is just as much in love with her as she with him, she asks the inevitable question:

“But what shall we do about us?”
“What about us?”
“Us,” I said slowly and painfully. “In the future.”
He stared at me surprised, almost blankly.

And suddenly it hits her: “I knew that in his own mind he had no future.”

The Colours of the Night by Catherine Ross - paperback edition

From this point, the tension is predictable: will Colin make it to thirty missions? On one hand, The Colours of the Night is no more than a well-crafted middlebrow romance. We know from the moment dashing Flight Lieutenant Craig emerges only slightly scathed from his crashed aircraft and borrows (and keeps) Virginia’s cigarette lighter that it’s just a matter of time before flirting becomes romance and romance leads to happy ending (or at least tentatively happy: Colin has made it clear he intends to return for another operational tour).

But offsetting this predictable formula is a wealth of details about the ins and outs of RAF and WAAF life. The regular medical inspections for the three scourges: lice, sexually transmitted diseases, and pregnancy. The itchiness and ugliness of the dark blue issue WAAF underpants and the various alternatives resorted to on all the days between medical inspections. The fact that no one knows what was happening on the base better than the radio and telephone switchboard operators.

Betty Beaty, AKA Catherine Ross and Karen Campbell
Betty Beaty, alias Catherine Ross and Karen Campbell.

Catherine Ross was familiar with all this from having been a Virginia Bennett herself during the war. In fact, as Betty Smith (her real name), she met her own husband, Group Captain David Beaty, himself a bomber pilot. They married after the war and David Beaty turned his hand to writing, becoming a successful writer of aviation-oriented novels (sort of the RAF equivalent to Douglas Reeman) and nonfiction books. Betty Beaty took up writing herself, first as Catherine Ross, then later as Karen Campbell and Betty Beaty. As Betty Beaty, she published nine Harlequin romance novels.

The Colours of the Night is no masterpiece, but it’s a thoroughly enjoyable tale that’s rigorous in its accuracy and honesty. I would recommend it highly to anyone who likes novels set during World War Two.

The Colours of Night, by Catherine Ross (Betty Beaty)

This is a contribution to the #1962Club, this autumn’s edition of the semi-annual reading club coordinated by Simon Thomas and Karen Langley.

Born in Captivity: The Story of a Girl’s Escape, by Barbara Starke (1931)

starke - born into captivity

I wouldn’t recommend the parents of a teenage daughter showing signs of wanderlust leave a copy of Barbara Starke’s Born in Captivity lying around the house. At age sixteen, Starke’s aunt gave her a copy of David Grayson’s The Friendly Road, an account of a walking tour made by an adult man in 1912’s America. “It was the image of Grayson walking down a wilful road into unknown territory conscious of the delightful prospect of not turning back at night, which suddenly filled my mind with the luminous possibilities of such an act.”

Reading Grayson’s book suggests to Starke that “Perhaps, after all, it was not absolutely necessary” to come home every night –“even if he had no money or other devices to keep him from harm.” A pretty risky proposition, even for a man. For an attractive young woman of eighteen, the age at which Starke finally managed to sneak out of the house and start the journey described in Born in Captivity, it seems certain to end badly.

But Barbara Starke had some special angels looking out for her. She traveled from Massachusetts to California and back to New York City, rarely paying her way, almost always by just walking along the side of the road and hoping some kind stranger would stop and give her a ride. She never actually hitchhiked: she mades that emphatically clear. If offered a ride, she would accept unless she felt uneasy about the would-be good Samaritan. If not, she kept walking. Somehow, in the hundreds of rides she accepted, only once or twice did she have to fight her way out of the car.

More than that, the men who offered her rides — and it was always men, even though she wore mens’ clothes and was usually scruffy enough that many assumed she was a man until she climbed in — would buy her a meal or two, or pay for a separate hotel room, or even hand her five or ten bucks to help out. There were some, of course, who said they believed that “if a girl dared to tramp the road alone she must be prepared to ‘come across.'” She usually managed to change their minds. She felt, in fact, that hers was the superior power to intimidate: “I could look straight at them, could say unexpected things coldly, so that they wondered what weapons I concealed that I should be unafraid.”

On the other hand — and reading this must have made her mother’s hair stand up, if she ever did read her daughter’s book — if Starke liked a man’s company, she wasn’t above sleeping with him. On an early leg, she felt attracted to a handsome and soft-spoken engineer and shared his cabin on a night boat to Albany. And felt not the least regret: “If the captain of this ship should come in now, and there should be a nasty scene, they could not make me feel shame, I feel so proud and clean for having stayed with you.”

Like many young people throughout history, a good part of Starke’s motivation was to reject her parent’s choices. “The net had caught my father, and respectability, the tradition of owning a home and sending one’s children to college, had kept him there.” The only result she could see from their keeping a house and raising a family was to be “cheated of any joy,” to be “shackled by them.”

The freedom of the road allowed her not just to see the country but to sample from a smorgasbord of relationship possibilities. She liked and respected the engineer on the night boat, but she knew she didn’t want to marry him. A safecracker befriends her in Denver and she toys with joining him on a job, but decides a jail cell was the one thing worse than domestic misery. In Santa Barbara, a guy named Joe pulls alongside and serenades her. She joins him and they spend a week or so together. “I began to divine that one could get fond enough of another person to want him about a great deal.” Yet she walks on without regrets. “That priceless feeling of affection as we said good-bye on the Merced road in the early morning was not merely because we had given each other such joy, but because we were not even pretending to try to make it last longer.”

Born in Captivity was called Touch and Go in its English edition, but neither title does the book justice. The roads Starke traveled weren’t always friendly, but they were always free, not only in terms of economics but in terms of her own spirit. Yet just as she recognized in saying goodbye to Joe on the Merced road, she could not pretend to make her months of vagabondage run on indefinitely. Unlike with Joe, however, a regret remains. “How am I going to reach the ground and the sky again?” she wonders at the end as she sits in an office typing pool.

The novelist Henry Williamson raved about the book to his friend T. E. Lawrence. “Have you read Touch and Go by Barbara Starke? Cape did it. That girl can write; and seems the best of the new straight-ahead younger generation — passing the old hulks of 1914-18 and the concrete-ribbed waterlogs of the war-child generation.”

A. T. Simon III and Helen Card, with Frederic Remington painting, around 1960
A. T. Simon III and Helen L. Card, with Frederic Remington painting, around 1960.

Barbara Starke was the pseudonym of Helen L. Card. As Starke, Card published one novel, Second Sister, in England in 1933. The only remaining copies of this are in the U.K. registry libraries. Although she received a scholarship to the Breadloaf Writer’s conference in 1937, her work soon became confined to articles and catalogues of Western art, particularly by Frederic Remington. She ran the Latendorf Bookshop on Madison Avenue for years and never married.

Born in Captivity: The Story of a Girl’s Escape, by Barbara Starke
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1931
London (as Touch and Go): Jonathan Cape, 1931

Star Turn, by René Clair (1926/1936)

Madeleine Rodrigue and Henri Rollan on the Eiffel Tower in Paris Qui Dort.

There are few lovelier works of French surrealism than René Clair’s short 1924 film, Paris Qui Dort, usually translated inelegantly into English as The Crazy Ray. In it, a planeload of people evade the rays of a secret weapon by which a mad scientist has put the inhabitants of Paris to sleep. The scenes of the deserted streets of 1920s Paris will tug at the heart of anyone who wishes they had a chance to time-travel back to the time of Hemingway, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and the school of innovative artists, musicians, and writers to which Clair belonged.

Right around the time that René Clair was finishing work on his first film, he wrote his first novel, taking the world of film as its setting. And had he been as disciplined in his editing as he’d been with Paris Qui Dort, Star Turn could now be considered a little classic every bit as elegant and amusing.

Dust jacket for Chatto & Windus edition of Star Turn by René Clair
Dust jacket for Chatto & Windus edition of Star Turn.

The original French title, Adams, refers to Cecil Adams, the world’s greatest movie star. Adams is everything a studio and a worldful of moviegoers could ask for: handsome, dashing, funny, heroic, romantic, debonair and homespun. Whatever the part demands. He has just finished his latest film, Jack Spratt, about a thief with a heart of gold who’s, well, all the above adjectives, and awakes on the morn of its premiere. Given the universal popularity of this phenomenon, the atmosphere is, predictably, intense:

Adams opens the car door. A mouth bawls his name. This shout, repeated by the echo of the crowd, rumbles down the street like an earthquake. A group of women scramble madly round the car, lifting it and smashing it against a wall. Cecil flounders and sinks. He’ll be drowned in admiration…. A police-charge stems the tide. Cecil, who was just going down for the third time, staggers to his feet. He escapes along a lane that has been cleared through the crowd except for, here and there, a little human debris. Nine killed, thirty wounded.

