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World War Two

The Last Blue Sea, by David Forrest (1959)

Cover of first edition of David Forrest was the pen-name of Australian writer, academic and historian David Denholm (1924-1997). Among his numerous works of non-fiction, including an acclaimed history, The Colonial Australians about the early white settlement of the country, were a few novels. The Last Blue Sea, published in 1959, was his first. The book drew considerably praise and attention when released in Australia and the US. However, the novel went out of print by the early 1970s and was then largely forgotten. Penguin Books Australia published a reprint in
1985 but the book has remained off the shelves since.

Forrest, a veteran himself of WW2, fought with the 59th Battalion of the Australian Army in New Guinea in 1943. That unit, although it had fought as a regular formation in the First World War, had been down-graded to a part-time reservist (militia) unit during the inter-war years. When the Second World War began, the 59th was re-assembled as a militia force. During the war, such militia units, comprised of conscripts and a smaller number of part-time reservists, formed a large part of the Australian army after 1942.

During the war, there was considerable animosity between the militia units and the men of the AIF (Australian Imperial Force), the latter comprising the volunteers who enlisted in the early part of the war. With some justification, the AIF units regarded themselves as better-trained, more professional and more motivated than the Militia men, whom the former nick-named “Chockos” i.e., chocolate soldiers who always melted under fire. There was no doubt that some militia formations deserved their poor reputations, especially those that remained garrisoned in Australia and were rife with in-discipline, desertions and poor morale. Yet some militia units performed remarkably well in the New Guinea Campaign, most famously at Kokoda in 1942. One can say “remarkably” considering the often poor training, lack of equipment and indifferent leadership many militia units were burdened with (some men arrived in New Guinea literally never having fired a rifle before).

With this background in mind, Forrest’s novel depicts a Militia unit—the 83rd battalion—in the campaign in eastern New Guinea in 1943 as US and Australian forces advance northwards, slowly pushing back the Japanese. The story is told from the viewpoints of a number of characters, including the battalion’s senior officers. But the primary focus is on one platoon and, in particular, on one of its’ sections comprising a Corporal and eight privates.

If the novel has any main characters, they would be two privates, 19-year-old Ron Fisher, a Bren-gunner and 26-year-old Robert “the Admiral” Nelson, a former schoolteacher and now an Owen (Australian-made sub-machine-gun) gunner. Nelson, the oldest of the section, has the fatherly role of the group. Yet even he, with his worldly wisdom, appears in awe of Fisher, an enigmatic figure, mature far beyond his years and whose background is only hinted at but indicates that he survived a tough childhood and is now a man that understands life more than many men twice his age.

The platoon engages the Japanese in the steaming, thickly forested steep slopes of New Guinea. The enemy, under-supplied and starving, fight desperately and with suicidal courage. In this struggle, there is no quarter, the enemy is never examined close-up, he remains a distant, hated figure. The militia men have to endure the taunts and insults from their AIF cousins. As the platoon advances through a ruined town, watching them are some AIF commandoes who snort with contempt “any battle they start, we have to finish.” The army is on a race against time, not just against the enemy but against the jungle and its climate. The campaign must be won before too many men succumb to malaria and before their rotting uniforms literally fall from their bodies.

The potential weaknesses of the militia is personified in one soldier of the section, private “Nervous” Lincoln who deserts early in the campaign but is caught and returned to his unit. He nearly makes it through to the very end of the advance before succumbing to his fear. To modern eyes, this might redeem him but as far as his comrades are concerned, “they would remember all their lives that Lincoln was not with them.” A major theme of the novel is the meaning to human existence that can be discovered by the endurance of hardship and danger. The Pacific Ocean (the “last blue sea” of the title) becomes a symbol as it slowly, tantalisingly becomes nearer as the exhausted soldiers advance through the jungle against the surviving enemy. A symbol of promise, of peace, of a just reward for hardship, sacrifice and duty. As the novel progresses, it becomes apparent that faint-hearted types like Lincoln were the exception, not the rule. “Their uniforms were rotting and falling apart, but their weapons were spotlessly clean.”

The novel explores the inner musings of the characters. In this, it anticipates such a device employed in the 1998 war movie The Thin Red Line although Forrest’s novel is not as dreamily lyrical as that film. Like all war novels published prior to the 1970s, there is a curious lack of coarse language, a reflection of the need to satisfy censors of the day. One critic did suggest that the novel’s depiction of Australian soldiers lacked the cheeky humour that they were known for, saying the Aussies in this novel are “way too serious and philosophical” in their manner. That might be unfair, given that these half-trained soldiers had been sent to one of the harshest terrains of the war against one of the most fanatical enemies, so a sombre mood might be understandable. In one later scene, Nelson, now a walking wounded case, is sent back to the rear accompanied by a younger injured soldier. The two crippled men have to climb a forested mountain, through clinging mud and steaming rain, their wounds crawling with infection. Seeing that the younger man’s will and strength is failing, Nelson saves him by goading him, “Didn’t you have to fight for anything, Jonesy? Was life just dished out to you on a silver plate?”

In another scene during the long trek back, Nelson says to Jones, “You can make this mountain mean something. I climbed a mountain once. When I was your age. And then I wasted the next seven years. You see, I should have gone on and climbed the next mountain. Only when I was over the first one, I sat down. I had to come to New Guinea to wake up to myself ….”

The Last Blue Sea remains curiously little-known in Australia, despite the lavish attention bestowed on this nation’s military history. It is one Australian novel that deserves a fresh audience.

This is a guest post generously contributed by Peter Hill [email protected]

The Last Blue Sea, by David Forrest
Melbourne: Heinemann, 1959

A Walk in the Sun, by Harry Brown (1944)

A Walk in the Sun was a slim war novel first published in 1944 which generated considerable hype and attention upon its initial release, followed closely by a successful film version. Yet, despite the praise of many reviewers and the conviction that this was a major work of war fiction, the book was soon forgotten. Perhaps it was obscured by the euphoria surrounding the end of the Second World War or more likely, it was elbowed aside by the spate of more self-important ‘big’ war novels that emerged in the United States in the post-war era.

Harry Brown (1917-1986) was an American writer & poet who achieved a measure of success in the post-war era. Born in Maine and educated at Harvard, Brown had works of poetry published in 1941 after winning several poetry awards, including the Shelley Prize in 1939. Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbour, Brown enlisted in the military in July 1941, serving in the US Army Engineers Corps. After the United States joined the war, the army put Brown’s writing skills to use by assigning him to the staff of Yank Magazine in 1942, a job he held until the end of hostilities.

After the war, Brown turned to writing as a full-time profession. By the early 1960s, he had produced four novels, a play, several collections of verse and he had written several Hollywood screenplays and had collaborated on a number of others. His play A Sound of Hunting (1946) was later filmed in 1952 as Eight Iron Men while his 1960 novel The Stars in their Courses inspired the 1966 John Wayne Western El Dorado. Screenplays that Brown worked on included The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and Ocean’s 11 (1960) and he was co-recipient of an Oscar for best screenplay for A Place in the Sun (1951).

A Walk in the Sun was Brown’s first novel, a work he wrote during his spare time while working for Yank. Released in 1944, the novel was an instant success, receiving much praise and it was serialised in Liberty Magazine that same year, expanding its audience. A film version was released the following year, directed by Lewis Milestone (of All Quiet on the Western Front fame). Critics received the novel warmly upon its initial release, the New York Times calling it the “best novel of the war.” Yet the novel quickly slid into obscurity during the next few years, as did, albeit to a lesser extent, the accompanying film version.

In just a few short years, the United States had advanced from an isolationist country ravaged by the Great Depression into an industrial and military super-power. Among the intelligentsia of the US, the final vestiges of the cultural cringe (inferiority complex) towards Europe were being eradicated as American artists and writers now felt able and emboldened to take their place on the world stage. For the American literacy scene, an event as momentous as the Second World War demanded a great and important novel, a new War & Peace for the 20th century. When Brown’s novel appeared in 1944, for a brief moment critics thought that the great American war novel had already arrived. Yet the post-war years saw a steady succession of WW2 novels, all generating attention and impressive sales, all of them big and long (some might say bloated and over-long). The war-novel “boom,” that lasted a decade and a half after 1945, began with Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions which both appeared in 1948, followed by Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny and James Jones’ From Here to Eternity (both 1951). Bringing up the rear came other (as popular albeit less-regarded) novels such as Leon Uris’ Battle Cry (1953), Anton Myrer’s The Big War (1957) and David MacCuish’s now-forgotten Do Not Go Gentle (1960). Brown’s book was simply swamped by this crowd of “big” war novels.

Looking back after nearly three-quarters of a century, it appears that while Brown’s little novel was perhaps over-praised upon its release, it is also true that it had been unjustly neglected in the decades since. The novel begins at the sharp end, in the early dawn, a landing barge carrying a platoon of GIs is approaching the coast of Italy. The novel is intentionally vague on the details- there is no mention of a date, or the exact location, there is no backdrop to the story, nor any explanation of the wider campaign of which this little group is a part of. As the novel begins, the platoon CO Lieutenant Rand has just been wounded in the head by shrapnel from a nearby shell, a freak casualty from one of the few shots the enemy has fired. The senior Sergeant, Halverson, is now in charge. Shortly after landing on the beach, Halverson leaves his men to go find the Company Captain but never returns, a victim of an enemy machine-gun nest. Command now falls to Sergeant Porter, a job he does not want.

The rest of the novel follows the shrinking platoon as it advances inland. Most of the men are veterans, having seen action in North Africa and Sicily. Some are already war-weary and one man will be claimed by combat fatigue before the morning is out. The novel is a simple one, the time span it covers is only half a day from dawn to early afternoon. No locations are mentioned, as far as the reader knows, it is just somewhere on the Italian coast. No context is supplied, the dwindling platoon seems to be on their own, marching inland towards an enemy-held farmhouse. The ending is ambiguous, there is no neat conclusion. It is like the author has simply taken a neat slice from the progress of one day in the life of an infantry unit in a combat zone. Only the reader has the benefit of hindsight, knowing that this is merely the first morning of what will be a very long and bloody campaign of which few of the platoon, if such a rate of attrition continues, will see the end of.

The style is straightforward and unpretentious. After the lengthy and self-important novels mentioned above, the simplicity of this little work seems refreshing. The characters in Brown’s novel only concern themselves with the present. There is no sentimentalising about memories of home, no musing on the deeper meaning of the conflict, no debates on the wider implications of what they do. As British regulars used to say in the Great War, these men are “‘ere coz they’re ‘ere.” There is certainly the influence of Hemingway but I would argue that Brown’s novel has more in common with the “Hard-Boiled” crime novels of the Thirties with its direct simplicity and its bluntness that nonetheless avoids explicit detail. A contemporary review in the Nation argued that Brown’s novel owed more to the short stories of James Thurber rather than Hemingway, as the novel does not have the righteous anger of the latter. That argument is valid, Brown’s characters may gripe and grumble but they do not rage against their fate. Like the characters in Thurber’s works, the members of the platoon are ordinary, decent men caught up in un-usual (or in this case, extreme) circumstances. Despite being a tiny fragment of a vast machine, they retain their identity as individuals. Despite the untidy confusion of war and the unjust randomness of who dies and who survives, these men remain compelled to keep going.

