This is a story about two novels. When Mary Lee Settle published Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday in 1964, she wasn’t happy with the reviews or how her publisher handled the book. Settle saw the book as part — the conclusion, in fact — of a larger series she’d begun with O Beulah Land (1956) and Know Nothing (1960), which ultimately became known as the “Beulah Land Quintet.”
Her plan was to trace the story of a family not unlike her own and those she grew up with: landed white people in West Virginia who could trace their lines from religious and political dissidents who left England for America in the 1600s, through the pioneers who drove their wagons into the hills of Appalachia and what would become West Virginia, who fought (on both sides) in the Civil War, who started the coal mines and fought in the battles between the miners and the owners (again, on both sides) in the early 20th century, and who saw the introduction of strip mining.
In 1964, an outside might have thought that this was a story that ended on a high note, at least for the owners and their descendents. Strip mining was pulling coal from the earth faster than any lot of troublesome miners could and the money that came in could be spent at exclusive country clubs, resorts like The Greenbrier, and shopping trips to New York and Europe.
Mary Lee Settle, circa 1960.
But Mary Lee Settle was no outsider, and she must have had the sense that there was going to be a price to pay for raping this land. She picked up on clues that are sprinkled throughout Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday. And so, almost twenty years later, after writing the beginning of the story (Prisons (1973)) and the penultimate chapter (The Scapegoat (1980), about the violence between the miners and the owners around 1912), she returned to update her ending with The Killing Ground (1982).
Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday appears relatively intact as the middle section (“Before the Revolution, 1960”) of The Killing Ground, which begins in 1978 and ends two years later. So, it can be read as a work in progress or a fragment. Personally, I think neither of those interpretations is correct. Fight Night and The Killing Ground tell fundamentally different stories. The Killing Ground is truly the culmination of the Beulah Land quintet, which is a larger story, a story about people and generations and their land. Fight Night, on the other hand, is a snapshot in time, a story about individuals, set over the course of little more than a weekend. And as a result, I think, a better and tighter book.
The book opens with a late night drunken phone call from Johnny McKarkle, the wealthy but aimless son of a family with coal money, to his sister Hannah in New York City. Johnny is in a phone booth in Canona, their home town in West Virginia. It’s Saturday night, “the night for a man to fight free to the surface of his life, not caring how he did it or how much hate he dragged up and let fly.” Johnny wants to confide in Hannah about his problems — marriage, meaningless job, unlistening parents — and to coax Hannah down to cut loose with him. The next call Hannah gets, a few hours later, brings the news that Johnny is dying, his head having been bashed in while he was sobering up in the town’s drunk tank.
Johnny is clearly painted as a tragic figure and Hannah isn’t much better off. But at least she’s had the sense to leave town, and when she gets off her flight from New York the next morning, her senses are alert for the signs of getting pulled back. Friends stop by her parents’ place — “set sentinel on the hill above Canona” — to express concern on their way home from church, but she knows they’re just looking for fuel for the gossip mill:
They would take whatever words I stammered out, piece an “inside” story together, their unkissed mouths breathing the smell of cigarettes and coffee into their telephones, making little secretive sounds to each other. I remembered how small termite mandibles were, and how, if you lean close and pinpoint attention, you can hear them, how their combined tenacity can crush a building. These women were moving close to trouble, chewing at it because they had, that week, none of their own to feed the others with.
These are the three best-written sentences I’ve come across in a long time. Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday is full of them. There are dry pages and a few ill-crafted passages in this book, but it’s worth reading just for sentences that cut to the bone like a switchblade in the hands of a killer with a swift and sure mastery of her weapon. Hannah on her father, a man who’s spent his adult life in the shadow of a domineering wife: “How could I ‘go easy’ with my father — a man whom I had never seen separately, as you see, in a split second of love or even horror, in all my life? Christ, I knew a two-day lover better than I knew my father.” On her mother, putting herself together after the shock of learning of Johnny’s death: “She began to take her own shape, hiding the woman again behind the lady.” Or Johnny’s relationship with Hannah: “Usually he loved me as you live in spite of.” Or the atmosphere of the Greenbrier (called Egeria Springs in the book): “Egeria’s smell, from the gate on into the rooms, a smell compounded of expensive secluded mountain air, hand-ironed linen, polish, huge, glossy, well-fed plants, and thick notepaper, I recognized later wherever I smelled it, and it brought me back to Egeria Springs. It was the clean, crisp new smell of protected American money.”
At times, Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday made me wonder if Balzac had been reincarnated as a woman from Charleston, West Virginia, for Settle deals with the relationship between families and money in a way few American writers — and even fewer of Settle’s generation — equalled. What she knew better than any of her characters was that families and money are always moving together in one of two directions, up or down. There is no stasis.
Johnny’s head is bashed in by one of his distant cousins, a hard scrabble farmer still trying to hold on to a poor patch of hill farm. Jake Catlett is from the unlucky line that got stuck with the rocky hillsides when the McKarkles got the rich bottom land along the river. A few decades of coal-mining wages wasn’t even to prevent the Catletts’ slow slide into deeper and deeper poverty.
But neither are the McKarkles secure in their grand house above Canona. Coal mining is starting its decline. Owners who failed to make the switch to strip-mining have already seen their fortunes evaporate:
Money disaster had a phrase: You ran through with every last thing. I could see people fleeing down River Street, running through it, shoveling money, until they threw the last thing, the last dollar, and having at last committed the unpardonable sin, they were stripped as if they had shed their clothes, left naked, turned away from, cut from the minds, except in moral stories or in late-night memories.
In the case of the McKarkles, this disaster is lurking somewhere in the future. Having lost his illusions during the war, Johnny — the heir to the McKarkle fortune, such as it is — has done nothing to avert this: “Without land to till or people to care for, Johnny had been caught in a parody where the land had shrunk to a genteel suburban house he wasn’t even needed to work for.” And with his death, that fate becomes certain.
The coming money disaster is paralleled by the disaster becoming evident in the toll that coal has taken on the landscape. That awareness is just setting in: “The river was too dirty with chemical and coal waste for many fish to survive in it. But they kept on trying.” As Settle sees it, however, in a perspective that at the time was just beginning to be expressed, the land was going to be the ultimate victim:
We had cut down its trees, and the water had poured down its naked gulleys and swept itself clean. We had stabbed too hard, and in those places it had shrunk back baring its rock teeth. Arrogance and lack of care toward its riches had grown into arrogance and lack of care for each other. The crash of the grabber at the coal face had exploited, grabbed, as we had grabbed. We had left a residue of carelessness, and the hatred that grew in it had made a fist.
When Settle returned to Canona and fit the small story of Johnny McKarkle into the fabric of the “Beulah Land” series when she incorporated Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday into The Killing Ground, the consequences of coal mining on both land and people had become clear. The two books, however, take very different views on their subject. In The Killing Ground, we see the decline of Canona and the McKarkles as if through a telescope, in the larger context of history. In Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday, we see in small dimensions: one weekend, one family, one death. The larger context of history is only the background to Hannah McKarkle’s close observation. And when the writer is a cold-blooded and skilled knife fighter like Settle, used to feeling her victim’s breath as the blade goes in, the larger context of history doesn’t stand a chance.
Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday, by Mary Lee Settle New York: The Viking Press, 1964
When you reach the end of Mundome, you may think you’ve misunderstood it completely and need to go back and read it again. That’s not only the sign of a great book about insanity but exactly what A. G. Mojtabai had in mind.
Mundome is about Richard, a sane, sober, faithful brother, and Meg, his sister trapped in some form of madness that leaves her in a near-catatonic state. Released after twelve years in an institution, Meg is now living with Richard. Each day, he struggles to pull Meg out of her fugue. He sits her at their dinner table despite the fact that her hands are bunched into fists so tightly that she cannot even hold a fork, let alone bring it to her mouth. He tries to engage her in conversation about the events of his day even though she stares ahead blankly. He sits Meg in their living room as if the two of them were an ordinary couple reading quietly after dinner, though they’re clearly not:
That evening Meg sat in the green armchair, the lamplight flaking round her shoulders. On her lap I placed the latest copy of Life magazine, open. On the page facing the story of interest was a luscious lobster dinner, a mayonnaise advertisement, complete with potato salad and pickle. Meg stared at the ad with some fixity, pursing her lips and raising the page closer to her eyes. Then she began to help herself, diving into the salad, tearing it to bits and stuffing her mouth with it. Clacking, chewing, coughing and spitting followed. I forced my hand into her mouth and cleared it, then ripped the magazine from her hands.
To distract himself from Meg’s stony isolation, Richard takes up writing, but he never gets past the beginning of stories that seem really to be about himself: “I am living at the bottom of a well. It is really very comfortable here and I see no point in moving.”
His job is another daily battle with insanity. Richard is an archivist at a city library. The library itself is stuck in limbo:
The acquisitions department continues to select books, to fill in the myriad order blanks, white, pink, green and yellow, to make out the invoices; they are as busy as spiders spinning, but the orders are never sent, the invoices are only filed away.
“This place is a warehouse, cold storage,” one of Richard’s colleagues tells him. “No action, nothing moves. It’s dead. Unreal.” Patrons die as they sit looking emptily at books and are only discovered at closing time. Answering reference desk requests, Richard finds himself going down endless threads of cross-references:
… see Marianna, an Idyll. Formed by an English Hand. Marianna: see An English Hand. An English Hand: see An Hue and Cry after the Funda mental Rights and Duties of Englishmen. An Hue and Cry: see Hymn to Wealth, a Satyr. Hymn to Wealth: see….
He chronicles the histories of the librarians before him who sat at the desk he now occupies: “Ada Nog. December 1958-May 1959…. After an uneventful day at work, Miss Nog put on her wrap, said goodnight, went home and put her head in the oven. No explanation offered or sought.” Yet despite this atmosphere of ennui, the library staff is taut with anxiety at the rumor of a visit from an efficiency expert, a ruthless streamliner who will cut through their ranks like a man with a scythe.
All this is driving Richard to his own form of breakdown. One night, as he looks at himself in the mirror, he makes hopeless attempts to restore his connection with his emotions: “I spent the better part of an hour making faces at myself, practicing love, hatred, anger, fear, envy, lust, grief, feeling none of them but giving a careful rendition just the same.” Meg’s psychiatrist becomes concerned with Richard’s mental state, hints at the possible need for hospitalization.
All along, your heart goes out to Richard. He’s a decent, serious individual fighting to overcome powerful forces of madness and chaos.
Or is he?
As one account of Mundome puts it, “The novel has two settings — inner and outer — which fuse at the end, and only one main character, or perhaps two main characters who fuse at the end.” Are Richard and Meg, in fact, two sides of the same person? Mojtabai later said that she meant all along to leave the reader in doubt, yet until the last few pages, we accept the explanation that most fits with our sense of what’s normal. Her design becomes more obvious when we know how Mojtabai approached writing her novels: “I work backwards from the ending,” she told an interviewer. “I usually begin with a haunting final image — a recognition scene — and proceed by unpacking the implications of that image as I go.”
Mojtabai came up with her title by fusing together two words from a Latin saying: In hoc mundo me extra me nihil agere posse, which she translated as “In this world I can affect nothing outside myself.” As she notes in an introductory comment, “Mundome is a deliberately ungrammatical construction, a forced juxtaposition of words that cannot fuse without some connective of action or relation.” Which is not unlike what she does with Richard and Meg, two characters who appear polar opposites until Mojtabai forces us to see the possibility that they might actually be the same person.
The Washington Post’s reviewer Jonathan Yardley, who called Mundome one of the best novels of 1974, described the book as “an intelligent whodunit,” but admitted that was a misleading label: “One is left in the end not with the answer to whodunit, but with a complex of questions that linger in the mind.” Even if some reviewers were irritated at the book’s lingering ambiguity, most saw Mundome as an exceptionally well-constructed and written first novel. Margaret Atwood called it “an extraordinarily pure novel, pure as the contained landscapes inside glass paperweights in which the snow falls endlessly on minute figures, preserved from dust and decay by the absence of air.” Time’s reviewer said the book “erupts with dramatic clues that flare backward and forward through the narrative like thin, ignited trains of gunpowder,” and the Antioch Review called it “The most remarkable first novel published in America during the past several years.” (Mojtabai was, for the record, an Antioch alumna.)
A. G. Mojtabai, 1976.
Mojtabai drew inspiration for the novel from two sources. While an undergraduate at Antioch, she worked one summer as an intern at the Chestnut Lodge Sanatarium in Rockville, Maryland. There, she dealt with a woman diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia who’d been a patient at the clinic for over twelve years. Mojtabai found her sense of the woman transformed over the weeks of dealing with her. Shocked by her condition, she then began to think her more sane than the clinic’s staff, capable of moments of striking clarity. But later, Mojtabai came to distrust her own impressions. “Again and again,” she later wrote, “I had to confront the fact that my attempt to understand her condition was a devious way of probing my own condition. When I left the job, I was in a very shaky state and my patient was no better.”
Mojtabai was also a veteran of the strange world of a large metropolitan library. After her divorce from an Iranian man she met at Antioch, she returned with her daughter to New York City, where she taught at Hunter College before taking a job as a librarian at Columbia, where she earned her MLS in library science in 1970. She was working at the library of the City College of New York when she wrote Mundome, her first novel. As she told UC Irvine professor Dr. Carol Booth Olson, Mojtabai based her descriptions of Richard’s library and its patrons on her observation of the daily activities of the main branch of the New York Public Library.
A. G. (for Ann Grace) Mojtabai went on to write eight more novels after Mundome. Her most recent, Thirst was published by Slant Books in February 2021. It draws upon material from both her 1994 novel Called Out, about a Catholic priest dealing with the aftermath of an airliner crash outside a small West Texas town, and Soon, a collection of sketches based on Mojtabai’s own work in a hospice.
Mundome is available on the Internet Archive: Link.
Mundome, by A. G. Mojtabai New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974
The exploits of George Manolescu, “King of Thieves,” from the Pittsburgh Press, 20 September 1905
Ever since Daniel Defoe published his novel Colonel Jack (1722), readers have been fascinated by the lives of career criminals. Although, as Defoe spells out in his lengthy original title of the book, his hero “was made Colonel of a Regiment” and resolved “to dye a General,” the core of Jack’s story was the “Six and Twenty Years” he spent as a thief.
Short, surprisingly readable, unapologetic, plain language life story of a burglar. It’s surprising to see that people were actually able to write in fairly modern American English in 1837. Mainly a series of stories recounting various crimes and time in prison. Unfortunately, he died about 2/3 of the way through the story, so the end of the book is written in the 3rd person by the warden. According to Wikipedia, and probably more interesting than any content in the book, is this factoid: “The book is most often associated with the copy in the collection of the Boston Athenaeum. This copy was bound in the author’s own skin, tradition holding that Allen requested that a copy of his confession be bound in his skin and given to John A. Fenno, who had earlier resisted Allen’s attempt to rob him.”
An early edition of The Autobiography of a Thief, by Charles Reade
The Autobiography of a Thief has been a perennially popular title, used, by my count, at least six times since Defoe. Charles Reade, who once competed with Dickens in terms of popularity with Victorian readers, took it for a short novel: The Autobiography of a Thief (1857). Reade, who was an advocate of social reform throughout his life, was careful to correct his narrator’s commentary. When the narrator writes that he “took with me three pounds ten shillings” from an Edinburgh baker after finding the work there too hard, Reade footnotes,
“Took with me.” No such thing. “Stole” is the word that represents the transactions. Always be precise. Never tamper with words; call a spade a spade and a picklock a picklock; that is the first step towards digging instead of thieving.
Cover of Jottings from Jail by Rev. J. W. Horsley.
A more authentic autobiography of a thief can be found in the opening chapter of Jottings from Jail; Notes and Papers on Prison Matters, by the Reverend J. W. Horsley (1887). Horsley, who served as chaplain at Clerkenwell Prison, collected oral histories and letters from inmates he came to know there. Horsley carefully annotated these accounts to help his readers decipher the criminal argot, such as in this inventory of the clients of a pub in Shoreditch popular with the East End’s underworld:
The following people used to go in there — toy-getters (watch-stealers), magsmen (confidence- trick men), men at the mace (sham loan offices), broads- men (card-sharpers), peter-claimers (box-stealers), busters and screwsmen (burglars), snide-pitchers (utterers of false coin), men at the duff (passing false jewellery), welshers (turf-swindlers), and skittle-sharps. Being with this nice mob (gang) you may be sure what I learned.
W. L. Hanchant later reprinted this autobiography in his 1928 book, The Newgate Garland; or, Flowers of Hemp, which collected poems, songs, and letters from London’s most notorious prison.
Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief by Hutchins Hapgood
In 1903, journalist Hutchins Hapgood collected the oral history of a New York City pickpocket and petty thief in The Autobiography of a Thief. Many were sceptical of whether Hapgood’s thief was real or imaginary. He was probably a little of both. But the book was rich in details of how small-time crooks of the Bowery operated. Here, for example, is how “molly-buzzing” — stealing women’s pocket-books — worked:
We worked mainly on street cars at the Ferry, and the amount of “technique” required for robbing women was very slight. Two or three of us generally went together. One acted as the “dip,” or ” pick,” and the other two as “stalls.” The duty of the “stalls” was to distract the attention of the “sucker” or victim, or otherwise to hide the operations of the “dip”. One stall would get directly in front of the woman to be robbed, the other directly behind her. If she were in such a position in the crowd as to render it hard for the “dip,” or “wire “to make a “touch,” one of the stalls might bump against her, and beg her pardon, while the dip made away with her “leather,” or pocket-book.
Although it was never published in English, the autobiography of a thief who styled himself as royalty in the criminal world appeared in Berlin two years after Hapgood’s book. George Manolescu’s Ein Fürst der Diebe. After leaving his native Romania, Manolescu quickly developed a taste for high-end burglary and specialized in robbing jewellers and jewel owners, particularly from their suites in the finer hotels of the Riviera, Baden-Baden, and other stylish watering holes. Manolescu’s book is said to have inspired Thomas Mann’s unfinished masterpiece Confessions of Felix Krull.
Cover of I was a Bandit, the 1930 Crime Club edition of Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook.
Two decades later, another international thief, Eddie Guerin, recounted his adventures in his 1928 book Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook. Tony Baer describes it as follows:
Amazingly well told autobiography of a career criminal who specialized in bank robberies.
Eddie grew up in Chicago in the 1860’s to the 1880’s. He published the book in 1928 at age 67, motivated in part by a desire to counteract his portrayal by his former flame in her book published slightly earlier: Chicago May, Her Story, by the Queen of Crooks.
There’s plenty of adventure, including blowing the safe of the American Express building in Paris, only to be double crossed, caught and sent to Devil’s Island in French Guyana to serve a life sentence. He later escaped and returned to the States, Canada and on to London where he continued a life of crime, narrowly escaping assassination by Chicago May and her new boyfriend.
What I dug most, however, was Guerin’s ‘underworld vernacular’ (his phrase—not mine—tho I suppose I’ll steal it now from this long dead thief).
The prose is precise, hardboiled, and terse. Just how I like it. He does not tell you. He shows you. With efficiency and enough flair to entertain without being at all showy or pretentious.
What I am now quite perplexed about now is whether the hardboiled school of writing was really drawn from Hammett and Hemingway, as we were always led to believe—or whether it was more some part of the zeitgeist. There appears to have been an underworld vernacular shared by cops and robbers and hoboes and day laborers alike. A dirty realism that people spoke around that time that finally made it pen to paper in the late 20’s.
Highly recommended. A real joy to read.
Cover of Stealing Through Life by Ernest Booth
Around the same time, Alfred A. Knopf published two closely-related criminal memoirs. Grimhaven, by Robert Joyce Tasker (1928), is an account of a convicted burglar’s time at San Quentin Prison. Tasker took up writing while in prison and eventually sold a number of articles about his experiences to Mencken’s American Mercury. While at San Quentin, Tasker met another inmate, Ernest Booth, a veteran thief in for a failed bank robbery. Booth decided to try his hand at writing as well. As Tasker recounts in Grimhaven, the two men decided to avoid competing with each other:
In the end we drew up an oral compact that I would write only of prisons, and he would write only of criminals not yet in prison. We talked of the various things my experiences had taught me and decided that he should write the story of a bank-robbery, giving it every detail, with every emotion recorded.
Booth’s own book Stealing Through Life appeared less than a year after Tasker’s. With a record far longer than Tasker’s, Booth took a rather Nietzschean view of the criminal class:
There are those of us — thieves and poets — who are born intact. Complete. The stern realities of life are inverted and become only so many evidences of unreality. Within our selves we have a complete world of our imagination…. Within this realm of our own possession we retreat when confronted with things that do not fit into our preconceived scheme of things-as-they-should-be.
“We are the odd ones. The criminals, the geniuses, the builders of Utopias,” he boasted.
Cover of Angels in Undress, the US edition of Low Company by Mark Benney
In 1936, three-time convicted burglar Henry DeGras published his account of growing up in the London underworld of prostitutes and “wide boys,” Low Company: The Evolution of a Burglar, under the pseudonym of Mark Benney. Released in the U.S. a year later under the odd title Angels in Undress, the book received wildly enthusiastic reviews, including from such notoriously tough critics as Rebecca West and George Orwell. Although his publisher Peter Davies touted Benney as “the man who committed a hundred burglaries,” Benney’s crimes had been mostly minor felonies. His last conviction was for skipping out on installment payments for a phonograph. Benney went on to write several novels about the world he’d grown up in, most notably The Big Wheel, discussed here recently.
Cover of Hustler! The Autobiography of a Thief by Henry Williamson.
In 1965, R. Lincoln Keiser edited the memoir of a petty thief, Henry Williamson, Hustler! The Autobiography of a Thief. A case worker for Cook County, Keiser got to know Williamson, a recent parolee from the Illinois State Penetentiary, and taped over a hundred hours on interviews which he condensed into this book. Although its cover appealed to a general audience, Keiser’s account was more sociological in nature and included commentary from Dr. Paul Bohannon, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University.
Cover of Killer: A Journal of Murder, by Thomas E. Gaddis and James O. Long.
In 1970, Thomas E. Gaddis, best known for The Birdman of Alcatraz, his 1955 story of prisoner and amateur ornithologist Robert Stroud, collaborated with James O. Long and in compiling the recollections of a truly nasty piece of work, the serial killer Carl Panzram. Robberies were the least of his crimes, but there were plenty of them. As Tony Baer describes it,
Prior to his execution in 1930, Panzram and his death row guard became friends, and Panzram made a parting gift of a short autobiography, first published in 1970 as Killer: A Journal of Murder by Thomas Gaddis, who fills in gaps in the narrative with chapters written in the 3rd person.
The first-person confessions from Panzram to be the most compelling bits of writing. He is completely unapologetic, yet recognizes his own monstrosity. He is not trying to leverage the confession for profit, titillation nor commutation. He recognizes that publication will come after death, and thus seems pretty liberated to simply tell his tale in simple unadorned prose.
The writing is lean and uses common no frills language. He does terrible things out of misanthropy and greed. But basically just feels like he’s “paying it forward” on the ill treatment he’s received from others.
Panzram was a textbook example of recidivism: “What time I haven’t been in jail I have been either getting out or getting in again,” he wrote. His coldly amoral voice is chilling:
In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all these things I am not the least bit sorry. I have no conscience so that does not worry me. I don’t believe in man, God nor Devil. I hate the whole damned human race including myself.
Cover of The Thief, the Autobiography of Professional Thief Wayne Burk.
The Thief: the Autobiography of Wayne Burk, Professional Thief (1971), an as-told-to book written by Los Angeles Times reporter Ted Thackrey, Jr., is perhaps the most insufferably self-satisfied of all these accounts. Burk claimed to have stolen over $15 million, though that number is hard to believe after I located a few stories of Burk’s exploits, such as his 1948 stick-up of the bar at the Hotel Il Trovatore in Bakersfield, California, where he made off with a whopping $185. Burk’s moral calculus is notable for its relativity:
Nobody in this world can ever say they starved because of anything I ever did. I don’t rob poor people; they ain’t got enough money to make it worth the trouble. I never screwed around with the stock market; there ain’t no one in this world can say I make their father jump out of a window because of something I pulled with a stock to make myself richer while everyone else in the country loses. I never made a motorcar that was so cheap and crappy that it got the people who drove it killed. I never put out a medicine that crippled people or gave them cancer, and I sure never shot some poor guy just because I didn’t happen to like his looks. If I put anybody out, I had a good reason — money!
Which sounds a little like the man who boasts that he’s screwed a lot of women but never messed around with anyone’s daughter.
Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief by Andrew Keith Munro
Alexander Keith Munro’s The Autobiography of a Thief (1972) proved to have been a work in progress. Less than three years after writing, “I had a tremendous amount of excitement out of being a burglar,” Munro apparently found the call of adventure irresistable and was sent up for stealing £23,000 in valuables from the country home of Sir Kenneth Clark, the art historian and broadcaster.
Excitement seems to be a common theme in these autobiographies. In The Boxman: A Professional Thief’s Journey (1972), Professor William J. Chambliss’s case study of a career burglar, Harry King shares the profound observation that, “It’s exciting and I really believe that it’s the excitement that makes it appealing.”
Cover of Where the Money Was by Willie Sutton with Edward Linn
The most purely entertaining of all these memoirs is the legendary bank robber Willie Sutton’s Where the Money Was (1976), which he wrote with Edward Linn after his release from Attica State Prison in 1969. Like Munro and Harry King, Sutton found the thrill of planning and committing robberies more addictive than their rewards:
Why did I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life. I enjoyed everything about it so much that one or two weeks later I’d be out looking for the next job. But to me the money was the chips, that’s all.
As imaginative as some thieves may be, they continue to stick to traditions when it comes to titles. When Bruce Reynolds, the mastermind behind the 1972 Great Train Robbery came to tell his story, he called it — you guessed it — The Autobiography of a Thief (1985)
Mentions of Eda Lord are sprinkled in the margins of dozens of biographies of 20th Century writers. She was food writer M. F. K. Fisher’s schoolmate and first love at the Bishop’s School in La Jolla, California in 1924. In 1930, she’s in France, having an affair with Lawrence Clark Powell, one of five he memorialized in his short novel The Blue Train (1977). Two years later, Christopher Isherwood sees her walk into a Berlin nightclub on the arm of Tania Kurella, a German woman who met the Anglo-Irish writer James Stern that evening and later married him.
In 1948, Malcolm Lowry gets drunk at a party at the house outside Paris she shared with her then-lover Joan Black. Her name pops up in accounts of Julia Child, Richard Olney, James Beard, and other culinarily-minded Americans who clustered around Child’s villa, La Pitchoune, outside Cannes. Even in Quicksand (2005), a memoir written by Sybille Bedford, with whom she lived for twenty years, Eda rates less than three pages.
She only emerges from the margins in two places: in her three brief and largely autobiographical novels — Childsplay (1961), A Matter of Choosing (1963), and Extenuating Circumstances (1971); and in Selina Hasting’s just-published biography of her long-time lover and companion, Sybille Bedford: A Life (2020). Through Eda’s first two novels we can follow her story up to her early twenties; Hastings fills in many of the gaps thereafter.
Eda grew up in material, if not psychological, comfort. She was born in 1907 in Durango, Mexico, where her father, Harvey Hurd Lord, a former Olympic athlete, managed a copper mine. In late 1910, her father and mother were forced to flee from Mexico on horseback, taking Eda with them, when miners and peasants turned on the Americans who owned much of the land Durango in one of the early incidents in the Mexican Revolution.
Cover of UK edition of Childsplay
Though Harvey Lord came from a wealthy family, he had an unfortunate knack for investing in unproductive mines. As a result, in her childhood Eda became accustomed to moving from place to place — a pattern revealed in the chapter names in Childsplay: Joplin, Missouri; Neosho; Webb City; Okmulgee, Oklahoma; Embreeville, Tennessee. The one constant was her grandmother’s home in Evanston, Illinois, where she spent most summers. Her mother died of cancer when she was three; her father remarried but Eda was never really accepted by her stepmother, and when Harvey Lord died in 1920, Eda became a ward of her grandmother Eda Hurd Lord.
Eda Hurd Lord was something of a force of nature. Daughter of the abolitionist lawyer and Chicago pioneer Harvey Hurd, she became a real estate developer, building up Evanston, Illinois as one of Chicago’s first suburbs. She was a patron of the arts, purchasing works by Winslow Homer and others and contributing money and paintings to museums. She was not, however, interested in matters of the heart. When Eda’s father died and her future was uncertain, her grandmother put the choice to thirteen-year-old Eda in business-like terms:
She said I had a lot to think about. She wanted me to make a decision, but I must do it slowly and carefully. I should not answer at once; tomorrow would be soon enough. She said she did not want to influence me one way or the other; I should make up my own mind. Did I want to stay on with her and remain a member of my own family? Or did I want to go to Oklahoma and live with my stepmother?
Her grandmother warned Eda, however, that “if I did decide in favor of my stepmother, she could no longer have anything to do with me. She could not.” “My grandmother might be cold,” Eda later wrote, “but at least you knew where you stood with her.”
As the title of Eda’s second novel A Matter of Choosing suggests, her grandmother continued to treat her as an autonomous being rather than a child in her care. Eda Hurd Lord moved from Illinois to California, first Glendale and then La Jolla, for its environment. She gave her granddaughter the choice of attending a public or private school. Eda chose private, entering the Bishop’s School in 1922.
Eda Lord, from the Bishop’s School yearbook, 1924.
Still busy with investments, her grandmother was often away and Eda became accustomed to the company of adults. One, a financier, took her along on trips down to Tijuana. Here she became acquainted with what she called “the idiot world of Prohibition drinking:
… the crazy behavior, the stumbling walk, women in evening dress out cold and carried off on stretchers. No one lifted an eyebrow; the Hamiltons did not even look up. I was learning not to be surprised at anything.
Unfortunately, Eda’s own drinking habits came to be modelled on what she witnessed in Tijuana.
With her talents and precocious sophistication, Eda became the “It” girl of the Bishop’s School. When Mary Frances Kennedy (later M. F. K. Fisher) entered the school in 1924, a year behind, Eda was the vice president of the Junior class, a member of the Debate and Thespian clubs, editor of the literary annual, and a player on the basketball, hockey, and baseball teams. “She could always do anything, anything at school better than we could,” Fisher later wrote; “she was more exciting and brilliant than any student had ever been.” Not surprisingly, Fisher developed an intense schoolgirl crush, an “awkward, bewildered, confused” love for Eda.
Eda then went to Stanford — her grandmother’s decision this time — where she quickly earned a reputation for flouting the rules. On a whim she and a fellow student paid $5 for a ride in an airplane, which resulted in a counseling from the women’s dean. This was just the start. Before the end of her first year, she was put on “social probation” (prohibited from speaking to other students on campus). As a sophomore, she began making outings with male students. One evening, after visiting a speakeasy in San Francisco, the car she was riding in was involved in an accident. Though everyone covered it up, word eventually reached the school administration and she was expelled. “They tell me that you break the laws of our country, as well, that you have taken to drink,” her grandmother confronted Eda upon her return. “Do you enjoy muddling your words?”
Intent on gaining independence from her grandmother, Eda got a job in the advertisement office of a department store in Los Angeles and took an apartment. A middle-aged bootlegger took a fancy to her and soon she was making the rounds with him almost every night. He was proud to be seen with a fresh-faced college girl on his arm. After a few months of this, however, she was ready to move on: “With Pat, I had seen it all; I was familiar with every used car park, gas station, restaurant, street corner. Los Angeles was an uninspired, sprawling, provincial conglomeration.”
She decided to try her luck in New York City. Her grandmother took the news in her usual matter-of-fact fashion: “Experience cannot be passed on to others,” she said. “Each human being has to find out for himself.” Eda was able to find work in New York but soon grew restless again. She met Karl Robinson, a young executive with an American oil company operating in China and the two were wed in early 1930. Soon after the couple arrived in China, however, Eda realized that married life was not for her. She journeyed north to Vladivostok and made her way to Europe via the Trans-Siberian railway.
Eda eventually made it to France, where she met her old classmate Mary Frances Kennedy, now married to Alfred Fisher. She ingratiated herself into the budding gourmet with a ten-pound tin of caviar she’d bought in Moscow. Mary Frances in turn introduced Eda to Lawrence Clark Powell, who was renting a room from them while studying at the University of Dijon. Eda and Powell had a brief affair, little more than a few days together. Powell was infatuated, Eda less so. As he recalls in The Blue Train, she said there was little “an old drunkard like me” could offer:
Besides, you’re my last man. I intend to live with women after this. Anyway, I’ll be dead of lung cancer before I’m forty. Look at my fingers. You’d think I was Chinese. What could I give you? A child? No. The good father took care of that. He told me it was an appendectomy when he destroyed my ability to bear a child. My best gift to you would be my body in alcohol.
In his retrospective account, Powell made Eda older and a redhead to enhance her allure and mystery.