As Adams watches the film from the safety of the projectionist’s booth, a transformation takes place that Clair may have borrowed from Buster Keaton’s 1924 film, Sherlock Jr.: “His three-dimensional body is absorbed by the screen and comes to life on its flat surface in the dancing shadow of Jack.”

This is the start of the dramatic predicament around which the plot of Star Turn revolves. Usually with celebrities, it’s the audience that has difficulty telling the difference between the performer and the character. In Adams’ case, he’s the one who finds it increasingly difficult to maintain an identity separate from those of his best-known roles.

There are seven of these alter-egos in all — from William the cowboy to Dorian the poet. (“My golden head troubles the beauty of the clouds,” Dorian declares. “One breath wafts me to heaven.” Dorian is a poet worthy of a place beside Percy Dovetonsils.) To make matters worse, each quickly suffers the same confusion as Adams and takes on an independent existence. Adams’ attempts to maintain some semblance of order are no match for their wills:

To avoid disconcerting experiences, he endeavoured to be William on Monday, Harold on Tuesday, and so on. On Monday he wore William’s outfit; on Tuesday Harold’s morning-coat. But the characters would have none of it. Eric appeared in William’s leather chaps. Jack turned up on the day set aside for Charles. They refused to fall into line.

He tries to escape them, traveling first to Japan, then China, then place by place around the globe back to New York. But one or all of the characters manage to keep up — indeed, are often already there when he arrives.

If all this wasn’t bad enough, Adams’ studio chief has come up with the perfect next part for the Greatest Actor on Earth: God. Perfect for the studio, disastrous for an actor in a losing battle with his multiple personalities. Yet the film gets made — and is then premiered to the entire planet simultaneously through a new invention that allows the atmosphere itself to be used as the screen.

What happens next, however, is determined by the most powerful of all deities: capitalism. With the power to speak to the whole world at once, the studio rebrands as Modern Religions, Inc. And instead of becoming the Almighty by playing God, Adams finds himself only a cog in an industrial entertainment machine.

René Clair on the set of an early sound film.

When Chatto & Windus decided to publish Adams in English in 1936 (the translator is uncredited), they asked René Clair to contribute a preface. With over a decade of film-making experience, Clair better recognized how the power of writer and director differed:

How fortunate is the literary artist, whose task of creation calls only for a pen and plenty of paper! The film director, on the other hand, is no more than a gear in the cinematographic machine. What complications are involved in bringing the slightest of his ideas to fruition!

Few things, he writes, are more misunderstood than the amount of control a director has over his own film. Asked what kind of movie he would make if he had absolute control, Clair responds, “You might as well ask a fish what it would do if it had legs and could stroll down Piccadilly.”

What matters in the real movie business? The same thing as in Clair’s fictional movie business: the bottom line.

If films acted exclusively by trained frogs induced a greater number of spectators to enter the portals of cinemas than do the pictures at present shown, producers would set about training frogs and would furiously outbid each other to acquire the brightest specimens of batrachian talent.

Clair wonders “how the genius of Shakespeare, of Wagner, or of Cezanne could have developed” if their work had depended on the collective judgment of the crowd. But it did, of course. Perhaps not with the efficiency of the studio system at its peak (around the time Clair was writing his preface?), but neither with the blithe independence he imagines.

The world of film he portrayed in Star Turn was, he writes, seen in “a flippant and fantastic light.” And yet, if we are to believe his own preface, the film world created by René Clair the novelist doesn’t really seem that far apart from the industrial enterprise described by René Clair the director. Aside from the one thing I mentioned at the start: René Clair the director would have had the assistance of an editor who would have excised the windy speeches that take what begins as a sublime little tale of comic surrealism and overwhelms it with more Serious Talk than its fine little frame can bear. Ah, if only it were acceptable to take the editing scissors to these bloated texts from the past. But perhaps that, too, is a bit too much like playing God.

Star Turn, by René Clair
London: Chatto & Windus, 1936

Fortune Grass, by Mabel Lethbridge (1934)

Advertisement for Fortune Grass by Mabel Lethbridge
Advertisement for Fortune Grass from the Daily Telegraph.

“Darling, are you sure it will not be too much for you?” Mabel Lethbridge’s first husband asks when she is pregnant and he learns his father has cut him off without a penny.

“Nothing is too much for me,” she replies. Which could well serve as this remarkable woman’s motto. Her portrait ought to be printed next to the word resilience in every English dictionary. Fortune Grass covers a little over ten years in her life, but what a lot she packed into those years!

Born in 1900, she lived an itinerant life as she, her sister, two brothers, and their mother trailed around the British Empire following her father, a soldier of fortune. When Mabel grew sickly (mirroring her parents’ marriage), her mother took the children to Ireland, where Mabel thrived in the quiet rural setting. Her mother then dispatched her to an archetypal horrible boarding school — a stay that was short-lived.

With the start of World War One, the family moved to Ealing and her sister and older brother headed off, one to be a nurse, the other into the Army. Though just 16, Mabel felt frustrated at having to wait two years to join the war effort. So, she lied. Mabel was nothing if not ruthlessly pragmatic and would, as we come to see, cheerfully wield a lie in service to what she considered a good cause.

Dismissed from nursing when the truth about her age comes out, she lies again — to both the recruiters and her mother, who thinks she is sewing uniforms — and volunteers for the dangerous work of assembling shells in a government munitions factory. No matter how many crude safety measures the Ministry of Defence tried to put in place, the women working there were never more than a stray spark away from death. “That’s the last shell, by the time you’ve done that the milk will be here,” one of her fellow workers says one afternoon when Mabel has been there for just over six weeks. “The last shell! The last shell!” she thinks. And then:

… a dull flash, a sharp deafening roaf and I felt myself being ’hurled through the air, falling down, down, down, into darkness. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. . . . Mother! . . . Mother! Leghe! Reggie! [Her brothers.] Wouldn’t someone come? Wouldn’t someone speak to me? I lay quietly on my side. Now a blinding flash and I felt my body being torn asunder. Darkness, that terrifying darkness, and the agonised cries of the workers pierced my consciousness.

When she comes to, Mabel reaches down and discovers her left leg below the knee has been blown off. Her whole body has been peppered with shrapnel and she is blind and almost deaf. Most of the other women in her hut are dead.

Evacuated from the scene, she wakens again in the hospital. A familiar voice, Tattie, one of her friends from the plant, is by her side. But Mabel’s greatest fear is for her mother: “Oh, Tattie, Tattie,” I sobbed, “I have lost my leg and I am blind, but you won’t tell Mother, will you?”

From the Daily Mirror, 18 May 1918.

For her sacrifice, Mabel is awarded the Order of the British Empire — at the time, the youngest person ever to win it. Because of her injury, the Viscount officiating, rather than she, had to get down on his knees to present it. The medal is not enough, however, to change how her family viewed her condition. “Don’t you realise you are a cripple?” her mother asks when Mabel declares her intent to go out and find work again. Other relatives give her the cheapest of hand-me-downs — a skirt with a large burn in the back: “That’ll do for Mabel, she never goes anywhere.”

But Mabel refuses to be a victim. She teaches herself to walk, first with crutches, then a cane. She stuffs some clothes into her purse, climbs aboard a bus, heads to Whitehall, and gets a job filling out for a ministry. After she finds a room she can afford in a miserable women’s hotel, she writes to inform her mother, begging her to stay away.

The squalor of the hotel and its older inhabitants — widows and spinsters who “exuded an air of tragedy” — combined with the tedium of her work and her still-weak condition and soon Mabel has to obtain a medical waiver and stop working. Stop working for ministry, that is, because what now commences is a whirlwind two years of jobs, relationships, and living arrangements.

Mabel washes dishes in a restaurant, sells matches at Tube stations, cleans stoops in Westminster and Knightsbridge, minds stalls in Borough Market, hawks newspapers, poses for art students, operates a crank organ, and works at least a half dozen other jobs. She sleeps in the bushes along the Embankment and works as a live-in companion. She co-habits with “Daddy,” the demobbed Army officer with whom she’d started a correspondence during the war — despite the fact that he’d married another woman in a mad moment — then falls in love with his cousin Noel, who moves in with them.