This is a guest post generously contributed by Peter Hill [email protected]

A Walk in the Sun, by Harry Brown
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944

Signed With Their Honour, by James Aldridge (1942)

Cover of Signed With Their HonourJames Aldridge (1918- 2015) was an Australian journalist and war correspondent who covered the Second World War in Greece, Crete and North Africa 1940-1941. Signed With Their Honour was his first novel.

Aldridge enjoyed a period of considerable success in the late-war to post-war period and his biggest-selling novel was The Diplomat published in 1949. In the early post-war era, Aldridge was one of Australia’s most successful novelists in international terms. Yet by the early 1960s, his prestige was on the decline with his novels receiving increasingly poor or indifferent reviews and afterwards Aldridge devoted most of his writing to producing work for children or young adults. By the time of his death in 2015, none of his works were still in print and Aldridge’s writing was virtually forgotten (when he died in London three years ago, none of the Australian media even bothered to notice).

Aldridge chose a variety of settings for his novels. Early works such as Signed With Their Honour and The Sea Eagle (1944) were set in the Second World War, The Diplomat was a political drama set in the Azerbaijan Revolution in Iran, The Hunter (1950) portrayed fur hunters in Canada’s north, The Last Exile (1962) was set in the Suez Crisis and A Captive in the Land (1962) was a Cold War drama. A common thread among his novels is the conflict between an individual’s desires, morals and conscience and his obligations, demands and duty to the state and its political structures.

Signed With Their Honour was one of Aldridge’s more durable works, remaining in print off and on until the 1980s unlike many of his other novels. Set in Greece and later in Crete, it depicts the British Royal Air-Force and its participation in the Italian invasion of Greece in 1940, followed by the German invasion in early 1941. Although the author was Australian, the novel’s central character, a young pilot named Quayle, is English. One of his fellow pilots is Australian but is only a minor character. Whether Aldridge chose this device to help improve potential sales in the UK is unclear.

The title of the novel is a line from a Stephen Spender poem ‘The Truly Great’, a work that celebrates the individual that seeks greatness, glory and achievement even if the price is a life cut short. Aldridge no doubt considered the line apt for a novel about fighter pilots in wartime. This novel depicts the pilots of a British fighter squadron equipped with out-dated Gloster Gladiator biplanes, isolated in the heat and dust of Greece with few supplies and facing a powerful enemy invasion. The novel is closely based on the exploits of a real-life unit, No 80 Squadron, which fought in Greece during that campaign and, despite possessing out-dated biplanes, inflicted heavy losses on their Italian and later, their German opponents.

For a wartime novel, there is a surprisingly bitter tone which possibly reflects the feelings of many towards Britain’s role in the Greek and Cretan campaigns which ended in defeat. Characters in the novel complain about the too-little supplies they have been given, the indifferent Allied leadership, the false promises and hopes given to the Greek people and the in-adequacy of their equipment, being allocated old biplanes while fleets of more modern fighter-planes sit on airfields back in England.

The central character Quayle develops a relationship with a Greek girl and his feelings towards her and the longings of his inner self, combined with his bitterness of the Allied bunglings of the war around him, leads him to consider desertion. But his conscience and sense of duty in the fight against Fascism compel him to remain in the air.

The novel received considerable attention when it was first published in the US and the UK, earning some positive reviews and it became a best seller in both countries. Not all reviews were positive, Time Magazine dismissed it as ‘clumsy fiction’ for example. But the novel received a lot of attention. Rank Studios in Britain purchased the film rights and in 1943 embarked on production of a film version. However the project was abandoned after three Gladiator biplanes were written off in accidental crashes and the funding dried up.

The novel owes a big debt to Ernst Hemingway and the master’s obvious influence was pointed out by the book’s more negative critics. But despite its’ flaws, I believe this novel deserves to be better known still today. It vividly portrays aerial combat and the sights and smells of the Greek campaign. And, unlike his later works, it moves along at a smart pace and doesn’t allow itself to become bogged down in the details. Aldridge’s later novels, although perhaps more ambitious, became bloated in their own self-importance. Even his 1944 follow-up to Signed With Their Honour, the novel The Sea Eagle, about Australian soldiers trapped behind enemy lines in German-occupied Crete, now looks rather dated and pretentious with its heavy-handed symbolism and references to Greek mythology. This novel is slimmer, easier to digest and deals with a subject that obviously fired the author’s imagination without stretching his writing abilities too thin.

This is a guest post generously contributed by Peter Hill [email protected]

Signed with Their Honour, by James Aldridge
London: Michael Joseph, 1942

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Kirkus Reviews:

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

• The New Yorker:

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

• Elizabeth Cade in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

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

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

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

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

• Polly Saunders in The Newport News Daily News:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover of US edition of A Distant Summer by Renzo Rosso

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published in the U.K. as:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digging for Mrs. Miller, by John Strachey (1941)

Cover of "Digging for Mrs. Miller"Digging for Mrs. Miller (1941) illustrates how, in the right hands, simple, undramatic, and limpid prose can have a stunning impact. Originally published as Post D in England, Digging for Mrs. Miller is John Strachey’s thinly-fictionalized account of his experiences working as an air raid warden during the most intense months of the Blitz in autumn 1940.

Strachey, who had been one of the most active members of the radical left in England in the 1930s, became a warden somewhat by accident. After one raid in September 1940, he came home to find his house roped off because of a nearby delayed-action bomb. Unable to sleep there, he bunked at the air raid post down the street, helping out with a few tasks to justify his place, and a few days later, he enrolled as an unpaid and part-time warden. His uniform was just a pair of overalls and a steel helmet. His equipment consisted of a flashlight (which had to be used sparingly in the blackout), a gas mask, some bandages, and a note pad.

Night after night, he would sit at an upstairs window in the house that served as the post for his sector–an area of perhaps 6-8 square blocks. The house belonged to his neighbor, Miss Sterling, who was also the head of Post D. Night after night, he would hear–and then see–the German bombers coming over London. And when a high explosive or incendiary bomb fell, he and the other wardens would run to locate the site, see if anyone was injured, and coordinate the work of the firemen, stretcher bearers, rescue workers, and the rest of the team that quickly appeared on the scene.

One of Strachey’s first realizations was how much working as a warden did for his own morale:

The main trouble of being a pure civilian during a prolonged air bombardment is that as such one’s only duty is to seek and to maintain one’s own, and one’s companions’, safety. And this is inevitably demoralizing. The instant that an individual is given even the simplest objective function, and becomes a member of an organized (and uniformed, this is notoriously important) group, the whole burden of deciding whether or not on any particular occasion to seek his or her own safety is automatically removed. While one is functionless one is continually irritated by such questions as, “Isn’t it really very silly to stay upstairs (or to go out) in this degree of Blitz?” The instant the individual has become a warden, ambulance driver, member of the auxiliary fire service, rescue and demolition squads, or stretcher-bearer, this question is, nine times out of ten, settled for him or her.

Though I’ve read several history books that dealt with the Blitz, Digging for Mrs. Miller was the first thing that really conveyed the sense of what it was like. Contrary to the impression one gets, the bombing was not on the level of the massive Allied raids against Germany. The Luftwaffe knocked out buildings more often than whole blocks, and Strachey’s team more often responded to single bombs than to wide scale destruction.

On occasion, though, a single large high explosive bomb could destroy the better part of a block. Strachey devotes 48 pages–nearly one third of the book–to “The Big Bomb,” a chapter detailing the hours of scrambling around and digging through the enormous piles of rubble left after a particularly large bomb exploded near their post. Hour after hour, working with no light and soaked with rain, he and other men tunneled their way in to locate victims, hauling away endless baskets full of rubble. In one case, it took the rescuers over 26 hours to reach a young woman buried under a small mountain of debris.

Strachey left the warden service at the end of 1940, when he joined the R.A.F.. Though he eventually wrote over a dozen works of political philosophy and advocacy, I suspect this short, simple tale is his finest legacy as a writer. It’s certainly one of the best books dealing with World War Two I’ve ever read.

Digging for Mrs. Miller, by John Strachey
New York: Random House, 1941

Four Memoirs of the Aftermath of War

As a veteran, I would like to take this day as an opportunity to remember that one of the worst things about a war is the suffering that continues after its end. In the stereotypical versions of the end of World War Two in Europe one sees in America and Britain, the symbol of V-E Day was the great joyous crowd doing the Lambeth Walk in Piccadilly Circus. But on the Continent, the end of the war merely opened a time of displacement, disruption, and slow, painful reconstruction.

Four fine neglected books, all written by women, remind us of one of the greatest tragedies to follow the war in Europe — namely, the plight of the millions of prisoners, forced laborers, and refugees who were displaced from their homes and stranded in foreign countries, often without the means to return.

• Aftermath, by Francesca M. Wilson (1948)

aftermathWilson, an English academic who had already worked with refugees from the First World War, Russia, and the Spanish Civil War, joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in early 1945, and was one of its first staff members to arrive in Germany to begin to deal with the enormity of the problem created with the liberation of concentration camps by the Allies. The first DP (Displaced Persons) camp she worked at was Feldafing in Bavaria, which the U.S. Army set up to house a trainload of Hungarian Jews one of its units found near Mühldorf , a satellite camp of Dachau. In these early days, those organizing relief quickly realized that they were dealing with people who had been subjected to a dehumanization more extreme than anything that even an experienced worker like Wilson had ever experienced:

They had the furtive look and gestures of hunted animals. By years of brutal treatment, by the murder of relatives, by the constant fear of death, all that was human had been taken away from them. We went into the dormitories where they were eating — the collected their food from the kitchen and brought it back to devour in relative privacy: nothing would persuade them to eat in communal dining-rooms. I noticed a man who was trying to eat but was too weak to finish his food. Three boys were staring at his plate. I had once seen the same look of burning yet cautious intentness on the Russian steppes. When the sick man pushed his plate away a thin arm shot out and seized the lump of meat left on it. The lad who had secured it slid out of the room, like a starving dog with a bone.