From France, she headed to Berlin, where she began working as a writer. The city’s pre-Nazi Cabaret decadence suited her perfectly. She may have had an affair that led to her having an abortion (Powell suggests this came earlier), but she began sleeping with women and frequenting nightclubs. It was in one of these that Sybille Bedford first met her. Sybille was in the company of Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria, Eda with her lover Tania. Eda later said that Bedford seemed “occupied and preoccupied.” Sybille, on the other hand, claimed that she “mostly sat prim and shocked — reading a review.” The two women went on their separate ways.
They met again briefly at a cocktail party in Paris in early 1939. The web of attractions at this affair was complicated to say the least. Sybille met Allanah Harper, a wealthy and worldly Englishwoman who would become her partner through the war years and later her supporter in many practical matters. Eda was with Joan Black, also a wealthy Englishwoman, with whom she would be involved through the same period. Sybille was interested in Joan and Eda. Though the two couples parted, lines between these four women would cross in numerous ways in the years after the war.
Sybille and Allanah sailed to America shortly after the Germans invaded in May 1940. Eda and Joan Black were trapped in France. Their different fates did much to determine the direction of Sybille’s and Eda’s careers. Eda and Joan made their way to the south of France, then under control of the Vichy government. They struggled with all the challenges of life under occupation — food shortages, fuel shortages, suspicion and harassment — but at least Eda’s status as a neutral foreigner offered some protection until Hitler declared war on the U.S. in December 1941.
The contrast between the account of living under occupation Eda tells in her last novel, Extenuating Circumstances, and the evidence of history is intriguing. In the book, Eda foregoes the first-person narrator of Childsplay and A Matter of Choosing for an impersonal third person. Her lead character, Letty, the widow of a British Army veteran, survives through a combination of ingenuity and good luck. A wealthy American couple leave her with the keys to their villa, which provides Letty with relative comfort and privacy — privacy enough to act as a safe house for escaping Allied airmen on occasion. The story as a whole carries a bit of a Swiss Family Robinson air as Letty and her friends overcome difficulty after difficulty by improvising solutions and outwitting the Vichy police and Gestapo. In the end, after Liberation, one character observes to Letty, “You have come a long way.” “I have,” she replies, “And you won’t catch me looking back.”
Compare this with Hasting’s description:
To those who knew Eda in the post-war period, she appeared a timid, fragile creature, shy and retiring, clearly reluctant to attract attention or to express any opinion that might be considered remotely contentious. In her younger days, however, Eda had presented a very different image, a dark-haired beauty, sociable, intelligent and high-spirited, attractive to both men and men, eager for adventure and determined to make a successful career as a writer.
Elsewhere, she writes that Sybille found Eda “pale and thin, very anxious and shy, clearly traumatised by her wartime experiences.”
What separated Eda from the fictional Letty was the reality of her experiences during the war. She and Joan were ill-prepared to deal with deprivation. Their life in Paris had been one of sleeping late, partying long, and drinking heavily. “We were too hazy with drink to notice a kerb,” Eda later wrote. Though they made their way to the Riviera, they didn’t end up in the comfort of a luxurious villa. Instead, they found a humble country house prone to the worst of the Riviera’s wet grey months: “dampness everywhere, between one’s ribs, dripping from one’s fingers, mud all over the floor. It corrodes one’s very soul.”
And instead of the Famous Five-style adventures of Extenuating Circumstances, Joan and Eda found themselves, in March 1943, interned along with hundreds of English and American women, in Cavaillon, one of the towns “approved” for them to live. As Eda wrote in an unpublished account that Selina Hastings most generously shared with me,
Cavaillon is the mouth of the funnel of the Rhône Valley and, in consequence, is the suction vent of mistrals blowing throughout the south. Wind shakes the ugly raw-blown houses and for weeks on end, wind flings dust everywhere: into eyes, mouths, nerves.
A few days later, however, they were rounded up and loaded onto a train. No one explained what was happening or where they were going.
Women at a Vichy French internment camp.
They ended up being offloaded into a camp on the outskirts of Paris where English and American women from throughout Vichy France, nearly two thousand in all, were being held for transfer to a German Internierunslager. In some ways, Eda felt more at peace there than at any time in the south:
In this prison life I was startled to discover a curious sense of leisured ease. There was no possibility of outdoor exercise: we were not allowed out; not necessity of wangling for food: we were given so much and no more, but, even so, more than we could buy outside. I walked from the dining room back to my bed and lay down with a book, savouring the peace and luxury of it. There was nothing I could do about anything.
… Outside, I could have been shot for no reason. Here I was known, named, numbered, and certainly under someone’s care and responsibility.
After a few weeks of this, however, the internees were told that they were being shipped back to Vichy with instructions to return to their places of enforced residence. Ironically, this news was nearly as bad as being handed over to the Germans. “It was as though a steel band had snapped,” Eda wrote. “The team spirit had been broken. People began grumbling.”
The women were transported back to the south of France to live, effectively, under house arrest. “We were a present from Vichy to the Germans, but they didn’t want us,” as Eda later put it in the words of a minor character in Extenuating Circumstances. The remaining months until the Allied landings in August 1944 were dreary, anxious, and hunger-filled. Eda later said that Joan took to reading cheap English mysteries for their descriptions of food and drink. “Literary bacon and eggs,” however, “are not very sustaining.”
Following Liberation, Eda and Joan made their way back to La Cerisaie, the farmhouse near Giverny that Joan owned. There, the women reconnected with friends from before the war and Joan began drinking great quantities of cheap red wine. For Eda, on the other hand, the one positive outcome of the wartime lockdown was recognizing that she was an alcoholic:
It was then that I had to decide that I must give up all alcohol and completely. Because that was the only real trouble: my liver had long before given up in despair and the alcohol went immediately into my blood stream, poisoning me, puffing me up, giving my mind strange illusions. I did this in as unobtrusive a way as I could, so that even now most people don’t know whether I drink or not.
Eda kept herself sober, as Sybille later put it, “with unrelenting effort — and the crutches of cigarettes and caffeine.” Eda would come to be known among acquaintances for her habit of arriving at parties with a thermos of coffee in hand. It seems as if Sybille saw Eda’s alcoholism as a purely a weakness rather than acknowledging her general success in maintaining sobriety.
Eda continued to write but published little. Malcolm Lowry praised a story she wrote titled “The Pig,” based on her experiences during the Occupation. “As a story perhaps it has, in one way, a kind of intolerance or lack of centre, even when it is being most subtle,” he wrote a friend, but admitted that “perhaps this imbalance is the clue to the author’s talent, or one clue.” He even suggested that Eda might pull together a collection of stories about “the gruesomes & comedies of the occupation.”
It was not until August 1956, after several more encounters, that Sybille and Eda became lovers. The relationship started with crash. Driving south from Paris, they were involved in an automobile accident that left Sybille with a broken hip. They recuperated at La Bastide, a villa in the hills above Cannes that Allanah Harper — a former lover of both women — was restoring with her husband. In many ways, La Bastide became the closest thing to home that Eda was to experience in her adult life.
For much of their time together over the next twenty years, Eda and Sybille lived on the move, never settling anywhere for more than a few months. As Sybille wrote in Quicksand,
… [W]e were living in years’ or half-years’ snatches in rented houses or flats in Dorset, in London, in Portugal, in Essex, then London again, then Italy: the Browning Villa at Asolo, an intolerable mistake with a sudden recourse to where we should have started: the South of France. And there we found the only both loved and permanent home I ever had: a conversioned annex built on Allanah Harper’s property.
This period, however, represented Bedford’s most productive time as a writer, as she published two novels, several collections of reportage, and a two-volume biography of Aldous Huxley. And Eda, who’d never written more than magazines and short stories, finally got down to work on a longer piece. She may have intended to write something about the Occupation: in one of Sybille’s letters, she writes that Eda is working on a piece about Marseilles and that “it is like a door burst open, then freedom and imagination and originality of the writing, filled with joy.”
Cover of US edition of Childsplay
What Eda published in the end, though, was Childsplay, which was essentially her autobiography up to the time of her father’s death in 1920 (though she places the event in 1917). Childsplay was published to good reviews in both the U.S. and England. The New York Times’ reviewer singled out Lord’s spare, elegant prose style. “She writes with great clarity and is able to make each separate scene count for exactly what she intended.”
Monica Furlong, writing in the Guardian gave the book its most enthusiastic review: “Masterpiece, tour de force, work of art — all the silly rave words of reviewers fail one utterly, yet the fact remains that here is a writer who uses language as if it had just been invented, who remembers precisely what it was like to learn to read, to get stuck on a roof and not be able to get down, to mistake a puppet for a real monkey. Miss Lord has no self-pity, no sentimentality, no vulgarity. Her greedy appetite for life takes a well-judged bite at America in the early years of this century….” Furlong later named it as one of the books she’d most enjoyed during the year, saying the book’s “vivid, singing prose” had “haunted me for months.”
Cover of US edition of A Matter of Choosing
Eda followed two years later with A Matter of Choosing, which carried her story forward to her arrival in New York City in her early twenties. Like Childsplay, it was written in a frank, unsentimental first-person voice that was as tough on herself as on those around her. The book displayed a remarkable level of constraint — not reticence, mind, but a maturity that recognizes the danger in making sweeping statements. As one reviewer put it, Lord’s prose was “cool and spare and always beautifully exact both in what it says and what it implies.” Only Anne Kelley though, writing in Chicago Tribune saw through Lord’s reserve to the vulnerable orphan she really was: “The sense of loneliness in the midst of so many people is overwhelming.”
M. F. K. Fisher, who saw Eda in the late 1950s after a break of many years, recognized that time had taken its toll on her. “I know that you are everything I recognized in you so long ago,” she wrote Eda in 1959, “tempered and refined and of course wearied by those processes.” Martha Gellhorn, who was a close friend, cautioned Sybille that “Eda will never decide anything because she cannot, and her motives are not what you think (gratitude, duty, affection) but plain terror.”
It was Sybille, not Eda, who took the lead in things. When Eda returned to the U.S. for the first time in over thirty years in early 1964, it was because Sybille had agreed to report on the trial of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby, for LIFE magazine. While Sybille attended court, Eda went on to California to stay with M. F. K. Fisher, where, as Sybille wrote after they met again in New York City, Eda had “put on some weight, thank God.”
Once back in France, however, Eda found it hard to get back to work on her long-delayed novel about the Occupation. Living with Sybille when she was working on a deadline was “like living with a caged tiger.” Eda had to take on most of the domestic duties. “I’ve been nurse, housekeeper, errand boy,” she complained, along with having to do most of the work in the large garden that Sybille wanted but could not care for. But Eda was also suffering from depression. Sybille wrote a friend that Eda refused to discuss what was going on: “That wretchedness was neither admitted, nor discussed; it was concealed.”
By the summer of 1968, however, Eda was dealing better with depression, thanks in part to effective medication. She returned to her third novel “without great faith but with tenacity and courage,” as Sybille put it. Deep into her research for the Aldous Huxley biography, Sybille traveled to the U.S. with Eda again. The two women spent some time with her aunt Margaret Burnham, the last of Eda’s father’s siblings. Sybille the experience stifling: “the days are spent in maddening slow rounds of trivia.” Aunt Margaret disapproved of Eda’s smoking and made a point to say so frequently. Yet she also insisted that her niece take part her busy social life, which left Eda “shrivelled with boredom” and with no energy to work on her book. The only relief was a visit to M. F. K. Fisher in Napa Valley, although Eda’s frailty worried her old friend: “I feel as if she is nourished on cobwebs,” she wrote afterward.
Cover of U.S. edition of Extenuating Circumstances
Eda finally finished Extenuating Circumstances in October 1970. Sybille’s long-time editor Robert Gottleib was happy to accept the book for Knopf. By now the story had only a loose connection with Eda’s own experiences during the Occupation. Instead of a grim account of survival and deprivation, it had become, as one reviewer put it, “a wry comedy” in which the heroine — seen through the distance of an impersonal narrator — was transformed from “starveling to spiv entrepreneur.” It was as if the only way Eda could put that time down on paper was to step out of the story completely.
Eda grew more and more reluctant to leave the annex of La Bastide that had become their home. She continued to struggle with depression, took no interest in eating — which would have been difficult for Sybille, who always relished good food and wine, of which there was plenty to be had with friends like Julia Child and Richard Olney nearby. Eda was likely dealing with a serious case of agoraphobia. As one can imagine, it was difficult to be around someone with such dark moods — hard to show love, harder to feel it. Reading the account of Sybille and Eda’s relationship in Hastings’ biography, you realize that while we may not have progressed much in the priority we give the treatment of mental illness, we are at least better at recognizing it. Neither woman was well prepared to deal with Eda’s depression.
And Eda’s smoking began to take its toll. She finally gave it up, but the damage had already been done. She was diagnosed with throat cancer. Worse, after suffering a hemorrhage, Eda was told that she needed to undergo a hysterectomy. Already weakened, she had no reserve to draw on for recovery and she died soon after. M. F. K. Fisher later raged at the decision about the operation: “It was cruel to make Eda submit to an obviously useless surgical interference so late in the game. After that biopsy, why not just keep her warm and as comfortable as possible? DAMN.” In the last days, Sybille wondered just what connected her with the woman she’d lived with for two decades: “The difficulty with Eda is that she is so hard to know. I feel that I do not really know her (which makes everything even sadder).”
Sybille survived Eda by almost thirty years. In contrast to Eda’s grim decline, she enjoyed her greatest recognition, earning an OBE in 1981, making the Booker Prize shortlist in 1989 with her novel Jigsaw, wining a Golden PEN award in 1993. After dedicating several of her books from the 1960s to Eda, Sybille finally addressed their relationship, if only briefly, in her 2005 memoir Quicksands. Now, fifteen years after her death, most of Sybille’s books are in print and likely to gain more readers as a result of Hastings’ outstanding biography. Eda Lord, on the other hand, is likely to remain where she is: on the margin of other lives.
My sincere thanks to Selina Hastings for her help with this piece. Her biography, Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life, is available from Penguin/Random House (U.S. and U.K.)
Feature on Shirley Schoonover from the Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, New York, 1 August 1971.
“Are you a lesbian?” a man asks the narrator of Shirley Schoonover’s novel Sam’s Song.
“No,” she replies. “But I’ve been called a unicorn. A zebra. I have a cousin who is an onion.”
Whatever Sam is, the only thing that’s certain is that’s she’s not happy with it. “I don’t quite know who I am,” she thinks. “Even after thirty years of living with me, I don’t feel familiar with myself.”
Everything about Sam’s Song is wildly out of place. Sam, the thirty-something mother of three who’s separated and in the final stage of divorcing her husband, in her own skin. “I find myself to be a bitch. But in a world of bitches, I don’t want to hand on to my children the ugliness that is in me.” She’s out of place in her community. Having chosen — unfathomably in the eyes of most of the people she knows — to leave her children in her husband’s custody, she’s the woman that other women talk about at cocktail parties.
Yet she’s unwilling to let her soon-to-be ex’s new girlfriend get ideas: “I’ll kill you, you bitch, before you’ll mother my children.” Restless and horny, she picks up men in bars knowing they have no interest in staying with her: “I can make love. Fuck, if you will. But, my God, I have the secret knowledge that I have been fucked with shit.” When they ask her name, she answers, “I am no-name.” She even dresses up as a man and goes to bars where gay men hang out. “I smell cocks and peacocks, cut booze, and brothers lusting for their brother’s cocks.” She drinks — hard. “You use up Scotch like other people use water,” observes Martha, Sam’s last remaining friend.
They fucked her up, her mum and dad. She’s Sam, not Samantha, because they wanted a boy, not a girl. “Girls are no good on a farm,” her father said. She admires men for their ability to take what they want, material or sexual. That same selfishness is one of the few things she’s sure of about herself. “Yes, I am selfish,” she admits to her son one afternoon as they swim together. “Fuck you,” he replies.
That stops me. I tread water again, looking at him. He stays out of my reach; I read his eyes. He knows I can feel his anger. At this moment he feels hate. He hates me because I left them with their father. No, just because I left them.
Which reminded me of something Nora Ephron once wrote: “You give kids a choice — your mother in the next room on the verge of suicide versus your mother in Hawaii in ecstasy, they’d choose suicide in the next room.” Yet as confused and unhappy as Sam may be, she’s clear-sighted when it comes to the potentially toxic effect she could have on her kids if left responsible for their day-to-day care.
Not that Sam is in ecstasy, let alone in Hawaii. Nor does she expect her life to be turned around by the freedom of the single life. “Living alone, unloving, I will shrivel and dry into an ancient sterile turd,” she thinks.
As these quotes suggest, Sam’s Song is a long way from the safe, nice housewives of 1960s sitcoms. When she wrote the book, Shirley Schoonover was herself the mother of three, living in Lincoln, Nebraska and in the process of divorcing her husband. That didn’t mean that the book was autobiographical, though. “I didn’t go to bed with any sailors, I didn’t pick men up off the street, I didn’t have a homosexual lover,” she later said. “But the anger was real,” she warned. And so was her frankness. “We Finns are very blunt,” she told an interviewer. “We come out and say, no tact whatsoever, what we have to say. I guess a lot of people don’t understand that.”
Schoonover and her husband met in Iowa, where she had studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first novel Mountain of Winter (1965), about a young Finnish-American girl growing up rural Minnesota, was closer to autobiography. Born Iliana Waisanen, she was given the name Shirley by her mother, who loved Shirley Temple and who wanted her daughter to seem “more American.” Schoonover hated the name.
Mountain of Winter was generally well-received. Bernard Bergonzi wrote that “its humanity, its breadth of feeling, and range and exactness of observation of men and nature, place it well above the ordinary run of first novels (or second or third novels, come to that).” The book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and folks in Lincoln were so proud of her accomplishment that the manager of her local IGA grocery store even cleared space on an endcap for a display and hosted an autograph party.
She joked that a few of the customers, as they picked up a copy along with five or six cans of Campbell’s soup, that the book might be “dirty.” “Well, it was very frank,” she later said, “but not nearly as potent as Sam’s Song .”
Headline from the Lincoln Journal Star review of Sam’s Song, 2 March 1969.
When Sam’s Song came out, however, it was another story. “Sam’s Four-Letter-Word Symphony” proclaimed the headline of the Lincoln Journal Star review. “If it had not been assigned to me for review, I would not have read past the first 15 pages.” The reviewer — a man — judged that Sam “is as abnormal as any woman could be” and that her language “is worse than any attributed to the wharves of Liverpool.” He did, however, admit that the book might be useful for students of vocabulary: “If there is a four-letter word used to describe sex in its most perverted form, it can be found in this book.”
Coward-McCann’s dust jacket blurb didn’t help. It promised that the book featured “sexy sex, sick sex, homosexual sex, racial sex, even religious sex.” The Journal Star’s reviewer wrote that Sam’s Song “ranks with the stuff that is sold under the counter in shops which deal with pornographic works.” Most Lincoln bookshops preferred not to stock the book at all, on or under the counter.
Martin Levin, then one of the New York Times’ lead reviewers, argued that those who wrote off Sam’s Song as pornography were missing the point: “When is a dirty book not a dirty book? When it is a cri de coeur, in which whatever detritus there is exists as part of the structure of personality.” Contrary to the Lincoln Journal Star’s reviewer, he considered Sam “a thoroughly homogenized mixture of ambiguous urges, detoured maternal feelings, sharply bitter humor, and ethnic (Finnish) traces.” It seems that the bigger the city, the better the chances of Sam’s Song getting a favorable review. When the novel came out in paperback in early 1970s, the Chicago Tribune’s book editor observed cynically, “It is one of the most revealing books ever written about a woman. Which is probably why the hardcover edition vanished without a trace.”
If anyone picked up Sam’s Song in search of a thrill, they were bound to be disappointed. Sam is certainly profane, but it’s not pornographic. Sam does not “discover” herself through her sexual liberation. Sex is more like booze, a source of temporary relief from pain. Sam’s Song is more a four-letter-word rap than symphony: Sam’s profanity is visceral, a sign of the pain, anger, and unrest always simmering, always on the brink of boiling over. It may be the rawest book written by a woman in the 1960s.
By the time the book was published, Schoonover was ready to leave Lincoln. “I literally felt like a zebra in a herd of horses,” she later said. When her divorce from her first husband, Leroi Schoonover, was finalized, she headed to New York, where she joined the faculty at the University of Rochester. She took revenge on Lincoln with a “Letter from Nebraska” that was published in the New York Times after she’d moved to Rochester. “If you don’t love Willa Cather’s work you are not included in the literary life of the university.” Sam’s Song is nothing like My Antonia: it’s closer to Last Exit to Brooklyn.
When it came to Nebraska as a whole, Schoonover concluded that, “As far as I can tell, there is no literary life in Nebraska.” “You ask if writers talk to each other,” she wrote her imaginary correspondent. Since Karl Shapiro, who’d been the editor of the university’s long-running literary quarterly Prairie Schooner had left Lincoln in the mid-1960s, she replied, “I’ve been talking to myself; and you know that can become agonizingly lonely. That’s Nebraska. Beautiful but killingly lonely for the writer.”
After a few years at Rochester, Schoonover moved to Missouri, where she taught at Webster University in St. Louis. While there, she published her last novel, Winter Dream (1979) a folk tale set in Finland in the 15th century. “I wrote it for the child in me,” she told a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. “I wanted to write something people could enjoy and whose characters they could love.” Schoonover moved to Teaneck, New Jersey in her later years to live near her son Noel. She died in 2004.
Sam’s Song, by Shirley Schoonover New York: Coward-McCann, 1969
Ad for and Cover of Benjamin DeCassere’s Forty Immortals (1926).
This is a guest article written by the critic and artist Richard Kostelanetz, based on a piece that originally appeared in Rain Taxi #88. His website is at richardkostelanetz.com
Ever since New Association of Sephardi/Mizrahi Artists & Writers International appointed me one of its honorary fellows more than a dozen years ago, I’ve become more curious about Sephardic writers in America, more than once pointing out their omission from the standard anthologies of American-Jewish writing (except, of course, for Emma Lazarus, whose rhymes grace the Statue of Liberty).
Certainly the most substantial of these needlessly forgotten writers has been Benjamin De Casseres. Biographical information about him was spotty when I last wrote about him in 2017. Born in Philadelphia 3 April 1873, he didn’t go to college, instead becoming as a teenager a regular patron at the local Apprentice’s Library, incidentally founded by another Benjamin (surnamed Franklin). Starting as an office boy at the Philadelphia Press, he became at seventeen an editorial writer and theater critic. One source of Jewish genealogy identifies him as a descendent of Baruch Spinoza via the philosopher’s sister Rebecca de Spinoza, who gave birth to an earlier Benjamin DC around 1660. Variously is his surname spelled: DeCasseres, De Casseres, and de Casseres. I prefer Casseres or BdC, alphabetized under C.
An appreciation by his friend the writer and cartoonist Carlo de Fornaro (1871-1949), also Sephardic perhaps (much like my friend Arthur Fornari), places Casseres on the staff of the Sunday edition of El Diario, the Spanish-language newspaper that still exists. He contributed to Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work, which was the most prominent avant-garde magazine in pre-WWI America, and then occasionally to The Smart Set from 1914 to 1922 at least.[1]
BdC published poems and essays in many other smaller literary periodicals. One poem favored by anthologists in his own time was “Moth-Terror,” which is a sterling example of his apocalyptic prosy poetry in the tradition of William Blake (well before Allen Ginsberg):
I have killed the moth flying around my night-light; wingless and dead it lies upon the floor. (O who will kill the great Time-Moth that eats holes in my soul and that burrows in and through my secretest veils!) My will against its will, and no more will it fly at my night-light or be hidden behind the curtains that swing in the winds. (But O who will shatter the Change-Moth that leaves me in rags—tattered old tapestries that swing in the winds that blow out of Chaos!) Night-Moth, Change-Moth, Time-Moth, eaters of dreams and of me!
Doing a Google search, I discovered him remembered for this aphorism: “Progress is nothing but the victory of laughter over dogma,” which is charming but, to my senses, uncharacteristic of a writer otherwise more heavy than light! Other websites have this odd aphorism: “A mouse …running in and out of every hole in the cosmos hunting for the Absolute Cheese.”
Even in his critical reviewing, Casseres had a penchant for hyperbole. “Eugene O’Neill was the first true dramatic genius that America produced. He spun all of his plays out of his own bowels, lifting them up into the light of eternal cosmic and human laws.” Of one O’Neill play, BdC writes: “Marco Millions is the roots of O’Neill become a gorgeous flower. The black in O’Neill’s soul has become gold. Social venom is transmuted into ironic laughter of the mournful gods. Impotent melancholy bursts into the flame of philosophic wisdom, ‘Caliban’ has become ‘Hamlet’; ‘Yank, the Hairy Ape,’ has become ‘Kublai Khan,’ epicurean pessimist.”
About O’Neill himself, Casseres waxes with an abundance of opening appositives:
Beachcomber, adventurer, water-front bum, a “down-and-outer” with sailors and stevedores, a man fired from a hundred jobs, a nervous smash-up that landed him in a sanitarium; a man of melancholic, tragic temperament, having been at Gethsemane and having walked the fiery, alcoholic hells (a more tremendous feat than water-walking), Eugene O’Neill came out of the sanitarium like Lazarus newly risen.
BDC seems to have made literary alliances, first with Stieglitz, who dropped him however, and then with the playwright Eugene O’Neill, who wrote an introduction to Casseres’s book, Anathema! Litanies Of Negation (1925, Gotham Book Mark). BdC also wrote a short polemic about H. L. Mencken and G.B. Shaw that demotes the latter as inferior to the former, who incidentally published BdC in the American Mercury.
Dennis Rickard, a biographer of the American painter Clark Ashton Smith writes that the Providence terror author H.P. Lovecraft in 1925 and 1926 “made several efforts to gain a wider and, perhaps, more sophisticated and appreciative audience for Smith’s paintings. In 1926, he arranged for a sampling of twenty paintings to be shown to the distinguished writer and critic Benjamin de Casseres, in New York, in the hope that he could ‘bring them to the attention of some art authority of adequate standing.’ Apparently, this came to naught, or nearly so. Smith again gained a fervent and lifelong admirer in de Casseres,” Another website credits BDC with coediting the German film Das indische Grabmal (1921) for American audiences as The Mysteries of India(1922).
As unfortunate in his personal life, he spent years winning his last love, who had initially married someone else and moved to California before returning to BdC.[2] He lived in a single room while working odd jobs. On BenjaminDeCasseres.com is miscellaneous information including addresses. From 1933 to his death 7 December 1945, he lived with his wife at 593 Riverside Drive in New York City, which is between 136th and 137th Streets.
Why was he forgotten? His most remarkable work was certainly eccentric, if not unclassifiable. Most of it came from smaller, less visible publishers. His final publisher, Gordon Press, barely distributed its books. As a Jewish writer descending from earlier Sephardic immigration he did not appeal to the later generation of Jewish-American literary publicists, most of whom descended from Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europeans.
Searching for his rather unusual name on the Internet, I suspect he was related to an earlier BdC, Jr. (!), who is identified in The Occident and American Jewish Advocate (June 1848) as trying to establish in Curaçao a Talmud Torah. “He is assisted by the Rev. David Cardozo, minister of the congregation. The plan has been accepted with enthusiasm by the people, and many of the younger members of the congregation have offered their services as teachers. Mr. De Casseres is a merchant, and our correspondent presumes that he must suffer a loss in his business by the time he spends in this benevolent object.”
I also found this passing comment about the later BdC in an inventory of Jack London’s papers at the Huntington Library: “Six letters from Jack to Benjamin De Casseres deal with literary matters, and one especially interesting letter from the just-widowed Charmian to the same addressee, dated November 29, 1916, firmly disputes De Casseres’ apparent assertion that Jack was now ‘star-roving’ after death.” Whazzat? His Wikipedia entry states that, “De Casseres described himself as an individualist anarchist, and as such he was both a strong advocate of capitalism and a frequent critic of socialism.”[3]
Once known as “the greatest unpublished author in America,” Casseres found a patron, described by Fornaro as “a Harvard scholar and efficient businessman Joseph Lawren” to issue his uncommercial unpublished manuscripts, sixteen in sum. Three volumes collecting his shorter works appeared in 1935, perhaps self-published. Reissued as pristine hardbacks by the Gordon Press in 1977, these I own and treasure, even though they lack any prefaces or annotations.
More recently, Kevin I. Slaughter, the proprietor of a Maryland small press wittily named Underground Amusements, has published several BdC volumes, sometimes reprinting earlier books, more often new compilations of fugitive pieces, in handsome perfect-bound editions that are readily available. Slaughter’s website BenjaminDeCasseres.com collects information about BdC as well as numerous pieces of his writing.
Editor’s Notes
Benjamin DeCasseres celebrates the end of Prohibition in 1933.
1 Like Smart Set’s editors H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, DeCasseres was a hard-drinking thinker (or vice versa). When Prohibition took effect in 1920, he tried to be “the last man in the United States to take a drink on the night the Volstead blight came upon the land. But along about 10:30PM, I got so busy tanking up that I forgot about my noble aspiratioin. I must have fainted. All I remember is that my elbow was stiff the next day.”
In 1925, in Mirrors of New York, he looked back fondly on his pre-Prohibition memories. James Traub quotes from this “thoroughly soused memoir” in his book The Devil’s Playground: a Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square: Times Square was “the central depot of a Grand Trunk Line of Booze” that stretched down Broadway, with the bar at the Knickerbocker Hotel as “the headquarters of the 42nd Street Country Club.” On the street outside, he said, “only one phrase could be heard: ‘Let’s have another!'”
DeCasseres vowed to be the first man in America to take a drink after Utah ratified the 18th Amendment, bringing an end to Prohibition. He arranged to have a telegraph terminal installed in a Manhattan bar so he could be informed the instant the ratification vote passed in Salt Lake City. “After it is all over, I shall return to my home and my literary work, ready to die when Satan calls. I shall have filled my immortal soul with ineffable joy.”
Benjamin Casseres and his wife Bio, 1925. Photo by Arnold Genthe.
2 According a newspaper article from 1931, DeCasseres first saw Mary “Bio” Terrill in 1902 in the kitchen of the boarding house where was living. “From that November morning until she left in March 1903, I saw her only four times, each time only briefly. In that time, I never touched her hand. I — reputed to be a brilliant and dynamic talker — was a perfect idiot in her presence.” Mary married and moved with her husband to the West Coast. DeCasseres got her address, though, and for the next 15 years, the two corresponded almost daily. Finally, in 1919, she divorced her husband and married DeCasseres. “In our 11-year marriage,” he told the reporter, “the first 16 years were the hardest.”
3 To call DeCasseres an individualist is to put it mildly. He was extravagantly and irrepressibly individualist. “Every great individualist worthy of the name is a renegade,” he once wrote. In 1932, he announced that he was going to publish a magazine to be called DeCassere’s Magazine, which would be written entirely by him. It would, he declared, “be a magazine of aggressive individualism, because the individual is the unit of all values.” Yet, he promised, the magazine would “have the smack and tang of eternity.” Although Slaughter reprints the pamphlet DeCasseres published as a prelude, the magazine itself never saw the light of day. In his 1936 pamphlet, The Individual Against Moloch, DeCasseres wrote, in words that would have made Ayn Rand proud, “There is no common good except the development of the individual. The state has no other function than to protect its members against invasion and promote the will of the individual so long as that will does not force itself on the will of another individual”
A tweet about T. J. Bass’s wildly ambitious and imaginative Nebula Award-winning novel The Godwhale (1974) triggered a short discussion of favorite novels from the 1970s. I was struck by how many of them were — well, if not science fiction, then at least strongly influenced by SF. I started buying books — almost always cheap used pocket paperbacks — for myself around 1973, and as I began to recall those purchases, I realized that my own favorites were novels that sat on the border between SF and literary fiction.
Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick pioneered this territory in the 1960s, writing books we now recognize as key works of 20th Century literature without any suggestion that they’re somehow lessened through their origin as Ace, Daw, Dell, and Panther paperbacks deliberately packaged to turn off non-SF readers. When Collier released its paperback edition of Italo Calvino’s SF fables Cosmicomics in 1970, the publisher just as deliberately Doris Lessing gave it imprimatur of legitimacy with her dystopian novel The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), then returned to give it a gargantuan world-building embrace with her five-volume Canopus in Argos starting with Shikasta in 1979. (I’m pretty sure I have all five volumes of the Knopf hardbacks somewhere in storage: they quickly became fixtures of remainder tables. Literary appetites were not quite ready to follow Lessing to such lengths.)
