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Faith, Hope, No Charity, by Margaret Lane (1935)

Dust jacket of first edition of Faith, Hope, No Charity by Margaret Lane

This is a guest post by Sarah Lonsdale.

The novel won a prestigious international literary prize in 1936, beating George Orwell, Graham Greene, Stevie Smith and Sylvia Townsend Warner, amongst others; but you’ve probably never heard of it.

Book prizes, particularly if one has access to the judges’ deliberations, tell us much about taste and contemporary literary fashion; often they tell us little about what makes a novel great, or indeed long-lived. In 1936, Margaret Lane’s novel Faith, Hope, No Charity won the English Femina-Vie Heureuse prize previously won by Virginia Woolf, Rose Macaulay and E. M. Forster. You’ve probably never heard of the novel, and maybe not even the author (unless you’re a fan of Beatrix Potter: Lane wrote a well-received biography of the notoriously misanthropic artist, author and naturalist). Competing against Lane’s debut novel for the prize that year were Graham Greene’s A Gun For Sale, George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying and, arguably the most literary of the novels considered that year, Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper. Other accomplished authors whose novels, shortlisted for the prize, fell by the wayside that year, were Rosamond Lehmann, Sylvia Townsend Warner and H. E. Bates.

The Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse of 1,000 francs (about £4,000 in today’s money), established by French publishers Hachette in 1904, added a competition for British authors in 1919 to encourage cordial cultural relations in the aftermath of the Great War. An English committee short-listed three novels each year, then forwarded these to the French judges who chose the winner. The English award lasted until 1939 and winners included Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall and Robert Graves, with the gender balance of winners roughly 50-50. The French Prix Femina continues to this day. The English committee’s criteria were that the winning novel should be a ‘strong and imaginative’ work, that the author should show promise for the future and that there should be something in the novel that should reveal the ‘true character and spirit’ of Englishness to French readers.

What was it about Faith, Hope, No Charity that felled so many literary giants but then itself sank without trace? At its heart the novel, set in the now-defunct London Docks at Wapping, is a critique of social, gender and economic relations of the mid-1930s. The main characters live in a dying and disorienting world, hovering between a Victorian past and an uncertain modernity hinted at by the dissatisfied poverty of the dock workers, clashes between the horse-based industries of the straw yards and the motor cars and growing numbers of Jewish refugees arriving in the East End. It shows that as the spectre of a Second World War loomed larger, there was not one, but several versions of Britain, as strange to each other as if they were separated by vast oceans.

Sir William Rothenstein and Margaret Lane at the presentation of her Femina-Vie Heureuse Prize for Faith, Hope, No Charity in July 1937.

Margaret Lane had been a journalist, working first on the Daily Express and then Daily Mail, writing ‘descriptive’ pieces about events she had witnessed and people she had met (including the trial of Al Capone in Chicago and a chilling interview with Frau Goebbels in 1933). Lane’s reporter’s eye describes in great detail a divided world where half-starving, tubercular dock workers vie with each other for jobs unloading luxuries destined for the wealthy inhabitants of the West End:

Certainly there was always a crowd of men, breathing frostily and stamping on the muddy cobbles by half-past seven in the morning whenever a ship was known to be coming in. The casuals would be there too, wary and anxious on the fringe of the crowd, afraid to shove in with the registered men and afraid of missing a chance. They always dispersed quickly, walking off at high speed with their chins thrust down in their mufflers, hoping to get to another call-stand where there might still be need of a few more hands… The warehouses smelled strongly of tangerines, and were stacked full of thin-looking, beautifully stamped crates of fancy goods from Japan, tinsel and Christmas decorations from the Baltic ports, frozen turkeys from Poland.

It is an environment that eventually kills young Arthur Williams, married to Ada, one of the book’s female protagonists. Lane implies this is no accidental death but murder by an unequal social and economic system. Superimposed upon this background of economic hardship run the lives of several young women. Each represents a different class: Ada, an ostler’s daughter, the lower classes; Charlotte Lambert, a dancer, precarious bohemia and Margery Ackroyd, the landed bourgeoisie. All three are trapped, living lives mapped out for them by the vastly overpowering economic, gender and social strictures of the time. Where Ada, a widow at 19, is passive, patient and dutiful, Charlotte sets out to marry a besotted young man from the landed middle class in a doomed attempt to alter her destiny. Margery, the youngest and most actively rebellious of the three, boards a train to London to escape a future of subjugated tedium in a damp country house.

None of the women end up in a happy ever after. In the bleak final scene, on a freezing December evening, each woman contemplates her entrapment. But is the scene also suggests how the three may help each other defy society and their destiny through a collaborative effort:

The three sat together for a little while in silence, finding a quiet comfort in the still room and the fire, the hot tea and fiery brandy they sipped so cautiously, and in each other. The coals settled and blazed behind the bars of the grate; the gas in its white globe purred hoarsely.

They are in the old pierhead house in Wapping, rented by Charlotte, a symbol of the fast-disappearing world of the dockside trade. The image of the fireside provides the reader with a shard of hope that rather than struggling hopelessly and individually, together these women may lead fulfilling and free lives.

The house is a liminal urban space and a home for characters on the edge of society: unmarried women and homosexual male dancers, surrounded on three sides by water. While it is firmly located in London’s East End, it is also ‘otherland,’ an extraordinary island of Bohemia sandwiched between the working-class tenements and the industrial docks and as such represents escape of a kind. In the novel, each woman takes a different journey to reach the pierhead: Ada, the widow, on foot, Charlotte, the jilted fiancee in a car and Margery, the refusenik debutante a train. Its themes of rebellion, disappointment and its examination of the ‘new public woman’ gives Faith, Hope, No Charity a modernity that was recognised by the Prix Femina committee.

The chairmanship for the 1935-1936 committee was shared between the novelists Kate O’Brien and Margaret Kennedy. Other judges that year included the artist Laura Anning Bell, the novelists Sylvia Lynd, Amabel Strachey and Netta Syrett and the poet Ethel Clifford; their comments and deliberations reveal much about how a book wins a prize.

One of the most outspoken contributors was the 70-year-old late-Victorian popular author Netta Syrett, whom the other, younger women appear to have been afraid to contradict. She described Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper, perhaps the most accomplished submission from a literary point of view as ‘a journal kept by a lunatic.’ Margaret Kennedy dismissed Greene’s A Gun for Sale as: ‘a bogus book. Intensely insincere.’ Sylvia Lynd was against Orwell, saying: ‘As with all his other books he displays a most unpleasant personality.’ And so it seems that Margaret Lane’s ‘promising’ novel was chosen by virtue of it not having anyone find anything egregious about it rather than it having any outstanding literary merit.

It was certainly a promising first novel, but not a great one. Some of the key characters are a little two-dimensional and not enough of their inner lives is revealed. The decisions Charlotte and Ada make are forced upon them and thus their ‘freedom’ lacks agency; their experiences are not transformative. The dropped ‘aitches’ of the working-class accents grate somewhat too. Although Lane wrote several other novels throughout her life, in the end, maybe it was the journalist in her that meant her greatest literary success was in biography and not fiction. There is an understanding and sensibility in her biographies of the writer Edgar Wallace and Beatrix Potter particularly, that is lacking in her treatment of her fictional characters.

Faith, Hope, No Charity, by Margaret Lane
London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1935

Dr Sarah LonsdaleSarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.

Love from a Convict, by Veronica Henriques (1955)

Cover of Love from a Convict by Veronica Henriques

Joan Reid would have sympathized with Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate). “How shall I fill up my years?” she asks as she stands on the threshold of adulthood:

“Paint,” said my mother. “I will have you taught.”

“Medicine,” said an aunt.

“Secretary,” said a friend.

“Photography,” said someone else.

“Plastics,” I wanted to add.

“But surely I should feel something?” she replies. “Some purpose which I must fulfil?”

Because this is fiction, or the Fifties, or both, Joan manages to land a job as a reporter with a regional newspaper in a small city on the Channel coast based on little more than the ability to type and spell. She sets out for life with a capital L with an exchange that’s one of the best leavetakings in literature:

“Goodbye,” I said to my parents, as they handed me over to myself.

“Goodbye,” I said, taking possession.

Everyone at the paper is very nice and very helpful and there is not a whiff of sexism or misogyny, which suggests that either Joan is oblivious to it or Henriques never actually worked for a newspaper, for both were certainly as pervasive as the clouds of cigarette smoke in such places back then.

Indeed, these two paragraphs encapsulate the brightest and dimmest facets of Love from a Convict (its U.S. title was Love for a Convict, though why just the preposition was changed is anyone’s guess). At its best, Henrique’s narratorial voice is snappy, clever, unexpected, and funny. Joan, however, is often too dense or too earnest to merit Henrique’s brio.

How earnest? Earnest enough to fall in love in the space of five sentences and even fewer minutes. Stranded out on the moors by a bitter storm, she and a colleague seek shelter at the only structure that seems inhabited: a prison. A warder lets them into the visitors’ waiting room and fetches a convict, who comes into to light the stove. And the lightning strikes:

His nose was fairly straight; it had a slight twist as it neared his nostrils, which sloped back gently, sensitively. His mouth was straight, the upper lip very slightly overlapping the lower. His chin was square. He was a very attractive looking man I he sort of man I would want to love.

And that is pretty much all there is to it. By the time they make it back to the office, Joan is certain that she is in love with Richard, the inmate. Several visits in the following weeks only set her mind more firmly, though Richard seems an unpromising candidate. Soft-spoken, well-mannered, and attracted in kind to Joan, he is also prone to sudden bursts of rage. And on the day when his sentence is up, he attacks the guard bringing him the civilian clothes he’s about to be released in.

Joan’s parents are, understandably, concerned, despite her open optimism in sharing her news:

“I am in love,” I wrote my parents.

“Who? Do bring him home,” they wrote.

“I can’t,” I answered. “He’s still in prison.”

Her fellow reporters also try to dissuade her, but Joan is convinced. “If I didn’t love him, would I know so surely?” she challenges them. A cousin of Richard’s she meets tells her that he is a vicious man, “constantly exploding with belligerence.” Richard’s parents, who she visits in search of answers, have written him off: “We have our own lives to live, and we have accepted the fact that Richard is better in prison than out.”

None of them manages to change her mind. Even when the prison’s governor advises her that Richard is likely to keep adding years to his sentence through his outbursts, Joan remains steadfast. And here we leave the story, with Joan and Richard stuck in their respective limbos.

For me, this stuckness was what kept Love from a Convict from rising to the level of Veronica Henriques’ frequently-sparkling prose. Reading it was like listening a light and swinging jazz tune on a scratched record, where tune returns again and again and again to a particular two-bar passage. [Some youngsters make have to Google “record skipping” to understand that analogy.] Stuckness is a problematic state to end a novel in — indeed, Love from a Convict seems almost unfinished.

Ironically, the structural aspects were what Kingsley Amis thought most successful in the book. His problem was with Joan, whose willful naivete he could barely tolerate:

I had barely caught sight of Love from a Convict before starting to object to it, and certainly there can be few books more energetically not my cup of tea.

I can just about stomach the idea of a sensitive girl reporter on a provincial newspaper falling in love with a noble-savage convict, but her only identifiable motive for what she does about it turns out to be, not love, but a half-hidden desire to be though shocking by some people and ‘interesting’ by others, and at this point the last of my sympathy expired. It is with all the more emphasis, then, that I must praise the book, firstly for the unusual vigour with which it puts of its (to me antipathetic) state of feeling, and secondly for its grasp of technique, flair for exposition, adroitness in scene-shifting and the rest of the how=d’ye-do — whatever it is that makes the reader detect some kind of sense of vocation in a novelist. So when the next one from this stable appears I shall, reluctantly, have to get hold of it. (The Spectator, 18 February 1955)

Other reviewers were generally as positive as Amis, most of them singling out the freshness of Joan’s voice and perspective. “A little tour de force in the sense of honesty,” wrote Newsweek’s critic.

Veronica Henriques, from the dust jacket of <em>Love from a Convict</em>.
Veronica Henriques, from the dust jacket of Love from a Convict.

Veronica Henriques was 24 when Love from a Convict was published. The daughter of the novelist and founding member of the British Commandos, Robert Henriques, she went on to write four more novels in the next dozen years. By the 1970s, however, she had become more interested in painting and printmaking and began showing her work under her married name of Veronica Gosling. She continues to create and foster a space for art and community in her Studio 36 in Exeter.

Love from a Convict, by Veronica Henriques
London: Secker & Warburg, 1955

June 30, from 365 Days, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain (1936)

Editor’s Note: This entry for June 30, 1934, written by the Swedish novelist Gustav Sandgren, offers a timely reminder of the precarious nature of freedom.

Headline: “Wanderers on the Face of the Earth” [Sweden]

The train moved out from the small station. He sat on the bench opposite me, his little dark-clothed body nervously twitching, his long white hands moving like disturbed birds. His eyes blinked behind silver-bowed eyeglasses. And I listened to him, while the landscape glided by as in a dream, silent and contourless.

“I tell you I am afraid,” he said. “You know I am an emigrant, and that I have saved my life by running away from Germany. Still it is not those facts that upset me. I am not afraid of anything happening to my body, it is not death I talk of. It is something other. Something dreadful beyond words. Something that happens not only to me, but to the whole world. You understand?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Pardon me I — I mean I have seen and felt ten millions of respectable citizens, of kind, labouring folks suddenly turn bandits, bloodhungry animals, craving for men to put to death by kicks and blows. I say to you, I have felt it, seen it, seen my best friend and neighbour, a peaceful clerk with ink-spots on his fingertops turn wild, heard him hammer at my door with an axe to get in and kill me. Yet it is not the facts I shrink from — it is the thing behind it, the evil power, the nothingness of all that we called human thoughts and feelings. We have been cheated, we are cheated, the whole of mankind. We have lived on illusions and now they are withdrawn from under our feet… ”

“But in this country you are safe,” I tried to soothe him.

“Nobody is safe, I am afraid. I say I am afraid. It is nameless ugly things that begin to darken over us, that are to come. I seek to calm myself, but I can’t, I can’t….”

His poor little figure hooked in the corner, his clammy hands fastening to the window strap. The train moved very fast, it was as if we were thrown forward through a mist of green, through a green dead dream.

And I felt his fear.

This piece appears in 365 Days, an anthology of what we would today call flash fictions, inspired by a newspaper headline and story for each day in 1934, that was edited by the American writer Kay Boyle and her then-husband Laurence Vail, along with their Irish friend Nina Conarain.

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

A Dozen Views of the Fall of France, June 1940

I recently spent the equivalent of two days listening to the audiobook version of The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 William L. Shirer’s massive follow-up to his classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. At over 1,000 pages, the book will satisfy all but the most obsessive reader’s appetite for the workings of French politics between 1870 and 1940. And if there is one resounding criticism I’d make, it’s that Shirer’s is very much an old-school history. This is history from the top down, as seen (and then exhaustively recounted in memoirs) by the politicians and generals at the highest levels of the government and military. With few exceptions, we get little sense of how the events of May and June 1940 were experienced by ordinary people.

One reason I find this episode fascinating is that it represented, in a matter of weeks, at times even just days, the complete overturn of the status quo of millions. At every level from the individual to the national, things that were taken for granted were torn away or fell apart. For me at least, I cannot read an account from this time without wondering, What would I have done? How would I have reacted? Would I have acted selflessly or heroically? Or panicked and clogged the roads like thousands of other refugees? I hope I never have to learn that answers to these questions, but here is a selection of 12 different ways in which people responded.

• Divided Loyalties: A Scotswoman in Occupied France, by Janet du Tessier Cros
Janet Griegson was a Scotswoman who married François Teissier du Cros, a physicist, in 1930. She found herself in the rural Cevennes region in southern France with her husband on military service in May 1940. In this memoir of her experiences during the war, she recalls first hearing the news of the invasion:

A little beyond Mandiargues some soldiers stopped the bus and came on board. They told us that their leave had been cancelled because at that very moment the Nazi troops were pouring into Holland. A buzz of dismay went through the bus. i sat frozen. Something in my mind was rushing desperately hither and thither, hunting for a way out. There was none. My sister Alice was married to a Dutchman and lived in The Hague. What would become of their children and of themselves? What about François? It was the end, the terrible end I had sensed from the beginning….

• Death and Tomorrow (American title: The Germans Came to Paris)(1942), by Peter de Polnay
Peter de Polnay, a Hungarian-born novelist who wrote in English, was living in Paris and enjoying the best of la vie bohème when war broke out. He first felt himself outside the conflict, and even the start of the Blitzkrieg seemed, at first, of little import:

I went to play bridge in the house of an English friend, and at that bridge party only English and Americans were present. They all said that the French were running; I heard the word running the whole afternoon. Now that the Germans are inside France, I suggested, the running will stop. The answer was that the Stukas and the seventy-ton tanks were invincible. But there was Weygand [the marshal commanding the French army], I said. It was a pretty gloomy afternoon, though nobody quite believed that those tanks were really invincible, it was talking of the devil in the hope that the talk would exorcise him.

Death and Tomorrow is a vivid description of the first days of the German occupation of Paris, enriched by the fact that de Polnay seemed to cross paths — and be trusted — by everyone: Germans, French, collaborators, black marketeers, and Resistance members. Eventually, though, his freewheeling ways attracted the attention of the Gestapo and he was forced to flee, making his way to England, the story of which comprises the second half of his book.

• The Train, by Georges Simenon
Twenty years after the fact, the prolific novelist Georges Simenon wrote one of his best novels — Brigid Brophy called it his masterpiece — about the choices people make when their lives are suddenly disrupted. The story opens as a Belgian couple are fleeing their home to escape the Germans. Familiar with the experience of occupation from the First World War, some of their fellow townspeople have decided to stay:

Other people, like us, were walking towards the station, burdened with suitcases and bundles. An old woman asked me if she might put hers on my cart, and she started pushing it along with me….

There was a rather wild look in most people’s eyes, but that was chiefly the result of impatience. Everybody wanted to be off. It was all a matter of arriving in time. Everybody was convinced that part of the huge crowd would be left behind and sacrificed.

Were those who were not leaving taking greater risks? Behind the window-panes, faces were watching the fugitives, and it seemed to me, looking at them, that they were stamped with a sort of icy calm.

The couple become separated in the evacuation and the husband meets a Czech woman who leads him to reconsider where he wants to go with his life. It’s a classic Simenon story, in which one unexpected accident, one step in the wrong direction, sets off a series of events that overturns everything an individual has taken for granted — rather as the fall of France did on a much larger scale.

• Running to Paradise (1943) and Bid the Soldiers Shoot (1955), by John Lodwick
Finding himself in France at the outbreak of the war, John Lodwick joined the French Foreign Legion and was involved in numerous skirmishes as the French and British armies gave way before the Germans. He wrote about the experience twice: first as a novel with his fictional counterpart Adrian Dormant and again, 15 years later, in a memoir that encompassed his time as a prisoner of war, his escape to England, and his work as an agent for the Special Operations Executive in France and the Balkans.
Both books demonstrate that Lodwick, for all his superficial nonchalance, was a veteran of intense combats. In Running to Paradise, he describes the psychological effects of being attacked by Stuka dive bombers:

Both the precision of their aim and the destruction caused by it were intense. The effect of it was moral as well as material. A bomb takes a certain time to fall, and whistles as it drops. The blast and danger of its explosion are as nothing compared to the agonized suspense of these few moments. A man lying with his belly married to the soil or in the shallow shelter of some hole, feels himself annihilated in advance, a grubby penny lying on the counter of eternity. He cannot see. He dare not raise his head. He can only hear, and since the enemy realize this and know the control which his auditory system exercises on his nerves, they fit sirens to their aeroplane engines — sirens, whose mournful wail, like the last breath of a banshee, shall deafen him and curdle his quaking tripes.

• F.S.P.: An N.C.O.’s Description of His and Others’ First Six Months of War, January 1st–June 1st, 1940, by Arthur Gwynn-Browne (1941)
Gwynn-Browne was an NCO assigned to a Field Security Post (a military police unit) with the British Expeditionary Force deployed to France after the German invasion of Poland. He witnessed, therefore, not only the truce-like “Phony War” but the panic and retreat when the German Panzers began driving through Belgium and France. Gwynn-Browne’s might be considered the first modernist account of World War Two, as his prose style shows the clear influence of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.
In the early days, his unit is assigned to try to manage the masses of refugees filling every passable road leading away from the Germans:

There were hundreds of cars, thousands of refugees. They all looked much the same and one car looked much the same as the next one coming after. On the top there were always the mattresses laid flat on the roof and on them lay blankets pillows eiderdowns rug and these were securely corded and then usually a bicycle and a child’s scooter and sometimes a pram securely corded on top of them. It was hot and dry and it was all right, later on it was cold and wet and then it was not so all right. Inside the cars there was everything the family had and all the women inside all wore little round hats with little veils on them. The children usually there were two or three children they were asleep. There were never any pet animals and the windows were tight shut though it was hot but they were closed. Perhaps it is not kind to say they all looked very bourgeois but they did, they were plump scented and stuffy.

• Europe in the Spring, by Clare Boothe (1940)
Playwright and occasional reporter Clare Boothe (not yet adding husband and Time/Life owner Henry Luce’s name to hers) traveled to Europe in April 1940 expecting to travel around and witness the uneasy stalemate underway since the end of the German and Soviet takeover of Poland. Instead, she found herself caught up in the flight from the German attack, waking up on her first day in Brussels to the news that German troops were crossing into Belgium and German planes bombing its cities and forts. She makes her way to Paris, where she watches as the facade of Parisian sophistication crumbles as the government and army fall apart:

Paris got its information about what France had been doing all day, all night, the way a woman gets hers about what her husband has been up to. You know how a woman says, the split second her husband walks in the door with a carefully arranged smile on his face: “So things have been going badly at the office?” And he says: “My God, how did you know?” And she replies: “Because I know you so well, darling.” That is how Paris, the wife, knew what was happening to France, the husband. All the smiles or frowns on the politicians’ faces when they left their offices, the way military moustaches drooped or bristled at midnight, the inflections of well-known voices saying nothing or something or anything on the radio, on the telephone; the way important. people walked in the street; the way ministry doors were slammed; by the significant silences of a great race of talkers; by a thousand little downward percolating uncensorable gestures and indications, the contagious climate of a mood spread from the top of Paris to the bottom—from clerk to doorman, to domestic, to waiter, to policeman, to taxi-driver, to the people—so that the people of Paris knew from hour to hour how the fate of France fared.

• Assignment to Catastrophe, by Major General Edward L. Spears (1955)
Spears, who grew up in France and had the dual advantages of a fluent mastery of the French language and culture and the trust of Winston Churchill, was appointed as Churchill’s personal representative to French prime minister Paul Reynaud soon after Churchill took over as British prime minister. Assignment to Catastrophe, Spears’ two-volume memoir of the lead-up to the war and of the fall of France, is a fascinating account of the personalities and politics at work in the last days of the Fourth Republic.
Knowing Marshal Pétain from his work as a liaison officer between the British and French forces during World War One, Spears paid a call soon after Pétain’s return from his post as ambassador to Franco’s Spain. He soon realized that the man who was being lauded as the savior of France was senile, ineffectual, and completely unsuited to the task:

Very sadly I said: “What France needs today, Monsieur le Marshal, is another Joan of Arc.” His reaction was startling. Once more he was all animation, his face lit up. “Joan of Arc! Joan of Arc!” he exclaimed, “Have you read my speech on Joan of Arc?” “No, Monsieur le Marechal “Now that is too bad, it should have been sent to you. I made it at Rouen; now when was it, in 1937, ’38? It was an extremely fine speech, I may say. I shall read it to you.”

To my amazement, not to say consternation, he went to some bookshelves between two windows, pulled out one or two bound volumes of typescript, did not find what he wanted, then bent right down to look at the lowest shelves. The effort was considerable, he straightened stiffly, and said: “I shall have it found, it is certainly here,” and, moving back to his desk, rang a bell. In a moment his Chief of Staff, General Bineau, appeared. He was almost as old as his chief (age was a major quality in the Marshal’s eyes) and, I think, very lame.

The problem was explained, and with courteous apologetic haste the General began to hunt for the speech.

It was presently found. “ Je vous remercie ,” said the Marshal, as, adjusting his pince-nez once more, he settled himself in a stiff arm¬ chair with his back to the window.

All I remember about that speech was that it was very, very long and that he read it in a monotone. I cannot recall a single sentence, or even its gist. What I do remember was the terrible sadness I felt as I watched him, a sadness now based on pity for a very old man for whom I had, till so recently, felt the deepest affection and regard. He was infinitely pathetic in his childish satisfaction as he read.

• My First War: An Army Officer’s Journal for May 1940, through Belgium to Dunkirk, by Basil Bartlett (1942)
Like Gwynne-Browne, Basil Bartlett was assigned to an FSP with the B.E.F., but in his case as the commanding officer. My First War is a case study in the incoherence of an army and society in collapse. Macmillan tried to market the book as “British nonchalance and dry humor at its most enchanting,” but what comes across more strongly is a world view consistently failing to take in the magnitude and reality of the chaos it was experiencing.
As his unit approaches Dunkirk, Bartlett asks a Belgian for the name of a good hotel there, “as we’re all tired and feel we’d like a wash and a sleep.” The man looks at him in amazement. He soon discovers why:

Dunkirk was a nasty shock. I knew it had been bombed, but I hadn’t realised quite how seriously. As I entered the town there was a roar of engines overhead. I looked up and saw about thirty pale-green aeroplanes with a black cross on their underwings flying very low above me. There were no airraid shelters to be seen. So I dived down a side-street and hid myself under a stone seat. At that moment the bombs began to fall. Each aeroplane dropped a 500-pound screaming bomb. Then they all scattered hundreds of little delayed-action and incendiary bombs. By a miracle I escaped being hit.
I crawled out feeling rather shaken.

• Strange Defeat, by Marc Bloch
Bloch, one of the leading historians of his time as well as a veteran of World War One, wrote a brief account that combined personal memoir with searching political and social criticism that was published after his execution by the Gestapo in 1944 for his work in the French resistance.
Serving as a fuels officer when his unit was cut off by the German assault in early May, Bloch evaded capture for ten days by disguising himself as … himself:

What, in fact, I did, after standing for a few moments deep in thought on the pavement of that hilly street, was to choose what seemed to me then the simplest, and, in the long run, the safest method of getting away. I went back to the house where I was billeted. There I took off my tunic. My rough serge trousers had nothing particularly military about them. From my landlord, who, with his son, showed, on this occasion, a high degree of courage, I got, without difficulty, the loan of a civilian jacket and tie. Then, after first making contact with an old friend who was a professor at Rennes, I booked a room in one of the hotels. Arguing that the best way to escape being noticed was to retain one’s identity, I put my real name and occupation on the form handed tome by the manager. My grey hairs were sufficient guarantee that no one would suspect the presence of an army officer beneath the outward semblance of so obviously academic a figure?

• The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940, by Lion Feuchtwanger (1941)
Novelist Feuchtwanger and his wife left Germany in 1933 after Hitler came to power, knowing that their status as liberal intellectuals and Jews put them at risk of Nazi persecution. Within two weeks of the German invasion of France in May 1940, however, he was told to report to the internment camp at Les Mille. After several months, he managed to arrange his escape from internment, disguising himself as a woman and making it to Marseilles. There, with the help of American consul Varian Fry, the couple were given passage to New York, where Feuchtwanger wrote this account of his treatment by the Germans.
Feutchwanger wrote of the experience of captivity with thousands of other prisoners in Les Mille:

What I found most difficult about the camp was the fact that one could never be alone, that constantly, day and night, every act, every physical function, eating, sleeping, voiding, was performed in the presence of hundreds of men, men who were talking, shouting, moaning, weeping, laughing, feeding, smacking their lips, wiping their mouths, sweating, smelling, snoring. Yes, we did everything in the most public view, and no one seemed to feel the slightest embarrassment.

• The Fall of Paris, by Ilya Ehrenburg
Ehrenburg spent the late thirties as a Soviet correspondent in Paris (and managed to avoid some of the personal and ethical risks of Stalin’s purges). In response to the fall of France, he quickly wrote a lengthy novel that, like Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy, traced the decay and breakdown of French society and the early impact of the Occupation. In it, he describes the despair of Parisians during the first days under Nazi rule:

All this time the Parisians had been staying indoors. They could not get used to the German soldiers in the streets. In the morning Agnés went shopping. The long queue was silent. The people tried not to think about anything. Searching for a pound of potatoes or a bottle of milk helped to distract their minds. If they talked at all it was about relations who had disappeared one had lost a husband, another a son.

Once an old man in a queue exclaimed: “What about France?”

Nobody answered, but everybody thought: “France is also lost.”

• Troubled Sleep, by Jean-Paul Sartre
In the third volume of his unfinished tetralogy about French society from the Munich crisis of 1938 through the fall of France and the Occupation, The Roads to Freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre follows a group of soldiers as they learn of the Armistice and are rounded up and shipped off to German prison camps. He describes a carload of prisoners watching as the French landscape rolls away from them:

Brunet saw a chateau that was not yet within their range of vision, a chateau in a park, white, and flanked by two pointed towers. A small girl in the park, holding a hoop, stared at them with solemn eyes; it was as though all France, an innocent and outmoded France, through those young eyes was watching them pass. Brunet looked at the little girl and thought of Pétain; the train swept across her gaze, across her own future of quiet games and healthy thoughts and trivial worries, on toward fields of potatoes and factories and armament works, on to the dark, real future of a world of men. The prisoners behind Brunet waved their hands; in all the cars Brunet saw hands waving handkerchiefs; but the child made no response, she only stood there clasping her hoop.

The Mermaids, by Eva Boros (1956)

Cover of first US edition of The Mermaids by Eva Boros

“He met her on the Danube Corso, on the 29th of August, 1936.” The scene is Budapest before the horrors. He is Aladar, a 30-something businessman, divorced, seeking an escape from the oppressive heat. She is an attractive peroxide blonde (“a Jean Harlow type,” he thinks). Their cafe tables abut and their glances lead to a conversation. Her Hungarian is accented, sketchy. She is Lalla, an Italian, a nightclub singer and dancer, or so she claims. He doubts her words. There is a certain frailty about her and sense of unworldliness.

He invites her to dinner but she declines, saying she needs to get home. As he helps her onto the tram, he slips his business card into her hand.

And for weeks thereafter, he returns to the same cafe in hopes of seeing her again. “Like most solitary people,” Boros tells us, “he is a creature of habit.” His persistence doesn’t pay off.

Then one day, a letter arrives in his office. It’s from Lalla, who invites Aladar to visit. “I am laid up with a cold” at the Pannonia sanitorium on the outskirts of town. She is a tuberculosis patient, he realizes.

Cover of The Doll's Smile, the US paperback edition of The Mermaids
Cover of The Doll’s Smile, the US paperback edition of The Mermaids.

Boros, who grew up in Budapest and who was herself a patient in such a clinic, captures the safe but fraught atmosphere in which some stay for years and some hemorrhage and die overnight.

Hospitals, like prisons, create their own time. Weeks pass unnoticed, while minutes seem to last for hours and days. You are aware of this change in the rhythm of time as soon as you enter the place. It affects you unpleasantly, like the smell of disinfectants and drugs. It feels like anxiety. You glance at your watch, for instinctively you know that there is something wrong with the time; that you have to come too early or too late. And you begin to wonder how long your visit is supposed to last. You are already counting in minutes and in seconds; the afternoon is never going to end. . . .

Like us, Aladar is, at first, uncomfortable seeing Lalla in her bed, walking her along the ward, sitting her on the terrace. But the ease of her talk and the friendliness of the other patients she introduces him to — bright young Franciska, charming Kati, the unassuming Count, who has been in and out of the clinic (mostly in) for decades — soon overcomes his awkwardness.

He returns the next weekend, and the next, and the next after that (creature of habit, remember?). He takes Lalla out for rides in his car, proud to be seen with a young, beautiful woman. Aladar comes during the week to meet with Lalla’s doctor (days before healthcare privacy regulations), looking for assurance that she will eventually be cured. He wants to take her away, marry her, add her to his treasures. “Yes, she is improved,” the doctor responds, careful not to confuse improved with cured — though Aladar instantly does.

Gradually, we realize the meaning of Boros’s title. Aladar has no more chance of taking Lalla away from the sanatorium for good than the prince has of taking the mermaid from sea. She understands this. On a trip into Budapest, he urges her to spend the night in town. “But remember that no hotel would accept me,” she reminds him, “What with my sputum-mug and all that.”

When Aladar does finally come to some acceptance of the situation, it is almost wholly selfish. “She couldn’t exist without her illness… She was made by her illness, she was her illness.”

The Mermaids is, as one can predict from the moment Aladar reads Lalla’s letter in his office, a tragic romance. But not a melodrama, thank God. Eva Boros is far too skillful and subtle an artist for that.

In fact, the pleasure of The Mermaids is that of putting ourselves in the hands of a masterful minimalist. Reading this book is like taking a glass of wine in the sun-dappled shade of a continental cafe. The experience is one to be savored, not indulged in. We take one glass and sit for an hour or so. Not two, and never three.

The U.S. edition of The Mermaids came with a long — and rare — tribute from Eudora Welty. “Thank you for letting me read this beautiful novel,” she wrote, likely in response to an advance copy. The book, she wrote, was a “sensitive, haunting work of a quality distinctly its own. While it probes deeply for unsparing truth, it is delicate as a flower to the senses.”

Most critics shared this view. Elizabeth Bowen, reviewing the book in The Tatler and Bystander, remarked that Boros, although Hungarian, wrote “far better English than many of us command!” She applauded the descriptions of the sanatorium’s atmosphere and residents and found that the novel “has a beauty hard to pin down. This book, I can only say, haunts me: I must re-read it.” Her fellow novelist Antonia White was equally impressed: “It is exciting, if a little disconcerting, that a Hungarian, writing her first novel in a language not her own, should produce a small gem of English literature.”

In the U.S., Granville Hicks, always an insightful and supportive reviewer, found The Mermaids “is completely unified by the mood that the author creates, and the writing has a kind of purity that takes the breath away.” On the matter of the inevitable comparisons with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Hicks argued that “Miss Boros, of course, is trying to do something very different from Mann, something much smaller than he attempted, but on her own scale she has been quite as successful, and that is a great deal to say.”

Eva Boros in Vienna, 1929. Photo by Bill Brandt.
Eva Boros in Vienna, 1929. Photo by Bill Brandt.

Though she set The Mermaids in 1936, Eva Boros had left Hungary years before. In 1928, she moved to Vienna, where she met the young German-born British photographer Bill Brandt. Like Boros, Brandt had spent time in a T.B. clinic — in his case, in Davos, the setting of Mann’s novel. Brandt fell for Boros — 21, blonde (natural), beautiful — and the two married … eventually. Brandt’s love life was never less than complicated and Boros eventually lost her taste for competition.

Her life remained intertwined with Brandt’s, though. In the 1950s, he entered psychoanalysis with a therapist named Barbara Lantos and suggested that Boros, now divorced from him but living in London as well, become her patient as well. Later, when Lantos was dying of cancer, she told her husband, a Hungarian emigre named Sandor Rakos, that he should marry Boros after her death — which he did.

Paul Delany, Brandt’s biographer, speculates that psychoanalysis may have cured Boros of the compulsion to write. The Mermaids was her first and only novel. It has never been republished.

The Mermaids, by Eva Boros
New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956

Seven Days Whipping, by John Biggs, Jr. (1928)

Cover of Seven Days Whipping by John Biggs Jr.

This is a note about a footnote. If John Biggs, Jr. is mentioned today, it’s inevitably as a supporting player in the life of his much more famous Princeton roommate, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and if either of his novels enters the discussion, it’s probably in a footnote. This is not entirely unjust.

Biggs (Princeton ’18), Fitzgerald (’17), and Edmund Wilson (’16) became friends through their passion for writing and editing Princeton’s two literary magazines, The Tiger and The Nassau Literary Magazine. Biggs would serve as managing editor for both, though he quickly realized that Fitzgerald was the better (and more prolific) writer. He and Fitzgerald shared a room during FSF’s last term at Princeton before entering the Army in late 1917.

The 1917-1918 staff of the Princeton Tiger. John Biggs, Jr. center front and F. Scott Fitzgerald behind him.

Biggs later admitted that while he was “a literary snob, Fitz was a snob’s snob.” Despite the fact that Biggs came from a far wealthier family, Fitzgerald somehow managed to dress in the best clothing available from Brooks Brothers and Jacob Reed. When Fitzgerald needed someone to get him out of jail after a bender, though, it was Biggs who inevitably provided the bail.

Both men enlisted in the Army after American entered the First World War. Neither made it overseas. While Fitzgerald married and moved to New York after his discharge, Biggs returned to Princeton to graduate and went on to earn his law degree at Harvard. Biggs and his wife traveled to Paris for their honeymoon but then headed back to Delaware, where Biggs followed in his father’s footsteps and established a successful law practice.

Although he was not even a year older than Fitzgerald, Biggs became something of an older brother figure for the writer. Biggs arranged for a house in Delaware when Fitzgerald needed to dry out and he took an increasingly active role in handling Fitzgerald’s legal matters. In return, Fitzgerald introduced Biggs to Max Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s.

Biggs wrote a long untitled novel while at Harvard that Fitzgerald shopped to Scribner’s, Putnam, and eventually, H. L. Mencken. “To my mind it has the most beautiful writing — and I don’t mean “fine” writing — that I’ve seen in a ‘coon’s age,” he told Mencken. “I don’t believe anyone in America can write like this — and the novel is also remarkable in the objectivity of its realism….” Mencken did not agree. Not only did the book never get published but Mencken, who crossed paths with Biggs socially from time to time, considered him dull and officious.

Scribner’s accepted Biggs’ next novel, Demi-Gods (1926), which reviewers found an awkward mix of American eccentric religious mysticism (there are two attempts to found a cult in the book) and Gilded Age tycoonism. Perkins accepted the book for Scribner’s but was measured in his feedback to Fitzgerald.

Perkins’ opinion of Biggs’ third novel, Seven Days Whipping, was much higher. Scribner’s publicized the book in all the major reviews. A shorter version was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine and prefaced with this potpourri-like teaser:

In describing the book, one is at a loss for comparatives. One thinks of James Joyce, of Edgar Allen Poe, even of that fantastic play, “Beggar on Horseback.” None of them fits, although all of them suggest something of the truth. Seven Days Whipping has certain qualities of Joycean introspection, the fascination of Poe’s stories, an atmosphere of fantastic mystery, a revelation of forces hidden deep in the primitive in all of us.

Fitzgerald was delighted at its apparent success. “I loved John’s book,” he wrote Perkins after receiving a copy. “It’s his best thing and the most likely to go. It’s really thought out — oddly enough its least effective moments are the traces of his old manner.” He did acknowledge, though, that “From the first draft, which was the one I saw, I thought he could have cut 2000 or 3000 words that was mere Conradian stalling around. Whether he did or not I don’t know.”

The book did not sell well, however, despite generally favorable reviews and Scribner’s support. And almost two years after his initial enthusiasm for the book, Fitzgerald — who was likely off on Biggs and all stable people in general, given his own troubles at the time — confided, “Seven Days Whipping was respectable but colorless. Demigods was simply oratorical twirp.”

I have to agree with Fitzgerald on Seven Days Whipping. That odd title, by the way, is the name of a Delaware tribesman whose sudden and dramatic appearance — with the aid of a tremendous hurricane-like storm — provides the climax of the book. In contrast, Bigg’s protagonist, Stawell — a Puritan throwback, perhaps (Stay Well)? — Ball La Place, is the opposite of dramatic. He is sober as a judge, which is fitting, since he is a judge (as Biggs himself would later become).

As dark clouds mass to the east, Judge La Place travels from his court in Wilmington to his family estate on the banks of the Red clay River. There, his wife awaits, expecting to deliver their first child at any moment. She is a late mother and La Place frets about her health and the birth. As they sit down for supper, the storm breaks with a violent fury. The telephone goes out and he decides to drive to fetch the doctor.

With sheets of rain and earth-shaking bursts of thunder battering him, La Place is startled to meet with a tall Indian, half-naked and carrying the body of a dead deer. What happens next is neither respectable nor colorless, but it is largely unbelievable unless you’re willing to accept that the mixture of an expectant wife and a melodramatic encounter in the rain would be enough to send a middle-aged judge into a murderous hysteria. A hysteria which evaporates as soon as the sun rises, the baby howls, and Seven Days Whipping manages to come back to life.

John Biggs, Jr. was not unfamiliar with hysteria and other forms of mental illness. He dealt with numerous cases involving commitment to mental asylums at a time when the power in such cases lay heavy against the individual and in the 1940s, he became the chair of the American Bar Association’s committee on the rights of the mentally ill.

He may not, however, have had the temperament to put himself fully into the mind of a man who goes mad, even if just briefly. Reading Seven Days Whipping, I was reminded of something James Baldwin once said in an interview: “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.” Whatever that something is, John Biggs, Jr. resisted it. If he wanted his readers to believe that Judge La Place becomes mad, he only succeeds in convincing us that he becomes histrionic.

Fortunately for Fitzgerald, Biggs was a far better lawyer and friend than he was a novelist. As Fitzgerald’s alcoholism and money problems grew worse, Biggs staunchly defended his interests and protected the writer against bankruptcy. Before his death, with Zelda in and out of institutions, Fitzgerald named Biggs executor and guardian of their daughter Scottie, and proximity to Biggs was one of the reasons that she settled in Washington, D.C. after leaving college.

I have to admit that I knew nothing about Seven Day’s Whipping when I started it. I was merely intrigued by the title and happy to give it a try when I spotted a cheap copy. In the end, it was more interesting as an entree to the story of John Biggs, Jr. — a good man, a good lawyer, a good judge, but a merely adequate novelist — than on its own merits. But such is the nature of reading forgotten old books: they’re not all masterpieces.

Seven Day’s Whipping, by John Biggs, Jr.
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928

Four Poems by Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan from 1927

Regular readers of this site know that I am slightly obsessed with bringing the work of Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan back to light (and back to print via the Recovered Books series at Boiler House Press). Though I thought I had exhausted the resources of the Internet and numerous archives in search of information about Trevelyan, I recently stumbled across four poems that were published in Nineteenth Century and Beyond in 1927 following her graduation from Oxford and her winning the Newdigate Prize for her poem “Julia, Daughter of Claudius.” Not only are these the only works by Trevelyan published between her Newdigate poem and her first novel Appius and Virginia (1932), but the poems are credited to G. Eileen Trevelyan, suggesting this was how she preferred to be known — at least in print.

In the interest of making Trevelyan’s work more accessible, I reprint here the four poems. The poems appeared in the September 1927 issue of Nineteenth Century and Beyond and were prefaced by the following note from the editors: “Miss G. Eileen Trevelyan of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, was the authoress of the Newdigate Prize poem of this year. It is the first award of this prize to a woman.”

Vale Atque Ave
I shall not hear the wailing and the chants,
I shall not see the smoke’s thin, acrid spire,
Nor hear the long, low throbbing of the drums,
Nor cast one blossom on your funeral pyre.

My feet will not read out the ancient dust
That stirs about Benares’ mystic shrine,
Nor, when your ashes flutter to their rest,
May there attend them any prayer of mine:

Yet shall I hail you in the setting sun,
In every changing glory of the air,
And find you ever in each blade and bloom
That grows on earth. Beauty is everywhere.

  
The Prisoner
“Do your chains clash loud on floor and wall,
Do you gnaw the bars of some dark den
Deep in the earth, where reptiles crawl,
Where day is harsh with frenzied brawl
And night with the shrieks of men?”

“My cell is clean and white and bar,
It echoes to no warder’s tread;
The hushed foot-falls of memory
Die slowly on the stagnant air,
And a sigh not born of misery,
A long-drawn, passionless despair,
The breath of the living dead.”

  
The Jewel
They brought the radiance from the violet wings
Of exquisite moments; myriad-plumaged hours
Of light and green-blue evening, starred with thought;
Dove-grey silences and emerald showers
Of song; and burned ecstacies of gold,
Crimson, amethyst and jade to mould
A jewel of limpid fire.

The brought the brazier
Of molten dreams; entwined curved filigrees,
Tortuous soul-threads, anguish-bright, drawn fine
By poignant fingers. Intricately now
Each facet blazed with subtle artistries
Of pain, a glory pendant in Life’s brow,
A flaming lamp in His eternal shrine.

  
Portrait
Broad white cliffs that face the sea,
Feathered spray and glistening loam:
Broad white brow that bends to me,
Bright as the foam.

Elfin smile that, dimpling, plays
At hide and seek with her lips and eyes:
Thistle-down the light wind sprays
Among hovering butterflies,

While far below where sea-birds sweep,
Where the blue sea takes the sky to mate,
The surge is hushed and the smooth sands sleep
And the still depths wait.

The Pole and Whistle, George Moor (1966)

“A frank novel of today’s most controversial subject.” The tag line on the cover of the New English Library edition of George Moor’s novel The Pole and Whistle is accompanied by a photo of two men having a chat in the pub over a pint and a fag. It may have been the publisher’s way of achieving some plausible deniability, given that the Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults, had yet to be passed. The subject could just as well be alcoholism, perhaps.

The contrast between the tentative tone of the book’s cover and the candor of George Moor’s writing, however, is striking. In fact, Moor’s ability to create a situation which is simultaneously utterly mundane and life-destroyingly risky is part of what makes The Pole and Whistle a fascinating work for its time.

John Anselm, in his mid-twenties, is working for his uncle in a chick hatchery in a large city in Lancashire (Moor was raised in Liverpool). His work is hard, tedious, and full of long days. One evening, dreading the long walk back to his apartment, he stops at the Pole and Whistle, a run-down pub just off the main square. There, as he quietly sips a pint, and then another and another, standing in the narrow “parlour,” he notices the young men in tight blue jeans going in and out through the door marked, “Singing Room.” The carefree spirit of the teenagers, the blare of the jukebox, and another pint or two releases John’s inhibitions. “Like a chameleon I changed my emotional colour with each succeeding song. I yearned for ‘Johnny’ and I flamed for ‘Norman.'”

Then, after a visit to the gents’, he encounters a sharp-dressed man in his late twenties who offers him a pint. “You were on ‘D’ landing in Stafford, weren’t you?” he asks. Frank Jeffers, just out of prison, is full of cock and confidence and not the least bit reserved about his interest in John. The two wander out and into a park, where Frank pushes John up against a tree and kisses him. “I’ll do you tomorrow night,” he tells John. “I’ll wait for you in the Pole and Whistle.”

“I had spent most of my twenty-five years as in a railway carriage where no one spoke and everyone kept his reserve,” John tells us. He has accustomed himself to loneliness as a way of avoiding the reality of his sexual orientation. “I could never be liberated from an inner watchfulness. To myself I disclosed only a slumbering awareness of what I was.” To be honest about his desire would ruin everything in his life: his job, the love of his parents, the acceptance of his community, the right to live freely outside prison.

But Frank wipes that all away with the openness of his physical and emotional attraction to John. Soon their nights all start in the Pole and Whistle and end in John’s bed, although this still requires some subterfuge to avoid the patroling bobby and suspicions of John’s landlady. Frank is even so comfortable with their relationship that he takes John home to meet his mum, almost to show off that he can make friends with someone of a better class.

For as genuine as Frank and John’s love for each other is, the fact that they are nightly committing an illegal act is not their only problem. Frank is a criminal, a petty burglar. He can never hold onto an honest job for more than a week or two and he is constantly trying to devise another easy theft. One night, Frank goes missing and stays missing for weeks. When he finally shows up at John’s flat, he confesses that he’d tried to pull a job in a nearby town, been caught, and spent some time in jail. Before long, he attempts another robbery, which also fails, and lands him in prison with a five year sentence.

If John is hoping for a discreet and (relatively) safe long-term relationship, Frank is the last man he should be involved with. Well, next to last, perhaps, after Beggy, one of Frank’s thuggish friends, who takes advantage of the absence of John’s protector to organize a session where John is gang-raped and tortured.

Feeling his world near collapse, John retains enough of a self-preservation instinct to grab a thin, implausible thread and save himself by taking a job in Japan. In a rare moment alone with his mother, he comes out to her. “I knew,” she tells him. “Only, you had so much control I thought it would be for ever.” “It is better to be dead than live without love,” he responds, adding, “The love of a man” to be clear. Their conversation ends in the most British way imaginable: “‘I accept you as you are,’ said my mother. ‘I’ll make some tea'” John replies.

Although The Pole and Whistle was a potentially controversial book when it was published (the New English Library lacked the visibility or marketing clout to attract any serious attention), it’s actually a quite ordinary and calmly-told story about inappropriate loves and learning to accept them. John loves Frank and knows they can never be together. John’s sister is involved with a married man and she and her parents accept this as a long-term relationship. John’s mother may regret the consequences of her son’s sexuality but accepts it as a fact. No one gets everything he wants and still life goes on.

The Pole and Whistle was only ever published as a paperback original and copies are extremely scarce today. But it is recognized as one of the few and one of the best English novels to deal openly with homosexual love published before the passage of the Sexual Offences Act. Dewey Wayne Gunn included it in his Gay Novels of Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth, 1881-1981.

It’s likely that the book had some autobiographical elements. After attending Cambridge, where he won several awards for his poetry, George Moor returned north, teaching in Lancashire and Wales before he moved to Japan in the early 1960s. There, he worked as an English teacher and translator. He later taught in Papua New Guinea and Iran, returning to England after the fall of the Shah. He won an award for his novella Fox Gold not long after that. This was collected with his stories “Nightingale Island” and “Bowl of Roses” and published by John Calder in 1978. He also had two novellas published in New Writing and Writers in the 1970s. Moor was a frequent entrant in New Statesman parody and satire competitions in the 1980s. He died in Burnley in 1992.

The Pole and Whistle, by George Moor
London: The New English Library, 1966

Margaret Boylen and her Odd Outcasts

Margaret Boylen
Margaret Boylen, from the dust jacket of The Marble Orchard.

Margaret Boylen was a writer ahead of her time. Her three novels were published in the age of Eisenhower and Father Knows Best, when men like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs could get away with writing about outsiders and fringe lifestyles but women had to conform to stricter stereotypes. Though a few critics appreciated what she tried to do, most found her choice of characters and plots too weird for literary fiction yet not weird enough to fit with a genre label like horror or science fiction.

The opening lines of Mary McGrory’s review of Crow Field, Boylen’s first novel, in the New York Times captures what might attract some readers and repel others: “Anyone who things that a Dali canvas should be wired for sound or that the Ancient Mariner would be the perfect dinner guest should be entirely charmed with Crow Field. Readers whose simpler tastes run to a desire to know what an author is talking about will probably leave off after a few pages, pleading seasickness.” She described Boylen’s prose as “a heaving sea of words” and “an epic verbal bender.” Martha Schlegel of the Philadelphia Inquirer thought that Boylen’s conception outstretched her talent: “This novel combines a mystery story with a stream of consciousness technique to present a symbolic struggle between good and evil, the whole meanwhile being used as a vehicle for comment on the state of humanity. The result … collapses under its own weight.”

Crow Field is set in a New England country town in the middle of summer stock season and takes place over the course of twenty-four hours. Ella Kinney comes to design sets for the resident theater company but is actually intent on figuring out the reason that the theater’s previous designer, Clem, disappeared. The actors and director think he just ran off out of artistic pique. Ella, aided by premonitory dreams, is certain he was murdered.

In none of her books does Margaret Boylen follow a straight line in her narrative or sentences, but Crow Field is by far her most circuitous work. If you’re looking for a story, you’ll probably not make it past the first chapter, which is a bit of a rapturous description of the town of Crow Field and its surroundings, sort of Thomas Wolfe channeled through Thomas de Quincey after a particularly good snack of opium.

But just as some travelers prefer wandering off the beaten path, some readers will relish Boylen’s meanderings. Here, for example, on her way back to her boarding house, Ella sees some children playing:

High on a heap of ashes, flapping her arms and crowing like a rooster, stood the little girl, the King of the Hill, empress and protector of all the children. She was their ideal; hers were the treasures of romance, imagination and daring. Aristocratic, greedy and generous, she bestowed favors of withheld them as she chose, for she knew everything in the world that could be done and could tell about it afterwards, saying that which was not, unchallenged, for in her mouth lies turned into fables. She stood on the ash pile crowing, and her followers brought her empty bottles, queerly shaped pieces of broken china, and the first violets of spring. She was a tidal wave that gathered to itself the whole ocean of childhood and strode inland like a mother, full-skirted and towering, to cast her watery brood on a friendly and unpeopled shore. There was nothing to hold or to bind her, it was the time of bliss and grace, she took the world by storm.

Though Doubleday tried to entice readers by promising “the excitement of literary discovery,” Crow Field was forgotten within weeks of publication. It took nine years for Boylen to return to print, this time with a new publisher (Random House), but yet another odd young woman as her heroine.

In The Marble Orchard, Lovey Claypoole, who was blinded by an explosion in her father’s workshop as he was tinkering with one of his many impractical inventions, regains the ability to see just before her grandmother’s burial in the cemetery — the marble orchard — atop the hill overlooking her Iowa town. There are echoes of Huckleberry Finn in the hideout Lovey makes for herself in the cemetery and later shares with the town’s renegade, Robber Jim, and a climactic flood to bring the town together at the end.

Boylen was a little more successful in attracting readers this time around. The New York Times book editor, Orville Prescott, confessed that he only read the book because it was pressed on him by his daughter. “I had to find out for myself about this strange novel which some people liked so much and some people disliked so heartily.”

It didn’t grab him at first: “The opening pages are enough to set one’s teeth on edge because they are so overwritten.” How overwritten? Well, here’s an early sentence:

When the supply of tombstones ran out and new upstart families had set up a rival cemetery on the other side of town, a cemetery whose polished and tinted marbles sparkled like wedding cakes in the sunshine, the First Families of New Hoosic (for such was the town’s inaccurate name), most of them, like mine, played-out, down-at-the-heel, the heel bruised by stones not left unturned in the bumsteered search for Grace, scurried around until they found, living in a tar-paper shack near Arbor Lodge at Nebraska City, an old-timer, a stone cutter who delighted in the prospect of scaring the daylights out of quick and dead alike.

Overwritten? Meandering, certainly, but no longer wrapping itself in the cloak of Thomas Wolfe.

Nevertheless, The Marble Orchard soon won Prescott’s heart. The book was, he cheered, “so original in matter and manner, so startling in its verbal acrobatics and so witty in a raffish and bizarre fashion unlike anything ever printed on paper before that it ought to make Mrs. Boylen famous.” On the other hand, he acknowledged, it might not: “Queerly brilliant books are all too often ignored.” Amen, brother!

The Times’s assigned reviewer, Victor Hass, saw the book as a quirky, corny country comedy: “Mrs. Boylen has recreated a time and a place and a people with wit, strength and an admirable economy of words [did he read the same book as Prescott?].” He then condemned the book to a New York reviewer’s Purgatory: “The result is an excellent regional novel.” These were the days when Willa Cather was still referred to as “a fine regional novelist.”

The best thing about The Marble Orchard is Lovey Claypoole’s voice, as distinctive in its perspective and diction as Mattie Ross’s in Charles Portis’s classic, True Grit. When Robber Jim — who is, in reality still a teenager himself and just a few years older than Lovey — tells her he plans to escape if sent to reformatory school, she despairs:

Misery. The good old-fashioned Number One Dilemma. Even setting aside the peculiar impossibility of it — or being but children, sexy, but children — the horned dilemma lowered at us. It often happens that two people who cannot be with each other cannot be without each other. But they have to, anyway, one thing or the other. And not pine away and die of it, either, nor lace it up in a suicide pact. Why not? Because it’s out of fashion, that’s why, and when a thing is out of fashion and has no style, you’ve lost the hang of it and don’t know how to do it anymore. But these are deep waters and God knows Lovey [Lovey often refers to herself in the third person] and her persnickety Robber were not in them. Just water-bugging over the surface, for the nonce.

The Marble Orchard sold slightly less poorly than Crow Field, but it did at least earn Boylen a Guggenheim Fellowship. Even with that, though, she struggled to progress on her third book. “I’m off to a party at the drop of a hat,” she told one interviewer. Still, she managed to return to print after five years — and with the same publisher — with A Moveable Feast. Although A Moveable Feast was a fresh title at the time, its use three years later for Ernest Hemingway’s bestselling posthumous memoir of Paris in the 1920s helped guarantee its disappearance.

A Moveable Feast (1961) is an Edward Gorey-esque take on Margaret Sidney’s Five Little Peppers books. In the opening chapter, we are introduced to the five Mortrude children, who attain a gruesome bit of early fame when their parents are both killed in a tractor accident that has to be read to be believed. Orphaned and penniless, they are rescued and raised through the collective generosity of their hometown of Clorinda. Or at least, that’s what their guardian and the book’s narrator, Will Calhoun, would have everyone believe.

Uncle Will has hopes for the five Mortrudes as he attempts to raise them (Chapter Two, “How They Grew”) and then, years later, when four of them (Little Od having died trying to fly from the roof of their house) return to Clorinda (Chapter Three, “Why They Grew”). Located just down the road from the Claypoole’s New Hoosic, Clorinda aspires to be a version of Lake Wobegon, a town where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

Instead, as the four big Mortrudes demonstrate, reality comes closer to William Carlos Williams’ vision than Garrison Keillor’s. These pure products of Clorinda go crazy, each in his or her own way. Like a remarkable number of Midwestern boys, Farnham heads straight for the coast and becomes a hard-drinking, far-traveling, tattooed sailor. Gidley rises high in academia but proves obsessed with minutiae. Jessica becomes a great beauty of Broadway who needs a third of a fifth to get through an evening.

And Eleanor becomes, perhaps, a proxy for Boylen herself. “Eleanor has still to learn that the shortest distance between a subject and a predicate is the simple declarative sentence,” Calhoun observes after reading an “unfairy tale” she sends him. In fact, as the Mortrude’s return to Clorinda approaches, he begins to see that his reality and theirs have been on separate planes for a long time: “Buffaloed. They had me buffaloed; from the very start, and my fear of the Reunion comes on apace.”

Several reviewers described A Moveable Feast as a Grand Guignol comedy set in a cornfield, but I think they missed what’s really going on in the book. It’s true that Boylen fills her pages with extravagant declarations and exuberant eccentrics. Like The Marble Orchard, it’s a book that would appeal to fans of Gorey, Charles Addams, and Lemony Snicket. But Boylen’s Midwest gothic has just as much in common with Flannery O’Connor’s Southern gothic: beneath its surface of the odd and the extreme runs a bedrock of moral granite. For Boylen, the real freaks are the ones struggling the most to maintain a facade of normality.

Margaret Boylen was just a year or two too early for the wave of black humor that became one of the high points in 1960s American fiction. And her chances of establishing a place alongside Bruce Jay Friedman, J. P. Donleavy, and Joseph Heller may also have been undermined by health problems. She died of a heart attack in 1967 at the age of 46. Her work has never been reissued.

The Room Opposite by F.M. Mayor (1935)

Cover of the Solar Press edition of The Room Opposite and Other Tales by F. M. Mayor.

This is a guest post by the founder of Solar Press.

By rights, F.M. Mayor should be one of England’s most beloved novelists. The Rector’s Daughter was a bestseller upon its initial release and her other books were moderate successes. Virginia Woolf and John Masefield admired her work, Bertrand Russell was a friend, and her one and only short story collection for adults — released posthumously in 1935 — received a glowing endorsement from M.R. James, arguably the world’s greatest writer of ghost stories.

And yet, F.M. Mayor is not a household name. There have been no films made of her books, no BBC miniseries. Though everyone who reads her work seems instantly to become a fan and evangelist, she never seems to break through into the mainstream. Her relatively recent critical reappraisal, primarily within academic circles interested in early 20th century women writers, seems to be the closest Mayor has come to a mainstream breakthrough since the original publication of The Rector’s Daughter in 1924.

Despite many attempts over the years — from Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press to the Penguin Modern Classics series, Virago, and, most recently, the always wonderful Persephone Books — Mayor’s work seems destined for obscurity.

And none of Mayor’s work has proved more obscure than her final (posthumous) release: The Room Opposite & Other Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

There is little information available online about the collection, beyond a handful of blog posts and M.R. James’ endorsement of the work — notable as M.R. James, a noted reactionary and literary traditionalist, rarely praised (more often, he openly criticised) contemporary literature. Like many others, James’ endorsement of a work was enough to intrigue me; unlike most others, I became so fixated on the work that I wasn’t deterred by its unavailability and instead sought the work out at the British Library.

When I finally read the collection, James’ praise made complete sense. Not only are Mayor’s short stories a masterclass in the form, but, as has been noted by others, there is a definite conservative, almost reactionary, streak within Mayor’s work that James would certainly have appreciated.

Though Mayor associated socially with notable feminists, she herself does not seem to have identified as a feminist — much of her association with feminists seems to have stemmed from her status as a spinster. But, while many of her friends and associates were spinsters by choice, Mayor was a spinster through tragedy.

As is reflected in her work, Mayor was a romantic. She viewed love as something spiritual, sublime, superhuman, supernatural — variously with the power to revive or destroy those who fall under its spell. When her fiancé, Ernest Shepherd, far away in India, died suddenly in 1903, she was devastated — receiving word of his death by mail as she was closing down her life in England and preparing to join him.

Already sickly, for Mayor the loss was a blow from which she never recovered. After Shepherd’s death, she moved in with her sister and lived her remaining years quietly, splitting her time between writing and local charitable work. There is no record of her ever having another romantic relationship, and the residues of Ernest’s death are clearly visible in her writing — most notably in her story “The Unquiet Grave,” the story of a lover who loses his betrothed while trapped miles away, unable to visit her; and “Le Spectre de la Rose,” in which a woman is haunted by a man who is the image of perfection, immortal, distant, never ageing, and unattainable; her devotion to him gradually destroys her.

As noted, Mayor’s stories have a reactionary streak, often showing a clear distrust of “progress” in the political sense. In her stories, family and tradition are valued for their own sake; folk knowledge is respected and folk traditions are considered a logical extension of this knowledge. By contrast, social progressives, atheists, reformists, and rationalists are (at best) misguided utopians. There is never any contempt for these individuals — Mayor’s work is too inherently compassionate for that — but there is a fear that, in man’s rush to modernise himself and his society, his soul may be in danger. While this is most explicit in “Mother And Daughter” — the closest any of the short stories comes to open polemic — it’s a constant theme throughout.

Despite this, Mayor’s reactionary streak, much like M.R. James’, could hardly be labelled a one-note ‘of the time’ Christian conservatism. This same collection features stories where those fighting against tradition and society for a more spiritual kind of true love, those who murder righteously to protect or avenge, and those in the country still clinging to their ancient witchery and occult practices are presented at least compassionately, and frequently heroically.

Mayor’s morality is less obviously political than it’s often presented, more self-directed, spiritual, almost pagan—in contrast to her publicly expressed Anglican religious sensibilities. It’s hard to pin her down as having any worldview in particular, beyond being distrustful of the rapid, radical social change happening all around her, and an innate belief in the Chesterton’s Fence idea of tradition.

Despite its reputation and M.R. James’ endorsement, The Room Opposite is not, as it is frequently discussed, just another hard-to-find volume of Edwardian ghost stories. In fact, only around half of the sixteen stories are tales of ghosts or the macabre and the mysterious. The other eight are powerful, emotionally resonant dramatic pieces. Like many posthumous collections, The Room Opposite & Other Tales collects stories written across a period of Mayor’s life, covers various settings and genres, and often serves as a way to display the author’s own conflicted attitudes toward various elements of the world around her.

One of the more harrowing examples of this is “A Season At the Sceptre,” a highlight of the collection. It’s a story of sexual impropriety, harassment, and cruelty that takes place within an acting troupe. In it, a fast and loose modernity destroys innocence through the clash of world-weary city starlets and a naive aspiring actress from the country. The results are devastating. Reading letters Flora Mayor wrote while working as an actress herself, it becomes obvious that this particular tale was almost certainly inspired by her own experiences, first in Hastings (“Conversation in the dressing room is not inspiring … it really does seem to me rather immoral in places, and the tone is low throughout”) and later at the Lyric Theatre in London (“There is a great deal more pawing and squeezing from the managers than one is used to”).

Another dramatic highlight is “Christmas Night at Almira”, a beautifully written yet heartbreaking rumination on the cycles of life, from the freshness of youth, through to the decay of old age. It’s staggeringly honest about it all, and contains some truly haunting passages — not least during its climax, in which the story’s carefree icon of youth is brutally confronted with that ultimate endpoint of elderly decline: death.

As for the pulp macabre, while those tales tend to be rather more hit or miss, they do most clearly show Mayor’s development as a writer. This is most visible when looking at the stories which bookend the collection.

The title and opening story, “The Room Opposite,” while far from bad, is one of the collection’s weaker offerings. A relatively run of the mill, traditional mystery piece which does little to stand out. Though fun, it’s unremarkable. By contrast, the final story in the collection, “Le Spectre De La Rose,” is a masterpiece. Combining the “weird” and the Gothic with a more romantic, emotional, female-centric theming, rare for stories of this type — the result is something, which, while calling to mind no mythology in particular, feels distinctly mythological; it has an air of Wilde to it, without ever feeling like a riff or pastiche.

Other highlights of the macabre include the gloriously gothic “The Dead Lady,” and the almost cosmic horror “There Shall Be Light at Thy Death'” Both stories which I will highlight but not describe, to protect the impact of reading them.

And now, you can finally read them.

Inspired by what we’ve now come to believe is F.M. Mayor’s true masterpiece — and our desire to reprint other “lost”, scarce, and out of print books — we established our independent publisher, Solar Press, in early 2023.

We released this book, our first book, on April 5th of this year and we are extremely proud of the achievement.

This is the first reprint of the work since its original publication in 1935 — for the first time since 1935, you no longer have to pay for a rare collectable first edition (averaging £800 – £1500), or take a trek out to London to visit The British Library’s reading rooms.

Mayor is one of the unsung literary greats, and we’re thrilled to finally make such a wonderful collection accessible to a new generation of readers.

Solar Press is an independent publisher based in Bath, UK, focused on reprinting lost, out of print, and forgotten classics.

The Room Opposite is available for purchase for £12.00 at www.SolarPressBooks.com.

John Lodwick, a Forgotten Novelist: Covers and Reviews

John Lodwick (courtesy of Kim Davis and the New York Society Library).

A look this week at the many novels of John Lodwick, a prolific writer who died at 43 from injuries after an auto accident in 1959. Anthony Burgess once said he started writing with the ambition of being “the next John Lodwick,” given that Lodwick’s mastery of the English language, in Burgess’s estimation, “matches Evelyn Waugh’s.”

John St. John provides a good synopsis of Lodwick’s career in William Heinemann: a Century of Publishing, 1890-1990, his history of the writer’s principal publisher, :

For most of his life he lived violently. He began the war by enrolling in the French Foreign Legion and after being imprisoned on a charge of mutiny and fighting for the Legion in its retreat near Paris he was captured, escaped, and arrested again as a bicycle thief. Eventually he found his way back to England and became a special agent. In all he was imprisoned over a dozen times – all this and much more was recorded in his reminiscences Bid the Soldiers Shoot (1958). The war over, he became involved with smuggling rackets. He had several wives who gave him several children. Latterly he lived in Barcelona, was usually having to write too fast so as to keep his creditors at bay, and there were continual crises interspersed with drinking bouts. In 1959 he died violently in early middle age as the result of a car crash in Spain.

After a failed start as a cadet in the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, Lodwick bummed around Europe and was sleeping in a friend’s car on the Riviera when he decided to join the French Foreign Legion after the outbreak of World War Two. Captured by the Germans, he managed to escape and return to England via Spain, a country he later adopted as his second home.

Lodwick joined the Special Operations Executive, where he had a dramatic career, parachuting eight times into occupied France and twice into Crete, escaping (again) from a German prison camp, and serving as a liaison with resistance groups in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. His commander, however, later described Lodwick as “plausible, well-spoken but unscrupulous…only interested in his own skin and any woman he might admire.”

• Running to Paradise (1943)
Between returning to England and joining the S.O.E., Lodwick managed to write his first novel. It won Dodd, Mead’s award for best war novel, but could just as easily have been considered an autobiography, drawn heavily from Lodwick’s time in France after its fall in 1940. Its central figure, an Englishman by the name of Adrian Dormant, was a fictional alter ego who would appear again in a half-dozen or more of Lodwick’s later books. John Hampson described Dormant as “a consciously unheroic figure, with a prodigious fondness for liquor.”
L. P. Hartley admired Lodwick’s “Elizabethan relish for horrors; down to the last bloody detail he describes them with enormous zest and with a great wealth of literary allusion.” And the book was certainly a departure from the stiff upper lip-ishness of most British first-person accounts of the war published up to then: “We are supposedly democrats. A horse can shit upon the floor, a cow can contain itself, and a staff officer, tarvelling in a private carriage, has usually an equally private water-closet. But the poor bloody private, torn between modesty and necessity, must get out and do it on the sleepers at every halt.”
John Chamberlain’s New York Times review, however, foretold some of the problems that would dog Lodwick’s work: “a first-rate representation of chaos. But the essence of chaos can be reproduced as effectively in ten pages as in 381.”

• Myrmyda: A Novel of the Aegean (1946)
Elizabeth Bowen wrote of the book: “I was interested, from the first page on, not only by the story-telling, but by the spirit behind it — curiously disspasionate, disinfected, and pure, to the point of coldness, of sentiment. This is definitely a novel, not simply reportage.”

• Twenty East of Greenwich, or A Barnum Among the Robespierres
Another adaptation from Lodwick’s wartime experiences, this time about a British officer trapped with a band of Chetniks in Communist-dominated Yugoslavia at the end of the war. It seems to be an odd mix based on one review’s description: “Throat-cutting and torture are the commonplaces of this adventure, yet it is all very gay — cynical and casual, with sprightly back-chat and a constant run of surprises.”

• Peal of Ordnance (1947)
Long before the condition had a name and acronym, Lodwick wrote this satiric portrait of post-traumatic stress disorder. A Royal Engineers sergeant trained in the use of high explosives suffers from amnesia and finds himself applying those skills to manic purpose in peacetime, blowing up, among other things, the Albert Memoirial and a B.B.C. studio. “Mr. Lodwick has managed his fresh and lively story very well, and for all the fun his moral is not lost,” wrote Kate O’Brien in The Spectator.

• Brother Death (1948)
Walter Allen called this a “psychological thriller reduced to absurdity, compounded of equal parts Graham Greene and Hemingway, but concluded dismissively, “I do not know Mr. Lodwick’s earlier novels, but it is only charity to assume they are better than this.” Vernon Fane in The Observer, however, found it chilling: “Not to be recommended to insomniacs.” Michael Moorcock later called it Lodwick’s most original and ambitious thriller, a mix of Greene and Hitchcock.
Brother Death has been reissued by Valancourt.

• Something in the Heart (1948)
Olivia Manning called it an “ephemeral entertainment, but, as such, very entertaining indeed,” though she chastised Lodwick for referring to a husband and wife as “man and superior domestic servant.”

• First Steps Inside the Zoo (1950)
Antonia White may have thought she was finishing off the book with her review, but any lover of oddball novels couldn’t help but be intrigued by her assessment:

One of those rather tiresome books about crooks, perverts, nymphomaniacs and sadistic millionaires which set out to be desparately tough and cynical but frequently trip up into embarassing sentimentality. At any moment the author is apt to become almost spinsterishly coy as when, having taken a medically realistic line about all physical functions, he suddenly referes archly to a kitten’s penny-spending tray.’ Nevertheless Mr. Lodwick can be amusing, he can create an atmosphere, he can describe odd and louche characters and he can tell a story. If some shock treatment could deprive him of all memory of Hemingway, Norman Douglas and early Huxley, he might become something on his own.

• Stamp Me Mortal (1950)
Marghanita Laski felt that Lodwick undermined himself in this story about a failed romance between an English widower and a younger French woman: “As though to disguise his extremely serious intention, the author punctuates the narrative with his own form of humour; at its best this is bitter and stimulating, at its worst it is vulgar and facetious.”

• Love Bade Me Welcome (152)
L. A. G. Strong (himself now a forgotten novelist) was quite impressed, called it Lodwick’s best book to date: “It is more mature, more economical, surer in movement and purpose and, form the technical point of view, quite dazzling.” Strong felt that the only thing that kept Lodwick from becoming a great writer was “the compulsion of a major occasion” — something that would call “for that simplicity of response which could unify his great gifts.”

• Somewhere a Voice is Calling (1953)
Several considered this Lodwick’s best book. In her reader’s report for Heinemann, Rebecca West wrote:

This man is a distressing creature. He upset me when he came here, because he was so like one of my traitors: not that I suspect him of any treachery, it is the abstract treachery to candour, the mere doing of things furtively and against the common understanding of the world, which covers people with a Graham Greene mould. If you get rid of candour you disorient people, they go off to the wrong point of the compass with an air of infinite cunning and superiority to the people who are outside the frame, and it all means nothing…. The queer thing about this book is that it is spiritually homosexual…. He is the spinsterish female who wants a big he-man mate who rapes the other girls right and left and drinks everyone else under the table. She adores this mate, and hates the other girls who get raped, and goes and settles things with the people who are involved in his drunken scenes.

Yet she also summed up the book by writing, “How much more interesting than nearly all his contemporaries. How beautifully suppled his writing. He folds a sentence round a fact or a thought as the girl in the shop ties a scarf round your neck and you can’t do it at home in the same way, not ever.”

In a reverse of his previous judgment about Lodwick’s work, Walter Allen wrote that the book “has given me more immediate pleasure than any new English novel I have read for several months.” In particular, he enjoyed Lodwick’s extravagance of language: “His is not afraid of lyricism or even of the purple patch; and how pleasant this is when so many novelists handle their typewriters with the caution usually reserved for tommy-guns and dare nothing more than the short sharp burst. Mr. Lodwick uses words as though he loves them.”

• The Butterfly Net (1954)
Angus Wilson appreciated the book’s “deserved eulogy of Mr. Curtis Brown” but not Lodwick’s views on the Society of Authors. He clearly identified the book as “a sort of roman a clef that was sort of a cipher for the reader to crack. Kingsley Amis enjoyed the book more, though he felt it was “no more than a clothes-line on which are hung successions of incredible garrulities about literary fiddling and deviling, sins of various dimensions, Stendhal, the heating arrangements in hell, and kindred matters.” He did spot a key parallel between Lodwick and his protagonist (Adrian Dormant again): “Dormant never writes more than the one draft; Mr. Lodwick, one suspects, has pursued the same policy here.”
In the book, Lodwick describes an incident that he was involved in at Heinemann’s offices at 99 Great Russell Street:

On his last visit to his publisher, about eighteen months previously. Dormant had arrived carrying an unwrapped bottle ofwhisky. Bound, eventually, for a party, he had just purchased this bottle at a vintner’s, three doors away. So frigid, so comminatory had been the stares of the ladies in charge of the reception desk at that epoch, that Dormant had not dared to proceed upstairs with alcohol in his hands. He had concealed his bottle in the’interior of the grandfather clock. On leaving the building, he had forgotten to retrieve it, and when about three hours later, he had been smitten with a vague consciousness that something was missing, had not considered it wise to return and retrieve his property. Dormant now opened the grandfather clock, but only dust and the great pendant bollocks of the mechanism were to be seen.

Though Lodwick was vocal in his complaints about how Heinemann treated him, particularly about their reluctance to be overly generous with advances, the publisher showed remarkable loyalty despite his foibles. James Michie recalled that he and fellow editor Roland Gant:

Admired his writing, which we felt was something special, though also remarkably careless. He never became a really important writer, maybe because of so many Spanish wine stains on the manuscript. He possessed overwhelming charm and rascality of the good sort. He once told me that he liked the wicked gleam in my spectacles.

• The Starless Night (1955)
A sequel to Somewhere a Voice is Calling, Julian Symons called it his best book, though he also found “something unsatisfactory in Lodwick’s writing, a sense of chaos and incompleteness, a certain contempt for the medium.”
Walter Allen later wrote of the two novels:

[Lodwick’s] character Desmond Thornton, the hero of the two related novels, Somewhere a Voice Is Calling (1953) and The Starless Night (1955), which seem to me to show Lodwick at his best, says of himself, “I was a stupid little boy, and I had just two gears: the tough and sentimental.” Lodwick had the same two gears, but also an extraordinarily sensitive understanding of the tough, of men like Thornton, a minor consular official in Spain who is always in trouble because violent action is his only means of expression. Thornton is a former Commando, and he emerges as a striking representation of a type common to all classes and cultural levels, the self-imprisoned man who can resolve the problems that beset him only through violence, the man for whom war is the ideal condition because in war his normally anti-social behaviour receives social sanction.

He writes with great panache, afraid neither of lyricism nor of the purple passage. His use of metaphor is especially skilful, and he uses it particularly to describe and reveal his characters and their behaviour, thereby opening them up, enlarging them, giving them at times something like universality. The final effect of these novels of action, mannered, sophisti- cated, lyrical as they are, is elegiac.

John Davenport was exuberant in his praise of The Starless Night: “What a pleasure to have to ride on a dark horse! Mr. John Lodwick is one of the few true craftsmen writing in English. He is so very civilised, his dialogue and backgrounds are so very good, that he is always a joy to read…. All his sensibility goes into action, and who cannot find that a relief?”

• Contagion in This World (1956)
A timely story: plague and quarantine in Cadiz. Vernon Fane found it “His best novel for some time, and his best is very good indeed, the characterisation firm, the dialogue crisp, the sense of place meticulous.” But he also noted what was perhaps Lodwick’s fatal flaw as a writer: “There is a sort of Balzacian impatience about him, as though he were already itching to go on with the next novel.” One could comment that Balzac’s is a fine brand of impatience, but one has to acknowledge that it led the book to fall short of Camus’s account of a similar situation in The Plague. But Lodwick still had his supporters, including Mervyn Jones, who urged in the Blackpool Tribune, “Don’t put down that pen, Mr. Lodwick!”

• Equator (1957)
Set on an island in a lake in Central Africa held by a Spanish madman and fought over by the British, French and Belgians. Pamela Hansford Johnson’s review deserved a flashing “Spoiler Alert” sign: “This seems to me the warmest and most magnanimous novel Mr. Lodwick has written, but I could wish the tone of his satire were less uneasy. Just as he is successfully inducing us to laugh the other side of our faces, he wrecks the mood by having his hero eaten by a crocodile.”

• Bid the Soldiers Shoot (1958)
In his last book published before his death, Lodwick revisits his war experiences again without the pretense of fiction. V. S. Naipaul called it, “First-class entertainment, packed with incident and with a cast of hundreds.” H. D. Ziman, writing in the Daily Telegraph, noted that there had already been a fair number of books written about the exploits of the S. O. E. and various resistance movements, but that, “What is unusual about Mr. Lodwick’s account is the sheet zest, the frankness about misjudgments and blunders, the emphasis on the comice rather than the tragic element.” “Yet,” Ziman added, “again and again something occurs … which reveals … not merely a resourceful tough-neck, but a man of profound feeling.”

• The Asparagus Trench (1960)
Jeremy Brook, in his Observer review, wrote that “Had Lodwick lived to complete the book there can be little doubt that it would have been one of the most distinguished autobiographies to have been published in many years. But the fragment we have can stand alone: perfect in form, tantalisingly allusive, full of youth’s irrecoverable imaginative vitality, and as passionately concerned with what lies below the surface of life as it is witty about the surface itself.” Hugh Siriol-Jones was similarly enthusiastic: “There is no book better for a cold winter evening,” he wrote in The Tatler and Bystander. “This brief, gay and touching book is both bentle and sharp-edged and takes its athor through his childhood and early days at school (a strange and wholly separate world, full of weird projects and maquis activity, wonderfully conveyed).”

• The Moon Through a Dusty Window (1960)
This posthumous novel is narrated by a character one can imagine as one of Lodwick’s favorite drinking buddies:

My friend, I come from treaty ports, from enclaves, from halfa dozen small and accommodating states, including our delightful little neighbour, Andorra, which lies like a thin-shelled almond between the powerful nutcracker jaws of France and Spain. I come from every airfield where the police are slack, and from every quay where there is a small and unsupervised crane.

In the Guardian, Anne Duchene dismissed the book as “roccoco rigmarole about various English outcasts … incapable of anything but corrosive lucidity in conversation.”

With the exception of a breezy history of the S.O.E. and the Valancourt reissue of Brother Death, Lodwick’s books have been out of print for decades. As Geoffrey Elliott writes in his 2017 biography, A Forgotten Man: The Life and Death of John Lodwick, there has been little interest in revisiting Lodwick’s work:

Someone asked me, out of the blue, why I thought John Lodwick was ‘important.’ Taking the word as most people understand it he probably wasn’t.

The answer is simple: because he was such an interesting character, cut from a very different cloth.

When Elliott’s biography was published, D. J. Taylor wrote in The Spectator,

One fail-safe test of a writer’s reputation is to see how many times his or her books get taken out of the London Library. Here, alas, John Lodwick scores particularly badly. If The Butterfly Net (“filled with a lot of booksy talk and worldly philosophising,” Angus Wilson pronounced in 1954) has run to all of five borrowers in the last five years, then The Starless Night (1955) seems not to have left the shelves since 1991. All this suggests that the title of Geoffrey Elliott’s valiant attempt to reconstruct Lodwick’s lost, vagrant and sometimes violent life is painfully accurate.

Based on the above survey of Lodwick’s work and the assessments of contemporary reviewers, however, I can’t help but feel that John Lodwick’s work deserves a second look.

April 23, from 365 Days (1936)

“Fatal Motor Accident in Bois de Boulogne”

Damocles is drunk. He has imbibed a stock of whisky, a warehouse of gin and a dockyard of champagne. Before slumping over the steering-wheel, he declares that the negro hostess of the joint he is leaving is his true and only mother; the other one, the blood relative, no longer counts at all.

Damocles drives on, now jerking upright, now falling asleep. The car lurches perilously: decidedly, it would be wiser to stop. Damocles abandons his car in the heart of the Bois and sets off on foot. He talks. His voice and his words are suspended in his delirium. He walks. He talks. The trees, the planets, the earth, the sky, all seem simple to him. He fears nothing, neither the bludgeon of the police nor the assassin’s knife.

Damocles returns to the civilized parts of town. His former wrath revives. He would like to knock down a house with his fist. “All — all are heartless. They sleep. They make babies. They do not know the horror of it all.” Further on, before a butcher shop, he emits atrocious yells. In a public park, he sees a drunk asleep on a bench. Damocles thinks himself an angel or in a dream.

At dawn, Damocles rings the bell of the apartment house where he lives with his mother. In a corner of the vestibule, weeping, his mother stands in her nightgown. The concierge, attired in her petticoat, is repeating: “Your son was killed tonight in a motor accident. They have just telephoned.”

Damocles feels himself all over and discovers that he has lost his arms and legs. Now he understands why it seemed to him that night for the first time, that he had come face to face with himself.

— Michel Leiris

365 Days is an anthology of flash fiction published decades before the form had a name. American novelist Kay Boyle and her then-husband Laurence Vail were in Austria at the start of 1934 — a year, as they wrote in the preface, “that was to be characterized by almost universal unrest, by civil war, revolution, by strikes and unemployment figures reaching monstrous proportions.” They decided to “compile a record in fiction form not only of that year’s nationally or internationally important events but as well of the ordinary individual’s life.”

They collected American, English, French, German, Austrian, and Italian newspapers, along with some from as far away as Australia and Singapore. From these they selected stories they thought representative of the year’s events, movements, and attitudes. With the help of their friend Nina Conarain, an Englishwoman who later published dozens of Mills & Boon romances as Elizabeth Hoy, they wrote or contacted fellow writers and asked they to write 300-word pieces, usually imaginative, based on these stories.

Some ignored these requests. Some just wrote one or two. William Saroyan sent in an entire year’s worth of material. Boyle, Vail, and Conarain knew they would have to fill in any gaps with their own pieces, but by the time submissions stopped flowing in, it was obvious that there were well over 100 days’ worth of material still to be written. Vail contributed some, including some of the most imaginative ones, but he began to lose interest in the project as his interest in his new lover, the heiress and art collector Peggy Guggenheim, began to heat up. In the end, it was Boyle, pregnant with her third child, who wrote over a quarter of the book’s contents, demonstrating exceptional versatility in her choice of subjects and styles.

Halfway through the year, much of the edited material for the book was destroyed when a pro-Nazi group set fire to the offices of an Austrian anti-Nazi newspaper, Tyrolia, and a burning package was tossed into the beer garden of Boyle and Vail’s hotel room and exploded. Less than two weeks later, Boyle gave birth to their daughter Katherine.

When the book was finally published in 1936, reviewers seemed to delight in dismissing the project as a novelty and to note how few of the stories met their critical standards. Now, however, it is a fascinating document featuring an impressive range of contributors. Raymond Queneau’s two days are his first work to be translated into English. James T. Farrell and Henry Miller provided pieces, as did now less well-known writers as Bessie Breuer, Grace Flandrau, Arthur Calder-Marshall, William March, Evelyn Scott, and Malachi Whitaker. The overall tone is empathetic, anti-fascist, activist, and angry, yet it rarely descends into propaganda. Indeed, one wishes that a collection of contemporary writers would take on a similar project for one of our own tumultuous years.

I have been reading my way through 365 Days a day at a time and will be posting other pieces from it through the rest of this year.

365 Years, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936
London: Jonathan Cape, 1936

The Forgotten Short Fiction of Edward Thomas

This is a guest post by Irfan Shah

It started, of course, with his poetry, predictably, with his best-known work, “Adlestrop”, and inevitably, with the famous, final lines that spell-bind like few others:

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

And this, in common with so many other people, is how I found Edward Thomas, revered as a poet but almost completely forgotten as a writer of fiction.

* * *

Edward Thomas was born in Lambeth, London in 1878 and studied history at Oxford. His first book, The Woodland Life, a collection of essays on the country, was published in 1896. Thomas subsequently embarked on a career as a prolific writer whose work ranged from biography to journalism, travel writing, fiction and literary criticism, although the strain of compromising his artistic ambitions to earn enough to support a family occasionally created periods of depression. His sense of being overwhelmed by a slurry of “hack work” was recognised by his friend the poet Robert Frost, who suggested in 1913 that Thomas devote himself to poetry, or as Frost himself put it, “I dragged him out from under the heap of his own work in prose he was buried alive under.” The poems he then wrote between 1914 and 1917 would secure his enduring reputation as one of Britain’s best-loved writers.

It was a love of Edward Thomas’ poems that set me off one day on an afternoon’s quest for more of his work. A meandering online search – the digital equivalent of beachcombing – took me to the Internet Archive, which brought up several books and led to a first twist of fate. For some reason, I was presented with a volume titled Cloud Castle and Other Papers, which turned out to contain not poetry but short stories. Two other books of short fiction were listed, Rest and Unrest and Light and Twilight. I had no idea Thomas had written books of short fiction, and from this brief list of little-known titles, Cloud Castle must have been the least-known of them all, having been published posthumously and containing an unfinished foreword by another neglected writer, W. H. Hudson, who himself died before its publication. Cloud Castle and Other Papers is not only overlooked but a death-shadowed work.

A second twist of fate: I often flick through a collection and pick a story at random. Had I done so this time and picked one of perhaps half a dozen other tales in that volume, I might well have given up on the book and never been the wiser. As it was, I started from the beginning and read the title story, “Cloud Castle.” By the end of the first sentence, I knew I had stumbled upon something special:

All the life of the summer day became silent after sundown; the earth was dark and very still as with a great thought; the sky was as a pale window through which men and angels looked at one another without a word.

In the story, a knight riding homewards with a friend describes a daydream in which he had been climbing a precipice towards a castle,

… when I began to climb again the moon was behind me and very low, and all the cliff was bathed in light and I seemed to hang like a carven imp on a sublime cathedral wall among the incense.

Eventually reaching an abandoned castle, he enters one particular chamber to find … well, the brief and strange encounter that occurs there is the heart of story and I’ll leave it for you to discover. What does or doesn’t, might yet, or could never have happened, remains oblique — hauntingly rather than frustratingly so.

I was startled. This wasn’t the Edward Thomas, the nature and the war poet, I had been expecting. In fact, the dream-logic of the story put me in mind of Jorge Luis Borges or something from the world of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. Going through more of the stories, I was once again wrong-footed as I came across, “Mike,” a touching ode to a fondly-remembered dog, which brought me very much back to the realm of the everyday.

. . . his tail when he trotted along curled over his back and made children laugh aloud; but when he was thinking about the chase it hung in a horizontal bow; when stealing away or in full cry it was held slightly lower and no longer bent, and it flowed finely into the curves of his great speed.

Having read Cloud Castle and Other Papers, I set aside the poetry and began to explore Thomas’ other collections of short fiction. There I found the expected pen-portraits of nature as well as imagined folktales, magic realism and slivers of lightly concealed autobiography — exquisite miniatures nestled amongst some, admittedly, frustrating and overworked thickets that might have been cut back by the author’s later poetic rigour. The experience of reading Thomas’ fiction was revelatory.

Edward Thomas’ prose, when it has been remembered at all, is often thought of as something from which he escaped when he gave himself to poetry in the last years of his short life. Things are changing with his travel books (often describing his journeys on foot through the countryside of Southern England), which are being re-discovered by a new generation of nature-writers. His short fiction, on the other hand, remains uncelebrated even though Thomas himself felt warmly towards it.

One reason might be the incredible inconsistency of the work. Some stories feel like unfinished drafts; others contain a scattering of minor details that, cumulatively, jar. In “Mothers and Sons,” a man on a train, inexplicably wearing a fez, is described by a narrator whose identity remains irritatingly rather than enigmatically, unclear; in “Hawthornden,” a deftly-handled fatality is ruined with the clunk of a redundant “He was dead.” Other stories stop abruptly, unfinished rather than open-ended. Some stories are overwrought, some empty. And yet, despite this, if you look through Thomas’ books of short fiction, you will find treasures.

Having unearthed this collection of treasures, I decided to share it with others. I began by creating e-books of Rest and Unrest and Cloud Castle and Other Papers – designing covers and writing introductions. I wanted desperately to do what publishers such as Persephone and Boiler House Press were doing — curating, championing — and was just as eager not to fall into the category of the print on demand publishers specializing in literary grave-robbing, pillaging the Internet Archive and other sources and selling public domain titles at exorbitant prices with no added value. Having released the two titles, I realised I wanted to do something else: to distil what I felt to be the best of Thomas’ short fiction into a collection. This is how I came to produce Where Lay My Homeward Path.

* * *

Among the ten pieces in the collection, there are to be found, as might be expected from Thomas, darkly poetic evocations of the natural world. His images of flora and fauna, of gold agrimony, pilewort and brooklime, flow through these stories, like the ships in John Masefield’s “Cargoes.” Tales such as “A Man of the Woods” and, more humorously, “Seven Tramps: A Study in Brown” are calloused, with fists plunged into the soil of Thomas’ South Country or guiding us “through thickets of perpendicular and stiff and bristling stems, through brier and thorn and bramble in the double hedges.”

In “Mike,” a narrator’s reminiscences of his dog, are cruel, loving, clear-eyed and elegiac: “He forgave me so readily that it took some time for me to forgive myself.” “Milking” is brief, hard, unsparing:

He stood there a moment – a tall, crooked man, with ever-sparkling eyes in a nubbly and bony head, worn down by sun and toil and calamity to nothing but a stone, hollowed and grey, to which his short black hair clung like moss.

And as well as “Cloud Castle,” there are other moments of melancholic whimsy — “Snow and Sand,” a ghost story perhaps, reveals its dream-like essence wrapped in a filigree of detail: “The rushy margin is strewn with delicate bones and feathers among the snowflakes.”

I tried to take the internal rhythms and tones of each story and combine them to create a larger, interconnected work, almost as if composing music. The penultimate piece in the collection is also the longest, and the final story, the shortest. There is a crescendo and a brief finale. The book ends with “The Stile,” which contains a single sentence imbued with a pathos provided by hindsight: “I am something which no fortune can touch, whether I be soon to die or long years away” “The Stile” was first published in Light and Twilight in 1911. In 1915, Thomas enlisted in the Army and was posted to France in January 1917. On 9 April, he was killed at the battle of Arras.

* * *

It has to be said that these stories, so ripe for rediscovery, can all be found for free at sites like the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg — you need only look for the books Rest and Unrest, Light and Twilight, and Cloud Castle and Other Papers. I press on with my own little book regardless, with a new cover design and a specially-written introduction, and we will see what happens. And if it should fail, it will be a heroic failure and maybe one day in the future, a site on neglected publishers will tell the story!

A word about W. H. Hudson. – another neglected writer

The original introduction to Cloud Castle and Other Papers was meant to have been by William Henry Hudson, an Englishman born in Argentina and a great friend of Thomas’. Hudson was himself an author and naturalist whose own writing helped foster the ‘back-to-nature’ movement of the 1920’s and 30’s. Although relatively little-known today, his influence persists. He wrote many books that ranged from natural history (British Birds) to dystopian science-fiction (A Crystal Age). His best-known novel, Green Mansions (1904), was often reprinted and made into a Hollywood film starring Audrey Hepburn in 1959. More recently, his novel A Shepherd’s Life (1910) was an inspiration for James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life (2015).

Hudson began work on the introduction to Cloud Castle and Other Papers just a few days before his death in August 1922. A fragment found subsequently among his papers was included in the Duckworth & Co. publication of Cloud Castle as a Foreword (and now also included in Where Lay My Homeward Path).

Irfan Shah is a writer and researcher. You can follow the fortunes of Where Lay My Homeward Path at www.openspacebooks.co.uk and on Twitter at @OpenSpaceBooks.

Central Stores, by Vicki Baum (1940)

“One must never place a loaded gun on the stage if it isn’t going to go off,” Anton Chekhov is said to have told aspiring playwrights. In Central Stores, Vicki Baum’s novel, not one but two pistols are introduced in early chapters. Any reader who’s ever heard about Chekhov’s gun will know to expect something explosive to come: a shooting, a robbery, a suicide, perhaps. By the time Der große Ausverkauf, the German original of Central Stores, was published in 1937, Baum had written 19 books in as many years, a production rate she kept up for another 20 years, amassing nearly 50 novels to her name.

Few writers can be this prolific without resorting to a few formulaic tricks, usually in the way of plots and characters. In Baum’s case, her plots tend to be variations on “Ship of Fools,” a warhorse from the Middle Ages that served many 20th bestselling authors (e.g., Arthur Hailey in Airport) well: put a batch of people with conflicting motives in a confined setting and let the inevitable chain reactions take place. This served her very well with her best-known and most successful novel, Grand Hotel (1929). So well, in fact, that these plots are usually referred to as “Grand Hotel” stories.

But by Central Stores, its limitations were becoming evident. Central Stores is a large Macys-like department store in midtown Manhattan, with twelve floors of everything from fish to furs. In fact, the first character in the book wafts into the china department with the smell of the fish on sale that day in the grocery department.

She was one of those customers who are always on the search for something cheaper. Shop-soiled blouses, leaky coffeepots, discoloured leather bags, clearance sales of imitation silk stockings — that is the sort of thing they go after. They are the wives of underpaid clerks, those worried and fretful women who never get anything which is worth the price they pay for it.

In Baum’s scheme, this woman is a secondary character. Though she will reappear to help frame the story, she is really just a device. Therefore, Baum has no need to tell us any more about her.

We can easily tell Baum’s primary characters. They all have names, ages, hair colors, physical assets or impediments, mannerisms. And like the pistols, if Baum mentions any of these, it’s a given they will serve some function in the course of the book. Mr. Philipp, the house detective, is in his sixties, balding, with a drinking problem and a pistol. Which means, we know, that he’s probably going to mess up and get fired and do something desperate. Lillian Smith, one of the models in the store’s haut couture department, is stunningly beautiful but perhaps a bit too slickly gorgeous and wears too much of a cheap perfume. These, too, will be used. Baum is a most utilitarian writer.

This is not to suggest that Central Stores is not an entertaining book. Although we can see her constructing a house of cards in the first two-thirds of the novel, just how it collapses and where the cards fall still comes as a surprise and the narrative’s momentum builds to the point where we keep turning the pages through the climactic chapters. I figured it would take me 4-5 days to read it; I finished it in two.

Several reviewers commented that Central Stores was perfect material for a film, and as I was reading it, I could picture Van Johnson as Eric, the tall window dresser married to Nina, the pretty young saleslady (Teresa Wright or Donna Reed). James Gleason, of course, has to be Mr. Philipp. Lillian Smith might be harder to cast: she needs a blonde, brassy femme fatale type, but not someone like Lana Turner who would become an A-lister. Lizabeth Scott, perhaps?

Central Stores is a bit of a puzzle in Baum’s oeuvre. When I first read about it, I just assumed that it, like most of Baum’s novels that were translated into English, would have been published and sold well in both the U.S. and England. But, in fact, Central Stores has never been published in America. Even its English publisher, Geoffrey Bles, appears not to have put much of a push behind the book, based on the few and small ads I’ve been able to locate. Was the perception of Baum as a German writer a factor? But she was, in fact, an Austrian Jew whose books were banned by the Nazis. It’s hard to tell now, but from what I can see, Central Stores was a natural for American readers and would have been a guaranteed bestseller. Unfortunately, this means that used copies are much scarcer in the U.S. now. Fortunately, the book is also available for reading on the Internet Archive (link).


This is a contribution to Simon Thomas and Karen Langley’s #1940Club, the latest increment of their twice-yearly call for readers to write about books published in a particular year.

Central Stores, by Vicki Baum
London: Geoffrey Bles, 1940

Cressida Lindsay, Bohemian

A year or so ago, I picked up this cute Ballantine paperback copy of No Wonderland from 1967, one of a half-dozen or so contemporary British novels published to exploit America’s fascination with the Beatles, Carnaby Street, and everything gear fab. “A young girl alone in London’s swinging night world,” with a picture of a mophead and his bird sipping from what appears to be a glass of water, and from all appearances very much in love. So one might expect this to be something of a mod rom-com.

Alice is just under 18, secretly loves Elvis (considered very old school by then), and is in London to experience life. She is intrigued by, then attracted to, then fully under the sway of Matthew, just over 19 and quite full of his own worldly-wiseness. Alice moves into his flat. Only it’s not entirely his flat. There is also David, a student, and Al, a somewhat older Jamaican man.

Matthew and Alice is a match made in Soho. Which means that Matthew sometimes has to work the streets as a rent boy while Alice sips endless espressos while wedging herself into crowded tablefuls of loud artists and drama students and people of ambiguous employment. This relationship swirls around with the current for chapter after chapter, with the only episode of real interest being when Al gets beaten up by a group of white fascists protesting against immigrants. At the end, Alice declares to Matthew, “I don’t want to marry anyone but you,” to which Matthew replies, “Don’t let’s get bored, Alice.”

While No Wonderland is not particularly interesting or successful as a novel, it’s scattered with moments of genuine observations. Like how awkward it is for a young man to pretend to enjoy dancing with a stranger while her boyfriend has disappeared, obstensibly in search of a drink, or how exhausting to sit and pretend to be interested in the conversation of people strenuously trying to win an ennui competition. In fact, what struck me most about No Wonderland was how most of this life that Alice seems so eager to experience is tedious and uninspiring.

And yet, there was something that made me want to give Lindsay another try. No John, No (1966), her third novel (No Wonderland was first published in England in 1962), is about another woman, just a bit older than Alice, and her search for love. “This is a novel about what it is like to be poor, rootless, intense, and lesbian, trapped in a desperate bohemian life on the wrong side of Notting Hill,” the book’s dust flap tells us. Well, at least we know not to expect a rom-com.

“At the moment,” Kate tells us, “I’m living with Terry who is a girl like me and I rather love Terry in a way.” Although Terry is in her 30s, Kate is pleased that she’s “not like most lesbians who get broad in the hips when they pass the age of twenty-nine.”

This is from the second paragraph on page one. Two paragraphs later, we read that “Kate as usual is doing nothing, she bites her fingernails and is waiting for me to do everything for her.” So, now this is Terry speaking. A page later, the author tells us that “Kate and Terry shared a flat near the Portobello Road market.” Then we’re back with Kate, then over to Terry, then back to the author, and so on for roughly half the book, until Kate meets Anne and now we get four perspectives.

Telling a story through multiple narrators is nothing new, of course. Changing them from paragraph to paragraph is somewhat more challenging, but it tends to be less so when what the author is trying to do is help the reader see the complexity of the story. Unfortunately, the story in No John, No is actually quite simple: Kate wants to be in love and, if possible, be loved in return, though that is of secondary importance. The switches of narrators is more distracting than revealing, particularly when the characters themselves seem preoccupied with figuring out their own identities.

The one person in the book who seems to see things clearly is Kate’s married friend, Helen. Helen finds Kate’s good-natured muddle-headedness infuriating, not endearing. “Do you want me to be like you, then? Are you worried that I’m different?” Kate asks her. “No, I don’t want you to be like me,” Helen replies, “but I don’t want you to do things without understanding why, and there is a reason, something to do with your past, a psychological reason Kate.”

Cressida Lindsay and her son Simon, 1963.

Helen may have been addressing her author as much as Kate. For Lindsay’s life was a journey full of abrupt changes of direction. Her granddaughter, Tanya Perdikou, reflected on its erratic course in a 2021 article for the Wellcome Collection:

She received little love from either of her parents and reacted by spurning obligation to others, spending many years erratically pursuing her own desires. Her rejection of the traditional role of ‘mother’ was extreme: she moved from home to home, lover to lover, descended into alcoholism, neglected her five children and ended up founding The Old Rectory, a commune in rural Norfolk.

At the time No John, No was published, Lindsay’s fourth child had just been born. Its father was Anthony Blond, who published Lindsay’s second novel, Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces. Blond was quite deliberately pulled by Lindsay into a complicated triangle with her and her lover, Mark Hyatt. Recalling the bohemianism of her grandfather Norman Lindsay, Blond writes that:

She was equally bohemian in outlook and had three children by three different men. When she met me she decided I was to serve as papa no.4. She stalked me with delicacy. Her current lover, papa no. 3, was a gypsy and a poet called Mark Hyatt. He was beautiful…. A sensuous poetic face, tender lips, eyes you could swim in and a faultless nose…. Of course I fell for him.

After sleeping with both Lindsay and Hyatt, Blond bought her the country house she longed for — The Old Rectory — and was dumped by Hyatt for a tall younger man named Atom. Some time later, when Blond was visiting Lindsay and the chidren there, Atom arrived to say that Hyatt had committed suicide after learning that he was about to be left for a woman.

The dramatically different covers of the UK and US editions of Lovers and Fathers.

She married Peter Hammerton in 1968 and had her fifth and last child by him. Her next novel, Lovers and Fathers (1970), is something of a fictional account of how she ended up with five children and at least as many lovers. Lindsay, the American publisher’s blurb tells us, “has always been completely open to love in whatever variety it presented itself, whether casual, Freudian, heterosexual, lesbian, forced, seductive, or literary.” Whether we’re quite sure of what all of those adjectives refer to, we certainly get a healthy sample of the frenetic and eclectic nature of Lindsay’s love life:

For six months I had lived with the children and a few lovers. For a week I had fallen in love with a journalist because his eyebrows hung over his eyes like a moustache, and his mouth was red and he had life so well organised…. Then for weeks I liked sleeping with me…. one evening I fell in love with a tall man who had green eyes….

And then there was Bill, off to Canada the next day, he talked of the forests and pines and he drank beer very quickly…. Also Robin. Sometimes he stayed and he was good to hold, and also to be held by. One day, he said, “I’m glad your Jason affair has burned itself out.”

Then we’re on to Thomas and Gloria and Robin and it becomes like trying to remember faces on the sidewalk from a seat in a fast-moving bus. Around the time of Lovers and Fathers , John Swinfield visited Lindsay at The Old Rectory and filmed a short piece for Anglia Television that is available for viewing (if you’re in the UK) on the BFI Player. It shows a vibrant if chaotic community of writers, artists, and musicians centered around the rough country house, with children wandering on and off camera and talk and music and laughter filling the air.

If Lindsay’s like was full of children and lovers and friends at the time, it was also full of alcohol. What she couldn’t silence with the noise and energy of the people around her she could try to numb with drink. Perhaps a clue to the demons she was struggling with can be found in her second and best novel, Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces (1963).

At least one reviewer joked that the book’s title tells us all we need to know about its plot. But plot is of secondary importance here. “This book makes shocking reading,” the paperback edition’s blurb tells us. Shocking is the wrong adjective, though. Shocks are sudden. They have lingering effects, but they are usually brief, like a bolt of lightning. Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces is like fifteen rounds of being bludgeoned by an exhausted but relentless prizefighter.

When the book opens, ten-year-old Rachel has found a purse with some cash on the street. She takes it home but know better than to tell her mother Lucy about it, for Lucy will just take the money down to the pub to get drunk and probably come home late that night with a man she’d picked up. Much of the world may still be a mystery to Rachel, but she knows that money buys food, which she never gets much of.

Rachel’s father has gone to war. We gather from a few things Lucy says that he was probably taken prisoner in the British Army’s retreat from the German blitzkrieg of May-June 1940, but it’s clear that Lucy has given up hope and Rachel is trapped in a limbo of deprivation and neglect. She has a few other children to play with and together they built a little shelter that becomes a refuge for Rachel, but it’s a rough sort of refuge. Stan, a thuggish boy just turning teen taunts Rachel as a “Lying Jew puss” and attempts to force himself on her.

Lucy’s drinking progesses to the point she staggers home one night in a fit of DTs and her ravings become so loud and violent that the police are called and take her away. Rachel is then sent to what she’s told is a girl’s school but is obviously a reformatory. The attendants, known as rats, feel free to insult, mock, and slap the inmates. “This is not a rest home for young ladies, you know,” one of the rats tells her.

Her situation improves a bit when she is moved to a Catholic convent, though the sisters inflict a form of religious abuse by hounding her with the need to memorize the catechism and prepare herself for conversion. Rachel spends almost four years here, but they pass in a few pages. Then one day, a balding man in a thick overcoat and a grubby shirt shows up to take her away. “Are you Daddy?” she asks. “I never expected such a grown-up daughter. And quite pretty,” he tells her. What follows are the worst three pages in the book.

Though Cressida Lindsay may not have experienced quite the level of abuse and poverty that her character Rachel does, she did have a childhood marked by extreme highs and lows. Her father, the novelist Philip Lindsay, was friends with many celebrities and a lively figure in London creative society, but he had trouble holding onto money and Cressida spent more time with the sisters at her convent school than with her parents. The title Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces may give some indication of the abandonment she may have experienced and explain why she so fervently sought the company of others, seeking a level of contact and commitment that not all of them were willing to give.

After over decade at The Old Rectory, Lindsay and her husband Philip moved into the city of Norwich. She became a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and cared for Philip when he began to suffer from dementia. After her death in 2010, her son Dylan Hyatt discovered the manuscript of a fifth novel, written around the time of her move to Norfolk, and arranged to have it published as an e-book. The Mole and the Mountain is available from Amazon.

Mock Autobiographies for April Fools

Long before Clifford Irving concocted his fake autobiography of recluse millionaire Howard Hughes, mock autobiographies have been a popular vehicle for satire — usually of the sort of people who wrote these books, less frequently (viz. Roy Lewis’s The Evolution Man), of the (real, not mock) author’s contemporaries. I’ve written about a number of these over the years, but I had no idea how broad this seemingly narrow sub-genre was until I started compiling this list, which is less comprehensive than I suspected a few days ago. And so, in no particular order, here is a baker’s dozen of autobiographies (and diaries) that are not — Surprise! — by the people they claim to be.

• My Royal Past (1940, revised 1961)
By Baroness von Bülop, nee Princess Theodora Louise Alexina Ludmilla Sophie von Eckermann-Waldstein. Actually by Cecil Beaton.
Perhaps the ultimate proof of the fact that Cecil Beaton felt his position as preferred photographer to the Court of St. James secure was the fact that not once, but twice, he mocked both his subjects and his own staid style of photographing them in this illustrated memoir of a remote offshoot of the tangle of Saxe-Coburg-Hesse-Hohenzollern-Hapsburg-etc. bloodlines that ruled Europe for too bloody long. Beaton himself dressed up as the Baroness, accompanied by such friends as the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, all dressed up in gowns and bemedalled uniforms.
The Baron and Baroness von Büllop on their honeymoon.
Beaton was so sure of himself, in fact, that he provided his own review blurbs before they were written: e.g., “Here, as Lord Beaconsfield said, is a book that no time should be wasted in reading.” Perhaps to capitalize on his renewed fame for his costume designs for the Broadway musical My Fair Lady, My Royal Past was revised and reissued in 1961, including this time a list of errata, such as . And as one accustomed to paying attention to details, Beaton was sure to include a detailed index with such entries as:
Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s entries in the index to My Royal Past.

• Quail in Aspic (1962)
By Count Charles Korsetz. Actually by Cecil Beaton
Beaton had such fun with My Royal Past that he took another shot at the sub-genre the year after its reissue. Quail in Aspic was an “as told to” autobiography of a Hungarian count who had a knack for being on the side of European noble houses moments before their demise. He manages to remake himself as a proper English gentleman, however, complete with a fine country house and a matching set of prejudices.
Elsa Maxwell as Count Charles Korsetz.
This time around, Beaton recruited his long-time friend, the society hostess Elsa Maxwell, to portray the Count in the photographs (by Beaton, of course) that illustrate the book.

 

• Cyril Pure’s Diary (1981)
By Cyril Pure. Actually by Michael Geare.
Cyril Pure is a man after every bookshop owner’s heart. Of malice, that is. Set up in Chipping Toad’s only bookshop, he dives headlong into the bookselling industry. Although it might be more accurate to say that the UK’s bookselling industry dives headlong upon him, rather like a pack of ravenous vultures. One publisher’s rep, having heard the shop has sold one of their books, leaves Cyril with 100 copies of a sure bestseller, Reminiscences of an Old Crocodile Shikari. The Chipping Toad Poetry Society names him its Vice President, in return for which he has the honor of hosting a reading by the famous Cement poet, Bert Stunge, and providing refreshments. Cyril puzzles over the inner meanings of Stunge’s work:

Tring, tring
Shoestring, heating
Bloating, fourteen
Umpteen, thumping…

Geare teamed up with Michael Corby the following year to write another mock diary, this time of the famed Transylvanian count, who, as it turns out, spent quite a lot of time in Victorian England, attending Balliol and Oxford, exchanging ripostes with Oscar Wilde, meeting Sherlock Holmes, and implicating Van Helsing in the Jack the Ripper murders. It’s earnest fun but more earnest than fun, unfortunately.

 

• Lord Bellinger (1911)
By Lord Bellinger. Actually by Harry Graham.
Although just one generation away from trade, Lord Bellinger has easily adapted to the life of the idle nobility, priding himself on being “naturally disinclined to anything approaching effort.” An early attempt at portraying the type of privileged dimwit parodied in Monty Python’s “Upper-Class Twit of the Year” competition and now occupying numerous junior minister positions in the current Conservative government, Harry Graham ultimately missing his mark by favoring kindness over brutality in his approach.
I wrote about Lord Bellinger back in 2013.

 

• Little Me: the intimate memoirs of that great star of stage, screen, and television, Belle Poitrine (1961)
By Belle Poitrine (see above for the rest). Actually by Patrick Dennis.
Dennis, rocketed to fame and fortune with his novel Auntie Mame and its Broadway and film adaptations, may have had most fun with this account of the successes, failures, and romantic entanglements of a grand dame actress a la Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, etc. Dedicated to her four husbands, including the fourth and shortest-lived (literally), Letch Feeley, the former Pomona gas station attendant who had the misfortune to step onto a yacht with his mistress just moments before it quite unexpectedly exploded. Illustrated with photographs by Cris Alexander.

Like Beaton, Dennis enjoyed this form so much that he followed a few years later with First Lady (1964), the memoirs of Martha Dinwiddie Butterfield, whose husband, George Washington Butterfield, occupied the White House for 30 days in 1909 — most of that time drunk or cavorting with his mistress, Gladys Goldfoil, in one of the spare bedrooms.

 

• I Think I Remember (1927)
By Sir Wickham Woolicomb (“ordinary English snob and gentleman”). Actually by Magdalen King Hall
A celebration of a life lived “when gentlemen were gentleman” and before “all this socialism, etc., made everything cheap and nasty.” As with Lord Bellinger, it’s easiest to simply poke fun at the pompous than to turn parody into an authentic comic creation. As The New York Times‘s reviewer put it, “In parodying the pompous tomes of reminiscences that great personages manage to foist on the publishers and public with little difficulty, Miss King-Hall has taken a step downstairs. It is as if James Joyce, after completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had gone ahead to fashion A Portrait of an Old Man with Senile Dementia.”

There must be something about these spoofs that inspires certain authors. Magdalen King-Hall wrote two others: The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765 (1926), which mocked the pretences and rituals of Georgian England and which she admitted she’d only written to escape the boredom of a summer at the English seaside; and Gay Crusaders (1934), the memoir of an English knight in the Third Crusade, an experience enlivened by liberal amounts of booty and made tiresome by the consistent habit of the French to arrival after all the fighting was done.

 

• Water on the Brain (1933)
By Major Arthur Blenkinsop, formerly of the Boundary Commission in Mendacia. Actually by Compton Mackenzie
Mackenzie, who ran a British intelligence and special operations network in Greece during World War One and was involved in everything from the disastrous Gallipoli campaign to an attempted assassination of Prince Phillip’s father, then King of Greece. Somewhat resentful at his lack of recognition from his higher ups, Mackenzie wrote this account of one particularly inept and dull-witted agent recruited into the service of His Majesty’s Director of Extraordinary Intelligence, MQ99(E).

 

• The Way Up (1972)
By Anaxagoras, Duc de Gramont. Actually by Sanche de Gramont (who later changed his name to Ted Morgan).
The Way Up may have been an attempt to cash in on the success of the first of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series, mock memoirs by Harry Flashman, the villain of Thomas Hughes’s earnest Victorian boy’s novel about Rugby, Tom Brown’s School Days. In De Gramont’s case, his villainous hero is a fringe member of the court of King Louis XV, adventurer, soldier of fortune, slave trader, and courtier. Ironically, however, it was Scotsman Fraser who demonstrated a greater talent for panache than his French wannabe competitor. De Gramont/Morgan stuffs almost 500 pages full of plot but failed to come close to the joyous sense of bastardry that makes the Flashman novels so much fun.

 

• The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace (1937)
By Ethel Firebrace. Actually by Gay Taylor and Malachi Whitaker.
The Victorian novelist par excellence, Ethel Firebrace wears out four typewriters churning out over a hundred novels or over five million self-righteous words. By her own account, Ethel is not a prig. It simply happens to be the fact that everyone else is lazy, ill-mannered, and untrustworthy.
And non-garglers. Ethel attributes her success (“or very nearly all of it!”) to her habit of gargling after food. Writers who fail to gargle “spring up like toadstools, live as long, and disappear as ignominiously.” Needless to say, but “there are no garglers among modern poets.”
As I wrote back in 2019, The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace was a jeux d’esprit for lifelong friends Taylor and Whitaker, but on the whole probably more fun for them than us.

 

• The Autobiography of Augustus Carp
By Augustus Carp, Esq. Actually by Henry H. Bashford.
Most of these books are amusing. Some are laugh-out-loud funny. The Autobiography of Augustus Carp is a comic masterpiece. Bashford, a Harley Street physician and amateur writer, grasped something that many of his fellow mock autobiographers failed to: namely, that one cannot spoof half-heartedly. There are moments, for example, when the reader sees the props in a book like The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, sees the scene being staged for a joke at Ethel’s expense. Bashford, on the other hand, understood that Augustus Carp is not only blissfully unaware of his ridiculousness but absolutely convinced of his constant and superior moral rectitude. And so, for example, if he happens to get hammered by imbibing excessively of a drink he’s told is “Portugalade,” he is not just a drunken boor but completely ignorant of the fact that he’s drunk. There’s a certain giddy delight in observing how often Bashford is able to coax Augustus into behaving like an idiot without his gaining the slightest clue to what’s going on.

 

• My Hey-Day: The Crackup of the International Set (1940)
By Princess Tulip Murphy. Actually by Virginia Faulkner.
Taken from a series of articles Faulkner wrote for Town and Country in the 1930s, My Hey-Day is a world tour in the company of Tulip Murphy, former good-time girl and widow of “Brick-a-Minute” Murphy, who claimed to be related to ancient Irish royalty in some unspecified way. Unspecified is all right with Tulip, who’se never seen a set she couldn’t force her way into. Whether she’s visiting Scandanavian, the Soviet Union, France, Tibet, or Hollywood, Princess Tulip manages to mock power, wealth, class, culture, sexuality, and, most of all, fashion. No matter how limited her purse, she finds some old thing to throw on:

I was wearing an original Déclassé (salvaged from the wreck of my wardrobe), of spaghetti-colored cambric, handsomely trimmed in gum-drop green duvetyn with shoulder-knots of solid tinsel. My hat was a saucy beret no bigger than an aspirin tablet, which was held to my head by a specially trained family of matching chameleons. My only jewelry, square-cut cultured emerald cufflinks, matched the duvetyn, and I carried a fish-net parasol which also could be used for water-divining.

Princess Tulip noted, with regret, that the onset of World War Two was curtailing the activities of the International Set: “Many of my oldest friends can now count their yachts on the fingers of a single hand.” However, Faulkner carried Tulip through at least a dozen more adventures after My Hey-Day was published, visiting New Orleans, Washington, Mexico, a Western dude ranch, and the wedding of Rita Hayworth and Aly Khan in 1949 and setting at least the American land speed record for gate crashing.

The Paper Dolls, by Laura Beheler (1956)

Cover of the UK hardback edition of The Paper Dolls.

Ida Erickson, the central figure in Laura Beheler’s first novel, The Paper Dolls, is a well-fed, well-housed, well-clothed child. Despite the Depression, both her mother and father have good jobs and can treat her to new dresses, cokes, and store-bought cakes when many of her classmates wear hand-me-downs and go without lunch. Every day, Ida comes home and, the good little girl she is, goes to her room and plays. Which suits her parents, who are usually fighting behind their locked bedroom door. Without her parents, Ida is effectively alone:

Her grandmothers and granddaddies were all dead; they never even knew she got alive. She didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Damned old women sat around her kitchen table and slurped up her cokes. Ida rocked from side to side, tears wetting her arms, rolling down her chin, falling in small droplets onto the grass. Whispering blearily, she moaned. Was there ever anybody in the whole history of the whole world who didn’t have anybody?

Cover of the US hardback edition of The Paper Dolls.

With no real friends, Ida has provided herself with her own friends, the characters she keeps in her Universal Theme and Composition Book (No. S-1055). Sometimes they are just the head and shoulders taken from a Montgomery-Ward catalog; sometimes a full-length figure cut from a copy of The Delineator magazine. Beside each, she notes the name, vital statistics, key facts:

Sands Chutney — 14 years — 5 feet 1 inch tall — 109 pounds — English aristocrat — very rich.
Agnes Eaves — 15 years — 5 feet — 97 pounds — blond hair — very educated.
Dan Davis — 15 years — 5 feet 3 inches — 110 pounds — plays violin — is orphan.

Ida lives in a world so devoid of emotional or social interaction that her paper dolls are not only her source of entertainment and comfort but, as the years go by, more real than the real people in her life. When her father, apparently an inveterate philanderer, leaves to take a job in another city, abandoning Ida and her mother, Ida replaces him with a new doll (Fritz Robinson — 15 years — 5 feet, 2 inches — 120 pounds — shipwreck survivor). When her uncle Johnny, a musician, comes to stay for a while and shows more interest than any adult has before, Ida has a brief reprieve from the relentless dreariness of her non-imaginary like. But when Johnny moves on, Ida replaces him:

The first night he was gone, Ida found herself restless in a sea of aloneness. She got out the Universal notebook, laid out a few characters. For a long time she stared at the line-up, wondering what to do with it. Finally she decided Sands Chutney was named Sandy Chutney, and he played a clarinet.

Asked what she’d done on her summer vacation, Ida has only her paper dolls to fall back on:

“Well uh, I have this friend Sands Chutney who’s from New York. He came to see us, and he brought his girl friend with him. Her name’s Agnes Eaves. Well, he plays a real good clarinet, and she plays piano. And they taught me to play drums and guitar. Sands Chutney owns this httle night club back in Memphis, and that’s where he met Agnes Eaves. Well, they kept begging me to go back with them and play drums and guitar in the band. Two or three times I thought maybe I would, but I decided . . .”

Though Ida finishes school, gets a secretarial job, becomes an adult, the world of her paper dolls remains the focus of her life. Pearl Harbor is attacked and America enters the war. But to Ida, the war “was simply an incontestable fact, not a penetrating experience.”

Until she meets Allan, a Navy ROTC cadet, who quickly falls in love with her. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he falls in love with his impression of Ida. At a superficial level, Ida understands what is expected of a young woman in the social rituals of romance and is capable of playing her part. But at some level, Allan is nothing more to her than a three-dimensional doll, and to him, she is much the same.

When Allan ships off with the Atlantic fleet, Ida moves to New York to wait for him. She dominoes through a series of jobs until she lands one as a day clerk in the Waverly Hotel. Like many of its residents, the Waverly is “a lost and seedy aristocrat.” A bitter 4F Jew named Wally Safferman — well, befriends is too strong a word, so let’s say he attaches himself to Ida. She’s willing to buy drinks and listen, even if she doesn’t really like him much.

The problem with Wally is that he does see Ida for who she is: “‘Ida, you are so …’ He paused, looking for words, then finished, ‘You are so unborn.'” Wally understands the difference between simple innocence and raw naïveté. Ida is still cocooned in the illusions she’s built up around her dolls. “Did you ever go through that stage where you watched with horror while your childhood dream world collapsed?” he asks her in astonishment.

Unfortunately, before Wally can burst Ida’s bubble, Allan writes to say that he’s returning. He has a job lined up in Topeka, Kansas and expects Ida to report for duty:

I’m the man in this outfit. Therefore, where my job is simply has to be the place we go. This whole thing has been crazy long enough, and I’m tired of it. So here it is straight and simple: will you come to Topeka and marry me?

Will she, readers? Well, let’s just say that it comes down to a choice between Allan in Topeka and Sands Chutney in a dark Manhattan bar.

Some reviewers found The Paper Dolls too close to a case study to be fully successful as a novel, but Laura Beheler offers a convincing case for fantasy as a survival mechanism that gets a person through a lot of bleak days. Few readers will reach the end, however, without seeing its long-term limitations. Which is why the other things reviewers called The Paper Dolls was a horror story. If it is a horror story, it is entirely because we cannot help but empathize with Ida, the lost little girl.

Laura Beheler, from the dust jacket of The Paper Dolls.

Laura Beheler was no Ida Erickson. Raised in Fort Worth, she served in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in World War Two, worked as a reporter for the Associated Press and a copywriter for Neiman-Marcus, took up fencing and became a regional champion. In the late 1940s, she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she became a junior high school teacher and wrote three published novels starting with The Paper Dolls. She never married, remained in Santa Fe until her death in 2008 at the age of 87, and presumably never kept a notebook full of paper dolls.

The Paper Dolls, by Laura Beheler
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1956

Monday Night, by Kay Boyle (1938)

“Do you mean to say I didn’t give you anything to eat yet?” one character asks another several hours into their wanderings around Paris in Monday Night. At this point, the pair has visited three or four bars and had at least a few drinks in each one of them. And the night is just beginning.

If you’re not one for drinking on an empty stomach, Monday Night may remind you of that time when you made the mistake of going out on the town with someone who considers bar nuts an entree. Bernie Lord, a medical student, arrives in Paris fresh off the train from Le Havre and meets up with a slight acquaintance from Chicago named Wilt Tobin who’s been living in France since before the First World War. His mission is to meet a man named Jean Sylvestre who has become world famous as a forensic toxicologist (though this was before the job had a name). Bernie is in awe of Sylvestre’s technical wizardry and hopes to learn a bit of the master’s craft.

Wilt is the only person Bernie knows in Paris. Literally anyone else would have been a better choice. Wilt is a writer, but somewhere along the way the pleasure of enjoying an aperitif at a sidewalk table outside a charming café has become a compulsion. Writing is now only a means to get money to drink with — that and cadging a glass or five off anyone who will listen to him. Stepping off the train in a crisp new blue serge suit, Bernie is shocked at his first sight of Wilt: “The cracked brown shoes, the grey trousers with no shape left in back or front, the paunch buttoned into the waistcoat, the shirt, the twisted tie, the soft, bristled jowls, the dark small almost fervently set eyes….” Wilt not only has “no sign of youth to recommend him, but no look left in eye or teeth to recall that he ever had been young.”

Still, Wilt feels some obligation to his friend. Luckily for him, though, their first stop, the pharmacy where Sylvestre got his start, is close to the Gare St. Lazare. When they fail to produce any further information about the man than the fact that Monsieur Sylvestre never comes there anymore, Wilt steers Bernie into the nearest bar to discuss next steps. This sets the pattern for much of the plot of Monday Night. The only difference between Bernie and Wilt and Vladimir and Estragon of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is that they’re looking instead of waiting. Oh, and drinking. In fact, each stage of looking tends to be preceded by around a half dozen drinks.

By around ten P.M., Wilt advises Bernie that it’s now either too late or too early to eat:

“The time we should have started in eating, if we were going to eat at all, was right after the first drinks, the first two or three drinks, right after the gin fizzes we had at the brasserie.” The darkness stretched before him as he walked, facsimile of that obliteration unpunctuated by mood or time that life itself and action had become…. “So now we’ll just have to hold off awhile until the red wine is out of the system,” he said. “I don’t want you to get sick the first night we’re out together. I want to take care of you, Bernie.”

Wilt not only seems to run solely on the promise of another drink but as the night wears on, he begins to take over Bernie’s quest as well. Early on, Bernie explodes at Wilt’s complete ignorance of the feats of Monsieur Sylvestre and the murderers condemned through his testimony. “My God, Wilt, don’t you know? Don’t you know about it? I thought everybody — anybody who read the papers, anyway — I thought there wasn’t anybody who–” But Wilt becomes convinced that Sylvestre is hiding a dark secret, that he is motivated less by objective truth than by revenge.

The two men head for Malmaison, on the outskirts of Paris, where Sylvestre now resides in a villa surrounded by large estate. Wilt begins to construct a psychological portrait of the chemist, examining his motivations, wondering at what it must be like to know your words will send a man to the guillotine. When they reach the villa, they learn that Sylvestre is in Lyons on a case, but his servants invite them into the kitchen, where a game of Monopoly is underway. More drinks are had as Bernie finds his will to live fading and Wilt cagily pries out information about Sylvestre.

Wilt and Bernie’s journey takes them out and back into Paris and through Monday night to early Tuesday morning. As with a bad hangover, the world they return to seems both fuzzy and jarring. Bernie no longer knows why he wanted to meet Sylvestre in the first place, and Wilt finds the solution to Sylvestre’s mystery in a newspaper headline spotted as they wait in the Gare St. Lazare for Bernie’s train back to Le Havre.

Monday Night has been described as an unusual detective story. If you accept this, then Boyle’s ending will seem abrupt and ill-prepared. But that’s the wrong way to look at the book. Boyle tells us what Monday Night is really about in its dedication, which comes from one of her unpublished stories called “The Man Without a Nation.” In that story, she writes of the “secret code” of the expats she had come to know in the course of — by that time — fifteen years in Europe:

Those who speak it follow no political leader and take no part in any persecution or conquest; nor have they to do either with a vocabulary of the rich or the poor or any country or race; it being simply one way of communication between the lost and the lost.

Wilt is one of these lost souls, one who has realized that he has stayed too long to be considered a tourist and can never stay long enough to become French. “It didn’t take me very long to find out I was in the wrong country,” he jokes to Bernie. “Only about eighteen years.” Boyle signals this awareness of being a displaced person (before that became an official term at the end of the next world war) in the book’s very first line: “You might have recognized it as a drugstore except for its situation in what might generally be called the wrong country.”

Kay Boyle based the character of Wilt on Harold Stearns, a man she and her second husband, Laurence Vail, came to know in Paris. Legend has it that after reviewing the proofs of a collection of essays by American intellectuals and artists that he edited titled Civilization in the United States, Stearns immediately booked passage to England, convinced that the United States had no civilization. In reality, it’s likely that a favorable exchange rate and the advent of Prohibition played a larger role in his decision.

As it was, he was only able to make it to Paris on the strength of a loan from Sinclair Lewis, who was in awe of Stearn’s potential. It was a loan that Stearns never repaid. Lewis later got something back, however, by referring to Stearns (indirectly, mind) as “an important habitue of the Cafe de Dome in Paris living these many years as a grafter on borrowed money.” Asked to respond by an American reporter, Stearns said he’d like to come back to the U.S. for the privilege of punching Lewis in the face.

Peter Pickem story
A “Peter Pickem” story from the Chicago Tribune, 1923.

For a while after arriving in Paris, Stearns was able to get by working as “Peter Pickem,” the Paris track correspondent of the Chicago Tribune. But then his drinking got so bad that he started to go blind and he lost that job and survived on a combination of betting on the horses and the generosity of his drinking partners. As he later wrote in his memoir, The Street I Know (1935), Stearns learned that few friends will buy you a meal, but plenty will buy you a few rounds at the bar. In his book Americans in Paris (1977), Tony Allan wrote that Stearns’s “shabby, unshaven figure was pointed out to newcomers as a warning of the dangers of the Latin Quarter.”

Hemingway was the first to commemorate Harold Stearns in fiction. In The Sun Only Rise, Jake Barnes encounters a friend named Harvey Stone in Stearns’s favorite café:

I walked past the sad tables of the Rotonde to the Sélect. There were a few people inside at the bar, and outside, alone, sat Harvey Stone. He had a pile of saucers in front of him, and he needed a shave.

“Sit down,” said Harvey. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Just looking for you.”

“Been out to the races?”

“No. Not since Sunday.”

“What do you hear from the States?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know. I’m through with them. I’m absolutely through with them.”

He leaned forward and looked me in the eye.

“Do you want to know something, Jake?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t had anything to eat for five days.”

Stearns wrote in his memoir, “I would stay up at the Sélect until dawn crept through the windows, drinking champagne and watching the boys and girls do their vaudeville stunts.”

Stearns himself described the Sélect as “a seething mad-house of drunks, semi-drunks, quarter drunks, and sober maniacs (most of whom were on the wagon only temporarily, of course, because of unkind medical favors of the fickle goddess, Venus).” It was, he wrote with bittersweet reflection, “a useless, silly life — and I have missed it every day since.”

But by 1932 — not Wilt’s 18 years, but a little more than ten — Stearns, like Wilt, knew he had stayed too long. “I was just an uprooted, aimless wanderer on the face of the earth. And a lonely one, too. I didn’t like that; I hated it. And, since there was nothing else to do, I would go into the bar and take another drink and try to forget.” With the arrival of the Depression and exodus of easy American money, however, even drinking to forget was becoming harder and harder. “With no teeth, few friends, no job, and no money,” Stearns wrote, “I naturally decided that all I could do was return to my own country — and to try to start all over. Everything about Paris had suddenly become distasteful to me; I suppose because I felt so alien and alone.”

If you’re a fan of 1930s detective fiction, you will certainly find Monday Night unsatisfactory. Sylvestre’s is not that much of a mystery. It’s really just the excuse for Boyle to send her lost soul, Wilt, and his naive companion Bernie, on their hallucinatory odyssey through the Paris night, an odyssey that will ultimately lead them both, like Stearns, back to America.

Monday Night represented both a structural and stylistic departure for Boyle. Although the plot takes place in the space of less than 24 hours, her night will seem endless to many readers. Though she sketches the people they meet in quick, precise strokes, it is Wilt and Bernie — and really just Wilt — who remains on camera, in focus, throughout the book. And in describing their wandering, Boyle switches back and forth between Wilt’s streetwise newspaperman’s chatter and rich, impressionistic descriptions of the Paris streets, scenes, and shadows. Reviewing the book in The Nation, Louis Kronenberger felt the latter “achieves strong and even beautiful effects, but shows too little restraint and has some of Faulkner’s and Wolfe’s tendency to overwrite.”

Most critics noted admirable qualities in Monday Night but felt it too much of an oddity to take as seriously as her previous novels. Otis Ferguson of The New Republic called Wilt “a sort of lost-generation Don Quixote.” Time’s reviewer found Boyle’s cast “a bunch of puzzling neurotics” and Alfred Kazin dismissed them as “manikins who walk through the book as on hot beds of coal.” Kronenberger, on the other hand, felt that part of the problem for reviewers was that their easy labels were ill-suited for Boyle:

Call her decadent and you will find an imagery that is vital and under almost perfect control. Call her lush and you’ll find prose with the delicacy, discipline, smoothness to the touch and good hard grain of carving in ivory. Call her a necromancer and then see by what homely undeniable things she sets up her rhythms and the overtone of their effect.

Monday Night has always had a small but loyal set of fans. Dylan Thomas called it “the best novel of the year” in a review for the New English Weekly and wrote Boyle a gushing fan letter that was reprinted on the cover of a 1970 reissue of the book. Doris Grumbach and James Laughlin of New Directions Press both named it one of their candidates for rediscovery in their submissions to Bill and Linda Katz’s 1983 guide to neglected books, Writer’s Choice. The editor Virginia Faulkner confided to Boyle that “Monday Night remains for me a landmark” in a letter written 25 years after the book first came out. And in the late 1940s, the actor Franchot Tone attempted, unsuccessfully, to raise money for a film version of the book, saying that its “way of story-telling makes me tingle.”

Boyle herself felt the book represented something of a breakthrough and said that she “liked it the best of my novels.” Perhaps this is, in part, because it is so overwhelmingly a book about men, about their actions and thoughts and desires. Her next few novels — Primer for Combat (1942), Avalanche (1944), and A Frenchman Must Die (1946) — would also take the world men as their focus — in combat, in mountain climbing, in wartime espionage and resistance. But most critics would agree that these attempts to create, if you will, lyrical action stories, are substantially weaker books when compared with Monday Night. Not much happens in Monday Night — if you set aside the drinking and walking — but within its small frame a moving and unsettling portrait of a lost soul can be seen.

Monday Night, by Kay Boyle
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938

Marie Beginning, by Alfred Grossman (1964)

Cover of first Us edition of Marie Beginning by Alfred Grossman

This is a guest post by the novelist Rob Palk.

Some books are neglected in their old age, others — a majority — are neglected from birth. Alfred Grossman, the author of Marie Beginning (1964), was both neglected and known for it, a painful combination. Newspapers profiled his neglect in pieces that failed to avert it. Anthony Burgess, recognising another flinty show-off, gave his endorsement. It made no difference. Grossman released four novels that received good reviews and were ignored by the reading public. His efforts after the fourth were ignored by publishers too.

From the Chicago Tribune, 2 June 1968.

Marie begins in the world of The Apartment, the American office in its imperial phase. Two frazzled male office wiseacres drink their coffees and swap dialogue. Our heroine, a gamine young woman from Brooklyn, arrives to ask for a secretarial job. Her interviewer, Lydia, has very large breasts. (It was 1964. If a male writer thought up some breasts he was going to tell you about them.) So far, so Mad Men. Only something odd is afoot; the two guys in the office are discussing puritanism and the Conquistadores, and Marie bombards her interviewer with vaguely blackmailing questions about the aforementioned breasts and is rewarded for this with a job. (Yes, breasts, yes, I know. Again, it was 1964 and Lydia’s breasts are pretty much a character in this book.)

Then there’s the style. We are barely allowed inside the character’s heads; instead their inner lives spume out of them in florid ejaculations. They don’t so much converse as perform dialogue at one another, in a sort of gnomic screwball-ese of Grossman’s own invention. Scenes blur into each other in the space of a sentence. Marie herself might seem a familiar figure, the plucky street urchin who rises to the top through street smarts. Except there’s something chilling, something eldritch, about her, possessed, as she is, of both amoral cunning and a mysterious innocence. She is the teenage girl as avenging angel, or Martian, and her ambitions are set on more than just a job.

One senses that Grossman fell a bit in love with his creation, in a sweetly Platonic way. (“You don’t want to screw me and you know it. You and me,” she tells an office confidante, “I was a grown-up daughter — you could have fun with just walking on the edge of sex, playing with it, making jokes.” That sort of Platonic.) Aside from an early incident where she goads a blameless colleague into a botched suicide attempt for no reason except curiosity, her Machiavellianism is usually aimed at deserving targets. As Grossman gets fonder of her, or perhaps more annoyed at how America treated its children, Marie aims beyond humbling a few workplace chauvinists and takes on the country itself, embarking on an epic Kulturkampf against just about everything her creator must have loathed about his nation.

By a chain of implausiblebut enjoyable occurrences, Marie maneuvers her way into wedlock with her boss, Alexander Forbes. As well as being a minor plutocrat, Forbes is a predatory sadist and pervert and very American sort of fascist. We never fear for Marie in his clutches, which perhaps reduces the tension, but we do get to see our youthful protagonist turn her wits against the whole of the US right, in both its bow tied pseudo-aesthete patrician and gun-toting thick-as-pigshit forms. The creepy milieu of American reaction, its paranoid and prurient obsessions with racial and sexual hygiene, are expertly evoked. (Biographical detail: before turning to novels, Grossman edited one of the many CIA funded journals of the era, something he evidently had mixed feelings about.)

I will spoil things for no one by revealing Marie triumphs over her grim spouse and survives to fight further battles in a follow-up [The Do-Gooders (1968)] I’m now keen to read. This sequel, though, was to be Grossman’s last novel. He had no readership and it’s hard to say why. Perhaps he was that bit too clear-sighted, lacking the streak of post-Beat sentimentality of his black-comedy confreres Heller and Southern. The rest of his life was spent ignored except for occasional magazine pieces questioning why this talented author had had so little success. Twelve years after Marie Beginning was published, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He spent his last days alone, unable to physically write, but still recording novels onto a tape recorder that he knew would never be played.

Rob Palk is the author of Animal Lovers (Sandstone Press). He tweets at @robpalkwriter.

Marie Beginning, by Alfred Grossman
New York: Doubleday, 1964

The Hospital, by Kenneth Fearing (1939)

Cover of the first US edition of The Hospital by Kenneth Fearing

Though it takes place within the space of just an hour or two, a lot happens in Kenneth Fearing’s first novel, The Hospital. A suicide, a disfigurement, an act of vandalism and a power outage, an old man’s death and a young woman’s reprieve from tuberculosis. But even more happens off-camera, so to speak.

Although Fearing’s Hudson General Hospital is an enormous Manhattan hospital with hundreds of patients and thousands of staff members, in his hands it’s just a microcosm in a world churning with events. A dramatic rescue at sea. A contest between rival gangs over who controls the dockworkers’ union. The collapse of a a giant company. An illicit affair. An attempt to unionize the hospital workers.

But these things are only mentioned in passing, a sentence or two, and with little in the way of context or explanation. Over the course of the book, for example, we learn that Steve Sullivan, a first mate, was responsible for a rescue at sea that was later resented by his ship’s owner, leaving him without a birth. We only get bits of this story — from Sullivan, from his mother, from his wife as she waits to be operated on for breast cancer, from the woman he’s in love with — and never all the details.

In part this is because Fearing is an impressionist, not realist. He works in quick strokes, not painstaking reproduction. But also because The Hospital is a mosaic composed of what dozens of characters think, feel, and see. This was the technique Fearing used in all his novels.

The table of contents of a Fearing novel is a list of names: each chapter a moment or two as seen by that character within the book’s overall short duration. Some are major characters, such as Doctor Cavanagh, the surgeon who removes the tumor from the breast of Freya, Steve Sullivan’s wife — a surgeon who’s racking up more than his share of operating room deaths. Some, like Tom Pharney, an electrician, walk on, utter a few lines, and exit, never to be seen again. In The Hospital, Fearing even includes a few faceless extras in his cast: the crew of a city tugboat, the attendant at a police switchboard:

Bong-bong, bong-bong-bong, bong-bong.

Every fire alarm in the city sounds up here, and it’s always going.

“Give me a description of the men. Yeah, describe them. Did they have a car? What kind of a car? Were they tall or short? Which way they went after they held you up?”

Bong-bong, bong-bong-bong, bong-bong.

“Police Headquarters.”

Bong-bong, bong-bong-bong, bong-bong. On the box in front of me, Precinct 19 shows a green light Take it.

“Headquarters.”

“Narcotics Bureau.”

Put the call through. There is the yellow light of an outside wire. Take it.

“Police Headquarters.”

The approach is remarkably effective at conveying a sense of the swirling currents of activity that go on in a complex institution such as a major hospital. It’s an approach that many a film director has followed when trying to tell the story of a big event, such as the Normandy invasion in The Longest Day. It also reinforces the sense that the institution is large and the people small. At the scale of a whole novel, it’s a bit like looking down on a busy city street from a window on the 25th floor.

It also may have enabled Fearing to play to his strengths. No character’s chapter runs more than a few pages, some just a few paragraphs. This saves him the task of any real character development. His people are more cogs in his narrative machine than the actual engine of the narrative. Though Fearing gives us a salad full of bits of their stories, his story isn’t really about any of them. It’s about Hudson General Hospital as a artefact of modern society. Again, to use a film analogy, we could consider The Hospital for the Best Editing award, but none of its cast would get nominated for an acting award.

Of Fearing’s fiction, The Big Clock consistently gets the lion’s share of the attention and critical praise, but having read most of them now, I think there is much of a muchness about all of them. For what it is, it’s a very well done muchness, and I full expect to go on and read his remaining novels. They race with the manic energy of Fearing’s best known poem, “St. Agnes’ Eve,” with its shoot-out between the police and gunman Louie Glatz:

And rat-a-tat-tat
Rat-a-tat-tat
Muttered the gat
Of Louie the rat,
While the officers of the law went Blam! Blam!-blam!

The Hospital, by Kenneth Fearing
New York: Random House, 1939