Despite the challenges of woefully inadequate supplies and staff, an oncoming winter, and a population devastated by malnutrition, disease, and depression, UNRRA and other relief organizations gradually established some degree of sanitation and comfort in the camps. But none of them was quite prepared to delete with the special challenge presented by the former residents of lands now incorporated into the Soviet Union. And their responses were not always something to be proud of:

They are now in exile because they do not wish to become Soviet citizens. Only they can decide about this. Soviet citizenship should be accepted voluntarily, and the policy not to compel their return is a right one: but the policy of leaving them to rot in DP camps is utterly wrong. Poland will not accept her former Ukrainian citizens — those who tried to go back there were turned back from her frontiers. Military authorities in Austria were trying last September to make a temporary solution. They reduced their rations, which had been kept to the 2,000 calorie level, to the 1,200 of the surrounding population, saying at the same time that all those who were physically able must pay for their board and lodging in the camps…. But unless these uprooted peoples are to be permanently absorbed in the German or Austrian economy — and this neither they nor their hosts desire — this is only a temporary solution. When all have gone home who will or can, there will still be three-quarters of a million irrepatriable DPs….

• The Wild Place, by Kathryn Hulme (1952)

the_wild_placeIn 1945, Kathryn Hulme arrived as UNRRA director of the Wildflecken DP camp in northern Bavaria. Like Wilson, she encountered a desperate situation and struggled in the first months to establish conditions fit for the people in the camp. Her first impressions, she wrote “entered with such sharp shock that never again would I be able to look on a refugee mass, even in pictures, and see it collectively, see it as a homogeneous stream of unfortunate humanity that could be handled with the impersonal science of the engineer who does not even think of the drops of water when he is controlling the flood.” At Wildflecken, she also met Marie Louise Habets, a Belgian nurse and former nun. The two became close friends and were to remain together as companions when they left the camp. Hulme would later fictionalize Habets’ experiences as a nun in the 1958 best-seller, The Nun’s Story. The Wild Place won the Atlantic Monthly award as best non-fiction book of 1953. Although not rare (AddAll.com lists over 50 copies for sale), it’s become something of a collector’s item, with prices starting at $35 and running to over $400 a copy.

• The Walls Came Tumbling Down, by Henriette Roosenburg (1956)

walls_came_tumbling_downRoosenburg was a young Dutch woman imprisoned in 1944 by the Nazis as a Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) inmate for her activities as a member of the Dutch Resistance organization. When the war ended, she and four other Dutch women were inmates of a prison near Waldheim in Saxony, in the Russian zone of occupation. Because one of the women was too ill to walk, they were left behind in the initial evacuation, and after turning their friend over for medical care, they had to work their way back over four hundred miles of territory that was still in chaos. It required an extraordinary amount of strength, ingenuity, and persuasiveness, and reading The Walls Came Tumbling Down serves as another illustration of the fact that a group of women is usually ten times smarter, better organized, and more practical than any equivalent group of men. Roosenburg, who worked as a journalist after the war, first wrote about these experiences in a four-part series in The New Yorker titled, “Annals of Liberation — The Journey Home.”

• The Children, by Charity Blackstock (1966)

the_childrenThe Children was the only book of non-fiction published by Ursula Torday under the pen-name of Charity Blackstock that she used mostly for murder mysteries and light thrillers. In it, she recounted her five years’ work as director of a scheme organized by an association of British Jews organized to help locate and reunite family members who had survived the Holocaust. The scheme involved arranging for displaced Jewish children being kept in group homes in France to be placed — only temporarily at first — with Jewish families in England. The Children provides a vivid demonstration of the paradoxes of memory: how quickly people in France and England could forget their own troubles during the war and grow callous to the plight of children orphaned and displaced in its wake; and how long these children remained scarred and disturbed by their experiences. Even for herself, Torday admits, “This business of going back is dangerous: by doing it one virtually stands still, and tomorrow is surely more interesting than today.” And she is able, writing nearly fifteen years later, to recognize that for the children, “The Scheme, the families, the Homes, are all part of a black and stinking past, to be remembered by all of us, but to be forgotten as far as it is possible by them. Even I myself, even the best of hostesses, must be unwilling reminders of a time when they were dependent on charity, deprived children, pathetic victims.”

All That Seemed Final, by Joan Colebrook (1941)

all_that_seemed_finalReading All That Seemed Final, I was often reminded of another multi-player London novel I’ve listened to as an audiobook in the last year–John Lanchester’s Capital. Both books interweave the stories of a cast of characters over the space of roughly one year, switching from one to another from chapter to chapter, and drawing many links between the “Big H” history going around them and the immediate facts and issues of their own lives. And, as with Capital, throughout All That Seemed Final, I kept asking myself: “This is wonderfully entertaining, but is it more than that?”

I was perhaps jaded from having read several reviews that criticized Lanchester’s book for being somewhat superficial, for playing tried-and-true cards like death and bankruptcy for easy emotions. After listening to the book, however, I have to disagree, if only on by the simple litmus test of how much I still recall so much of its story and mood nearly a year later. And–with the exception of a few lightweight characters–I think I will be able to say the same of All That Seemed Final a year from now.

The story opens in the Spring of 1939, just as the flowers in St. James’ Park are beginning to bud and Hitler is invading Czechoslovakia. Colebrook introduces her cast in midstream–hosting a party for charity, heading home on a crowded bus, wondering whether to end an affair or a marriage. Quite a few are on the margins of society–a minor art critic, a shell-shocked veteran clerking in a tobacco firm. If they take note of the headlines about the possibility of war, it is, of course, only to wonder what inconveniences it might bring. “Will they intern my wonderful cook for being Austrian?” frets an aging femme fatale. Those most have memories of the last war, they are (the former soldier aside) as something fought “over there,” leading them to assume the next will also be somewhat distant from their own lives.

Colebrook takes her title from Proust: “Thus the face of things in life changes, the center of empires, the register of fortunes, the chart of positions, all that seemed final, are perpetually remoulded, and during his lifetime a man can witness the completest changes just where those seemed to him the least possible.” And, to the credit of her originality, not all of the changes that come to Colebrook’s characters result simply from the outbreak of war. While the slick and successful painter finds substance and moral fiber within when he joins the Army, the adulterous wife is forced to a decision for reasons quite apart from the events around her. Although all feel themselves to be in a sort of limbo, for some the uncertainty contains more promise than dread. But Colebrook also shows, with great skill, the crushing fear of pain and destruction felt by a few for whom the waiting is the worst ordeal of all.

All That Seemed Final received positive reviews went it came out in the fall of 1941. Writing in The New York Times, Marianne Hauser called it “a fine, clever book, well written and thoroughly convincing.” But timing was against its success: English readers were already caught up in the war and American readers soon had problems of their own to worry about. The book has never been reissued.

Colebrook, who was born and raised in Australia, emigrated to England in the mid-1930s, and felt moved to write the book in frustration with “this callous and rather hopeless disregard of the obvious fact that Europe was again drifting toward open conflict.” It was not until she moved to America in late 1940, however, that she was able to finish the novel. She wrote just one other work of fiction, The Northerner (1948), which was set in rural Australia. She worked as a journalist and, on occasion, as a social worker, in New York City. She published three works of nonfiction, including The Cross of Lassitude (1967), a study of juvenile delinquency. She died in 1991 at the age of 80.

All That Seemed Final, by Joan Colebrook
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company

The Pork Butcher, by David Hughes (1984)

Cover of first U. K. edition of 'The Pork Butcher'The Pork Butcher is a book one can easily admire, but it’s hard to imagine anyone liking it. In this slender novel–barely 120 pages–Hughes pulls off a feat similar to that of Nabokov in Lolita–that is, allowing us to see the world through the eyes of a man who’s guilty of horrible things while neither repulsing us nor gaining our unguarded sympathy.

In Hughes case, the crime is both a war crime and a crime of love. Ernst Kestner, now a butcher in Lubeck, recently widowed and even more recently diagnosed with lung cancer, decides to head to France to confront memories he has tried to suppress for years. As a soldier in the Wermacht serving in France in 1944, he took part in the massacre of the entire population of a town, an incident based on the destruction of Oradour-sur-Glane. Among the town’s residents was a woman with whom Kestner was in love and was conducting an affair. The orders to attack the town comes, in fact, on the very day he was planning to desert and attempt to run away with her to neutral territory.

Hughes never identifies Ernst’s precise motivation for following these orders–fear, loyalty, hatred or simply the habit of obedience, and Ernst himself seems to lack the introspection to find out for himself. In fact, he appears, as one character puts it, to have “less and less ability to absorb what happened on that one day.” Even so, Ernst is certainly more nuanced in his moral reasoning than Major Kane, the protagonist of Hughes’ other portrait of evil, The Major. While he may never come to grips with his reason for doing what he did, he never pretends it was anything but wrong.

The Pork Butcher was easily Hughes’ most successful novel, both critically and commercially. It won the Welsh Arts Council fiction prize in 1984 and the W. H. Smith literary award in the following year. Hughes sold the film rights for the book, and the movie version, Souvenir, starring Christopher Plummer, was released in 1989. Hughes’ own verdict on the movie? “Terrible, just terrible.”

British critics were lavish in their praise–and still are. In The Guardian’s obituary, Giles Gordon called it one of “the novels that define our time and are metaphors for it.” U. S. reviewers were less enthusiastic. Kirkus Reviews wrote that it suffered from “talkiness throughout and an awkward bunching-up of developments in the busy yet ineffectual final pages.” Personally, I would put the book somewhere between the two extremes. I found its strongest points not related to the moral issues but Hughes’ ability to capture the sensual–sights, sounds, smells, feels–in a few choice, precisely drawn strokes. His description of a picnic of sausages, cheese and bread beside a little brook in France will get you checking on airfares. Overall, though, I rate The Major as a stronger and more convincing work.

One thing David Hughes could never be faulted for, however, is long-windedness. I’ve got copies of two other novels–Memories of Dying (1976) and The Little Book (1996) waiting to be read, and they, along with The Major and The Pork Butcher represent fewer than 500 pages total. At that length, I’d be silly not to give more of Hughes’ work a try.

The Pork Butcher, by David Hughes
London: Constable and Company, 1984

Breaking Point, by Jacob Presser (1958)

breakingpoint

Subtitled “A Factual Novel,” Breaking Point is a chilling account of life in a Nazi transit camp, an official limbo from which the only exit is on the weekly train to Auschwitz. Yet its author, the Dutch historian and secular Jew, Jacques Presser (who was referred to as Jacob Presser in English language editions), never set foot inside a transit camp and spent several years of the war in hiding.

“The one thing I want to repeat for the tenth, for the hundredth time is that all this is true, that it was thus and not otherwise,” writes Presser’s alter ego and narrator, Jacques Suasso Henriques, a Dutch Jew of Portugese descent. Asserting the truth of a work of fiction so forcefully demonstrates remarkable self-confidence in the author, although there was certainly less scrutiny of Holocaust survivor credentials at the time the book was first published in the late 1950s.