Writers who ventured into this territory faced considerable obstacles. SF writers struggled to be taken seriously by critics and readers of mainstream fiction. Straight fiction writers risked being marked forever with the stigmata of the space opera. When one of the toughest of straight fiction writers, Harry Crews, opened William Hjortsberg’s second novel, Gray Matters in 1971 and read the first sentence, he later recalled, “My heart sank. I thought, ‘My God, he’s committed science fiction.'” Crews was willing, at least to state his objections:
Without going into too much detail, I think honor demands that I admit my prejudice against and contempt for most of what is called science fiction. Here is the formula — and therefore much of the reason for my contempt — for successful SciFi: it must have an anonymous ruling force; dehumanized people; totalitarian one?world drive to power; violence of mindnumbing dimensions ( people who have no stomach for the violence of their own everyday lives seem to read the violence of the future as morally instructive); and nuclear warfare.
“Every one of these elements of the SciFi formula are in Hjortsberg’s novel,” Crews acknowledged, the result, in his opinion, was simply “an engrossing fiction informed by an imaginative use of science.”
Here is a survey of 25 novels from the 1970s that looked beyond the labels that booksellers and librarians crave and forced their readers to wonder if they’d stumbled in the wrong section. It’s not a comprehensive list by any means (omitting the significant arrival of feminism to SF that took place at the same time), but I hope it suggests that there are plenty of reasons not to write off the 1970s as just the decade of polyester shirts and leisure suits.
I’m stretching the envelope of “the 1970s” to include this gentle fable. Frayn makes his leap into the future with his usual elegance of phrase: “Once upon a time there will be a little girl called Uncumber,” the book begins. He depicts a world where almost everyone is controlled through drugs and isolation has become a prevailing mode of existence. Among other things, its spare prose and pared-back descriptions offer a marked contrast with the next four titles.
Perhaps the wildest, druggiest, and word-drunk-est of the orgy of SF novels written by Brits in the midst of the psychedelic era, in Barefoot in the Head Aldiss tosses LSD, James Joyce, fascism, and the Christ myth into the blender and comes up with a perfect cult classic concoction: unreadable to many, a nectar of the gods to a few. Reissued as a Faber Find.
Jimmy Miller was Jane Miller, known to everyone as Jimmy, and the widow of novelist Warren Miller. This first novel was published by Knopf, which was not known for its SF work at the time. Set in the future — i.e., 2004 — it depicts a world devastated by a combination of a Chinese virus (hmm …) and a nuclear war started by the French. New York City has become the refuge of the Richies, who play a human-hunting game with the Poories. The Big Win makes a Poory a Richy. The Big Lose, as you can imagine, is terminal. It’s a bit of a mess but a crazy sort of fun featuring, as Raymond Sokolov put it in his New York Times review, “plenty of unquotable and impressive lubricity.”
Along with Aldiss, Moorcock, and other veterans of New Worlds, Spinrad, an American, helped bring SF into the age of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. In this novel about a talk show host (Barron) stumbling into a massive conspiracy about the means of ensuring immortality, Spinrad also introduced techniques from experimental fiction, such as cut-up (viz. Burroughs, Gysin). Not everyone liked the results. Joanna Russ felt the author had taken on so much in terms of style and content that he ended up being smothered by it.
The first in Moorcock’s four novels starring his anarchic, transmutating, polymorphically gendered superman, Jerry Cornelius. Word of mouth at the time I became aware of them in the mid-1970s was that Cornelius was sort of a drug-taking hipster James Bond, but I now suspect that everyone who said that was going off the covers, not the contents. Some of the books’ sexism has not aged well, but Moorcock’s embrace of body transformations and gender fluidity may resonate better with today’s readers than it did with his largely male audience when the novels first came out.
Abe was ahead of trend: he actually wrote this as a serial back in 1958-59. However, it was only published in English in 1970, which is why I’m including it. I turned to it somewhere in late high school after giving up on A Woman in the Dunes as just too abstract for my taste at the time. Inter Ice Age 4 should be a highly relevant book for our time, as it’s set in a world soon to be inundated by the melting of the polar ice caps. But there’s also a murder mystery, conspiracies, malevolent government and business entities, and heavy doses of biology (Abe trained as a physician). I got through it only vaguely understanding what I was reading, but I suspect now that it can hold its own alongside some of the early works of Stanislaw Lem (another writer who trained as a doctor but chose not to practice).
Another vision of a dystopic America, this time told by parallel narrators: Lt Col Danny March, a war-weary veteran (“I’ll tell you something about making dead guys…. You do it often enough and you’ll get used to it.”) and Anne, a woman on the run who finds her way to a pacifist commune called Calabria, isolated deep in a National Forest. Reed referred to it as her Why Are We in Vietnam?: “We were Americans, ergo we must be brash, insensitive, militaristic types. Never mind that Apollo 11 was heading for the Moon, Teddy Kennedy had just walked away from a fatal wreck in Chappaquiddick, leaving behind a drowned girl; less than a month later the Sharon Tate murders would confirm what many would not say but secretly suspected: that Americans were a crude, savage lot.” Though Reed had published some more conventional SF stories, Armed Camps cries out to be seen as serious fiction and not somehow diminished as a work of genre.
There were plenty of novels written about young men running away — from the draft, from the farm, from the Establishment — in the early 1970s. But unlike most of them, Going Nowhere is far more timeless than of its time. Partly this is due to Greenberg’s approach to fiction, which always uses the most concrete details (one of his stories is about a man discovering just how far he can allow his foot to rot before it becomes inedible) to anchor the most abstract conceptions. In this case, it’s also due to the conception at the heart of the story: Unteleology, the philosophy of fundamental purposelessness that one of its characters develops. SF skeptic Harry Crews admitted in his New York Times review that Going Nowhere was the first novel with a spaceship in it he’d been able to finish since he was 10: “Any writer who will begin a novel of only 143 pages with a 400?word sentence, which sentence itself be gins with ‘Once upon a time,’ can’t be all bad. For one thing, you know he’s not playing it safe. He’s a man you can count on to take a chance.” “Alvin Greenberg,” Crews wrote, “is such a man.”
Greenberg, who died in 2015, is one of America’s most neglected metafictionists. One of his early short stories, published in Best SF 1970 (edited by Aldiss and Harry Harrison), was titled “‘Franz Kafka’ by Jorge Luís Borges by Alvin Greenberg.” He would go on to write stories such as “The Beast in the Jungle vs. A Sense of the Comic,” “Not a Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer,” and “The Mind of Emile Zola.” His work — four novels, short story collections, and poetry — is consistently theoretical yet worldly, extreme yet specific, tragic while remaining comic, and always accompanied by a genial narrative voice. You don’t always know where you’ll be going with Greenberg, but you’ll be in good company.
This is the novel that had Harry Crews reaching for his gun when he suspected Hjortsberg of fomenting SF. And of course, it is SF if we accept that fiction set in the future that involves some extrapolation of existing scientific, cultural, and/or political developments (or degradations) as SF. I think we can all accept that SF does not always equal space opera, and in this case, there is neither space nor opera. Gray Matters is the great brains-in-jars novel. Humans exist as the merest essential vessel to keep a brain functioning. Everything else is accomplished through thought: communication, commerce, and even sex. Gray Matters also has the merit of brevity: no reader of Hjortsberg even set down one of his books because it was too long.
Subtitled The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World, Love in the Ruins, envisions an America where all differences in race, religion, class, etc. have grown to their extremes (kind of like today). A lapsed Catholic scientist develops a machine to detect early signs of mental and spiritual degradation in hopes of bringing people to heal themselves. Instead, it becomes an object of great interest to the government, and soon the inventor finds himself on the run through the crumbling remnants of the United States, accompanied by Moira and her beloved pocket edition of the poems of Rod McKuen, “a minor poet of the old Auto Age.”
Not really a novel but a collection of five novellas about the inhabitants of 334 East 11th Street, a housing project in Manhattan, during the second Roman Empire, which is just a few years after 1972. Samuel R. Delany was so impressed with one of the novella, “Angouleme,” that he wrote a book-length study of it titled The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction. In it, Delany argued, among other things, that 334 was SF not because of any explicit scientific content but by virtue of its imaginative breadth.
Set in a Britain cut off from the rest of the world (Brexit foreshadowing, anyone?) and controlled by alien spaceships that hover in the sky, A Sweet Sweet Summer is East Enders dialed up to 11 and projected into the future. The aliens encourage all the fringe factions — fascists, Communists, racists, and even Scientologists — to incite violence and create chaos. “Shooting, pimping, knifing, beating to death, whether of strangers, life-long buddies, close relations, evan cannibalism, these are merely the pattern of life,” as the TLS reviewer summarized it. All narrated by Pelham, whom one Amazon reader described as “possibly the most repellent protagonist I have ever read.”
Saw was one of a short-lived series of largely experimental novels published by Knopf around this time. They were all printed in a rare — for Knopf, at least — glossy hardcovers without dust jackets, and on the rare occasions you stumble across them these days, they’re in surprisingly good shape, suggesting that Knopf shold have stuck with it. Steve Katz was the experimental fictionist of his time who most embraced the spirit of Pop Art. Although there isn’t a giant can of Campbell’s Soup in Saw, you wouldn’t be startled if one showed up. There are, however, a woman named Eileen who mates with an orbiting sphere in Central Park, a spaceship named Leroy, and a hidden hippopotamus. As with a number of the books on this list, Saw embraced (or stole) numerous elements from SF but it was never accepted as SF by SF die-hards (or later academics writing about SF in the 1970s).
Motorman was the first of a series of four novels that Ohle would write over the course of forty years featuring a character named Moldenke. Moldenke is as a “bloodworker” in a gauze factory in Texaco City outside L.A. (hence the title, perhaps, but there is no Motorman in the book) but also lives in a world with multiple moons, occasional double suns, and cosmic-scale timeshifts. One reader has compared it to a mix of Italo Calvino (in his Cosmicomics stage) and Cormac McCarthy (in his The Road stage). Out of print for decades, Motorman is now available from the Calamari Press (and you have even download a PDF version of it for free). In his introduction to this edition, Ben Marcus adds to the list of comparisons, calling Ohle “the dogsbody that resulted from a glandular mishap between Flann O’Brien, Leonora Carrington, Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler, Borges, and Raymond Roussel.”
In his prolific career, Paul West wandered in and out of just about every genre you could think of, so it wasn’t surprising that his journey eventually led into SF. In Colonel Mint, he takes a top-ranked insider — the astronaut Colonel Mint — and turns into an outsider when he sees an angel through the window of his space capsule — and then makes the mistake of reporting it. Garth Lloyd Evans, writing in The Guardian, argued that West had simply “changed the conventional traditional context for his consciousness of being alive.” Changed it, that is, “from the parochial, the provincial, the national, the routine tick of the clock, into an awareness of eternity as our natural habitat.” Unlike much of the formulaic stuff that cluttered science fiction, however, Lloyd Evans felt that “this shift of vision does not involve a loss of heart or render one invulnerable to this world, now.”
Quake is a dystopia novel after every Los Angeles hater’s heart. Wurlitzer operated in the realm of Pynchon, Vonnegut, and Brautigan, taking American quirks and twisting them into intricate origami. Here, we have Los Angeles after that massive earthquake we all know is coming some day. But instead of a predictable catastrophe novel, this is the story told by a writer who, if you will, inhaled. Like Hjortsberg, Wurlitzer wrote books you don’t have to set aside long weekends for.
Klise, whose day job was running an educational filmstrip company, wrote this, his only novel, as much as a moral exercise as a fictive one. He takes an innocent — Willie, a truly hybrid American, Irish-Indian-Black-Chinese with “red hair, red-gold-black-brown skin, and blue almond-shaped eyes spangled with brown,” and injects him into a dystopian world full of complex variations on the themes of power and evil. First Willie becomes the greatest pitcher in baseball with his trademark “upcurve” ball. Then he somehow manages to become Pope and the object of nefarious plots by Vatican, government, and media. The Last Western has never been reprinted and goes for a ridiculous amount of money if you can find a copy. But you can also download it for free from the Internet Archive.
Depending on your perspective (or experience of reading it), Dhalgren is either a masterpiece, a gripping vision of America in its end state, or a convoluted and confusing mess. Launched with great noise as a Bantam paperback original when it came out, it may have suffered a fate similar to another thick book from around the same time, John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues. Both books struck many as too full of their own self-importance to get out of the way of their readers. Now, however, when those who read it come to Dhalgren rather than having it thrust upon them, it’s seen for what it is: a challenging, complex, and deeply considered work of modernism that also happens to be SF.
Jane White, whose work was first recommended to me by Brooks Peters back in 2008, wrote a number of odd, edgy psychological thrillers starting with Quarry in 1967. Her last book before her death in 1977, Comet was a dystopian novel with an extreme version of life on Earth after a great holocaust — a disaster so great and so long ago that no one knows quite what it was. Life is hardly above the level of the Stone Age now, with the added twist that procreation is essentially impossible. Into one of the tribes scattered over this world come a man and a pregnant woman. Does this all lead to a Second Coming? To be honest, I can’t say, having never read this myself. But it awaits on my shelves.
Dr. Martin Bax’s only novel, The Hospital Ship is the story of the Hopeful, an atomic-powered and largely self-contained hospital that sails around a world rapidly breaking down through a mix of disease, autism, and widespread psychosis. The hospital’s director decides that the solution is — you guessed it — breeding. Bax’s subject matter is heavily influenced by J. G. Ballard, so it’s not surprising that Ballard contributed a generous blurb: “the most exciting, stimulating and brilliantly conceived book I have read since Burroughs’ novels.” A number of readers have rated Bax’s technique better than his results, as he employs a variety of documentation, from letters to logs to patient records, to illuminate the story. Michael Orthofer at the Complete Review took the opposite view, however, and I recommend his review for anyone interest in learning more.
I wrote about Plus back in 2013, when I called it my most neglected book for the simple reason that it took me 36 years to get around to reading my copy. McElroy’s writing is notoriously challenging, but even by that standard, Plus is, at least in the estimation of one Amazon reviewer, not the place to start: “If you haven’t read McElroy, don’t jump into this unless you consider yourself the boldest and bravest of readers.”
Much of the reason stems from McElroy’s subject, which is a disembodied brain floating in orbit around the Earth as the control system of a satellite. Imp Plus — the brain — has limited understanding of language and even more limited grasp of vocabulary, so McElroy has to tell his story as if manipulating by remote control. As Imp Plus becomes more sentient, his language grows and we see that McElroy is leading us through the brain’s struggle to establish an identity independent of ground control — the other being known to Imp as the Acrid Voice. It’s a bold experiment that ultimately succeeds, but it’s a bit like scaling El Capitan with your bare hands. You will work hard, but if you make it to the top, you may find it one of your most intense reading experiences.
DeLillo wrote SF? He sure ’nuff did. In Ratner’s Star, Little Billy Twillig, a child prodigy, is enlisted by a mysterious military/scientific research institution to help them decode an enigmatic signal from space. “We feel certain it’s a mathematical code of some kind,” the director tells him:
Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one language we might conceivably have in common with other forms of intelligent life in the universe. As I understand it, there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality.
To which Billy replies, “Did you just fart?” Among DeLillo scholars, Ratner’s Star is considered a work from his formative stage, before the era of his prize-winning/bestselling books. Which means it’s both less effective as a coherent work and full of greater experimentation and risk-taking. DeLillo takes codes, the encapsulation of information in condensed packages, as an overarching metaphor for the obstacles facing all forms of communication, and so plays around with text and dives down rabbit holes like the significance of symbol-based languages like Chinese. But if you’re looking for another fat DeLillo novel to follow up Underworld, this is the natural choice.
In this broad satire of the American military-industrial complex, an aging billionaire named Skylor Blue, has himself reconstituted by attaching his head to a mechanical spider run by a computer. The narrator, a failed poet and lowly copywriter in one of Blue’s aerospace companies, travels into the bowels of the Byzantine security mechanisms set up to protect Blue’s new being and comes to face the reality of life as a Six Million Dollar Man:
And my body knew what it was looking at too:It recognized immediately what the head in the mechanical spider meant to it: The body, the mortal coil, the source of despair, the thing that gets sick, manufactures aneurysms, tumors, cataracts, piles, stones in the bladder, limestone in the arteries, the shakes, the drops, the shits, the tears; the thing that hurts you so terribly, the thing that finally betrays the clever, efficient brain by withering like a leaf, is superfluous. (“The body’s only purpose is to carry the brain,” said Edison, and he should have known.)
Perhaps not surprisingly for a book written by an American male in the 1970s, along with robotic life comes new extremes of sexual experience. Comparisons with J. P. Donleavy are not out of order.
Despite the title, I may be stretching things to say there’s a real SF element in this novel. Set in Fork River, a nearly-deserted Kansas town near the geographic center of the U.S., The Fork River Space Project is about a collection of oddballs who come together to work on what they hope will be a landing site for UFOs. Even if the guy who came up with the idea isn’t fully convinced that aliens even exist, he sees it as a way to “restore awe.” In the meantime, it’s where folks gather on Sunday, listen to music, and “go into orbit.” This is certainly one of Morris’s lesser books, but in a way it’s significant as perhaps the first mainstream novel to recognize that ever since the first Moon landing in 1969, we’ve been living on a small planet in a very big cosmos.
With this novel — which I can well remember buying in hardback for its beautiful cover and opening with anticipation — we see serious fiction approaching the obstacle of the leap into imaginative fiction … and balking. Set in a largely depopulated United States after some unspecified catastrophe, this novel proved that a story about an epic journey (in this case from East to West) is bound to fail without a destination. I recall there was a lot of wandering through the overgrown ruins of cities. Nothing else stuck with me. Thomas M. Disch justly savaged the book in his New York Times review and summed up the challenge of venturing into the No Man’s Land between straight fiction and SF:
A Secret History of Time to Come fails equally at the general task of fiction and at the specific task of science fiction. The special merit of the best SF is not its capacity to predict the future but to analyze and analogize the present. It offers writers an opportunity to make scale models of moral problems that cannot be dealt with — not, at least, with the same clarity and directness — using the conventional devices of the realistic novel. At this essential science fictional task, A Secret History of Time to Come has the moral and intellectual finesse of a World War I poster exposing Hun atrocities.
Have the boundaries between serious literary fiction and SF evaporated since the 1970s? A visit to most libraries and bookstores today would suggest not. But luckily, plenty of writers don’t let that dissuade them.
I wonder how many people under the age of 40 understand the point of this question. If you’re under 40, by the time you learned to read, Rod McKuen had already begun to fade from the scene. He was no longer a regular on television variety shows — in part because television variety shows had themselves faded from the scene by the end of the Seventies. He was still performing live, but much of his audience were people who’d been going to his shows for years. After pumping out a steady stream of books of poetry and lyrics for over two decades, his output — having made him the biggest selling poet in the world for much of that time — fizzled out. After Intervals and Valentines in 1986, there would only be two more books, published in the early 2000s.
But there was a time — from 1967 to around the mid-1970s — when you couldn’t walk into a bookstore or record store or turn on a TV or radio without bumping into Rod McKuen. If he wasn’t as big as the Beatles, he was as big as Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass or Jacqueline Susann and certainly more prolific.
That was when, as a profile that appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle in 2002 put it, “every enlightened suburban split-level home had its share of Rod McKuen.” “His mellow poetry was on the end table (Listen to the Warm), his lovestruck music and spoken-word recordings were on the hi-fi and his kindly face was on the set, on The Tonight Show and Dinah Shore’s variety hour.” (In our house, it was The Sea, one of his collaborations with Anita Kerr.) In Frank Sinatra’s long career, Rod McKuen was the only songwriter he ever devoted an entire album to. Guys bought his books to show their girlfriends how sensitive they were and women bought them for their boyfriends to show them what sensitive was. “The cult of Rod McKuen grows by leaps and bounds,” proclaimed a 1967 profile in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
The same year, The Chicago Tribune’s entertainment editor gushed, “Rod McKuen is great, great, absolutely great! His is a poet, and he sings and reads practically nothing but his own songs and poems. Doesn’t sound like a night club act? Well, he doesn’t just read and sing them — he lives them and makes you breathe and feel them. He drags you through the gamut of emotions, putting a lump in your throat one minute and making you chortle the next.”1
Bear in mind: this was a guy who wrote poetry and then read it in a quiet, gravelly voice (he used to joke that “It sounds like I gargle with Dutch Cleanser” and rock critic Greil Marcus once said it had “the force of a squirrel’s”) over a soft musical accompaniment. That was it. He didn’t dance and you couldn’t dance to him. He didn’t act, or at least hadn’t acted since his last B-movie in early 1960s. He didn’t tell jokes, or at least not many and not well enough. He wasn’t a sex symbol: although there were plenty of women (and undoubtedly some men) who fell in love with him, he made it clear he was a loner. And yet, he’s the only poet with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And yet, as late as 1974, he was being billed as “the greatest entertainer in the world!”2
Ad for Rod McKuen’s 1974 appearance at the Troubadour in Santa Monica
He did, however, infuriate many people who took poetry seriously. The English poet David Harsent described McKuen’s poetry variously as “scraps of maudlin meditation masquerading as emotion deeply felt,” “ersatz anguish, carefully sifted to pablum for easy consumption,” and “lumpish impressions of places and people, flashes of cheap surrealism and clumsy gropings at the numinous.” “No one has done more to degrade language and human sensibility,” D. Keith Mano wrote at the end of a full-page skewering in the National Review.
Josh Greenfeld, writing in Mademoiselle, lumped McKuen with Kahlil Gibran and the now-forgotten Walter Benton as “the Marshmallow Poets.” “The main thing I have against McKuen is his oversimplification of everything,” Greenfeld says. “I mean, if your pussy cat comes home, your life problems aren’t solved. And the words, the phrases McKuen uses! They all lack that precise particularization that is poetry.” Professor Robert W. Hill of Clemson University argued that McKuen “touched the anti-intellectual, the escapist, the superficial, the blindly sentimental capacities of the American public.” McKuen’s books, he wrote, belonged in “the lachrymose quagmire of the KMart poetry section.”
This was similar to the view expressed by Margot Hentoff in The New York Review of Books in its one and only review of his poetry: “McKuen is so devitalized a singer, so bad a poet, so without wit or tune—as well as so out of touch with the contemporary pop sensibility—that one can only consider his monumental nationwide popularity as a kind of counter-counter-cultural phenomenon.” Karl Shapiro said it was irrelevant to speak of McKuen as a poet. Shapiro conflated McKuen with Bob Dylan into a creation he called Dylan MacGoon. Asked about his creative regime, Shapiro wrote, “MacGoon tried to answer as best he could (language is not his strong point).” One reviewer refused to do anything more than include the title of McKuen’s latest in a round-up of recent poetry books. Reviewing McKuen, he complained, was “a bit like using a jack-hammer to clear cobwebs.”
This attitude was a dramatic contrast to the gushing admiration with which Margaret MacDonald, a reporter for the Oakland Times reviewed McKuen’s first book of poetry And Autumn Came in 1954. She praised the book’s “powerful impact of sincere emotions, expressed in clear language with original figures of speech and a sensitive approach.” “Like all true poetry,” she felt, it could “stand the test of re-reading” and was “one which all who really love poetry will keep in an easily accessible place for frequent perusal.”
There was a long gap between that review and the next. As Barry Alfonso writes in his fine biography of McKuen, A Voice of the Warm, McKuen self-published his next collection, Stanyan Street & Other Sorrow, and sold it at his concerts and other appearances while his long-time partner, Edward Habib, drove up and down California, placing it with bookstores. “I’d go through the telephone book and get addresses of bookstores,” Habib told Alfonso. “I’d go to the stores and say, ‘Can you handle five books? If they don’t sell by next week I’ll come and pick them up.’” In a matter of a year or so, this approach stacked up over sales of over 50,000 copies.
It was McKuen’s lyrics that sold the books — lyrics he wrote first for Glenn Yarbrough, one of the most successful of the school of well-scrubbed folksingers so popular in the early 1960s, and later for himself after signing with RCA. McKuen was a prolific lyricist, heavily influenced by Jacques Brel, whom he came to know during a spell in France and with whom he collaborated, performing some of Brel’s songs and writing others than Brel performed in translation. Indeed, the label chansonnier was perhaps more appropriate for McKuen than poet. And his performances drew inspiration from Brel, as McKuen usually sat on a stool on a bare stage, dressed in turtleneck sweater, jeans, and sneakers, and sang/spoke his songs.
In 1966, RCA released a Yarbrough album titled The Lonely Things: The Love Songs of Rod McKuen. The next year, having signed with RCA as well, McKuen recorded Listen to the Warm, which was also the title of his third book. Having heard about the grassroots success of Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows, Bennett Cerf of Random House had approached him to join its list and the two men agreed to an initial release of 30,000 copies of Listen to the Warm.
Gene Shalit broke the news in the Los Angeles Times, commenting, “Insiders versed [funny, Gene] in publishing history can’t remember another volume of poems by a national unknown which got such a send-off.” McKuen cagily negotiated a partnership arrangement that allowed him to continue publishing the books with his own Stanyan Press imprint, which gave him the advantage of Random House’s nationwide marketing while preserving the independence to put out other titles (which ultimately included God’s Greatest Hits, a collection of Bible quotes illustrated by the folk artist Sister Gertrude Morgan).
Listen to the Warm was as much a phenomenon of 1967 as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonelyhearts Club Band. The book sold over one million copies in hardback within a year of its publication. Although the record’s success was less spectacular, it became the first of nine albums McKuen placed in Billboard’s Top 200 charts over the next four years.
Both the book and the record opened with a poem that became a favorite for many McKuen fans. “A Cat Named Sloopy” remembered a cat McKuen had owned when he was living in New York City in the early 1960s.
For a while the only earth that Sloopy knew was in her sandbox. Two rooms on Fifty-fifth Street were her domain.
In the poem, Sloopy wait while the poet goes off in search of love, or at least one-night stands, until one day when he runs away.
Looking back perhaps she’s been the only human thing that ever gave back love to me. prologue
Some of its fame could be attributed to association (or confusion) with a popular tune from two years before, “Hang On, Sloopy” by the McCoys. But it was a heartstring-tugger sure-fired to bring out the hankies. I suspect more than a few of his fans wanted to take Rod home like a stray kitten.
After years of hanging around the margins, McKuen quickly found himself in the warm embrace of the book, record, television, and stage business. He did hundreds of live shows each year, dozens of television appearances, and continued to release new books of poetry and new records at a steady rate. Ads for his books and LPs ran in mainstream magazines like the Saturday Review of Literature, Playboy, Life, and Time. In a 1980 book titled Shrinklits: Seventy of the World’s Towering Classics Cut Down to Size, Maurice Sagoff parodied Listen to the Warm:
Are you sentimental? Dote on plastic charm? Rod’s massage is gentle, Does no lasting harm:
No deep thoughts to rile you, Blandness to beguile you, Pare your toenails while you Listen to the smarm.
McKuen’s only record to break into Billboard’s Top 100, however, came years before Listen to the Warm. It was a novelty tune titled “Oliver Twist” that mocked the rage launched by Chubby Checker’s hit, “Let’s Do the Twist.” He later blamed his scratchy voice on too many nights of trying to sing the tune at bowling alley lounges.
An ad for a 1961 McKuen appearance performing his hit, “Oliver Twist”
“Oliver Twist” was only one of the many milestones along McKuen’s career path to bestselling poet (or chansonnier). After dropping out of high school, he started working as a disc jockey for an Oakland, California radio station. Within a year, he had attracted the attention of Bay Area entertainment columnist Dwight Newton, who included him among his “1952 Prospects”: “A young man with much promise. Writes interesting, colorful scripts for his disc jockey show. Good individual voice.” After a spell in the Army, he returned to the Bay Area, took an apartment on Stanyan Street in San Francisco, and began appearing as a singer in nightclubs such as the Purple Onion.
He also dipped his toe in the water of Hollywood, picking up a few parts but eventually earning lobby card billing, if only as a supporting player, on such movies as Rock, Pretty Baby. One of McKuen’s friends later joked that, “If Rod weren’t a poet, he’d make a tremendous marketing analyst,” and the proof can be found early on. In 1956, the United Press syndicate ran a feature titled, “Rod McKuen Has Too Many Talents.” “McKuen is a young man in a very pleasant quandary,” wrote the anonymous author — most likely a press agent paid by McKuen. “He does so many things well that he has trouble sometimes deciding which talent to emphasize.”
The article also reported that McKuen had “appeared in five Japanese films” while serving with the Army. This was just one of many accomplishments that McKuen would claim over the years. Others included singing with Lionel Hampton’s band, writing a column for the San Francisco Examiner, and performing for a state dinner at the Kennedy White House. He told one interviewer, “I write novels under other names. I wrote a medical book. I’ve had a couple of books of history that have done very well. I’m in the middle of doing a history now that will be about 12 or 13 volumes by the time it’s finished.” He also claimed that every day he ate one meal, read two books, wrote ten poems, and worked 16 hours straight.
Three and a half years of research has led me to believe that Rod told many white lies and some real whoppers about his life and career. A constant need to legitimize himself and prove his worth drove him to exaggerate his actual accomplishments, which were truly formidable. His deceptions were mostly benign; he probably came to believe many of them were true. In the end, they invoke more sympathy than outrage. No amount of recognition could still the nagging inner voice that he just wasn’t quite good enough.
Even after achieving commercial success as America’s chansonnier, culminating in his first appearance at Carnegie Hall in 1969 (which was recorded and released as an album), McKuen continued to pad his resume. Perhaps his most dubious claim was of having taught himself musical composition. As early as the late 1950s, when he recorded several albums that would today be labeled “beatnik jazz,” he was taking credit for not only the lyrics but the music to his chansons. In 1960, he collaborated with veteran studio arranger Dick Jacobs on an instrumental album titled Written in the Stars, also known as The Zodiac Suite, with each track based on a different astrological sign. McKuen was listed as composer, but this needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
There was a lot of musical ghosting going on in the 1950s and 1960s. As is almost common knowledge today, most of the music heard on recordings by the Beach Boys, the Monkees, and other LA-based pop groups was actually played by a handful of ace session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew. TV comedian Jackie Gleason claimed arranger credits on several dozen easy listening albums that were the work of trumpeter Bobby Hackett working at union scale.
McKuen acknowledged some of his collaborators, such as Stan Freeman, another veteran faceless studio musician, but in reality Freeman probably did most of the work. As Michael Feinstein told Barry Alfonso, Freeman recalled that McKuen would say something like, “I want to write a concerto for oboe and this and that instrument” and then hum a couple of melodies that Freeman would then work into a completed piece. And Freeman was certainly not McKuen’s only “collaborator”: others included John Scott Trotter, Vince Guaraldi, and Arthur Greenslade.
McKuen’s musical credits began to pile up quickly in the late 1960s. He was credited with a number of soundtracks, most notably for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Song in 1969 and which became a #1 pop hit for the English singer Oliver. His “classical” compositions began to compete with, and eventually overtake, his chanson albums. He took to listing them along with the titles of his books on the frontispiece.
Rod McKuen’s credits, from Intervals (1980)
As Alfonso writes, McKuen’s compositions “sound like an amalgam of Aaron Copland–like Western elements, stage musical melodies, and film soundtrack excerpts” — in other words, the sort of pleasant but somehow generic stuff often sold as library music. He gave Newsday reporter Leslie Hanscom a recording of his opera The Black Eagle when she interviewed him in 1979. “On later sampling,” she wrote, it turned out to be a work of truly masterful monotony with a plot and theme that might have made Jonathan Livingston Eagle a more appropriate title.” Hanscom found that McKuen “projects a sense of self that could dwarf Wagner.” That might have been an understatement: in 1983, he told Bill Thomas of the Baltimore Sun that he’d rewritten Wagner’s entire Ring cycle and reduced it down to 5½ minutes. Though McKuen often award-dropped the fact that one of his pieces was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music for 1974,3 for his composition The City: A Suite for Narrator & Orchestra, the other fact that composers such as Patric Standford openly admitted to ghostwriting for him tends to diminish just how impressive that accomplishment sounds.
The more one looks into the details of McKuen’s life and work, the more McKuen comes off as a Jack of all trades and master of none. His poetry and lyrics, in particular, were written at a furious rate. He published nearly 30 collections of poems, the vast majority new, in the space of 20 years. By the end of 1968, three of the alone had sold over one million copies. By 1972, it was 12 books and over 4 million copies; by 1974, 15 and 9 million; by 1979, 24 and 16 million. McKuen’s modesty about the success of his poetry tended to ring false. “I’ve sold five million books of poetry since 1967,” he told one interviewer, “but who’s counting?” Or, on another occasion, “I didn’t even know I was a millionaire until I read about it in the newspapers.”4
The enormous popularity of McKuen’s poetry could be one of the reasons so many critics attacked it. As critic Gary Morris has written, “There aren’t many art forms where commercial success is relentlessly equated with aesthetic worth.” The National Lampoon made an obvious joke of it in their McKuen parody: “The lone$ome choo choo of my mind/i$ warm like drippy treacle/on the wind$wept beach.” Even the New York Times felt free to publish their own parody: “I met your press kit first/Box of mimeographed attributes and achievements.”