“Peggy the chair girl,” from the Sunday Pictorial, December 3, 1922.

In her own mad moment, she decides she and Noel must get married. And in nearly the same moment, she devises the scheme by which she makes her first fortune: renting folding chairs to people waiting in queues outside West End theaters. From offering a handful of chairs outside the Ambassador Theater, near the apartment she shares with Noel, “Peggy the Chair-Girl” expands her business in the space of a year to one involving thousands of chairs and several franchisees. She even finds herself in the midst of a turf way when a group of thugs attempts to take over her concession outside the wildly popular revival of Gilbert and Sullivan musicals in 1922.

Article about Noel Kalenberg’s failed suicide attempt, 1922.

Her marriage to Noel, however, proves a complete failure. Claiming to be studying for the bar, he is nothing but the polar opposite of Mabel: lazy, snobbish, and a drunkard. Mabel decides within the first month that she must leave and says so to Noel. She then marches out to manage the chair rentals at the Ambassador. Standing on the sidewalk outside the theater, she and the patrons hear two shots from the direction of her apartment. She rushes upstairs to find Noel has attempted suicide. There is a great hubbub and Mabel is briefly suspected of murder.

Like everything else he puts his hand to, suicide is yet another failure for Noel. He recovers and Mabel takes him back in. Mabel is carrying his child, but that doesn’t prevent him from knocking her around and drinking up her earnings. The situation only gets worse when he stops studying for the bar and his father cuts off his allowance.

Ad for Mabel Lethbridge, Estate Agent (1934).

Yet none of this gets Mabel down. Her water breaks as she’s vending chairs. She delivers the child and promptly goes back to work, carrying the baby in one arm and passing out chairs with the other. And she soon manages to dispatch Noel off to his family in Ceylon. As we leave our heroine at the end of Fortune Grass, she has just established herself as the first woman estate agent in England. And she’s just 28!

Mabel Lethbridge went on to write two more autobiographies and rack up another marriage and many more accomplishments, making herself a wealthy and widely popular woman in the process. By the time she died, she’d been the subject of a “This is Your Life” television show and included in the historic BBC “Great War Interviews” series.

Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, who knew her as “Granny Mabel” in the 1960s, just before her death, mentions Mabel in her book The Slow Train to Milan:

I was always frightened of cupboards, ever since the day in Cornwall at Granny Mabel’s when a leg sprang out and hit me, and it was her leg, with her thick stocking and built-up shoe, and I screamed and dropped it, and Granny Mabel laughed. I had been seven at the time, and I had never realised that Granny Mabel had only one leg. Mabel Lethbridge O.B.E., who didn’t like you to miss out the letters after her name, and who had worked in a munitions factory during the First World War when she was sixteen. The factory had been bombed, and a whole wing of the nearest hospital had been cleared for survivors, but Mabel alone had survived with one leg blown away, and the other ruined. She had received her O.B.E. in hospital from the King. Granny Mabel, who had been everywhere, and married a millionaire and who could swear more than any sailor on the quay at St Ives.

So, the next time you feel, as they say in Texas, like climbing aboard your pity pot, think what Mabel Lethbridge would do in your shoes — one of which had an artificial leg stuck in it!

Fortune Grass, by Mabel Lethbridge
London: Geoffrey Bles, 1934

Margaret Fishback, Poetess: A 1932 Sketch by Joseph Mitchell (plus notes)

Sketch of Margaret Fishback, from the Pittsburgh Press Sun, 14 February 1932.

Margaret Fishback was among the most commercially successful poets of the 1930s, a prolific writer of comic verse who probably sold more books and had more poems published in more magazines than the better-known Ogden Nash. I doing some research on Fishback recently, I was startled to see the byline on a short portrait that appeared in several newspapers in February 1932: Joseph Mitchell. Yes, Joseph Mitchell, the author of Joe Gould’s Secret and legendary New Yorker writer who came to work daily for decades after publishing his last article for the magazine.

This piece was written in 1932, six years before Mitchell joined The New Yorker. At the time, Mitchell was just 24, a few weeks short of getting married, and working for the New York Herald Tribune. He’d begun to get a name for his color pieces, usually sketches of odd characters in the city — from bartenders to circus owners. A portrait of an author with a new book out would have been a pretty mundane assignment compared to what would become his signature, a soft piece to help sell Fishback’s first collection, I Feel Better Now.

Ad for I Feel Better Now, Margaret Fishback’s first collection of poems.

Not that the book needed much help. Published the same week that Mitchell’s article appeared, by the end of March, I Feel Better Now had gone through six printings.

NEW YORK. Feb. 13—Margaret Fishback. a young woman who likes to sit on summer nights in the somber beer houses which line the Hoboken waterfront and talk to the reminiscent sailors, said she wrote the casual verses in her book, I Feel Better Now, while riding to work on a Fifth Avenue bus and while eating lunch in a restaurant in Pennsylvania Station.

“And I wrote them on the backs of speakeasy cards,” she said, “and I wrote them while dressing to go out to dinner with some gent or other. And I wrote them while walking over the Brooklyn Bridge to see our absurd skyline. And on the Staten Island ferry. And on the bench. You know, everywhere.”

Miss Fishback has had long hair since she was a child. It is the color of corn shucks. She always has a good time. She likes elevator operators and bartenders. She gave the first autographed copy of her book to a conductor on a Fifth Avenue bus.

She lives in an old-fashioned house at 222 E. Sixty-first Street with Elizabeth Osgood, who is head of the proofroom at Appleton’s. There are 19 poplar trees on the block. There are also two churches but she does not known much about them.

“No, I don’t know what kind of poplars they are,” she said. “Lombardy poplars, maybe. I don’t know anything about nature. Do you like beer? I don’t care for it. The foam chokes me. All the people I know like beer. Over in Hoboken they live on it. You know. I have a lot of fun washing my hair. I like shower baths.

“The reason I started running around is because there are a lot of cats in the back yard of my home. And there’s a lady who always turns the radio on when they play ‘When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.’ I never went around to speakeasies until they began playing that. One night last summer I heard that song over and over. I got out of the house and went to the Palace, and the first thing I knew a woman named Kate Smith was singing it all over the place. Then I went to a speakeasy.”

Miss Fishback is an advertising copy writer for Macy’s. She is called “the highest paid advertising woman in the world,” but she laughs heartily whenever she hears that she is. She came to New York eight years ago, found a job in a ballet, danced in various opera companies at $1 a night and $1 for each rehearsal, wrote poems for F. P. A.’s [Franklin P. Adams] column in the World under the name of Marne and always had a good time. She is a graduate of Goucher College. There she was a friend of Sara Haardt, who is the wife of H. L. Mencken.

“Mencken is the most attractive man I ever met,” she said. “I like men. I never was married, but I have had my troubles. You can be sure I have had my moments. Hell, I’m not a lady poet. I’m not literary. I like to get around. The reason I’m not a married woman is because I don’t have time. I work from 9:15 to 6:30. I’m always in a hurry. It wouldn’t be fair to marry. I’m too interested in my work.”

Miss Fishback is a very lovely young woman. She does not like to play tennis, cook, sew, or play bridge. She does not like parrots. She is entranced by the commonplace. She buys chestnuts on a windy corner, finds a worm and writes “a triolet on an enviable existence.” Walking around New York she reaches the Garlic Belt and decides that “on Bleeker Street the babies’ noses aren’t pampered by the scent of roses.” and under the “L” she decides that “on Second Avenue the babies howl as if they had the rabies.”

The titles of her poems are indicative of her personality — “A tomato is all right in its place,” or “Capitulation within the city limits, preferably the East Fifties.” or “No duels, drama, or bloodshed to speak of,” or “Lines on watching a mother at her crooning,” or “Orange juice and a quick swallow.” She wears bracelets made from the hoofs of elephants. She likes to wear sweaters. She writes triolets in Maine bathtubs, and she swims with a great deal of pleasure, and she has two favorite drinks.

“I like an old fashioned,” she said, “if it’s made with a great deal of care. But I can care violently for sidecars.”

