www.NeglectedBooks.com: Where forgotten books are remembered
Kim Askew and Amy Helmes of the wonderful Lost Ladies of Lit podcast recently invited me to talk with them about G. E. Trevelyan’s remarkable first novel Appius and Virginia. Back in print now thanks to Eye Books and the Abandoned Bookshop Press, Appius and Virginia started me down my journey of discovering Trevelyan’s work a little over three years ago.
You can listen to the full conversation at the Lost Ladies of Lit episode 59: G. E. Trevelyan — Appius and Virginia.
“I always thought refugees were other people” are words none of us would ever want to say.
But no one ever chooses to become a refugee on a whim. Instead, as we witnessed just this week in Afghanistan, refugees usually have to grab what they can carry and leave in a rush. Their motivation is less to run towards than to run away, usually from violence, persecution, or simply chaos.
Resi, the teenage girl who narrates Monica Stirling’s 1958 novel Sigh for a Strange Land, awakes one morning to find a policeman at her apartment door. He informs her that her Aunt Natasha has been injured and is lying in the city hospital. Hurrying to see her aunt, Resi notices that the streets are oddly quiet. There are no queues outside the shops and the few people who pass look at her with shocked expressions.
Aunt Natasha’s only injury is a hangover from celebrating too hard the night before and she and Resi are soon headed back to their apartment. Now, however, the streets are full of noise, with groups of men running down sidewalks and the sounds of gunfire in the distance. Turning into their street, they see their apartment block going up in flames. The revolution has begun.
Seeking out the only friend they have, a horse trainer named Boris, Resi and Natasha soon find themselves on an overloaded truck headed for the frontier. After a long journey through the night, they climb out to face a table of Red Cross workers. Each of them is handed a piece of cardboard with a word on it: “REFUGEE.”
Some of their companions react in shock and disgust. “Refugees! My family’s an honorable one,” says one. “I’ll have you know, my grandfather founded our shop, built it up from nothing, and it’s been in the family ever since — wars, risings, strikes, upsets, nothing’s been able to dislodge us. And now . . . ”
If Resi, Natasha, and Boris are somewhat less surprised, it’s because their lives have been punctuated by displacements. Natasha and Boris grew up as members of the Russian imperial elite before the revolution of 1917. Natasha followed the White Russian diaspora to Paris and Italy. Boris joined a circus and found himself a citizen of an itinerant nation. Resi, left to Natasha’s care after the death of her parents, carries the blood of four nations in her veins: Russia, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and France. And none of them has any papers, of course. “Could we ever prove I’m me if we wanted to?” Resi asks at one point.
Although Stirling never names the country from which the trio is fleeing — which adds to the sense of displacement that pervades the book — one cannot help but assume it’s Hungary, whose abortive revolution against a Soviet-backed regime in 1956 led to over 150,000 Hungarians seeking asylum in the West.
Resi, Natasha, and Boris sneak out of their temporary refugee center and enjoy a brief holiday taking in the opulence of what is clearly Vienna:
Halfway down the next street—which was full of traffic, I’d never before seen so many motor vehicles in one place — we were attracted by a prodigious delicatessen store. The vast window’s centerpiece was a glass-fronted silver machine in which a chicken roasted on a revolving spit. Either side stood massive hams, their outsides neatly breadcrumbed, their insides the color of dark pink roses. Spread around these in tiers were shallow white china dishes containing black and green olives, soft-fleshed tan mushrooms, smooth-skinned coppery sausages, the harlequin colors of vegetable salad, artichokes with gray-green mauve-topped leaves firm as if sculpted, beets with their darkly crimson juice turned cherry-color where it dissolved into a moat of sour cream, pies with richly glazed and crusted tops.
They pool their few coins and manage to buy coffees, cocoa, and pastries at a café. “Cafés are apt to outlast governments,” observes Boris.
Soon, though, they are back sleeping with hundreds of other refugees on a gymnasium floor, and Natasha, who is probably closer to 70 than the 50 she looks like, takes ill. The odd little family unit that has sheltered Resi through her childhood falls apart, and she is forced to decide for herself what place she will adopt as home.
Stirling quotes from a 1958 essay by V. S. Pritchett in which he wrote, “In the last hundred years half the world’s population has become uprooted, expatriated from class, race or nation. We live on frontiers.” Sigh for a Strange Land is a simple, short story about people accustomed to that frontier existence. For this trio, nation and home have become concepts as slippery as a bubble of mercury.
And Stirling, who saw a great deal of displacement as a correspondent during World War Two and its aftermath in Europe, is fundamentally distrustful of these concepts. “I’ve never understood why anyone finds it difficult to believe chairs and tables are made of constantly moving atoms. Nothing is reliable in this moving world but love,” Resi comments early on. “All I’m interested in writing about is love,” Stirling once told her friend The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent Janet Flanner — another veteran expatriate. “Private life,” Boris tells Resi, is “the greatest resistance movement of them all.”
Sigh for a Strange Land is a simple, moving tale that manages to weave two disparate themes together: the unstable, transitory nature of home and nationality, and the strong, unwavering bonds of love. It’s a tale that resonates in this moment every bit as it did over fifty years ago. It’s available on the Internet Archive (link) and I’ve had it in my Calibre library for years, but it was only when Scott at Furrowed Middlebrow recently posted about Monica Stirling that I thought to take a serious look at it. I was hooked by the opening line: “The day the revolution started my Aunt Natasha was drunk,” and had to keep going.
The whole time I read the book, I kept thinking that it could quite plausibly have been written within the last ten years: it has that sort of timelessness, aided no doubt by Stirling’s choice to minimize her specific geographical and temporal references. I do have to agree with David Williams of the TLS, who wrote when the book was first published, “The first part is so god that one’s disappointment over the other two is keener perhaps than it ought to be”: there is a faint scent of sentimentality that lingers over the middle section and lasts until near the very end, when Resi has to confront her situation without the support of Natasha and Boris.
But overall, it’s a superb and taut novel. As John Davenport in The Observer, “Miss Stirling knows how to be exquisitely brief.” It’s a welcome skill in an age not lacking in loose baggy monsters.
‘I was born dead’ is the ominous first sentence of Lady Eleanor Smith’s 1939 memoir Life’s a Circus. The doctors at the scene of her birth pronounced her dead without checking for any signs of life and threw themselves into attempting to save her mother. The midwife, with nothing to lose, had the bright idea of massaging the newborn with gin and slapping her repeatedly until she elicited a wail. Mother and daughter both survived and Lady Eleanor grew up to become a Bright Young Thing, journalist, publicist and novelist, with a particular devotion to the circus and scenes from Romani life.
Lady Eleanor Smith (1902-1945) was the daughter of Conservative MP Frederick Edward Smith, ennobled as Earl of Birkenhead when appointed Lord Chancellor in 1919, and Margaret Eleanor Furneux (a granddaughter of Joseph Severn, painter and friend of John Keats). The young Eleanor enjoyed a privileged upbringing with ponies, dancing classes and Christmases spent at Blenheim Palace (her father was one of Winston Churchill’s closest friends). Despite growing up in the heart of the establishment, she was drawn to Romani culture from an early age, teaching herself the language and making the serendipitous discovery that her paternal great-grandmother was a Romani woman named Bathsheba (apparently the Lord Chancellor was proud of his ‘romantic’ origins rather than trying to conceal them, while at the same time exaggerating the humbleness of his middle-class Birkenhead upbringing).
Like her contemporary Nancy Mitford, Smith’s formal education was centred around learning to speak French. A happy experience at Queen’s Gate School, South Kensington, alongside lifelong friends and fellow Bright Young Things Allanah Harper and Zita Jungmann, was not to last. She was sent to boarding school but ran away, after which she completed her education with an extended stay with an aristocratic Belgian family who lived at the Museum of the Congo outside Brussels. On her return to England, she refused to ‘come out’ as a debutante as was expected for a young lady of her background and decided instead to pursue a career in journalism.
Through her social connections, Smith landed a role writing a twice-weekly ‘Women’s Gossip’ column for an evening paper but disliked “publicising a loathsome clique of nitwits”. She then worked as cinema critic, which she found more convivial. Highlights included introducing Katharine Hepburn and Elisabeth Bergner to British audiences(and being introduced to Hitler’s policies by the Austrian-Jewish Bergner).
A stint travelling with a circus as a publicist provided ample research opportunities for Smith’s first novel Red Wagon (1930). Red Wagon is far from culturally sensitive. Nevertheless, it stands up as a gripping yarn even today.
Inspired by Victorian showman ‘Lord’ George Sanger, “one of the finest types of English circus man”, the novel tells the life story of self-made and (mostly) benevolent circus dictator Joe Prince in flashback form. In the novel’s present day, the circus is no longer the national institution it was in previous decades nor is Joe Prince quite the “roistering king of the road, a plutocrat among nomads” he once was. One of his daughters has settled in suburbia and the other, to her father’s disapproval, wants to showcase her equestrian skills for cinema.
The action then flashes back to the 1860s when Joe is five years old and his acrobat mother is killed in a fire during an American tour. After a period of fostering by a Thénardier-esque clown, he’s sent to a Dickensian orphanage. He escapes in his teens, joins a circus, works his way up through the ranks and eventually sets up his own circus, always living by the mantra ‘Circus first’.
According to the Scotsman, ‘The book stands as a challenge to all those who doubt woman’s ability to write a ‘straight’ tale unmarked with the stamp of ‘feminine’ psychology’”. The novel features a male protagonist who isn’t prone to self-reflection and who pulls himself up by his bootstraps. Joe Prince is defined by his relationship with the circus and its nomadic life rather than by his romantic relationships. The novel is ‘romantic’ in terms of its setting rather than its love story.
A life-changing romance does occur, but it’s near the end and is one-sided. It’s hard not to be creeped out the way in which Joe, in middle age, marries the much younger Romani princess Sheba (surely named for Smith’s ancestor Bathsheba), the daughter of Starlina, his first crush. Sheba, who is “bought from her people for the sum of fifteen pounds”, can’t settle into the role of circus chatelaine and eventually abandons her husband and daughters to return to her community.
The depiction of Romani characters is the most troubling aspect of the novel. ‘Gajo’ (non-Romani) circus folk and Romanis are not allies. “Joe, in common with most circus children,” Smith writes, “had been brought up to despise and hate this dark race […] sometimes they attached themselves to circuses and brought disgrace to any show”. Despite Smith’s personal identification with Romani people and Joe’s coming to admire them, her Romani characters are strongly ‘othered.’ Sheba and the other Romani in the book are described as ‘wild’, witch-like,’ ‘savage’, ‘brazen’, ‘tawny’ etc. The circus itself is also described in disruptive terms, as something that allows ‘the English to take their pleasure not sadly, but almost savagely, with a boisterous brutality that would endure long into the night.” Smith feared that “It will be a dreadful day when the circus decides to become social” (but noted that she had never personally seen a mistreated circus animal).
Vita Sackville-West, writing for Common Cause, hailed Red Wagon as “a brilliantly successful first novel” and Oliver Wray of The Graphic commented, ”‘I have not read so satisfying a novel since Mr Priestley’s The Good Companions.” The Yorkshire Post found Joe Prince “a most human and likable creature… a real relief after the fantastic figures of most novelists who have touched his kind.” Of course, Smith’s title and her father’s fame may have had some influence on the praise it received. Lord Birkenhead was appalled to learn that his daughter was writing a novel and assumed it would only be published because of who he was – but he eventually changed his tune and gave her a ruby and diamond brooch representing the red wagon shortly before his death later the same year.
Alongside the positive literary reviews, Red Wagon was the subject of a minor cause celebre. The book was banned by Glasgow public libraries when an elderly councillor proclaimed that the 28-year-old Smith “knows too much for her age” and should have “shown more reticence” in her handling of the “love incidents”. I would hazard a guess that this complaint refers to the scene in a seedy Montmatre hotel room in which Joe loses his virginity to Rose, a worldly American equestrienne: ‘He wanted her and would apparently take her without wasting any time on preliminary dalliance. He pulled her on to his knee, burying his face in the daffodil shower of her hair, kissing her wildly, roughly, madly, holding her so tight that he hurt her and she cried for mercy’. Publisher Victor Gollancz responded, “I have had many funny experiences during seven years of publishing, but this is much the funniest.” He quipped that the real reason for controversy was the title, with ‘Red’ suggesting political sympathies at odds with those of Glasgow council. Which seems unlikely: Gollancz was himself a socialist but Smith was her father’s daughter politically. The novel went into its fourth printing despite the Glaswegian objections.
Joe Prince may have disliked the cinema, but the epic scope and flamboyant setting of Red Wagon made it ideal for filmic treatment. In 1933, it was adapted by Elstree’s British International Studios, directed by the Austrian-born Paul L. Stein and starring the American actor Charles Bickford (who went on to be a three-time Oscar nominee for Best Supporting Actor) as Joe. It was an ambitious production by British standards of the time, running 50% longer than average — 107 minutes long as opposed to the usual70 minutes.
As the author of the source material, Smith felt that she was regarded ‘the lowest form of animal life” on the film set. But she also acknowledged that novelists were not suited to adapting their own work for screen and that specialist scenario writers were required. Feeding an appetite for melodrama with exotic settings, several of her subsequent novels were turned into film, including Ballerina (The Men in Her Life), Tzigane (Gypsy) and Caravan, starring actors such as Loretta Young, Chili Bouchier and Stewart Granger.
Smith cultivated a fey, uncanny image of herself in the press and in her memoir. Life’s a Circus related childhood encounters with a ghost dog called Gyp and grisly tales told by a nanny who attended the last public hanging in Britain. In the 1930s, she lived in a flat off the King’s Road with a black cat named Satan (despite the fact she was a Roman Catholic – probably a reference to her 1932 short story collection Satan’s Circus). She conjures up images of an aristocratic, urban version of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s heroine Lolly Willowes. She died at the age of 42 after a long illness and her most enduring work is probably her Regency-era novel The Man in Grey, albeit mostly by virtue of the Gainsborough Studios’ film adaptation starring James Mason and Margaret Lockwood.
Despite its entertainment value, it’s difficult to imagine Red Wagon being reissued. Unsurprisingly, Smith’s oeuvre wasn’t included in Elizabeth Macneal’s recent list of favourite circus novels for the Guardian. However, her short story ‘Candlelight’ is included in the British Library’s Tales of the Weird anthology Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird. As a glimpse inside the imagination of an unusual aristocratic bohemian, it’s left me sufficiently intrigued to try Eleanor Smith’s Gothic short fiction.
Julia Rank is a London-based theatre critic, historical researcher and academic proofreader. Her favourite things include theatrical fiction, interwar chorus girls, and the American baritone and film star Gordon MacRae. For more information, visit her website, julia-writes.com.
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Charles Williams was a friend of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and, like them, a member of the legendary Oxford literary group known as the Inklings. Gervel Lindop’s recent biography of Williams therefore refers to him as the ‘Third Inking’, while Sørina Higgins’s blog, dedicated to his life and work, calls him ‘The Oddest Inkling’. Exactly how odd is something revealed in detail by Lindop’s biography, which I strongly recommend. Williams had a reputation for saintliness in his own lifetime, but much of his private life was more complicated than that reputation suggests, and modern fundamentalists attracted by his association with the Inklings might find his interest in magic and hermeticism disconcerting.
Unlike Lewis and Tolkien, Williams was not an academic, and attended the Inklings’ meetings for the most part only as a visitor to Oxford. His background was also quite different to theirs: he was from a lower middle-class family whose financial difficulties meant he had to drop out of the University of London after a year and take a menial job in the printing industry, though he managed to rise and become an editor at the London offices of the Oxford University Press. He was also a teacher – but he lectured in what would now be called FE: night-school classes for adult learners. (Only towards the end of his life, when the OUP had moved its offices back to Oxford during the war, did he give a series of lectures on Milton at the university, arranged by Lewis and Tolkien).
Williams wrote works of popular history for OUP, as well as poetry often inspired by Arthurian myth. But his novels, ‘supernatural thrillers’ published by T.S. Eliot at Faber, were his greatest success. The Eliot connection suggests the range of Williams’s interests: unlike Lewis and Tolkien, he was not hostile to literary modernism per se.
Though Williams is now relatively obscure – at least compared to his more famous friends – his novels pioneered a third model for fantasy writers to complement those of alternate, secondary worlds (Tolkien) or portal fantasies (Lewis). Lewis himself explains how this third model worked in a short talk he gave on Williams’s novels. These books, he said, mix:
what some people call the realistic, and the fantastic. I’d rather fall back on an older critical terminology and say that they mix the Probable and the Marvellous. We meet in them, on the one hand, very ordinary modern people who talk the slang of our own day, and live in the suburbs. On the other hand, we also meet the supernatural—ghosts, magicians, and archetypal beasts. … [T]his is not a mixture of two literary kinds. … Williams is really writing a third kind of book, … in which we begin by saying, ‘Let us suppose that this everyday world were … invaded by the marvellous. Let us, in fact, suppose a violation of frontier.’