A few tried to look beyond the sales figures. Robert Kirsch, the LA Times book editor, declared in late 1968, “I don’t believe that Rod McKuen can be ignored as a poet simply because he is the best-selling troubadour in America today.” But even Kirsch found it hard to be unqualified in his praise. Although he found that McKuen “more than occasionally … is capable of rendering awareness into perceptions of small but haunting truths,” he also acknowledged that “He is less effective on the printed page than on his records, where, assisted by music and the nuance of the spoken voice, he evokes recognition and fantasy.” Too many of McKuen’s poems — such as “Manhattan Beach,” from Lonesome Cities — read less like poetry and more like, well, notes:
I’ve taken a house at Manhattan Beach working the summer into a book.
Eddie came last weekend and brought two girls and some books. The girls were pretty but the books stayed longer and now they menace me stacked up on the floor staring back in unread smugness.
Otherwise I’ve had no visitors.
In a survey of American poetry of the 1960s written a few years later, Louis Simpson quoted from Listen to the Warm:
But yesterday you touched me and we drove to the toll beach and ran in the sand. Sorry no one could see how beautifully happy we were.
“Well, what’s wrong with it?” Simpson asked. “It’s simple, it makes lots of people happy. Only an effete intellectual snob would find fault with it…. The world is like a sand-pile with lots of nice gooey wet blobs to play with. It’s a soda pop, a weenie-roast, a sticky, marshmallow kiss.” McKuen’s world, he wrote, “is the province of Youth.” But Simpson warned that, “Youth sooner or later will want to have poetry. Not this slop.”
McKuen claimed he started writing poetry because he couldn’t find ones he liked. “I wanted to say something different or write about what everyone else was saying but say it in a different way.” But in truth, what tends to distinguish McKuen’s language from that of other poets is its lack of individuality. His poetry, like his music, is not so much different as generic.
“Forever is not far enough/to throw a smile/that never was” McKuen writes in one of his later collections, The Sound of Solitude. Which seems at first glance like a koan, something a guru or Yoda might say. Except … look closer, read it over a few times, and you realize it’s nothing. We know what each word means, but put together it’s nonsense. Everywhere is close enough/to lose a memory/you never had. Would you buy a book filled of 80 pages with that?
Saturday Night Live used to run a cartoon feature about two superheroes known as the Ambiguously Gay Duo. McKuen might be crowned the Ambiguously Poetic Poet. “I’m not a poet, I’m a stringer of words,” he sometimes demurred. Yet when the Los Angeles Times invited McKuen to submit a short reflection “On What Poets Are … and Aren’t,” he wrote with patent self-importance, “A poet is a keeper of the language.” The job of the poet was to “shed light on the darkness.” A poet “must repair but never rape the words that form his native tongue,” adding rather disingenuously, “nor should he be an advertisement for himself.” The LA Times piece sparked some sharp reactions. One reader wrote in to say that “Having McKuen comment on the nature of poetry is somewhat akin to having a kindergarten fingerpainter comment on the art of Picasso.”
McKuen often resorted to a rhetorical trick when asked to defend his poetry:
Actually, I really don’t think it’s fair to criticize poetry. A novel, sure. But not poetry. See a poet is his poem. He lives his poem. So if you just give a poem a quick reading and call it something like sappy, then you’re really calling the poet sappy. It just isn’t fair. Not really.
Attack my poems and you attack me, McKuen was saying — a cheap way of warding off any interviewer with good manners. “I lived that poem,” he liked to declare. “I defy you to catch me and say that I wrote about the experience badly. How do you know what the experience was? You didn’t live it!” Some who profiled McKuen pointed out, however, his penchant for assuming a martyr-like pose. Like the old joke, he seemed to say, “I’ve suffered for my art. Now, you can suffer, too!”
Rod McKuen signing books at a Phoenix mall, 1977.
Another tactic was to compare his fame to that of his critics. “Name one critic who’s downed me,” he challenged Bill Thomas, “and ask five total strangers if they know who he is. I bet none do. Then ask them if they’ve heard of me. They may have a good opinion or a bad opinion — but they sure as hell know who I am.”
On other occasions, McKuen would defend his poetry by trotting out its achievements. “I mean — if I wasn’t a damn good poet,” he told Rick Soll from The Chicago Tribune in 1975, “why would I be in the Oxford Book of Verse, why would I be in all the famous quotation books, why would my poems be used in hundreds of college courses?”
The trouble is: none of that was true. There is no Oxford Book of Verse. There are Oxford books of English Verse and American Verse and Comic Verse, and McKuen is in none of them. I also checked more than a dozen different quotation books published between 1968 and 1978, and the only one I found McKuen’s name in was What They Said in 1971: the Yearbook of Spoken Opinion. McKuen’s quote is worth repeating in the context of this discussion, however:
Critics attack my poetry because it’s understandable. I always think everything should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. A while ago it was announced that I would come out with a paperback of new poetry. I got bad reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Book World and a rave from Coronet, and I still have not written one word of the book.
Which, of course, was also untrue.
As for his poetry being used in hundreds of college courses, this was also improbable. A few, such as Brian Curtis in a 1972 article in The English Journal, the journal of the National Council of Teachers of English titled, “The Necessity of the ‘Rod McKuens'”, argued for McKuen as, if you will, a gateway drug for serious poetry. However, this argument tended to produce the response reported by Ross Talarico in his book Spreading the Word: Poetry and the Survival of Community in America: “As a matter of fact, I brought sneers to the faces of poets and critics when, during a couple of panel discussions over the past few years, I’ve made the observation that if poetry survives at all in America, perhaps more credit will go to Rod McKuen than to any of a few high-powered poetry critics.”
And both Curtis and Talarico were careful to point out that while McKuen’s poetry had utility, it lacked quality:
Do I say these things because I am a fan of Rod McKuen’s? No, not really. I’d be the first to say his poetry is filled with overused, often trite phrases, sentimentalism, predictability, and a naive, terribly romantic view of the world. [Talarico]
I do not suggest that “trash” compose the curriculum, although it fits the nation’s bias and fills drugstore shelves. We all leave our McKuens behind, and, if lucky, we suffer “growth.” [Curtis]
Part of the problem was McKuen’s own understanding of poetry. “The problem is that a lot of people who write poetry think the more obscure they can be, the more intelligent their poetry is,” he once told an interviewer. “To me, intelligence and obscurity never went together.” He sometimes compared his poetry to that of Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams, but mostly in self-defense: “Their poetry was very uncomplicated, very straightforward.” “I write in the language of my day and try to make it effortless for the reader,” he said on another occasion, which only supports Dick Cavett’s quip that McKuen was “the most understood poet in America.”
Now, there’s nothing at all wrong with poems written in simple, uncomplicated language that reads effortlessly. Millions of American schoolchildren have had their first exposure to modernist poetry through Williams’s red wheelbarrow:
so much depends upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens
But I think it’s illuminating to compare McKuen’s simplicity with that of another poet known for creating poetry from simple, clear words: Mary Oliver. For the same of illustration, let’s look at how they each treat the subject of dogs. Here are two selections from McKuen:
From Caught in the Quiet (1970): My dog likes oranges but he’ll eat apples too. Like me, he goes where the smiles go and I’d as soon lie down with sleeping bears as track the does by moonlight
Don’t trouble me with your conventions, mine would bore you too.
Straight lines are sometimes difficult to walk and good for little more than proving we’re sober on the highway.
I’ve never heard the singing of the loon but I’m told he sings as pretty as the nightingale.
My dog likes oranges but he’ll eat apples too.
And from Listen to the Warm: See the dog he doesn’t move—a voyeur. Never mind. What we’ve done is beautiful. For gods and animals to see, for us to stand aside in awe and look ourselves up and down.
And Mary Oliver:
From Devotions Now through the white orchard my little dog romps, breaking the new snow with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited, hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins until the white snow is written upon in large, exuberant letters, a long sentence, expressing the pleasures of the body in this world.
Oh, I could not have said it better myself.
Neither poet tells us much about the dog they’re writing about. In both McKuen poems, however, the dog is merely an object. It, like the “gods and animals,” is there merely to be a silent witness. In Oliver’s poem, on the other hand, the dog’s the star. We’re sure that McKuen has seen dogs; but we know that Oliver has owned dogs and has watched them delight in hopping about in drifts of new snow. And while McKuen’s dogs are there to gaze upon his sensitive pensiveness in wonder, Oliver is the one observing and taking joy from her dog’s exuberance.
In his later years, McKuen was candid about his less-than-ideal childhood. He was born in a Salvation Army hospital, his father having vanished soon after sleeping with his mother, who was working as a taxi dancer. He was sexually abused by an aunt and uncle, physically abused by his stepfather, and probably both as a teenager at the Nevada School of Industry. He dropped out of school and went on the road at a young age and spent time as an in-house male prostitute at logging camps in the Pacific Northwest. A background of this sort of abuse is now known to be associated with an “impaired capacity to develop proper definitions of the self,” as the psychologists Bessel van der Kolk and Rita Fisler have written.
One suspects, therefore, that part of what was missing from McKuen’s poetry was himself. For all the supposed confessional honesty of his poetry, McKuen concealed and distorted much about himself, including his sexuality. Ambiguity was not a trick he used to avoid being pinned down: it was at the heart of his being. He was careful, for example, not to openly declare himself as gay. Though he lived with Edward Habib for decades, he always referred to Habib as “my brother.” After the success of Listen to the Warm, McKuen would refer to having a son and daughter he’d fathered during a stay in France in the early 1960s, but as Alfonso writes:
There is no information that confirms Rod McKuen ever had children. To the author’s knowledge, no one else has ever mentioned meeting or communicating with them. At least four of his closest friends either doubt or flat-out deny that Jean-Marc and Marie-France ever existed. After Rod’s death, no son or daughter came forward to claim anything from his estate.
Yet clues slip out here and there in his poetry, if only unconsciously. In “A Cat Named Sloopy,” for example, he writes:
I never told her but in my mind I was a midnight cowboy even then. Riding my imaginary horse down Forty-second Street, going off with strangers to live an hour-long cowboy’s life, but always coming home to Sloopy, who loved me best…
While “midnight cowboy” might have been an obscure reference when Listen to the Warm was published, it became impossible to miss after the release of the Oscar-winning film two years later. And some of the lines in the title poem are positively creepy: “Follow women after dark/they can only yell for help or whisper yes”; “I’m grateful then for your upbringing/it led you like an arrow here uncomplicated and mine.”
Though many of McKuen’s poems are about love, they are almost never a celebration of love or the loved. Instead, McKuen most often looks at love in the rearview mirror. Even when he’s in a relationship, he’s thinking about its end, as in the lyric of one of his most popular songs, “If you go away”: “If you go away/as I know you will….” One woman who posted about Listen to the Warm on Goodreads wrote tellingly, “My husband gave me [McKuen’s] three small poetry books, early in our marriage. I think I probably related some of his feelings in poems. Now I just see a man having affairs with various women, and then breaking up with them.” In fact, the one constant in McKuen’s views on love is himself: “If I’m still alone by now it’s by design/I only own myself, but all of me is mine.”
His political views were as ambiguous as his sexuality. Though hundreds of thousands of young people bought his books, he was never comfortable being associated with hippies, Flower Power, or other aspects of the youth movement. “Flower power is fine but what they really need is shower power,” he used to joke, and he had little patience for hippies: “I got my success on my own terms, worked for it, suffered for it. Hippies are fine, but I like to be clean myself,” he told the New York Times in 1969. In one of McKuen’s earliest profiles, Joyce Haber of the Los Angeles Times wrote that his careful choice of material and his own presentation made him “a hip square or a square hip, depending on which way you look at it.” Flower children may have bought his books, but they didn’t go to his concerts. One account of a McKuen performance described his audience as “white, female, middle class, scrubbed and respectable.” “I’m an entertainer,” he would say, “and that’s what I want to be. People don’t want to keep getting hit in the head with social commentary all the time.”
When the Saturday Review invited McKuen to review a collection of Mao Tse-tung’s poems, he made sure to stipulate that “Being neither far right, left, nor extreme middle (though having antagonized in my brief span each faction in turn), I am more concerned with poetry than with politics.” Even McKuen’s religious views were elusive. He told one interviewer that he’d been “a Roman Catholic, an Episcopalian, a Methodist, a Mormon, and a Quaker” and that he was planning to give Judaism and Greek Orthodoxy a try.
In some ways, it was as if McKuen was trying to be both the most famous poet in the world and invisible. When his book The Power Bright and Shining: Images of My Country was published in 1976 to coincide with the Bicentennial, he claimed that he had started out wanting to write “a kind of Studs Terkel book” featuring the words of working men and women.5 “Unfortunately — or fortunately, I suppose — it’s not easy for me to be invisible….”
It’s the ambiguity of McKuen’s identity that ultimately undermines his poetry. One reviewer on Goodreads wrote, “These poems are like the antithesis of Bukowski.” Well, exactly. Like him or not, Charles Bukowski was unapologetically himself. Rod McKuen, on the other hand, seems never to have been entirely satisfied with whatever self he devised.
And that lack of a strong sense of self may have been the secret to both his commercial success and his artistic failure. There was just enough content in McKuen’s poems to give his readers the sensation of reading poetry without any of the individuality or obscurity that make good poems both challenging and memorable. McKuen dedicated Come to Me in Silence by saying, “This book is for nobody/everybody.” “I think he should make up his mind,” quipped the Daily Mail’s book editor, Peter Lewis.
“If there’s a message in my work,” McKuen would often tell interviewers, “it’s about man’s inability to communicate.” Which cannot but remind one of Tom Lehrer’s joke: “If a person feels he can’t communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it.” Even McKuen occasionally allowed readers to see the emptiness at the center of his poetry. As he wrote in “October 3,” from In Someone’s Shadow:
If you had listened hard enough you might have heard what I meant to say. Nothing.
I was going to end this piece here, dagger neatly inserted into the poet’s corpse. But I realized this would leave an incomplete picture of McKuen’s work. One of my favorite adages is that if a pile of horseshit is big enough, there might be a pony in there. I went through more than a dozen of McKuen’s books across his career as part of my research. And yes, there are a LOT of poems about beaches and sunsets and loneliness, but there are also oddities.
Fans of pop music have long known that some of the most interesting tunes in an artist’s repertoire are the stray tracks thrown in to pad out one side of an LP, songs where the constraints of what should or shouldn’t go into a hit were tossed aside and caution shelved in favor of unfiltered creation. Sometimes, the result is awful; and sometimes the result is — well, if not genius, at least intriguing.
And the same is true of McKuen’s oeuvre. It may be that McKuen sheltered a big hole of hurt at the center of his being. And while a big hole of hurt may be a handicap as a poet, it can often be a source of great energy for a satirist. Listen to the Warm, for example, which is easy to dismiss entirely from its drippy dedication alone — “For E.: If you cry when we leave Paris/I’ll buy you a teddy bear all soft and gold” — includes a poem with the title “First and Last Visit to an Annex in Burbank.” “Time was you couldn’t see the Forest Lawn for the trees.” Forest Lawn, just to fill in possible gaps in cultural history, is a huge cemetery in Glendale, California where hundreds of celebrities from L. Frank Baum to Elizabeth Taylor are buried. It’s also one of the inspirations for Whispering Glades in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One And because it’s the cemetery that set the standard for the grandiose American style, it’s also largely swathes of headstone-dotted grass.
The fact that I had to explain McKuen’s joke drained what meager comic value it may retain, but it serves to illustrate the vein of ironic observation that runs quietly underneath much of the teddy bear dreck of his poetry. One of the best examples is his 1959 album Beatsville. It was marketed to tap into the Beatnik craze, the fascination with beret-wearing, goatee-bearded, finger-poppin’, jazz-loving coffee house-haunting poets and musicians who ranged from serious (Allen Ginsburg) to silly (Maynard G. Krebs). Its cover shows an angst-ridden McKuen brooding over a glass of cheap wine as he sits next to a wild abstract painting with a mysterious and beautiful woman and would lead the buyer to believe this is a sincere sample of Beat art.
Instead, it’s a pastiche. Though he’d spent plenty of nights strumming his guitar and singing folk songs and published his own book of poetry, McKuen wasn’t buying the shtick. On Beatsville, he mocked the beats as poseurs — such as “Raffia the poet, who is not only an angry young man but a dirty old man as well” — and riffed on their lingo (“I was mixed up with this Gemini cat who, well, she didn’t like to be liked, like”). As Alfonso puts it, McKuen “came across more as an observer (or infiltrator)” than a card-carrying Beat. He went on to demonstrate his disdain for the Beats even more obviously in the single “The Beat Generation” he released with Bob McFadden soon after: “Some people say I’m lazy/They say that I’m a wreck/But that stuff doesn’t faze me/I get unemployment checks.”
He went through years, or volumes, rather, without indulging his appetite for caustic commentary, but sometimes it came out despite himself. One of the tracks on his first album with Anita Kerr, The Sea, included a short number titled “Body Surfing with the Jet Set” that was full of parodies of surfer talk along the lines of Beatsville: “Madame Marie Ouspenskaya went through her whole life never learning to surf/But she sure had some bitchin’ garlic leis.” Years later, in his collection Beyond the Boardwalk, he reused that title for something whose humor is almost too black to bear:
My father’s uncle’s brother married his cousin. Twice he beat her up and twice the police came and twice they carried her away. Does that make her his cousin twice removed? Surf’s up.
I keep a loaded pistol just beneath my bed, it’s nice to have a gun that works in case I lose my head. Hang ten.
Edward Habib and Rod McKuen at McKuen’s Hollywood mansion.
In his later books, the sunshine fades and more often gives way to unvarnished sarcasm. The Beautiful Strangers (1980) includes a multi-part poem titled “A Field Guide to Cruising” that is nothing less than a summation of decades of cruising experience — by both McKuen and his “brother” Edward:
Do not dress up or down but as you would for an occasion. With some luck and some premeditation it will be one.
Avoid church socials or the Bake-off. Those who gather at such gatherings have paired off long ago. They are in the middle of what they perceive as the act of living life, who are we to interrupt them?
In its way, this is every bit as uncomfortable as anything in Bukowski. If nothing else, McKuen here ventures into territory few other American poets (well, perhaps aside from William Dickey in The Rainbow Grocery). In the same book, “Designer Genes” veers into Ogden Nash territory with its perhaps too-ephemeral satire on a 1980s fad:
With laissez-faire each derriere with nom or nom de plume is held in place with little space to wiggle or sha-boom.
In one of his last books, Intervals (1986), McKuen not only displays a more good-natured sort of humor but also includes his most extensive use of social observation in a long poem titled, “Is There Life After Tower Records?” The poem, dedicated to Tower Records founder Russ Solomon, will tug at the nostalgia strings of anyone who spent a long night browsing through the aisles of this legendary West Coast record store.6 (And for those under 40, I won’t try to explain what a record store was except to say that it was the social and cultural heart of many towns in America.)
See them move between the aisles, pathways so narrow that passing past another is bold adventure, thrilling drawing-in of breath and stomach. And in between the aisles, the islands back to back that hide the million dreams inside bright jackets, well-turned sleeves plastic fused so fast it must be cut apart to reach the shiny metal hopes, the deep dark vinyl of delight whose inner grooves can only be decoded by the diamond needle, narrow beam of laser light.
This is just the kind of ecstasy you would experience flipping through the shrink-wrapped albums that filled Tower Records’ trays.
Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard in L.A.
Occasionally, just occasionally, McKuen shared moments too candid to be faked. Nothing like the trinkets about sun and sand and cats that cluttered many of his pages, with details that quickly burrow themselves uncomfortably into the reader’s mind:
One day coming home I saw a farmer pissing by the road. His balls hung down below his hand and looked so heavy that I began to run for no apparent reason. I didn’t stop until I reached the safety of my room.
Home again, I pulled the shade and got down from the bureau my Sunday School coloring book. Having chewed my brown Crayola just the day before, I had no choice but to color Jesus Christ’s hair yellow.
Ten pages before this in And to Each Season …, McKuen tells a ridiculous and unbelievable story about a friendship he made with a mountain lion he spotted in the woods behind his family’s house when they lived in rural Washington state. A few pages on, we’re back in the land of sun and lovers left behind.
Had McKuen held himself to the same standard of intimacy displayed in poems like this, he might truly have earned a place in one of the Oxford books of verse. And his poems might still be taught today.
But perhaps poet is not really the right label for Rod McKuen. Remember what he often said: “I’m an entertainer,” he would say, “and that’s what I want to be.” Perhaps we should heed Maya Angelou’s advice and believe him.
Reviewing that 1974 performance at the Troubadour in Santa Monica, Dennis Hunt of the L.A. Times wrote, “His performance was awash with flagrant melodrama. He used a lot of old, obvious tricks to put his songs across. On his closing number, ‘Seasons in the Sun,’ he was even gesticulating in the flamboyant manner of Al Jolson.”
There was a time when Al Jolson was considered the greatest entertainer in America. Today, it’s hard for anyone to see Jolson’s blackfaced rendition of “Mammy” in the original The Jazz Singer and cringe. As it might be hard for anyone to listen to one of Rod McKuen’s albums or read one of his books now and wonder how they managed to sell in astronomical numbers. Perhaps entertainment is not quite so timeless as poetry.
My thanks to Barry Alfonso for suggesting I take a look at Rod McKuen’s increasingly — if somewhat justly — neglected poetry.
1 The Tribune article also mentioned that the same bill featured a ventriloquist, Aaron Williams, “and his dusky friend, Freddy.”
2 The ad for McKuen’s appearance at the Troubadour credits the “greatest entertainer in the world” quote to The Times, London. I searched through the archives of The Times and failed to find any such statement. Indeed, the only time The Times saw fit to give McKuen more than advertising space, it was a brief entry in the “Times Diary” for 20 February 1969 about an appearance he made at the Odeon cinema on Leicester Square reading the lyrics to his title song for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Perhaps this, like many other things, was just something he made up.
3 One of McKuen’s favorite claims was that of having been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music in 1974. This intrigued me so much that I contacted both the Pulitzer committee and the Pulitzer archives at Columbia to confirm it. What they both stated was that prior to 1980, when the Pulitzer Prize adopted its current nomenclature of winners, finalists, and entrants, the submission process for the Music prize was essentially open. All entrants were considered “nominees” and all nominees (there were 40 in 1974) received a certificate. It is quite possible that McKuen or someone working for him submitted the nomination. That didn’t keep him from frequently mentioning the nomination for years thereafter.
4 After reading dozens of McKuen’s newspaper interviews, I strongly suspect the piece he was referring to was … an interview with Rod McKuen.
5 McKuen said he’d spent months traveling around the country as research. “I took a lot of odd jobs” taxi driver, hot dog seller, ice cream seller, mine worker, garbage man. “I was found out in Florida and it got on the front page of the Miami Herald that I was a Miami garbage collector for a week.” In fact, no such story appeared. Instead, on December 18, 1974, a story appeared on page 2 of the Herald that reported that “Millionaire poet Rod McKuen worked in Miami as a garbageman sometime in the last three months as research for a new book.” He said it was the toughest job he’d ever done. “I was aching everywhere. I don’t know what they put in those cans. It must be cement bricks.” The story also added bartender and soda jerk to the list of his odd jobs. The source for the story? Rod McKuen.
6 I’m told that people shopped at Tower Records during daylight hours, but I have no personal experience of this and have to discount it as myth.
The Glasgow-based independent publisher the Common Breath recently reissued the Great Depression classic of homelessness, Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing, and the initial response of readers has been quite enthusiastic. I think a lot of today’s readers may not have been aware before now that there was a wealth of good writers beyond John Steinbeck who dealt with the impact of an economic and social catastrophe that reached as far back as the mid-1920s. So, I wanted to take this opportunity to mention some of the other remarkable books written in the 1920s and 1930s that focused specifically on life “on the bum”: the experience of the homeless, unemployed, and often desperate men and women who drifted about America in search of something to hope for.
The grandfather of all American hobo books is probably Ralph Keeler’s Vagabond Adventures (1870), which I wrote about in one of my earliest posts back in 2006. Keeler got around by steamboat instead of railroad, but his life of wandering and casual labor set the pattern that thousands would follow. Vagabond Adventures is so old that it predates the word hobo, which seems to have sprung up in the 1890s and which, according to etymologist Anatoly Liberman, has an uncertain origin. By the 1893 edition of the Funk & Wagnall dictionary, however, the establishment had already passed its judgment on the hobo: “An idle, shiftless wandering workman, ranking scarcely above the tramp.” Tramp, in fact, was the label preferred by poetic types, starting with W. H. Davies’sThe Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) and continuing through Harry Kemp’sTramping on Life: An Autobiographical Narrative (1922). Kemp’s book, however, also marked the end of the romantic notions about life on the bum.
Jim Tully was probably the first to celebrate the hobo-cum-hobo life, though by the time he published this autobiography, he’d been off the road for over a decade. Still, he worked hard to cultivate his image as a bruiser and built upon it through a series of novels about boxing, carnies and circus performers, thiefs, and prostitutes. A lot of the tough-guy literature of the 1930s drew its inspiration from Tully.
Jack Black spent most of his life on the wrong side of the law. The novelist and historian R. L. Duffus claims that Black was credited with over half the robberies that took place in the first year after San Francisco was hit by the 1906 earthquake. In between stick-up jobs and break-ins, however, Black preferred to travel like other hobos, at the railroad’s expense. Though he doesn’t actually use the word hobo in the book, there are plenty of stories about swinging into empty freight cars and run-ins with railroad bulls. It’s likely that Black decided to write his autobiography after seeing the success of Jim Tully’s, but Black has inspired his own followers, including William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, and Black is sometimes described as “the original beatnik” (a word that’s probably just as archaic as hobo by now).
There are several different reissues of You Can’t Win available now, including a Kindle edition and an audiobook.
Bottom Dogs, Dahlberg’s first novel and largely autobiographical novel was written in Brussels but centers on the year or so that he spent bumming around the West after he was discharged from the Army. Dahlberg’s alter ego, Lorry, is what country songwriters call a ramblin’ man: “He didn’t care if he never saw any grub, he wanted his freedom, he wanted to knock about, hit the road whenever he felt like it, bum around the country.” And he arrives in a new town in typical hobo fashion:
… [H]e looked down; the train was rattling away at forty anyway; he wasn’t sure; but he knew he couldn’t jump. He’d have to wait till they got outside the yards of Ogden, Utah. He’d have to lay low, too, when he got in; he might get picked up in the streets. He wasn’t quite sure what he would do yet. Pulling into the yards outside of Ogden, Lorry jumped, hitting the coal cinders. He went down solid, bleeding at the hands and knees, and limped out of the railroad yards, stumbling toward the Lincoln Highway. He trudged along, half-heartedly hailing passing autos; he was too dirty; his shoes half off him; cinders in his ears; soot through his hair; no one would stop for him; they might think he was a stick-up.
Dahlberg was the first to test the appetite of critics and readers for a fictional equivalent of Tully and Black’s memoirs. Despite a foreword by D. H. Lwawrence, Bottom Dogs got a less than stellar reception. For Saturday Review, it seemed “to represent the vanishing point, the reductio ad absurdum of the naturalistic ‘low life’ novel,” that it amounted to ‘sub-animal reaction reported by sub-animal itself.’ “We doubt if the book helps one to understand any considerable or significant part of anything,” its reviewer sniffed.
Bottom Dogs is out of print now, but copies of the collection of Dahlberg’s first three novels that was published by Crowell back in 1976 can be picked up cheaply on Amazon and elsewhere.
More cultural artifact than story, The Hobo’s Hornbook reprints dozens of hobo rhymes and songs, including classics such as “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.” George Milburn, then a budding young folklorist, collected them from a variety of sources, including interviews with hobos in towns around the Midwest. “The idea that hoboes, as a class, were imbued with the spirit of the medieval troubadours first occurred to me in 1926 when I was living on the outskirts of Chicago’s hobohemia,” Milburn wrote in the introduction. “A short distance away was Washington Square, known to staid Southsiders and suburbanites as ‘Nut Square’ and to hoboes the nation over as ‘Bughouse Square.’ In that oasis speech is free and the hoboes make the most of it. There it was that I found my first hobo elocutionists….”
In You Can’t Sleep Here, Newhouse’s first novel, the hobo life is not a matter of personal choice but economic necessity. In the novel, a newspaper reporter loses his job and quickly drops through what little social support net existing in those early Depression days — getting evicted from his apartment, sleeping in flophouses and park benches, standing in soup kitchen lines, and finally sharing a crate in a Hooverville. The novel reflects the energetic radicalism with which Newhouse and many others responded to the economic devastation that followed the Stock Market crash. As one reviewer wrote, “Starvation has a remarkable effect on the intellect; the latter becomes susceptible to ideas to which, in the pride of its security, it had been stubbornly closed.”
Despite its somewhat childish title and a certain simple-worded prose style, this is a serious anthropo-/socio-logical study of the tens of thousands of young people made homeless, destitute, and itinerant by the Depression. Minehan spent several summers riding the rails and collecting observations and interviews in places like Chicago’s Bughouse Square. The New York Times’ reviewer was grateful for Minehan’s factual approach: “Congratulations are due to Thomas Minehan that he did not attempt to make literature out of the material he has put into this book. The stark, brutal, vivid, uncompromising realities of life he has set down in it are more important for his purposes, and for any use that could be made of them, than any literary product into which they could have been transformed.”
Algren’s first novel, it drew upon his experiences in Texas, where he lived for a year or so after graduating from college. While there, he became so destitute that he stole a typewriter and landed in jail for a spell. The book sold poorly when first published and Algren preferred to draw attention to A Walk on the Wild Side, the 1956 novel into which he worked a number of elements from the earlier work. Of Someboy, Algren later wrote, “This is an uneven novel written by an uneven man in the most uneven of American times.
Still, it’s full of details that demonstrate that Algren was no dilettante when it came to his time on the bum. He records verses like those found in Milburn’s collection:
The roundhouse in Cheyenne is filled every night With loafers and bummers of most every plight ; On their backs is no clothes, in their pockets no bills. Each day they keep comingfrom the dreary black hills.
He also recounts the tales that hobos tell each other about railroad bulls and sheriffs to avoid — like Seth Healey in Greenville, Mississippi:
He’ll be walking the tops and be dressed like a ’bo, so you’ll never know by his looks he’s a bull. But he’ll have a gun on his hip and a hoselength in his hand, and two deputies coming down both the sides ; your best bet then is to stay right still. You can’t get away and he’ll pot you if you try. So give him what you got and God help you if you’re broke. When he lifts up that hose-line just cover up your eyes and don’t try any backfightin’ when it comes down — sww-ish. God help you if you run and God help you if you fight; God help you if you’re broke and God help you if you’re black.
In this, Anderson’s first novel, an unemployed musician travels around America as a hobo until he stops in Chicago and forms a band with other homeless musicians. They get arrested after a fight breaks out when they refuse to play the Communist anthem, the “International.” Anderson was skeptical of the likelihood that the Depression would lead to revolution: “”Every idle man becomes economic-minded. He starts wanting to know why this man has a chauffeured Packard and he can’t get his three dollar shoes half-soled? But the American isn’t going to turn socialist or communist. At least not in this generation.”
This may accounted, in part, for Tom Kromer’s disdain when he reviewed Hungry Men for The New Masses. Kromer found it paled beside his own novel: “You will see no Jesus Christ looks in the eyes of Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men, no soup-lines that stretch for a block and never start moving, no derelicts dying of malnutrition on top of lice-filled three-decker bunks while the mission sign outside flashes ‘Jesus Saves’ on and off in the dark. In a word, you find no Hungry Men.”
The University of Oklahoma Press reissued Hungry Men in the early 1990s, but it’s out of print now. A Kindle version, however, is available from Amazon. Anderson’s second novel Thieves Like Us, which was filmed by Robert Altman in the 1970s, has been included in the Library of America’s volume Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s.
This is a picaresque novel by the long-forgotten novelist Louis Paul. Though the story centers on the travels of two ex-doughboys after World War One, Paul incorporated elements from the life of his better-known friend, John Steinbeck. It’s perhaps less of a hobo book than a book of many unsuccessful attempts to be hobos. The lead, one Resin Scaeterbun, accompanied by his Army buddy Copril Ootz, wind back and forth across the States in search of idleness.
As Paul told an interviewer, “They want to become bums, to give their whole souls to the art of bumming. But they find themselves circumvented and defeated on every hand.” But, he complained, “In a competitive economy, it is very hard to avoid work.” Instead, Resin finds himself at various times a bootlegger, fight promoter, poet, reporter, pornographer, and screenwriter, ending up in the thoroughly disgraced profession of bookseller. One reviewer wrote that Paul “writes as Rube Goldberg draws cartoons, with a delicious sense of the ridiculous.”