Born in Washington, D.C. in 1904, Margaret Fishback attended Goucher College outside Baltimore, where she became friends with Sara Haardt, who later married H. L. Mencken. She then headed to New York City. She took whatever work she could, including dancing in the chorus at the Metropolitan opera, until, on the strength of a few poems she’d sold to F. P. A., she walked into Macy’s department store and proposed to go to work in their advertising office.

They accepted, and she would remain with the store over ten years. Many newspaper stories suggested she was at one time the highest-paid woman in advertising, though she always dismissed this as unsubstantiated nonsense. (Though, given the pay inequality that prevailed at the time, it probably wouldn’t have takem much to claim the title.)

Her copy for Macy’s was, in some ways, more absurd and edgy than her poetry. An early item claimed that cows were positively thrilled to be giving up their lives for Macy’s latest line of purses. Fishback used to roam the store in search of odd items to boost, once proclaiming that a two-foot long cake tester she found in the kitchen department was just the thing when it came time to bake a two-foot tall cake. (The store ended up selling thousands.) And she was unapologetically on the side of women as the wiser of the two sexes, as demonstrated by this ad cartoon from 1938:

Cartoon: "We could be just as crowded at Macy's and not get wet!"

Fishback once said she started writing poetry as a reaction to seeing other people hold up writers as demigods. “I’m not literary,” she would demur. “I do things by ear.” And she never got too sophisticated in her poesy: indeed, as it sticks to simple meters and always rhymes, it might be more accurately called verse than poetry. But her early poems could be subtle and flirt with complex effects:

View From a Fifth-Floor Fire Escape

An underfed ailanthus tree
Contributes animatedly
One bright, intrepid splotch of green.
And here and there through the ravine

An enterprising ray of sun
Contrives to have a little fun
By wriggling through a window just
To call attention to the dust.

And though it’s messy in the street,
The sky above is large and neat.
And from this fire escape of mine
The cloud effects are very fine.

Along about this time of day
Despite the roof across the way
That harbors shirts hung out to dry
Against the valiant Gotham sky.

The poems in I Feel Better Now draw directly from Fishback’s own experiences: working, commuting, living in a fifth-floor walkup with no view except from the fire escape:

It may be just as well that I
Can’t have a penthouse in the sky.
Perchance it’s just as well to be
Whete it’s impossible to see
The rivers and the boats unless
I wash my face and change my dress
And hop a crosstown trolley car.

This was something new in 1932 and working women responded with enthusiasm. “Reading Miss Fishback is contagious business,” wrote a woman reviewer. “You stop strangers in the trolley car or in the subway and begin to read to them aloud.” Fishback’s poems could be found almost every week in one or another magazine: from The New Yorker and Vanity Fair to Ladie’s Home Journal and the women’s sections of newspapers all over. Enough to collect for a second book, Out of My Head (1933).

With few points of reference, Margaret Fishback was often compared to Dorothy Parker, though Parker’s poetry was far more acidic and her fiction far more serious than the lightly comic stories she began to write. On the other hand, her work was positively biting compared to the warmer verse of Phyllis McGinley.

Her life and her voice took on a new tone in 1935 when she married Alberto Antolini, a buyer at Macy’s. She was undoubtedly the only poet whose engagement was announced in the pages of Sales Management magazine.

Her third book, published the same year, I Take It Back, was a little sunnier. The title was chosen by her husband and reviewers noted that it had “far more of sentiment and less of wit than I Feel Better Now. “The mighty Amazon has washed the poison off her darts and her winged shafts of poesy no longer sting.” Antolini convinced Fishback to move to the suburbs (Camden, New Jersey) — even though she had early written a poem about her own “Suburbaphobia”:

What meagre charm I had before
Expires the moment that the door
Of any suburb-going train
Clangs shut. And I do not regain
My normal joie de vivre until
I leave each flagrant daffodil
And buttercup behind, hell-bent
On getting back to God’s cement.

Her life and writing changed again in 1941, when she gave birth to their son, Anthony. She left Macy’s days before the delivery, and became a stay-at-home mom. She continued to write and publish poems — dozens and dozens about Tony — and slowly took on freelance copywriting work.

She remained at home, taking an active part in Tony’s life (one interviewer found her assembling five hundred gift bags for a school fest) until he went away to college in 1958. Then she returned to advertising, but moved from Herald Square up to Madison Avenue, joining Young & Rubicam and then Doyle Dane Bernbach a year later. Fishback was there to witness the change in culture depicted in the TV series Mad Men, as print and radio ads began to take a distant backseat to television and “branding.” And she continued to publish: as late as 1966, her poems and comic anecdotes could be found in Look magazine’s “Look on the Light Side” section. One of her last contributions to Look was a declaration of her failure to be that thing an advertising professional most wanted to encourage: a competitive consumer.

Underprivileged
Our living standard is so low,
We’ve but a single radio.

No wonder that our children fret
With just one television set.

No doubt our solitary phone
Feels unendurably alone.

But most traumatic of all scars —
We haven’t ever got two cars!

Margaret Fishback died in 1985. Kathleen Rooney made Fishback the protagonist of her 2018 novel, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (though I wonder what Fishback would think of her fictional transformation into Boxfish). Fishback’s poetry books are long out of print and somewhat scarce, though One to a Customer (1938), which collects her first four collections, can be found on the Internet Archive (link).

Note: Margaret Fishback the comic versifier should not be confused with Margaret Fishback Powers the Christian poet.

Articles of Association for Adventuresses, from Written with Lipstick by Maurice Dekobra

Title page from Written with Lipstick by Maurice Dekobra (1938).
Title page from Written with Lipstick by Maurice Dekobra (1938).

One of my Neglected Books guilty pleasures is the work of the prolific French novelist Maurice Dekobra. There was a time when Dekobra was among the best-known and most successful authors in the world. His books are said to have been translated into over seventy languages, and there was a time when no novelist came close to him as a precursor to Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann for American readers: our titan of titillation, if you will.

Dekobra’s books are like fresh garlicky potato chips: heavily seasoned and hard to resist, but not good to overconsume. From everything I’ve read, he was a man of monstrous ego. A man who, had the great Victor Hugo himself been around at the time, wouldn’t have hesitated to tell le maître des Les misérables to step aside as he paraded down the Champs-Élysées.

Dekobra’s egotism enabled him to blithely ignore his own ignorance. Reality and research were for the timid and unimaginative. The fact that he knew nothing about a subject never prevented him from making up his own facts. And if their foundations and construction seemed a bit jury-rigged and unstable, no matter: speed was what mattered most. As long as the reader kept turning the page, credibility took a back seat to pure forward narrative momentum.

Cover of Reader’s Library (UK) edition of Prince or Clown by Maurice Dekobra.

In his 1929 novel Prince ou Pitre, published in English as Prince or Clown, for example, he invents an entire Balkan country, Phrygia, its language and culture. The Phrygians, for example, consume massive amounts of yarka, their national drink. Yarka, Dekobra informs us “made from distilled tomatoes and geranium leaves.” Geranium leaves are, in fact, edible and have been used to season dishes, supposedly; but distilled tomatoes? (The answer turns out to be yes, according to drinks website SevenFiftyDaily (“The Arrival of Tomato-based Spirits: European distillers are betting on Americans’ fondness for the nightshade with a new crop of liquors”) — so get your yarka franchise going today!)

Then there is the Phrygian language, which is capable of expressing things hitherto unthought and unfelt:

“Afafna!”
“Afafna?”
“That means in Phrygian, ‘By the body of my mother, I am overcome with zodiacal emotion.'”

Dekobra presents us with other bits of Phrygian: Tchik zaga houm-houm crakoi (“I’m feeling better” — I think); Zurbe Barigoul! (um .. sorry, not a clue); Djouk! (you can probably figure this one out yourself). (I must omit Kayout Kagda, as that would be a spoiler.) He also offers us a remedy for accidental poisoning: “Give her a spoonful of milk every two hours, a cup of cod liver oil, boric acid and gum-arabic.” (OK, admittedly this is probably what the finest GP in Paris would have prescribed … in 1729.)

Not surprisingly, Dekobra also had a high opinion of his high opinions. American and English newspapers loved to offer their readers his grand pronouncements on everything from love and marriage to food. And especially, women. He was, after all, “The Man Who KNOWS Women.”

From the London <em>Sunday Dispatch</em>, 11 December 1938.
From the London Sunday Dispatch, 11 December 1938.