In a portal fantasy like Lewis’s Narnia chronicles, characters from our world enter another through a magical gateway such as Professor Kirke’s wardrobe. In Williams’s stories, by contrast, representatives from other realities enters ours. In some respects his stories therefore resemble weird fiction, which is also preoccupied with the terrifying consequences of a ‘violation of frontier’. Except that for Williams these intrusions were not really violations at all. As Eliot wrote in his introduction to Williams’s final novel, All Hallows’ Eve, ‘For [him] there was no frontier between the material and the spiritual world. …. To him the supernatural was perfectly natural, and the natural was also supernatural’.
I confess that my interest in Williams is really only in his last two (and best) novels, Descent into Hell (1937), and the posthumously published All Hallows’ Eve (1945): I haven’t read any of the others, and the poetry does not appeal to me at all. But these two books are quite remarkable – not least for what they do with the idea of hell and the afterlife.
Williams is undoubtedly an odd stylist: his sentences are often crabbed and convoluted, not helped by his habit of inventing neologisms for religious or theological concepts in an attempt to avoid triggering preconceptions or taking sides in pre-existing doctrinal controversies. But he can also be a writer of great power, peculiarly alive to the far-reaching consequences of seemingly small moral choices.
In Descent into Hell, the titular journey is embarked upon by a historian, Lawrence Wentworth, who runs a discussion group for young people in his village. His downfall begins with his inability to accept that Adela, a woman from that group, has no romantic interest in him. Wentworth therefore welcomes the attentions of a succubus, a spirit form of Adela, who promises to submit to his every whim. For a fantasy writer, Williams here is peculiarly hostile to fantasy, at least when it takes the form of a denial of reality – worse, a denial of Kant’s moral imperative, the recognition that others have their own autonomy and desires independent of our own.
At the same time, Wentworth is also unable to admit to a professional error – the wound to his amour propre is too great for him to bear – and both these choices seal his fate. The hell that he enters, while still alive, is one where, having refused to accept his real relations to others and his obligations to the professional community to which he belongs, he is left alone. But not merely alone. Language is necessarily social: to speak implies an interlocutor. Without the willingness to fully imagine such an interlocutor, language itself collapses, and beyond that, even the possibility of associating things in meaningful patterns.
It is a hell of solipsism. The following passage comes from the extraordinary final paragraphs of the novel:
Then everything at which he was looking rushed together and became a point, very far off, and he also was a point opposite it; and both points were rushing together, because in this place they drew towards each other from the more awful repulsion of the void. But fast as they went they never reached one another, for out of the point that was not he there expanded an anarchy of unintelligible shapes and hid it, and he knew it had gone out, expiring in the emptiness before it reached him. The shapes turned themselves into alternate panels of black and white. He had forgotten the name of them, but somewhere at some time he had thought he knew similar forms and they had had names. … There was, at the end of the grand avenue, a bobbing shape of black and white that hovered there and closed it. As he saw it there came on him a suspense; he waited for something to happen. The silence lasted; nothing happened. In that pause expectancy faded. Presently then the shape went out and he was drawn, steadily, everlastingly, inward and down through the bottomless circles of the void.
Wentworth is a living character who enters hell prematurely. Descent into Hell also features a dead character – a ghost, in effect – a wretched suicide who lingers around the site of his death in a kind of grey limbo. Near but not in the living world, he is as alone as he felt in life. But not as alone as Wentworth, since he is still able to perceive – to receive – the attention of a sympathetic woman, herself close to death, who reaches out to him.
This kind of provisional limbo state also appears in All Hallows’ Eve, and it suggests Williams’s willingness to depart from Christian orthodoxy. In traditional Christian thought, death offers a kind of terminal end point beyond which moral choice is not possible. One’s eternal fate is fixed at the moment before death. (Even if one believes in purgatory, this does not change one’s ultimate fate: everyone in purgatory will ultimately attain heaven; no one in hell will).
In these two novels, by contrast, not only is hell a place to which you condemn yourself and can enter before you die, but – for those who retain some attachment to life even after their death – moral choice is still possible. Ghosts are, in effect, invited to reconsider the meaning of their life: now that it is over, with what in their earthy existence do they wish to identify themselves? And what do they wish to transcend? Do they wish to relive and reaffirm their most selfish impulses? Or do they want to search within their histories for flickers of generosity and love, however small and faltering these might be? And they can be very small indeed: the redemption of one of Williams’ ghostly characters begins with her remembering her husband getting up in the night to fetch her a glass of water.
Williams’s novels are full of more obvious and dramatic supernatural elements: the succubus, a doppelganger, a sinister cult leader bent on world domination, the Holy Grail, a magical Tarot deck – but for me the most powerful aspect of his fantasy is the way it magnifies the consequences of seemingly small and ordinary choices we make in our earthly lives and assigns to them a cosmic and eternal significance.
Jonathan Walker grew up in Liverpool, but has lived in Glasgow, Cambridge, Swansea, Canterbury, Venice, Sydney and Melbourne. He is the author of a biography of a seventeenth-century Venetian spy, Pistols! Treason! Murder!, and a fantasy novel set in an alternate version of Venice, Five Wounds. His latest novel is a work of weird fiction set in 1980s Liverpool: The Angels of L19, published by Weatherglass Books. He has doctorates in history and creative writing.
Stella Gibbons’s first novel Cold Comfort Farm still resonates, if vaguely, in the popular mind. “Wasn’t there a movie?” Or, “didn’t I see that on TV?” In England, “something nasty in the woodshed,” the phrase invoked by the supposedly mad Aunt Ada Starkadder, proprietress of the farm, is still a cultural touchstone almost 90 years after the book was first published.
But as wonderful a satiric comic masterpiece as Cold Comfort is, the dozen or so of Stella Gibbons’s later novels that I have read are just as — if not more — rewarding because they allow a deeper experience of Gibbons’s greatest literary character: herself.
That is not to say that she wrote the same book again and again, as so often happens with writers who strike the jackpot with their first published work; rather, she creates in each book a different prism (and sometimes more than one) through which she reveals different aspects of herself. To read multiple Stella Gibbons novels is to get to know her better and better, and she is a very satisfactory companion.
She was born in 1902, the first of three children of a quiet and sweet mother who died suddenly when Stella was in her 20s and a volatile father of Irish extraction, a “bad man, but a good doctor” (as she described a character thought to be based on him). Her childhood home life was marked by her father’s rages fueled by his unsatisfied career ambitions. In his 1998 biography, Out of the Woodshed: the Life of Stella Gibbons (Bloomsbury), Stella’s nephew Reggie Oliver quotes a letter from Stella’s daughter Laura (his cousin):
Every few weeks it was ‘That name is not mentioned in this house,’ with an accompanying shudder and pursed lips, as one or other member of the family indulged in some escapade of which the other disapproved. Consequently, sides were taken….
Stella was old enough to be affected by the experience of two world wars and the accompanying changes in British culture and society, as well as by the concomitant destruction of the English countryside and the rise of highways and car culture, all of which bothered her greatly.
Well-educated herself, and a writer who honed her skills on more than 10 years of meeting newspaper deadlines, she lets slip literary references easily understood by any conventionally educated English school graduate; she asserts unapologetically the inherent differences between men and women, the value of marriage and the power of beauty–male and female; money is usually on people’s minds, and she shows she knows how to live on meager earnings. She values tidiness and order, well-turned fashions, and sensitivity to children.
That catalog of subjects and attitudes could lead one to expect a stuffy, garrulous, old-fashioned storyteller. Instead, she takes the dross of mundane lives and spins it into fairy tales that are also down to earth. She peoples her novels with men and women whose aspirations have run aground, but who inhabit a world of metaphysical rebalancings and animistic forces that permit them some escape.
——
For the purposes of this essay, I am drawing on only two novels, Bassett (1933) and The Woods in Winter (1970). They come near the start and end of her writing career. And they offer the clearest example of characters that reflect herself.
Bassett was the “conventional” book she was contractually obligated to write in order to convince her publisher to take Cold Comfort. The Woods in Winter was the last book she wrote for publication, though two other novels appeared posthumously.
Bassett opens with a typically succinct Gibbons observation:
There is a simplicity which comes from living too much in the world, as well as a simplicity which comes from living out of the world.
Hilda Baker belongs to the latter group. She is one of Gibbons’s shabby heroines of no great intellectual shakes or culture, but still worth knowing better. “Sensitive and intelligent people will refuse to believe that Miss Baker could be happy. However, Miss Baker was happy.”
She is also a beneficiary of one of those coincidences Stella regularly employs: Miss Baker (who has no living relatives) has suddenly inherited 200 pounds from a distant uncle. Added to her 180 pounds of savings from her paltry salary at a paper pattern office, she is faced with a dilemma of what to do with so much money. She fears it will “Dribble Away” (Gibbons’s caps) unless she makes a plan.
She responds to an advertisement soliciting “another lady, with some capital” to invest in converting a faded country estate to a boarding house. The response, from a Miss Eleanor Amy Padsoe, is postmarked “Bassett.”
And so we are off.
The letter from Miss Padsoe leaves Miss Baker “in some bewilderment,” and indeed, it is a masterpiece of flighty asides and unintelligible confidences. However, Hilda decides to visit. Once in the village, she accepts a ride from a handsome young man in a smart roadster, a silent girl at his side.
Miss Baker learns that the girl is Queenie Catton, another of Stella’s unlikely heroines and another partial stand-in for the author herself. Raised in a loud, activist socialist household, Queenie doesn’t fit in. She is, as her family admits, “our quiet one….So far she had effortlessly resisted all attempts to make her be anything…”
When Miss Padsoe and Miss Baker eventually meet, it does not start well. They are each horrified by the other, but of course do not say so. They eventually get along, and the flowering of their unlikely friendship is a pleasure to behold.
The young man who gives Miss Baker the ride is George Shelling, half of a cold-blooded aristocratic brother-sister duo who dream up sophisticated amusements while living in the country with their widowed mother. According to Reggie Oliver, Stella admitted she modeled the Shelling menage on the family of the man who ended their engagement; he, too, lived with his sister and mother and traveled in the “free love” set.
Queenie is the bridge between these two storylines as the hired helper to Mrs. Shelling and a loyal supporter of the two Misses.
In contrast to the louche brother and sister, Miss Padsoe and Baker pursue simple pleasures with beneficial results. “At eight-thirty precisely the two ladies, washed, dressed and trim … sat down to their eggs or sardines…. The afternoon was passed in more washing up and in cutting bread and butter for tea at half-past four, and then at half-past six it was time to begin preparing for supper at half-past seven. By ten … they ate cocoa and cake like schoolgirls, and fell into bed at eleven, drunk with unaccustomed work, and slept all night.”
In typical Gibbons fashion, Bassett climaxes in a whirlwind of loose ends being tidied up in a way that is satisfying but not always expected.
The Woods in Winter, the last novel Gibbons wrote for publication, seems an intentional bookend to Bassett and an autobiographical coda. She sets it in roughly the same period as Bassett , the early 30s. The early action takes place in two settings familiar to her, the seamy precincts of the North London of her girlhood and Hampstead Heath, where she lived much of her adult life.
Its beginning is once-upon-a-time-ish: “Some forty years ago, there used to be in North London a place called St. Philip’s Square…. It was not a true square, but a rectangle, open at one end to a main road, along which trams and buses ran up to Hampstead Heath; a drab yet swarming place….”
As in Bassett , Gibbons creates two characters far apart in social standing and education but reflecting two aspects of herself: Helen Green, the young aspiring poet (Gibbons’s first book was a collection of poems, favorably viewed by important figures of the time), and Ivy Gover, the old fabulist.
Helen is well-educated and moves in high-brow Bohemian circles but is not quite a part of them; Ivy is a barely literate char who has gypsy-like powers and a proletarian sureness of where she stands (she always thinks of Helen as “Miss Green”). Ivy and Helen are connected by the fact that Helen employs Ivy to clean the small, dark cottage she is renting from a mother of a friend of hers; it’s located in the Vale of Health, the same stretch of Hampstead Heath that Gibbons lived in.
Again, as in Bassett , a bit of luck visits a penurious city-dwelling lower-class female of a certain age. Ivy’s great-uncle, whom she hasn’t seen since her girlhood, bequeaths his rundown cottage in the country near where Ivy was born and where she was sent to char for the gentry at age 11.
For Ivy, the Square is a hectic place: “The Square simmered in the early autumn plague of heat, sending up its shrieks and shouts and heavy footsteps to a pair of small ears that carried two beads of heavy gold, chased with a design that looked ancient, on delicate lobes.” In contrast, Helen looks out on “a prospect very different…. a quiet little street, made up of grey pavement and a long brown wood fence, above which looked the innocent head of a may tree whose berries were just beginning to redden, all lit faintly by the gold of the ascending moon. A bird was singing, far off in the dark woods of the Heath–perhaps even a nightingale–anyway, it was a heartbreaking sound, and Helen thought that she was exceedingly unhappy.”
Ivy, suspicious of the lawyer’s big words, goes to Helen to have her read the letter about the bequest. Helen reassures Ivy that the offer is valid and that she is lucky to have it.
By the time she wrote The Woods in Winter, Gibbons had perfected the technique of dueling interior and exterior dialogs, where each participant is saying what they don’t think and thinking what they don’t say, as in this exchange between Ivy and Miss Green:
“Just think, Ivy. It’s beautiful country there. I … know it well…”
Ivy was not interested in what Miss Green knew.
This being a Stella Gibbons novel, there are a number of pairings both theoretical and actual and various courtships, not all successful. Marriage is one of Stella’s interests. Though she shows sympathy for those who take a more transactional approach, she comes down on the side of marrying for love. In this novel, there are two such marriages by its end.
Of Helen and Ivy, Ivy is the more compelling character. Here she is in her first full night in the cottage, with her dog Neb. Ivy has just said farewell to a friend of her late husband who has delivered her mattress in his van and put it in the bedroom upstairs. Just before he takes his final leave, he suggests she air it out.
Ivy ran up. Up the stairs she raced, light as a leaf, with Neb after her, and in a minute down tumbled her mattress, almost into the fire … straightening it with determined kicks from her sturdy small boot. “Airin’! It don’t need no airin’, do it, beauty?…”
The story never leaves the country setting once Ivy is settled there. The characters Stella has created play out their dances under her masterful direction.
Her final chapter brings us to the present of 1970, as Stella is entering the winter of her life (she was 68 when it was published). Helen makes a final visit to the quaint village near the woods of the title. The High Street of Nethersham is now a tangle of automobile traffic, rooftop television antennas and suburban villas.
Helen escapes the traffic and noise to walk to the hilltop demesne of the old Lord (long dead). Helen encounters one of her friends from the old days and asks about the characters whose fates we do not know. Gibbons writes, “Helen had not quite yet come to that age when one hesitates to ask after a contemporary not seen for years. But she was one the edge of it.”
Helen takes one last look at the Lord’s hill and its beeches as she heads toward “the flat, beetle-like tops of the cars, jerking, stopping, jerking, stopping, behind the hedges whose lower branches were clotted with litter and grey with dust.
There they stood, high above her and far away, solemn and still in the waning fire of sunset; towers and castles of rustling green; benign father-gods of the woods; filled with their gently-stirring life in the blue air of summer or roaring slowly in winter’s gales….
The last passage is a word-for-word reprise of Helen’s private musings some 40 years earlier when she proffered her congratulations to Ivy on her good fortune in inheriting the cottage (which Ivy rejected silently). This constancy of Helen’s attitudes within the span of the 40-year narrative is matched by Gibbons’s constancy in her outlook over the nearly 40 years that separate these novels; this is what makes Gibbons’s appeal timeless, just like a fairy tale.
In her monumental reference work, An Encyclopedia of Fairies (Pantheon, New York.1976), Katharine Briggs notes that the term “fairy” is relatively recent and is derived from “the classical three Fates … supernatural ladies who directed the destiny of men ….” Stella and her fictional stand-ins were deeply concerned with getting other people’s lives properly sorted out and in conformance with Gibbons’s deeply felt morality. Following her efforts over the decades is a source of pleasure.
Bassett is available from Penguin Vintage Classics and The Woods in Winter is available from Dean Street Press.
Phyllis Orrick is a retired academic editor and former alternative newspaper editor and feature writer. Follow her on Twitter: @orrickle
Little Victims is not a good novel, but it is a fascinating one. When it was published in 1932, it earned Richard Rumbold the censure of the Roman Catholic Church for its open discussion of homosexuality in public schools and Oxford, but for today’s reader its far more interesting aspects relate to its psychological aspects — often apparently subconscious — and its glimpses into the lives of the trailing edge of the Bright Young Things of Evelyn Waugh’s youth.
It’s not a good novel because it’s shoddily assembled and emotionally overwrought. Rumbold purports to tell the story of Christopher Harmsworth as seen by one of his schoolmates and friends, but he also tossed in personal letters, first-person passages, and liberal use of an omniscient narrator. The story centers around the unhappy triangle of Christopher, his tyrannical and brutish father, and his high-strung, overaffectionate, and often unstable mother. When in contact with each other, these three compounds hover on the edge of an explosive reaction.