Breaking Point is the title given the English language translation by Barrows Mussey. The original Dutch title was De Nacht der Girondijnen, which literally means “The Night of the Girondists.” The reference is to the arrest, trial and execution of the Girondists, a loose political faction that opposed the most extreme measures of the Jacobins and, in the end, fell victim to the very same themselves. (Through much of the war, Presser worked on a biography of Napoleon, Napoleon: Historie en Legende, which was published in 1946.)

Jacques Henriques is a teacher in a secondary school, living in tenuous security due to his family’s “Portugese papers,” in the book’s opening scenes. From time to time, he notes the absence of one or more of his students as the Nazis put increasing pressure on the dwindling Jewish population, but he feels relatively insulated from this terror. Then, one day, while quizzing his students on the “approved” Dutch history textbook, one of them tells him that her mother had been taken the day before:

“And she’d had herself sterilized, because they said …” Then she was crying. This is true; I could repeat it at the Last Judgment: this is what a thirteen-year-old girl said, those very words, in Class 2A of the so-called Jewish High School.

What next? I put down my book, and let the children “work individually for the rest of the period,” the classic phrase of teachers who don’t feel like keeping going.

With that, he walks out of the school without a word and decides to hide himself from the terror in the place he’s least likely to be taken. One of his students puts him in contact with Siegfried Israel Cohn, who runs the Disposition Service at the Westerbork transit camp. The DS, also known as the Jewish SS, polices the inmates of the camp and organizes the selection and loading of the weekly shipments to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. “We, a few intellectuals, office clerks, workmen, traveling salesmen, and peddlers, were to the others undoubtedly the most loathsome scum that God had ever created,” Henriques writes, but they were also effectively immune to selection themselves as they played an essential role in the process.

Henriques enters the camp and joins the DS with a reference from Cohn’s son, and attempts to appreciate the safety of his situation and numbing himself to reality by becoming as cynical as Cohn himself. He even admits to enjoying his position as Cohn’s adjutant: “I did not find it unpleasant. Sure enough, it gave me a pleasing tingle. Plainly I was already beginning to be a man.”

Soon, however, he finds it impossible not to see the camp as a version of hell:

This hell exists today alone. There is no past and no future; everyone knows that in his heart. The past is dead; the future is death. Between the two lies the narrow watershed, life. And that life consists of pursuing a shoelace, of quarreling over a seat by the stove, of fleeting encounters with a woman on the barter system, of intolerable loneliness in intolerable crowds. Each week it rises anew to the fiercest, the unspeakably grisly horror of the one night, the night before the departure; the apocalyptic plunge, forever new, of hundreds of human beings into destruction and death.

Henriques’ cloak of cynicism quickly wears thin, and, in the end, he finds it impossible to keep his anger and fear under wraps. The smallest event–Cohn knocking a book from the hand of a man waiting to board the train–proves his breaking point.

lanotteDespite the fact that Presser never experienced the camps at first hand, Breaking Point is a thoroughly convincing account. So convincing, in fact, that one of the most renown survivors and writers on the Holocaust, Primo Levi, was moved to translate the book into Italian in 1974 (as La notte dei Girondini).

Presser had ample evidence to draw upon. In 1943, his own wife, Debora, was arrested for holding forged papers as sent to Westerbork. Although she later died in the Sobibor camp, her life in the two camps was conveyed to him by her surviving fellow inmates. In 1950, he was contracted by the Dutch government to write a history of the experience of Dutch Jews during the War, a book published in English (and still in print) as Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry. In his research for that book, he came across the diary of a Polish Jew who was a member of the FK [Fliegende Kolonne, or Flying Column], which dealt with the victims’ luggage. Although it did not mention Presser’s wife, it covered in detail the week she spent there.

In an afterword to a Dutch edition of the book quoted in Lina Insana’s 2009 book, Arduous Tasks: Primo Levi, Translation and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony (Toronto Italian Studies), Philo Bregstein wrote,

And here is an indication of why Presser, before he could begin Ashes in the Wind, first had to write this story about Westerbork: compelled by his sense of personal co-responsibility and in despair over the loss of his first wife, he had searched in this historical material for the place where his wife had last been before all traces of her were lost: that was Westerbork. It was for this reason that Presser knew so much about this subject, even though he had survived the war by going into hiding and had never set foot in Westerbork.

jacquespresser
Presser himself saw a link between the two books that was not solely due to their subject. Although meticulous in documenting his sources and a critic of the hagiographic style found in most biographies of Napoleon prior to his own and that of his countryman and contemporary, Piet Geyl, Presser was nonetheless ready to note that both fiction and history were forms of story-telling:

… for me, there’s very little distance between literature like Night of the Girondists and history like Ashes in the Wind … Yes … there is reality in the fable of Night of the Girondists … just as the reality of Ashes in the Wind is … a fable. It goes beyond dry description … it has something to do with literature.

Just over 80 pages long, Breaking Point is barely more than a long short story, and written in an unadorned, frank confessional style. Yet it’s also a remarkably nuanced work that raises themes that extend far beyond its brief scope. I have to look back to Levi’s own last book, The Drowned and the Saved, to offer a comparable text.

Breaking Point, by Jacob Presser
Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1958

Broken Images: A Journal, by John Guest

Coverr of first U.K. edition of 'Broken Images'

Despite all the exhortations to stop and smell the roses, that what matters is the journey, not the destination, I tend to read in something of a rush, mindful of the ever-growing stack of books that still beg to be read and rediscovered. It takes an exceptional writer to subdue this inclination and get me to take a work at his or her own pace.

I took John Guest’s Broken Images: A Journal (1949) along on a recent trans-Atlantic flight, figuring I’d have time not only to finish it (it’s just 220 pages long) but to get through some work-related reading as well. Instead, I spent the entire flight, along with the next leg of my trip, reading it — not because it was a struggle but because Guest’s writing is so superb I wanted to enjoy every sentence.

At the time that World War Two broke out, John Guest was in his late twenties, working in a publishing house and wandering rather aimlessly into his future. He didn’t rush to enlist but was inducted into the Royal Artillery in May 1940. Broken Images opens with a journal entry written–quite against regulations–on his second day in the Army, and continues until his separation five years later, in October 1945. Many of the entries were sent to the poet and lyricist Christopher Vernon Hassall, with whom Guest served on an anti-aircraft battery stationed near the London dockyards.

When Broken Images was first published, the Spectator’s reviewer wrote that “It will be surprising if the last war produces a more rewarding set of personal impressions than the journal of Mr. John Guest.” What’s remarkable, though, is that I would never think of recommending it as a great war book. True, it is all about Guest’s experiences during the time he served in the Army, and he did experience combat first-hand in North Africa and Italy — where some of the most hard-fought battles of the war took place.

But its finest characteristic is that of a sensibility to life that never, despite all the drudgery and monotony of Army life and all the strains and fatigue of combat, seems anything less than fresh and alert. Here, for example, is an early observation from his first month in uniform:

But doing guard also has its pleasures. It is the only time when one is really alone. It is lovely, too, on warm starlit nights. Another pleasure, relatively new to me, is to see the dawn and hear the birds’ chorus; shortly after the sky has paled, one bird emits a sleepy note — do you remember that magical verse in “Tears, idle tears”:

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half awaken’d birds …

–and within two minutes every bird in creation is singing wildly.

Guest loved poetry and nature. He notes the flowers, bushes and trees wherever he is, knows the names of most of them, and often remembers a line or two of verse they inspired.

While he wasn’t a model soldier, he was no slacker and was selected for officer training during his first year. Although he’d never had any association with the Army and felt no regret when he left it behind, Guest early on came to understand that his time in the uniform represented a personal transformation: “Something is between me and everything now. We seem to be breaking apart, diverging, but reality is on my side — vivid reality — while everything I used to be and do belongs elsewhere, connected to me only in memory, not it fact.”

Throughout much of the book “the war” seems to be a show playing on another stage. Guest does not deploy to a combat theater until he’s been in the Army for nearly three years. He spends far more time training, taking part in exercises, and waiting, and even when he is in within eye sight of the enemy, the fighting is more often incidental than intense. He apologizes, in fact, in one entry,

This is just to set your mind at ease in case you thought I was in the big attack. If you have been imagining me in the thick of battle, you would have laughed to see me this afternoon (or indeed most afternoons and evenings) sitting in a canvas chair at the edge of our olive grove — sleeves rolled up, dark sun-glasses, a book on my knee; listening to the birds and swatting flies with a grass switch. In front, the bank falls steeply away through a wood full of cyclamen, genista and honeysuckle, to a green valley below, and from where I site I can hear the stream that runs through it. But, apart from the occasional bang of guns, one wouldn’t know there was a war on.

Being far enough away from the front lines does not equate to enjoying the pleasures of peace, however. “You do not know what a country which has been fought over looks like,” he is careful to caution Hassall:

Everywhere the signs are unmistakable — one knows without thinking about the evidence. It is rather like one of those abandoned industrial areas at home; but here they are not abandoned; people are still living in them. Even if the houses are not in ruins, everything has a tired, disused look. Gates and hedges are broken. Rusting skeletons of vehicles lie in the ditches. Windows are broken. Roads in bad repair. The fields untended. Ground under trees or by the roadside all chawed up and rutted. Empty food tins. Trees cut down or splintered. Charred remains of fires. Human excreta. Broken drains, pools and floods–all the million and one things which should be mended, tidied, tended, buried or otherwise seen to, are left undone.

Guest never takes himself to be anything but a small cog in a big machine, and he often notes the tendency of the Army to grind everything down to an anonymous uniformity. Indeed, as he queues for one in the many steps involved in being processed out of the Army, he muses, “It was really a huge machine which had been churning away at top speed for six years…. All you had to mind was that you didn’t get nipped in the works.”

If there was one thing that most certainly didn’t happen to Guest, though, it was the sacrifice his individual sensibility. His eye was always alert to nuances of landscape, the life going on in the margins, and the endless human comedy. On leave in Rome, for example, he delights in the band playing in the lounge of an English officers’ hotel:

This consisted of three middle-aged Italians — two male and one female. One man played a huge sort of guitar-cum-zither which he held like a banjo and plucked. To the end of our stay I was absolutely convinced that it made no noise whatsoever, and that upon closer inspection it would transpire that the strings were made of elastic or wool. For all that, his gnarled right hand plucked and flipped with all the merriment in the world, and his left hand scrambled deftly up and down the wires.

I’ve already overindulged in the temptation to quote at length from Broken Images. It really is a deliciously well-written book that I have left riddled with dog-eared pages marking particularly fine passages.

About the time that Broken Images was published by Longmans, Green and Company, Guest joined the firm as a literary advisor, and he remained with the firm until his retirement. Aside from The Best of Betjeman, which he edited, Broken Images is the only book he published. It earned a mention in both Paul Fussells’ Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War and Samuel Hynes’ The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to a Modern War and was reissued in 1970 as part of Men at War, a short-lived series from Pen and Sword Books. It richly deserves to be brought back to print. In researching this post, I came across one review in which the reviewer gushed, “I enjoyed this book so much that it is difficult to avoid seeming over-elaborate in praising it.” I second that emotion.