Dekobra would argue that his ideas were grounded in careful and objective observation. When he visited in New York in January 1930, for example, he told reporters that he had come to conduct a study of American women:

From the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 19 January 1930.
From the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 19 January 1930.

Nevermind that upon debarking the week before, he felt confident in announcing that what American women needed was a good shaking:

From the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 11 January 1930.
From the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 11 January 1930.

By the time he’d ended his American tour, he was ready to set down his conclusiong about American women and American romance in algebraic precision:

From the Long Beach Sun, 30 August 1931.
From the Long Beach Sun, 30 August 1931.

Ten years later, as a refugee from occupied France, he predicted with striking inaccuracy the economic landscape of the postwar world:

From the Montreal Gazette, 2 April 1941
From the Montreal Gazette, 2 April 1941

When Dekobra turned fifty, he thought it was time to offer the world a larger piece of his mind. His autobiography, published in English as Written with Lipstick, is part memoir, part stories polished to perfection at countless dinner parties and rounds of drinks with friends — always showing Dekobra to his best advantage — and part pontifications as solemn and authoritative as any declared from a balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square in Rome. These last are easy to spot in the book: they’re always in numbered lists. There are, for example, four key failings of English women:

  1. They do not understand how to choose their dresses — above all, to choose colours — too much apple green and red geranium.
  2. They marry without careful consideration — before they know whether the man is suitable.
  3. They talk too much about their household affairs.
  4. They are too fond of bridge.

At the end of his chapter on “The Adventuress” (“chief character in tens of thousands of novels in every language under the sun”), he provides us with his “Articles of Association for Adventuresses” — or, “Ten Commandments for Love’s Highwaywomen”:

  1. Choose an original name — Thea, Belkis, or Mareva.
  2. Confide to men under strict secrecy that you are the niece of a revolutionary executed in prison, or the natural daughter of a Balkan king [from Phrygia, for example].
  3. Although you may have taken you M.A. at Oxford, speak English with a Russian accent, slightly flavoured with Bulgarian and just a suspicion of Hungarian.
  4. Have a favourite flower — a red lily or a Brazilian cowslip — that you won the first time you were kissed on the lips by a Cossack general at the age of sixteen.
  5. Introduce anecdotes into your conversation. Remark casually, for example: “‘In summer it is warmer than in winter,’ as the great Lao-Tze has said.”
  6. Always live at a hotel. An adventuress has no use for a kitchenette.
  7. Wear an antique ring on your little finger — one that used to contain deadly poison and was used by the Florentines in the days of Lucretia Borgia.
  8. If you happen to be spending a few days at Margate [surely Dekobra didn’t write Margate in his French original], say to the man who is paying you attention, “My dear, I have just arrived from Stamboul.”
  9. Procure a number of leading Continental hotel labels and stick them on your new luggage. An adventuress who does not travel is like a panther without teeth.
  10. An adventuress does not eat eggs and bacon for breakfast. She takes snails on toast, six olives, half a pound of caviare, and an aspirin tablet in a glass of absinthe.

When he returned to France after the war, Maurice Dekobra continued to publish several novels a year into the 1960s, but hardly any of these were translated and published in English. To readers now accustomed to fug, Lolita, and Playboy, Dekobra’s brand of footsies-as-sex seemed as outdated as Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang. Which is a bit of a shame, as Dekobra’s postwar novels were, according to Claude Duneton, precursors to Frédéric Dard’s fast, furieux, and funny San Antonio novels.

Cover of Maurice Dekobra: Gentleman entre deux mondes by Philippe Collas (2002)
Cover of Maurice Dekobra: Gentleman entre deux mondes by Philippe Collas (2002).

However, by the time Philippe Collas’ biography, Maurice Dekobra: Gentleman entre deux mondes, was published in 2002, most of Dekobra’s work had falled out of print and, even for French readers, he was an unknown. Melville House reissued his single biggest bestseller, The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, as part of its Neversink Library in 2012, but that appears to be the only one of his books currently available in English.

The Weepings and the Laughters

The Weeping and the Laughter by Viva King (1976)
The Weeping and the Laughter by Viva King (1976).

I bought Viva King’s autobiography, The Weeping and the Laughter, on the strength of a single review: “How pleasant to know Viva King even if it only be at second-hand through this candid and amusing book.” It also said that “There were few of that period [Bloomsbury, 1920s] whom Viva King did not come to know.” Ezra Pound greeted her naked once (he, not she). She corresponded with Augustus John, dined in Soho with Norman Douglas, had Ivy Compton-Burnett and her partner Margaret Jourdain to tea. Maurice Richardson quipped in the Observer, “If you fired a shotgun at one of Mrs. King’s parties you would risk peppering half the characters in the novels of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell.” Anthony Blond wrote that trying to keep track of the people who flash through King’s pages was like trying to read the names of stations on a fast-moving train.

But reviewers also noted her reputation for exceptional generosity; Richardson called her “a sort of British Higher Bohemian Mother Courage” and admired her honesty in writing of an affair she had with a sailor 40-plus years her junior when she was 70 — despite his tendency to make off with her jewelry. (She offers a fastidious way of saying that her lovers were uniformly bad at foreplay: “I needed revving up — and though the men may have had the right tools, they were bad mechanics.”)

When, as is my habit, I went in search of other reviews of Viva King’s book, I quickly discovered that “The Weeping and the Laughter” is a popular title. The phrase comes not from Shakespeare, as usual, but from an Ernest Dowson poem whose title, “Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam,” is taken, in turn, from a poem by the Roman poet Horace (translation: “The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long”). Dowson’s poem is appropriate for an autobiography written in one’s eighties after a long and busy life:

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

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

That hasn’t prevented other authors from using it for their own purposes. So, let’s take a look at some of the other books with this title.

The Weeping and the Laughter by Joachim Maass (1947)
The Weeping and the Laughter by Joachim Maass (1947).

The first, from what I can determine, to use the title was the English translation of this German novel about the murky details surrounding the murder of a Hamburg businessman. Married to a dancer whose career was cut short by an accident, Ernst Tylmann never understood the artistic temperaments of his wife or their three children, so the police suspect any of them might have killed him for his sheer obtuseness. Several reviewers compared the novel to Crime and Punishment — and then quickly added that Maass lacked Dostoevsky’s obsessive intensity. This may be one of those books whose cover outrates its contents.

The Weeping and the Laughter by Vera Caspary (1950)
The Weeping and the Laughter by Vera Caspary (1950).

Vera Caspary’s publisher boasted that The Weeping and the Laughter was her “debut in serious fiction” — which, of course, is a slight against Laura and previous novels that were marked as suspense or murder mysteries and consequently, not “serious.” The mystery here is Beverly Hills widow Emily Arkwright’s own psyche and motivations. Why did she attempt suicide when she was, on the surface, popular, happy, and successful? Dorothy B. Hughes — no slouch at writing “serious fiction” mislabelled as suspense herself — called it a fine portrait of “the self-sufficient modern woman who will break before she will bend.” This was reissued some years ago by the Murder Room Press, but for some reason, Amazon reports the Kindle edition is “out of stock” (is this even a thing?).

The Weeping and the Laughter by Julian Maclaren-Ross Caspary (1953)
The Weeping and the Laughter by Julian Maclaren-Ross Caspary (1953).

Julian Maclaren-Ross, who might have caught some buckshot had a shotgun been fired at one of Viva King’s parties (he was X. Trapnel in Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time), took the phrase as the title for his first memoir. This volume covers his childhood up to the age of ten. Born in Ramsgate, he wrote that his first memory was of seeing an attack by German Zeppelins (an astonishing feat if it was the first raid on Ramsgate in late 1914). Arthur Marshall wrote in the New Statesman that some of Maclaren-Ross’s recollections were “probably tosh,” but overall the book gave a “charmed pleasure” and was “immensely engaging.”

When it was publised, The Weeping and the Laughter was intended to be the first of a total of four books of autobiography. They even had titles: Threnody on a Gramophone, The Sea Coast of Bohemia, and Khaki and Cockayne. Drink, poverty, and chaotic habits undermined his plans, and it was up to London Magazine editor Alan Ross to assemble posthumously his fragments into Memoirs of the Forties (1965), which achieved a success that eluded Maclaren-Ross during his lifetime. These were subsequently combined with The Weeping and the Laughter and other pieces into Collected Memoirs, which was published by Black Spring Press in 2005. I’m shocked to see that this edition been out of print for over a decade now. Unacceptable!