To someone who grew up in California, a place like Wisconsin seems both drab and exotic, the sort of bland nowhere you would never want to visit deliberately. This may be the prevailing view, but that’s not how I thought of the Badger State when I lived in San Diego. I remember discovering Michael Lesy’s classic book Wisconsin Death Trip in the early ‘70s. Its grim prose and even grimmer photos from the 1890s captured a world as darkly fascinating as H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham for me. The Wisconsin countryside seemed like a vast empty plain where human affairs — quiet tragedies punctuated with loud explosions of insanity — could play out. Living in a supposed paradise at the far end of the continent, Californians tend to think of the Midwest as irredeemably dull, filled with the sort of stunted people who don’t have the gumption to move West. To me, though, books like Lesy’s made the case that places like Wisconsin were filled with mystery, shadowy secrets, old houses harboring old people possessed by twisted dreams.
A lingering association of the Badger State with things stark and spooky led me to pick up a paperback copy of Good-Bye Wisconsin (Signet edition, 1964) at a San Diego used books store in the 1990s. The author of this short story collection was Glenway Wescott, a writer completely unknown to me. Reading it, I was struck by his lyrical prose and the empathetic treatment he gave to his damaged and morally confused characters. Years later, I ran across Wescott’s novel The Grandmothers at a library sale in the Pittsburgh area. This 1927 novel — apparently a best-seller that went through at least 24 printings — was a much deeper dive into the moody Midwestern landscapes and tormented characters that Good-Bye Wisconsin dealt with. I recently re-read it and found it an even richer experience the second time around.
Glenway Wescott, 1933.
On the surface, The Grandmothers treads the same ground covered by Sherwood Anderson: commonplace scenes rendered with a poetic touch, filled with repressed, thwarted men and women who turn into grotesque exaggerations of themselves when their hurts and grievances remain buried too long. Anderson generally dealt with Midwestern small town life rather than more isolated rural folk, but the same sense of rigid Protestant proprieties draped over chronic regret and moldering obligation is present in Wescott’s novel as well. Both Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and The Grandmothers feature an adolescent boy with artistic inclinations who strongly resembles the author at a similar age. That said, Wescott seems to accept and embrace the failings and cruelties of the society he grew up in with a greater sense of forgiveness than Anderson does. And while Westcott is more literal and less parable-like in his accounts of his characters’ lives, his poetic language is even more mystically evocative than Anderson’s. The Grandmothers doesn’t mythologize its gruff, semi-articulate men and wounded yet indominable women so much as surround them with a visionary glow. Its prose heightens the normal world and makes you see it with renewed color and vibrancy:
“They went down the Mississippi on a river boat. There were whisperings of the water and a sound of kisses around the prow as it advanced through regular ripples that were like a wedding veil…”
“The east was covered with tiny clouds like the torn bits of paper which a newcomer finds in a dismantled house; the sun entered the sky like such a newcomer.”
“As a flying seed will debauch a whole meadow with flowers, one kiss, one caress not even wished for, had spoiled her peace of mind, even her good health.”
The arc of The Grandmothers is simple and reminiscent of similar narratives. A group of families move to frontier Wisconsin before the Civil War and intermarry, establishing lines of descendants who prosper or succumb to ill fortune (mostly the latter) as the world enters the 20th Century. Wescott treats nearly everyone with respect and at least a modicum of sympathy — there are no real villains in the book. He doesn’t shy away from bringing out the more unpleasant and downright bizarre qualities of his characters, though. One of the grandmothers of Alwyn (the stand-in for a young Glenway Wescott) suffers from excessive prudery and takes to hiding small household objects to torment her husband. The couple’s poisoned but enduring marriage is summed up in a bitter vision: “During their last years it was as if they lay on one deathbed — the dying hands interlaced by habit, by hatred of each other and love of God, the dying mouths murmuring truths without pity and complaining still.” (I read this and thought of certain photographs in Wisconsin Death Trip and shuddered a little.)
At times, the slow-seeping toxicity within these family relationships gets a tad claustrophobic. Those who wander away from the ancestral homesteads generally come to no good, though their travels do add some excitement. Black sheep Evan Tower runs off to fight in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, deserts the army and hops a freighter for London, marries an Italian woman and ends up living with his wife and children under an assumed name in New Mexico. These adventures provide contrast to the severe monotony of rural Wisconsin life, throwing its grinding routines and unyielding moral codes into starker relief.
Wescott parses the subtle shadings within old-fashioned Protestantism without displaying disdain or boredom. (Unlike Sherwood Anderson, he doesn’t flaunt his pagan instincts.) The lives of the most publicly religious are portrayed in the least flattering terms — the “stringless harp wrapped up like a mummy in the music room” found in a minister’s home suggests his overall stuffiness. It is the women in the book — most of them thwarted or broken by love — who seem to possess the most life-affirming faith. Believe in a forgiving God and the promise of heaven makes the sorrows of the everyday world easier to accept. Yet that isn’t the whole story – as the book nears its conclusion, Wescott makes clear that hard-shell Methodism, habitual labor and flattened expectations still allow for nobility and satisfaction if not joy. The “dignity of citizenship” and “the perfect and tender monotony of an uneventful married life” deserve celebration, something Anderson (let alone fellow Midwestern chronicler Sinclair Lewis) might not concede.
The final chapters of the novel lay the older generation to rest as Alwyn’s growing awareness of his family heritage comes into focus. Wescott notes that Alwyn spied upon his family, “studied to convict them,” even as he watched his grandmothers slowly die. He compares his desire to write to the art of taxidermy, an attempt to simulate life out of selected pieces of the dead past. As she wastes away, his maternal grandmother mistakes Alwyn for her son and tells him, “You know, you are my only sweetheart.” Whether this parting benediction is given to the wrong person is irrelevant. Wescott finds an all-embracing love in the resolute endurance and collective heartbreak of his ancestors.
In its sometimes bleak, sometimes tender depiction of a vanished world, The Grandmothers anticipates Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels. There’s a quietly compelling drama to the stories that both writers tell about the Midwest, as well as an attempt to describe ordinary men and women with as much perceptiveness and nuance as possible. They share a deep empathy for the overlooked and undervalued. I haven’t seen Wescott’s name invoked in reviews of Robinson’s fiction. Those who admire her work would find The Grandmothers worthy of discovery.
I have visited Wisconsin many times over the past two decades. I’ve seen the sorts of places Wescott described in The Grandmothers and maybe even met the descendants of the people he wrote about. The mysteries of the Badger State still haven’t been dispelled for me. I hope they never are. If I need to revisit them, I will return to The Grandmothers one more time.
The Grandmothers, by Glenway Wescott New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1927
Dust jacket for 1935 edition of Waiting for Nothing by Tom Kromer.
A few days ago, the Glasgow-based independent publisher the Common Breath released their first reissue title, bringing the Great Depression classic of homelessness, Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing, back to print for the first time since 1986. Though it’s mostly been out of print since its first publication in 1935, Waiting for Nothing was been quietly influencing generations of writers from Hubert Selby to Breece D’J Pancake to James Kelman with its hard-nosed prose, impressionistic narrative, and grim, survivalist outlook.
But who was Tom Kromer? Facts about him are scarce to start with and he didn’t help much when he was asked to contribute an autobiographical note for the British edition of Waiting for Nothing:
I am twenty-eight years old, and was born and attended school in Huntington, W. Va. My people were working people. My father started to work in a coal-mine when he was eight years old. Later, he became a glass blower, and unable to afford medical treatment, died of cancer at the age of forty-four. There were five children and I was the oldest. My mother took my father’s place in the factory. My father’s father was crushed to death in a coal-mine. My father never hoped for anything better in this life than a job, and never worried about anything else but losing it. My mother never wanted anything else than that the kids get an education so that they wouldn’t have to worry about the factory closing down.
Owens Glass Factory #2, Huntington, West Virginia.
Kromer glosses over the specific. He was born in Huntington in October 1906, the son of Michael Albert Kromer, who’d emigrated from Russia in 1891 to join his father at a coal mine in Pennsylvania, and Grace Thornburg, a West Virginia native. Bert Kromer spent most of his working life in one of the big glass and bottle factories in northern West Virginia. The Kromers lived in several different towns while Tom was growing up, but settled in Huntington, where his father went to work at the Owens Glass Factory. In the 1920 census, Bert Kromer’s occupation was listed as glass-blower. Coming after years of working in coal mines as a boy, it was a job that likely contributed to his early death from lung cancer.
Kromer mentioned having three years of college but didn’t identify the school as Marshall University there in Huntington (later portrayed in the movie We Are Marshall). He wrote, “I taught for two years in mountain schools in West Virginia,” but didn’t say that he’d left when two of his favorite professors were fired after they protested the school’s banning of Mencken’s American Mercury magazine for its printing an article about a Missouri prostitute nicknamed “Hatrack.” Nor that he took the schoolteaching job to support his family after his father’s death in 1926.
Kromer returned to Marshall in the fall of 1928 and got his first taste of life “on the fritz,” as he put it, on an assignment for the Huntington Herald-Dispatch soon after. As an experiment, the paper sent him out, dressed in shabby clothes, onto the streets of Huntington to beg for change. “Pity the Poor Panhandler; $2 An Hour is All He Gets,” read the resulting article. It may have given Kromer a false sense of the ease with which one could live life on the bum: in hindsight, $2 an hour would seem a a fortune in the eyes of the narrator of Waiting for Nothing.
A month or so later, Kromer ran out of money to keep attending Marshall and decided to head to Kansas in search of farm work. He would spent most of the next five years on the road. As he wrote in his autobiographical note,
My intentions were to hitch-hike, and after hiking all day without a lift, a freight train pulled to a stop Beside the road. I crawled into a hox car. i never again voluntarily took up the responsibilities of hitch-hiking, but I always aligned my interests with the interests of the railroad companies. They generally got me where I wanted to go, which was never more definite than “east” or “west.”
The big Kansas farmers had already mechanized their operations, so there was no work to be had. “I got my first taste of men trying to buck a machine,” he later wrote. Kromer headed home after five months with little money and many hungry days. But things were just as bad in Huntington and he soon headed out again.
Waiting for Nothing is a lightly-fictionalized distillation of Kromer’s years as a hobo. He claimed that, “Parts of the book were scrawled on Bull Durham papers in box cars, margins of religious tracts in a hundred missions, jails, one prison, railroad sand-houses, flop-houses, and on a few memorable occasions actually pecked out with my two index fingers on an honest-to-God typewriter.” In fact, most of it was probably written in a notebook in the relative comfort of Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps in California between mid-1933 and mid-1934.
The Oro Plata, Murphy’s Camp, California (1934), by Marcy Woods.
At one of these camps near Murphy’s Camp in the Sierra Nevadas, he met the painter Marcy Woods. Kromer complained to Woods that he’d sent his manuscript, then titled “Three Hots and a Flop”, to several publishers with no luck. Woods’ wife Hazel was acquainted with the muckracking journalist Lincoln Steffens, who’d retired near the Woods’ home in Carmel, California, and offered to send the book to Steffens. Steffens returned the book after a few days with an enthusiastic note: “This story, this portrait of a ‘stiff’ is important. I sat up late nights reading it and I knew I was getting something I had never ‘got’ before: realism to the nth degree.” Encouraged by this response, Kromer sent the book to John Steinbeck’s first publisher, Covici-Friede. They rejected it.
Kromer wrote to Steffens again, asking for advice on hiring a literary agent. Steffens recommended Maxim Lieber, then the champion of many of the most promising radical writers in America: Erskine Caldwell, Katherine Anne Porter, Josephine Herbst, Albert Maltz, Albert Halper, James T. Farrell, Nathanael West, and Langston Hughes. Lieber submitted the book to Alfred A. Knopf, who’d begun to publish such writers in the hard-boiled style as Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain. Knopf quickly bought the book and included it on their Spring 1935 list as “Title not announced.” Knopf did not care for “Three Hots and a Flop.”
By then, Kromer had left the CCC and taken a job at the Harvard Book Store in Stockton. One of the biggest risks of life on the road — along with getting beaten up by railroad bulls and falling off a train — was tuberculosis, and Kromer’s health could no longer stand up to the physical demands of the CCC work. The book store hosted a signing for Kromer when Waiting for Nothing came out in early 1935.
Harvard Book Store ad for Waiting for Nothing.
Waiting for Nothing came out at a busy time for the book reviewing business. It was competing with the likes of Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, Faulkner’s Pylon, Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat, Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart, and Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet. And it wasn’t the first novel about life “on the fritz.” Edward Newhouse’s You Can’t Sleep Here, which was based on Newhouse’s experience of unemployment and homelessness in New York City, came out the year before and a few months later, Edward Anderson’sHungry Men was instantly compared with Waiting for Nothing.
Yet Waiting for Nothing still stood out from its competition. It’s easy to imagine Kromer’s fingers flying on a typewriter’s keys: his prose has the same striking staccato pace:
It is night. I am walking along this dark street, when my foot hits a stick. I reach down and pick it up. I finger it. It is a good stick, a heavy stick. One sock from it would lay a man out. It wouldn’t kill him, but it would lay him out. I plan. Hit him where the crease is in his hat, hard, I tell myself, but not too hard. I do not want his head to hit the concrete. It might kill him. I do not want to kill him. I will catch him as he falls. I can frisk him in a minute. I will pull him over in the shadows and walk off. I will not run. I will walk.
Many, including Kromer, spotted the influence of Hemingway, especially his first short story collection In Our Time. But it’s also very close to this sample from a young hobo’s diary, quoted in a 1934 book titled Boy and Girl Tramps of America, a factual account by Thomas Minehan published in 1934:
Sept. 11. Villa Grove. Rode with truck. Good town. Raining when I hit first house. Woman gave me three eggs, two big pieces of meat. Cream and corn flakes, cookies, jell and all the coffee I want. Ask lots of questions. Man in house, too. He gives me a dime when I go. Made thirty cents hitting stem. A junction. Took train. Friendly. Good for supper and that’s all.
Sept. 12. Shelbyville. Cop picked me up. Sent to jail, had to work two hours for dinner and supper. Stayed in jail all night. Six guys of us. N. G. Got out before breakfast. Walked with Shorty to Baxter. Small burg. N. G. Rode with farmer to Clarksburg. N. G. Got handout from farm girl, bacon and bread. Me and Shorty came back to ask for drink of water and she says, “Sic ’em,” to big gray dog. Dog jumped at Shorty, but Shorty socks it. I gets a club. Dog chases us a mile until we get to gravel and a lot of bricks. Boy did we give it to him then.
One critic later groused that “the ‘Tom Kromer’ of the book is a craftily simple version of the Tom Kromer who wrote it: the former doesn’t know where is next meal is coming from, but the latter knew to tell it like A Farewell to Arms.” And while it’s true that Kromer was better educated than the average hobo, his experience and hardened attitudes rang true to the life Minehan encountered when he accompanied one of his subjects through a week on the skids:
Large sewer rats scurry across the floor, rustling the newspapers, foraging in the filth. Drunks stagger in, miss the top step in the darkness, and stumble to the bottom. They call and curse at each other, fight, vomit, urinate in the darkness. Some groan. Many hiccup. One sings a ribald ballad, tuneless and wheezy. And by my side a sixteen-year-old boy coughs, continually, without waking. Deep and chesty is the cough. Between coughs, I can hear his labored breathing. A rattle comes from his throat. The rattle becomes deeper, more difficult. Breath wheezes, a pause. And cough, cough, cough, until the tubes are clear, and the boy can breathe again.
For Kromer, rats carried a special terror:
I listen to these rats that rustle across the floor. I pull this sack off my face and strain my eyes through the blackness. I am afraid of rats. Once in a jungle I awoke with two on my face. Since then I dream of rats that are as big as cats, who sit on my face and gnaw at my nose and eyes. I cannot see them. It is too dark. I cannot lie here and wait with my heart thumping against my ribs like this. I cannot lie here and listen to them patter across the floor, and me not able to see them.
It’s hard to believe that Orwell hadn’t taken some of his inspiration for Winston Smith’s fear of rats in 1984 from Waiting for Nothing.
A few months after the US publication, Constable published Waiting for Nothing in England. Theodore Dreiser was enlisted to write an introduction, which was enthusiastic, if in Dreiser’s uniquely ham-fisted and occasionally incoherent way. In the 1986 University of Georgia edition of Waiting for Nothing, which also includes most of Kromer’s other writings, Arthur D. Casciato wrote, “In the entire introduction, only Dreiser’s first two sentences really make sense: ‘This book needs no introduction or foreword,’ he writes. ‘It is its own introduction or foreword.’ Dreiser probably should have left it at that.”
The English edition was, however, missing an entire chapter. In Chapter 4 in the original, the narrator meets and goes home with a homosexual known as “Mrs. Carter” simply to get a warm meal. Once at Mrs. Carter’s, he faces the facts of his situation:
I will have to go to bed some time. This queer will stay awake until I do go to bed. What the hell? A guy has got to eat, and what is more, he has got to flop.
“Sure,” I say, “I am ready for the hay.”
You can always depend on a stiff having to pay for what he gets. I pull off my clothes and crawl into bed.
Given the laws in England at the time, however, Constable was in a quandary. “An experienced member of the book trade had sent us a warning,” they wrote in an insert that took the place of Chapter 4, “and we must decide whether, under existing conditions in this country, a true incident which could be publicly described in America was one which might not be publicly described in England.” It might not, Constable decided.
We have cut out Chapter IV entirely — cut it out with reluctance and with shame, merely consoling ourselves with the thought that fortunately the continuity of the book is in no way affected. Were we wrong to cut it out? No one can possibly say. Would we have been guilty of corrupting youth had we left it in? Once again, no one — in advance — has the smallest idea. That is how things are in England these days; and that is why Waiting for Nothing appears in England in an emasculated form.
On the strength of his five years on the road and the reviews of Waiting for Nothing, Kromer felt he’d earned the right to sit in judgment of those who would write about the hobo life. His contempt for Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men when he reviewed the book for The New Masses is unmuted:
You will see no Jesus Christ looks in the eyes of Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men, no soup-lines that stretch for a block and never start moving, no derelicts dying of malnutrition on top of lice-filled three-decker bunks while the mission sign outside flashes “Jesus Saves” on and of? in the dark. In a word, you find no Hungry Men. When one of Mr. Anderson’s puppets gets a gnawing in the pit of his guts, he takes him up to a back door or a restaurant and feeds him. When his hero is mooning on the waterfront over a respectable two-bit whore that he is in love with, you will never guess what happens — the Communist in the book hands him fifty bucks and says here take this dough, I’ll not be needing it and make a home for the gal.
“Perhaps Mr. Anderson has never seen a bunch of desperately hungry men,” Kromer speculated.
Soon after Waiting for Nothing, however, Kromer found that even the book store work was too much for him. He headed again back to West Virginia, where one of his classmates from Marshall, Thomas Donnelly, convinced him to come to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Donnelly was taking a teaching post at the University of New Mexico starting that fall, working for their former Marshall professor Arthur S. White. His two Marshall acquaintances arranged a scholarship for Kromer to study journalism. In the report of literary conference in July 1936, Kromer was identified as “a health seeker and student living in Albuquerque.” Not long after he started classes, he began coughing up blood and was admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital for treatment.
At St. Joseph’s Hospital, Kromer met Jeannette (Janet) Smith, a Vassar graduate who was being treated for rheumatic heart disease. Janet had been working in New Mexico for the Federal Writers Project and teaching at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school near Santa Fe. The two decided to get married, but postponed the wedding until Kromer was discharged from the Sunnyside Sanitorium where he’d been transferred. Janet got a job writing for the Albuquerque Tribune and Kromer sent off reviews for The New Masses and articles for The Pacific Weekly, a liberal magazine recently started by Steffens and his wife, Ella Winters. He applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship but was turned down. He also began work on a new novel titled Michael Kohler based on his grandfather’s life as a coal miner.
And that was essentially the end of Tom Kromer’s career as a writer. Janet and Tom Kromer married in December 1936. His last article, “A Glass Worker Dies,” based on his father’s death, appeared in The Pacific Weekly the same month. Tom never finished Michael Kohler.
The Kromer House, 1968. Photo by Harvey Hoshour.
In 1937, the Kromers bought a lot in Alameda, on the north side of Albuquerque, where they constructed an adobe house still known as “the Kromer House.” Janet became the editor of the Tribune’s Women’s Page and supported the couple until her death from lung cancer in 1960. According to at least one account, by the late 1940s, tuberculosis and alcohol abuse had turned Tom into a recluse. After the war, Janet established a chatty weekly advertising paper known as Janet Kromer’s Shopping Notes and there is a chance that Tom contributed some of its material. He was, in any case, the named party when an upset local Albuquerque TV personality sued Janet’s Shopping Notes for libel over a suggestion that she was pregnant and taking a beauty course when she was neither.
By the time the suit was dismissed by the New Mexico Supreme Court in 1964, Tom Kromer had left the state. He sold the Kromer House to Harvey Hoshour, an architect, who later reported that the place had fallen into serious disrepair. Hoshour and his wife restored the house and it’s now listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Kromer moved back to Huntington and took a room in the same house on 4th Street he’d left in 1929. He lived there, cared for by his sisters Emogene and Katherine, until he died in 1969. He was buried in a family plot alongside his parents.
Kari Sund is a PhD student at Glasgow University working on a thesis about the Hollywood novel. She’s following in noteworthy footsteps: the late novelist and memoirist Carolyn See published her own dissertation, The Hollywood Novels: An Historical and Critical Study way back in 1963. I contacted Kari recently to ask if she’d share some recommendations from her wide reading in this genre, and she generously agreed.
What got you interested in novels set in Hollywood? Were you a film buff who got interested in literature or a literature buff who got interested in film?
Definitely the latter. I first became interested in the Hollywood novel when I was doing my Postgrad in American Literature, though the course didn’t focus on the genre. One of the texts on the core course was John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, and when I had finished reading this my Kindle recommended that I read Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, which I had never heard of, but absolutely loved. As both the works were published in 1939 and both were set in California during the depression era, I wanted to write about their differing depictions of the Western Dream in American Literature, drawing from Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893).
Around about the same time, I was writing my dissertation on the portrayal of alcohol, waste and occupation in the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and this led to me reading his unfinished Hollywood novel The Last Tycoon (1941). That set the ball rolling: the more Hollywood novels I read, the more I wanted to read. What most surprised me was the fact that until reading Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, I hadn’t come across discussion of the Hollywood novel as a genre. I had taken undergraduate modules on twentieth-century American literature, and a postgrad in American literature, but the genre hadn’t been covered and it wasn’t even mentioned in any of the American lit anthologies on my shelves. That added a layer of intrigue to the topic for me, which I find always helps when you are going down a rabbit-hole.
1. Merton of the Movies (1922) by Harry Leon Wilson.
This is perhaps the first Hollywood novel to become a best-seller. It’s interesting to compare what contemporary reviewers said to how the book’s remembered now. The New Republic’s reviewer, for example, said “for the thousands who will laugh with Mr. Wilson there are millions who might read his story and see nothing in it to laugh at at all.” Harry Leon Wilson has a reputation as a comic novelist (e.g., Ruggles of Red Gap): is this a comic novel or a tragi-comic novel?
For me Merton of the Movies is a tragi-comic novel, and it really surprises me how many scholars, critics and reviewers refer to Wilson’s work as simply comic. There is no doubt that it is laugh-out-loud funny at times. Merton is a small-town shop assistant who wants more from life and dreams of finding success as a serious actor. He moves to Hollywood, struggles at first, but eventually finds fame in slapstick Keystone Kops-style comedy westerns due to his remarkable likeness to an existing Western star.
The only problem is that Merton has a deep disdain for these comedies, seeing them as the lowest form of acting. But when a director recognises the humorous scenarios created by Merton’s tendency to take himself far too seriously, he exploits this, putting Merton in a comedy role without telling him. Merton thinks he has finally got the serious Western role of his dreams. This is hilarious, of course, but because all Merton’s colleagues and bosses on set are part of the ruse it’s also humiliating to witness. Merton finally reaches the level of fame and success he has long dreamed of, but by a means which he has always scorned – slapstick comedy – and so there’s a bittersweet element to this.
It’s definitely difficult to feel sympathy for Merton at times because he is pompous and judgemental, but Wilson’s novel speaks about the culture of the Hollywood film-factory utilising human beings for its own means, a culture which countless Hollywood novels would continue to explore into the 20s, 30s, and still do today. Merton can bring you tears of laughter and of pity, definitely a tragi-comic novel, and a wonderful read.
Some years ago in The New York Times, Nora Johnson called Merton of the Movies“>Merton of the Movies one of the Hollywood novels that had become “dated as old valentines in their innocence and their view of the movie capitol as exciting, amusing, certainly loony, but harmless on the whole.” Is this a fair accusation?
I don’t think this is entirely fair, no, mainly because I don’t feel that the novel depicts Hollywood as harmless. Wilson captures the excitement, or rather obsession, that people felt about potential fame and success in the field of acting, and that’s a dream that I don’t think has ever fully left Western culture. But with this obsession comes a resulting difficulty in distinguishing between reality and fantasy – another theme which Hollywood novels have continuously explored – and this is one of the main concerns of Merton of the Movies. Merton experiences delusions in his humdrum life back home, like getting into fights with mannequins at work as he envisions himself in a Western saloon scene, and becoming the laughing stock of the town when he tries to steal a local horse as his trusty steed.
After he has made the pilgrimage to Hollywood he ends up so destitute that he finds himself secretly living on film sets and nearly starving, and it is because his hold on reality is so loose that he is able to normalise this situation. He constantly filters the events of his own life as they might be depicted through a Hollywood memoir, or fan-magazine interview, with a famous star. Wilson’s narrative depicts these scenes in a comedic style, but Wilson himself was not a fan of Hollywood and there is an undeniably serious message in this novel about how harmful an extreme obsession with Hollywood, film, and the cult of celebrity can be.
The exploration of this theme has endured not only in fiction, but also in films about Hollywood and the West. Sunset Boulevard (1950), Mulholland Drive (2001), and more recently Ingrid Goes West (2017), all explore the distortion of reality through their character’s proximity to, or obsession with, Hollywood and celebrity. Ingrid Goes West links this to the use of social media in modern culture, exploring how we distort our own portrayals of reality via platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, and how these portrayals in turn impact our perceptions of our own lives. So, I don’t feel that Merton of the Movies“>Merton depicts Hollywood as harmless, nor do I think that the work is dated given that one of its main themes is still so relevant today. Johnson’s words do resonate in respect of one aspect of the novel though, and that is the fact that Merton still finds success in Hollywood, even if it isn’t his preferred role.
Scholars like John Parris Springer have observed that Wilson gives in to the fairy-tale perception that dreams really do come true, and I have to admit that I also find it disappointing that he somewhat endorses the idea that anyone could make it in Hollywood.1 This truly was a harmful message, one that was bringing thousands of starry-eyed young people to the film-capital in search of fame, only to be met with disappointment and sometimes destitution. Yet without this ending—Merton’s success—it would have been a completely different novel.
2. Minnie Flynn (1925) by Frances Marion
Frances Marion was the highest-paid screenwriter (of either sex) in the 1920s. What does Minnie Flynn tell us about Marion’s view of the industry she was so successful in?
This picks up where I’ve just left off with Merton of the Movies. In Cari Beauchamp’s compelling work Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood (1997), she writes that Marion wanted the novel to be “a warning to the thousands of women she saw pouring into Hollywood full of optimism and without the slightest idea of what lay ahead”.2 So Marion was open that this was a cautionary tale for young girls coming to Hollywood to try and make it as actresses.
At the time when Minnie Flynn was published, people were travelling to Hollywood in the thousands to find fame and success only to find that even extra roles were impossible to get because there was such a vast pool of hopefuls to select from. Hollywood had more budding actors than it needed. Marion’s message was that even for those young girls who did find work, it would not necessarily be the experience that they envisioned.
The novel follows a young girl, Minnie, who starts out as an extra in the East coast film industry. She is given an introduction by a minor actor she meets at a ball and who is interested in her romantically. Minnie doesn’t find massive stardom, but she does find moderate success and moves to Hollywood to continue her career.
Marion really emphasises the serious pitfalls, and one of the main ones is the loss of trust in friends and family members. Most of Minnie’s loved ones use her for what they can get when she is at the peak of her fame, and are nowhere to be found when she is down-and-out, it’s quite tragic. Then there is the added fact that, for most, fame rarely lasts.
Marion also makes it explicitly clear that women trying to make it as actresses were objectified sexually, often from a young age, as part-and-parcel of the casting process. This is one of the most significant aspects of the novel for me, as it reflects that a culture which still exists today – as we have seen in the last couple of years with the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the Me Too movement – has been deeply ingrained from the early years of silent film.
Marion confessed later that she spent four months writing the first four chapters and then finished the rest of the book in just six weeks. The “tough guy” novelist Jim Tully said she “was guilty of the artistic murder of a beautiful character.” Did you notice any significant shifts in style or quality in the course of the book?
I wasn’t aware of this when I was originally reading it, and I think it would lead to a different reading experience, so it makes me want to read the novel again! There are some aspects of the work which instantly come to mind. For example, Minnie moves from the East coast film industry to the West coast film industry, and her time in Hollywood is short in the grand scheme of the novel. I was surprised by just how much of the novel is set in the East and how little is set in the West, though this was also an aspect I enjoyed as I felt it highlighted the relevance of the East coast film industry to Hollywood, another topic which my thesis gives focus to.
As for Tully’s accusation, I guess the answer depends on how we consider Minnie as beautiful. From the start she’s described as physically beautiful but Marion also emphasises the many flaws of Minnie’s character: she is selfish, fickle, shallow, and pretty mean! If Tully means that the character was beautifully crafted, then I would agree, but I also felt the ending was effective, not rushed. Minnie ends up being used by partners, lovers, family members, and so-called friends. By the close of the book she is destitute, having lost her fame and her looks, and she’s punishing herself for her fate.
3. Twinkle, Little Movie Star (1927) by Lorraine Maynard.
This is a children’s book — what might be considered YA (Young Adult) fiction today. What interests you about this book in the context of your research?
Hollywood-related fiction for children plays a huge role in my research. The first film-related novels to be published about Hollywood were in the form of series-works for children, so they really hold a formative position in the genre, yet these and all works for children are consistently dismissed from scholarship. Because of this, I assumed that they would be irrelevant to the larger genre, yet when I started reading these works I was struck by the similarities in the themes they explore, but also by the fresh perspectives that they bring to the genre, and so I felt they warranted more attention.
The most interesting aspect of Twinkle for me is the depiction of a child star – Vivi Corelli – and that stars experience of working in the film-industry of the 1920s. The story is almost wholly set in Hollywood, bar a few visits for location shooting, yet the universe we encounter in the novel really exists in a vacuum of film sets through the eyes of a child. Through this novel, Lorraine Maynard depicts and condemns the working conditions for child actors by detailing the dangers which Vivi is at the mercy of because of those conditions. It also touches on the use of animals in the industry, as Vivi’s co-star is a beloved dog, Scamp.Illustration from Twinkle Little Movie Star
Would you consider Maynard’s child star, Vivi Corelli, a precursor to Shirley Temple?
Absolutely. Lorraine Maynard herself had worked as an actress for a short period of time when she was a teenager, so she would have had experience on film sets and in studios, and would have been familiar with the phenomenon of child stars in America. Variety also claimed that this work was allegedly based on “Baby Peggy” (Diana Serra Cary) who was one of the first child stars of the silent movie era, a real-life precursor to Shirley Temple.
4. Remember Valerie March (1939) by Katherine Albert
Like Frances Marion, Katherine Albert wrote from insider knowledge of working in Hollywood. Yet The New York Times reviewer wrote, “It would be shocking to think that her people represent a cross-section of Hollywood, and this reviewer is left unconvinced by the jacket’s assurance that such is true.” Having read a fair share of Hollywood books by now, how realistic did the book seem to you?
For me, this is a good example of a Hollywood novel being unfairly dismissed based on its authorship and the subcategory to which it belongs. The work is female-penned, focuses almost entirely on the career of an actress and has elements of romance and sensation in it. Having dissected bibliographies on the genre and having now read a fair amount of scholarship on it, works with these characteristics have often been dismissed since—and they were not even given serious attention at the time of publication either. There is nothing in this work which strikes me as more or less realistic than the next Hollywood novel.
Remember Valerie March takes the form of a mock star exposé narrated by Conrad Powers, who’d directed most of March’s films. It focuses on Valerie’s personality, her rise to fame, her acting roles and methods, and the events of her personal life. The writing is sometimes deliberately sensationalised due to it being a mock-exposé, yet the story remains believable. The New York Times review wasn’t the only one to disparage the work: Hollywood novelist and scriptwriter Budd Schulberg dismissed Valerie March, along with Minnie Flynn and a number of other works about women’s experience in Hollywood as “Glamour Books, glorified fan magazine stuff”.3
This was the common view of these works in the 1950s and there hasn’t been much to contradict this stance in Hollywood scholarship since. This is one of the reasons I feel these works warrant further exploration. Given the prevalence within the genre of surrealist novels like The Day of the Locust (1939), satires like Carroll and Garrett Graham’s Queer People (1930), and tongue-in-cheek works like Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One (1948), it does become difficult to distinguish this genre as “realistic”.