It’s clear to Christopher that his parents should never have married. Aside from money and a peerage, his mother’s family had nothing going for them and many things going against them:
Old Lord W__ was in the last stages of debauchery brought on by habitual drunkenness and constant sexual intercourse with common prostitutes during his frequent visits to London. His wife was in a lunatic asylum, and his eldest son had committed suicide for no apparent reason.
Since they did, the next worst thing they could have done was to have children. Unfortunately, his mother became pregnant soon after the wedding, and produced little Christopher, “the unfortunate victim of the muddleheadedness and idiotic notions of his forebears.”
In the race for the lion’s share of the blame for victimizing the boy, Christopher’s mother is the clear winner. She was overly affectionate. “As thousands of men were being slaughtered in the mud of Flanders,”
She suckled his lips and gave him a thousand kisses, which were her husband’s due; she slept next his bed, and in the morning he was brought into hers, and she cuddled him between the sheets. She petted him, she took him everywhere, she spoilt him. She called him “dearest” and “darling” and “sweetest,” and held him up to everybody to be admired. It was not affection, it was passion.
No wonder, then, when Colonel Harmsworth decides to send Christopher off to boarding school at 14, one leg of the triangle is severed completely: “From that moment, Christopher took a violent dislike to his father, and continued to dislike him for the rest of his life.”
Sheltered and innocent, Christopher is ill-prepared for the realities of his public school: “Homosexuality was rife there, not only among the boys themselves, but between the masters and the boys.” To Rumbold’s somewhat self-righteous narrator, “unless you are a fool or a saint it is impossible to live in a community of perverts without becoming aware of and suspectible to its practices.” In his eyes, the young man left the school four years later accustomed to thinking of homosexuality as “the most prevalent and natural of sex manifestations.”
Going up to Oxford doesn’t improve the situation. Inspecting his tutor’s bookshelves, Christopher spots, hidden behind a set of Motley’s The Rise of the Dutch Republic such titles as Sexual Physiology, Advice to Young Men and Sexual Life in Ancient Greece. Not long after settling into his digs, Christopher is visited by a fop in a blue silk shirt and carrying an ebony walking stick who invites him to a meeting of the Sitwell Society: “Yes — Edith and Osbert and Sache; they come down and speak every term.”
Christopher attempts to set himself on the upright path with a heartfelt address on socialism to the Oxford Union, only to see that “Already he was marked, stamped — as a pervert, and he would never be able to live it down.” He dons his mantle of victimhood with little resistance. After all, “the system’s to blame — that bloody system, which tries to educate you according to its absurd standards and perverts your sensibilities in the process.”
By his third year, the bright, healthy young man has a grey complection, skin roughened from “the unrelieved application of cheap cosmetics.” His bedroom as the appearance of “an untidy beauty parlor.” He spends most of his time in the company of the likes of Chum Price, a Brian Howard-like figure of extreme aestheticism who proclaims his hobby as “rescuing pretty boys.”
It’s at one of Chum’s parties that Christopher meets Henry Armitage, an older man from London who “seemed to know and to have known everybody worth knowing.” Henry takes the young man under his wing, inviting him to his London flat and for weekends at his country estate. Henry is married to Isabella Armitage, a writer and “one of London’s most renowned Lesbians.”
If the Armitages sound suspiciously like Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, there’s a reason. They are. Little Victims is a thinly-veiled roman-à-clef that takes Rumbold’s feelings toward his parents, friends, and lovers and winds them up to a fever pitch.
In real life, Rumbold became one of Harold’s protégés and lovers while at Oxford. While Christopher’s narrator portrays Henry Armitage as a sophisticated seducer, the reality is that Rumbold was a bit of an opportunist himself, particularly when it came to indulging in his fantasies. Nicolson would later write of Rumbold, “He had no control over his fantasies and day-dreams, over the alternating gusts of elation and melancholy that assailed him, over his almost incredible ignorance and therefore suspicion of the world around him.”
Rumbold published Little Victims while still at Oxford, and quickly faced the price of his youthful choices. When attending a service in the private chapel of the Old Palace in Oxford soon after its publication, Father Ronald Knox refused to offer him the Sacrament.
“When he reached me,” Rumbold later recalled, “He snatched the silver plate our of my hands and passed it one to the next person.” When Rumbold later wrote Knox demanding an explanation, Knox replied, “A few weeks ago I heard from the Archbishop of Birmingham that somebody had called attention to your novel, and asked if some public notice ought not to be taken of it.” The Archbishop told Knox that Rumbold ought not to be admitted to Communion. “The whole book is foul and offensive, and unless he withdraws it from circulation, and says he is sorry for having pbulished it, I do not see how we can allow him to receive Holy Communion.”
“I have written a very moral book,” Rumbold told reporters when news of the Archbishop’s decision became public. “I have attacked every kind of sexual licence, but my Archbishop, like most of the Catholic hierarcy, has no powers of discrimination. I wish I knew what he objects to in my novel.”
“I was at a Catholic school. People seem to believe that Catholic schools are immune from vice and different from Protestant schools. That is untrue. They are worse. How can I make Catholic schools pure unless I point out first of all how bad they are?” To some extent, he had a point. Its settings aside, Little Victims is as much a moralistic tract as Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, including its melodramatic ending (Christopher finds himself incapable of heterosexual love, goes mad, and shoots himself).
Rumbold told reporters that he would appeal to the Pope. “I feel sure his Holiness will reinstatement, being a man of great sense and intelligence,” he assured them. He swore that he would travel to Rome for a private audience with the Pope, but there’s no evidence that ever took place.
Rumbold’s was a life of bold promises and disappointing results. If he’d hoped that Little Victims would launch him as a bright young talent, he was soon discouraged. As William Plomer later wrote in his introduction to A Message in Code: The Diary of Richard Rumbold 1932-1961, “It was the work of a confused young man who had been subjected to exceptional strains, was unsure of himself but ambitious, and was wildly and rashly trying to assert himself.”
Rumbold suffered from ill-health, depression, restlessness, and a near-constant sense of dissatisfaction with his own life and the state of the world around him. He trained as an RAF pilot during the war but lost his commission after flying an Anson under the Menai Bridge. He translated a collection of Flaubert’s letters and wrote a biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, but never managed to produce the great novel or poems he felt he should. In March 1961, while working with his friend and loyal companion Hilda Young in hotel room at Palermo, he stepped into the bedroom and, moments later, fell from the window and was killed instantly. The Italian coroner would not rule it a suicide.
The one subject that most interested Rumbold was himself. Little Victims was his first and least successful attempt to portray his life and his intense feelings toward his parents and others. He later revisited the story in his autobiography, My Father’s Son, first published pseudonymously as “Richard Lumford” in 1949. His third version can be seen in the diaries edited by Plomer. Plomer asked for its readers to think kindly of his late friend:
I myself knew Richard well for nearly a quarter of a century. I found him, in the face of his recurrent troubles, a courageous and exceptionally honest man, warmly affectionate and unembittered. Not one line in the papers he left and nothing I have heard about him, whether in his lifetime or after his death, has made me think otherwise. His courage and honesty light up the evidence of his lifelong battle to overcome his troubles and fulfil himself as a person and as a writer.
If Clarissa is a neglected read, it might have brought some of that neglect upon itself. It’s 1500 pages long for a start and over the month I read it, I developed aches and pains from lugging the thing about. It’s in epistolary form, a mode of storytelling that resolutely declines to come back in fashion, even in an online age. Its morals are not our own. It’s about a rape, which arrives about a thousand pages in. You can see why people give it a miss. Still, you should read it. You just have to acclimatise.
Clarissa is a product of the Wild West era of the novel, when the form hadn’t quite been fixed yet. A novel could be a lawless hotchpotch of philosophical dialogues, melodrama, borrowed stories and crude farce. Clarissa played a part in domesticating the form, in erecting the dry stone walls of realism, but it still very much belongs to the rougher age. It turns, in its later pages, into something like a Christian chapbook on a vast scale.
Another cause of the book’s neglect might be that its author, Samuel Richardson, lacks glamour. He was, in every sense, bourgeois. He didn’t have the frenzied entrepreneurialism of Defoe, the worldly conviviality of Fielding or Sterne’s strenuous peculiarity. He was smug about his achievements, obsequious to his social betters and prone to tedious moralising. He wanted novels to be respectable. He seemed unaware of the streak of lechery that runs through all his work. He’d be easy to dismiss, if Clarissa wasn’t so good. Greatness doesn’t always fall where it’s expected.
His debut novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740) is the tale of a fifteen year old servant girl whose reward for resisting her employer’s sexual harassment is his hand in marriage and the riches and acclaim that go with it. Even at the time, there seemed something not right about this and the book’s denouement annoyed Henry Fielding so much he spent his first two novels taking the piss out of it, going so far as to name the first Shamela.
Richardsons’ follow up, Clarissa, came in 1748 and at first seems more of the same. Clarissa Harlowe is young, beautiful and a paragon of virtue, this virtue expressing itself in pious reflections, acts of charity and a strict system of daily organisation, which we are given in full (it’s that kind of novel). Robert Lovelace is also a looker, generous and charming, but abnormally dedicated to having it off and unscrupulous in furthering this cause. The book consists mostly of letters between Clarissa and her rather more likeable friend Anna, and Lovelace and Belford, a wavering fellow rake. Only, somehow, unlike Pamela, it slaps. The moralist in Richardson is restrained, at least for a while, and the artist in him takes over.
Dr Johnson is supposed to have said that anyone reading Clarissa for the plot would end up killing themselves, but there is a story of sorts. Clarissa’s family are keen on her marrying Solmes, an unappealing neighbour, and when she demurs, they take the very eighteenth-century step of holding her captive. Lovelace, meanwhile, has spotted her and has Designs. In a panic, Clarissa flees with him to London and is promptly held captive again. Perhaps Dr Johnson had a point. Yet I was completely gripped.
What matters isn’t the plot so much, but something else that happens as we go on. The mad abundance of letters to and fro, the characters all being compulsive jotters down of every thought, yanks us into the action. Richardson starts to use the letters like Shakespeare uses soliloquies. His characters argue with themselves, change their minds, waver in their intents, over a long series of erotic negotiations and, perhaps for the first time in the English novel, we feel we are seeing actual human beings and can look inside their thoughts. Clarissa and Lovelace might have been supposed to represent chastity and libertinage respectively, but there’s always the feeling of actual people behind these archaic beliefs, who won’t always live up to them.
So, Clarissa is exemplary, but also stubborn, priggish and far more attracted to Lovelace than she’d like to be. Lovelace, who could have been a moustache-twirling cardboard baddie, becomes something far more complex, split between his absurd and frightening commitment to the sexual chase and his growing regard for his victim. It’s an extraordinary act of ventriloquism, so that reading the Lovelace letters, it’s easy to forget we are reading Richardson at all. It’s as though the Puritan author poured all his buried flamboyance, libido and wit into the performance, along with a smidgeon of class resentment. Lovelace is fun to read. Richardson expressed some shock at how popular Lovelace proved, especially with female readers, but it’s easy to see why this was. He’s funny, he’s intelligent. He is also, we learn, a rapist and, even knowing it was coming, his drugging and rape of Clarissa still has the power to horrify.
The first time I read Clarissa, her ordeal struck me as implausible. My 20-year-old self didn’t believe we lived, anymore, in a world where wealthy individuals ferry teenage girls into brothels with the aid and assistance of their peers. Many years later, this disbelief has passed. Apparently likeable men do monstrous things unchallenged and Lovelace is an ancestor of every charming monster, from Humbert Humbert to James Franco. Clarissa’s preoccupation with bodily autonomy is put in religious terms, but, squinting past this, it’s impressive how much Richardson noticed the difficulties women face. And in Clarissa’s friendship with Anna Howe, who teases her and playfully toys with her own suitor, he created -to this male reader- a convincing friendship between two teenage girls. There’s something heartening in one of the founding English novels being about a young woman’s act of refusal.
After he rapes Clarissa, an alternately penitent and defiant Lovelace proposes marriage, a then standard way of saying sorry and restoring honour to all parties. Clarissa is having none of it. She forgives all who have wronged her, but is set upon leaving a world that has done its best to subject and degrade her. Here the book becomes much odder. Richardson seems to remember his business is offering life lessons and Clarissa embarks on a decline that is also an apotheosis, bidding farewell over a long 500 pages. At least half of this is great; long before they were considered diseases, Richardson seems to have understood PTSD and what looks like anorexia and the slow conversion to virtue of Lovelace’s friend Belford can still move, but some of it exasperates. My own tolerance was tested when, with a good few hundred pages left, our heroine buys a coffin. Having invented realism, Richardson swerves away into melodrama at whiplash speed and we are given a series of unlikely come-uppances and moments of repentance. Clarissa herself becomes a near saint rather than the sympathetic young woman of the opening stretch. She takes longer to die than Rasputin or Clive James. The moralising side of Richardson takes over and we are given many homilies on correct behaviour, including a demented passage where he tries to convince us that women of loose morals are ugly when not wearing make-up (this argument is not made, as you might expect, in praise of cosmetics).
Perhaps the problem comes from Richardson having no model of female excellence that wasn’t chiefly passive. All the characters line up to tell us, at dull length, how Clarissa is the most virtuous of women, but there isn’t any suggestion she could do more with her greatness than turn someone down and die. There’s a gulf between our way of looking at the world and his, and Clarissa’s death doesn’t quite cross it. You have to think yourself back into an England where refusing to marry your rapist could be an act of shocking radicalism. If you can do this, it sort of works.
If this proves too great a leap, if you can’t take Richardson’s forcing of characters who seemed to pulse with life into a sort of moral tableau, there’s still a hundred reasons to read this book. Read it for the weird moments of recognition, for the conversations we’re still sadly having, for Belford correcting Lovelace in his disbelief in female friendships, for Anna observing, after her friend is raped, that she now views seemingly good men as ones “who haven’t yet been found out.” Read it for the way erotic attraction and moral repulsion play against each other in Clarissa’s letters about Lovelace, read it for the stream of consciousness bricolage of the letters Clarissa writes when her mind is disordered, read it for the dash and swagger of Lovelace’s letters hiding an ethical abyss, read it for Anna and Clarissa’s friendship, for Richardson’s sudden moments of startling insight. You’ll roll your eyes at times but you might find yourself dabbing them as well.
Rob Palk is the author of Animal Lovers (2018, Sandstone Press) and has written for The Guardian, The Fence and the Erotic Review and broadcast on the BBC. He is currently seeking agent representation for his second novel, The Crowd Pleaser. He tweets at @robpalkwriter.
Poor Peter Vansittart. When he died after a career spanning seven decades and producing over 40 books, some newspapers reached back to the very beginning and dredged up a damning line written about his first novel I Am the World: “I can without hesitation say that this is the worst book ever published.” Just which critic wrote that, I’ve been unable to determine. But it’s the sort of absolute declaration that lends itself to endless repetition.
Was the judgment deserved? That’s very hard to tell because I Am the World has since become exceedingly rare. There are just three copies listed for sale, all well over $100, and six library copies listed in WorldCat.org. From the reviews I’ve been able to locate, I Am the World is, like several of Vansittart’s later novels, set in an abstract location — in this case, a country referred to simply as “The Land.” It tells of the ascent to the throne of absolute dictatorship of a charismatic peasant named Goran, aided by a Jewish banker named Finkenstein.
Vansittart’s descriptions of Finkenstein are difficult to read now. He’s a man “big-nosed in expensive glory” whose “slim tentacles swarmed everywhere.” Vansittart calls the Jews of The Land “mysterious people borm from the knowledge of Babylon darkly, living in the two worlds of race and nation, hiding disease and strength behind the glitter of their eyes.” Another Jew is “a short red figure with a snake’s tongue and a brain fertile and oozing like a grey sponge pressed by a hand seeking its own advantage.”
But the magnetic Goran is a bad piece of work, too. He beats up a blind old woman: “Goran smashed his fist savagely and with all his strength into her face, and she dropped recumbent and bleeding to the ground. With a single curse he stepped over her dragging the sack up from behind the wordless body.” When he ultimately rejects worldly power and seeks refuge in the sanctuary of a cathedral, he makes it clear that there is no place for the likes of Finkenstein there.
Though the “worst book” review may be apochryphal, the reviews I’ve managed to locate are hardly the kind to show off to Mom:
V.S. Pritchett, Vansittart’s editor at Chatto & Windus, did suggest numerous changes, including toning down the language, all of which the author declined to make. This set a pattern that Vansittart repeated throughout his career. In a fascinating survey of Vansittart’s career packaged in a review of his 1986 novel, The Aspect in the London Review of Books, Martin Seymour-Smith wrote that, “The problem for Vansittart has always been that he is excessive: he wants to achieve too much within the bounds of a single volume. Nor will he give this ambition up – but by now his persistence has become courageous and impressive.”
Seymour-Smith identified this problem as far back as I Am the World. The book, he wrote, “is excessive (promisingly so): about the rise and fall of a dictator clearly based on Hitler, it seems to want to say everything that can be said about dictatorship. It is relentlessly and ambitiously unpleasant – the brutal and dark side of Vansittart has not, surprisingly, attracted the attention of reviewers – and is written in a curiously over-rhetorical, almost gushing style which sits very awkwardly with its sombre theme.”
Somehow, Vansittart managed to be a prolific producer of books despite his consistent habit of writing as he chose. Reviewing Vansittart’s novel Landlord in 1971, Auberon Waugh called him “one of those heroic people who just go on writing novels in English.” Francis King, reviewing Lancelot, Vansittart’s 1978 retelling of the Arthur legend, described the author as a noble eccentric: “Though he does not usually appear in histories of the modern English novel, though he has won no literary prizes and though his name is probably unfamiliar to the majority of the general reading public, he is a writer whose singularity is matched by his strength.” He continued to have advocates for his particular exceptionalism. In 1983, reviewing Vansittart’s Roman novel Three-Six-Seven: Memoirs of a Very Important Man, wondered, “When will this writer of extraordinary talent receive his due?”
He did get formal due, courtesy of the Queen, just before his death in 2008, being awarded the Order of the British Empire. Although the New York Times obit said that Vansittart’s work was “like caviar to the critics and a stranger to the best-seller list,” he did crack the UK best-seller lists with his 1995 survey In the Fifties. And, as D. J. Taylor noted in Vansittart’s Independent obituary, the writer “belonged to a practically exclusive literary category: the defiantly highbrow novelist who, sustained by a private income and supportive publishers, writes more or less to please himself. Such qualifications are usually a guarantee of direst obscurity. Certainly none of Vansittart’s 40-odd books sold more than a few thousand copies or even went into paperback.” Although Taylor called Vansittart was a marginal figure in English literature, he credited him with “the virtual reinvention of the post-war historical novel.”
Rosemary Tonks wrote six novels, but in many ways they’re six versions of the same story. Married or not, her lead characters are women, young but not naïve, not sure of what they want but sure of what they don’t, sure that they want a man in their life but not sure which one or how. They’re poised like a driver at a red light in an unfamiliar neighborhood, knowing they’ve got to make a decision: Left? Right? Straight? The only thing that’s clear is that backing up is not an option.
In the case of Sophie in Tonks’s last novel, The Halt During the Chase, as the book opens, she’s left her job as an administrator at a language school in Kensington and is wondering whether she truly loves Philip, the rising star in Treasury. As the book opens, she’s also in the middle of a conversation about school knickers at her mother’s house in Hampstead.
In the book’s opening chapter, there in that Hampstead kitchen, Tonks perfectly captures the way the pendulum swings back and forth between affection and annoyance in an adult daughter’s conversation with her mother. The shared memories then painful, now comic: “The regulation dark blue knickers. And they were knickers too!” The mother’s desire to see the daughter settled, the daughter’s chafing at the spectre of entrapment. And the mother’s long-developed and now deadly skill in wielding the weapons of conversation. Such as that simple and deceptive question: “How’s it going?”
“How’s it going?” So childish, so shrewish, that I had to answer on the same level: “How’s what going?” She would then draw her face into an expression of nauseating complicity, just like a mime who only has one second to portray some human failing and so has to do it with decisive vulgarity. Heaven knows what underworld theatre she got the expression from, but it was invaluable.
Sophie’s mother is also a bottomless well of advice and life lessons, on everything from religion to noses:
A woman’s nose has to be small and neat. But a man is quite different. If a man hasn’t got a good nose, he should sit down and grow himself one, because he’s going to need it!
Backing up is most definitely not an option for Sophie.
In fact, after two hours in that kitchen, she feels suffocated. Desperate just to get out the front door and to the freedom that lies outside, even on the sidewalks of Hampstead.
More air! I couldn’t get enough of it — I wanted a cold, flowing river of it past my cheeks. Drink it down, white stuff, and get rid of all the vinegar inside you that makes you trembling and irresolute, afraid that you ‘re not rich enough for your lover, whom you love too much on one level and doubt on another.
Moving foward is the only choice, but how is still in doubt. The obvious answer seems to be marriage with Philip. Brilliant, fit, handsome, and obviously destined for a future KCB, Philip is also the safe choice: “the sort of man with whose life nothing could possibly go wrong; decisions were permanent, and ended at death.” Philip is a precursor of the Tony Blair Labourite: socialist, but not in a sweaty way. His socialism, Sophie thinks, is “so snobbish, so exclusive, so bogus.”
How snobbish, she suddenly realizes, when, lying together in a hotel bed after making love, Philip tells her, “I was going to ask you to come and live with me. But I can’t promise you there won’t be an emotional bust-up in five years’ time. And then you’ll be less well off financially than you are now.”
To Philip, this is both pragmatic and empathetic. What better demonstrates how much he cares for Sophie than his consideration for how hard it will be when he dumps her? To Sophie, this is soul crushing. Trapped beside Philip in that perfectly equipped, airtight hotel room, she feels herself being swallowed whole. Again, she finds herself suffocating. She claws through the heavy curtains, manages to crack up the window, and drinks in the air. “I have never tasted anything like it. Through that gap in the plating of the hotel, I began to carry on my life once again.”
In his perfect dispassionate way, Philip has pushed Sophie out into that intersection, forcing her to make a choice.
Here, however, we find the one thing that distinguishes Sophie from Tonks’s other heroines. She’s begun to realize she’s got a soul. She’s started attend lectures by Mr. Ruback, Hampstead’s resident mystic. She may not fully understand how she will develop her spiritual self, but she knows that it will not be Philip’s way — having all the right opinions, furnishing one’s life with all the right accessories. “Isn’t buying new lampshades a form of slow death?” she wonders.
The Halt During the Chase is not only Rosemary Tonks’ funniest book but it’s also her deepest. Or rather, it’s a book that hovers on the edge of depth. By the time the book was published, Tonks had entered a period of soul-searching that had been triggered by her mother’s death in 1968. As Neil Astley wrote in his Guardian obituary, “Rosemary turned her back on Christianity, and for the next eight years attended spiritualist meetings, consulted mediums and healers, and took instruction from Sufi ‘seekers’ before turning to a Chinese spiritual teacher and an American yoga guru. All these she repudiated in turn.”
One opens the book thinking the chase of the title is the hunt of one sex for another. Sophie does turn from Philip to take some interest in his half-brother Guy, but the real quest is a spiritual one. “They taught you that it was your job to develop yourself, as the primary purpose of life,” she says of Ruback’s lectures: “the chase is inward [Emphasis added].” It clear that this is Sophie’s most likely direction when she exits her intersection.
Though Tonks ultimately returned to Christianity years later, she dismissed her own writing as something as pointless as buying new lampshades. She burned an unpublished novel and if she’d had her way, would have seen to it that every copy of her published books saw the same fate.
If one knows nothing about Rosemary Tonks, The Halt During the Chase is a remarkable work, studded like a bejeweled belt with shrewd and funny observations and perceptive about the quandaries of women looking for ways to make a life not centered on a man and family. But once you know her story, it’s hard to read Halt without sensing the spiritual direction in which she was about to turn, without knowing that she would soon want to destroy the very words we are reading.
It’s not hard to think of fiction set in Cambridge, from E.M. Forster’s Maurice (written in 1913-14, published posthumously in 1971) to Dusty Answer (1927) by Rosamund Lehmann and, more recently, Laura Barnett’s The Versions of Us (2015). But I’m convinced that well-written nonfiction can bring an authentic story to light in a way that no novel can. My research is on Cambridge’s first women students, university wives and college tutors (link) and there’s nothing like hearing their own voices, in the form of memoirs and biographies based on their letters and diaries. Here I focus more closely on two of these books.
Mary Paley Marshall’s memoir What I Remember was published by Cambridge University Press, 1947. It’s a slim volume, only 50 pages long, with a jaunty introduction by the historian G.M. Trevelyan who writes:
If people who knew not the Victorians will absent themselves from the felicity of generalising about them for a while, and read this short book, they can then return to the game refreshed and instructed.
What I Remember begins, as many good stories do, with a happy childhood. Mary’s was spent in a rose-covered country rectory, where her father Reverend Thomas Paley encouraged his daughters’ education: ‘We had a father who took part in work and play and who was interested in electricity and photography’, she recalls. She moved to Cambridge in 1871 as one of the University’s earliest women students and one of the ‘first five’ at Newnham College; Girton College had begun two years previously. The idea that unmarried women could live apart from their parents and attend lectures was, as Paley Marshall said herself, ‘an outrageous proceeding’ at the time.
Soon after she arrived in Cambridge, she became fascinated by Political Economy because of Alfred Marshall’s lectures. He was ‘a great preacher,’ she observes, who spoke passionately about the need for women’s equality in education and quoted from George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss. With his encouragement, Mary was one of the first two women to sit for the University’s final year exams in 1874 and she became Newnham’s first residential lecturer.
By the mid-1870s the Pre-Raphaelite era of colour in dress and house decoration had dawned all over England. As Florence Ada Keynes later wrote: ‘Newnham caught the fever. We trailed about in clinging robes of peacock blue, terra-cotta red, sage green or orange, feeling very brave and thoroughly enjoying the sensation it caused’ (By-ways of Cambridge History (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1956, first published 1947)). The college room that Mary studied and slept in was, like those of her students, papered in William Morris designs and hung with Burne-Jones prints. At the age of twenty-five she was that rare thing in Victorian times, an unmarried woman who lived independently from her parents and earned a good income doing a job she loved.
Then she and Alfred Marshall married and accepted posts at the newly founded University College, Bristol, where they taught and together published a textbook on The Economics of Industry (1879). Their working marriage seemed the ideal of an intellectual partnership that Mary had dreamed of, and What I Remember describes the happy years the Marshalls spent in Sicily and in Oxford before returning in 1885 to Cambridge. Alfred was made a Professor and published The Principles of Economics (1890) and Mary returned to her post at Newnham, where her inspiring teaching would have a great influence on one student: Winnie Seebohm.
‘This is the true story of a young woman who lived in the later part of Queen Victoria’s reign,’ Victoria Glendinning writes at the beginning of A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter, her biography of Seebohm.
But do not be misled into thinking that because it is history it has nothing to do with you. 1885 is yesterday. It is probably tomorrow too. — From A Suppressed Cry
The prize-winning biographer of Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell and Leonard Woolf, among others, Glendinning took as her first subject her Victorian great-aunt Winnie Seebohm, but the book is no less powerful for Seebohm’s obscurity. A Suppressed Cry was not much noticed when it was published in 1969 and it disappeared from view until it was reissued by Virago in 1995 with a new introduction by the author.
The issue at the heart of A Suppressed Cry is how a young woman from a close-knit Hertfordshire family rebelled against their loving claims on her and achieved her ambition to study at Cambridge. The Seebohms were linked to other Quaker clans in what Glendinning describes as ‘a tight genealogical spiral’ with banking and scholarly connections. Winnie’s father was the economic historian Frederic Seebohm, and she grew up with her siblings and invalid mother in an idyllic house called the Hermitage in rural Hitchin. Despite her obvious intelligence, Winnie was expected to be a ‘good daughter’, contented with flower-arranging and visiting her Quaker relations until a suitable husband was found for her. But she decided that ‘no woman (it is not my business to consider a man’s life) has any excuse for living a life that is not worth living’.
So, in 1885, at the age of 22, she took the gruelling Cambridge entrance exams and won a place at Newnham. A Suppressed Cry reproduces some of the touching letters and diary entries she wrote there. Winnie was thrilled with her college room, her new friends and the freedom to spend her days reading books and writing essays. She adored her tutors, particularly Mary Paley Marshall, who taught Political Economy ‘from a philanthropic woman’s point of view’. ‘She is a Princess Ida,’ Winnie told her sister, thinking of the heroine of Tennyson’s poem The Princess who founded a university for women.
She wears a flowing dark green cloth robe with dark brown fur round the bottom (not on the very edge) – she has dark brown hair which goes back in a great wave and is very loosely pinned up behind –very deep-set large eyes, a straight nose – a face that one likes to watch. Then she is enthusiastic and simple. She speaks fluently and earnestly with her head thrown back a little and her hands generally clasped or resting on her desk. She looks oftenest at the ceiling but every now and then straight at you.
Winnie wanted to become a teacher just like the marvellous Mrs Marshall, but her time as a student was heartbreakingly brief. After just six weeks at Cambridge, she fell ill and was brought back to the Hermitage to be nursed by her family. ‘How queer it looks to see everybody so leisurely here!’ Winnie wrote to her classmate Lina Bronner, confessing how she longed to return to Cambridge. ‘I imagine you lingering on dear Clare Bridge, and King’s spires will be looking grey and sharp against the sky.’
Her kindly tutor Mary Paley Marshall also wrote to her. She was the only woman Winnie knew who seemed to have it all, combining fulfilling academic work with her role as a wife. ‘If she is the woman of the future, I am sure the world will do very well,’ Winnie wrote in her diary. It was one of the last things she wrote. She died after a severe asthma attack – though she may also have had undiagnosed anorexia – just a few weeks later. Expected from childhood to suppress her ambitions and put others’ needs first, Seebohm was, in Glendinning’s memorable description, ‘left stranded on the shores of the nineteenth century’.
Mary Paley Marshall’s married life was far from the ideal that Winnie perceived. In the early 1880s Alfred turned against the idea of women at Cambridge: ‘it is not likely that men will go on marrying, if they are to have competitors as wives’ he told LSE founder Beatrice Webb. He insisted that The Economics of Industry, the book he and Mary wrote together, should be pulped and in 1897 he voted against women being awarded Cambridge degrees. But unlike Winnie, Mary was a survivor and she had the final word. After Alfred’s death in 1924 she co-founded Cambridge University’s Marshall Library of Economics. She worked there for nearly twenty years and her portrait now hangs above the library staircase opposite his.
What was left out of (or ‘forgotten’) in Mary Paley Marshall’s memoir What I Remember is at least as interesting as what was put in; and the cheering counterbalance to Winnie Seebohm’s sad story is the continuing success of Newnham, which celebrates 150 years as a women’s college this year.
Dr Ann Kennedy Smith is a freelance writer and researcher based in Cambridge. Her book reviews and essays have been published in the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Slightly Foxed and the Journal of Victorian Culture among others. You can follow her blog and other activities at AKennedySmith.com.
And so they sat and talked and drank and even sang a little. And the Puppa came beaming up with fresh supplies, and the Mumma sat at the desk and scolded the Puppa roundly because he hadn’t done anything wrong.
And at a table in the corner a pair of palooka writers looked on fascinated and invented fantastic names for them, and imagined their life stories.
The palooka man had a shock of black hair like a Japanese doll without a fringe, a moon-shaped, moon-coloured face that looked like a moon that needed shaving, and ash all over him. His name was S.J. Simon.The girl palooka looked like a Semitic sparrow. She was Caryl Brahms.
And they didn’t know what the future was to hold for them either.
But you could bet your monomark there’d be a lot of laughter in it.
From You Were There.
I didn’t know what a monomark was when I first read this (an ancestor of the postcode, apparently) but the rest made complete sense to me. It is the final paragraph of the last novel written by Brahms and Simon, completed by Caryl Brahms after S. J. Simon’s death in 1948 and, entirely appropriately, it is the story of their first meeting. Even now I find it moving, because for me it is one of the best farewells of all time. It’s a tribute to a novel-writing partnership that lasted only eleven years but in that time produced eleven books, several short stories and a host of films, stage plays, radio broadcasts and television adaptations. They were called “lunatics of genius” by the press; they invented at least one genre between them, and while only one of their joint novels is currently in print, they remain my favourite writers of all time.
Caryl Brahms was born Doris Abrahams in Surrey in 1901. S.J. Simon – real name Simon Jacobovitch Skidelsky – was born in Ekaterinoslav in 1906, the son of Russian Jews who emigrated to France after the revolution. The two first met when they were fellow lodgers at a house on Finchley Road, and they first worked together on contributing subjects for the Evening Standard cartoonist David Low; forming an instant rapport, they soon decided to collaborate on a novel. They had known success in other areas – Brahms had written a very A.A. Milne-esque slim volume of verse called The Moon On My Left, while Simon (as noted elsewhere on this site) was one of the best bridge players of all time – but the decision to become a novel-writing duo was a brilliant one.
The first Brahms and Simon novel, A Bullet In The Ballet, was an instant hit. The first of several comic murder mysteries set in the world of dance, A Bullet In The Ballet combined expert knowledge (Brahms was a balletomane and brilliant theatre critic), superb character writing (the member of the Ballet Stroganoff company are fantastical creatures, rendered just the right side of caricature), and a new way of writing crime fiction, that of introducing a long-suffering detective (Inspector Adam Quill) into a closed world of people whose self-obsession, egotism and devotion to their craft would make, frankly, anyone want to murder them.
But mostly it was the humour that made A Bullet In The Ballet so good. Characters as disparate as modernist choreographer Nicholas Nevajno, always trying to cash a bad cheque, and the prima donna Stroganova, always hoping for six curtain calls, were depicted in a prose style that combined, unexpectedly, the floriate excess of the ballet world with a new kind of bone-dry wit. One of the great joys of reading Brahms and Simon is their unique way of turning a sentence, the way they can convey changing moods in a sentence, one minute mocking the foolishness of human beings and the next bringing out unexpected sympathies. For lunatics of genius who could write at the same pace as their beloved Marx Brothers, Brahms and Simon were also full of heart and love for their creations. Almost, to use one of their favourite turns of phrase, they might be sentimental writers.
A Bullet In The Ballet was the first in a long series of Stroganoff novels, but Brahms and Simon were unable to restrict themselves to ballet mysteries: their other great achievement – many would say greater – was to, essentially, invent the historical comedy. Most people would say that the best Brahms and Simon novel is 1941’s No Bed For Bacon, and it would be insane to argue against this notion (although I will try soon). No Bed For Bacon, written during the London Blitz when both writers were air defense wardens, is not just a magnificent imagining of the London of Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, it is possibly the greatest comic novel of all time. Part romance – it tells the story of Shakespeare’s affair with the lady-in-waiting-turned-boy-actress Viola, it’s also part history lesson (a scene where old seadogs recall the victory over the Armada, written at the last minute to up the word count, is poignant and moving) and it is entirely, outrageously funny. Only a stone carving or a genuinely bad person could not love it.
Shakespeare sprang to his feet. ‘Master Bacon,’ he demanded passionately, ‘do I write my plays or do you?’ Bacon looked at him. He shrugged.
From No Bed for Bacon
And great though No Bed For Bacon is, it is possibly not as great as the duo’s other notable historical novel, the epically glorious Don’t Mr. Disraeli, which is nothing more and nothing less than a comic tribute to the entire 19th century (its authors said that it was “not a novel set in the Victorian age but a novel set in its literature”). Based around a Victorian reworking of the Romeo and Juliet story, with Capulets and Montagues replaced by Clutterwicks and Shuttleforths, Don’t, Mr. Disraeli is also infected with the spirit, marvelously, of J. W. Dunne’s long-neglected but at the time hugely-influential An Experiment With Time, which proposed that time was not linear at all but rather simultaneously occurring everywhere, a viewpoint adopted by J. B. Priestley in An Inspector Calls and other plays. Brahms and Simon use Dunne’s notion to present a Victorian era where anyone can appear in the book so long as they lived or died in the 19th century: thus the Marx Brothers and the Duke of Wellington exist side by side, while Victoria herself appears many times at every stage of her life, from dowager widow to young bride. Stuffed with vignettes, running gags (even the title of the book is a catchphrase) and moments of great power (a montage concerning the poor of London is worthy of its roots in Henry Mayhew), Don’t, Mr. Disraeli may sometimes lack the lightness of No Bed For Bacon, but it is an extraordinary achievement.
Brahms and Simon have always been immensely popular with other writers: Don’t, Mr. Disraeli was admired by Evelyn Waugh, who namechecked it in his Sword Of Honour trilogy, while No Bed For Bacon is one of Neil Gaiman’s favourite books. Their work has been adapted for stage, radio, television and cinema: particularly worth watching are the film versions of Trottie True and No Nightingales. They wrote superb short stories for Lilliput magazine, some of which were collected in To Hell with Hedda. And when Simon died suddenly in 1948, Caryl Brahms found a new collaborator in Ned Sherrin, with whom she worked until her death in 1982. Not enough of their work is currently in print, aside from No Bed For Bacon, which enjoyed a brief flurry of new recognition when people flagged up its accidental and coincidental similarity to the Tom Stoppard-scripted movie Shakespeare In Love. Now it is the 21st century and it has been three quarters of a century since the “Semitic sparrow” and the man with the moon-shaped face wrote together, but they will always be my favourite writers, and those of many other people. Much of their work is out of print, but copies of their books are easy to find online, and other readers will be drawn to them as I was.
And if I had one, I’d bet my monomark on it.
David Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Night Train, was published in September 2020. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.
This is my contribution to Kaggsy and Simon Thomas’s (Stuck in a Book) #1936club celebration.
If you’re a theater lover like me, All Star Cast is the next best thing to the thrill of seeing a live performance. That’s because it’s about a live theater performance as experienced by both actors and audience.
Its premise is simple: a young theater critic, David Winters, arrives at the Empress Theatre in a taxi with a fellow critic, O’Hara. They’re there to attend the premier of a new play, The Ace of Wands, by the veteran playwright William Renishaw. And over the course of the next 270-some pages, Naomi Royde-Smith takes us through that experience.
We watch the audience dribble in, take their seats, converse with each other, anticipating the curtain’s rise. We follow the action on stage through three acts, hear the dialogue, watch the actors come and go, observe the sets and the use of props, feel the tension grow as it comes to seem as if the wrong person is going to be sent up for murder, sense the tragic relief as the right person arrives at the decision to admit guilt. And then, after the cast takes their bows, we join the slow stream climbing the stairs to the lobby, sharing reflections on the performance.
Fin.
When All Star Cast was first published, more than a few reviewers expressed surprise that no one had ever come up with the idea before. It’s not the same thing as reading a script. Royde-Smith includes all, or virtually all, the dialogue, but instead of stage instructions to the director and cast, she describes the action as seen by the audience — in particularly, by David Winters, who, though new to the job of critic, is an experienced and keen-eyed theater-goer.
An action, for example, as simple as a character picking up a small table lamp and placing it near another character is more than it seems:
“Queer bit of business with the lamp,” whispered the little man, as Rawlinson left the stage, “I wonder what it has been done for.”
“I wonder,” murmured David, not attempting to express his own recognition of the change in lighting effected by this simple and obvious gesture. The pillar of white light between the still unclosed doors in the centre of the background now showed faint and grey like the plinth of some vague funereal monument. The light from the shaded lamp on the ground made a round pool on the rug by the chesterfield, and threw a diffused circular glow upwards, changing the shadows of the room.
Is this something in the script or something the director has added? Something incidental or intentional?
Well of course, in a good performance, as this one seems to be, nothing is incidental, and a few pages later, we see that the lamp allows the murderer — and the audience — to see a crucial prop: a tarot card, the Ace of Wands. The Ace of Wands shows a hand holding a staff emerging from a cloud. Right-side up, it signals promise, a new opportunity; reversed, it warns of misfortune to come. Which way the card is read, and when and to whom the card appears, becomes instrumental to the plot twists that follow the murder in Act One.
We, like the audience, are surprised that the victim is the difficult Russian wife, played by Vera Paley, “famous for wearing to-day what every fashionable woman would be trying to wear next week.” It is she who enjoys the play’s star entrance:
Critics had been known to complain that, whether she played Rosalind or the Second Mrs. Tanqueray, she was never anyone but Vera Paley; but the salvo of applause with which she was greeted from the stalls as well as from the more discriminating parts of the house showed that she held a wide public under some kind of spell. She paused, holding the door open with her left hand, outstretched at full arm’s length behind her, so that the player with whom she was talking as she entered was hidden from the audience. Without bowing or losing her pose, she smiled as the applause increased in volume. She let the play cease while she, as Vera Paley, took her reception.
Within the next twenty minutes, she will be lying dead on stage, an antique Indian dagger through her heart.
“But darling,” David overhears a woman saying as the audience files toward the bar at the interval,
“Vera Paley can’t be killed in the first scene of Act I. She’s the leading lady.”
“Oh! So you think she’ll recover — or come back as a ghost and haunt them all?”
“Recover — ofcourse. Vera’d never do any highbrow spookery stuff. She’ll be ill in the most marvellous négligé — and then there’ll be a perfectly terrific love scene…”
Instead, as David learns from another critic at the next interval, Vera Paley is paying a favor to the producer and will be gone by the end of the first week to start rehearsals for a showpiece of her own.
This is just what makes All Star Cast so fun. You get to experience not just the play but all the trappings and all the threads that come together to weave a unique evening at the theater.
Naomi Royde-Smith knew her subject from all angles. She’d been a theater critic herself through much of the 1920s and had written several plays that were produced in London’s West End. Her husband, Ernest Milton, was an actor, a stalwart of the Old Vic’s company for over twenty years. And, as she conveys so effectively in her account of The Ace of Wands’s opening night, she understood just how complex were the sensations and interactions of a night at the theater:
It was difficult enough to form an opinion on a play, seen for the first time, that would not cry to be revised or restated when once you saw your own words in print. You could go back, re-read, check, verify when reviewing a book: but a play acted itself without repeating any passage, noteworthy or obscure, and while it told its tale, demanded attention on three counts. Its appeal was too complicated. You were bound to miss some point, while under the impression made by another, in a scene which you had to see, to watch and to hear in one and the same unrelenting minute. You had to pass judgment on playwright, players, scenic artist and producer at one sitting, while their combined work was set in movement before your eyes and made its continuous appeal to your ears as well.
“How flat and stale these journalistic phrases were in comparison with the state of mind in which the play had actually left him!” David Winters despairs. And it’s a tribute to Naomi Royde-Smith’s skill that All Star Cast succeeds so well in putting us into that state of mind — and longing for the chance to return to a theater ourselves.
All Star Cast is fairly rare, but luckily it’s available online from the Internet Archive: Link.
“You didn’t have time to think about the dangers of a raid in the cipher room of the secret service sabotage organisation. You were too bloody annoyed.”
There are many mysteries about this book: they start before the book has even begun, in the authorial blurb, and they continue even after the book has ended.
In the endpapers of the dust jacket, an anonymous writer says of S-s-s-sh that “readers of her Contract for a Corpse should find this, her latest book, even more satisfying”. There is, in actual fact, no evidence of that a book called Contract for a Corpse ever existed, while the only other novel published under Kathleen Mary Carmel’s name – Secret Service – turns out to be a French translation of S-s-s-sh. “Kathleen Mary Carmel” is itself a pen name, made out of the author’s real names, and S-s-s-sh, while a small classic of genre fiction, is not what the writer is most famous for.
Kathleen Mary Carmel was best known as Carmel Withers. Nicknamed, inevitably, Caramel, she was a brilliant and highly respected bridge player, and it was through that game she met her future husband S. J. “Skid” Simon. They both represented their country at bridge and even appeared on TV television programmes playing bridge before World War Two.
Skid was a household name, a brilliant analyst and a formidable player who was not only the author of the influential Why You Lose At Bridge (a book that is immensely readable even if you know nothing about bridge) but also, with Caryl Brahms, one of the most popular writers of the 1930s and 40s. (I shan’t write about Brahms and Simon here, except to say it was as a lifelong fan of their work that I came to Kathleen Mary Carmel and S-s-s-sh: despite their own reduction in fame, Brahms and Simon’s work, which ranged from historical comedies to ballet-related detective novels, has had many fans, from the late Ned Sherrin, who wrote with Caryl Brahms and completed her autobiography, Too Dirty For The Windmill, and Neil Gaiman, who ranks Brahms and Simon’s No Bed For Bacon very highly indeed.)
When I came across mention of Kathleen Withers in Too Dirty For The Windmill, I wanted to find out more about her, but there was very little information out there. I managed to acquire a copy of S-s-s-sh (as well as its French translation) and spent a while trying to find the elusive Contract for a Corpse without any luck. All I knew was that she had a file in the National Archives related to her real-life work in ciphers during the Second World War, that she was a champion bridge player, and that she had been married to SJ Simon, who predeceased her by only a year.
S-s-s-sh is an excellent book. From its dedication – FOR THE CIPHER ROOM MICHAEL HOUSE – via its unsentimental tone, appropriate for a murder mystery set during the carnage of a world war, to its satisfactory conclusion, this is a novel that’s entirely convincing in its milieu and entirely chilling in the way it follows its murders and the reason for those murders. Along the way, we are engrossed in the minutiae of life in a wartime cipher department – the flirtations between male officers and female staff, the triumph at cadging an extra piece of toast and marmalade, the sheer exhaustion of working in near-impossible conditions to save the lives of countless men and women – and we are caught up in a bigger picture: this killer’s agenda is, unsurprisingly, entirely connected to the greater drama of worldwide conflict.
It is also a funny book, a suspenseful book and at times a chilling book. The scene where the narrator reports that she has found a woman’s body stuffed into a cupboard plays out with humour at her superior’s bureaucratic bluster but also with casual horror – “I was tired, the smell was sickening and now into the bargain I was getting bored”. And, as befits a story set in the small, cramped world of a cipher unit, where everything is a secret and everyone lives in each other’s pocket, throughout there is a sense of claustrophobia and paranoia quite at odds with the increasingly cosy way that current WW2 novels portray Britain at war, all country lanes and boffins cycling off to Bletchley. S-s-s-sh is a book that’s full of the mundanity of war and all that it implies.
By the sound of it, this dry, half-humorous, half-serious tone was entirely typical of the author, whose death in 1948 (it was reported as suicide) was deeply mourned by her fellow bridge players. “It is at this moment at once a pride and a tragedy of remembrance that the writer of this brief memorial recalls that he was for long her partner and her friend,” wrote one of her obituarists, Guy Ramsey. Friends and fellow players recalled her wit and intelligence, and it is clear that she was more than a match for her anarchic, chaotic and popular husband (who died of a heart attack after a television appearance).
Kathleen Mary Carmel Skidelsky, née Withers, deserves to be remembered for more than one excellent novel (I am hopeful that one day S-s-s-sh will be reprinted), and it looks likely that she will be: while researching this piece, I came across the work of Shireen Mohandes, a writer and expert on bridge history. Ms Mohandes has been researching Kathleen’s life in some detail, and brought several important facts to my attention: you can read her work at www.mrbridge.co.uk/library (she was also kind enough to source the accompanying photograph and to ask permission from Kathleen’s family to reproduce it).
For now, however, it’s enough to read S-s-s-sh for its lucid, convincing depiction of a novel world of terror, and to remember Kathleen Mary Carmel as both a writer and a person of distinction.
[Editor’s note: When S. J. Simon died in July 1948, just hours after appearing on television with Terence Reese, it was front-page news on most British papers, even though the Times incorrectly identified Caryl Brahms as his wife. His death devastated his wife, who suffered from severe depression thereafter and took her own life with an overdose of barbiturates just days short of its first anniversary. S-s-s-sh is so rare that the only copy listed in Worldcat.org is at the British Library.]
David Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Night Train, was published in September 2020. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.
Ever since Daniel Defoe published his novel Colonel Jack (1722), readers have been fascinated by the lives of career criminals. Although, as Defoe spells out in his lengthy original title of the book, his hero “was made Colonel of a Regiment” and resolved “to dye a General,” the core of Jack’s story was the “Six and Twenty Years” he spent as a thief.
Thieves’ stories appeal to both the sinner and Puritan in us. Neglected Books fan Tony Baer describes a curious homegrown example from early 19th Century America titled Narrative of the Life of John Allen, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the Highwayman, Being His Death-bed Confession to the Warden of the Massachusetts State Prison (1837):
Short, surprisingly readable, unapologetic, plain language life story of a burglar. It’s surprising to see that people were actually able to write in fairly modern American English in 1837. Mainly a series of stories recounting various crimes and time in prison. Unfortunately, he died about 2/3 of the way through the story, so the end of the book is written in the 3rd person by the warden. According to Wikipedia, and probably more interesting than any content in the book, is this factoid: “The book is most often associated with the copy in the collection of the Boston Athenaeum. This copy was bound in the author’s own skin, tradition holding that Allen requested that a copy of his confession be bound in his skin and given to John A. Fenno, who had earlier resisted Allen’s attempt to rob him.”
[For the long and strange history of binding books in human skin, see Megan Rosenbloom’s recent Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin.]
The Autobiography of a Thief has been a perennially popular title, used, by my count, at least six times since Defoe. Charles Reade, who once competed with Dickens in terms of popularity with Victorian readers, took it for a short novel: The Autobiography of a Thief (1857). Reade, who was an advocate of social reform throughout his life, was careful to correct his narrator’s commentary. When the narrator writes that he “took with me three pounds ten shillings” from an Edinburgh baker after finding the work there too hard, Reade footnotes,
“Took with me.” No such thing. “Stole” is the word that represents the transactions. Always be precise. Never tamper with words; call a spade a spade and a picklock a picklock; that is the first step towards digging instead of thieving.
A more authentic autobiography of a thief can be found in the opening chapter of Jottings from Jail; Notes and Papers on Prison Matters, by the Reverend J. W. Horsley (1887). Horsley, who served as chaplain at Clerkenwell Prison, collected oral histories and letters from inmates he came to know there. Horsley carefully annotated these accounts to help his readers decipher the criminal argot, such as in this inventory of the clients of a pub in Shoreditch popular with the East End’s underworld:
The following people used to go in there — toy-getters (watch-stealers), magsmen (confidence- trick men), men at the mace (sham loan offices), broads- men (card-sharpers), peter-claimers (box-stealers), busters and screwsmen (burglars), snide-pitchers (utterers of false coin), men at the duff (passing false jewellery), welshers (turf-swindlers), and skittle-sharps. Being with this nice mob (gang) you may be sure what I learned.
W. L. Hanchant later reprinted this autobiography in his 1928 book, The Newgate Garland; or, Flowers of Hemp, which collected poems, songs, and letters from London’s most notorious prison.
In 1903, journalist Hutchins Hapgood collected the oral history of a New York City pickpocket and petty thief in The Autobiography of a Thief. Many were sceptical of whether Hapgood’s thief was real or imaginary. He was probably a little of both. But the book was rich in details of how small-time crooks of the Bowery operated. Here, for example, is how “molly-buzzing” — stealing women’s pocket-books — worked:
We worked mainly on street cars at the Ferry, and the amount of “technique” required for robbing women was very slight. Two or three of us generally went together. One acted as the “dip,” or ” pick,” and the other two as “stalls.” The duty of the “stalls” was to distract the attention of the “sucker” or victim, or otherwise to hide the operations of the “dip”. One stall would get directly in front of the woman to be robbed, the other directly behind her. If she were in such a position in the crowd as to render it hard for the “dip,” or “wire “to make a “touch,” one of the stalls might bump against her, and beg her pardon, while the dip made away with her “leather,” or pocket-book.
Although it was never published in English, the autobiography of a thief who styled himself as royalty in the criminal world appeared in Berlin two years after Hapgood’s book. George Manolescu’s Ein Fürst der Diebe. After leaving his native Romania, Manolescu quickly developed a taste for high-end burglary and specialized in robbing jewellers and jewel owners, particularly from their suites in the finer hotels of the Riviera, Baden-Baden, and other stylish watering holes. Manolescu’s book is said to have inspired Thomas Mann’s unfinished masterpiece Confessions of Felix Krull.
Two decades later, another international thief, Eddie Guerin, recounted his adventures in his 1928 book Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook. Tony Baer describes it as follows:
Amazingly well told autobiography of a career criminal who specialized in bank robberies.
Eddie grew up in Chicago in the 1860’s to the 1880’s. He published the book in 1928 at age 67, motivated in part by a desire to counteract his portrayal by his former flame in her book published slightly earlier: Chicago May, Her Story, by the Queen of Crooks.
There’s plenty of adventure, including blowing the safe of the American Express building in Paris, only to be double crossed, caught and sent to Devil’s Island in French Guyana to serve a life sentence. He later escaped and returned to the States, Canada and on to London where he continued a life of crime, narrowly escaping assassination by Chicago May and her new boyfriend.
What I dug most, however, was Guerin’s ‘underworld vernacular’ (his phrase—not mine—tho I suppose I’ll steal it now from this long dead thief).
The prose is precise, hardboiled, and terse. Just how I like it. He does not tell you. He shows you. With efficiency and enough flair to entertain without being at all showy or pretentious.
What I am now quite perplexed about now is whether the hardboiled school of writing was really drawn from Hammett and Hemingway, as we were always led to believe—or whether it was more some part of the zeitgeist. There appears to have been an underworld vernacular shared by cops and robbers and hoboes and day laborers alike. A dirty realism that people spoke around that time that finally made it pen to paper in the late 20’s.
Highly recommended. A real joy to read.
Around the same time, Alfred A. Knopf published two closely-related criminal memoirs. Grimhaven, by Robert Joyce Tasker (1928), is an account of a convicted burglar’s time at San Quentin Prison. Tasker took up writing while in prison and eventually sold a number of articles about his experiences to Mencken’s American Mercury. While at San Quentin, Tasker met another inmate, Ernest Booth, a veteran thief in for a failed bank robbery. Booth decided to try his hand at writing as well. As Tasker recounts in Grimhaven, the two men decided to avoid competing with each other:
In the end we drew up an oral compact that I would write only of prisons, and he would write only of criminals not yet in prison. We talked of the various things my experiences had taught me and decided that he should write the story of a bank-robbery, giving it every detail, with every emotion recorded.
Booth’s own book Stealing Through Life appeared less than a year after Tasker’s. With a record far longer than Tasker’s, Booth took a rather Nietzschean view of the criminal class:
There are those of us — thieves and poets — who are born intact. Complete. The stern realities of life are inverted and become only so many evidences of unreality. Within our selves we have a complete world of our imagination…. Within this realm of our own possession we retreat when confronted with things that do not fit into our preconceived scheme of things-as-they-should-be.
“We are the odd ones. The criminals, the geniuses, the builders of Utopias,” he boasted.
In 1936, three-time convicted burglar Henry DeGras published his account of growing up in the London underworld of prostitutes and “wide boys,” Low Company: The Evolution of a Burglar, under the pseudonym of Mark Benney. Released in the U.S. a year later under the odd title Angels in Undress, the book received wildly enthusiastic reviews, including from such notoriously tough critics as Rebecca West and George Orwell. Although his publisher Peter Davies touted Benney as “the man who committed a hundred burglaries,” Benney’s crimes had been mostly minor felonies. His last conviction was for skipping out on installment payments for a phonograph. Benney went on to write several novels about the world he’d grown up in, most notably The Big Wheel, discussed here recently.
In 1965, R. Lincoln Keiser edited the memoir of a petty thief, Henry Williamson, Hustler! The Autobiography of a Thief. A case worker for Cook County, Keiser got to know Williamson, a recent parolee from the Illinois State Penetentiary, and taped over a hundred hours on interviews which he condensed into this book. Although its cover appealed to a general audience, Keiser’s account was more sociological in nature and included commentary from Dr. Paul Bohannon, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University.
In 1970, Thomas E. Gaddis, best known for The Birdman of Alcatraz, his 1955 story of prisoner and amateur ornithologist Robert Stroud, collaborated with James O. Long and in compiling the recollections of a truly nasty piece of work, the serial killer Carl Panzram. Robberies were the least of his crimes, but there were plenty of them. As Tony Baer describes it,
Prior to his execution in 1930, Panzram and his death row guard became friends, and Panzram made a parting gift of a short autobiography, first published in 1970 as Killer: A Journal of Murder by Thomas Gaddis, who fills in gaps in the narrative with chapters written in the 3rd person.
The first-person confessions from Panzram to be the most compelling bits of writing. He is completely unapologetic, yet recognizes his own monstrosity. He is not trying to leverage the confession for profit, titillation nor commutation. He recognizes that publication will come after death, and thus seems pretty liberated to simply tell his tale in simple unadorned prose.
The writing is lean and uses common no frills language. He does terrible things out of misanthropy and greed. But basically just feels like he’s “paying it forward” on the ill treatment he’s received from others.
Panzram was a textbook example of recidivism: “What time I haven’t been in jail I have been either getting out or getting in again,” he wrote. His coldly amoral voice is chilling:
In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all these things I am not the least bit sorry. I have no conscience so that does not worry me. I don’t believe in man, God nor Devil. I hate the whole damned human race including myself.
The Thief: the Autobiography of Wayne Burk, Professional Thief (1971), an as-told-to book written by Los Angeles Times reporter Ted Thackrey, Jr., is perhaps the most insufferably self-satisfied of all these accounts. Burk claimed to have stolen over $15 million, though that number is hard to believe after I located a few stories of Burk’s exploits, such as his 1948 stick-up of the bar at the Hotel Il Trovatore in Bakersfield, California, where he made off with a whopping $185. Burk’s moral calculus is notable for its relativity:
Nobody in this world can ever say they starved because of anything I ever did. I don’t rob poor people; they ain’t got enough money to make it worth the trouble. I never screwed around with the stock market; there ain’t no one in this world can say I make their father jump out of a window because of something I pulled with a stock to make myself richer while everyone else in the country loses. I never made a motorcar that was so cheap and crappy that it got the people who drove it killed. I never put out a medicine that crippled people or gave them cancer, and I sure never shot some poor guy just because I didn’t happen to like his looks. If I put anybody out, I had a good reason — money!
Which sounds a little like the man who boasts that he’s screwed a lot of women but never messed around with anyone’s daughter.
Alexander Keith Munro’s The Autobiography of a Thief (1972) proved to have been a work in progress. Less than three years after writing, “I had a tremendous amount of excitement out of being a burglar,” Munro apparently found the call of adventure irresistable and was sent up for stealing £23,000 in valuables from the country home of Sir Kenneth Clark, the art historian and broadcaster.
Excitement seems to be a common theme in these autobiographies. In The Boxman: A Professional Thief’s Journey (1972), Professor William J. Chambliss’s case study of a career burglar, Harry King shares the profound observation that, “It’s exciting and I really believe that it’s the excitement that makes it appealing.”
The most purely entertaining of all these memoirs is the legendary bank robber Willie Sutton’s Where the Money Was (1976), which he wrote with Edward Linn after his release from Attica State Prison in 1969. Like Munro and Harry King, Sutton found the thrill of planning and committing robberies more addictive than their rewards:
Why did I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life. I enjoyed everything about it so much that one or two weeks later I’d be out looking for the next job. But to me the money was the chips, that’s all.
As imaginative as some thieves may be, they continue to stick to traditions when it comes to titles. When Bruce Reynolds, the mastermind behind the 1972 Great Train Robbery came to tell his story, he called it — you guessed it — The Autobiography of a Thief (1985)
I have been on a streak of novels that tug insistently at the reluctant Freudian in me. Dinah Brooke’s The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert was, by the author’s admission, an act of reparation for her own father’s failures as a husband, businessman, and father. I’m working my way through the small oeuvre of Richard Rumbold, who spent much of his life engaged in a civil war with his father and other proxy father figures.
Even without context, Mark Benney’s novel The Big Wheel (1940) is full of dangling psychological threads that cry out for a good tugging. At the core of the novel is the strange relationship between the narrator, a former burglar named Harry Carne, and an ambition and hyperactive young journalist named Eric Felton. The two men meet when, hoping to make a little money after his release from Holloway prison, Harry tries to sell a few articles to Eric’s newspaper. Eric becomes fascinated with Harry and soon invites him to take a spare room in his flat and start working as Eric’s assistant, a job that mostly involves churning out articles under Eric’s name.
Eric’s concept of journalism seems to have been developed from years of reading the stuff that filled the back pages of London papers:
Journalism was a constant exercise in selecting from a grim, mechanised world its trivial accidents and hazards, and refocussing them until all else was blotted out of the world picture. It kept him in a ferment of small surface excitements, and it was these, communicated into his writing, that made him a good journalist. If a film-star had chosen an Amerindian for her fourth husband, if a cow was born in Wilshire with reindeer horns, the fact would keep Eric in continuous bubbling enthusiasm for hours.
Like Harry, Eric has come up from the tenements, self-taught, full of rough edges, and prone to the allure of bright, shiny objects — and people. “Eric liked to view himself as a patron of genius,” Harry observes, but the geniuses Eric was attracted to tended to be eccentrics: “Anyone who dyed his hair green, or wore shorts in winter, or expounded cosmic themes in an unintelligible gibberish, stood a fair chance of being entertained by Eric.”
Just how Eric affords to be so generous is a bit of a mystery until Harry meets Phoebe, a woman with murky connections who, he gathers, is both Eric’s lover and patroness. Harry’s first sight of Phoebe is as she emerges from Eric’s bedroom one morning, and his description of her dressing is almost bilious in its hatred toward older women:
She seemed to have none of the normal woman’s feelings of pudicity, and no awareness even of her grotesque appearance. She made no attempt at concealment as she divested herself of coat and nightgown before stepping into her undergarments. She moulded herself into tight corsets with apparently no sense of the obscenity of the kneading motions whereby she subdued her flesh. Busily she drew on her stockings, and fastened her suspenders, chattering brightly all the while about her darling Eric and her pleasure that he had at last found a friend who was at once a wide boy and a nice boy. [A “wide boy,” in British slang, refers to a man who lives by wheeling and dealing, often criminal.]
Harry learns that it’s Phoebe who’s paying for Eric’s flat. When Harry asks just what he does for her in return, Eric is vague: “Oh, odd things. Just ideas like the wheel and that club you saw.”
“The wheel” is the big wheel of the title, a large Ferris wheel, part of a small amusement park set up on a vacant lot in East London. The Ferris wheel is equipped with enclosed cars just big enough for two people to sit in comfortably. Eric’s “idea” was to run the wheel very slowly, allowing couples just enough time and privacy to enjoy each other’s company in ways that London offered few clean and cheap alternatives for.
This is just one of Phoebe’s ventures. She is a rising star in the London underworld, an entrepreneur busy expanding her little empire into horseracing betting and penny casinos in Brighton. She has her hooks into the police, with a growing roster of bent cops, as Harry discovers when he gets on Phoebe’s wrong side. As affectionate as she seems toward Eric, he knows Phoebe wouldn’t hesitate to throw him under a bus.
He knows this because she’s already done it to her own son. Jim, an ex-boxer who works as the “Big Wheel’s” bouncer, has done a stint in prison himself, as he tells Harry:
“Wodger get done for?” he asked sympathetically.
“Screwing,” I said.
“The berks!” he said feelingly, and added: “I done a carpet at the Ville.”
“What for?” I asked.
“V’lent assault,” he said. “But somebody mixed it for me. I never done it, they mixed it for me. Found me fingerprint on a broken bottle what somebody’d been glassed wiv; en said I done it. But I never! Me, I don’t use glasses.”
What Jim doesn’t know is that his mother had arranged for his prints to be put on the bottle by one of her crooked cops. She was taking revenge for some wrong the generally harmless palooka had done.
This is just one reason why Harry hates Phoebe, though. Another is that she’s a little too much like his own mother, who, it’s clear, was both a prostitute and a minor operator. Harry sees his criminal record in patently Freudian terms: “Always the fundamental object of my burglaries had been to win my way back to acceptance by the Phoebes — to force their respect, to share their expansive, explosive life.”
The dynamics among the men in the book is equally rich in nuances, whether intended or not. “I’m not a pansy!” Eric protests at one point, but his actions suggest this is not a black-and-white situation. The language that Benney uses at points is difficult to read today as simply poetic:
With a rueful movement of his lips, he [Eric] reached across the table and touched my hand; it was the gesture of one willing to forgive, but unable to forget. “That’s all right,” he said sepulchrally. “You two [Harry and a woman] go ahead and enjoy yourselves.” Then he drank off a glass of beaujolais at a gulp and took up the bottle to re-fill.
When Harry contemplates taking up with Margaret, the woman in the above scene, his language is equally open to analysis: “Living with her, I should always be her dependent, a hungry mouth at her paps, a leech on her arteries.”
The characters in The Big Wheel are too unstable for anyone to expect a happy ending. It takes far too long, however, and Benney introduces too many unnecessary detours before this house of cards collapses. Like other novels from this period I’ve read, The Big Wheel seems to cry out for an editor with a sharp pair of scissors. I get the impression that for every Max Perkins and Edward Garnett, there were a hundred other editors who gave their authors’ manuscripts a quick glance for spelling errors and passed them along for typesetting.
But there are also wonderful bits of writing scattered throughout these pages. A cheap cafe in the early morning before the breakfast rush: “Charwomen wash the corpse of time killed, and downstairs, in the lavatories, one’s footsteps echo hollowly as in a marble mausoleum.’ [OK, perhaps hollowly needs to go back to the thesaurus it came from.] Convincing details of life in poverty: a neighbor asks for change for the gas meter; when Harry notices he has two ha’pennies in his hand, the man explains that he’s keeping them to put on his mother’s eyes when she dies. It’s also a rich source for your vocabulary, one cited numerous times in Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of the Underworld: berk (slattern); nark (rat); on the rory (down and out); straighten (to bribe).
Benney’s account of the London underworld in The Big Wheel seems almost sociological in its detail, it’s understandable, for formal sociological research would be his ultimate destination. Born Henry Charles in the East End in 1910, he grew up in the world of The Big Wheel. His mother was a prostitute. He was taken up by a small-time stage performer and adopted the man’s last name of Degras. It was as Henry Degras that he served three sentences in prison, the last, for fraud, at Wandsworth.
After his release in mid-1933, he was befriended by the publisher Peter Davies, who encouraged him to take up writing. The result, an autobiography titled Low Company, was published in 1936. By then, he’d married for the first time, to a woman named Phyllis Benney. Given his real criminal record, Davies recommended Degras take up a pseudonym, and he chose the name of his wife’s late brother: Mark Benney.
Low Company was an immediate success. George Orwell, one of the toughest critics when it came to working class literature of the time, called it “one of the best lumpenproletarian books of our time.” The book was so well done, Newsweek informed its readers, that “the publishers feel impelled to swear it isn’t a literary hoax.” Every major paper and magazine gave it enthusiastic reviews, and Peter Davies encouraged his protégé to try his hand at fiction as well.
His first attempt, The Scapegoat Dances (1938), got mixed reviews. James Agate felt that Benney had “acquired a style of which any writer ought to be thoroughly ashamed.” But even the poorest reviews held out hopes for better. The next year, he put his writing skills at the service of one of his underworld acquaintances, producing What Rough Beast? A Biographical Fantasia on the Life of Professor J. R. Neave, Otherwise Known as Iron Foot Jack Neave. Neave was a “wide boy” well known around Soho, who, as Matt Houlbrook puts it in Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 (2005), operated at various times as “strongman, club manager, antique dealer, con artist, and street phrenologist.”
The Big Wheel (1940) was considered a big improvement over Benney’s first novel. Reviewing the book for the Tribune, Orwell wrote,
It is about the London sub-world, the dreadful civilization of pin-tables, cheap night clubs and furnished single rooms, where sport, crime, prostitution, mendicancy and journalism all overlap…. Its distinctive mark is its acceptance of the lumpenproletarian outlook, its assumption that the world of narks, pimps, eightpenny kips, punchdrunk boxers and rival race-gangs is as eternal as the pyramids.
V. S. Pritchett called Benney “the highbrow of the lower depths and the only novelist we have who really knows the Soho underworld” and estimated that the novel’s strongest points were “wit, a restless, over-excited mind, a bottomless pessimism, and a wonderful ear for the dialogue of his people.” Frank Swinnerton, who often found other novelists wanting in comparison to himself, offered begrudging praise: “Mr. Benney can be tiresome, but he is interestingly tiresome, and his people and their seamy streets are real.”
Swinnerton’s comment offers a clue to where Benney’s real interests lay. If the most successful elements of The Big Wheel are its details of London underworld life, it’s because Benney was, fundamentally, more interested in being a recorder than a creator. In 1939, he married Jane Tabrisky, a graduate of the London School of Economics who’d worked earlier for the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. When the war broke out, he attempted to enlist but was rejected for medical reasons. He then went to work at an airplane factory, an experience he turned into his third and last novel, Over to Bombers (1943).
After the war, he was able to get a civil service job as an Industrial Relations Officer with the Ministry of Fuel and Power. The Ministry sent him to report on conditions at coal mines around Durham in the northeast of England, which led to his 1946 book, Charity Main: A Coalfield Chronicle. Following this, he decided to undertake a study of conditions in British prisons and sought advice from Mark Abrams, who was pioneering techniques in polling and surveys. Gaol Delivery, published in 1948, led to further social science work and, ultimately, to an invitation to teach sociology in the undergraduate College at the University of Chicago.
Though he was the only member of the Chicago faculty with no college education whatsoever, Benney thrived in the university environment. As he later wrote, “I think that if I had known in 1950 that such a course as Social Science 2 was being offered anywhere in the world I would have strained all my resources to take it. It was ironical that I found myself now in 1951 both taking and teaching it.” Benney went on to work with David Riesman, whom he later referred to as his “champion.”
In 1959, Benney took a job on the faculty of Shimer College in Mount Carroll, Illinois. The small school, small town atmosphere of Shimer didn’t suit Benney, who was by then on his third marriage and still retained a few habits from his underworld upbringing. He left after a few unhappy years that he documented in his last book, a memoir of his “reformed” life after Low Company, titled Almost a Gentleman (1966). His last years were spent as a researcher for hire for government and academic institutions. He died in Clearwater, Florida in 1973.
Written by Jayne Sharratt.
“Hot off the oven of our own time” was the verdict on new novel The Big Firm, according to The New York Times of 20th February 1938, in a review which also found it “unusually significant” and “distinguished as a work of literary art”. The novelist was the forty-three-year-old British writer and left-wing activist Amabel Williams-Ellis, who, although fulfilling the description of “neglected” today, in her lifetime was used to commanding press attention.
I began investigating Amabel’s story after visiting Plas Brondanw, the Snowdonia ancestral home of her husband Clough Williams-Ellis, architect of the fantasy village Portmeirion, and seeing her name on a plaque commemorating their marriage in 1915. Though Amabel was described only as a daughter, sister, wife and mother in the guidebooks, I followed my hunch there might be more to her than that and began digging. I found that in a career spanning seven decades of the twentieth century Amabel had published over seventy books. Six of these were novels, mainly written between 1925 and 1939.
One sign of her present-day obscurity is the difficulty I have had in buying copies of these novels, and what follows relies on my memory and notes of reading the book in the British Library in pre-pandemic times, as well as my own research into her life.
Born in 1894, Amabel was the daughter of the influential editor-proprietor of The Spectator, John St Loe Strachey, and grew up in a family where celebrity was normal. Dinner with a prime minister, story time with Rudyard Kipling, chess with the governor of Egypt and tea with the explorer Mary Kingsley were normal experiences for a girl whose relatives included the biographer Lytton Strachey and the painter Simon Bussey.
When journalists and photographers turned up at her wartime wedding in a rural chapel in Surrey at an hour of the morning intentionally chosen to evade them, chasing the bride and groom down the hill to their getaway car, they came for her not Clough. She was both a Jazz Age socialite and an activist with serious politics and a steely work ethic. Despite the war being over and Clough being offered alternative employment as an architect, the Army refused to discharge her husband at the end of the war until he had written a history of the Tank Corps, so Amabel sat down and wrote it for him, finishing it just in time for the birth of their second child, Charlotte, in 1919.
The Big Firm(1938) was Amabel’s fourth novel. It was written in an atmosphere of increasing international tensions and crisis – Hitler’s annexation of Austria took place within weeks of its publication. Completion of the novel had been complicated by the concussion Amabel suffered when she was struck by a car while visiting her mother and her friend and author Margaret Storm Jameson helped proofread the draft for publication. The Big Firm tells the story of Owen Wynne, a scientist who works in microbiology research and his love affairs with two women, Caro and Nicola. The big firm of the title is Consolidated Scientific Products, which employs Owen and prevents him from publishing his research. Owen’s political leanings are left-wing; the plot concerns his attempts to prevent arms and scientific products being sold to the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War. The action moves remorselessly and thrillingly to the climax in which Owen and Nicola race to intercept a shipment intended for a mysterious cargo ship moored off the coast of North wales.
Characters who wrestle with strong political principles when others seek to corrupt them are a feature of The Big Firm. When Nicola, the wife of a Labour MP and committed member of the Labour Party herself, hears her husband preparing to compromise to gain a government post, her respect is lost. “This isn’t the moment when responsible leaders ought to stress our fundamental socialist policy,” he tells her. “We’ve got to soft pedal, otherwise the Labour Movement will be destroyed.” Nicola decides she must leave him. To her, his pragmatism is “false and horrible.” Her decision to end the marriage over this difference of political views might seem extreme to us, but in the context of the 1930s politics compromise could mean appeasing dangerous forces.
Amabel recognised the threat posed by Hitler to world peace when he came to power and advocated action to prevent full scale war. To this end, in July 1934, she travelled to New York to give evidence to the American Inquiry Commission, which was collecting information about conditions in Germany in the hope of getting the US government to take notice. Amabel described her missions to Berlin that year, the death threats she had received, and the treatment of Jews and Communists. “There is not only no right or justice in Germany, there is no truth,” she told the commissioners.
For the rest of the 1930s, Amabel campaigned against Fascism. She was put under surveillance by the British secret service as a result. Her son Christopher was killed in 1944 in Italy at the age of twenty-one, and she often wondered whether she had done enough to prevent the war. Amabel always suffused her writing with the issues which most concerned her, and in this light The Big Firm is part of the history of the anti-Fascist movement in the 1930s.
To the New York Times’ reviewer Jane Spence Southson, it was the scientific background of The Big Firm that stood out. A wife of one of the directors of Consolidated Scientific Products declares in a speech that although many people think of themselves as contemporary, they don’t have the first clue what is going on in the world of science. Southson notes that this will not be true for readers of the novel, which she considers more masculine in tone than any she has ever read by a woman because it is so detailed and knowledgeable on its subject. Reviewing Amabel’s memoir in 1983, Michael Holroyd noted that her working method was always to write a book in order to learn about its subject, and she would have been very much following her inclinations in the case of The Big Firm.
The masculine tone Southson referred to may have been a reference to its descriptions of the inner workings of Owen’s employer, CSP, an environment rarely written about by women at that time. Amabel had a track record of writing about technical “male” subjects established when her first published book detailed the development of the tank as a weapon of war. When she wrote a careers guide aimed at boys and girls in 1933 called What Shall I Be? she visited work places personally and interviewed the people who worked there to gain insight into what their work actually entailed. At a chemical plant, she observed astringently, “for some unexplained reason women are hardly ever employed…. Probably this is just a custom of the trade, for their seems to be no other objection.”
Amabel always said that if she had been a boy, she would have chosen to be a scientist. Given no formal education or encouragement to go to university by her parents, she became a writer instead, but ensured that her daughter Charlotte became a scientist after studying at Cambridge University. Charlotte’s daughter, Dr. Rachel Garden, also a scientist, told me that her grandmother had a well-hidden insecurity about her lack of formal education which she rectified by asking questions of experts. It is probable that this kind of research lay behind her convincing portrait of a research scientist facing moral dilemmas at work in commercial industry.
In her testimony before the American Inquiry Commission in 1934, Amabel made a point of saying that the Nazi regime was suppressing women’s rights, that Nazis held that women were to be wives and mothers in the home only, with the primary task being to raise “fine warriors.” In Britain at that time, opportunities for women were slowly improving but the belief that women had to choose between family and career was still dominant. As a writer, Amabel was always concerned with women’s feelings about their lives.
Both Caro and Nicola, the women in The Big Firm, are struggling with complicated emotions towards traditional female roles. When the novel opens, Owen is having an affair with Caro, a woman of whom her family say, “all girls want to elope with their schoolteacher or with the butcher, or eat hasheesh, or run away to sea. They all want to – but Caro does.” Caro is lost. She realises that clinging to Owen will not give her the purpose she craves. Married women confuse her: “Could she, did she even desire to become like them, so peaceful…so blank…annihilated?”
But what, she wonders, is her alternative?
“You remember I tried to be a Doctor once? It was too difficult . . . oh, well! Anyhow, I believe a lot of women don’t stick things because they find it hard to believe enough in themselves…to think the work that they do, is all that necessary.”
In the 1950s, Amabel would write bitterly about the way in which society’s “uncreating unbelief” in a girl’s “power to do anything worthwhile” held young women back from reaching their true potential. Perhaps this is what she was implying with the deeply unhappy Caro.
Meanwhile, Owen and Nicola have been working together as part of the Industrial League Against War. They acknowledge their love for each other on the journey to Wales to intercept the suspicious cargo ship. Nicola has realised she is pregnant with her husband’s child and looks at Owen with “the desperate eyes of a creature in a trap.” In the end, Nicola and Owen decide to be together and love the child nonetheless. It is not going to be an easy romance, but the reader feels it might be a successful one.
Both Caro and Nicola are wrestling with their roles in a society which is not built for their benefit. This was a theme Amabel would return to, most notably in her 1951 work of nascent feminism The Art of Being a Woman.
In the late 1930s, Amabel was a modern woman writing about issues which still resonate today. Why then, is she so unknown? One answer to this question could be the variety of genres Amabel wrote in. Her dozens of books include biography, politics, memoir, feminism, parenting, anthologies of fairy tales and science fiction, and non-fiction books for schools. By the time of her death in 1984 the novels, none of which were written later than 1951, were forgotten and (if her work was mentioned at all) she was considered “a writer for children.”
Another answer lies in the fact that she was a woman. A male reviewer of her autobiography (who complained that she failed to say enough about all the famous men she had known and talked too much about herself) decreed her a writer “fated to be known by her menfolk”. This was an unjust self-fulfilling prophecy, but the growing fame post World War Two of her architect husband Clough Williams-Ellis and Portmeirion overshadowed Amabel’s own achievements. Portmeirion is such a flamboyant and colourful vision it is hard for Amabel’s narrative to have space within it, and the Williams-Ellis name today is synonymous with both the village and the pottery begun by Amabel and Clough’s daughter Susan.
Amabel herself recognised that her legacy might have fared better if she had written with her birth name when she called her memoir All Stracheys are Cousins. In the majority of Amabel’s books I borrowed from The British Library, the same pencilled hand had struck out Williams-Ellis on the title page and annotated “Strachey”. In the eyes of The British Library she was a Strachey.
A recurring note in Amabel’s writing is her hope for the next generation of young women. In The Big Firm, a schoolgirl called Lou tells Nicola that she wants her own life to be different:
“I should want to be able to say I was a something – you know, a doctor or a writer or a vet or something. I’m certain that if I was doing politics like you, I should want to be a member of parliament or in the cabin … not just a person who makes speeches.”
Amabel Williams-Ellis cared deeply about her family, but she was also very resoundingly “something” in her own right and The Big Firm is convincing evidence of this.
| This is a guest post by Jayne Sharratt. Jayne is working on a biography of the writer and activist Amabel Williams-Ellis. Follow her on Twitter: @jayne_sharratt. |  |
Sometimes the story around a book is even better than the book itself. This is definitely the case with Dinah Brooke’s 1974 novel The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert.
The Miserable Child is a six-year-old English girl abandoned in a dismal boarding school in the south of England. Her mother is in a sanatorium, her father, as the title suggests, is in the desert — in this case, serving with Montgomery in Egypt. It’s the autumn of 1942. At the school, they have whalemeat stew for lunch: “There is a war on, you know.”
The little girl knows she’s been abandoned: “Daddy Daddy Daddy, you don’t think of me at all,” she complains. “You imagine that I am secure, but there is no security for me if you are about to die.” In the desert, Monty has a Plan. A great offensive against the Germans is in preparation. The girl, of course, knows nothing about this — at the time.
In telling the story of The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert, Dinah Brooke adopts both the perspective of a frightened and lonely little girl in 1942 and of her adult self, aware of history with a big H (the battle of El Alamein) and a little one (her father’s being evacuated with a case of jaundice before the attack). At school, “The Miserable Child is alone and panic-stricken.” At the same time, however, she also wanders around the front in Egypt, observing the progress of the battle: “The Miserable Child wanders up to Kidney Ridge, where the enemy are launching heavy armoured counterattacks…. She prowls around the battlefield like a jackal, a hyena, sniffing at bodies as the sun rises high and the heat and the flies and the stench rise with it….”
Brooke switches perspectives instantly, without offering us signal or clue. It makes reading a disconcerting experience but also adds to the impact of the narrative. Though things follow a roughly chronological order, we are never quite sure of where the narrator stands. Are we seeing things through the eyes of the Miserable Child in the moment or through the eyes of the woman whose memories of her miserable childhood and knowledge of other facts provide context not available to the girl?
We are one-third of our way into the book before it becomes clear that this is really the story of the father, not the child. The son of a steel-makng family in the North, Bob is a promising young man, ready to work his way up the ladder at the works, eager to push for improvements. His judgment is not always sound, however. He has a bit too much of a taste for drink and he marries a fragile, artistic woman suffering from TB. When the war comes, he is happy for the opportunity to escape into the Army, placing his daughter into a convenient school and enjoying a spree in London with his best friend’s wife before shipping out.
Though Bob proves unfit for service and returns to a post with the steel works, his promise has already faded. He knows neither how to accommodate the growing role of the trades unions nor how to keep the trust of the financiers or government ministers. So, he heads to Kenya to launch himself again, divorcing his first wife and picking up another along the way. The Miserable Child, of course, is left to make her way at the same miserable school.
The construction firm he joins in Kenya goes bust, and Bob takes to drink while his new wife’s popularity among the clubmen leads to mocking comments behind his back. He gives up Kenya and the wife and heads back to England. Within weeks, he’s lying in a locked ward for alcoholics, admitted through the collusion of his brother and the presiding physician.
From here, Bob’s story is one of steady decline, with most of his time spent in jail or asylums. Everyone agrees he’s a fine fellow. On the few occasions when he’s able to visit his daughter, in school or in London or on the maternity ward after the birth of his first grandchild, everyone comments on his manners and charm. It’s just that he can’t take care of himself, let alone anyone else. And so he leaves the Miserable Child there in the hospital facing the prospect of raising her child without the help of her own parents.
With only what we’re told in the book, we’re left wondering what Dinah Brooke was trying to do in The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert. We feel sympathy for both father and daughter, but what is the point of this account of their miseries?
Fortunately, Brooke gave us her answer in “An Obsession Revisited,” an essay she wrote for Fathers: Reflections by Daughters, a collection edited by Ursula Owen and published in 1983 by Virago. “I was obsessed with my Dad for twenty years,” she writes.
You could almost say I made a career out of him – or out of the lack of him. Do people whose fathers are more present in their lives become so obsessed? I never lived with him after I was three, hardly saw him between the ages of seven and twenty-five, yet the amount of energy I focused on him was phenomenal.
“It would be hard not to describe his life as a failure,” she acknowledges. Like Bob in the book, his father ran a steel factory — Lysachts Steel Works in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire. He married a painter with lung problems, hit a plateau in his rise in the firm, and shrugged off the fetters of that life by joining the Army and warehousing his daughter in a boarding school. After the war, he divorced, remarried, went to Kenya and failed to make a new start. And from there, as Brooke puts it, “He became an alcoholic, went mad, and spent most of the rest of his life in asylums of varying degrees of Dickensian horror.”
In hindsight, she sees the novel as an act of reparation — a posthumous attempt to establish kind of relationship she never had — and of restoration (of her father’s reputation):
I mean look, a book, printed pages, hard covers, shiny pictures. Just look at you, see what a mess you made of your life? You’re much better like this. Neat, full of good things, fixed, appreciated. You really fucked it up didn’t you, you silly old man, but don’t worry, I’ll make it OK. I’ll rewrite your life for you, not improving things much — playing around with the facts a bit, yes; putting you into the army instead of the air force so I can have some nice games with Monty at El Alamein, but not papering over the cracks; not trying to make you appear better, more successful, a better father.
Joe, while I’m writing about you I feel as if I’m pushing something uphill. Making a tremendous effort, as if I have to act both parts at once, the parent and the child. I did so want you to be a father to me. I did so want someone to be a father to me. You did the best you could. It wasn’t a lot. The desire was there, but the execution was feeble.
It wasn’t enough, though. “I was really hooked on fathers,” Brooke admits. She wrote another novel (Death Games (1976)), in which “a suicidal daughter pursues her father through the horrors of war-torn Vietnam, and finally, in the heat of the afternoon, she makes love to him, and as he comes he has a heart attack and dies.” In an early fictional instance of self-harming, the daughter holds lit cigarettes to her skin just to feel something.
“Thank goodness I’ve finished with that little lot,” she concludes.
There’s another twist in the story, however. In “An Obsession Revisited,” Brooke mentions spending six years at the ashram of the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. After becoming interested in the Bhagwan’s teachings in London, she travelled to India and made several short stays, during the last of which the Bhagwan annointed her with a new name, Ma Prem Pankaja.
Brooke decided to bring her children along and to settle in India for the long term. As she later wrote,
So we went, and settled into a run-down ex-British Raj house next to the ashram, surrounded by mangoes and palm trees. The only trouble was the kids didn’t like it much. The schools were dreadful, and there weren’t any kids their own age, turning ten, around the ashram. My daughter was having quite a good time, but my son desperately wanted to go home, and I more and more wanted to stay.
So, Brooke took her children back to England, left them in the care of their father, the actor Francis Dux, and returned to India. Brooke’s close friend, the writer Sally Belfrage, joined her and remained at the ashram for the better part of a year. Belfrage later published an account of the experience, Flowers of Emptiness: Reflections on an Ashram (1981), that offers an independent, if not entirely objective, view of Brooke’s time as a sannyasin (convert).
Belfrage was outraged by Brooke’s decision to leave her children behind. She also wasn’t convinced by Brooke’s embrace of her new faith. “They make her wear only orange,” Belfrage wrote, but in Brooke’s case, “It’s not by any means the shaven-headed-saffron-Buddhists-of-Oxford-Street sort of thing — Dior or Chloe will do as long as it’s orange,” and she looked “as Vogue-y as ever.” To Belfrage, the Rajneeshis were nothing more than a cult: “If Bhagwan were Billy Graham, they’d be out crusading; if he were Charles Manson they’d be out killing….”
Brooke returned to England, having decided against following the Bhagwan to his new enclave in Oregon, around the time that Flowers of Emptiness: Reflections on an Ashram was published. Feeling attacked by her friend, Brooke wrote an article titled “The Myth of the Responsible Mother” that appeared in The Guardian in May 1982. “I’d like to say something about motherhood from the point of view of this character, which was me,” it began.
“Leaving my children certainly did not happen easily or casually. Being an averagely neurotic, guilt-ridden middle-class Englishwoman I manage to make it as difficult as possible for myself and everyone else by endless agonies of indecision,” she admitted. In her response to those who criticized her decision, Brooke also pointed to experiences recounted in The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert:
Among the myths to which I have subscribed is the one which decrees that children can only be happy rolling around like puppies in large groups wearing the minimum of clothes and not being forced to learn anything — because of course I was an only child and went to boarding school and had to wear a uniform.
And her feelings during this separation were perhaps not that different from those of her father over those years in the boarding school. “Most of the time I didn’t miss them at all,” she confessed. “My mother wrote regularly, sending photos and telling me how they were.”
After two years at the ashram, Brooke returned to England to spend Christmas of 1977 with them. When she returned to India, however, “I couldn’t stop crying. I cried for six weeks, almost all day, every day.” “Somehow,” she recognized, “all the sorrow of my own childhood were condensed into this endless crying.”
Discussing her situation, the Bhagwan suggested that Brooke was making the mistake of trying to take responsibility for her children’s feelings. She came to accept this view. “My parents are not responsible for the way in which I experience my life,” she informed The Guardian’s readers, “and neither I nor their father are responsible for the way in which our children experience theirs.” She felt justified in her choice: “I spent six years with an Enlightened Master, and not gift that life has to offer can be greater than that.”
As one can imagine, not everyone agreed with Brooke’s conclusion. The Guardian printed a number of angry responses to what most seemed to consider a “self indulgent” article. “I’m sorry that Dinah Brooke got so little out of being a mother,” wrote one. “My stomach churned on reading about Dinah Brooke’s six-year stay in India sans children,” wrote another, who couldn’t imagine spending even six days away from her own.
Dinah Brooke effectively disappeared from the printed page after “An Obsession Revisited” was published. In the short biographical remarks that preceded the essay, she wrote, “Returned to London. Ran a market stall, met Derek, now Mahabodh. Work as temp. sec. and freelance journalist. Tomorrow?” From what I’ve been able to determine, although Brooke had worked for The Observer and others prior to taking up fiction, her work after the ashram wasn’t for any major papers or magazines. [2023 update: Perhaps more will be revealed with the republication of her novel Lord Jim at Home by Daunt/McNally Editions.]
In September 1838, Mr. Charles Green, already considered England’s greatest balloonist (or aeronaut, as he preferred to say), entertained London crowds by making several ascents in his newest balloon, the Nassau, from Vauxhall Gardens. On one of these, he was accompanied by John Poole, then one of London’s leading playwrights (and soon to be author of the comic classic, Little Pedlington and the Pedlingtonians. Together they flew across London from west to east, enjoying a bottle of sherry and watching dusk settle over the city, until they came to ground somewhere along the road to Chelmsford.
Crotchets in the Air, Poole’s account of the trip, is as light as the gas filling Green’s balloon and unashamedly unscientific. “Why did you go?” Poole asks himself in hindsight. “To get out of the city,” is his reply, the balloon merely offering a novel and altogether more pleasant alternative to going by land:
One gets tired of being suffocated in coaches, choaked with coaldust in steam-boats, rattled and rumbled on railroads. But, up yonder, the ineffable stillness, the progressing movement without the slightest sensation of motion! whether up, down, forward, back, you seem to be suspended motionless in the air, whilst everything above, below, and around, is complaisantly taking the trouble of moving out of your way.
And unlike these forms of locomotion, travel by balloon is … quiet.
And then, the noiselessness, the perfect quiet, which I have before alluded to! It is the sublime of stillness. They who have not heard it — do not add this expression to your collection of bulls — they who have not heard it (for the ear is affected by it) can form no idea of it. In the tillest night, on the quietest spot on earth, some sound is occasionally heard, how soft or slight soever it be — the ripple of water, the buzzing of an insect, the fall of a leaf. But up there, you might fancy yourself living in an age antecedent to the creation of sound. There might you indulge to the uttermost in the luxury of thought, reflection, meditation there revel in all the delights of imagination, with not the ruffling of a utterfly’s wing to put your fancies to flight.
Indeed, the experience is so novel and so much more graceful than any of the land-bound options that even the departure comes in an unexpected manner. “I do not despise you for talking about a balloon going up, for it is an error which you share in common with some millions of our fellow-creatures,” Poole writes his friend. Instead, when Mr. Green casts off his anchor ropes, the balloon sits still and the land falls away.
[D]own it went with everything on it; and your poor, paltry, little Dutch toy of a town, (your Great Metropolis, as you insolently call it,) having been placed on casters for the occasion — I am satisfied of that — was gently rolled away from under us.
And the sights to be seen from several angels up (as RAF pilots used to put it) surpass those of travel on land (“Trees, rivers, and fields; fields, trees, and rivers! with here and there a hill some certain number of feet higher or lower than another!”). “Sights, oh! such sights! Gulliver not fabulous. Men and women six inches tall; and in proportion as we rose, they diminished — to five, four, three inches.”
Height eliminates all distinctions of class or rank: “The proud, the humble, the dignified, the lowly, yet, to us, the greatest amongst them was undistinguishable from the rest!” Poole admits, though, “I am glad I am down again, for I was imbibing a very contemptuous opinion of my species.”
Poole traces their route in the landmarks below. Westminster Abbey, Covent Garden, Blackfriars, St. Paul’s. Seeing St. Paul’s from above gives him the frisson of discovering a whole new sense of awe: “like possibilifying of an impossibility.” Seeing Newgate Prison, on the other hand, evokes feelings of outrage.
With what stomach for your breakfast would you get out of your bed at eight in the morning to be strangled at nine, in the open face of day, and in the presence of thousands of persons collected together to glut their eyes with the sight of a human being throttled with a rope — for such is the fashionable phrase — you call it the cant — for describing the execution of a murderer: how, I say, would you like that?
And as they drift away from the city and the sun sets, Poole sees London as any airline passenger would know it — but as none of its residents has seen it before: “And now conceive yourself looking down on an enormous map of London, with its suburbs to the east, north, and south, as far as the eye could reach, DRAWN IN LINES OF FIRE!”
Not everything about air travel is better, however.
There are no inns in the whole of that country so that when what we had “got in that bottle,” which was some sherry, was exhausted in drinking to the health of our dear little Queen, we could not get our bottle replenished for love or money.
Crotchets in the Air can be found on the Internet Archive and will take less time to read than it took Green and Poole to travel across London. It’s a sublime little gem and a perfect escape for anyone suffering from the lockdown blues.
A tweet about T. J. Bass’s wildly ambitious and imaginative Nebula Award-winning novel The Godwhale (1974) triggered a short discussion of favorite novels from the 1970s. I was struck by how many of them were — well, if not science fiction, then at least strongly influenced by SF. I started buying books — almost always cheap used pocket paperbacks — for myself around 1973, and as I began to recall those purchases, I realized that my own favorites were novels that sat on the border between SF and literary fiction.
Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick pioneered this territory in the 1960s, writing books we now recognize as key works of 20th Century literature without any suggestion that they’re somehow lessened through their origin as Ace, Daw, Dell, and Panther paperbacks deliberately packaged to turn off non-SF readers. When Collier released its paperback edition of Italo Calvino’s SF fables Cosmicomics in 1970, the publisher just as deliberately Doris Lessing gave it imprimatur of legitimacy with her dystopian novel The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), then returned to give it a gargantuan world-building embrace with her five-volume Canopus in Argos starting with Shikasta in 1979. (I’m pretty sure I have all five volumes of the Knopf hardbacks somewhere in storage: they quickly became fixtures of remainder tables. Literary appetites were not quite ready to follow Lessing to such lengths.)
Writers who ventured into this territory faced considerable obstacles. SF writers struggled to be taken seriously by critics and readers of mainstream fiction. Straight fiction writers risked being marked forever with the stigmata of the space opera. When one of the toughest of straight fiction writers, Harry Crews, opened William Hjortsberg’s second novel, Gray Matters in 1971 and read the first sentence, he later recalled, “My heart sank. I thought, ‘My God, he’s committed science fiction.'” Crews was willing, at least to state his objections:
Without going into too much detail, I think honor demands that I admit my prejudice against and contempt for most of what is called science fiction. Here is the formula — and therefore much of the reason for my contempt — for successful SciFi: it must have an anonymous ruling force; dehumanized people; totalitarian one?world drive to power; violence of mindnumbing dimensions ( people who have no stomach for the violence of their own everyday lives seem to read the violence of the future as morally instructive); and nuclear warfare.
“Every one of these elements of the SciFi formula are in Hjortsberg’s novel,” Crews acknowledged, the result, in his opinion, was simply “an engrossing fiction informed by an imaginative use of science.”
Here is a survey of 25 novels from the 1970s that looked beyond the labels that booksellers and librarians crave and forced their readers to wonder if they’d stumbled in the wrong section. It’s not a comprehensive list by any means (omitting the significant arrival of feminism to SF that took place at the same time), but I hope it suggests that there are plenty of reasons not to write off the 1970s as just the decade of polyester shirts and leisure suits.
Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one language we might conceivably have in common with other forms of intelligent life in the universe. As I understand it, there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality.
To which Billy replies, “Did you just fart?” Among DeLillo scholars, Ratner’s Star is considered a work from his formative stage, before the era of his prize-winning/bestselling books. Which means it’s both less effective as a coherent work and full of greater experimentation and risk-taking. DeLillo takes codes, the encapsulation of information in condensed packages, as an overarching metaphor for the obstacles facing all forms of communication, and so plays around with text and dives down rabbit holes like the significance of symbol-based languages like Chinese. But if you’re looking for another fat DeLillo novel to follow up Underworld, this is the natural choice.
And my body knew what it was looking at too:It recognized immediately what the head in the mechanical spider meant to it: The body, the mortal coil, the source of despair, the thing that gets sick, manufactures aneurysms, tumors, cataracts, piles, stones in the bladder, limestone in the arteries, the shakes, the drops, the shits, the tears; the thing that hurts you so terribly, the thing that finally betrays the clever, efficient brain by withering like a leaf, is superfluous. (“The body’s only purpose is to carry the brain,” said Edison, and he should have known.)
Perhaps not surprisingly for a book written by an American male in the 1970s, along with robotic life comes new extremes of sexual experience. Comparisons with J. P. Donleavy are not out of order.
A Secret History of Time to Come fails equally at the general task of fiction and at the specific task of science fiction. The special merit of the best SF is not its capacity to predict the future but to analyze and analogize the present. It offers writers an opportunity to make scale models of moral problems that cannot be dealt with — not, at least, with the same clarity and directness — using the conventional devices of the realistic novel. At this essential science fictional task, A Secret History of Time to Come has the moral and intellectual finesse of a World War I poster exposing Hun atrocities.
Have the boundaries between serious literary fiction and SF evaporated since the 1970s? A visit to most libraries and bookstores today would suggest not. But luckily, plenty of writers don’t let that dissuade them.
“After all, he’s not a young man,” Dorothy Rutherford’s mother advises her. Dorothy, in her early thirties, working as a bank clerk and living with her parents, has the limited options available to many lower-middle-class women one hundred years ago. She can continue at the bank, after which, as her mother tells her, “You’ll have to live out your old age in one room on a tiny pension.”
Or she can marry. Unfortunately, at her age, handsome or even passable eligible suitors are no longer looking her way. Her one offer comes from Frank Chappie, a red-faced, twice-widowed retired furniture store owner. His merits, as Mrs. Rutherford assess them, come down to two: “He must be seventy, if he’s a day — you’ve only got to look at his neck. Well — mind you, one would never wish anything to happen to anybody — but it’s obvious he can’t last very long.” And once he’s gone, “You’ll be rich — and free.”
And so, Dorothy agrees. And soon learns that “can’t last very long” is, in fact, insufferably long. Mr. Chappie (never Frank) is demanding. “Girlie!” he calls to his wife whenever she’s out of sight for more than a minute. He is tight-fisted. And he is ardent. Turpin captures the horror of the old man’s kiss:
“My darling,” he murmured, folding her soft form in his bony arms and pressing his hard, thin lips against her full, naïve ones. He kissed insatiably as if he were trying to drain the fountain of youth and beauty. Then from between his lips she sensed the stealthy advance of a little serpent that was trying to insinuate itself into the privacy of her mouth.
Like any prisoner confined against her will, Dorothy seeks relief in fantasy. In desperation, she latches onto Tommy, a driving instructor and cheap version of Ronald Colman. Lessons with Tommy provide Dorothy’s one furlough from Mr. Chappie’s funerary passion. Working on commission, Tommy is happy to encourage Dorothy’s demand for more and more frequent sessions behind the wheel, even if at the price of an older woman’s unwonted advances. He has “a predator’s streak of cruelty. He liked to keep his victims, conquests, until, as he expressed it, they almost cut their throats themselves.” Among other things, “This saved recriminations.”
With Dorothy’s ever more frantic longings for Tommy, Tommy’s ever mor cautious manouevering to thwart them without losing a client, and Mr. Chappie’s increasing suspicions and unrelenting desire for proof of her affection, the situation spirals upwards. In a French or Italian opera, this would all culminate in a great coloratura aria. In this tight-laced English novel, nary an antimacassar is disturbed. Instead, all the dramatic tension resolves quietly, efficiently, and without the slightest risk of embarrassment in the eyes of the neighbors.
Though Behind the Net Curtains is set in the 1930s, it could just as well — and often seems to be — set during the Edwardian era, or even — aside from the crucial role automobile driving lessons play in the plot — in the late 19th century. As seen in The Laughing Cavalier, Allan Turpin wrote in the 1960s and 1970s novels set in the 1920s and 1930s that rang with the features and attitudes of the decade before his birth — demonstrating, perhaps, the truth of V. S. Pritchett’s observation of “how long the shadow of Victorianism was, how long it takes for a century to die.”
Turpin might well be considered a male counterpart of Ivy Compton-Burnett (if somewhat less prolific), writing over and over tight-knit family dramas that — no matter when written — always seem to take place in some ambiguous period between the 1880s and the death of King Edward VII. And like Compton-Burnett, the pleasure of Turpin’s small dioramas is his cold-blooded and sharp eye for hypocrisy in all its subtle manifestations. You don’t care to know any of his characters, but you enjoy watching them set to their paces.