The Weeping and the Laughter by Judy Chard (1975)
The Weeping and the Laughter by Judy Chard (1975).

I include this only for the sake of completeness. This is the sort of book that no one bothers to review. The publisher’s own jacket blurb suffices to explain why:

Kate Fielding – a widow, but still comparatively young – seems to have everything a woman could wish for in life – except someone with whom to share it. Then she meets and falls passionately in love with a young artist — Larry Stafford. Can their love survive the difference of a decade in their ages, the criticism of friends and of Kate’s daughter, Roz, herself deeply involved with a married man? Can they overcome the terrifying illness which attacks Kate?

Folks, Lloyd Douglas wrote this story back in 1929. It’s called Magnificent Obsession. Save your time and watch the Douglas Sirk – Rock Hudson – Jane Wyman movie version, which put the O in overwrought (and we’re all the better for it).

The Weeping and the Laughter by Noel Barber (1988)
The Weeping and the Laughter by Noel Barber (1988).

This was Barber’s 32nd novel, published posthumously. A bestseller, probably because he’d amassed an army of fans with the previous 31. Twins of noble birth are separated in the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. The lucky one makes it to Paris and finds success in love and business. The other is lost and written off as dead. But is he? And what about that teddy bear: is it just an object of childhood obsession like Charles Foster Kane’s Rosebud? Or is there more to the story? I’m pretty sure I will never know. Or care.

Where are the The Weeping and the Laughters of this century? Has Ernest Dowson lost his capacity to inspire?

Knopf’s Borzoi Puppies – An Experiment in Experimental Fiction


The Seventies were weird. A lot of long-established conventions faltered or were kicked over, a lot of idealistic ventures were launched, often fueled more by hope than resources, and many institutions grabbed desperately at innovations they gambled would turn into lifelines. One such experiment was Alfred A. Knopf’s brief series of dust jacketless, shiny-covered hardbacks that championed the work of young American writers playing around with fictional forms and styles — a series referred to as “Borzoi puppies” after Knopf’s legendary Borzoi Books. Knopf launched the series by promising to break new ground between traditional hardbacks and cheap mass market paperbacks, offering “new novels at plausible prices.” The plausible price in 1971 was $3.50. (According to USInflationCalculator.com, this is equivalent to $26.37 today. By comparison, another Knopf title from the same year, Thomas Bernhard’s Gargoyles, sold for $5.95 or $44.82 in 2023. Which goes to show that despite what some folks think, the price of new books today has not remotely kept pace with inflation.)

If you’re a veteran of American used book stores, you may have come across one or more of these. Fifty years later, they still standout on any shelf: such slick spines are more often confined to textbooks and high-end vanity publications. That look was the first thing to attract the interest of people covering the publishing industry. Reporting on the initiative in the New York Times, Joan Baum wrote, “At the risk of emphasizing the container at the expense of the contained, it should be noted at once that these slim volumes are bound in strikingly handsome overboards with back photos of the authors and cover designs that evoke the mood and subject matter within.”

Bill Katz (who later compiled Writer’s Choice, a cornucopia of neglected book recommendations, with his wife Linda Sternberg Katz), introduced the series to his fellow librarians in a piece in Library Journal:

With In the Animal Kingdom and Burnt Toast, Knopf initiates a program of publishing new fiction by young novelists at a reasonable price. The books are just slightly smaller than the ordinary novel, bound in paper over boards, and nicely produced, with attractive covers and good, wide margins. Each of the present works has as its hero a youth engaged in a version of the ancestor quest, familiar through anthropology, by which manhood is achieved. And, though the two books are very different in style and tone, each has a large component of ritual. These initial selections evidently were made with an eye to capturing two segments of the youth market: the English-major set, who may be impressed with Warren Fine’s impacted manipulations of time sequence and narrative voice; and the flower-child communards, to whom Peter Gould’s unremitting ingenuousness may appeal.

The series was short-lived: Knopf published four titles in 1971 and four more in 1972. By 1973, it was dead and forgotten. Dead probably because Knopf lost money on them — or at least (such is the logic of the market), didn’t make enough money. But unjustly forgotten, in my view. So, here is my attempt commemorate this experiment.

Cover of Burnt Toast by Peter Gould

• Burnt Toast, by Peter Gould
Peter Gould’s amiable autobiographical novel about life on a Vermont farm with a sort-of commune of friends was a perfect introduction for the series. “We consulted the oracle when this book was first begun,” read Gould’s dedication. “This is what came up: ‘Innocence (The Unexpected)’.” The optimism of innocence, or maybe the innocence of optimism, was behind both Knopf’s investment and the creative spirit of these writers. Each of these books was an attempt to change the world, or at least evidence that the belief that fiction could change the world was still alive and kicking.
The farm in question had already been celebrated in Raymond Mungo’s nonfiction book of the year before, Total Loss Farm: A Year in the Life. As often happens, Gould’s version was more earnest and less commercially successful. His hero, Silent, and a character named V.D.C. (for “Very Decent Citizen”) enter forthrightly and energetically into the task of farming and community building and take each setback with a mixture of wonder and resilience. Joan Baum wrote that rather than trying to turn his work into a book, Gould should have “tacked it up instead on the hardwoods in Vermont and read it aloud to the community for free.”
You can purchase Peter Gould’s more recent nonfictional account of his experiences at Total Loss Farm, Horse-Drawn Yogurt, on his website, PeterGouldVermont.com.

Covers of Their Family and In the Animal Kingdom by Warren Fine, illustrations by James Grashow

• In the Animal Kingdom and Their Family, by Warren Fine
Warren Fine had more ambition that all his series-mates combined, and it shows in these two books, which have accumulated a tiny but loyal following over the years. In the Animal Kingdom and Their Family tell related stories that revolve around Orcus Berrigan and Gerhard Blau, who desert the revolutionary American army and head into the wilderness that is now the Midwest. They become trappers and Berrigan settles with an Indian woman known as Marie or Sawpootway. Their Family is Blau’s fantasy of what happens to Berrigan and Sawpootway in the years after the two men parted. Where In the Animal Kingdom is rhapsodical and profane, Their Family blends realism and visions, particularly as experienced by Sawpootway:

In the dream, her hands covered her ears; if she put her hands upon the sewing in her lap, she’d have to listen to words about Legget. She reached for the sewing, needing its confirmation: a voice spoke of her existence in an old life. The voice said nothing of Legget; her sewing disappeared beneath her fingers, and she didn’t miss it. Dutchess rose out of the water, lake water still and deep. The man, from her first dream, perhaps Legget, perhaps Thurlow, perhaps… The man from her first dream, a shape shifting, threw Dutchess into an oven, where, cooked, she became Sawpootway. In the oven, she bled forever from her womb, and no man would touch her. The man departed, betraying her as if he were one, now laughing at his joke, who’d already died, long before.

Something in Fine’s work set reviewers’ teeth on edge:

Warren Fine is a devotee of the “Faulknerian” school of writing: using endless, snake-like sentences and relying on purple prose to tell poetic rather than objective truth. If you believe that reality is mysteriously subjective and that a tale can never be told simply, then Their Family is your literary cup of commas, diluted with pitchers full of colons and sweetened by tablespoons full of semi-colons.

It’s hard to see what the fuss was about. “Faulknerian” is actually off the mark, in my view. The real tip-off to Fine’s creative inspiration is in his dedication in In the Animal Kingdom: “For John Hawkes.” Fine was probably the closest any writer came to following in “the school of Hawkes” (or is it “Hawkesian”?), with its mixture of mystical eroticism and precise, at times painful, concrete details.

And, it must be said, a clear invocation of the spirit of Walt Whitman in the opening to In the Animal Kingdom:

In America, I throw my single voice about like a ventriloquist; like an evangelist—ox, eagle, ass, or winged man, play my various tongues, both intimate and distant voices cast from my mouth, as if fishlines spread to flickering sheets, become so much like fish themselves, like blades and flames, to catch my experience in the animal kingdom, to come into my story, feeling as if with my tongue, to know again, and know mostly now, the process of my adventure in the flesh, as all tongues, like castaways returning through my mouth, reenter and descend into my present body.