One thing that sets Remember Valerie March apart is the fact that Albert related the story through the voice and perspective of a male narrator–Conrad Powers, the director who discovered Valerie March. Why do you think Albert made this choice?
I’m not sure why, but it makes for a complex portrait of a Hollywood actress. In part, it’s a necessary measure to fit with the mock star-exposé form the narrative takes. At the time, the relationship between an actress and their director was something which film fan magazines and Hollywood gossip columns would often focus on as part of their preoccupation with revealing “insider” stories (and something we still read about in gossip magazines today!), so on more obvious level it would encourage an existing readership who were interested in Hollywood to buy the novel.
I don’t know if this was Albert’s conscious intention, but I also felt the narrative perspective highlighted the way in which women in Hollywood were—and often still are—filtered through male perspectives, and this is another reason why I selected this work for focus in my thesis. Conrad Powers has a close relationship with Valerie, and at times quite a strong ability to influence her decisions. I don’t think that Albert intended for the reader to always take Powers’ view of events at face value, but for them to question if there was a different perspective.
5. In a Lonely Place (1947) by Dorothy B. Hughes.
You’ve written that “For me, this is neglected in the sense that it’s not traditionally considered to be a Hollywood novel, but I think there’s a really strong argument for it being one!” How would you make that argument?
This ties in with a larger existing scholarly debate over how much of a link to Hollywood a Hollywood novel should have. Some critics think that a Hollywood novel should have a specific and significant geographical setting in Hollywood, while others feel that Hollywood doesn’t need to be a specific or central setting, but can be more of a “symbol rather than setting”, in the words of Jonas Spatz.4 To play devil’s advocate, I don’t really agree or disagree with either, or not yet anyway!
The genre has such an enormous and diverse collection of novels, all of which have varying degrees and forms of involvement with Hollywood as either a place or an industry. Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park (1951) isn’t even set in Hollywood, but with an overarching concern with the film industry and the people in that industry, no one can deny its status as a Hollywood novel. Then you have works like Remember Valerie March (1939), which are very distinctly set in Hollywood, painting a clear picture of living and working in Hollywood even down to what interior design is popular with the stars. Yet, as we have seen with the review you cited, it is still critically dismissed for being unrealistic or inaccurate.
In A Lonely Place (1949) hasn’t been discussed within the genre – to the best of my knowledge – and it isn’t recorded in any bibliographies of the genre, and I believe this is because of the book’s delicate involvement with Hollywood. Hughes goes to great lengths to utilise the geographical area, as the protagonist Dix Steele drives round specific streets at night, haunting hotspots where he *spoiler* looks for murder victims. The geographical element is very much there, but many would argue that there is no actual concern with Hollywood as none of the characters or plots are prominently involved in the film industry.
Much of Dix’s urge to kill, though, comes from a feeling of resentment which is clearly linked to class, money, and lifestyle. He pretends to be a novelist and tries to exude the casual superiority of a man of leisure. But, of course, this only betrays an inferiority. He is financially dependent on an uncle he hates, and the perpetual land of sunshine and beautiful film-people represents, for Dix, a fantasy which he has been shut out from after serving in the war.
His experience is such a truly stark contrast to the leisurely life which was consistently promoted in Hollywood through consumerism. This lifestyle was promoted through the films being produced, by the publicity machines of film studios, by the fan magazines, even in the shop windows you would pass as you walked down the street. The message was that this life of leisure was attainable if you only looked the part.
Dix is trying desperately to look the part but only feels an increasing sense of unbelonging that adds to his resentment. I would argue that there could be no better setting to fuel this type of resentment than Hollywood itself. So, though it might seem almost like an incidental setting – just the backdrop to a serial killer’s hunt – I think Hollywood is the essential setting for In A Lonely Place. I don’t think this novel could be set anywhere else and still have the same associations.
One last question: some people say that Hollywood and the movie business is an artificial environment, so fictions set there are inherently stilted or simplistic. Others say it’s an environment that distills, drawing out and intensifying aspects of the world at large. Where do you side?
From the Hollywood novels which I have read I think the genre tends to draw out and intensify aspects of the world at large. An idea which you come across frequently in scholarship on Hollywood and the Hollywood novel pre-1950s is that Hollywood was being perceived and portrayed in these novels as a “microcosm” of America. This idea doesn’t always resonate with me when I’m reading Hollywood novels, but I think in a great many of these works Hollywood is definitely being used to explore some of the larger social, cultural, and artistic concerns which people were experiencing at this time.
The early works I examine from the 1910s and 1920s reflect the changing perceptions of social class in America, women’s role in the workplace, concerns and excitement over industrialisation, invention, and technological advancements being made. I really haven’t read one Hollywood novel that I’ve found stilted or simplistic. Instead, even the least complex works still provide insight into significant aspects of the film industry and reflect larger concerns over cultural or societal issues, and if we are examining Hollywood and the film industry from a historical perspective these are extremely valuable insights.
Footnotes
1John Parris Springer. Hollywood Fictions: The Dream Factory in American Popular Literature. Norman. University of Oklahoma, 2000.
2Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood. California, University of California Press, 1997.
3Budd Schulberg. “The Hollywood Novel.” American Film (Archive:1975-1992), vol. 1, no. 7, May 01, 1976, pp. 28-32.
4Jonas Spatz. Hollywood in Fiction: Some Versions of the American Myth. Mouton, The Hague, 1969.
Kari provided the following profile: I’m studying for my PhD in American Studies at Glasgow University, and my thesis is on the Hollywood novel genre pre-1950s. Other research interests include F. Scott Fitzgerald, and particularly the role played in his novels of alcohol, work, and waste. As a part-time student I also spend my time working in financial services, hospitality and teaching. My Twitter handle is @karichsund and my email address is [email protected], would love to hear from anyone with similar research interests, or fellow part-time PhD students as it’s always nice to connect with those who have a shared experience of this!
For about five years now, Karen Langley (Kaggsy of Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambles) and Simon Thomas (of Stuck in a Book) have instigated a semi-annual event in which people around the world take a week to read and write about books published during a particular year. The next round, coming up the week of 5-11 October, will look at books from the year 1956.
1956 was a terrific year for what I might call good but not stuffily great books. Perhaps the best example is Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, which won her the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and which is much loved for the spirit embodied in its opening line: “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.” This was Macaulay’s last novel; also appearing in 1956 is Anthony Burgess’s first novel Time for a Tiger, the first book in his Malayan Trilogy.
To encourage folks to take advantage of the #1956Club while also discovering something beyond what’s readily available for instant download or overnight delivery, I’ve put together this list of 10 long-forgotten and out of print books from 1956.
A first and only novel about a jazz pianist working in Chicago. In the Sphere, Vernon Fane wrote, “Mr. Whitmore’s hero is an eccentric young man who describes himself as the last individual in the world, is a brilliant jazz pianist and, by his almost total independence, makes himself as many enemies as fans.” In the Guardian, Anna Bostock found Whitmore’s knowledge of Chicago and jazz “fascinating … with its own values, manners, and language, and the author’s sure command of these gives the novel something of the quality of a good travel book.” In the Observer’s year-end wrap-up, John Wain wrote that he’d under-praised Solo, “which has stayed in my mind very firmly since January, and show no sign of dissolving.”
A novel about the theater and all the personalities around it. In the New Statesman, Michael Crampton wrote that it “throbs with the passionate, false life of the stage. Everybody strikes poses, and there’s a good deal of sharp elbowing up right and down left in the crowd scences. But I find that green-room novels, like salted almonds, are insidiously to my taste.” Isabel Quigly praised Stern’s ability to manage a vast cast with sublime nonchalance. “For All We Know (a suitably airy title) is about one of those brilliant, fictional families with ramifications so complex that even with a family tree at the beginning you can hardly tell by the end exactly who is whose great-aunt or grandmother or second cousin. But it doesn’t really matter; what does is the frightful, fascinating buoyancy of plot, characters, conversations and, of course, plain narrative.”
One of Powys’s last books, described as a phantasmagoria and set in Wessex at the time of Roger Bacon. “A profusion of odd characters — barons, sorcerers, giants, enchantresses — appear and disappear, argue, tangle and disentangle, evacuate, copulate or die,” wrote Tom Hopkinson in the Observer. Hopkinson found the book a molten, formless mass — but didn’t think that mattered much. “The book’s chief quality,” he wrote, “lies in the author’s immense erudition and expansive kindliness of heart, which gleam, whenever they are allow to, through the boisterous confusion of action and the ceaseless babel of talk.” Both Stevie Smith and Angus Wilson named The Brazen Head one of their books of the year. “It is beautifully, deeply weird and also happy,” wrote Smith, while Wilson called Powys “still the most original living English writer.”
A novel about an English-educated Indian young woman in Bombay (Mumbai). Isabel Quigly found it seems—and maybe is—the first novel I remember reading which takes you right away from, right beyond, the confines of western thought. And so delicately that you barely notice, till afterwards, you have spent time in another world. The surface is perfectly familiar—a light, glittering, conversational style, dialogue that often recalls Mr. Waugh in his bright young days, action at just the right pace to keep you interested but not breathless, characters beautifully disposed and organised. ” “The worn old adjective ‘brilliant’ does really apply to this extraordinary eyocation of a way of life at once familiar and remote: and so deftly, so—in a brash, lighthearted way—femininely” Quigly concluded, “that you are half lulled into thinking it just another novel about social habits: which it is, but so very much more. And, I almost forgot to say, highly entertaining, at the idlest level of appreciation, as well.”
Mary Scrutton spoke for many potential readers when she wrote in the New Statesman, “I never met a more misleading title than Image of a Society. It sounds like yet another sociological survey. In fact it is rather like a good Arnold Bennett, only it is well written [posthumous apologies to Mr. Bennett]. It is about the people who work in a large Building Society in a provincial town, and more particularly about two of them—the ambitious, cocky, extrovert executive who is fancied as the next General Manager, and the sad, intellectual parent-ridden young solicitor who falls in love with that executive’s wife. Both men are most shrewdly studied, but not at the expense of the background; the whole movement of the office is tersely and wittily conveyed.” Scrutton had exceptional praise for Fuller’s skill: “It is a beautifully organised novel, all the more moving for being closely pruned. It gave me the feeling that I had when I first read Afternoon Men—namely, that most novelists never succeed in extracting the statue from the stone at all. No wonder it is often such hard work trying to enjoy them.”
This short novel drew upon Hersey’s years of living in China as the son of American missionaries. An American engineer travels by upon a junk up the Yangtze River in search of a location for a dam. But the story is more in the journey and the interactions between the young Westerner and the members of the crew, lead by a man known as Old Pebble. Howard Mumford Jones wrote that the book’s narrative “is merely the occasion of the novel, not the substance of Mr. Hersey’s art. He wonderfully succeeds in purveying the slow, dreamlike journey up this ancient river. We move with the junk as if under enchantment and are as helpless as the teller of the story to alter the drift of event or comprehend the Chinese enigma.” Santha Rama Rau found that Hersey “captured all the magic, the terror and the drama of that extraordinary stretch of water.” John Wain called it “the most distinguished book I read in the year — the one I would have least hope of ever being able to emulate.”
A short novel about the encounter between two drifters and a farm family they meet on a road in South Africa. John Wain gushed about the book in his Observer review: “A Dance in the Sun is a beautiful performance, a model of how to treat a vastly complicated subject without over-simplifying, and yet without ever becoming confused. As a novel of suspense, it could be enjoyed in the simplest way, but I doubt if anyone will be able to keep his reaction dewn to this level; the real subject of the book, race relations in South Africa, is so insistently present that it will touch and move the stupidest and most calious reader.” “Altogether,” Wain concluded, “one might, without absurdity, put this novel on the same shelf with A Passage to India — and that is a very small shelf.”
A short, simple, almost artless story about a holy guru living as a hermit on an island in the Ganges and the quite unholy measures he takes when he encounters competition in the form of Dr. Mishra, who wants to set up his own commune on a neighboring island. It’s a bit parable, a bit human comedy, and a bit distillation of Godden’s many years of observing Indian manners and thought. “This gravely mischievous fairy tale has a moral too good to give away,” wrote John Davenport. “A singularly charming book.”
Jamie Is My Heart’s Desire left many reviewers flummoxed but impressed. In the Listener, Sean O’Faolain wrote that it was “impossible to summarise … all a matter of mood, atmosphere, place, temperament: New York in a strangely, Parisian dress, more Baudelaire than Bonwit Teller.” The hero lives above a funeral parlor, hangs out with a deadbeat novelist, a one-eyed priest, and a warm-hearted social worker. The trappings and atmosphere of the mortuary seeps into everything in the book — “Only the vampires are missing,” O’Faolain joked. He was not entirely off the mark in writing that “Mr. Chester is a real writer; corrupted, somehow, astray somewhere, probably in French Lit., and exile — I hazard the guess.” “Would Mr. Alfred Chester, present whereabouts unknown, please return home immediately where his talent lies seriously ill?” O’Faolain pleaded.
The second of only three novels that Boylen wrote before dying at the age of 46, The Marble Orchard takes the Southern Gothic sensibilities of Flannery O’Connor and sets them down in the middle of Iowa, where Boylen grew up. Lovey Claypoole, a girl blinded as a result of one of her tinkerer-inventor father’s failed experiments, spends many hours roaming the graveyard — the marble orchard of the title — and talking with her town’s outcasts. Orville Prescott, the New York Times’s oracle of the time, only read the book because his daughter forced it on him. “I had to find’ out for myself about this strange novel which some people liked so much and some people disliked so heartily,” he later wrote. “Sometimes its crackling rainbow prose seems so artificial that all sense of reality is lost. But far more often Lovey’s extraordinary talent for the imaginatively right word, for the concrete detail that will bring a whole episode into life, for a fantastic but wonderful figure of speech, makes reading The Marble Orchard an exhilarating experience.
In the end, Prescott found the book “so original in matter and manner, so startling in its verbal acrobatics and so witty in a raffish and bizarre fashion unlike anything ever printed on paper before that it ought to make Mrs. Boylen famous.” It did not, of course. But as Prescott acknowledged, “Queerly brilliant books are all too often ignored.”
If you’re running out of time to locate one of these ten neglected titles, however, here are some others worth at look. These well- or somewhat well-known and in print titles from 1956 are almost enough to tempt me to divert from my path through the land of the neglected:
Ackerley’s loving memoir of his Alsatian dog Queenie (whose name was changed to Tulip out of concerns over inferences about Ackerley’s homosexuality) was turned into an animated feature with Christopher Plummer in the lead in My Dog Tulip in 2009. Both the film and the book are well worth looking for.
Settle’s third novel and the second volume in what would ultimately become known as the Beulah Quintet, O Beulah Land is about the early settlement of the Ohio Territory. Like all of Settle’s books, it combines deep tenderness towards nature and emotion with absolutely unflinching depiction of the violence that runs through so much American history.
This was really the first novel that made English language readers sit up and realize that Latin American novelists were coming up with something new — the sizzle before the Latin American boom, if you will.
A huge book (~800 pages) and a huge bestseller, this account of the grim conditions in the notorious Confederate Andersonville prison camp — particularly coming after World War Two and the grim images of Nazi concentration camps — helped offset (somewhat) the nostalgia for the antebellum South embodied in that other doorstopping bestseller, Gone with the Wind.
Technically, this only qualifies for the #1956Club for readers in the UK, where it was published about nine months later than its appearance in the US and Australia. Like The Lost Steps, The Tree of Man was a book that made readers in the Northern Hemisphere sit up and realize that great fiction that wasn’t just English stories transplanted were being written in Australia.
Moberg published the first of his four volume Emigrants series in 1949, but it first reached English readers in 1956. In a fair world, we’d recognize it as one of the better candidates for the Great American Novel: taken together, the four books are the closest thing we have to an epic of the American Dream in all its complexities.
Kennaway’s first novel, later made into a terrific film starring Alec Guinness, Tunes of Glory is a favorite with many a soldier for its knowing depiction of the turnover of traditions and generations that’s inherent in the history any military unit that wants to remain effective.
Angus Wilson was just nine years older than Kingsley Amis but he unjustly got labeled as an old man (in contrast to the Angry Young Men), despite the fact that his satirical blade cut far deeper and sharper than Amis’s. I’m not sure he had the best judgment in his choice of titles, either, which is a shame. I’d take Anglo-Saxon Attitudes over Lucky Jim any day of the week.
Although I prefer McCarthy as a critic than as a novelist, I had to include this book — which Edward Albee had to have read before writing “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — because it is so much better than the book she’s best known for (which need not be named).
Another example where the novelist’s best known book pales in comparison to a somewhat lesser known work. I remember the impact when I realized, late in the book, was Golding was doing, what really was the fate of Pincher Martin. It was like that moment in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road when we learn that April Wheeler is dead: a punch in the chest that takes your breath away in shock.
So much life, so much suffering, so much death is packed into the under-200 pages of this novel about the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. An antidote for anyone who gave up without finishing Midnight’s Children
Lionel and Diana Trilling in the 1940s Diana Trilling started writing weekly book reviews for The Nation magazine in early 1942 and kept at it for most of the next seven years. Collected in her 1978 book, Reviewing the Forties, her reviews offer a fascinating glimpse into the state of English-language fiction at mid-century.
She came to the job in part through the reputation of her husband Lionel Trilling, but she came well-prepared, having been Lionel’s copy writer for over a decade. As Paul Fussell wrote in his preface to this collection, “as a critic, Diana Trilling has range; she is not satisfied to leave literature sitting there uninterpreted in its fullest psychological, social, and political meaning, for she perceives that “literature is no mere decoration of life but an index of the health or sickness of society.”
Books, for Diana, were either decent or indecent, vulgar or civilized, responsible or irresponsible. Forget the hundreds of skewered writers who have gone down into oblivion; routinely, she also took apart the likes of John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Evelyn Waugh, Arthur Koestler. Reviewing Truman Capote’s debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, in 1948, she wrote: “I find myself deeply antipathetic to the whole artistic-moral purpose of Mr. Capote’s novel…. I would freely trade 80 percent of his technical virtuosity for 20 percent more value in the uses to which it is put.”
As Tobi Haslett wrote in The New Yorker, also reviewing Robins’ book, Diana Trilling’s “gimlet-eyed assurance that has not always aged well.” Trilling was already developing a reputation for being, as Marjorie Perloff put it, “a difficult, at times unpleasant woman — self-absorbed, arrogant, catty and competitive — who managed, sooner or later, to alienate just about everyone she knew.” Not that she couldn’t be entertaining when she had her knives out. I love this assessment of that domesticated English favorite, Angela Thirkell:
Advertised as a pleasant bundle of froth, Angela Thirkell is in fact quite a grim little person. For all her gentle voice, she is one of the great haters on the contemporary fictional scene. She hates sex, the movies, and the lower classes, except an occasional half-wit mechanic. The cousin of Rudyard Kipling, she hates “natives” and foreigners; she hates servants, except the governess who can frighten the grown son of a peer by asking him if his hands are clean.
Trilling’s standing as a critic has fallen considerably since her death. She is dismissed for having slammed the likes of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jean Stafford, Saul Bellow, and Christopher Isherwood, while praising a few number of now-forgotten novelists.
It’s this point, however, that interested me in Reviewing the Forties. While many seem to think that Trilling’s criticism of books now considered classics such as 1984 imply that she was also dead wrong about the writers she liked, I’ve read enough to know that forgotten-ness is never a reliable indication of whether a book is worth reading. Here, then, is a sample of some of the now-neglected books that Trilling gave her thumbs-up to:
… written when Miss Athas was only twenty-two, her first published work, is strikingly talented. It is also an admirable attempt to put sensibility at the service of growth rather than of self-pitying retreat.
There is much fantasy in our literature of sensibility but it is predominantly narcissistic, unable to move beyond the range of the writer’s self-love. The fantasy in Miss Athas’s novel is almost frighteningly unhampered. On the one hand, Miss Athas can generate large dramatic conflict out of something as seemingly trivial as the murder of a pet canary. On the other hand, she can match Faulkner in the imagination of aberrant behavior. Her story is set in Maine and even her descriptions of landscape and weather are free and bold. It is only in her statement of the source of Eliza Wall’s sexual fears that Miss Athas works by rote, looking to the textbook.
A social-work novel, despite the fact that it is unsparing in its criticism of that profession, Lilly Crackell is the most estimable novel I have read this week. A story of America’s lower depths, Lilly Crackell traces the career of a young girl raised in the squalor that is so apt to fringe American prosperity. When we first meet Lilly it is 1918; Lilly is a lovable child of fourteen, about to become the mother of an illegitimate baby. Twenty-four years later Lilly is the mother of six children and still the victim of almost unbelievable misery and privation.
Mrs. Slade … writes barely and factually with none of the “literary” overtones that make poverty good reading: it is unlikely that Lilly Crackell will have a fraction of the popular appeal of The Grapes of Wrath. But the book is no less courageous: it takes courage to make explicit the meaning of the war for people who have never had a chance to be anything but a drain on society.
Mrs. Morris has published a volume of short stories but I am unacquainted with the earlier work. Her novel is set in Sweden where she was bom, and has two heroines, the sisters Anna and Jezza, who tell their firstperson stories in alternating chapters. Both girls are excruciatingly precious, and precious to themselves; self-love seems to be a concomitant of sensibility in women writers, and Mrs. Morris is one of those oh-the-aching-wonder-of-it-all literary women for whom a snowflake or a sausage is equally an occasion for ecstasy. Yet whatever my dislike of so much quiver, I have to admit Mrs. Morris’s talent. Cumulatively, her sensibility loses some of its exacerbation and even begins to take effect; after the first hundred pages I found myself acutely aware of the charm of her village in northern Sweden, almost as nostalgic for it as if I had myself known it. And it is certainly no denigration of Mrs. Morris’s gifts to say that she frequently invites comparison with better writers than herself: for example, her gallery of decayed gentlewomen — Anna and Jezza’s aunts — is suggestive of Chekhov, and the spiritual stature which she can give to the life of privacy suggests Isak Dinesen.
[It] wears no air of importance, is entirely understandable and even lively, it must be singled out from the run of current fiction: these are rare, if relative, virtues. It is some time since I have read a novel whose author comes through his book so attractively. Even where Mr. Newhouse’s manner is less than striking and his characters less dimensional than is their human privilege, we see the former fault as a defect of modesty, the latter as a defect of kindliness.
Like most good South American fiction, The Horse and His Shadow is a revolutionary novel but unlike the revolutionary fiction of our own country, it is subtle, fluid, deeply concerned with the drama of human relationships. The action moves between the estancia of Nico Azara, outside Montevideo, and the community of Polish refugees and poor natives who live on the fringes of Nico’s lands. On the estancia itself there is every shade of political opinion. In addition to the peons at the one extreme, and the arrogant Nico at the other, there is Adelita, Nico’s wife, an aristocrat of decent liberal opinions; there is Bica, her servant and illegitimate half-sister, who lives in lonely severity among the men ranchers; there is Marcelo, Nico’s brother, sought by the government for his part in smuggling refugees into Uruguay. Mr. Amorim doesn’t measure either the decency and courage or the weakness of these people by the famihar yardstick of their social-political views….
Even the poor people in Mr. Amorim’s novel, the gauchos and the struggling refugees, are shown naked of grandeur in an amazing scene in which two of their number steal the services of Don Juan for a broken-down mare. What Mr. Amorim is saying is what is too seldom said in fiction these days, that it is by both the new and the old, by the mixture of good and evil, by the progressive and the retarding, that society must advance, and he says it in the only way fruitful for the novelist, through drama and even melodrama.
[T]he surprise literary package of the season, the most thoughtful and talented novel I have read this year. Mr. Wolfert is correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance, a Pulitzer prize-winner in reporting, and author of The Battle of the Solomons but he turns out to be that rare creature, a newspaperman with a notable gift for creative writing. Tucker’s People is an outstanding novel, the simple statement of whose theme—the numbers racket in Harlem—gives no hint of its emotional and intellectual scope. Tucker’s People is a study in gangsterism; its characters are racketeers, politicians, hangers-on, police, and their families. But this is no Damon Runyonesque novel of the underworld; Mr. Wolfert talks out of his head, not out of the corner of his mouth. He views gangsterism as an aspect of our whole predatory economic structure and at least by implication his novel is as much a novel of legitimate American business as it is of racketeering.
In the sense that Mr. Wolfert is attacking the entire system of capitalism, he has of course written a “radical” novel, but it is in the sense that his method is the method neither of pamphleteering nor of rabble-rousing but the method of anatomizing society by anatomizing people that his novel is truly radical.
…although not so direct in its romantic appeal as Kabloona, the same writer’s account of his stay among the Esquimos, is still one of the notable books of recent years, shining out of the mist of most current writing with the full light of M. de Poncins’s remarkable personality. To read the books of M. de Poncins is to be unusually aware of their author: he seems at once very worldly and very internalized, monastically intense in spirit. One has the impression of an intelligence peculiarly of the French aristocratic tradition, and indeed Home Is the Hunter is a reconstruction — or a commemoration — of the almost feudal background against which, we can guess, M. de Poncins was himself bred. It is published as fiction but it is not strictly a novel. Rather, it is both elegiac poetry and penetrating sociological research into a culture which was already vanishing glory when the author was a small child before the first war.
The writer Trilling singled out for her greatest praise was a favorite of neglected book fans: Isabel Bolton. Of Bolton’s debut novel, Do I Wake or Sleep, she wrote:
Isabel Bolton’s Do I Wake or Sleep is quite the best novel that has come my way in the four years I have been reviewing new fiction for this magazine. Small, anonymous in the welter of current books, it might very well have escaped my notice had Edmund Wilson not called attention to it in the New Yorker: the possibility of such an oversight will now become my reviewer’s nightmare. Mr. Wilson’s high praise prepared me, however, only for a work of exceptional talent. It did not prepare me — nothing but reading the book could — for the extraordinary process of revelation that Miss Bolton’s novel turned out to be.
Opening as a minor work of poetic sensibility, the kind of writing which Miss Bolton herself goes on to describe as achieved with the nerves rather than with the deeper centers, Do I Wake or Sleep gradually deepens to become a work of compelling insight; then the story progresses a bit farther, and the intelligence that one has hitherto noted simply as a restraining force upon poetic excess slowly proclaims its dominion over the novel’s whole conception; finally one confronts the real shape and intellectual strength of the book, and recognizes the source of and response to a major fictional experience.
I have no idea who Miss Bolton is: the jacket of the novel is provocatively uninformative. Whoever she is, she is the most important new novelist in the English language to appear in years. Whatever her literary apprenticeship, her book—it is a long novelette, really, rather than a novel—is the achievement of a fully matured artist.
When Bolton’s second novel, The Christmas Tree, came out three years later, Trilling proclaimed that Bolton had established herself “as the best woman writer of fiction in this country today”:
Miss Bolton works like a mosaic-maker, piecing together bits of scenes and persons—but it is a full panorama and a full cast, though given us in such tiny fragments—until finally, in unbelievably small compass, the whole pattern and intention are laid out before us. By what miracle of selection and organization she catches in 212 pages all we need to know of four generations of her Danforths, a story which in the hands of any other writer would have been a giant tome, is a not-to-be-fathomed secret of her craft. She could not have done it, one is sure, had she used a different narrative manner. The reader may be too conscious of, even irritated by, her long Proustian sentences but they admirably connect past and present, and permit Miss Bolton to recollect, create, and comment upon, all at the same time and with greatest economy.
The sweet spot for my individual strain of nostalgia is right around 1965. That was about the time I began to get an allowance and to be free to wander around on my own — which, taken together, meant I could go to Saturday matinees, buy comic books, baseball card, and model airplanes, and eat at the snack bar. In other words, begin to exist as a semi-autonomous consumer of then-contemporary culture. I knew, of course, that I was on the outside of the real world — the adult world — but at least now I could press my face up against the glass.
There were many things about the adult world I didn’t understand, but there were a few things that I knew for sure belonged to adulthood. Driving and cars, of course. Smoking and drinking. Hairdos for women and suits and ties for men. Cocktail parties and dancing. These were all things I saw my parents doing, wearing, going to, talking about — but the guides to the adult world I trusted most were magazines like Life, Time, and (when I could sneak a peak at it) my dad’s Playboys.
From LIFE magazine, 1965: Debutante Anne Morris on a date at The Embers in Manhattan.
The adult world I saw in the ads and photo spreads in these magazines is the world of Edwin Gilbert’s The Beautiful Life (1966). Everything that constituted “the beautiful life” — the life led by the best people, the in-est of all the In Crowds — as represented in the magazines can be found here. Slim, straight-line, minimalist dresses; Twiggy-style short hairdos; glamorous women in evening gowns on the arms of rich, handsome men in tuxedos; discotheques and designer living rooms; pop art and dinners at the Four Seasons.
As a work of fiction, it’s moderately above average. Gilbert made his living writing well-constructed but somewhat superficial novels that offered readers glimpses into worlds they probably didn’t have access to: the late-stage 400 (Silver Spoon, 1957); silver salver diplomacy (The New Ambassadors, 1961); Detroit auto executives (American Chrome, 1965); old money (Newport, 1971). He was a craftsman whose sales and reputation depended more on consistency than genius.
This shows most in Gilbert’s choice of protagonists. Bayard Burton “Grove” Grovenour is a 30-something heir with old money and new ideals. He and his daisy-fresh wife Rosemary return from the Siberia of suburban Connecticut to dive into the deep end of Manhattan life, taking a penthouse apartment at 1027 Fifth Avenue as their modest pied-a-terre. Grove wants to save New York from godless modernistic architecture and city planning. Rosemary just wants to belong. Grove fails spectacularly; Rosemary manages to reach the epicenter of In-ism, becoming the icon everyone wants at their party or on their magazine spreads. But none of that much matters: they are merely the jetsam Gilbert tosses in to lure the sharks, remoras, and other prey and parasites of High Society.
It’s not the story that matters here, anyway. The best way to enjoy The Beautiful Life is as a time-capsule. It’s like a trip back to the poshest parts of Manhattan when to be rich, young, and white in Manhattan was to be at the apex of the food chain.
But that’s not what makes the book interesting. Grove, Rosemary, and all their rich friends are, after all, pretty dull stuff. It’s the ecosystem that serves, entertains, dresses, drives, houses, feeds, doctors, and otherwise supports them Gilbert meticulously documents that raises The Beautiful Life above its mid-60s airplane reading peers.
Gilbert structures his book as a series of set-pieces, each taking place at a specific address, each hosted by a particular enabler, starting with Andrew, the doorman of 1027 Fifth Avenue. Andrew “knows his air of solicitude is both pleasing and proper to their rank (or what they might wish their rank to be)” and maintains careful control of the hierarchy of the building’s tenants through the nuances of his service. Mrs. Alfreda Peysen, 44-year resident and minked-and-bejeweled heiress, gets “his warmest (seniority) greeting.” Young Mr. Grovenour, newly-arrived and prone to poking around at the base of the trees along the sidewalk, on the other hand, gets just enough politeness to cover up Andrew’s contempt.
Next, we meet Katherine Reeves, the stiff-coifed, tight-lipped real estate agent who shows the Grovenours their prospective apartment. Their judgment of the place, of course, is far less important than her approval of them. She finds “simple satisfaction from passing judgment on the lowly and on the highly who come within the precinct of her verdicts.” As a result, Gilbert tells us, she is “one of the happiest of human beings.”
Smirnoff ad from LIFE magazine, 1965, with Killer Joe Piro and Skitch Henderson.
Gilbert’s tour of High Society’s courtiers and household staff continues with a visit to Big D’s, the Park Avenue discotheque where DJ Ray Noonan (a surrogate, perhaps, for Killer Joe Piro) takes control over a crowd of the idle and powerful each night:
Watch him now: a record is playing on the first turntable; a second record is already silently spinning on the second turntable; a third is in place. As the first disc nears its rockrolling end, Roy deftly drops the arm onto the second platter so that one overlaps the other and he reaches to the control panel and juices up the volume so that the changeover is made with kinetic brilliance; and then he dials it down again and prepares the record to go next on turntable number three.
But this is not the artistry for which he is paid. Roy’s gift lies in his ability to pace the dancers, and to anticipate their moods: Is the Frug blasting too long? Is the age group changing? Is fatigue or boredom seeping in? Has he caught the signal from the bar that business needs to be escalated?
Roy, an ex-GI from Oklahoma who quietly seeds his fat tips into a house for his family in Queens, has classified all the fauna that congregate on his dance floor: “the old Crust and the young Crust, the Cafe Mafia, the Jets, the Pop people, and a few, a very few Just Plain Money.”
Gilbert’s tour continues with a lunch visit to Le Trianon, overseen by Claude Troube, who enforces the restaurant’s code with a velvet-gloved iron hand:
His attention is also sensitive to the welfare of the diners, particularly to those who are new to his tables, those who might violate any of a number of decrees: pipes and cigars are interdit; cigarettes are permitted but not between courses. It is also to be understood that since too many martinis before dining anesthetizes the senses, the waiter will not serve more than one, possibly two, cocktails; but not a soupçon more. As for the so-called health diets of some Americans who fuss about the use of butter, cream or salt — such idiocies will not be tolerated here.