Broken Images: A Journal, by John Guest
London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1949

The People Immortal, by Vasily Grossman

One of my earliest posts on this site was devoted to Vasily Grossman’s epic of the Russian experience in World War Two, Life and Fate. At the time, it was out of print in English translation and had been for over a decade.

Since then, Life and Fate has been reissued as a New York Review Books Classic and Grossman’s work has found a substantial audience. His wartime reporting has been collected as A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945, and about a year ago, his last work, An Armenian Sketchbook, previously unavailable in English, was translated by Robert Chandler and released as another NYRB Classic.

A year or so before I started this site, I came across a copy of Grossman’s first book published in English: The People Immortal in a Charing Cross bookstore that’s since become a pseudo-French bakery. It was in the bargain shelf, priced at one pound.

Out of curiosity last week, I decided to see what it was going for, given Grossman’s recent fame, and found a grand total of one copy for sale, priced at over 100 pounds. Which motivated me to dig it out and give it a read. Now, if by the end of this post you decide you can’t live without a copy, my recommendation is to opt for the U.S. edition, which was published by Julian Messner in 1945 under the title of No Beautiful Nights (there are three copies currently available).

In the English translation, credited to Elizabeth Donnelly in the U.S. edition, The People Immortal appears to be an abridgement of the Russian original, with a shorter text and four fewer chapters. How much has been lost, I cannot tell for certain, but given that Grossman shifts between characters and scenes, much as he did on a much grander scale in Life and Fate, it would have been easy to drop a chapter here and there without affecting the principal narrative.

The People Immortal takes place over the space of about ten days in August 1941, and follows a number of Russian soldiers and civilians as they retreat in the face of the German invasion. When first published in 1942, the book was something of a best-seller and was widely acclaimed. Grossman was nominated for the Stalin Prize for literature that year, but Stalin vetoed the selection and gave the prize to Ilya Ehrenburg instead. At the time, it must have been quite effective as propaganda, as Grossman displays throughout the book a profound confidence in the superiority of the Russian character, which he sees as more significant in the long run than the Germans’ military advantage.

As a work of fiction viewed from a distance of seven decades, it’s an uncomfortable mix of fine descriptive writing and simple Russian boosterism. I say boosterism simply because Grossman’s book lacks the fire and brimstone of the most strident Soviet propaganda. The Germans are referred to as “Germans,” for example, when a hardcore Soviet writer would call them “Hitlerites.” That’s not to say that he doesn’t engage in an occasional bout of character assassination: “German creative thought has been rendered sterile in all fields–the Fascists are powerless to create, to write books, music, verse,” remarks his chief protagonist, Commissar Bogarev, at one point.

Grossman’s approach to propaganda is less to denigrate the Germans than to highlight the most positive aspects of the Russian character. Thus, we get the stoic and indomitable leader (Bogarev), the salt-of-earth Russian mother, the happy-go-lucky soldier who breaks into song to rally his comrades when the going gets rough. Indeed, much of this will be familiar to anyone who’s ever seen the Hollywood equivalent from World War Two:

Casualties among the men were heavy. Red Army man Ryabokon fought to his last round of ammunition; Political Instructor Yeretic, after downing scores of the enemy, blew himself up just before he died; Red Army man Glushkov, surrounded by the Germans, went on firing till his last breath; machine-gunners Glagoyev and Kardakhin, faint with loss of blood, fought as long as their weakening fingers could press the trigger, as long as their dimming eyes could see the target through the sultry haze of battle.

On the other hand, The People Immortal is redeemed somewhat by Grossman’s frequent use of nature as a means to set the war in perspective. Even greater than the strength of the Russian people is the resilience of the Russian land. As one soldier lies in a field, waiting for the command to rise and attach a German outpost, he notices the life going on around him:

Running across the dry ground is a crack like a fine streak of lightning. The column of ants winds along a bridge in strict order, one after the other, while those of the other side of the crack patiently wait their turn. A lady-bird–a plump little old woman in a bright red dress–is hurrying along, looking for the crossing. A gust of wind, and the grasses sway and bow, each in its own way, some humbly and quickly prostrating themselves to earth, others stubbornly, angrily, quivering, their ears spread out–food for sparrows.

It may also be that The People Immortal is redeemed by its brevity. Grossman puts his cast into a quandary–being trapped behind German lines, rescues them with a bout of ingenuity and heroism, and brings the story to a quick end. Another hundred pages and it might have become, as someone once described his next novel, For a Just Cause, which has not been translated into English yet, “a Socialist Realist dog.”

In the end, though, like that book, The People Immortal is of interest today only as an early and largely unsuccessful prototype of Life and Fate. Only a Grossman completist should consider hunting down a copy.

The People Immortal, by Vassili [Vasily] Grossman, translated by Elizabeth Donnelly
London/New York/Melbourne: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., 1943

In Search of Myself, by Hans Natonek

Hans Natonek, Paris 1939About a year ago, I posted a short item on Hans Natonek’s In Search of Myself, his account of his experiences as an exile from Nazi-occupied Europe coming to grips with a new life in America. At the time, there were no copies of this book to be found for sale on the Internet, and that’s still the case today.

However, thanks to my son and his access to the great resources of the University of California Library system, I was recently able to borrow a copy and can supplement the reviews I quoted on the original note.

In Search of Myself opens with Natonek and his fellow refugees awakening from their rude beds in the hold of a ship arriving in New York Harbor from neutral Lisbon. The time is somewhere in the fall of 1940.

As we learn, Natonek was one of a number of German and central European writers who fled to France in the late 1930s to escape Nazi persecution. Then, when France fell to Hitler in June 1940, they were uprooted again. Some of Natonek’s friends, such as Ernst Weiss, lost all hope and chose suicide as their escape. Natonek, like Lion Feuchtwanger, made it to Marseilles and were able to link up with Varian Fry, whose Emergency Rescue Committee was able to secure passages to America for over two thousand artists, writers, and others marked for capture by the Nazis.

Natonek did not regard America “as a kind of umbrella under which I may huddle until the storm is past.” He was convinced from the very beginning that it could only be a temporary refuge: it would either join the fight against Hitler or find itself another victim. His frustration with the isolationist view of America as a haven made safe by the Atlantic comes up again and again until the attack on Pearl Harbor brings the US into the war.

A street in lower Manhattan, 1942. From the Charles W. Cushman collection (Archive ID P02677)

He arrived with just four dollars in his pocket and a few vague references. He had no plan for how to survive, and the first fifty-some pages of the book, which describe his first two days in New York–walking around Manhattan, eating in a drugstore, encountering orthodox Jews on the Lower East Side, discovering the cheap hotels in the Bowery where a quarter bought one night in a bed in a room full of other dirty and drunken men–are the most vivid and exciting in the book.

He struggles with a language he knows very little of:

The business of making oneself understood with a minimum vocabulary has a charm of its own, particularly for a man who has made the use of words his métier. I had delighted in the splendor and the ornate richness of my native tongue. I reveled in its abundance, squandering it in intricate expression. Now I found a sober joy in economy, building what words I had into simple patterns solid with meaning. At first I tried self-consciously to carry out this feat. Then, as I embarked upon the vast sea of my subject, my few words began to fail. How could I bail the sea of sorrow with the thimble I had?

While Natonek was early on filled with admiration for the optimism and opportunities of America, he did not consider himself a candidate for a starting a new life from scratch. His counselor at the National Refugee Service quickly dismisses his hopes to continue working as a writer, surviving on the meager $18 weekly allowance provided by the service. “I hope you will not persist in your attitude. Writing is a hobby ….”

Natonek, however, considered it full-time job requiring the most intensive commitment of himself: “To learn a new language at fifty, to learn it intimately as a writer must know it, is, of itself, an almost superhuman undertaking. For only by making the language a part of myself shall I ever succeed in expressing not only what I am, but what I have seen.”

In the end, he is forced by circumstance into a rough compromise. He works a variety of small jobs, often getting fired for incompetence within the first few days, but making enough to eke out a survival and still find time to begin writing a new book in the Reading Room of the New York Public Library. He makes a few friends and eventually manages to speak with a literary agent who takes a sample of his new diary and encourages him to carry own.

He connects with Anna Grunwald, an acquaintance from his time in Paris, and through her is able to travel outside New York. The size and openness of America thrills him:

The road unwound like cotton from a spool. I imagined it leaping onward, Nebraska, Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming. … It was not necessary to plan this trip or any trip within the confines of this country’s boundaries. You could cross a line and never know that you had entered a new state.

The money I had in my pocket would buy the necessities of living from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There was not a hot-dog stand, a soda fountain, or a tourist camp that would not welcome me. The political ideas in my head were my own business.

Will I ever become accustomed to the wonder of these things?

He continues to scrape by, however, stumbling from job to job, until he accepts, sight unseen, a position as porter working in the morgue of Harlem Hospital. It is while there that he finally hears back from his agent, who has managed to land a contract for his American diary: this book.

Natonek married Anna and took U. S. citizenship in 1946. Although he wrote, late in In Search of Myself, that, “One day, perhaps, if God grants me another year, I will stammer a book in English,” he never did. Nor did he ever publish a new book in German, despite attempts, after the war. He died in Tucson, Arizona, in 1963.

The novel he refers to working on throughout the book, about the life of Gilles des Rais, companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc and a notorious child killer, was published posthumously in 1988 as Blaubarts letze Liebe (Bluebeard’s Last Love). Just a few months ago, Lehmstedt, a German publisher, released a collection of Natonek’s short pieces, Letzter Tag in Europa: Gesammelte Publizistik 1933-1963, along with the first biography, by Steffi Böttger, Für immer fremd (Forever Foreign or Forever an Outsider).

The Bitter Season, by Robert M. Coates

Cover of first U. S. edition of 'The Bitter Season'The Bitter Season, Robert M. Coates’ 1946 novel is, according to its dust jacket blurb, a story of “the civilian in wartime; the men a little too old, or a little too frail, to be warriors.” Like many such blurbs, it’s a poor attempt to make something of a book that it is not.

Tom, Coates’ protagonist and narrator, is “a little too old” to run the risk of being drafted, but certainly not too frail, given his many walks around Manhattan in the course of the book. And World War Two, particularly the impending invasion of France, looms large in his thoughts and life. But he is hardly an everyman and Coates never suggests that his is anything but an individual and unique perspective on his situation.

Tom is a writer, and as the book opens he has separated from his wife, Laura, a nightclub singer, after a dozen or so years of marriage. Over the course of the five months covered by the superficial narrative, he reflects upon their relationship, begins to build a life on his own, dates several women, and falls in love with one of them–Valerie, a Dutch refugee. As far as this slight and generally uninteresting story goes, the book might jokingly be summed up as “They also serve who only sit and mope.”

Personally, I think Coates could have dispensed with plot entirely, although it served at least as a skeleton upon which to hang his thoughts and observations, and probably also as an artifice by which to give his publisher a genre to categorize it with. Writing in Saturday Review, reviewer Donald Hough asked, with some frustration, whether The Bitter Season could even be labelled as fiction: “But what about something that in both form and content is nothing other than an outline of personal reactions to a given scene, of a point of view, and which by the device of naming a protagonist is called a novel?” Tom’s story is the weakest and most forgettable aspect of the book, and detracts from what is good in it.

The New Masses took a more lenient view, describing the book as “an experimental mixture of narrative, diary or journal, prose poem, and philosophic disquisition,” and pointing out that such things could be found in fiction as far back as Fielding and Sterne. Even so, it’s only the prose poems and philosophic disquisitions that offer the book’s lasting values.

manhattan1

As I noted, Tom spends a good deal of time wandering around the streets of Manhattan, which allows Coates to paint some memorable scenes of the city:

I walked up to Fiftieth or Fifty-first Street, and then zig-zagged back down through the quiet cross streets to Rockefeller Center. It was April, I think, and the night was warm, but there was still ice-skating at the rink there. The music was playing, and the glare from the floodlights, reflected from the cloudy surface of the ice, poured up like the glow of some mechanical aurora borealis upon the quiet darkness above. I stopped for a while to look down from the railing on Forty-ninth Street at the skaters circling to the music’s rhythm in the sunken rectangle below. They looked small, even at that little distance, and intent on their glides and their maneuvers–they seemed oddly disassociated from the life that went on above them; as I leaned on the rail there, watching, it was like looking down at the creatures in some air aquarium, darting this way and that in response to motives and impulses that were largely incomprehensible to me.

Tom’s wanderings also bring him into contact with men whose attitudes and opinions add a disquieting note to the relentlessly upbeat stream of bond-selling, war-boosting propaganda. A cab driver blames a fire in an office building on “the Jews” eager to collect the insurance. A man at a bar likens European refugees to vermin that have infested the city. Another says “the niggers” have been given too much freedom by Roosevelt and need to be brought back under control when the war is over. Coates notes a subtle parallel between the violence of the far-off battlefronts and the violence implicit in such views.

Coates’ is an existential perspective. Living on his own, cut off from friends who know him only as half of Tom-and-Laura, Tom is deeply lonely:

Loneliness, I’ve discovered–I discovered then–is a hard-to-define emotion. It’s the product of unfulfillment, a factor of frustration, and as such it is largely an emotion of negatives; it arises most often not from something that has, but from something that has not happened–a letter that has failed to arrive, a telephone that refuses to ring–and its worst feature is that its causes and its control are not governed by anything that you can do or can hope to do, but depend on the actions of some other. Thus it is that it has nothing to do with setting or with circumstance; it can descend on you anywhere, anytime, and as reasonlessly and as abruptly as a cloud can blot out the summer sun.

Coates describes what people were experiencing at this time as “a sort of global loneliness.” It was “the feeling that whatever was happening or was going to happen would occur despite anything you could do to aid or prevent it.” Despite the constant barrage of headlines, newsreels and radio reports, “the storm never touched us directly; all we felt was the heat and the omninousness and the tension.”

manhattan2

Although the great event looming offstage throughout the book is the D-Day invasion, when it finally arrives, there is no real sense of relief. The headlines of combat and casualties continue on. In a sense, The Bitter Season is less a book about life on the homefront during World War Two than an anticipation of life during the Cold War, when the threat against individual life became greater in scale even as it became more remote and beyond any individual’s control.

Ultimately, though, Coates’ choice to wrap his meditations around the frame of a plot undermines the book. Hough’s review for The Saturday Review wasn’t too far wrong in observing that Coates “… is a good workman at the typewriter end of his craft and he leads you on, paragraph by paragraph, through sheer competence in writing, and a dangling hope that something is going to happen, until finally he seems tired of chasing his tale and steps nimbly aside to let you read on into the dust-jacket flap.” Without the plot, The Bitter Season would probably have become a forgotten little book of “prose poem and philosophic disquisition.” With it, it just became a forgotten little novel.

The Bitter Season, by Robert M. Coates
New York City: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1946

Log Book, by Frank Laskier

This slim book–just 119 pages–contains some of the simplest and most powerful writing I’ve come across in a long time. And at the same time, it’s something of a mystery.

Born and raised in a house just up the street from the Liverpool waterfront, Frank Laskier ran away to sea when just fifteen. Shifting from ship to ship–many of them tramp steamers whose conditions resembled those of B. Traven’s The Death Ship–he spent most of the next dozen years as a merchant seamen. Aside from a short stint when he tried life ashore and ended up in jail for burglary, he spent much of the time filthy and miserable at sea or drunk and violent in port.

Then, sometime in late 1940, his ship, Eurylochus, was attacked and sunk by an merchant raider, the Komoran, off the coast of West Africa. Laskier’s foot was blown off by a shell, and he and the other thirteen survivors spent three days adrift in a life raft before being rescued by a Spanish trawler. He was eventually repatriated to the UK, where he idled away his days in a pub until a young BBC radio producer overheard him regaling some friends with a story. The producer thought him a natural radio personality and convinced Laskier to record an account of the attack and his rescue.

The piece proved immensely popular with wartime listeners and Laskier went on to write and broadcast more talks over the next year. These were collected as My Name is Frank. Of the book, a reviewer in the Spectator wrote:

Frank Laskier’s broadcasts had the stuff of greatness; put into print they lose nothing in the reading. By a natural genius this seaman has found an expression and a rhythm which the poets and artists of the modern world have been striving after for generations.

Although a genuine article, Laskier did allow himself to be used for maximum propaganda effect. In The Merchant Seamen’s War, Tony Lane refers to him as a Stakhanov–the Russian coal miner made a worker’s hero by Soviet propagandists. Laskier appeared in several films, encouraging others to join the Merchant Marine. You can see a preview of one at the British Pathé website.

Cover of the U.S. edition of 'Log Book'A year or so later, Laskier published Log Book. The book is clearly an autobiography, as the story follows his own exactly. But, for some unexplained reason, Laskier chose to call himself Jack in the book, and to treat the story as fiction, avoiding most references to specific times and places.

The book suffers not at all by this choice–indeed, it may gain in power, as it thereby allows the writing to stand on its own.

And what writing it is. Reviewing the book in the New York Herald Tribune. Lincoln Colcord called it, “a work of art so simple and acute, that one often pauses to wonder. Here, for example, is Laskier’s description of the return from liberty of a hand who had watched his own brother fall and smash his skull on the deck a few days before:

Outside, beyond the pool of light over the gangway, the stand-by man and Jack could hear a man stumbing along. He seemed to be having an hysterical argument with somebody. It was the donkey-man–still in his engine-room clothes–as he had gone down the gangway for a quick one. His face, as he came under the light, looked blotched, and red and swollen. He stopped at the quayside and looked up at the ship; a big, grimy figure, gazing up the gangway to the faces of the man and boy–then passing to the outlines of the ship. “You dirty, hungry, lousy bastard! You stinking, bloody old death trap.” His voice rose to a scream: “You … you death ship! Hey, boy, call the bosun–and tell him to come ashore and meet the bloody Madam.” He stood there swaying, and they could see the sweat slowly trickle down his face. Or was it tears–dead bosun was his brother. The stand-by man stood at the tope of the ladder. “Come aboard,” he said, “come up now mate and get some kip.” The donkey-man looked up at him, then he slowly started to crawl up the ladder. Up and up, dragging one foot after the other. his gnarled hands gripping the rail. Up and up, away from the land, away from the whores, and away from himself. He was all the Jims, all the sailors. Leaving all the sordidness and filth of the land–leaving that land–crossing that silent, inviting strip of water–stepping into a new world. One board, the ghost of his brother waited to lead him gently to his bunk. His footsteps rang hollowly as he slumped along the darkness of the deck and vanished into the fo’castle.

There are dozens of such passages throughout the book. I counted over twenty pages I’d dog-eared while reading it.

Laskier was thirty years old when he wrote Log Book, but his voice and perspective are those of a man of long and hard experience. After years of whoring, drinking and fighting, a year in Borstal and another in Nottingham prison, he finally experiences an epiphany one night when he takes a break to go on deck as his ship steams through the Bay of Biscay:

His old friends the porpoises came out and did their set of lancers in front of the bows. He could hear the rustle and swish of their bodies as they surfaced. And the gentle plop as they submerged. The sea, the sky, the moon and the stars–in unison–told him of the glorious heritage of beauty that belongs to the sailor. They would forgive him all, so long as he was worthy of them and could feel their beauty.

His personal peace is short-lived, those, as the Second World War breaks out shortly after he reaches port. He signs on with another ship and is soon convoying a load of Britsh children to Canada. On the return voyage, the old freighter’s engines fail to keep speed and the ship is forced to fall out and make its way back to Liverpool alone–a nervous week of scanning the surrounding waters for signs of U-boats.

The ship’s end comes, however, not in the bitter, rough North Atlantic but on a calm evening, as “Phosphorus gleamed in the wake of the ship, pale green; long, beautiful streaks of cold fire.” The attack comes abruptly, with great noise, fire, explosions, and is over in just two pages, as Jack throws himself into the water, not realizing his foot is gone. He and the few survivors endure three days, exposed, with no water and sharks constantly circling and scraping against their raft.

They have the good fortune to be rescued by a passing trawler and, later, by a Royal Navy ship, and Laskier and his shipmates are evacuated to a hospital ship anchored in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The book ends with Jack back in the UK, and, like Laskier, discovered by the BBC and speaking for the first time on the radio.

Despite the enthusiastic critical reception of Log Book and My Name is Frank, Laskier was quickly forgotten when his propaganda value had faded. He moved to the US and tried to get the movie studios interested in his stories. His first genuine novel, Unseen Harbor, was published in 1947, but received little notice. He died less than a year later, the victim of an automobile accident.

Log Book, by Frank Laskier
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1942
New York City: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943

Diary of a Self-Made Convict, by Alfred Hassler

Cover of the first US edition of 'Diary of a Self-Made Convict'In the spring of 1944, nearly two and a half years after registering with the Selective Service as a conscientious objector, Alfred Hassler was sentenced to three years in Federal prison for refusing to accept the draft or participate in an approved civilian program. Had his hearing been held a week later, he would have been released, as the Selective Service stopped drafting men of his age (34). Instead, however, he spent almost a year in the Lewisburg, Pennsylvania penetentiary, until he was pardoned in March 1945.

Hassler assembled his Diary of a Self-Made Convict from his prison journal and letters to his wife and friends. The book wasn’t published until almost ten years after his sentencing. It’s a unique document, as Hassler was far from a typical prisoner. A member of the staff of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the oldest organization in the U.S. devoted to nonviolence, he was married, well-educated and, as his title indicates, something of a self-made convict in that he could have chosen to serve as a conscientious objector without going to prison.

Hassler wasn’t separated or isolated from other prisoners, and mixed freely with bank robbers, racketeers, rapists, and murderers. It’s clear he was an approachable guy who gained the trust of a wide variety of men–both prisoners and prison officials–easily, and he recorded the stories of dozens of his fellow inmates: from a black man busted for heroin use to “Nucky” Johnson, one-time political boss of Atlantic City. At the time, Federal prisons were full not just of “traditional” prisoners but also draft-dodgers, deserters, conscientious objectors and suspected spies such as members of the German Bund. As a result, Diary of a Self-Made Convict portrays a remarkable cross-section of 1940s American society, or at least a peculiar subset of it.

Although Hassler seems by nature to have been a discreet and gentle man, he is frank about the worst aspects of prison life. He notes that effeminate men are preyed upon and is approached at least once by a prisoner looking for a homosexual partner. Masturbation–or, as one of the prison’s psychologists refers to it, “learning to live with yourself”–he finds “widely–almost universally–practiced.” Racism is institutionalized, with blacks segregated from the white inmates through a variety of Jim Crow measures. He observes theft, brutality, and intimidation–and also despair:

Last night some wild geese passed overhead, flying low. Their honking was quite clear as they flew south, and for just a moment I caught a glimpse of the long “V” of their flight silhouetted against the patch of sky visible from my cubicle. At the very moment of their passage, from some other near-by cell I could barely hear the deep, almost silent sobs of one of my fellow convicts. It is no longer a novel sound, but it wrenches my whole spirit with wretchedness whenever I hear it. During the day, the men maintain the cloak of bravado in which they wrap their self-respect; at night, alone in the darkness, their grief and fright sometimes become too much for them to bear.

I suppose that the very unpopularity of their subject keeps prison books from staying in print for too long. Malcolm Braly’s classic, On the Yard, is out again as a New York Review Classic, but that’s something like the third or fourth time it’s been reissued over the course of the last forty-some years. Still, I’m surprised that Diary of a Self-Made Convict hasn’t attained at least an equal or better standing. It’s a simple, honest, objective and well-written account of prison life that makes it quite clear that even a man who made a deliberate choice to go–and then served less than a year–found it a soul-testing experience. If learning about prison is part of a basic education in life, and I think it is, then it would be tough to find a better basic text than Diary of a Self-Made Convict.

[Diary of a Self-Made Convict is, in fact, in print from a company that calls itself Literary Licensing, LLC. and appears to be a small-time operator in the direct-to-print, copyright-free publishing business. But I recommend finding a used copy instead via Amazon or AddAll.]

Diary of a Self-Made Convict, by Alfred Hassler
Chicago, Illinois: Henry Regnery Company, 1954

Spring Offensive, by Herbert Clyde Lewis

Spring Offensive takes place during the first twenty-four hours of the German attack against French and British forces along the Maginot Line in April 1940.

Cover of first U. S. edition of 'Spring Offensive'Of course, the Germans didn’t attack the French and British in April 1940, but two months later, in June, and when they did, they wisely bypassed the Maginot Line in favor of a blitzkrieg through the Ardennes and the Lowlands. This is a major reason why Herbert Clyde Lewis’ second novel, Spring Offensive, quickly flew from the new release stacks to obscurity. While the Phoney War dragged on, there was still an opportunity for a writer like Lewis to fantasize about what might happen when the shooting started. When it did start for real, events moved too fast for anyone to have time for fiction.

Peter Winston, Lewis’ protagonist, is a young American from outside Indianapolis serving with a British Expeditionary Force unit encamped in a small French town along the Maginot Line. He’d joined out of mixed motives–a bit of anti-Nazi fervor and a bit of self-pity. His girl had dumped him, he’d lost his job as a newspaper reporter, and his best friend had begun to avoid him as a hopeless loser. Readily accepted into the British Army, he now finds himself killing time in the most meaningless military drills.

One night, he decides to sneak out of the barracks and commit a small act of eco-vandalism. Taking a packet of flower seeds he’d obtained from a villager, he quietly slips into the barbed wire and anti-tank obstacles of the No Man’s Land between the Allied and German lines and spends the night planting seeds.

As dawn breaks the next morning, however, the sky is suddenly filled with the shriek of incoming German artillery shells. Winston injures his ankle in trying to run back to his unit. He takes a piece of shrapnel in his shoulder and winds up pinned down in a shell hole. Over the next few hours, he watches as the fearsome blood-letting of First World War battles like the Somme are re-enacted with faster-firing machine guns and deadlier explosives. Late in the afternoon, a young, frightened German soldier rushing forward in another futile charge bayonets him in the gut, leaving him to die in his muddy crater.

In many ways, Spring Offensive reworks the situation of Lewis’ first novel, Gentleman Overboard, which I covered here several months ago. Instead of a stockbroker slowly drowning in the Pacific, we have a young soldier dying in No Man’s Land. In each book, Lewis switches between the present and flashbacks to his protagonist’s past and between the mind of his unlucky hero and the thoughts of other people in his life. And in both, Lewis is quite effective in conveying the wavering emotions and wandering thoughts of a man consciously moving closer and closer to death.

Unlike in Gentleman Overboard, however, a rather abstract situation is replaced by one very much within the reality of his contemporary readers. In early 1940, the American public was torn between support for the Allies and the isolationist views of the “America First” movement. Some of the thoughts that run through Winston’s mind as he lays in his shell hole touch directly on that debate:

And he was wondering why he had come all the way across the ocean to fight when he might have stayed at home, right in Indianapolis, and fought there. There was a war to be fought in America, he thought, and what a war it was! He was not proud of having been a private in the B. E. F., but he would be proud to be a general in that other army. And millions of men would volunteer, brave young men with hard brave faces, men from the fields and the factories and city streets and country roads, men marching west and shaking their fists at the setting sun. Winston moaned softly and moved his head from side to side. He didn’t want to die; he wanted to live and go home and fight in America’s war, in the war to make American a Land of Promise once again.

Now it could be that this is only meant to be a last thought of a dying man, no more or less significant than his memory of slipping his hand around the waist of his old girlfriend. But it’s hard for me to separate this passage–which, by the way, goes on with yet more Hollywood-ish populist cliches (Lewis did go on to work for the studios)–from the general premise of the book: the young man going out to plant flowers and being caught in the crossfire of a vast, bloody, and largely pointless battle. Perhaps Lewis truly did not intend to take a stand against anything but war itself, abstracted from the context of Nazism, Antisemitism, and Fascism, and was not casting a vote with the America Firsters. He did, after all, demonstrate an ability to view the most desparate situation–a man drowning alone at sea–with remarkable objectivity in Gentleman Overboard.

If he did, then Spring Offensive must rank with one of the great examples in literature of bad timing. Within weeks of its publication, the statis of the Phoney War was replaced by images of Panzer tanks rolling across France and the Nazi flag flying under the Arc de Triomphe. And within a few years, the abstract image of anonymous young German soldiers was replaced by that of S. S. troops carrying out mass executions. Whatever Lewis’ intention, it’s impossible now to view this book outside the context of its time.

In the very last lines of Spring Offensive, a German shell lands directly on top of Winston. “… [A]nd when the smoke cleared away, he wasn’t there any more.” History appears to have had the same effect on Spring Offensive.

Spring Offensive, by Herbert Clyde Lewis


New York City: Viking Press, 1940

The Invisible Flag, by Peter Bamm

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Excerpt


A man–a human being–is wounded. In the split second in which he is hit he is hurled out of the fighting machine and has become, in an instant, utterly helpless. Up to that moment all his energy was directed forward, against an enemy army stretching across the landscape like an imaginary line, its exact position unknown. So engrossed was he in what went on round him that he was left with no conscious thought about himself. but now he is thrown back on himself: the sight of his own blood restores him to full self-awareness. At one moment he was helping to change the course of history: at the next he cannot do anything for himself.

Hours afterwards night falls. Gray fear envelopes him. Will he bleed to death? Will he be found? Is he going to be hit again? Are the Germans retreating? Will he be captured by the Russians?

An eternity passes before a couple of soldiers drag him a short way back. There, in a shell crater or some primitive dugout, the first outpost of medicine, sits the regimental medical officer. The wounded man is given a bandage, a splint, a tourniquet, an injection to ease his pain. Then he is left to lie around somewhere, wondering again if he will ever be moved. At last he is carried further and eventually put into an ambulance. He finishes up among a multitude of other wounded men, lying in semi-darkness and a fearful silence broken only by the groans of those around him. At long last his stretcher is lifted again. From the moment he comes into the bright circle of light under the theater lamp he ceases to be a mere lump of animate matter and becomes a patient, a man who is suffering. When he leaves the operating theater, the pitiful, dirty, bloodstained creature is once again a human being, cared and provided for.

This small miracle is accomplished with a piece of thin steel which weighs less than a couple of ounces–a scalpel. At its tip converge years of skill and training; a technique developed through centuries of experiment; the immense and complicated organization of a modern army’s medical service. And above it, as it cuts deep to heal, above that little tent in the wood by the Dniester, there flutters beneath the wide Ukrainian sky a small dauntless flag: an invisible flag: the flag of humanity.

Editor’s Comments


Cover of first U.S. paperback edition of 'The Invisible Flag'Peter Bamm’s The Invisible Flag is an extraordinarily well-written semi-fictional memoir of his experiences as a field surgeon with the German Army on the Eastern Front in World War Two. When it was first published in 1956, the Times Literary Supplement called it “a masterpiece,” and the book is studded with passages of stunning prose equal to and even better than that quoted above. Bamm fell in love with the Russian landscape even as he saw it torn up in brutal fighting. One imagines him in company with Konstantin Paustovsky, sharing a drink outside a dacha while they took in the beauty of a summer twilight in the Ukraine.

In the course of the book, Bamm’s duties take him rolling forward across the steppes in the blazing summer of 1941; enduring bitter winters that threaten lives even more immediately than combat; into the hills of the Crimea and the mountains of northern Georgia; and then, with the long retreat beginning with Stalingrad, back through the Ukraine and into Poland and Eastern Prussia. In each place, Bamm notes how nature carries on oblivious of man’s activities around her. He makes us feel the sweat blinding him as he operates under a blazing sun and the bitter winds biting his skin as he trudges through deep snow to reach a rear command post.

He also brings a gallery of characters alive: rugged and ingenious NCOs who regularly manage to locate food, supplies, horses, or wagons for Bamm’s unit, a Wermacht equivalent to the U.S. Army portable surgical hospital; a Russian POW who staggers into the unit’s camp one morning and remains as a helper for the next four years; civilians who display exceptional compassion and generosity even when they’ve lost everything and others who begrudge the slightest favor to their own; and veteran officers who struggle on despite the hopeless of inevitable defeat and the insanity of the Nazi regime.

In real life, Bamm was one Curt Emmrich, a surgeon who had served with the German Army in World War One–a highly educated and cultured man who had traveled the world, spoke French, and quoted Homer and Virgil. His deep pride in his own professionalism as a doctor and soldier is evident throughout the book. He allies himself with other experienced officers and medical men and contrasts his views and actions with those of the S.S. and other Nazi party members. In fact, he refers to Nazis in general as “the others” throughout the book. Bamm and his fellow officers and men appear to hold themselves to a higher moral standard: “The orgy of revenge in which the Dictator was indulging was complemented by an orgy of servility among his creatures. To the soldiers all this was repugnant.”

He does not deny in anyway the atrocities that were going on around him throughout the campaign on the Eastern Front. He recalls Jews being led away to the outskirts of a village, forced to dig a trench, then shot and bulldozed into it. He cites the case of one officer who was imprisoned for taking photos of such an event. He knows that Jews were taken into vans and gassed. He knows that Communists were hunted down and executed. His justification for remaining silent in the face of these actions is merely that it would have been futile to protest. Instead, his focus is on doing his duty as a surgeon, trying to save the lives that pass through his tent–regardless of whether they are German or Russian, Christian or atheist. One presumes no Jew ever made it to his operating table.

Bamm made a conscious moral compromise that weighed his ability to save lives and spare suffering over his ability to interfere with the gross outrages going on around his. One must accept this fact to read The Invisible Flag. Some may not be able to. Within the boundaries of Bamm’s choice, the book is rich in superb descriptive writing:

The whole crawling mass has meandered twenty yards onto the open field to by-pass a dud bomb that lies unexploded in the middle of the road. To left and right the fields are strewn with a weird assortment of stoves, milking stools, bedsteads, radio sets, munition boxes, lamps. It is like the aftermath of a flood. Every few hundred yards is a broken-down vehicle; or a dead horse with a swollen belly; or a corpse. Crows rise with a heavy flapping of wings. Tattered gray clouds chase without pause high above the living and the dead; high above beast and man.

The Invisible Flag received enthusiastic reviews and sold well, both in Germany and in numerous translations, but has been out of print in English since the late 1950s. If another powerful semi-fictional memoir of war on the Eastern Front, Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier, deserves reprinting and notice despite continuing controversies over its veracity, then there is no excuse for Peter Bamm’s remarkable book being left in the shadows.

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The Invisible Flag, by Peter Bamm (pseudonym of Curt Emmrich)
London: Faber, 1956
New York: John Day, 1956; Signet (paperback), 1958

The Time of the Assassins, by Godfrey Blunden

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Time of the Assassins'I first read Godfrey Blunden’s The Time of the Assassins back in the late 1970s, after coming across a copy of the Bantam Modern Classics paperback reissue. The tag line on the cover read, “The nightmare novel of the terrorist war between the NKVD and the Nazi SS.” I was intrigued to find this unfamiliar author and title, and this subject, packaged as a “modern classic”, along with such established titles as All the King’s Men, Darkness at Noon, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Anthony West reviewed the book for the New Yorker when it was first published in 1952, and I will quote him at length to tell what the book’s about:

Godfrey Blunden is a newspaperman, and his novel about the Nazi occupation of the Russian city of Kharkov, The Time of the Assassins, is more a matter of reporting than of invention. But while it has no great aesthetic appeal and cannot be given much credit for literary grace, it makes its points in a blunt way and tells its horrid and fascinating story effectively. Mr. Blunden was in Russia during the war, and he was one of the correspondents who entered Kharkov soon after it was first retaken from the Germans. From the things he saw and heard among the ruins, and the things he learned later, he has constructed a convincing account of what happened in the town. In a sense it is stale news and of very little interest; Kharkov was lost to the Germans as they pressed eastward across the steppes toward Stalingrad, recovered after a year or so, lost again in a week, and finally retaken and held. A story of the events, and of the atrocities, during this swaying to and fro would be sad but boring because it is the story of too many towns and one already knows it too well. But Mr. Blunden is not reporting at that level; he is concerned with states of feeling and with what the time meant to people whose lives were altogether changed by the events that poured over them.

Kharkhov (Kharkhiv) under German occupation, 1942
… The Germans took Kharkov is a rush, so unexpectedly and so rapidly that all public records fell into their hands. Among them were lists of members of the Communist Party. While the city was still welcoming the Germans as liberators who had brought an end to the years of terror and purges that had begun in the early thirties, the Gestapo began hanging their way through the lists. Within a few days there was not a street, square, or public building in Kharkov that was not decorated with the supreme emblems of cruelty — hanged men and women….

The long-drawn-out process of disillusion began as the Ukrainian welcome to the foreign liberators was choked into stunned silence. At first the S.S. confined themselves to wiping out the Communists, and since the Party itself had ruled by terror, the German butchery seemed like the first step to setting up a rational state. But then came the massacres of prisoners of war, and then the massacres of the Jews, and then massacres of Slavs to make room for German colonists…. The unbelievable had happened; the liberators had brought with them a way of life worse than anything a sane man could imagine. The only hope was the return of the men who had made government an affair of secret denunciations, terror, and cold remoteness. It is human nature to reject despair. Mr. Blunden’s teacher and her friends believed that what they were going through might mean an end to government by terror — that it was impossible to live through it without learning how important kindness and gentleness and the humanitarian values were. When the Germans were driven out, something better would come.

But kindness and gentleness proved to be disloyalty to the only force that could drive the Germans out…. The Party came back, hardened, more tenacious, more uncompromising than ever, and among the first people it killed was the teacher.

The closing passage of The Time of the Assassins vividly depicts this grim denouement. After years of Soviet-managed famines and Stalinist purges, after battle, conquest, and a year of ruthless German occupation and exterminations, the few surviving innocents are smashed before they even have the chance to catch their breath:

In these cold battlefields and devastated cities there are no grotesqueries. The dead lie as in sleep, quietly no-sleeping, may lie there for as long as there is frost, the snow sweeping over them like a soft lace shroud, the flesh waxed and pink as with health. Nor does high explosive make that much difference or, as with this old woman, the rifle butt. Lying there on the floor her face broken, she is yet human, real, still clutching the old string bag with which, evidently, she attempted to fight her aggressors. And the children about her skirts! The children in the corners of the room! In the other rooms! Difficult even to see where they had been shot, lying there in sleeping attitudes, little bundles of ice-starched clothes, bullet-tinctured somewhere, frozen, perfect small angular faces, thin drumstick legs. There in the old schoolhouse, in the ruin of broken-in windows, torn-up floor, over-turned stove, in the confusion of rags and refuse, they are not in themselves horrifying; when the life-ending is less pathetic than the life-in-living, death may seem even pretty and peaceful. This is what Maryusa is thinking as she walks through the streets, a pace ahead of her captor: there are no lives any longer, therefore no responsibility; all that for which she has fought so stubbornly is now disposed of. She is not thinking of punishment; there being none to punish the doer, that is, none above the human authority by which this action was condoned. In her mind there if only peacefulness. It is not bad that the children are dead. The struggle was carried on, but now it is ended. Already in the basement room of the NKVD she awaits her own prompt demise with the same expectancy.

… Later (we remember) there were some in Moscow who thought the liquidation of the Kharkiv [Blunden uses the Ukrainian name for the city] schoolteachers precipitate. But the matter was soon forgotten, for not much over a week later (it seems so long ago now as to be hardly worth mentioning), the Germans were back in Kharkiv.

Cover of Bantam Modern Classics edition of 'The Time of the Assassins'If history is a broom, sweeping back and forth through time, then The Time of the Assassins is history told from the dust’s perspective. The truly nightmarish aspect of the experience of the survivors of Kharkov is that the purpose of the Soviets’ purge after retaking the city was rendered moot in the space of a week or so. There was no safe situation: side with either the Soviets or the Germans and you risked being killed as the other’s enemy. Attempt to remain neutral and focus on surviving, and you risked being wiped out by either side’s blind adherence to its ideology. It would not be too hard to see some parallels between the Kharkov of The Time of the Assassins and Baghdad and other Iraqi cities today, where there is danger in taking sides with the Shiites or Sunnis or Americans and danger in not taking sides. One wonders if retaining hope in such a situation isn’t just as insane as the monomanias of the various factions.

Lionel Trilling wrote the introduction to the Bantam Modern Classics edition, and I will let him provide the critical assessment of The Time of the Assassins:

I have no knowledge of what literary model Godfrey Blunden had in mind for his remarkable novel, The Time of the Assassins. But if I had to guess by whom he had regulated his tone and attitude, I should think it was not a novelist at all. My own reference as I read Mr. Blunden’s book was to certain historians, to Thucydides and to Tacitus, and, in a lesser degree, to Josephus. Like them, Mr. Blunden tells a story to which the only possible response might seem to be despair. Like them he maintains the power and fortitude of his mind, and of ours, before the terrors of actuality.

This is, I believe, a very considerable achievement, possibly a great one. It is first to be thought of as a literary achievement. Nothing could be more difficult than to present human extremity without, on the one hand, falsifying or mitigating the facts, or, on the other hand, assailing and subduing our minds with the details of horror. It is also a moral achievement, of the intelligence put at the service of the emotions.

… Yet if what Mr. Blunden tells us is more terrible than what we read of in the old historians, still Thucydides’ account of the Melian massacre, or of the plague at Athens, or of the death of the Athenian army in the Sicilian quarry, or, again, Tacitus’ record of the tyranny, torture, and treachery of the Roman civil wars, or Josephus’ narrative of the war against the Jews, are the ancient analogue of what the modern world has experienced in more extravagant form. And in the attitude of the historians, in their determination to maintain the power and integrity of the mind before the decay of the very fabric of society and the human soul, we have the tradition in which Mr. Blunden has put himself.

… The narrowness of the circumstances in which Mr. Blunden’s characters must exist, the limitation of their power of choice, is, as I have suggested, a disadvantage to the novelistic imagination. It is a measure of Mr. Blunden’s quality, of his literary power, his intelligence, and his moral commitment, that he overcomes this disadvantage. He overcomes it by realizing the power of the historical imagination. Like Thucydides, he derives his information in part from personal observation — he was for many years a correspondent in Russia and in that capacity was with the Red Army at Stalingrad and when it made its first reinvestment of Kharkov — and in part from careful inquiry. His commitment is to fact and to essential truth, which he serves no less by his imagination than by his experience and research. There is no page of his work that does not compel our admiring interest.

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The Time of the Assassins, by Godfrey Blunden
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1952
London: Jonathan Cape, 1953