Warren Fine never managed to publish another book after these two novels. He taught at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, often holding class in the Zoo Bar off campus, then moved to the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where he was found dead in his apartment in 1987 at the age of 44. His passing was marked by his favorite bartender in the Lincoln Star: “He drank, he gambled, he was lax about his health and his taxes. He hurt some wonderful women and they left him. They had no choice. He was desperately self-destructive… I know he believed the first rule of being a writer: write an awful lot.” Fine’s papers at the UNL archives include the manuscripts of dozens of stories and at least one unpublished novel.

The two striking cover illustrations are by James Grashow.

cover of Arkansas Adios by Earl Mac Rauch

• Arkansas Adios, by Earl Mac Rauch
I’ve got to be honest about this one. There was a period, maybe from the early 1960s into the early 1980s, when Playboy magazine used to publish serious fiction in between the ads and nudes. Serious, often innovative, but also tending to fall into a certain rut that was even narrower and more identifiable than the supposed New Yorker school of spare short stories in which nothing happens (I’m citing the stereotype here). That rut was usually comic, often ribald, and pretty much always confined to male authors.,/dd>

I don’t know if Earl Mac Rauch ever published in Playboy, but if you wanted to get a good sense of what the Playboy school (or perhaps, playground) of fiction was like, give Arkansas Adios a read. It’s about a precocious eleven-year-old boy growing up in Red Mound, Arkansas and his picaresque adventures — at least, as picaresque as you can get on a fat-tired bicycle. One of his adventures involves playing a trick on the town’s prostitute. If that sounds like comic gold to you, you’ll probably love this book. Bearing in mind that Rauch published his first novel, Dirty Pictures from the Prom, while an undergraduate at Darmouth, I can be excused for describing the humor as sophmoric.
Reviewing the book for the Boston Globe, Richard Pearce wrote, “More than anything else, Rauch leads us from one episode to the next in anticipation of some mind-blowing joke that lies just beyond the novel’s reach.” Pearce rated the book “a minor by singular accomplishment like that of a Pogo or Snoopy cartoon,” which in my opinion is an insult to Walt Kelly and Charles Schultz.
Rauch does play around with fictional conventions, giving his characters dialogue balloons at one point, but I’m stretching to class this with the other books on the list as experimental fiction. His main claim to fame is his screenplay and novelization of the cult movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai.

Cover of Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense by Kathy Black

• Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense, by Kathy Black
Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense is about a Barnard graduate named Betty who’s trying to get a book called Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense published — that is, once she’s written in. In search of material, she interviews friends and old classmates and spends time in Paris with her boyfriend Arnold.
The book is filled with snippets. Snippets of the interviews, of Betty’s notebooks, of a play she wrote in elementary school, of letters to editors, of thoughts on such topics as “Modern Youth Searches for an Identity.” Even a snippet of an author’s apology to the reader:

“I started writing this book because I wanted to write something and because I needed something to write about so K said “Why not ask girls about their future plans” said K. In college you never think about the distant future said Arnold. So here it is, the distant future.

All this would quickly grow insufferable were it not for Kathy Black’s winning acknowledgement that since we’re following along with her wanderings, she owes the reader a chuckle or accurate insight every page or so. As the New York Times reviewer, Thomas Lask, wrote, Black manages to capture the spirit of a certain segment of American youth on the cusp of a new decade: “The goodwill of these young people, their desire to redress injustice, to make the world better, to do something about the deep stores of guilt that lie in their hearts all shine through their immaturity, their quixotic and sometimes dangerous behavior.”

As far as I can tell, this was Kathy Black’s only book.

Cover of Saw by Steve Katz

• Saw, by Steve Katz
Of all the authors represented in the Borzoi puppies, Steve Katz was the most committed to experimental fiction as both cause and form. He founded the Fiction Collective (still going strong, yay!) with fellow experimentalists Walter Abish, Ronald Sukenick, et al., and never lost his love of play in every aspect of writing and publishing. His first novel, The Exagggerations of Peter Prince includes photos, illustrations, one-, two-, and four-column texts, and even a full-page set of exit doors in case the reader feels like quitting. His short story collection Creamy and Delicious (recently republished by Tough Poets Press) has been called the best embodiment of Pop Art in fictional form (and, I’m happy to note, is currently ranked as the 2506th greatest fiction book of all time according to TheGreatestBooks.org).
Saw could be seen as Steve Katz’s riff on J. G. Ballard, at least J. G. Ballard’s disaster novels of an Earth subject to relentless heat, rising sea levels, crystalization, and blistering winds. In this case, the disaster is garbage. It’s set in a New York City swimming in garbage: “Garbage heaps. Garbagy air, people wander around in the garbage, kicking it up underfoot, sucking it into their lungs, kissing it into each other’s mouth. The Garbage Age, not the Space Age or the Computer Age.” And when a couple manage begin enjoying a gourmet meal of asparus and veal Milanese, their apartment is invaded by “the fetid grimy rabble of the streets nobody loves. They drag with them some garbage cans full of steamy putrid stuff, and plastic bages full of sodden trash.”
So … how does this relate to the astronaut on the cover? Well, the Astronaut is Steve Katz, who is watching the garbage-piled world and us the reader and reserving his right to remain the impassive observer — or to descend and reorganize the world as a new Creator. If you have any familiarity with fragmentary fiction, you will be able to enjoy Saw. If not, you may feel like the New York Times reviewer, who claimed his ARC fell apart and left him with scattered pages and Chapter 7 following Chapter 17. Which I suspect Steve Katz would have told him was a darned good novel, too. Kirkus Reviews took a more tolerant view, saying it was “simply a charming book that amuses the reader as it gently deposits him from one place to another, with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of pleasure if you’re so minded.”
Saw is in print, at least according to the website of the University of Alabama Press.

Cover of The Log of the S. S. Mrs. Unguentine by Stanley Crawford

• Log of the S. S. The Mrs. Unguentine, by Stanley Crawford
Stanley Crawford’s first novel, Gascoyne was a broad-brush satire of the American way of enterprise, something not too dissimilar from Stanley Elkin’s early novels or Max Apple’s wonderful collection The Oranging of America. His second — let’s call it The Log for short — represents the fabulist strain of 1970s American experimentalism. Mrs. Unguentine spends forty years as the partner and shipmate of Unguentine, the captain of barge full of plants, odd machines, and miscellaneous junk. They wander the sea aimlessly — literally: Unguentine “had been steering all those years with no idea of what he was steering towards.”
Eventually the S. S. The Mrs. Unguentine becomes something of an ecosystem onto itself — a state both cozy and comforting and profoundly isolating. Until one day when Unguentine falls overboard. Though this comes to seem to Mrs. Unguentine as less an event then a condition, a state that may or may not persist: “[T]here seems to be no longer any precise moment when old Unguentine vanished from my life, it seems rather an almost gradual process that went on over many years and as part of a great rhythm, as if, through some gentle law of nature, his disappearance would be followed by his gradual reemergence, that he would come back, so on, so forth.”
The Log was the beloved secret book of a handful of readers for years, but now it’s back in print and available from the Dalkey Archive.

Cover of Motorman by David Ohle

• Motorman, by David Ohle
People who wax about how weird and unsettling Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is need to read Motorman. The short novel has enough strangeness to fill a 400-page novel. The Motorman is Moldenke, who is kept alive by the transplanted hearts of several sheep and spends much of his days feeling guilt for having killed some jellyheads (who are people … maybe … sort of) and resisting the competing influence of Bunce, the “Bust’em or Burn’em Big Brother,” and Burnheart, the Organ Transplant King.
In his introduction to the Calamari Archives reissue of Motorman, Ben Marcus writes of the awe with which the few people he knew who were aware of the book — let alone had read it — spoke of it: “For a long time I was scared to read Motorman. It had come recommended to me in such hushed tones that it sounded disruptively incendiary and illegal. Not only would the reader of this crazed novel burn to ashes, apparently, but he might be posthumously imprisoned for reading the book—a jar of cinder resting in a jail cell.”
One of the striking aspects about Knopf’s backing this series is that they were able to get a book like Motorman reviewed in dozens of newspaper book sections around the country — even papers like the Fresno Bee. The downside, however, was that they couldn’t prevent reactions like this: “This particular book, a first novel, is a bummer. It is not good writing by any standard. There is no real creativity and certainly no redeeming social value. Is Ohle’s purpose to put a copy of Motorman into every spaced-out acid-head’s hands?” Well, Motorman did get into the hands of some spaced-out acid-heads as well as into the hands of a few lovers of envelope- and mind-expanding fiction who carried a torch for David Ohle’s odd book until, within the last decade or so, it’s begun to be recognized as a significant and complex work.

Having read half of them, I must say upfront that I don’t think any of them, with the possible exception of David Ohle’s Motorman, can be considered a classic. But neither are these complacent books. For literature to remain vital, it has to keep changing, and part of that change depends on writers who are willing to take risks and try things without the guarantee of success. While Knopf’s venture was probably a commercial failure, it would be a mistake to consider any of these books a critical failure. Not everything works. But there is something good in each of them and something for other writers to learn from. And for that alone, these puppies deserve to be remembered.

A Jingle-Jangle Song, by Mariana Villa-Gilbert (1968)

Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press ad for <em>A Jingle-Jangle Song</em> by Mariana Villa-Gilbert.
Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press ad for A Jingle-Jangle Song by Mariana Villa-Gilbert.

Mariana Villa-Gilbert, who died recently at the age of 86, spent most of her life as a largely forgotten writer. Her last novel, Manuela: A Modern Myth, came out in 1973 and, like the previous five and her one short story collection, The Sun in Horus (1986), quickly went out of print and have never been reissued.

Such is the fate of a writer whose work earns the half-hearted verdict of “interesting.” Her first novel, Mrs. Galbraith’s Air (1963), about — well, not so much an affair as an attraction — between bright schoolboy and an older, sophisticated married woman was nuanced and complex but perhaps at a level a bit beyond its author’s reach. When I read it last year with some anticipation, I found that what was meant as subtle too often came out as muddle. I gave up several chapters into Manuela when the comic satire seemed to lose all connection to reality, though I still plan to take it up again in hopes that the problem was less with the book than with my tired brain.

Villa-Gilbert probably took her title of A Jingle-Jangle Song from Bob Dylan’s early hit “Mr. Tambourine Man,” for it takes place in a brief moment, probably around late 1964, when there seemed a chance that the American folk revival from which Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, and other singers might wash ashore in England with similar success. Sarah Kumar, Villa-Gilbert’s heroine, is undoubtedly modeled on Joan Baez, with similar long black hair, olive skin, piercing dark eyes, and otherworldly voice.

Arrived in London on a brief stop en route to appearances in France, Sarah is taken by a British DJ to an opening at a Pall Mall art gallery and subsequent after party. Jet-lagged and uncomfortable, she drinks far too much and finds herself hanging over the sink in the ladies’ room. Which is where Jane, an older woman and wife to the exhibiting sculptor, comes to her aid. Jane cleans Sarah up and escorts her to a quiet couch to sleep it off.

The next day, Jane and Sarah meet again in a Soho cafe. Jane is waiting to meet her husband for lunch; Sarah is trying to re-enter the world with the help of caffeine. They talk and agree to meet later. Jane is already aware of a vague attraction. Discussing Sarah with her husband after the party, she had found herself being wary of how she spoke of her:

“Twenty-two.” Carefully. And putting aside the earring now, placing it exactly — so. Afraid he might wonder at her interest, that she’d bothered to discover her age. (Oh but it was ridiculous, the way one hummed and hahed over these things. Why on earth should she be ashamed of her interest in a member of her own sex?)

Within 48 hours of their first meeting, the two are making love, both apparently for the first time with another woman. Jane’s background is one of mostly unfulfilled matrimony punctuated by a very occasional affair (her husband’s far more frequently). Sarah, however, is scarred. After losing her virginity to a professor for whom she was just one in a long string of undergraduate conquests, she fell into a five-year relationship with a messianic figure who abused her physically and emotionally. This ended when she was swept up as a rising star by her agent, who is only interested in Sarah as a property — abuse of another form.

Now caught in a torrent of recording sessions, television appearances, concerts, and revolving hotel rooms, Sarah arrives in London not just jetlagged but shell-shocked. Her attraction to Jane, is less physical than for the emotional safety she offers. For her part, Jane is drawn both by Sarah’s beauty and the intensity of her passion for living, chaotically as she currently expresses it.

A Jingle-Jangle Song falls into that narrow sub-genre of the layover romance, where some of the magic resides in the relentless approach of the departure. We all know these things can only end in one of two ways: with a wistful farewell and a heart-breaking return to normal life; or with the last-minute scene in which the two lovers decide to rescue their love at the cost of all the resulting disruption to their normal lives. Either romance or normalcy has to win. This is the logic of this particular cliche.

In the case of A Jingle-Jangle Song, however, we are left one step short of the fork in the denouement. Either Villa-Gilbert was reluctant to choose her ending or intentionally manipulating her readers’ expectations.

Mariana Villa-Gilbert, from the late 1950s.
Mariana Villa-Gilbert, from the late 1950s.

In his Guardian obituary of Mariana Villa-Gilbert, Christopher Adams wrote of the novel, “Attacked by reviewers for its lesbian content, it nevertheless gained a following in the lesbian press and stands as an important contribution to the genre.” Attacked is too harsh a word. Pigeon-holed might be more accurate. Mary Kenny, in the Evening Standard, dismissed A Jingle-Jangle Song as “yet another [unsuccessful] stab at the definitive lesbian novel, not without talent — but not wholly with conviction either” and exhorted the author: “Come, come, Miss Villa-Gilbert: we did better in the dorm at convent school.” Vernon Scannell, quite the proper Englishman in the New Statesman, admitted that “For non-lesbians like myself, the love scenes have a certain didactic interest,” unconsciously revealing just how limited was his understanding of the physical act of sex between two women took place. (And the sex in the novel is barely past the “brush of a fingertip” level.) The worst take by far was that of David Irvine in the Coventry Evening Telegraph, who concluded that the root of the problem was that Sarah Kumar “can never quite reconcile herself to the fact that she is a half-caste.”

The most insightful and enthusiastic review was that written by Gene Damon, editor and critic of the pioneering American lesbian magazine, The Ladder. Damon, whose job often involved reading the sleasiest and worst-written porn, wrote that, “For me, the reward for searching through endless hundreds of books each year is the occasional title tha tmakes all the boredom and all of the irritation engendered by many of them, worth it.” A Jingle-Jangle Song, she announced, “is one of the special books.” Damon felt that “the nature of love is discussed and examined without clinical detractions” and the sex was described in realistic yet tender terms.

A Jingle-Jangle Song was, Damon wrote, “the closest thing to a romantic novel one could expect in this time.” Still, she did note that Villa-Gilbert’s decision to switch back and forth between character’s perspectives was undermined by her use of aa third-person narrative, “which is awkward and unsatisfactory” — as indeed it is. In a book where so much of the time is spent in scenes with just the two women, it can at times prove challenging to keep track of which she is which.

Now that I read neglected books not just to write about them here but with an eye to whether they might be worth including in Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press, I can see that there is a middle ground between “justly neglected” and “reissue worthy.” It links to something I discussed back in 2020 with Álvaro Santana-Acuña, the author of Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic. “There are other works that are canonical but not classics,” he argued. “They have literary merit, but they cannot survive in the wild, so to speak. They need support from institutions—academics, publishers, national governments.” When we select a book for Recovered Books, a primary consideration is whether it’s likely to be of enough interest to current readers to make a profit, however modest. This is not, as Santana-Acuña puts it, a curatorial project.

Does A Jingle-Jangle Song deserve reissue? I agree with Christopher Adams that it has some place in the history of lesbian relationships in the English novel, and for that alone it merit inclusion in a series devoted to neglected fiction on this theme. At the same time, I think there are enough essential flaws in its execution that it is hard to argue it can stand on its own without that pigeon-holing label. As a straight white male, I am uncomfortable in making that statement. It may well be that A Jingle-Jangle Song changed some lives. It may be that its structural flaws are of secondary importance to its place in the development of lesbian themes in literature.

What should be clear, regardless of one’s view of where it best fits in our understanding of literature, however, is that it doesn’t deserve to be so obscure and inaccessible that there are no copies for sale and just around three dozen copies sitting in (mostly) university libraries around the world. This is one of the reasons why I hope the Internet Archive, the Hathi Trust, and similar initiative continue to scan and make such books available online. What we understand as literature only grows when we can find places for books like A Jingle-Jangle Song and the other works of Mariana Villa-Gilbert and many, many other writers like her.

A Jingle-Jangle Song, by Mariana Villa-Gilbert
London: Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1968