In the course of the book, we meet Chet Darnell, the fresh-faced juvenile of 46 who tickles the ivories for the private parties of the most exclusive clientele; Lorio, maître d’ “haute coiffure who turns each customer “from a flat-heeled, over-scrubbed, dull-suited, tight-curled nonentity into a chicly shod, clad and coiffed creature of infinite allurement’; Martine, who dresses them at her by-name only boutique, and Dolores the masseuse, catering to the oft-divorced and accustomed to “working on the same body while the name keeps changing.”
From LIFE magazine 1966: “At Arthur, in New York, the country’s most famous discotheque, the patrons lend a bizarre air to the club, arrayed before a Mondianesque background in their Op art mad rags. In foreground is director, Sybil Burton Christopher.”
We hang out in the chauffeur’s room in the garage of 1027 Fifth Avenue and in the apartment of Hank Hartley, art dealer to the elite, who helps them cover their walls “with paintings of monumental cheeseburgers, colossal Coke bottles, cans of baked beans, soaring syringes, F.B.I, posters, ceiling-high photos of Clara Bow’s face and Elizabeth Taylor’s mouth, and many other fine artworks of this genre.” We visit the atelier of Waldo Stryker — Andy Warhol stand-in — who produces these paintings to fund the art films he forces his patrons to endure:
There followed a shadowy view of an amorphous room which contained a bed on which lay a long-haired, pock-faced girl in white leotards; she was reading a book and she would wriggle around sporadically, and then putting the book aside would stare languidly to her left. The camera would hold on her for what seemed an interminable time as she stretched her body and began undulating in a clumsy and prolonged exhibition of sexual frustration or, if you chose, desperate longing for human recognition and affection. Alternating with these views, the camera would swing leftward to show nearby a brutish young man of outsized shoulders and biceps, attired in the glossy black deep-sea diving gear of a frogman, as he kept checking his twin-tubed oxygen tanks and his elongated spear gun, working away with total masculine preoccupation.
In silence the film’s monochromatic images continued their alternating rhythms with absolutely no variety and with no regard for time until the final shot, which was sustained for nine minutes as the camera held on the girl’s blemished face, the only relief coming when a fly, which touched down on her cheek, caused her to twitch the insect away.
As we swirl along through the haunts of the hoi-polloi, we watch as earnest Grove is discreetly shuffled off to the fringe as an idealistic nut-case and Rosemary becomes a star entrant in the popularity contest, “in full combustion as she hastened her pace, projecting her personality, driving fiercely to hold onto her rating in the popularity poll, the trophy that confirmed her position as one of the prize tigers running in the annual New York In-ism Sweepstakes.” The lesson, I suppose, is that success is hollow, but Gilbert makes Grove’s righteous failure look pretty hollow, too. The only characters who truly seem happen in this book are all the extras who open the doors, spin the records, tinkle the ivories, drive the cars, and otherwise make sure that the Good Life, if not really all that good, is at least comfortable. They seem to have the wisdom to stay on the sidelines of the Rat Race and carefully manage the bits of cheese they collect.
You can have your Jane Austens, or go back to the Regency days courtesy of Georgette Heyer, or the tea-cosy days courtesy of E. M Delafield. When I’m suffering from a serious spell of nostalgia, keep that land spreadin’ out so far and wide — just give me Manhattan in ’65.
The Beautiful Life, by Edwin Gilbert New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966
It’s a little surprising, given how George Floyd’s dying words “I can’t breathe” have been heard around the world and ignited such widespread protests against institutional racism and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, that no one has noted their echo in the title of Ronald Fair’s novel We Can’t Breathe. A largely autobiographical novel of growing up as a black child in Chicago during the Second World War and after, Fair called it “the work of my lifetime, the book I’ve been trying to write for 10 years.”
Its central theme is that of finding a way to achieve some success as a black man in a white man’s world while maintaining some remnant of self-respect. All the ingredients of ghetto life are here: poverty, prejudice, drugs, numbers runners, petty crimes, gospel churches and corner gangs, rotten landlords and decent hard-working people being ground down by the daily friction of life. Fair’s fictional self, Ernie, narrates the story retrospectively, speaking as one who has managed to escape the worst effects of this childhood.
Ernie and four of his friends form a band after they are tormented and mocked by a group of older boys. “The five of us were brothers now, and we had to fight the others for fear that they would rob us of what little manhood we had. We had to fight the others, otherwise we would have lived in such fear of them that we would not have been able to breathe.” As they grow, they confront the threats of their world: gangs and dope dealers; the ferocious, relentless rats that infest their basements and alleys; and the prejudice of most of the white people they come in contact with. At times, they find themselves in situations where the only options are fight or flight, others where it’s a choice between surrendering — or bullshitting one’s way out.
One of the boys, Willie, takes the latter approach when caught shoplifting in a white store. “Catch the nigger before he gets away!” one of the clerks screams. he coolly walks up to her, sticks a finger in her face, and asks, “Bitch, just who the hell you think you callin a nigger?” When the manager responds by slamming him against a counter shouting, “But you were stealing, boy, and you know that’s wrong,” Willie shifts gears and adopts the stereotype of the chasten, contrite Uncle Tom:
I sho do, suh, but I had to do it to get some money for my baby sister,” he lied. “We ain’t got no food at home. Honest. We ain’t even got no bread. You know what it’s like, mister, you know, to be hungry — I mean to be real hungry? My mama left home las week and ain’t nobody there to take care of the baby cep me and I had to do somethin cause we so hungry. I didn’t know what to do, mister, I swear I didn’t. I thought if I stole somethin I could maybe, you know, sell it and get some money for food. Know what I mean? Ain’t gonna call no police, are you? Please don’t, mister, please. Please. I’m sorry.
Willie proceeds to lay out a woeful tale designed to induce maximum sympathy and swears to come work sweeping out the store’s basement — knowing full well that the white manager wouldn’t recognize him if he walked into the store the very next day.
Ernie is a little luckier than his friends. Though he’s exposed to the same environmental and institutional obstacles, his mother and father stay together, they eat together each night, and no matter how dismal their apartment, he has his own bed to sleep in each night. His father encounters humiliating discrimination in trying to work in a defense plant and becomes for a time an angry and abusive drunk, but he finds a way out and Ernie has more of a sense of home and family than Willie and the others.
He also has the luck to encounter a friendly, and for the time, exceptionally enlightened English teacher in junior high school. She sees some promise in his awkward attempts at writing and gives him a book to take home and read. “I thought reading was a drag,” he recalls.
I had spent years reading about white children on farms, white men at their work, white mothers at their household chores, white animals with black spots, white families going on picnics, white grandparents coming from the country to visit their children and grandchildren, white soldiers, white generals, white sailors, white naval captains, white admirals, white explorers, white heroes, white traitors, white pilots—white-white-white-white-white everybodies with white everything they did being about as interesting to me as all of the white teachers I had had who really did not give a damn if I ever learned to read or spell or write or think.
The book Mrs. Taylor gives Ernie is a biography of Toussaint l’Ouverture, the black general who led the Haitian revolution against the Spanish and the French. After resisting it for weeks, Ernie picks it up while staying home sick and is thunderstruck. “A Negro general,” he tells his mother. “Wow, Mom, I never knew there was a Negro general did anything anywhere. A Negro! Wow, Mom, I gotta read this whole book.”
With Mrs. Taylor’s encouragement, Ernie begins to write stories set in the world he’s grown up in. When she returns his first piece, however, he is surprised at her corrections. “I was shocked to see how many times she had drawn a line through the word ‘mothafucka.'” Thinking back on the experience, he reflects,
I realize that it was a story about a mothafuckin bunch of fuckin drunks in a rotten fuckin mothafuckin town with a mess of mothafuckin other mothafuckas, fuckin around and fuckin up their lives and every other mothafuckin person in the mothafuckin neighborhood who was unfortunate enough to live in the mothafuckin city with all the fucked-up mothafuckin white people fuckin over the black mothafuckas all the fuckin time. The story ended with the only way to get out of the mothafuckin trouble in the mothafuckin world was to end up as a mothafuckin dead man, six mothafuckin feet under the mothafuckin ground.
“Is this really the way they talk?” she asks him. When he replies, “Yes, ma’am,” she responds — and here I suspect we are dealing with fiction rather than autobiography — “If that’s the way some of the people you know really talk, then I suppose I had no right to change their language.”
Ronald Fair on the cover of his 1975 chapbook, Excerpts
Perhaps this did occur. Perhaps Fair did have such an open-minded, sympathetic teacher at some point. But this anecdote illustrates why We Can’t Breathe, although undoubtedly a highly accurate picture of black life in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, fails to satisfy as a work of fiction. Ernie emerges as a young man largely unscathed. He is the survivor, but his survival seems to owe much to — well, either luck or predestination. “I had been granted immunity by the gods or by God or by the natural order of things,” he writes, “because I had been given a vision of survival without dehumanization. I would survive in spite of what happened to everyone around me.” It is hard to empathize with a character who comes off as a bit of a Teflon man. And to be honest, throughout the book, Fair’s anger is often muted by a certain amount of nostalgia for his good old days, no matter how unlikely he’d really want to turn back the clock.
George Davis, reviewing We Can’t Breathe in the New York Times, saw it as weaker overall than Fair’s first novel, Many Thousand Gone, which had been published seven years earlier and which Davis called “One of the most beautifully written books of the last decade.” Readers who turn to Many Thousand Gone for beautiful writing, however, are in for a shock. Fair subtitled the book A American Fable, but it bears little resemblance to anything Aesop ever wrote — unless there’s a version of “The Tortoise and the Hare” floating around somewhere that ends with the tortoise eating the hare.
The premise of Many Thousand Gone is simple and gut-wrenching: in a little quadrant in the middle of Mississippi called Jacobs County, wholly owned and run by the Jacobs family, slavery has never ended. Tiny, unimportant, in the midst of a state resentful of its status after the war, and surrounded by sympathetic counties, Jacobs County has managed to keep history from moving past 1864. Few outsiders — and definitely no black ones — are allowed in. The only way out for the slaves is escape. Letters in and out are censored. Black men who show any sign of resistance are beaten to death and buried. All black women are considered fair game for any white man to take in the bushes and rape.
Although Samuel Jacobs, the founder of Jacobs County, had originally strived to keep his slaves of pure black blood, over the decades the policy of his descendants towards rape has meant that there are fewer and fewer pure black babies. When the last of these is born, Granny Jacobs — like most of the black residents, she carries the name of the county’s founder — dubs him “the Black Prince” and vows to arrange his escape. When he is still a teenager, she carries out an elaborate plan by which she smuggles him to a friendly black family in a nearby county while convincing the sheriff of Jacobs County that the young man has died. The family takes him to Chicago, where he becomes a writer. The episode cannot help but bring to mind the story of King Herod and the infant Jesus.
The catalyst that sets off the chain reaction that destroys the century-long status quo in Jacobs County is when the Black Prince publishes a book about the town. He sends his grandmother a copy of Ebony with an article about it. The censor in the Jacobsville post office passes it to the sheriff, who recognizes immediately the danger in allowing the slaves in his county — all but one, the preacher, kept illiterate — see photos of black people living better than most of the whites they knew. “I can tell you one thing,” he says. “You ain’t gonna see none of them pictures as long as I’m alive.”
But word gets out and soon the slaves are curious. “They wanted to know more about the magazine, about the bright cars and fine clothes, the beautiful black women and the big houses, and especially about the schools, where colored boys and girls and young men and women learned about things the Jacobs County Negroes didn’t understand, but knew must be worth learning if the colored folks up north bothered about them.” The young black men in the county begin to talk of organizing against the whites and to placate them, the preacher writes a letter to the President of the United States:
I is writin to tell you about us because if you dont come down here or send that army down to do something to free my people they is going to kill every white man and every white woman and every white child in Jacobs County. We slaves down here Mr. President. We been slaves ever since I can remember and I been here sixty years and Granny Jacobs been here more than eighty years and she still a slave. The sheriff and Mr. Jacobs and the sheriffs deputies make us work in the fields and in the house and in the warehouse and on folks farms and in the post office and in the stores and in the jails and everywhere and aint never paid us no money cep when we ask for food or for some clothes or things like that and they dont let us leave Jacobs County. Ifen one of us tries to leave we gets kilt just as quick as swattin a fly we gets kilt. We just found out that colored folks aint slaves nowheres else cep here and we want you to free us.
The letter is smuggled out of the county. There is no reply. But months later, a carful of Federal men arrive in Jacobsville and start asking questions. The sheriff is cagey enough to keep them from discovering too much and concocts a reason to lock the agents up. Unfortunately for him and the rest of the white population of Jacobs County, however, any combustible mixture held too long and under too much pressure is bound to explode. The ending is swift, violent, and ruthless.
Many Thousand Gone is not the black equivalent of The Turner Diaries, however. This is a less a fable than a parable, a story to be told and read not literally but for its lesson. When Lillian Smith reviewed the book for St. Louis Post-Dispatch shortly before her death, she wrote, “It would be a wonderful thing if we had on our streets … storytellers telling long tales to the people. What a story this is to tell! What a soft mercy might creep into dry, hating hearts if only they could feel the poetry of this little book.” Many Thousand Gone is brief — barely more than a hundred pages — crisp, powerful as a gut-punch but told in a cool, matter-of-fact tone. There may be no actual Jacobs County, but in creating it, Ronald Fair illustrated with the precision of a haiku the damage that any inequality too long sustained can wreak upon both the oppressed and their oppressors. It’s not a book whose time has come, sadly. It’s a book whose time has never left.
We Can’t Breathe, by Ronald L. Fair New York: Harper & Row, 1972
Many Thousand Gone, by Ronald L. Fair New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965
Few things give you as good a picture of life at a particular time and place as seeing what people considered satire. Satire with legs is tough to write. Barbs that seemed razor sharp at the time can strike today’s reader as dull — or worse, off-target or unsuccessful to an extent that can be excruciating to watch as a rerun. What was meant to poke the funnybone can seem like an unwelcome jab in the ribs. George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea is an example of the dangers of consuming satire too long after its sell-by date.
By the Sea is set in the remote seaside town of Plankton. When I read the book, I was sure that Plankton was somewhere along the Central California coast, but many of its contemporary reviewers were convinced it was in New England. Albee offers no good geographic reference points to anchor it, so let’s say we’re both right.
Plankton’s original name — as not even the Indians found the place habitable before the crazy white men showed up — was Zion’s Golden Strand. A religious sect named the Semi-Submersion Redemptionists, whose men wore beards like Spanish moss and women dressed “like adders in calico,” settled there around 1900 to practice their faith in peace. Which they did for several decades, until their stricture against sex in any form began to whittle their number down to a handful. Then, during Prohibition, the rumrunners moved in, using it as a quiet and safe to land fast boats full of illegal hooch. After FDR eliminated the profit margin, the town was left for the strays and stragglers to occupy.
There is Bonesetter, a retired seaman who runs the town’s drug store and lives in a loose menage with his wife and her ex-stripper sister, Zarafa. There is Manuel Ortega, known to everyone as “Spic” (and here we begin to see the stretchmarks in the satire), who lost an arm bringing a load of whisky ashore and stayed to run the general store. There are the Tatum sisters, two retired librarians, and their mother, whose dementia takes the peculiar form of believing herself to be General George Custer. And there are a handful of artists, sculptors, and miscellaneous Bohemians.
The diverse collection of Planktonians is united on one point: that success as defined by the world outside is an anathema. “The human race, friends, cannot stand success,” Bonesetter tells his fellow townspeople. “Prosperity makes monsters of us all. Plankton has never known prosperity, and never will. Plankton is a serene place, a joyful place, an undiscovered place; what the literary critics call a happy valley. Let us keep it that way.”
Of all the misfits, none is quite so ill-fitted as Myrthis Lathrop. Having been sent to university to study law by his father, Myrthis rejected the notion that commerce was a game he needed to play. “The world is a mighty tough place, my fine young liberal,” he father told him, “as you’ll find out when you try to make a dollar.” To which Myrthis replied, “The world is a mighty tough place because it’s full of men trying to make a dollar.” He decided instead to move to Plankton, where he could live in one of the old abandoned Redemptionist houses for nothing, and be a bum, making a few bucks by selling samples of plants, sea creatures, and insects to his old university’s laboratories. When we first meet him, Myrthis is spending his day lying on the ground, taking notes on the second day of the Ant War.”22 blacks still on their feet, to 112 browns.”
Myrthis is himself a bit of a parasite. His fellow Planktonians feed him, fuel him, clothe him, fix his plumbing, and when necessary, save him from drowning. As little as they aspire to material success, Myrthis’s obstinate aimlessness irritates many and maddens Bonesetter in particular. He concocts a scheme to marry Myrthis off to Vitalia, a scroungy young woman recently arrived in town.
Hoping this will force Myrthis to settle down, Bonesetter is disappointed. Myrthis and Vitalia decide to establish a newspaper, despite the fact that they have no printing press and can’t write — or at least, spell. Undismayed, Myrthis types up the first issue with its front page story, “YOUR FRIEND AND MINE THE COKROACH.” Myrthis is not just pro-roach: he is a zealous roachist. “Those of us who are a bit too sure that we are the final and fairest flower of Creation will do well to reflect upon the fact that the cokroach has been here longer than we have and will be here when we are all through.” When the universe comes to its whimpering end, he assures his readers, “it will be the roach, not Man, who will stand on tip-toe on the last charred Reef of Earth and cry farewell my brothers farewell farewell.”
Somehow, Myrthis’s piece gets into the hands of a desperate syndication agent, and the next thing you know, all of America is calling for more. Myrthis and Vitalia are swept off to New York City to make the rounds of television game shows, news shows, and talk shows, all of which offer Albee opportunities to satirize What’s My Line, The Tonight Show, and other artefacts of the time that have now grown quaint or forgotten.
P. G. Wodehouse described By the Sea, By the Sea as “like a sort of innocent Peyton Place,” which may be more accurate now than when he said it. Peyton Place long ago lost its scandalous reputation, and so, by extension, has By the Sea. When the book was marketed, the favored hashtags were #lusty and #Rabelaisian, neither of which could manage to raise the lightest eyebrow today. Yet some of the reviewers were still able to wind themselves into a righteous tizzy about it. Writing in The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Martin Quigley practically issued an invitation for a book-burning: “This is a rather pleasant and funny little summer story that has been spoiled by self-conscious and witless dirty talk. The publisher and the author are trying to justify and exploit the dirty talk on the grounds that it is Rabelaisian.” Scoring points with the chauvinists in his audience, he added, “It is remindful of a sissy trying to pass himself off as a tough guy.”
Barely two hundred pages long, By the Sea, By the Sea could easily sit at one end of the bookshelf alongside Tobacco Road and Cannery Row — neither of which, IMHO, carry much more than trace amounts of the humor and raucousness that made them favorites of a generation or two of mostly male readers. It takes a lot more to stand out as a drop-out from society in today’s world.
Not that George Sumner Albee hadn’t earned his stripes as an outsider. He’d taken to the road early in life, traveling around the world in his twenties, stepping in to save Hemingway from getting pasted by a boxer in Key West in the thirties, taking a house in Cuba’s own Key West, Varadero, in the 1950s. He was a connoisseur of the laidback expat lifestyle, capable of writing a long and gushing letter in praise of Under the Volcano to Malcolm Lowry. Lowry, replying from an unhappy spell in England, was somewhat envious: “I have an impression that Cuba must be a marvellous place in which to live, and pursue the Better Life, the Better Thing, and indeed celebrate generally the Life Electric.” Finding the political climate in England not much more enlightened that that of Eisenhower’s US, he added, “… the only thing one could do is to put one’s school cap back on and read Wordsworth, or perhaps Henry Adams, until it all blows over. Meantime it is likely that no contribution will be made to human freedom.”
Albee had made his living as something of an acceptable rebel, a gentle satirist. His first novel, Young Robert, was a semi-autobiographical jab at his own young self, a story about a San Francisco youth full of the spirit of the Gold Rush and progress with a capital P. Although he published a couple of softer, more nostalgic novels in the 1950s, he earned his living as a writer of magazine fiction back in the days when that was still possible.
Albee’s magazine fiction was often satire a soft S. His 1948 story for Cosmopolitan, “The Next Voice You Hear,” played out a premise he came up with over lunch with a friend. “You know,” he said, “wouldn’t it be something if God would come on the radio and give people such a bad scare they’d wake up and behave themselves!” He repeated the story to his friend, Cosmopolitan’s fiction editor, Dale Eunson, and Eunson told Albee the magazine would buy the story if he wrote it.
George Sumner Albee’s story, “The Next Voice You Hear,” from Hearst International-Cosmopolitan, August 1948.
In the finished product, the voice of God goes out over every radio station on Earth one day: “A plan of creation ought by rights to go forward under its own rules, but you, dear children of the Sun’s third planet, are so near to destroying yourselves I must step in. I shall spend this week with you.” As you might expect, this news sends everyone but the most deeply devout into a panic, but God’s subsequent broadcasts are written in a wholly New Testament voice. When he takes leave on the following Saturday, his voice has “the gentleness, the fondness, the inifinite patience of the voice of an older brother teaching a beloved younger brother to skate, or make a kite, or whittle”: “A planet is a school. Live, dear children, and learn.”
Poster for the 1950 movie, The Next Voice You Hear
“The Next Voice You Hear” was made into a film with the same name in 1950, starring James Whitmore and Nancy Davis (soon to be Reagan). Producer Dore Schary wrote an account of the making of the film, Case History of a Movie, soon after. James M. Cain, reviewing the book for the New York Times, wrote that “it gives a picture of movies that is almost definitive, with a singularly candid viewpoint.”
Illustration from The Saturday Evening Post, February 9, 1957.
Albee was a flower child before the name existed. In his 1957 story, “The Mysterious Mr. Todd,” an updated version of Twain’s Mysterious Stranger pleas for a town council to turn a patch of land into a park instead of a prison:
There are people in this world who like prisons. They like them because prisons lock up souls, and they believe in locking up souls. They want to see all of us in uniform, marching along in lock-step, saying, “Yes, boss; yes, Fuhrer; yes, commissar.” A prison is the sorriest place in the world, sorrier than any cemetery, because in prison you bury souls. Now what does a park stand for? A park is a scale model of what we hope we’ll turn the whole danged world into someday. A park is a place where we can walk under trees, with flowers around us, and meet our neighbors and shake their hands and ask them how things are going and meet ourselves, too, maybe, on a quiet path, and find out who we are. A park is a freespace for free men. That’s why we’ve got to choose it every time — every time! Because the men in prison are the men who never had parks.
Illustration from “Let’s Put Women in Their Place,” by George Sumner Albee, from The Saturday Evening Post, December 16, 1961.
But not all of Albee’s satire reads quite so benignly today. In a 1961 piece for The Saturday Evening Post, for example, his tongue was perhaps too deeply buried in his cheek for his self-mockery to come through. Titled, “Let’s Put Women in Their Place,” he criticizes the U.S. for being the only country where women are not banished when men sit down to talk. He sorts women into seven categories such as “The Frustrated Actress” and “The Compulsive Talker.” He then lays out a program by which husbands can retrain their wives: “Take her to court trials. Take her to visit a chemical laboratory. Play Bach to her. Read her a bit of Kant, showing her how he extrudes one idea from another. From time to time, hit her.” With a little patience and persistence, he assures the reader, “in a year’s time you may find you have a chastened, thoughtful, well-mannered, reticent woman who can actually join in a conversation without destroying it.” And if she happens to slip into her old habits, “Check her promptly. ‘How would you like a rap on the mouth?’ is a query that startles the sturdiest woman.”
This is impossible to read without cringing. If you ever wondered what men like Mad Men’sDon Draper were reading, it was far more likely to be this than the poetry of Frank O’Hara, I’m afraid. George Sumner Albee may have been lucky that he died in 1965: I’m not sure how he would have fared when the Women’s Lib movement got going.
In 1974, by the way, Paramount Studios announced that producer Jerry Bruckheimer would be filming By the Sea with a script by Steve Tesich, but the project appears to have stalled soon afterward.
By the Sea, By the Sea was recommended to me by Kate Peacocke, who wrote from New Zealand, saying her father “loved its zany humour and its gentle wisdom, and so do I.” For me, the book lands halfway between unjustly and justly neglected. If you do read it, it’s best to look for the spirit of “Mr. Todd” and ignore the brief flashes of “Let’s Put Women in Their Place.”
Other Reviews
• Vernon Fane, The Sphere
… a happy, bawdy and very funny novel indeed; Mr. George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea, which I propose to re-read often and certainly not to lend, unless it is to benighted travellers unable to get to a bookshop. Mr. P. G. Wodehouse has gone on record as finding it one of the funniest books he has read for ages and full of charm, too. He adds that it is like a sort of innocent Peyton Place, as contradictory a statement as the old master can ever have emitted. Be that as it may, he is certainly right about its being funny, and since that is a quality fairly thinkly parcelled out in contemporary fiction, I can recommend it to those readers who are free, broadminded and twenty-one.
• Dave Lipman, The Kansas City Star
If Aldous Huxley had stumbled across Plankton, he would not have had to search around bravely for new worlds. He could have loosened his tie and luxuriated in the company of somebody like Myrthis Lathrop…. There’s a theory, unproved, that a man who uses shingles from his own roof for firewood is a man worth meeting. It follows that a book in which such a man plays a leading role is a book worth reading.
• Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Guardian
the funniest book I have read in years: that is to say it is not “a riot of fun” but witty; satirical, not smart; adult, not “adult”; and like funny books from Candide to Lucky Jim, basically serious…. A young man’s book, presumably, which I wholly recommend.
• Lynn Hopper, The Indianopolis Star
Light, brassy, with serious undertones, and definitely on the wild side. A new book with more charm than most summer fiction is George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea.
By the Sea, By the Sea, by George Sumner Albee New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960 London: Victor Gollancz, 1960
“Listen to me! Somebody please listen!” cries Henry Preston Standish, the hero of Herbert Clyde Lewis’s 1937 novel, Gentleman Overboard, as he struggles to stay afloat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, exhausted and past hope of rescue. “But of course nobody was there to listen,” Lewis wrote, “and Standish considered the lack of an audience the meanest trick of all.” Lewis died of a heart attack at the age of 41, broke, out of work and alone in the middle of New York City, a victim of Hollywood blacklisting, his three novels long out of print: a writer who’d lost his audience. No one came to rescue him. As long as a writer’s words are preserved, though, there is a chance of his work being rescued. In the case of Gentleman Overboard, it took over seventy years for someone to spot the book, lost in the ocean of forgotten books, and the rescuers came from three different continents. Lewis’s story of one man dying alone and forgotten is now being read by thousands who find it speaks to a sense of “shared loneliness.”
Born in Brooklyn in 1909, Lewis was the second son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His mother Clara came to the U.S. with her family in 1887 at the age of two. His father Hyman arrived a year later at the age of thirteen, apprenticed to work for his older brother Samuel as a tailor. By the time Herbert was born, the Lewises were living in the Brownsville neighborhood around Tompkins and Lafayette Avenues. The area was then the heart of the largest Jewish community outside Europe, the first stop for tens of thousands of like Lewis’s parents, immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe. Between 1890 and 1915, the number of Jews living in New York City jumped from under 100,000 to nearly one million. The name Lewis was Anglicized from Luria and Hyman and Clara helped ease their sons’ integration into American life by giving them solidly Anglo-Saxon names: Alfred Joseph, Herbert Clyde and Benjamin George.
For Herbert Clyde Lewis, Brownsville was the quintessential American melting pot — at least in hindsight. In 1943, he wrote an article titled “Back Home” for The Los Angeles Times about visiting his boyhood streets for the first time in twenty years. “As I walked slowly around the block and let the memories flood back,” he wrote, “it seemed to me that my old neighborhood was a miracle—the greatest miracle that had ever visited the earth. Here, for the first time, people came from all the corners of Europe, the Near East and China — and lived side by side in close quarters and did not cut each other’s throats.” There was something in the air, he believed, “that made us feel maybe the other fellow’s beliefs and background were all right too.”
However rosy Lewis’s memories of his boyhood in Brownsville may have been, he left home early and quickly established what became a lifelong pattern of short stays and frequent moves. He quit high school at the age of sixteen, worked a variety of jobs with local newspapers, briefly attended both New York University and the College of the City of New York (finding “neither institution suited him”), then spent the winter of 1929-1930 in Paris. He returned to America in March 1930, took a job as a sports reporter in Newark, New Jersey, then moved nearly halfway across the world to Shanghai, China. He spent the next two years there working as a reporter for The China Press and The Shanghai Evening Post.
Herbert Clyde Lewis in his early 20s, courtesy of Michael Lewis
Living in China may have satisfied his appetite for travel at first. In early 1933, Lewis returned to New York, took a job with The New York World Telegram, switched to The New York Journal American, got married, and rented an apartment in Manhattan — one of the few times he kept the same address for longer than a year. His time in China provided the material for his first ventures into fiction, which were short but action-packed. “Tibetan Image,” for example, tells of fortune hunters forced to abandon a million dollars’ worth of silver fox pelts in the Gobi Desert when they are attacked by a pack of man-eating dogs. It appeared in Argosy magazine in November 1935 and was followed by others full of stereotypes of enigmatic, slightly sinister Chinese. He also tried to his hand at writing for the stage, collaborating with a former reporter, Louis Weitzenkorn, on “Name Your Poison.” In the play, a group of petty crooks take out a life insurance policy on a homeless derelict and then attempt — unsuccessfully — to kill him through a series of “accidents.” The show opened for a pre-Broadway run in late January 1936 and closed after six performances. The play needed “repairs” was the only explanation offered by its producer, who let his option lapse a few months later.
Although Lewis claimed he was happy with his job at the Journal American, a certain discontent with comfortable situations seems to have been part of his nature. As he later told Newsweek magazine, the idea for his first novel, Gentleman Overboard, came to him as he stood on the roof on his apartment in Greenwich Village one evening in late 1936. Lewis looked down on the street below and considered what would happen if he fell: “How would a man bridge that dizzy mental gap between the security under his feet and that world ‘down there’?” He decided to write a story to find out. To emphasize that mental gap, he chose as the subject of his experiment not an itinerant reporter like himself but with a man whose very being embodies security.
Henry Preston Standish, the gentleman of Gentleman Overboard, is as solidly fixed to the bedrock of the American establishment as a man could be. His family name evokes the English man of arms who sailed with the first Pilgrims on the Mayflower, the subject of “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem memorized by generations of schoolchildren. Graduate of Yale, partner in a Wall Street investment bank, member of the Finance Club, Athletic Club and Weebonnick Golf Club, owner of a comfortable apartment on the Upper West Side, faithful husband and loving father of two, Standish is the definition of a solid citizen. “He drank moderately, smoked moderately, and made love moderately; in fact, Standish was one of the world’s most boring men.” When Standish contemplates the prospect of a world without him, he thinks with regret that “New York City would be dotted with spaces that could never be filled by anyone but the real Henry Preston Standish.”
And yet, like Lewis, Standish feels an irresistible urge to leave and find something that was missing at home. In Standish’s case, the impulse hits him out of nowhere. One day, sitting in his office, he “suddenly found himself assailed by a vague unrest.” He feels compelled to get up, leave his office, and take a walk along the Manhattan waterfront in Battery Park. As he looks out at the water, “Forces beyond his control grasped him and shook him by the shoulders, whispering between clenched teeth: ‘You must go away from here; you must go away!’”
Standish does not understand this impulse. “There was no sane reason why he must go away; everything was in its proper place in his life.” At the same time, his instincts tell him “that he never would be able to breathe freely again unless he went far away.” Standish wasn’t the first character in American literature to feel this urge to escape. Fifty years before Gentleman Overboard, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn lit out for the Indian Territory “because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it.” Perhaps what Lewis called “security” was just another name for Huck Finn’s “sivilization.”
But when Standish sees the last sight of New York slip over the horizon as he sails away on a cruise through the Panama Canal to California, he feels as if “all his weariness, all his doubts and fears, vanished magically into the sea.” In California, the sense of relief continues. Standish discovers “a certain zest to things now that he had not experienced back home before; all his sensations were intensified.” He decides to keep going, to take another cruise, this time to Honolulu. “Why, Henry?” his wife begs when Standish calls to break the news. “I don’t know,” he replies. Even after he reaches Hawaii, he delays his return, exchanging his ticket back to San Francisco for a berth on the Arabella, a freighter taking a leisurely three-week voyage from Honolulu to Panama.
Lewis then sets his experiment in motion. Early one morning, while most on the ship are asleep and Panama still at least ten days away, Standish slips on a spot of grease while strolling on deck and falls overboard. Lewis has put his subject about as far away from the security of a comfortable life in New York City as one can get — two thousand miles from Panama, three thousand miles from Hawaii, along an infrequently-traveled route. Even here, though, conventions manage to reach out and control Standish. After he surfaces, when there is still a chance of his being heard by someone on the Arabella, he finds himself “doomed by his breeding”: “The Standishes were not shouters; three generations of gentlemen had changed the trumpet in the early Standish larynx to a dulcet violoncello.” Standish hesitates to cry out and the Arabella steams away, its crew and other passengers oblivious to his plight. Another twelve hours pass before his absence is confirmed—and, in a cruel irony foreshadowing Lewis’s own death, some onboard conclude that Standish’s accident was, in fact, suicide.
With cool precision, Lewis peels back the layers of “sivilization” as the hours pass and his subject tries to stay afloat, waiting to be rescued. Standish kicks off his shoes, then bit by bit removes his clothes, until he is naked, his eyes and lips scorched by the sun. At first, he feels embarrassed at making the Arabella turn around and rescue him; then pride in his “tremendous adventure” of staying alive until his rescue; and finally, when he realizes there is no hope, of regret. “And with each thought a pang came to his heart that had shattered, a pang of regret that he could not go on like other men having new extraordinary experiences day after day.” Extraordinary experiences like his heart “having gone on beating thirty-five years without once stopping”; like never having gone hungry; like having been given everything he had ever desired. In the end, “there is one desire that will not be satisfied”: to live.
When Lewis finished writing Gentleman Overboard, his own situation was precarious. He’d been living beyond his means, borrowing money and falling months behind in his rent. Just weeks before Viking published Gentleman in May 1937, Lewis declared bankruptcy with debts of $3,100—over a year’s income for a newspaperman—and “no assets, except possible royalties” from the book. It would not be the last time that Lewis would find himself flat broke. Reviews of Gentleman Overboard began appearing soon after—the first on May 23 in The New York Times, the same paper in which his bankruptcy notice had appeared. Reviewer Charles Poore called the book “entertaining” and “a flight of fancy,” but sensed Lewis’s underlying design: “Standish seems to be undergoing an experiment rather than an experience.”
The book’s brevity seems to have led many reviewers to consider it insubstantial. “It is a good enough book of its kind, but it is one of those stories that might have been a masterpiece and is by no means one,” William Rose Benet wrote in The Saturday Review. Only Arnold Palmer, reviewing the British edition published by Victor Gollancz in the magazine Britannia and Eve, saw the book’s length as a virtue: “He has told, with unusual skill and intensity, a story which ninety-nine writers in a hundred would have ruined by expanding into a full-length novel or compressing to the requirements of a magazine editor.” Evelyn Waugh on the other hand, writing in Time and Tide, thought it wasn’t short enough: “In spite of its brevity it is too long; a Frenchman could have told the story in 50 pages.” Viking issued a second printing; Gollancz did not.
Hollywood came to Lewis’s rescue. In August 1937, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Metro Goldwyn Mayer had signed Lewis as a “term writer” — a staff writer with a contract for a term, usually six months at the then-lucrative salary of $250 a week. Lewis, his wife Gita and their infant son Michael headed for California, arriving in early September “in our original protoplasmic state,” as he wrote his brother Ben (on MGM stationery). By Christmas, Lewis could report that he was busy working on a remake of the silent movie Tell It to the Marines and expected to “be here for a long time.”
He was still struggling to pay off his debts, though. He wrote Ben that people were “pressing me for debts and making my life miserable by threatening to sue me and attach my salary.” “All the other writers live in big houses and entertain,” he complained, “and we live in a shack.” MGM shelved the remake of Tell It to the Marines and Lewis’s contract was not extended. He was able to get a job with RKO, collaborating with Ian Hunter on a pair of B-movie musicals starring the boy tenor Bobby Breen, Fisherman’s Wharf and Escape to Paradise, both released in 1939 and both forgettable. By the end of that year, Lewis quit RKO and moved back to New York City with a job offer from the J. Walter Thompson advertisement agency and the manuscript of a second novel in hand.
Lewis’s anti-war sentiments had been stirred by the outbreak of war in Europe. In Spring Offensive, Peter Winston, a young American out of work, unhappy in love and at odds with the isolationist mood in America, concludes “There was no place for him in his own country” and travels to England to enlist in the British Army. When he completes his training and deploys to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force, however, he finds there is nothing to do in the months of stalemate known as the Phony War. He decides to make a small protest by sneaking into the no-man’s land between the Maginot and Siegfried lines and planting a packet of sweet pea seeds. As Winston crouches there planting his seeds in the early hours one morning, however, the Phony War comes to an abrupt and violent end. He finds himself stranded between the two sides, unarmed and with little chance of survival. Like Standish in his last moments, Winston loses all hope: “There was no one who wanted him anywhere.” A shell strikes and Winston is obliterated.
Lewis’s timing could not have been worse. Spring Offensive was published in late April 1940. Two weeks later, German panzers began rolling into Belgium, France and the Netherlands. By the end of June, France had capitulated. “For its own sake, this slender novel should have made its appearance well before the beginning of the actual Spring Offensive,” concluded The Saturday Review. Ralph Ellison predicted in his New Masses review, “little will be said of it these days in the capitalist press.” He was right: the book sank without a trace.
Lewis still had hopes for his career as a novelist, though. Convinced that his handicap had been trying to write while holding down a full-time job, he took his family, now including a baby girl, Jane, to quiet Provincetown, Massachusetts. There he wrote his third novel. Focused on the residents of a rooming house in Greenwich Village on Christmas Eve, Season’s Greetings is a love-hate letter to New York City. Lewis allowed himself a much richer prose style; the book is filled with vivid descriptions:
Slowly the noises of the city came to life, autos shifting gears, horns honking, doors slamming shut, trains rumbling underground, machines chugging and whirling, feet tramping, babies wailing, children shouting, peddlers calling their wares. Slowly the smells of the city came to life, coffee brewing, bacon frying, garbage stewing, chemicals churling in cauldrons.
Despite the vitality of Lewis’s writing, though, his subject once again was grim: “the problem of loneliness in a city of eight million people.” One of the residents is a German refugee without a single friend or acquaintance in his new country. Another is an embittered alcoholic, a third an old woman who has outlived her family. Although some of the residents do come together to create, for a few hours, a sort of community, Lewis refuses a happy ending for all. As his neighbours gather for an impromptu Christmas party, Mr. Kittredge, who began the day convinced “there was no purpose in living any longer,” finds that nothing in the course of the day has changed his mind. He quietly slips out to Washington Park with a rifle and commits suicide—alone and unseen: “Around the whole windswept park, in all the apartment houses and brownstone mansions and college buildings, not a single window opened and not a single person looked out.” Less than ten years later Lewis himself died alone and unseen in the Hotel Earle across the street.
Published in September 1941, Season’s Greetings received favourable but not glowing reviews. The New York Times’ reviewer called it “a story that pulses with feeling for the complex and comprehensive personality of New York.” The American Mercury did not care for Lewis’s change of style: “Overwritten in spots, it belabors its point, yet it holds the reader’s interest.” Once again, Lewis was a victim of bad timing. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, fewer Americans were in the mood to buy books about Christmas. The short biographical sketch on the back of Season’s Greetings mentioned that the author and his family had returned to New York and promised that “This time Mr. Lewis expects to stay home for good.” But it didn’t work out that way.
After working for The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter for about a year, Lewis tried again to make it on his own as a writer—without much luck. As Los Angeles Times’ film industry reporter Fred Beck later told the story, by late 1942, Lewis “was a small, sad man, shivering on the streets of New York.” A short story Lewis had written, “Two-Faced Quilligan,” had been rejected by 33 magazines and he worried that his family “would have salami for Christmas dinner.” As Beck put it, “Herbie wished somebody he knew would come along so he could borrow a buck.” Instead, Lewis came home to find an acceptance letter from Story magazine and a check for $50—enough for a generous Christmas and a month or two more. Soon after, Variety reported that 20th Century Fox had bought the movie rights for the story and hired Lewis as a writer for $500 a week. Lewis and family returned to Los Angeles.
Despite the turnaround in his financial situation, Lewis was never content in Hollywood. “Life is rather dull here,” he wrote his brother Ben in July. “It’s completely unreal going to the studio every day and writing scripts about make-believe people while the real people are cutting each other’s throats with gusto everywhere.” In November, he complained, “I look around me and see the things that success buys out here, and I don’t like any of them. Swimming pools get full of dead flies and uninvited guests. Big houses get full of live flies and uninvited guests.” Lewis wrote that he had decided to take a job offer with radio comedian Fred Allen and move the family back to New York. Fred Beck made the news public in The Los Angeles Times with a sly aside: “Fred Allen has a new writer, brand new, and I’m just wondering if everybody is now going to be happy now that they’ve got what they wanted.”
The answer was no. Lewis expected to replace several writers who were going to be drafted. They weren’t. After eight weeks with Allen’s show, Lewis decided “I was tired of taking money under false pretenses” and returned to Hollywood. Lewis continued with 20th Century Fox, which released the movie version of Lewis’s story, Don Juan Quilligan, in June 1945. As little as he cared for the work, Lewis desperately needed the studio’s money. In early 1945, he complained to Ben that “the Internal Revenue Bureau has attached my salary to make me pay off an old tax debt to Uncle Sam, which cuts down my fun, finances and practically eliminates (for the next few months) all the plans we had to send you our wedding gift.”
Herbert Clyde Lewis (lower left), Dalton Trumbo (rear center), and other reporters in the South Pacific, June 1945
Lewis’s only break from the studio grind came in May 1945 when he, Dalton Trumbo, and four other writers were sent on a six-week tour of combat areas in the Southwest Pacific at the invitation of General Henry “Hap” Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps. “I’m really seeing the war on this 16,000-mile junket,” he wrote from Guam on June 16, 1945: “the planes, the fleet, the infantry, almost everything else.”
The war ended just two months after Lewis’s return from the trip. He sold more stories: “D-Day in Las Vegas” to RKO and “The Fifth Avenue Story,” which Lewis co-wrote with Frederick Stephani, to Liberty Films. Filmed as It Happened on Fifth Avenue, the story earned Academy Award nominations for the two writers in 1947. But by then Lewis’s life had begun to fall apart. He was drinking heavily and taking barbiturates to help him sleep. His son Michael remembers seeing his father “naked and completely comatose, in a chair” around this time. “My mother told me it was alcohol and seconal.” Gita Lewis had begun to work for studios as a writer herself. As Michael recalls, “my & my sister’s real parents” during this time were the full-time maids his parents hired. The couple separated in 1947.
Lewis’s professional life was also coming apart. In January 1947, he became a member of the editorial staff of The Screen Writer, the magazine of the Screen Writers Guild. Unfortunately, the Guild was about to become the focus of Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiries into possible Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. Working in support of the U. S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the F.B.I. interviewed dozens of witnesses and collected thousands of documents related to liberal political activities in Hollywood. An F. B. I. informant identified Lewis as a member of the American Communist Party.
Whether the allegation was true or not, Lewis had taken up with the losing side. He joined over 100 writers, actors, directors, and musicians signing a full-page advertisement protesting the House committee’s hearings — which only added to suspicions about his politics. A month later, Dalton Trumbo and nine other members of the Screen Writers Guild were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the committee. A group of the most powerful studio executives met in New York in December and issued a statement vowing, “We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the Government of the United States.” The practice of blacklisting had begun. “The swimming pools are drying up all over Hollywood. I do not think I shall see them filled in my generation,” Lewis remarked to a reporter, jokingly. But he did not take the experience so lightly. He suffered a nervous breakdown in mid-1948 and was unable to work for a year.
In September 1949, he returned to New York City for what would be the last time — alone. His wife Gita chose to stay in Hollywood. He took a job as rewrite man for The New York Mirror. “I’ve enjoyed myself thoroughly and straightened myself out completely,” he wrote Ben from New York in October 1949, adding that he’d sold several of his stories to provide an allowance for Gita and the children. Michael Lewis recalls that “the four of us tried living together again as a family” in New York around Christmas 1949, but the marriage may have reached a breaking point. Gita took Michael and Jane back to Hollywood and moved in with Tanya Tuttle, wife of blacklisted director Frank Tuttle, who had gone to France in search of work.
In April 1950, Lewis filed for bankruptcy, citing over $26,000 in debts and unpaid income taxes. He moved into a room at the Hotel Earle in Greenwich Village. Although once considered among the best residential hotels in the city, in 1950, the Earle was, in the words of the poet Dylan Thomas, who stayed there around the same time as Lewis, “a pigsty.” Lewis moved from the Mirror to Time magazine, but he was still broke. He apologized to Ben for not being able to help pay their father’s bills from a prostate operation.
In late September, he left Time—whether voluntarily or not is unclear. Three weeks later, he was found dead in his hotel room. Although his death certificate stated the cause was heart attack, some of his acquaintances believed Lewis had committed suicide — which, Dalton Trumbo wrote his wife, was “sad, but no more than to have been expected.” “The only food on which a drowning man could subsist was the hope of being rescued,” Lewis wrote in Gentleman Overboard. Perhaps he had lost hope of being rescued himself.
He passed on to his widow only the prospect of future sales of his writing — of which there were few. In December 1950, one of his early stories, “Surprise for the Boys,” was adapted for the CBS television series Danger. A few years later, a producer bought the rights to Lewis’s story “The Bride Wore Pajamas,” but the film was never made. Finally, in 1959, Gita, now remarried, sold his unfinished novel, The Silver Dark, to Pyramid Books, a paperback publisher. Despite a cover plug by novelist Budd Schulberg proclaiming it “A genuinely original and compelling novel,” the book was never reviewed and never reissued. According to WorldCat.org, just two copies remain in libraries.
The Silver Dark might have marked the end of Lewis’s story. His work was ignored in studies of American novels. His film credits alone kept his name alive in occasional reference books. His daughter Jane died in 1985 from complications related to diabetes; his brothers both died in the late 1990s and his widow Gita in 2001. Only Michael, with a handful of his father’s letters and one lone page from his journal, remained to remember Lewis.
In the spring 2009, I came across a review of Gentleman Overboard while browsing through the archives of Time magazine. “What would it feel like to fall off a ship in mid-Pacific?” the reviewer asked. “With as much calm authority as though he had fallen overboard himself, Herbert Clyde Lewis tells just what it feels like.” Having established this website three years earlier, I was looking for long-forgotten books with unique qualities and Gentleman Overboard sounded like a perfect candidate. I located a copy, read it and posted a short enthusiastic review. Without having seen the Newsweek article describing Lewis’s original idea, I referred to the book as an experiment:
What matters is not whether it succeeds or fails but simply seeing what happens. Lewis puts his subject into the experiment and observes. This novel holds his notes. Few scientists could have recorded the results with such an elegant and light touch. It’s been said that a true artist knows when to stop … and does. By this criterion alone, Herbert Clyde Lewis proves himself a true artist with Gentleman Overboard.
A few months later, I received an email from Diego D’Onofrio, an editor with La Bestia Equilatera, a small Spanish-language publisher in Buenos Aires. “I would like to ask you,” he wrote: “Which neglected book do you recommend me to publish?” Not familiar with La Bestia’s audience, I was reluctant to offer many suggestions, but replied, “If I had to pick one off the top of my head that is very accessible to a wide range of readers, I guess I’d pick Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis. It should be relatively easy to translate and has a strong narrative line that should grab most readers very quickly.” Diego thanked me and said he’d order a copy.
Diego and his editor-in-chief Luis Chittaroni loved the book and in May 2010, they contracted for a translation and scheduled the book for publication. The Spanish title would be El caballero que cayó al mar (The Gentleman Who Fell into the Sea). The challenge of publishing a neglected book in another language is considerable, D’Onofrio later wrote. “Because nobody knows the author, not least the book, which is also not known in his native language … the only tool you have to sell the book is that it must be extraordinary in itself.”
By this standard, El caballero que cayó al mar performed exceptionally well. Its early reviews were consistently enthusiastic: “Simple y magistral. Sólo eso. Sencillamente eso,” Alejandro Frías proclaimed in El Sol de Mendoza: “Simple and masterful. Only that. Simply that.” Another reviewer called it “una perlita”: “a little pearl.” The book continued to win critical acclaim as its readership spread beyond Argentina. In August 2018, one of Spain’s leading critics, Ignacio Echevarría, praised the book in his monthly column for El Cultural and in September 2019, a feature on CNN Chile recommended it: “Con magistral sencillez, Herbert Clyde Lewis lleva el relato a una dimensión filosófica.” (“With masterful simplicity, Herbert Clyde Lewis takes the story to a philosophical dimension”). Eight years after the first publication of El caballero que cayó al mar, D’Onofrio reported, “It is the book with the most unanimous praise from our entire publishing house, which now has more than 90 books.”
Even as the Spanish translation was underway, Luis Chittaroni began to share PDF copies of the original Viking edition with acquaintances in the Argentinian literary community. The novelist Pablo Katchadjian in turn recommended the book to his friend Uriel Kon, an Argentina-born Jew living in Jerusalem and then starting up his own small press, Zikit Books. Looking for English-language novels that could be easily translated and published in Hebrew, Kon found the book matched his criteria perfectly: “Clear, elegant prose; a compelling, existential story; a book you can sit down and read in a night.” He arranged for a Hebrew translation and Zikit published האדוּ שבפל לים (roughly, The Nobleman Fell into the Sea) in June 2013.
The book struck a chord among Israeli readers. A feature review in Ha’aretz, one of Israel’s most widely read newspapers, called it “A miniature masterpiece that emerged from oblivion.” Zikit printed 1,00 copies — a number Kon considered “somewhat optimistic” at the time. That edition sold out in under two months and Zikit went on to sell over 7,000 copies. “There are around three to four thousand serious literary readers in Israel,” Kon estimated. “By that standard, this was a huge best-seller — a cult classic.” Standish’s predicament — lost and forgotten in a great ocean — Kon believes, “Resonated with many Israeli intellectuals who felt themselves isolated—not only as Jews surrounded by the Arab world but also unheard in a society dominated by conservative forces.”
In September 2019, Auteursdomein, a small Dutch press based in Amsterdam, published the English-language text of Gentleman Overboard under the simplified title, Overboard. This edition was sponsored by Dutch novelist Pauline van de Ven, who had come across Gentleman in a box of old books and ashtrays left by a distant uncle. As she writes in her foreword, “I read it without interruption from cover to cover and was impressed by the austere language, the strong images and the universal scope of the haunting story.” For van de Ven, the book’s power lies in its appeal to a paradoxical sense of “shared loneliness.” It belongs, she believes, in “same gallery of honor” as Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a another short novel about a prosperous businessman facing his imminent death: “It’s an existentialist masterpiece.”
Despite its rescue by publishers on three different continents, however, Gentleman Overboard remains out of print in the United States. Just three copies of the 1937 Viking edition are available for sale. The book’s success with readers in Argentina, Chile, Spain, Israel, and the Netherlands suggests the time is ripe for its reissue in its native country. There is still a chance for a new generation of American readers to discover Herbert Clyde Lewis’s “little pearl.” All it will take is the right person to listen.
My sincere thanks to Michael Lewis for allowing me to quote from his father’s letters and his own emails.
Reading Spillville is a pleasant way to take a trip while cooped up in lockdown. It’s short, like the trip Patricia Hampl and artist Steven Sorman took in the summer of 1986, driving down from Minneapolis to Spillville, Iowa, where the composer Antonin Dvorák spent a summer with his family in 1893.
Back in 1893, Spillville was an enclave of Bohemia in northeast Iowa. “These people came to this place about forty years ago, mostly from the neighborhood of Písek, Tábor,” Dvorák wrote a friend in Prague. “All the poorest of the poor. And after great hardships and struggle, they are very well off here.” By the time Dvorák came to visit, the Czech emigrants had erected a fine church, St. Wenceslas’, and boasted a post office, park, and a ring of prosperous farms surrounding the town — although the Dvoráks still had to come by carriage from the nearest train station in Calmar.
View of Spillville, Iowa in 1905
Dvorák had been coaxed to Spillville by his secretary, Josef Kovarík, whose parents had settled there. He liked that Spillville wasn’t on the railroad: less noise to block out the birdsongs. The morning after the Dvorák arrived, Kova?ík’s mother spotted the composer walking around at 5 o’clock in the morning. Was anything wrong, she asked? No, he replied. It was just that for the first time in eight months since coming to America, he could hear the birds. Dvorák’s job as director of the National Conservatory of Music required him to take an apartment in Manhattan, where the noise of horse traffic, steam trains, ships, and crowds was a constant annoyance.
As Hampl rides in the backseat with Sorman’s daughter, she realizes how she’s shut herself off to the landscape. “Story is impatient with description, and therefore with landscape’s passive willingness to be framed into a picture.” “But now, passing through this spring farmland,” she observes, “the love of place creates a desire to pause for description.” Part of that, I think, is because the landscape around Spillville is rich but not overwhelming. I grew up in Seattle, where on any clear day you can look south as see Mt. Rainier looming massive and blueish-white. It is so much bigger than anything man will ever build, always reminding you that you are puny and short-lived.
Spillville, on the other hand, has under 400 inhabitants today and wasn’t bigger than that by more than a few dozen in 1893. Dvorák could easily walk from one end of town and back after breakfast, before settling down to compose. Although some claim he wrote his best-known symphony, No. 9, From the New World, in Spillville, that work was finished before he left New York. He did, however, write his popular melody “Humoresque,” a piano quintet (Opus 97), and his String Quartet No. 12, the American. He translated the song of the scarlet tanager he heard there into the scherzo of the quartet.
Hampl doesn’t try to analyze Dvorák’s work or extract more than is obvious from his experiences there. Though not a musician herself, she remembers from her piano lessons with Sister Mary Louis an essential lesson that any good musician has to learn:
“Count first, dear,” she urged. “Then work on feeling.”
Feeling was fine, feeling was indispensable — she granted that. Nothing wrong with feeling. But — this was her point — I had feeling. No need to work further on feeling.
Besides, she would say gently. always a reluctant corrector, there was no work to feeling. And music was work.
Not much beyond the compositions, long walks, and quiet evenings in the summer heat happened during Dvorák’s stay. There might have been some gossip about his oldest daughter Otýlie and one of the Indian men in town, but it died out once they left in September. Not much happens during Hampl and Sorman’s visit, either. They walk through St. Wenceslas, sit in the park with the Dvorák memorial, and tour the one showcase in town, the Bily Clocks museum, which occupies the first floor of the house the Dvoráks rented. The museum is filled with the elaborate wooden clock cases hand-carved by the bachelor brothers Frank and Joseph Bily over six decades. Then, like the Dvoráks , they head back up the highway to Calmar and home.
Barely 100 pages, Spillville is a pleasant trip to a small river town and the quiet that descends when the sound of the highway traffic falls away and there are just the crickets, the birds, and people softly talking.
Spillville, by Patricia Hampl Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1987
Next week, folks around the world will be taking part in a unique collective reading event: #1920Club, the next installment of a semi-annual celebration organized some five years ago by Karen (Kaggsy) and Simon Thomas. The rules are simple: sometime during the week of 13-19 April, read a book published in 1920 and write something about it.
You can see an example of the diverse titles and perspectives that come together under this umbrella from the very first such event, the #1924Club.
But every time I go into the university library and wander down the aisles of English and American literature, I have to wonder: Does the world really need yet another bit of writing about Edith Wharton or D. H. Lawrence or F. Scott Fitzgerald? These writers are like those hotels with 10,000 reviews on Tripadvisor. Checking today, the current count on Goodreads for The Age of Innocence stands at 134,391 ratings and 6,378 reviews. Stop. Just stop. Will yet one more opinion make any difference?
I don’t pretend that every book I write about on this site is a masterpiece. I hope no one feels obligated to read anything I’ve featured here. But I do try to shine a little light on the things that few or none have read and written about for years, often decades. That, in its own humble way, seems to be adding something original to the world.
I want to encourage you to do the same. Go off-piste, as they say in skiing. Read and write about something from 1920 that no one else will. Maybe it’ll just be ho-hum, no life-changer, maybe too flawed to recommend to anyone else. Some books are neglected for good reasons, and you will do the reading public the service of warning them off. Maybe it’ll surprise you: who knew Elisabeth Sanxay Holding wrote straight fiction before she got into writing mysteries? Tell the English reading public about Polish novelist Zofja Nakowska’s first major novel, Kobiety (Women). Do you agree with Orlo Williams that Storm Jameson’s first novel, The Happy Highways, is just full of “Talk, talk, talk”? Is Stephen Hudson the English Marcel Proust? Chances are good that you’ll be the first, or at least one of the very few, to have traveled down that piste in many, many seasons. Every rediscovered masterpiece has to have its first rediscovery.
So here are a selection of long-forgotten titles from 1920 you might consider exploring as your contribution to the #1920Club. In most cases, you can find the book on the Internet Archive for free and easy downloading. I highly recommend downloading a PDF version rather than Text, EPUB or Kindle: these are usually unedited OCR’d versions with many, many errors. As I explained in this post from 2018, a PDF version, a good PDF viewer, and a nice-sized tablet computer are all you need to have a reading experience that’s the next best thing to holding the actual book in your hands.
• Invincible Minnie, by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
Her first novel, about a tenacious if unlikeable woman. “She is a short, plump, dowdy little woman … stupid, unsympathetic, unimaginative; but somehow she always had her own way…. If Invincible. Minnie had been written by a man instead of a woman he would probably have been lynched before this. … [But] there was no doubt after the second page that the book would prove utterly captivating, for there Mr. Peterson is described as having a ‘long yellow moustache, standing out fiercely like a cat’s;’ and reading on a matter of two or three pages, we encountered that ‘ridiculously coy old skeleton,’ the Defoe horse. It is inconceivable that a person capable of immortalizing horses and moustaches at a stroke could fail to do superlatively well with human beings.” — Constance Murray Greene, The Bookman “The book is firm and muscular, ripe and complete. No first novel of such intellectual or creative energy has appeared in this country for some time.” — William Curtis in Town and Country.
First published anonymously, which is why some von Arnim fans may not be familiar with it. The diary of a woman as she sits in an isolated chalet in the Swiss Alps. “The opening confession of a woman broken by some disappointment in love … lead one to expect a series of admirable, sometimes profound, reflections of the usual introspective order.” Instead, “a mind well stored with generous knowledge of human nature, both sore and soft with painful memories, and, above all, with a sweet and racy humour which lights up every page…. Poignant, rich in comedy, lit by that rare sense of humour which almost touches tears, while behidn the hearts and minds so vivivdly drawn stands the unintentional revelation of the writer’s personality, setting the little tale in an atmosphere which deserves the adjective already used — inspiring.” — TLS
Available at the Internet Archive: LinkRockwell Kent and Son. Illustration from Wilderness
• Wilderness, Rockwell Kent
The story of the artist’s six-month stay, with just his nine-year-old son for company, on Fox Island in Resurrection Bay, Alaska, profusely illustrated with drawings by Ken and his son. “It is not only a narrative of a simple and natural life in these days of a complex civilization, but it is a frank revelation of the ideas, thoughts, aspirations, and conceptions of an unusually artistic temperament.” — em>The Bookman
A time travel story. The hero is projected from the General Strike of 1924 into the future. The ability to use technology has been lost incomptence of later generations. Progress has been replaced by a surrender to decay and entropy. A former Army artilleryman, the hero enlisted by the Speaker, the Ruler of England, to aid in the civil war with the Chairman of Bradford and the President of Wales. ‘To appreciate the story the reader must follow it in the same gusto for adventure, and he will be repaid with a very pleasant entertainment.”–Orlo Williams in the TLS
Set in Memphis during the city’s battle with an epidemic of yellow fever in 1878, about a miser trying to protect his material wealth against an invisible killer:
And now, near and far away, across the town, the light of the Fever fires came out again, like evil flowers blossoming in the night. Not lighted in early all the cases now. As time went by, they gave that idea up. But now there were so many deaths everywhere, only an occasional fire, lighted here and there, made a great lot in the town.
“Before Hagar’s Hoard was twenty-one pages old I knew I was in the grip of a conqueror. Mr. George Kibbe Turner may be a new writer but he is already a master. Just that handful of pages, and my nerves were crawling with the secret and unconjectured fear that came to Memphis in ’78.” — W. Newton Douglas in The Sketch. Warning: in keeping with the fashion of the time, some characters make prolific use of the N-word.
Orlo Williams’ review in the TLS really sells this one: “We cannot help feeling glad for the sake of Mr. [sic] Storm Jameson that he has got The Happy Highways off his chest. It must be a great relief to have discharged so much matter into the form of a novel…. Talk, talk, talk — this long book is a deluge of talk on every controversial subject in modern society, which makes the brain reel long before the end…. He seems to be writing down a flood of memories, lest he should forget them, for the satisfaction of his own soul…. When Joy, Mick and Margaret are just a little bit older, they will realize that there is a great deal of difference between being young and being extremely young. Extreme youth must rant and rage and tear the world to bits, without the world’s being harmed or benefited thereby. It all blows away like the spindrift cast up by the storm.”
In her autobiography, Journey from the North, Jameson wrote that the book only had two readers she knew of: an American convict and John Galsworthy. Galsworthy wrote her editor, Charles Evans: “This authoress has done what none of the other torrential novelists of the last ten years has achieved — given us a convincing (if not picture, at least) summary of the effervescence, discontent, revolt, and unrest of youth; the heartache and beating of wings. I should like to meet her. She must have seen and felt things…. To an old-fashioned brute like me, of course, the lack of form and line and the plethora of talk and philosophy pass a little stubbornly down the throat and stick a little in the gizzard, but the stuff is undeniable, and does not give me the hollow windy feeling I get from a German novel….”
• Kobiety (Women); a novel of Polish life, by Zofja Rygier Nakowska
“This very unusual book reveals the secret springs of all human life.” Well, that might be setting the bar a bit too high. “To read it after a long course of the mediocre, superficial writing through which a reviewer, in the course of his duty, must wade is like emerging from the subway and drawing pure air into the lungs.” Uncredited critic, New York Times The TLS was more measured in its assessment: “The book is indeed surprisingly uneven; subtle and extravagant, balanced and preposterous in turn, always stifling in its moral atmosphere, yet redeemed by a malicious sort of candour which endows the heroine herself with something akin to probity and extorts for her a certain respect.”
The story of a failed marriage between the daughter of a Chicago millionaire and an English nobleman (in contrast to Borden’s own long and successful marriage to Sir Edward Spear). New York Times: “Where its author has been most successful is in the atmosphere of dull discontent, of poignant disillusion, which she evokes throughout. She gives a depressing picture of the utter cynicism of the English high society into which her heroine falls, against which she sets with telling effect the rawness and childishness of the ultra rich set of Chicago. There are neat characterizations, epigrammatic bits of phrasing and some passages written with unblushing frankness — in fact, for frankness concerning things usually veiled or ignored in conventional conversation the book stands high even in this age of audacity in thought and language.”
Stephen Hudson’s novels, according to his own Wikipedia entry, “are now almost entirely forgotten.” Hudson was the pseudonym of Sydney Schiff, who was one of the first Englishmen to celebrate the work of Marcel Proust. Schiff took over translation duties from the ailing C. K. Scott Moncrief and was responsible for the translation of Time Regained that most English readers who made it that far through In Search of Lost Time will have read. He hosted a famous 1922 party at which Proust was introduced to James Joyce, an event celebrated in Richard Davenport-Hines’ 2006 book, A Night at the Majestic: Proust and the Great Modernist Party of 1922.
If the following, from The Nation, is accurate, Hudson/Schiff was clearly influenced by Proust in his own fiction: “Mr. Hudson is quite unconscious of the noisy and dazzling things that fill the day and die; he addresses himself with infinite quietude and patience to study and record the permanent foundations of human nature. Richard Kurt is very coolly and closely written, very exact and unemphatic, and quite long…. We are given indirectly, and wholly through Richard’s perceptions, presentations of his father and of his wife, that are astonishingly penetrating in vision and concrete in effect…. Rarely as a riper first novel appeared. It is solidly founded in its observation, built with a serene sureness of touch, careless of vain graces, disdainful of all appeal save that of its inner veracity.” (Note: published in the U.K. in 1919, in the U.S. in 1920)
by Patrick Bennett (1988), however, Anderson spent two years “in the twilight world of vagabonds, riding the side-door Pullmans across the nation — San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, Boston. Now and then he turned to riding his thumb along the highways, although he felt that hitchhiking was ‘like sticking your tail out and every time somebody passes they kick it.'”
Kari provided the following profile: I’m studying for my PhD in American Studies at Glasgow University, and my thesis is on the Hollywood novel genre pre-1950s. Other research interests include F. Scott Fitzgerald, and particularly the role played in his novels of alcohol, work, and waste. As a part-time student I also spend my time working in financial services, hospitality and teaching. My Twitter handle is @karichsund and my email address is 
, she wrote:
, came out three years later, Trilling proclaimed that Bolton had established herself “as the best woman writer of fiction in this country today”:
