Option one: you publish nearly 100 novels and stories – many bestsellers – in your lifetime. You make a good living from your writing and have some impact, particularly within the burgeoning women’s equality movement, as many of your female protagonists are strong, independent and clever. Highbrow critics, suspicious of your copious output however, ignore you. A century after your death, not one of your novels is read, beyond the odd specialist scholar. The occasional mildewed cloth-bound first edition turns up in second hand bookshops and anyone who takes the chance to read your effortless prose is amazed they hadn’t heard of you. But you’re never going to be canonical, not even in this current revival period when forgotten women novelists are being exhumed more rapidly than the dead rise up in a zombie apocalypse. There are just too many of you.
Option two: you publish a handful of well-received literary novels, a couple of which, 100 years after your death are still in print, having made it onto university English studies reading lists. One, about turn-of-the-century English rural life, that critics considered your best (though you didn’t), is turned into a costume drama starring, I don’t know, Benedict Cumberbatch or Alicia Vikander. In your lifetime you’re never quite solvent and never quite satisfied, but you have a kind of immortality, even in a fleeting film credit.
Which would you choose? Or back then, being a writer on a vast production line with very little agency, could you choose at all? So many late-Victorian novels have sunk without trace, victims of what was recognised even at the time as “over-production”. But this is of course what this site is for, to find gems such as those that disappeared under what the Daily Mail described in 1903 as “the flood of fiction”. The Mail complained that of the 1600 novels published each year, barely any would survive the season and that “women are the worst offenders if over-production be an offence.” One estimate is that 99.5% of all nineteenth century novels printed, read and relished in their tens of thousands have vanished into what Franco Moretti called ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’.
Adeline Sergeant, from Notable Women Authors of the Day, by Helen C. Black (1893).
So, now we come to the case of Adeline Sergeant (1851-1904), named and shamed in the Daily Mail as one of the women culprits who wrote too many novels. She wrote 90 novels and stories in her lifetime, her output increasing with her years – publishing six a year 1901-1903 and eight in 1904. Even popular newspaper reviewers expressed fatigue at having to read yet another of her novels, one critic complaining: “Adeline Sergeant, like the poor, will always be with us.” She was so prolific that fourteen novels were published after she died, presumably of writing fatigue, in a boarding house on the south coast of England where so many English spinster novelists went to die. Her productivity meant that reviewers couldn’t keep up and only a fraction of her output received any critical notice. Many of her novels were sensational pot-boilers with romance or crime at their heart, often with a moral, heavily influenced by her religion – she moved from committed Methodist to committed Catholic through her life – and with titles like The Failure of Sibyl Fletcher and The Claim of Anthony Lockhart.
From the Daily Mail, 25 April 1901.
But even in cases like Sergeant’s, there is always the one that got away.
The Work of Oliver Byrd slipped out, unnoticed, in 1902, between The Master of Beechwood and Barbara’s Money. Very different from her other novels, it is remarkable for capturing the lives of early professional women living alone in London and negotiating social opprobrium for not accepting the chosen path laid for them of marriage and motherhood. While post-Second World War writers like Margaret Drabble and Muriel Spark are held to be the first to depict the lives of professional women, Sergeant and other forgotten women writers of the turn of the last century were doing this some fifty years earlier. The popular writer Dolf Wyllarde, for example, goes into great detail on lives in women-only boarding houses right down to the choice of wearing dark colours to disguise ink stains in her novel The Pathway of the Pioneer (1906).
Advertisement for The Work of Oliver Byrd
As Virginia Woolf acknowledged in Three Guineas, the only area of work where women were allowed to compete with men, because of its low pay and prospects, was the world of writing, the world Sergeant chose for herself. The Work of Oliver Byrd records the lives of professional women writers at the turn of the twentieth century and is to some extent, a feminist response to George Gissing’s famous critique of the writer’s life, New Grub Street (1891). Where the literary men of New Grub Street have to battle with populist taste, uncomprehending publishers and critics and lowbrow journalists, the women in Sergeant’s novel have to start by deconstructing their very selves. Women who want to be taken seriously as writers either have to marry a publisher against their better judgement or to conceal their feminity and write under a male pseudonym. The Work of Oliver Byrd follows two women who explore these routes to pursue their writing, the act of which is presented as a grand passion, a vocation that none who is called can resist, no matter the risk. And the risk, with a predatory, exploitative male editor, is great. While these women writers accept being under-paid, even plagiarised, , the worst risk is that of being found out to be a writer at all. For while women were indeed able to scratch out livings with their pen, the woman writer still attracted social opprobrium, hence the widespread use of male pseudonyms at this time. Oliver Byrd, it is no spoiler to reveal, is actually a woman called Avis Rignold, who goes to great lengths to disguise her indentity, using Post Office boxes, false addresses and avoiding in-person meetings.
There is a great detail of autobiography in the novel: while writing it Sergeant was living at the Chenies Street Ladies Chambers in Bloomsbury, a haven for single, intellectual women including the Quaker campaigner Emily Hobhouse, archaeologist Mary Brodrick and the historian Charlotte Fell-Smith. The most important room in the apartment of one of the professional women in the novel is described by Sergeant in loving detail:
It was lined on two sides with books – heavy, ponderous, learned-looking tomes, the bindings of which were darkly, yet richly coloured like leaves in autumn, lit with gleams of gold. A substantial writing-desk, with drawers and pigeon-holes innumerable, stood near the middle of the room, and before it stood a circular-backed, leather-seated armchair, which formed Eleanor’s usual seat when she had work to do.
Be still my beating heart. Perhaps, with the exception of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic poem Aurora Leigh, I haven’t read an earlier depiction of the woman writer at her desk, striving to call words down from the heavens to translate onto paper:
What should she write about tonight? What had she to say? Her head throbbed, her eyes burned: she wanted to lie down quietly and go to sleep. But the wants of the public had to be satisfied and for this she must take up her pen and weave together laboriously the light fancies, the vague dreams of her better hours…she threw on a dressing-gown, turned up the gas and sat down to write.
There is a feminist message to the novel: the women writers are presented as either serious campaigners for justice or as uniquely able to capture “knowledge of the human heart”, while the dastardly male editor only seeks to repress them or pass their work off as his own. Written at a time when few women writers – including Sergeant herself- were taken seriously, it is a passionate plea to women to be proud of their work and continue fighting the fight. I wonder if Oliver Byrd, written towards the end of Sergeant’s life is some kind of letter of regret, that she didn’t allow her talent or novels to breathe, instead chasing one after the other after the other in a phenomenal sense of urgency that prioritised quantity over literary immortality. For she certainly could write – her prose is as easy and pleasant to consume as a jar of warm honey – and her novels are bursting with sparkling and contemporarily urgent ideas on social justice, women’s equality and the plight of the poor in wealthy imperial London. Maybe, like Avis Rignold, she didn’t quite have the courage to say: “This is who I am, and no one else.”
The Work of Oliver Byrd, by Adeline Sergeant London: James Nisbet and Co. Ltd., 1902
Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.
It’s not every day that you might turn on a television without referring to any guides and get to see a dramatised documentary based on a mystical, blind and deaf poet. That programme, ‘The Different Drummer’, in Easter 1980, was my introduction to Jack Clemo. I was spiritually and literary smitten by his unusual story. He saw himself as a poet, novelist, autobiographer, short story writer and Christian witness. The latter description as important as all that preceded it.
As Clemo highlighted in his first autobiography, Confession of a Rebel, he was, from a conventional point of view, unschooled. I myself was a partially schooled poet and wrote from an explicitly Christian point-of-view. As far as I knew, no evangelical-yet-literary poet, like Clemo, existed in Ireland.
I wanted to connect with him, so I wrote, enclosing a small chunk of bog turf as something illustrative of Ireland, just as the Cornish clay was an important symbol to him. Soon I got a reply about the dilemmas and challenges of being both convinced Christian and poet:
… Very few poets since Hopkins have felt this tension between Christianity & art, & I can see why my books & the TV film of my early struggle must have made special appeal to you. When one looks at the general cynicism & triviality of most modern poets, it’s clear that only a faith in redemption, personal guidance & victory in Christ can free a poet from illusion & disillusion…
In time I went to visit Clemo in his small stone cottage, at Goonamarris Slip, Cornwall, where he had been born and lived. The gloomy landscape was all concrete grey. Hills of clay tips surrounded his cottage. Clay dust discoloured everything. However, he turned that stark and ugly landscape into many meaningful metaphors in his prose and poetry.
Jack Clemo in the 1980s.
You may wonder how I communicated with this blind and deaf poet and author. His wife instructed me how to communicate, spelling out sentences letter-by-letter on his rough skinned palm , each sentence requiring a telegram like full stop, for clarity.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but I did not expect such immediate and intimate contact! Clemo’s roughly-accented replies were difficult to decipher at first. After a few hours of my tactile tracing of words and his guttural verbal responses, I got exhausted. Then we continued many conversations on Christian faith, literary hopes and my upcoming marriage, using manual typewriters instead. We exchanged a hundred letters between 1980 and 1994. As far as I know, I became his sole protégé.
After a few false starts, Clemo’s unusual literary breakthrough came when his first novel, Wilding Graft, was published by Chatto and Windus in 1948. It sold an impressive 2,000 copies in the first week in UK. Not at all bad for a first publication.
The plot precis of Wilding Graft:
Set in the clay mining country of Cornwall during WW2, Wilding Graft turns on two characters, Garth Joslin and Griffiths. At the start of the book, Garth has just returned from his mother’s funeral. His relationship with his fiancée, a somewhat frigid and ill-matched girl named Edith, has been disintegrating as his mother’s mental illness has developed, and has finally ended – taking with it Garth’s good reputation in the area—after a flirtation with Irma Stribley, a London girl on a brief visit to relatives in Cornwall.
Garth’s mother, broken from nursing her husband through his final illness, had attempted suicide at the time of Edith’s marriage to another man, and had spent the last four years of her life in Bodmin mental asylum.
Garth, being (unconventionally) Christian concludes that there must be some divine plan working itself out through all that has happened, and determines to wait for it to become plain: to wait for Irma to be brought back to Cornwall.
As L. A. Thompson wrote in his thesis, Jack Clemo, 1916-55: The Rise and Fall of the ‘Clay Phoenix’:
Wilding Graft was written to show how God works and triumphs over atheism, paganism and worldliness… Clemo believed the novel was ‘given to [him] by God as a prophecy for [his] own life’ and as such it developed extra significance. He did not consider it to be a projection or fantasy, but his own future fictionalised: first healing and then marriage, with both just around the corner.
The original publisher’s blurb invited comparisons with Hardy and Powys, and very few reviewers failed to acknowledge the similarities. Expressions of Clemo’s Christian faith caused both praise from Professor of English Mary Ellen Chase and consternation from Maurice Lane Richardson.
Chase, writing in the New York Times, praises Clemo on a number of fronts, and has great sympathy for his Christian outlook. She stated that Wilding Graft an “should deserve attention both from those who like an excellent story and from those who are interested in the novel as a form of art…” She also goes on to say that: “the slow, exhaustive and yet tense treatment of tremendous human conflicts belong to the the 19th rather than 20th century novel….(giving) a certain stature seldom seen in distinctly modern fiction.”
However, writing in the Times Literary Supplement on 27 March 1948, Richardson praised Clemo for his depiction of the region and recognised his potential, but criticised him for including too much ‘mystical religiosity’ and not enough ‘humanism’. As Luke Thompson wrote in his thesis:
It was as though Clemo had been caught between the desires to write a popular potboiler, such as many of the working people used to enjoy, and a literary work of artistic value. As it is, the novel stands alone, a unique and powerful gesture, a page-turning romance with an undercurrent of divine interference and a surface of realism uncommon in writing about Cornwall….
I would be lying to say I enjoyed Wilding Graft’s regional and rather stilted plot. Rather, I read it as a unique accomplishment by a disadvantaged author who saw life through a Biblical lens of hope.
In 1981, at 65, Clemo received an honorary literary doctorate from the University of Exeter. Not bad for a blind and deaf autodidact author who went against the tide and who attended no college.
By the time of his death, in 1994, Clemo had published ten poetry collections of poems. He also had published a second novel, Shadowed Bed, as well as two autobiographies, Confession of a Rebel and Marriage of a Rebel. His third novel The Clay Kiln was published posthumously.
The University of Exeter, UK holds an archive of his manuscripts and papers.
Louis Hemmings worked for much of his life in various bookshops: second hand, religious and a mall bookshop. He also sold used theology books online from 1994 until 2014. His writing has principally been poetry but after a late entry into college, at the age of 62, discovered he could write credible fiction. His third and last novella, A Boarding School Boy’s Regrets will be self published September 2022. Louis collaborates with photographers and artists for his WordPress and Youtube channels. Louishemmings.com.
When it comes to books, good things often come in misleading packages. This is particularly true when it comes to pulp paperbacks from the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these were sold at newsstands and drug store check-out lines, where the key to a sale was more about catching the eye than conveying truthful information about content. And the demand for new titles to push into those display racks meant that publishers tended to be undiscriminating about content.
Sometimes, this means the content is pure formula, nothing more than a rush-job assemblage of one-dimensional characters, hackneyed plots, and ineptly written prose. Sometimes — not too often, but sometimes — this means the content is pure gold. A masterpiece in disguise. And sometimes, this means the book is just, well, interesting.
Interesting. Yes, that’s the word our mothers taught us to use when we couldn’t think of anything nice to say. But to me, interesting hasn’t lost all its meaning. Interesting here means that the book is perhaps not fully successful yet still worth reading, often because it leaves me wondering about what might have been.
The minute I saw The Girl in the Gold Leather Dress (1961), I knew it would at least be interesting. “Ginsburg – Kerouac – MORHAIM” announces the banner at the top of the back cover. Morhaim? you ask. So did I. But this was a somewhat rare (for Signet Books) original novel, not a reissue of something from a major publisher, so it looked promising.
And promising it certainly is. The girl of the title is Rena, an undergraduate at UCLA (or something like it) who’s unhappy with the choices that life is presenting her. Which is understandable, given that we first see her heading off to a frat party with a superficial honor student too dumb to realize what an unusual woman he’s with.
For one thing, while he’s wearing the same sportscoat/tie/loafers combination as every other male in sight, Rena is wearing a hand-tailored dress made out of glove leather the color of wheat. She’s a knock-out in it and she knows it. So she’s not surprised when Tom, a football player and one of the alpha dogs of the fraternity, tries to steer her into his bed. The scene is the same pathetic melodrama played out every Friday night by undergraduate men all over the world:
“Oh, honey, help me, help me,” he said. His voice was as spoiled as a child’s begging candy. “Help you what?” “You know.” “Say it.” He struggled for a moment, not wanting to verbalize his desire. Then he said, “I’m so excited.” “You want to …” began Rena, pausing for him to finish the sentence. “… make love,” he said. “That’s a lie,” said Rena, her face showing scorn. “You don’t want to make love, you want to screw.”
Rena rejects him, pointing out that football is “merely a society-approved sublimation of homosexual impulses.” This happens in the book’s first ten pages. I knew I wanted to see where Victoria Morhaim would take Rena.
Rena is at an experimental stage in her life. She’s willing to sleep with a man when she feels the attraction (as with the maker of the gold leather dress) and just as willing to turn them down. She will drink or smoke pot if she’s in the mood or toss someone from her apartment for offering either when she’s not. That apartment reflects the unsettled state of her life: “At times Rena would suddenly see the tangle of things and feel a desperate need to straighten them out, but that desire never lasted long and the apartment remained untouched.”
Her parents are ready for the experiment to end. Actually, her mother is more than ready. After calling Rena a slut, her mother ejects her from their house, telling her to “Take the stench of your way of life and your mind with you. Don’t ever come back here again.”
As many young people discover, knowing what you don’t want doesn’t necessarily get you any closer to knowing what you do, and this is both Rena’s dilemma and the source of Morhaim’s difficulties in turning The Girl in the Gold Leather Dress into a coherent work of fiction. If one had to predict what will happen after the first few chapters, it would be natural to guess that Rena will go through a series of relationships that will ultimately lead to either happiness (with some form of Prince Charming) or wisdom (with some form of acceptance that Prince Charming doesn’t hold the key to happiness).
And while that’s essentially what does happen, the problem lies in the execution. At several points in the book, Morhaim switches from Rena’s point of view to that of one of the men she’s involved with. These transitions are neither well-executed (the men are names without character) nor useful for advancing the narrative.
Part of the problem, I think, is that Morhaim doesn’t trust her own creation. Rena lacks no confidence when it comes to her opinions. When Dr. Altman, an older “more sophisticated” history professor, invites her to his home, he proudly displays his collection of books on early American history, expecting her to be in awe. Instead, she’s in shock:
“Look at this, this collection of prints.” Rena lifted the leather cover. “It’s pornographic. Look at those pictures: scalpings, burnings, murder, mutilations.” She flipped the pages of the book. “Look, look here.” She pointed at one particularly gory print. An Indian was in the process of decapitating a pioneer woman. “This is the most perverse thing I’ve ever seen.”
Yet within another twenty-some pages, we see Dr. Altman coming to Rena’s rescue, calling her “Rena girl” as she begs, “Help me, Leonard. Please. Help me.”
A similar problem exists with Morhaim’s second novel (also a Signet original), The Girl Who Had Everything. Here, she offers us a portrait of a woman a few years older than Rena but none the wiser. Samara — Sammy to everyone — is a former homecoming queen from the San Fernando Valley now working for an electronics firm in San Francisco. Though she’s “just” a secretary, she is, in fact, the administrative glue that holds the marketing department together, and not long into the book is offered the job of running it.
Unfortunately, Sammy has completely bought into the idea that a wedding ring is the key to happiness. Worse, she also accepts wholeheartedly the myth that men have all the brains in business.
Around the same time that the door to career advancement opens, Sammy meets the perfect man. Charles runs his own company, owns a fabulous home with a bay view, knows the maître-ds at all the best restaurants in town, and — very much a stereotype of the “sophisticated man” in those days — confidently knows what to order for Sammy without asking her. She’s as giddy as a baby on a swing when he asks her out for the first time.
“Yippeeeeeeee,” she screamed. “My God, what was that?” Maxine appeared suddenly in the doorway. “That, Maxine,” said Sammy, “was a man. Man, man, man!”
To which we can only respond, “Oy, oy, oy!”
Things too good to be true usually are. Beneath Charles’ man of the world mask is a petty, violent, jealous boy. So it’s no surprise when, suspecting Sammy of having another lover — her gay interior decorator, of course, because jealousy rarely improves discernment — Charles shows her that he must be the only one to control her in a predictably adolescent way: he rapes her.
Once again, Morhaim makes her heroine weak and unstable. Sammy has been seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Rolfe, on a regular basis for over five years. “He helps me live through the week. I don’t think I could make it without him,” she tells a friend. In truth, Dr. Rolfe is a model of the kind of shrink who turned a generation or more of women into therapeutic co-dependents. When Sammy tells him about meeting Charles, he dismisses her enthusiasm:
“No, my dear girl, that is not the answer. You don’t need another man right now. You need something to get rid of all that hostility that is in you…. I have told you many times that it does no good to be angry at me. I am only the voice of your conscience.”
Dr. Rolfe’s answer to Sammy’s problems: “Why don’t you join a dramatic group?” And with that, he sends her on her way, reminding Sammy, “Don’t forget the check next time.”
Instead of encouraging Sammy’s development into emotional independence (she has, after all, already achieved financial and social independence), Dr. Rolfe’s guidance ultimately sends her into a literal regression. She returns to her parents’ house and, digging through her high school and college souvenirs, reverts to Homecoming Princess and “Queen Samara, SDM Fraternity,” imagining herself in a white ballgown, descending the staircase to awaiting admirers: “All the best, the blond and the dark and the young.”
Morhaim’s trilogy of conflicted feminism concludes with the most misleadingly packaged of her books, Casebook: Nymphomania — “Based on Actual Case Histories,” the front cover declares: “A Book that Probes Beneath the Skin of Four Women Ruled by Sexual Compulsion.” The book includes an introduction by Dr. Albert Ellis, then a prominent psychotherapist and prolific author on sexual topics, to encourage the reader to think this is some sort of clinical text.
It would be more accurate to describe Casebook: Nymphomania as a collection of four linked short stories, four sketches of women for whom sex is a major source of unhappiness. Unhappiness because each, in her own way, seeks fulfilment or advancement through sex, only to find the resulting relationships shallow, unsatisfying, or downright harmful.
Whether what any of them exhibits is a form of nymphomania is beyond my ability to answer, but if any reader was expecting to be titillated or shocked by Casebook: Nymphomania, they were certain to be disappointed. The book is about as sexy as a manual on venereal diseases. These not four vixens. These are four miserable women.
“Angelique Adams,” for example, the first story in the book, tells about an ambitious and calculating beauty who sleeps her way into Hollywood stardom, starting by allowing a powerful agent to rape her at the age of fifteen on his proverbial casting couch. Angelique considers herself an opportunist, choosing her partners and the occasions based on the advantages she expects to realize as a result. Unfortunately, she has no exit strategy, and at the ripe age of 38, finds herself more and more isolated: like “she was living in an elevator — going up and down endlessly, but never getting off at any floor, never exploring the world beyond the confines of the elevator.”
“Lois Love,” Morhaim’s second subject, grows up in a family that has apparently arrived at emotional exhaustion without ever venturing to any other destination. Morhaim’s description of a Love family dinner is grim:
Mrs. Love sighed deeply as she reached for the bowl of stew. It was not that she had worked hard to prepare dinner and was now sighing over the quick disappearance of so much labor … no, she had opened several packages of frozen stew, and heated the contents a quarter-hour before the meal; rather, she was sighing over the rapidity of the entire operation. She prepared, the family ate, and then each disappeared to his own corner. But she, herself, was incapable of bringing any warmth to the ritual of dinner and so she submitted, with that sigh, to the machine-like process of feeding her family.
With no model to ground it in, Lois’s initial attempts to find love are unsuccessful, if not self-destructive. Where Rena pretty ruthlessly rejected the football star, Lois goes along with a good-looking boy at a frat party and ends up being gang-raped. She bounces through several other short affairs until she ends up in an awkward arrangement with a wealthy bisexual man named (creepily) Dad. In the end, the most satisfying relationship she experiences is with a cross-dressing lesbian she initially mistakes for a man.
The writing in Casebook: Nymphomania is often strong. Carefully chosen words, striking images, little muddling around in making a point. We cannot help but feel sympathy for these four women. But I found it unsettling how consistently Morhaim treats her women as victims. To her credit, she does not suggest that there is a single or common reason they become victims. To paraphrase Tolstoy, she believes that every victim is victimized in her own way. Taken together, these three books offer a comprehensive catalogue of the factors oppressing the lives of women in the early 1960s. But in none of them do we see women moving beyond victimhood or exploring other ways of staking out an identity for themselves. And so, I would argue, Victoria Morhaim’s fiction from the early 1960s is of greater sociological than literary interest.
Morhaim went on to publish further under a variety of names. As Victoria Kelrich, she wrote two pulp paperbacks, Charades (1978) and High Fashion (1981). As Victoria Reiter — taking the name of her second husband — she published another thick soap opera-ish novel, Big Hawaii in 1977, and then translated several of the novels that Daniel Odier published under his pseudonym of Delacorta, including Luna (1984) and Vida (1986).
The Girl in the Gold Leather Dress New York: Signet Books, 1961 The Girl Who Had Everything New York: Signet Books, 1962 Casebook: Nymphomania New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1964 All by Victoria Morhaim
Peter Kerr writes from New Zealand to recommend Albert Segal’s first (and apparently only) novel Johannesburg Friday:
This must be regarded as a “neglected book”. I came across it by chance in my grandfather’s bookcase.
Set in Jo’burg, possibly in the early Fifties, the book presents the points of view of four members of the Leventhal family on the Friday before a long weekend Yom Kippur. They are parents, Sophie and Sydney and the middle two of their children, Laurie (an apprentice druggist) and Jessie (a law clerk). The book has four chapters devoted to each. Each is beset by personal, spiritual, familial and societal considerations that are often at odds with the turbulent and tense struggle to maintain one’s ground in the big city; in this case it’s Jewish culture and religion that is at stake.
The mother is devoted to family but this devotion brings worries about status, money and its scarcity, her husband’s health and the decline in his fortunes, scandal and gossip and finding suitable Jewish matrimonial matches for her kids. She treats the Bantu servant, Sixpence as “too much of a nonentity to be regarded as a person”, vilely.
Laurie, the middle son, has caused consternation on two fronts. He wants to give up as an apprentice pharmacist and take up writing. This is anathema to parents who have scrimped and sacrificed to send him to college and, on qualifying, on the way to a status job (although not in the same league as a surgeon or medical specialist). The other front is Poppy Harris, a Gentile young woman who was once a boarder with the family. They are desperately hot for each other and desperate measures are adopted. Poppy is another source of loathing and denunciation for Mrs. Leventhal.
Mr. Leventhal is yet another cause for concern. As a young man he has prospered in real estate as the Witwatersrand gold fields burgeoned. Once married he rediscovers his religion. It brings him his greatest comfort and guidance. He has given away his prosperous career and now finds solace and a retreat in owning a shabby book-store in the city. He is aware that his decisions have brought economies to his family, about which he is concerned, but it is his Jewish faith and culture that predominate. He is a sad and fading personality.
Unlike the daughter, Jessie, who is fully alive, intelligent and capable in a variety of jobs in a male dominated commercial world. She works in a lawyers’ office, one of whom acts for Africans who suffer daily indignities. She is in love with the lawyer’s son, but this relationship has run into a Jew/Gentile impasse that causes her grief and resignation, at least from her job.
This is a very good book; it is a first effort for Segal, about whom I know nothing. The only disappointment is that no story can develop because the book’s structure is bound by the confines of a single day. The detailed characters embodied in the novel cry out for a plot or plots.
It’s interesting to know that Jo’burg was a tough dangerous city well before the 1970’s when the townships erupted in revolt. The likelihood of uproar and dispute in the street is ever present. We’re aware of an overriding suspicion between the different cultures and peoples who have washed up there. The same unease infects the Leventhal family. There’s a sense that it’s all a temporary set up. Unspoken thoughts will one day be realised.
I’d love to know more about Albert Segal. Did he write anything else? What became of him?
Albert Segal, from the dust jacket of Johannesburg Friday.
Peter thought that readers of NeglectedBooks.com might be able to shed some more light on Segal’s life and work.
There are at least a dozen copies of Johannesburg Friday available for sale, most of them fairly cheaply. The book was published in the summer of 1954 by Geoffrey Bles in the U.K. and McGraw-Hill in the U.S.. McGraw-Hill must have given its edition respectable marketing support, because reviews appeared in newspapers across the country as well as in a number of national magazines like Saturday Review.
In the New York Times, Ann Wolfe called it “Less of a novel than a Joycean close-up of a self-contained family,” a book in which Segal’s purpose was “to stage the inner drama of a simple family’s life,” but one enriched by its setting in a country where there were such dramatic differences in how different peoples were treated. The Kirkus Review credited Segal for a portrait of the Leventhals that was “virtually a biopsy” but concluded, “The fact remains that Segal has yet to learn to tell a story of some kind.”
Some reviewers were even more brutal. In The Baltimore Sun, Lynwood Kniesche called it “a singularly unremarkable book in almost every respect.” And he castigated Segal for how little about he incorporated his setting: “It may very possibly be that Mr. Segal, who was born and raised in this city, has, as a consequence, become either blind or blasé” to it. On the other hand, Barbara Merline of The Los Angeles Times, thought Segal had been very aware of the larger life of Johannesburg: “These four lives are ingeniously threaded into the seething torment of the city — a city driven by fear and hatred, a city in transition. The author keeps a fine balance between his characters and background in a warm and moving story.”
One noteworthy review appeared in the September 1954 issue of Jewish Frontier. In it, Harold U. Ribalow compared Johannesburg Friday with Nadine Gordimer’s first novel, The Lying Days. Of Gordimer, he wrote, “In her novel she revealed an unusual talent and showed once again that she wrote not only as a lyric artist, but as a woman aware of her Jewishness and the situation of the Jew in South Africa.” He was more critical of Segal’s book:
Nadine Gordimer indicates that she may yet produce the novel of Jewish life in South Africa. Although Albert Segal tries to do that in Johannesburg Friday, he does not quite manage it.
For one thing, Mr. Segal has attempted to write a novel with as little dialogue as possible. This makes for static story-telling and, alas, some dullness. Nevertheless, Mr. Segal is a talented writer and his characters do come to life….
Mr. Segal, in describing the cross-currents attacking Jew and Gentile, white and black, never forgets to reveal that his Jews are uneasy, uncomfortable and, in a deep sense, unhappy in South Africa.
Another interesting perspective is offered by the several reviews in journals aimed at black readers. In Jet magazine, its reviewer wrote:
Although Segal points up the plight of the African, he is overly careful in his handling of the European’s treatment of the black majority. An African is caught stealing a purse from Jessie and is turned loose at her request. An African servant rapes a white girl and is sentenced to the gallows, but the judge sympathizes with “any man whose passions might be whipped up during the course of his duties,” and breates white women’s behavior before African men. Johannesburg Friday is rich in excursions into Jewish living, but the telling is in such detail that action sometimes drags, interest lags.
In Phylon, a literary journal from the historically black Clark University in Atlanta, John Reinhardt wrote:
Segal has deliberately minimized externalities and concentrated on the com- plex emotions sustaining the seemingly trivial actions. The introversion and rigidity of Mrs. Leventhal, the ambivalence and paranoia of Max, and the estrangement and anxieties of son and daughter determine the life of this family and at the same time seem to symbolize the seeds of turmoil in a seething continent. Especially is this true when the passions and impulses of whites and blacks are juxtaposed. The native servants remain inscrutable to the Afrikaners, despite the certainty of the latter that oversimplified and obvious assessments suffice to account for the African’s bitterness. Not always satisfied by easy appraisals, Mrs. Leventhal longed for “an insight into the workings of their minds.” And in their minds resides much of the worth of Johannesburg Friday, though it is by their brawn that Johannesburg judges all issuing from the Zulu- land kraals. That her servant, Sixpence, represents more than a simple cluster of biological facts never occurs to Mrs. Leventhal. “If ever she believed him to be a human being, endowed with feelings and impulses and sensitivities, she disguised it from both herself and him.”
In the Journal of Negro Education, Mark Watkins of Howard University wrote:
The lives of these people are affected by much of what is Johannesburg, especially the struggles of the Jewish minority in the face of the ill-concealed disparagement of the gentile majority, the problem of the Bantu in the city, and the general turbulence of the times. This is a realistic exposure of human problems in a modern industrial and ethnically complex community. It is focused on Jews in the local setting of South Africa’s great commercial center, but it also is a rather good portrait of human nature and personality in general.
I’ve been able to find no trace of Albert Segal after the appearance of Johannesburg Friday (though I have not attempted to see what might be available through South African sources). If anyone knows more, please let us know using the comment feature below.
Johannesburg Friday, by Albert Segal London: Geoffrey Bles, 1954 New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954
“Pablo has confessed his love for me. I was stunned.”
We are, too, when we learn, a few lines further down the first page of Rosalyn Drexler’s third novel The Cosmopolitan Girl, that Pablo is a dog. The narrator, Helen, lives in the Hotel Buckminster in Manhattan. The hotel has a strict no-pets policy, but Helen has trained Pablo to walk on his hind legs and dresses him up in a man’s suit, wig, and hat. Pablo is “an intelligent dog, well coordinated and faithful” — which goes without saying, Helen reminds us.
He can also carry on a conversation and enjoys having Helen read to him from the newspaper. They share their most intimate thoughts and dreams. “I dreamt I was lying in the courtyard dead,” Pablo confides after a troubling night sleep. Helen promises to ask her mother what the dream means.
Helen’s mother is a psychic who changes her lovers more often than her sheets. Helen’s father is a fabulously wealthy herbalist. Neither parent is particularly concerned that their daughter is in love with a dog. It’s good to know she’s got a steady relationship.
It’s not without its difficulties, though. Helen notices that the roll of stamps is growing smaller and smaller and discovers that Pablo has been sending obscene letters to sex magazines. Also, her mother’s latest lover, Albert, is taking an interest in Helen. He tries to seduce her one night, but she finds the fact that he’s disguised himself as Gertrude Stein disconcerting. “I did not want to discover that yes, Gertrude did have a penis.” Well, who would?
Helen often gets her advice about romance from Cosmospolitan magazine. Cosmo tells her that “Anything goes” is the motto of her time: “Whether your ‘thing’ turns out to be of redeeming social importance is not crucial; it’s the passion with which you defend you view that’s important.” And so, she decides to sleep with Pablo.
The sex is not bad, but not great. Pablo’s nails leave deep scratches on Helen’s back and he seems unconcerned whether she enjoys it. Things grow even more complicated when Helen finds that an old man in the hotel is stalking her. When she visits his room to warn him off, the man introduces Helen to “your twin sister” — a life-size rag doll he’s dressed and made up to look exactly like her.
Rosalyn Drexler, from the dust jacket of The Cosmopolitan Girl.
It should be apparent by this point that Rosalyn Drexler was not looking to Zola for inspiration. Any pretence of realism is abandoned in the first paragraph of The Cosmopolitan Girl. Nor is this an example of magical realism in the fashion of Garcia Marquez and his Latin American colleagues. The clue to her approach can be found in two of the writers quoted on the back of the book’s dust jacket: Stanley Elkin and Donald Barthelme.
Elkin, Barthelme, and Kurt Vonnegut were the most critically and popularly successful American fabulists of the 1970s. For Barthelme in particularly, the aim of a piece of writing was more to achieve some formalistic coherence than to be realistic. No one thinks that the children in Barthelme’s The Dead Father are really dragging the giant corpse of their father across the landscape, but from a symbolic standpoint it’s an amazingly effective parable for the emotional burden that parents can leave behind.
By this standard, how does The Cosmopolitan Girl measure up? Well, one thing that Elkin, Barthelme, and Vonnegut all had going for them was a brilliant gift for comedy. I suspect that many people who read Barthelme’s stories in The New Yorker enjoyed his extravagantly absurdist humor without noticing the serious messages underneath the jokes.
And Drexler certainly holds her own in this regard. She takes full advantage of the playfulness that characterizes so much of American experimentalist fiction of this period. There are newspaper articles, letters, advertisements, dialogues from radio shows, to do lists, and a dozen other types of material included alongside passages of conventional narrative.
The Cosmopolitan Girl has 145 chapters in its 192 pages, but you can’t really say they’re squeezed into the book because some of them are just a sentence or two long. Take this example, when Helen is trying to write an article about incest for Cosmo:
103 Article going well. Already have four typewritten pages.
104 Article going well. Already have three typewritten pages.
105 Article may not be written. Should be able to begin on the fifteenth page, as one begins on the top floor of the Guggenheim to see the show. It’s too exhausting to begin on page one. It’s never any good. Has anything ever been written backward?
106 .reverof em evarc mih ekam dluohs amleS hserf fo etsat teews eht, ffo repparw ym sleep luaP nehw, nehT. wollamarc a ekil nat ni depparw nruter ll’I.
What, then, about Drexler’s underlying message? I’m tempted to reread The Dead Father now because I suspect there is more of a connection between it and The Cosmopolitan Girl than Barthelme’s blurb on the back. The Cosmopolitan Girl came out in 1974, The Dead Father a year later. Both deal with the complexities of the relationship between parents and children, particularly after the parents are gone.
And Drexler is also examining the nature of marriage and romantic relationships. It may be absurd that Helen finds happiness, at least for a while, with Pablo as a partner, but it’s really no more absurd that the notion that the stereotypical heterosexual American couple like Ward and June Cleaver were the ideal to which everyone should aspire. The Cosmopolitan Girl is not just a product of American experimentalism in fiction but of the wave of feminism and sexual liberation that was shaking up the country. (It’s telling that Gloria Steinem is one of the back-cover blurbers. It’s sad, however, that her quote appears second down the page after Norman Mailer’s).
The Cosmopolitan Girl is no more than a night or two’s read, and well worth looking for as both a very funny book and an illuminating artifact of its time.
The Cosmopolitan Girl, by Rosalyn Drexler New York: M. Evans & Company, 1974
“A hundred women came to paradise and a hundred angels fell” reads the tagline on the cover of the Red Seal/Gold Medal paperback original edition of Nancy Morgan’s 1952 novel City of Women. It was an obvious attempt to repeat the success of Gold Medal’s edition of Tereska Torres’s Women’s Barracks, a memoir of life among the women of the Free Free forces in London, down to its cover by Barye Phillips, the same artist, showing women in much the same variety of déshabillé.
Beneath the surface, however, the two books had little in common aside from the fact that both were clearly based on lived experience. In Morgan’s case, however, the experience was that of living in the large complex erected near Pearl Harbor to house the hundreds of civilian workers brought to Oahu after the declaration of war.
Lynn and her husband Mack have come from Kentucky on a ship full of troops and civilian workers. The idea of taking war work in Hawaii was entirely hers. Mack, we soon discover, is a small-minded, embittered man who should never have left home, let alone gotten married. Had Mack ever been happy? Lynn wonders soon after they move into a bleak, nearly unfurnished apartment in the married quarters. “Perhaps he had been before he married her. He had told her so many times that he was.” Mack is utterly out of place in Hawaii: “He hated it, the sun hurt his eyes, and he was affronted by the sensual warmth.”
Lynn, on the other hand, quickly comes to love her new situation. She’s good at her job, desired by the thousands of single men on the island, even desired as a friend by the women she’s become acquainted with on the ship.
Though Lynn decides to move into the single women’s quarters after Mack throws her clothes out the window in a jealous fit, it takes Morgan another two hundred pages to make their break permanent. For her part, the process is made easier by meeting a handsome, understanding lieutenant, though this only provokes Mack further into his fortress of surliness. She starts to receive anonymous letters: “Watch your step. We know what you’re doing and what will happen to you if you don’t stop seeing that lieutenant. You’re a filthy whore and we find ways to get rid of women like you.” “We” is clearly Mack and his buddy Toby, who probably resent most of all not having a nice basement to chain Lynn up in.
Much of the book is taken up with the other dramas that arise among Lynn’s barrack-mates, most of which we can predict. An unwanted pregnancy, a romance with a married officer, and a case or two of island fever. There is also the somewhat more “scandalous” element of a happily predatory lesbian, but Morgan is too unsure of, if not uncomfortable with, same-sex relations that it’s not much more than a novelty item. Neither does she treat her exotic setting as much more than a backdrop. Nancy Morgan may have been writing from firsthand knowledge of what it was like to be a civilian worker living in Hawaii during the war, but for all she makes of it, City of Women comes off as no more interesting than a week or two’s worth of General Hospital.
City of Women, by Nancy Morgan New York: Red Seal Books/Gold Medal Books (Fawcett Publications), 1952
In 1962, after eight years as a Police Constable 258 of the Metropolitan Police between 1951 and 1959, he published The Little White God, an early example of what later came to be called a ‘police procedural’ novel.
Why then, if he only published one novel, is he of any interest?
First, because Brock went on to publish some very good poetry – quite a lot of it – and two of his poems are among the most anthologized of the twentieth century. So, the novel is an interesting waystation on the path of his development.
Second, because the novel is worth something in its own right. After a shaky few opening paragraphs, it develops strongly and gives an intriguing view of an unusual episode in an ordinary copper’s life in a suburban division of ‘the Met’ during the post-war years. It describes the perpetual battle between an efficient police force and a justice system striving for fairness; it lays bare, very vividly, the universal battle between the ‘doers’ and the paper-shufflers in any organisation; and it analyses, softly and subtly as it goes along, some deep moral issues about right and wrong.
Brock was born in 1927 to a working-class family in the middle-class suburb of Dulwich in South London. Books were apparently few in the Brock household and the atmosphere was occasionally ‘turbulent’. Brock won a scholarship to the local grammar school but left after completing his school certificate, the family lacking the funds or ambition to push his education any further.
Too young to be ‘called up’ in the war years, he completed his National Service in the Royal Navy and ended up in Hong Kong waiting to be “demobbed’ in 1947. Listless and bored, Brock began to read anything he could get his hands on at the NAAFI (the British servicemen’s welfare organisation) library and, finally, was reduced to borrowing a book of poetry.
This proved to be the opening of a door. After reading the paperback poems, Brock knew he wanted to write. As his fellow poet, obituarist and friend, Anthony Thwaite, would put it later, Brock thought that most activity is a means of defining oneself; and for Brock, poetry was the best means, of doing that.
After leaving the Royal Navy, Brock secured a job as a trade journalist and used the free time it afforded to write poetry, most unpublished, as a way of developing his proficiency and style. He gradually accumulated publication credits in small, literary poetry magazines of the time. He married in 1949 and, with a young family needing the regularity and the prospect of increasing income, two years later he joined the Met. He continued to write poetry.
His break came when the editor of the Times Literary Supplement published a few of his poems, accepted on their merits, without any knowledge of who or what the author was. The TLS is famously intellectual, so publication caused quite a stir in literary circles, when his identity as a working policeman with no more than a grammar school education became known.
This led to a brief flash of celebrity. when a journalist from the Daily Express interviewed him and the paper’s editor gave the resulting piece a full-page splash. Far from the reprimand expected for giving an unauthorised interview,– which appeared in the Daily Express as ‘PC258 CONFESSES I’M A POET –THE THINGS HE THINKS UP AS HE POUNDS THE BEAT’ – Brock’s revelation was received tolerantly.
In 1959, he left the police and joined the advertising firm of Mather and Crowther as a copywriter. It was here that he mined his experiences “pounding the beat”, as the Express had it, and produced The Little White God. The novel was published by the prestigious firm of Hutchinson (no, unfortunately not Constable). The Little White God was never published in the USA, despite the American readerships’ appetite for police novels (although British readers were happy to lap up American crime fiction in all its forms) possibly because of some of the unfamiliarity of the context and the commercial risk associated with a first novel.
The Little White God describes the downfall of Detective Constable Mike Weller, a (generally) good and conscientious policemen, who, like most of his colleagues, is tuned in to the rhythms of the streets he patrols. He is an alpha male without being macho; aware that only a thin line of fate separates him as a policeman from many of the criminals he brushes up against, coming as they did from the same background. They drink at the same pubs, live in the same areas, marry women from the same background– and accept the rules that police, crooks, the courts and prison dance to in the game of justice in post-war Britain. But the men who join the police become “Little White Gods” and their downfall, if it comes, is even harder.
‘Like most of his colleagues’ does not mean all of them, though. Weller has the misfortune to report to a superior officer who does not have the tolerance Brock himself experienced as a PC. Although happily married, Weller cannot resist having an affair with the wife of a small-time criminal he has arrested for ‘sus” — suspicion of attempting to break into a locked shop. The relative triviality of this offence and the three-month sentence it attracts is crucial to the timing of Mike and Rosie’s affair. It is a criticism later levelled at Weller that he could have “fitted him up” better by charging him with by going equipped for breaking and entering.
The affair develops into much more than Weller anticipates. The crook seeks revenge by putting stolen goods in the shed at the back of Weller’s house and then writing anonymously to the Station Sergeant at Weller’s police station. Through force of circumstances, the sergeant is forced to report the anonymous letter to the new senior officer in charge of the station who is out to make an impact. The officer, in turn, outwits his divisional chief in a trial of procedural strength and Weller is the victim of the struggle.
The Little White God is structured in two parts, the first being the development of the affair and the receipt of the letter, the second what happens afterwards. It is very definitely a book of two halves in terms of writing style, as well. While the second half is tight and falls very much into the category of a ‘police procedural’ the first half is, initially, slightly over-written:
Outside the Court, the sun was doing its best but making heavy weather of it. It would look out of the clouds for a minute or two and then the sky would shut up to give the wind a chance. Round the corner it blew as though it were coming straight from Siberia. It was the kind of wind that seemed to make your clothing feel transparent.
And later:
On top of the bus the wind came at them like a four-ale bar pug – all rush and no science – until they turned a corner and it retired out of breath.
“Transparent”? “Four-ale bar pug”? Apart from the confusing analogies, Brock is obviously in poet mode in starting the book.
But the narrative soon gathers its stride. The descriptions of South London suburbia and its residents becomes more fluent and less contrived, more based in the reality of Brock’s experience — and Mike Weller’s fate:
It was as if there were two police forces. One was the real one which caught criminals and the other was the one that existed in some high-up’s office at the Yard. The real force was there to catch criminals and you caught them the best way you could. You knew who they were and if you couldn’t get them down according to Judge’s Rules, you got them down in your own way. Mike could see nothing wrong with that. He was paid to catch thieves and he bloody-well caught them.
But it is this attitude that proves to be Mike’s undoing. His ambitious station commander has aspirations for a position at the Yard and has the mindset to go with it. In his eyes, Weller’s having an affair with a criminal’s wife is the greater crime and, thwarted at not being able to take Mike out ‘fairly’, he ensures that Weller pays for his indiscretion. Brock keeps the reader uncertain about Weller’s fate almost to the end of the book.
Weller is demoted from detective to beat policeman and subjected to all the petty and largely mindless administrative procedures that the lowest on the pecking order have to put up with. He loses his wife and his marriage, probably keeps the love of Rosie but certainly loses his livelihood in a grand gesture of resignation.
To the British reading public at the time, this unsentimental insider’s view of the police would have been a marked change from the prevailing conventions. At the time, the most famous fictitious British policemen was Dixon of Dock Green — an avuncular sergeant close to retirement age who had seen it all and who recounted police-station stories of the “it’s a fair cop, guv” type on television on Saturday evenings. The revolutionary and grittier Z Cars (which influenced many later British police series) was just about entering its stride but the cynical tone of Line of Duty and its Chief Inspector Hastings of AC12 (who would become a British cultural icon in his own right), with its unremitting focus on internal corruption, would have to wait a generation or more of profound social change.
Despite his upbringing and background, Brock is only hit-and-miss when it came to the novel’s dialogue. Conversations in the workplace and between policemen are clear, unstilted, direct but with the necessary amount of ellipsis of ordinary dialogue between people with shared conventions and background. Conversations between the male and female characters are less convincing. Aside from using the word “gel” (hard ‘g’) to stand for the South Londoner’s catch-all term for a woman, Brock offers few other stylistic clues to accent or educational background in the male-female exchanges. The 1950s lower classes in Peckham are suspiciously precise about grammar and syntax — especially Weller’s paramour Rosie.
But this is carping criticism. The novel is not dialogue-dependent for its momentum, being as much an examination of social ideas, cultural customs and a dissection of moral attitudes.
Cover of Invisibility is the Art of Survival.
What then of Brock after The Little White God? In his first collection published in the US, Invisibility is the Art of Survival, the jacket biographical sketch states:
Born in London in 1927, Brock says he has spent the subsequent years waiting for something to happen, occupying his time as a sailor, journalist, policeman, and adman, in that order. Yet none of this, he feels, has touched him, “except with a fine patina of invisibility.” Poetry, however, is for him an act of self-definition “which sometimes goes so deep that you become what you have defined. And this,” he adds, “is the nearest thing to an activity I have yet found.” Thus in addition to being poetry editor of Ambit, Brock has published several volumes of his own. His first, An Attempt at Exorcism, was brought out in 1959, and was followed over the next decade by A Family Affair, With Love from Judas, a large selection in Penguin Modern Poets 8, and A Cold Day at the Zoo. Confronted with his work, American readers will agree with the critic Alan Pryce-Jones that Brock has written “some of the most observant and compassionate poems of our time–poems, moreover, in which the poet keeps his feet on the ground as skilfully as his head in the air.”
(Alan Pryce-Jones was the editor of the TLS who first spotted Brock’s poetry.)
The reviews that the Little White God received may also have contributed to Brock not writing another novel. The Times reviewer praised the novel’s “blatantly unvarnished authenticity” but Simon Raven (another now-neglected novelist) in The Spectator damned it with faint praise by saying that the documentary account was “smartly done in its way”. An anonymous reviewer in the TLS said that “the documentary element is the most valuable … but does not go deep…” while having “… sufficient vitality to complement the other more important side of the novel”. But perhaps what might have sealed the fate of further novelistic adventures was Anthony Burgess’s (rather unkind) conclusion in The Observer that “Brock is capable of better than” a documentary.
Brock probably got something out of his system with The Little White God. It was written at the same time as James Barlow, Allan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, John Braine, John Osborne, and the loose grouping that became known as the ‘Angry Young Men’ were active. So it was in good radical company. But Brock maintained that it was poetry that helped him to define himself, so the success he began to have with that – he joined the editorial staff of the quarterly literary magazine Ambit in 1960 – probably meant he chose to concentrate on the strong suit of poetry rather than risk further half-hearted praise with novels.
Like most poets – and many prose authors – Brock could not make a living out of his writing alone, so for 30 years he stayed in advertising at Mather and Crowther, rising up the company, through its mergers, to end as a director and originating the famous “No FT. No comment.” slogan along the way. He edited the poetry section of Ambit for nearly four decades (1960-97), rubbing shoulders with the likes of J. G. Ballard, Eduardo Paolozzi and Carol Ann Duffy.
The Little White God was an early starter in the field of the British police procedural. The description of the investigation by the ‘rubber-heelers’ –Scotland Yard’s internal affairs men, who are the catalysts of Weller’s demise – is, as the publisher noted, documentary in style and as different from the aristocratic, amateur detective novels beloved of the Golden Age as chalk from cheese. Changing social attitudes from the war and then post-war austerity did away with that.
Those who only know Brock’s poetry will find it an interesting read since it fits well with his early poetical works and fills a gap, demonstrating the importance of experience in his writing. It is a deceptively angry book — angry at the frustration of advancement because of artificial barriers; impatient with rule-bound satraps who value mindless procedure above sensible outcome: hinting at the beginnings of rebellion.
Those who are fresh to Brock may well find that the novel is an enticing stepping stone to a poet of considerable talent in encapsulating the significance to the individual of common hurts. It was only as he got older that he got mellower. His initial works were partly autobiographical, coloured by the unhappiness of his first marriage. Later they became broader and less personal – more infused, paradoxically, like The Little White God –with the experience of ordinary people of the hurts inflicted by the world. Two of his poems– “Five Ways to Kill a Man” and “Song of the Battery Hen” — were particularly popular with compilers of anthologies.
As an ex-journalist and writer of academic texts, Stephen Bloomfield is baffled why so many excellent books become neglected.
The Little White God, by Edwin Brock London: Hutchinson, 1962
If the term had existed in 1962, critics would have labelled Personal File a “mid-life crisis” novel. It is certainly a novel of middles. George Park is middle-class, midway through life’s journey, midway through his career, midway in the ranks of the civil service.
As the book opens, he is about to face an Establishment Panel, which is a euphemism for a promotion panel. He realizes that this could be, effectively, his last such panel:
Everyone knows that this is the promotion which matters. If you stop here beyond … say, about forty-two, you probably stop here indefinitely. If you make it, then in ten or twenty years you might even take home a medal. If I don’t get it this time I probably won’t get another Panel for about three years. Then I’ll be forty-two. The odds against will be longer then.
George does not do well. To forget his failure, he leaves work early and goes to the movies. There, he becomes infatuated with one of the ice cream girls and, rashly, decides to ask her out, in what has to be one of the worst sales jobs in the history of romance:
It’s not that I am interested in you. You represent everything I have not got: youth, love, warmth, happiness. Of course, I have no excuse for not having them. I have children — nice ones — and a wife. But my life is empty, dry. I might be a vegetable, or an electronic computer.
“I like to hear you talk,” the girl replies, and she agrees to meet him for a drink.
Looking at this description, George’s affair with Lily, the ice cream girl, seems completely unbelievable, but in the book it comes across as only somewhat unbelievable. George is fascinated by her beauty, her casualness, her working-class life; Lily is amused by his awkwardness, touched by his tenderness, and glad of something to lift her out of her boredom. Never for a moment do we or they think of this as anything permanent.
Jones contrasts George’s situation with those of his colleague Peter — recognized by all as the more competitive — and of the Junior Minister they both work for, a rising star from their own year at Oxford. All three men are at crucial points in their careers. The poses of their college days are “now hardened into attitudes; it was no longer a game.” The Junior Minister’s success is tempered by the miserableness of his marriage. And Peter is obsessed with fears that he is just one mistake from seeing his promise transformed into disgrace.
George’s pessimism deepens when he considers the example of his own father, whose “life had not been as he had expected”:
He had won none even of the modest prizes which had seemed within his reach, had inspired no special affection among his colleagues. Even his family had comforted him only moderately…. He now slept a good deal during the day, did nothing by which one day could be distnguished from another, had no plans for the future.
In the hands of a writer willing to inflict real pain upon his characters — someone like Richard Yates, who never hesitated to peel away that last layer of self-respect — Personal File could have been a truly powerful novel. But there’s a certain reluctance to deal with serious levels of discomfort that dulls the book’s impact.
When you learn a bit about G. O. Jones, you get the impression that he was neither invested enough in the book nor sufficiently misanthropic to sacrifice his characters. Gwyn Owain Jones was something of a Renaissance man. A pioneer of low temperature physics, head of his department at Queen Mary College, who left science at the age of 50 to become director of the National Museum of Wales. He was an admirable administrator, a manager who brought out the best in his people, a leader who sought to improve the institutions he ran. An amateur musician, he also managed to write Personal File and several other novels in the course of his very busy life.
Anyone who’s worked a large bureaucracy, and particularly civil service, will recognize the world and characters of Personal File, even though sixty years have passed since its publication. This does not, however, mean that it’s anything but a respectably well-crafted piece of middlebrow male fiction. For me, it was far more interesting than something of similar caliber involving espionage or adventure, but no more than a satisfying evening’s read.
Personal File, by G. O. Jones London: Faber and Faber, 1962
“The first 36 pages of The Monkey Puzzle excited me more than any first novel I have read for years,” wrote the Daily Telegraph’s reviewer, Peter Green. “Here, I thought, is a real winner.”
So did I when I first started the book. It opens in a philosophy tutorial in Professor Marble’s rooms. It’s one of the hottest tickets at this London university, with students squeezed into various forms of seating, increasing in discomfort as they decrease in seniority. Marble has disposed of individuation and problem of identity and is launching into negation. “What is ‘failing to find?’ my cigarette-case?” he asks. “Is it finding my paper the books the ashtray plus the rider that these are all the things on the table? How do we verify ‘my cigarette-case is not on the table’?”
Professor Marble is, as several biographers have pointed out, a fictionalized version of the philosopher A. J. Ayer, under whom Veronica Hull (then Veronica Benton) studied at University College London in the mid-1950s. Though it was later claimed that The Monkey Puzzle satirized Ayer’s affairs with numerous female students, I suspect the people who say this never read the book. When, on several occasions, Hull’s protagonist Catherine says she’s in love with Professor Marble, it’s obvious this is intended with a healthy dose of self-mockery.
Catherine, sitting in one of the more uncomfortable chairs at the opening tutorial, is struggling with the problem of ‘failing to find.’ “She had failed to find anything.” In fact, she is struggling with pretty much everything in her life. She’s taken to attending Mass every morning “in order to give God a last chance to reveal himself.” He has not. Her hairdresser hacks her curls into an Iris Murdoch-like pageboy cut. Her step-mother disapproves of her decision to study philosophy, expects Catherine to transform herself into a completely conventional housewife, and offers no practical or emotional support.
When she fails a critical exam, she becomes so distraught she finds herself admitted to a mental asylum. She awakens to a ward full of unhappy faces that stare back at her “munching and uncomprehending like cows.” They and the nurses are drowning in a slough of despond and Catherine’s greatest concern, even more than how to get out, is how to avoid being strapped down for a dose of E.C.T..
She gradually realizes that there is, in fact, a code of conduct among the inmates,
… the most honourable one she had yet encountered…. United against a common double oppressor, their madness and the hospital authorities, they rose above trivialities and did everything they could to help each other when the nurses weren’t looking. Catherine noticed many instances — a hot-water bottle passed on among four patients, a surreptitious puff of a Woodbine in the lavatory, such possessions as they were allowed to share, and always encouragement which if eccentric was well meant.
Though she frustrates her psychiatrist by preferring to talk about metaphysics than masturbation, Catherine manages to get herself released before experiencing the worst horrors of the asylum, but it soon proves only the first loop of a scarifying rollercoaster ride.
She spends a few weeks at a dismal, unheated boarding school in the North. Friends get her a job as a live-in teacher for the children of a couple of hyper-sensitive intellectuals in Essex: “She had expected them to be dirty but friendly; she found them dirty but extremely unfriendly.” She spends a few weeks homeless in London, going from cafe to cafe, and bar to bar in Soho, “where poets, painters, intellectuals and bums gather in the community of drink.” Her diet of cadged drinks leaves her wound up tighter than a violin string and she falls ill and spends time in a hospital (not mental this time).
All she really wants is “time to look at people and understand.” Everyone around her takes this as a lack of sufficient career-mindedness. What she’s trying to do is to learn to “live with my dirty brain,” to avoid becoming one of “the people I was brought up with” — the people who “hid trouble under a bank balance.” In the U.S., Catherine would have been considered a member of the Beat generation. In the U.K., perhaps one of the Angry Young Men — if she’d been a man. As a woman, however, she’s a bit too early for 1960s’ feminism and too independent to conform to the stereotype of a housewife and mother. (She does end up as both wife and mother, but only according to her own model.)
Catherine provides Veronica Hull with a wonderful vehicle for sharp and satirical observations and The Monkey Puzzle is one of the funnier novels I’ve read in quite a while. Unfortunately, Hull undermines her own work by failing to give the book sufficient backbone. Peter Green of the Telegraph thought the book lost steam after the first chapter. I think it holds up for a good four-and-a-half. but then, instead of keeping a tight focus on Catherine, she wastes her time and ours on characters none of us cares about. Like John, the “interesting” working-class philosopher, who never seems to open his mouth without going on for at least 2-3 pages. Like Adrian, her husband, who might be gay or might be a petty criminal but is probably just the ambiguous blob he seems. In the end, Catherine is not sadder but wiser than she started, just duller.
Not everyone agreed with Peter Green (and me) about The Monkey Puzzle’s diminishing returns. Angela Milne felt that Hull wrote “with an excellent colloquial simplicity, telling dialogue and a biting wit. This novel (her first) may not seem to have much shape, but it reaches its final comment decisively.” Angus Wilson remarked that “I have seldom read scenes at once so comic and so terrifying….” The book met V.S. Naipaul’s demanding standards: “The book is full of good things,” he wrote, though he added that “the early chapters are the most impressive.”
The Monkey Puzzle was Hull’s only published foray into fiction. She wrote several works of history and worked as a translator of French and German. The novelist Robin Cook, who lived with her for several years in the early 1960s, said she “had a brain like a bandsaw” and described himself as “one of her few survivors.” One wonders what might have come from Hull’s having a more supportive editor or a less sexist philosophy tutor.
The Monkey Puzzle, by Veronica Hull London: Barrie, 1958
I first learned of Louise W. King’s queer comedies from Barbara Grier’s capsule book reviews (written as Gene Damon) in the 1960s lesbian magazine The Ladder. “If ever a novel could rightly be termed Gay, this is it,” she wrote of King’s first book, The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies (1964), describing the book as “High camp in full flight.”
I suspect that Grier was the only reviewer who “got” the book. The TLS missed the fact that it’s a work of comic fiction, noting instead that it admirably avoided “the twin temptations of revelatory pornography and sociological exposition.” Hear, hear! Punch’s reviewer, the young Malcolm Bradbury, on the other hand, bristled at the publisher’s description of the book as “camped up Jane Austenese,” writing that “my indignation still hasn’t cooled.” He found it more “camped-down Truman Capotese” and dismissed it as a complete failure as a work of fiction: “Nothing at all in the way of real relationships or convincing dialogue pulls them around in the direction of reality; so that the bright sparkle of the wit seems to have nothing to engage with, and Jane Austen wouldn’t like it at all.”
But then, even its publishers didn’t understand The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies. The U.K. publisher, Michael Joseph, was responsible for the completely off-target Jane Austen comparison. And the U.S. publisher, Doubleday, was even more obtuse. At the time, Doubleday ran a regular ad in The Saturday Review of Literature and similar journals in the form of a “Letter from the Editor” written by one L. L. Day. Their ad for the week of November 14, 1964 called the book “the best novel I ever read about an interior decorator living more or less happily in sin with the cast-off girlfried of a lady truck driver,” which suggests that the copywriter either didn’t read the book or was one of the dumbest straight men on Madison Avenue.
Both The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies and its sequel The Velocipede Handicap (1965) are about the misadventures of an queer threesome living in Greenwich Village. Miss Moppet is a beautiful blonde agent of chaos who carries on like an airhead while maintaining an impressive TBR stack in her bed (“In her bed? You mean by her bed?” “No, in her bed”) with everything from Naked Lunch to the complete works of Shakespeare. Everywhere she goes, she insists on bringing along her pet turtle Emma Hamlet Woodhouse, named for her three favorite works of literature [Woodhouse = Wodehouse. Ed.].
Miss Moppet is alternately loved and loathed by Lillian Richardson, a lady truck driver who hits the road whenever she finds her patience with Moppet’s antics running thin. Rounding out the trio, narrating their tales, and usually cleaning up afterwards, is Maurice Calhoun, an interior decorator and delicate Southern beau. Whenever Lillian heads out of New York City, she leaves Moppet in his charge. Maurice denies any such responsibility:
I might take this opportunity to explain about Miss Moppet and how she doesn’t belong to me at all. And just in case any damnyakee Federalist is making ready to pop up and give me that Union jazz about no one human being owning another since the days of the unspeakable treachery of General Butler and his ilk, I know it sufficiently good and well…. Miss Moppet is more than usually unrewarding as far as I am concerned because not only can you not hitch her to a little basket cart and drive to distant places … but she doesn’t care for men and won’t do the littlest morsel of housework.
In fact, the book opens with Maurice complaining that Moppet has just slipped into the bathroom with a copy of McTeague to avoid washing the dishes.
The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies is no novel, but rather a collection of four stories, and though The Velocipede Handicap is one coherent story, taken together the book more closely resemble The Pickwick Papers or Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour than anything we’d consider a novel today. One story is about a trip to Coney Island where Emma Hamlet Woodhouse (the turtle) gets lost (temporarily). In another, Maurice comes home to find that Miss Moppet has smuggled a racehorse into the laundry room. A racehouse features again in The Velocipede Handicap, but this time outside the apartment and in the clutches of a bunch of mafiosi.
But just as with P. G. Wodehouse, it’s a mistake to read the Moppet/Lillian/Maurice stories for plot. Good comedy is always about the journey, not the destination. And though King’s characters are gay, there’s nothing more titillating in her books than there is in Wodehouse’s. She does, however, slip in more than a few sly observations from the queer side of life.
On one of her road trips, Lillian sends Miss Moppet a postcard of a redhead stripper from Reno. “It’s true what they say about the West, love L.” reads the inscription. Moppet begs Maurice to explain: what did they say about the West? “They always do say the West is wide open.”
When, at Coney Island, Miss Moppet tells Maurice somewhat haughtily that she doesn’t swim, she wades, he informs her,
Moppet, honey, you can wade elegantly near the shore. It’s out deeper all the evil dykes swim, to show how terribly manly they are. You’d be fifty million times happier just messing around in the shallows with the queens…. You don’t want to go wading in deep water where some butch is likely to drown you without ever knowing it.
So much for the TLS reviewer’s claim that King avoids “sociological exposition.”
Louise W. King, from the dust jacket of The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies.
I have to admit that I found The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies and The Velocipede Handicap somewhat tedious when I first read them straight through (no pun intended) some months ago, and I kept putting off writing this post. But that tends to be true of a lot of comic writing. I thoroughly enjoy S. J. Perelman, for example, whenever I sit down and read one of his pieces. One — not two, and never three. And I’d put the same warning label on these two books: “To Be Consumed in Small Portions.”
Taken in small bites, there is something to enjoy on almost every page. Here, for example, is a moment in a diner, from “The Love Goddess of the Middle West,” about the attempt by Miss Moppet’s third cousin twice removed to make it in the Big Apple as “an editor, or an actress, or a poetress, or all three”:
The Love Goddess said loudly that she’d like a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of sarsparilla to drink, without bothering to say please or thank you. The waitress mopped off the marble top of the table, and carefully wrote down what the Love Goddess wanted on a little pad of paper. No sooner had the waitress turned herself around and got halfway to the safety of the kitchen, than the Love Goddess changed her mind about the sarsparilla. By saying “hey” very insistently several times, the Love Goddess managed to call the girl back. After an unconscionable amount of erasing and a few false starts for the kitchen on the part of the waitress, the Love Goddess settled on a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of sarsparilla.
One of the few critics to mention King’s work after its initial publication called her books “amusing but mindless and stereotyped trash.” While I think that’s quite unfair, I wouldn’t take the Wodehouse comparison too far. One of the reasons we can still read and enjoy Wodehouse is that there is always a certain deftness in his touch. Restraint is crucial for comic writing to survive, and strain is the disease that usually kills it off. King wrote these books in the space of just a couple of years (her first story appeared in The Transatlantic Review in 1962), and there are times when her effort to be funny shows.
Louise W. King only attempted one other work of adult fiction, an apparently un-ironic Gothic thriller titled The Rochemer Hag (1967). She moved to Connecticut, where she took up ceramics and was active in animal rights causes. She self-published a children’s book about two Pekingese puppies, Geronimo and Geranium, in 1979. She died in Washington, Connecticut in 2016.
The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies (1964) The Velocipede Handicap (1965) New York: Doubleday & Company; reissued in 1971 by Curtis Books
Proximity is often what leads me to discover a neglected book. Whenever I look into reviews of something I’m planning to write about, I scan through the other titles discussed. This is most useful with reviews in British newspapers and magazines from the 1930s to the 1970s, when it was the habit of the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and other journals to have a reviewer — and sometimes, quite prominent writers such as L. P. Hartley, Angus Wilson, or Anita Brookner — to cover three to five new works of fiction in the space of an 800-word article.
In this case, it was Angela Milne’s review of Veronica Hull’s novel The Monkey Puzzle that led me to No Bedtime Story (1958), the last of a half-dozen novels that Mary Nicholson, née Crawford, published between 1932 and 1958. Milne described the book as “told by a small boy of a nameless oppressed country” in the days following a popular uprising against the ruling regime. In light of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and on the heels of reading a similar account of a revolution in a nameless European country and its refugees, Monica Stirling’s Sigh for a Strange Land, I was intrigued. While there were almost no used copies available, they were cheap, so I bought one.
Were No Bedtime Story to be published today, it would probably be categorized as a young adult novel. The story is narrated by a boy named Jacko, probably around nine or ten, living with his mother, father, and little sister Vicky in the capital of a country that might just as well be Hungary or any other landlocked European state. (All we know is that the sea lies somewhere across the border.) His father is an activist, a leader of the printer’s union, which seems to be organizing against some status quo, some combination of political and economic forces, and he often hosts meetings — sometimes attended by men with foreign accents — at their apartment.
But all we see and know is through Jacko’s eyes and thoughts. And for him, the story begins when the radio announcer says she is sorry: “Children’s Hour was cancelled. She said we weren’t to be cross about going to bed without our bedtime story.” The next morning, Jacko’s father leaves early. “It’s a day of great events,” he tell his family. His mother sends Jacko to school with Vicky, but the streets seem mostly deserted aside from a figure or two rushing along.
When Jacko and Vicky arrive at the school, there is talk of the “great events,” but no one quite knows what is going on. Everyone is sent home. From their apartment window, Jacko sees crowds rushing down the streets carrying flags and policemen chasing after them, knocking down and arresting a few. His mother puts on her green overcoat and leaves, telling Jacko that she’s going to do some shopping. She does not return.
The next morning, knowing no better, Jacko dresses and feeds Vicky and the two head to school again. Now, there is no one but Christina, a student teacher, and Banger, a neighborhood delinquent. Leaving Vicky in their care, he heads to the city’s main center to try and find his mother. He comes across some men loading bodies into a truck. A skirmish breaks out and he jumps into the truck with the men, who drive to the edge of town. There, he sees hundreds of bodies:
They were arranged tidily in rows, so I was able to walk down between them, when I had dodged out of sight of the lorry, looking for the green coat. I didn’t think it was any use looking at the faces, because some of them were not like faces. The clothes were torn, too, but not so much.
I found the green coat at last, and the face, which was not bloody at all. But it was white and glossy like a candle, and though it looked like my mother, it was also quite wrong. I might not have been certain it was her, except that she still had her string bag, helf-full of fading spinach, twisted round her wrist.
This passage captures what is best about No Bedtime Story, which is Crawford’s skill in capturing the mix of concrete details and incomplete comprehension with which a child might perceive a chaotic situation. We know that some kind of revolution is going on, that tanks are rolling down the streets, that people are either huddled together in their apartments or trying to escape to safety in another country. There are scenes we are all too familiar with: a tank knocking down the wall around a suburban garden, blowing a hole into a family’s home; people running away from gunfire; roads clogged with people fleeing and airplanes swooping down to spray them with bullets.
The disarray and confusion that occurs when a war crashes into a civilian population is amplified by Jacko’s youth and lack of a frame of reference. When he hears a great screaming noise, sees a great shadow pass over him, feels the blast of heat from an explosion, it takes him a moment to understand that a plane has been shot down. When he then comes across a man in a fly suit, a parachute strung out behind him, crawling feebly to drink from a pool of water, he doesn’t know if this whose side the airman is on: he simply acts on instincts and pushes the man into the water, drowning him.
I found the simple details and abstract setting of No Bedtime Story highly effective. It was hard not to project images from the war in the Ukraine onto some of its scenes. Several contemporary reviewers, however, had reservations about Crawford’s decision to use a child as her narrator. Anthony Cronin, writing in the TLS, acknowledged that “the story is told skillfully enough; there is no obvious insincerity.” “Yet,” he wrote with some suspicion, “we have the feeling that use is being made of a child’s eyes for an adult purpose.” He felt that Crawford was pushing an agenda, probably a liberal one: “We know of course that all political action leads to evil but there are ways and ways of telling us.”
Portrait of Mary Crawford by Elizabeth Henderson, from the flyleaf of No Bedtime Story.
Angus Wilson, on the other hand, considered the novel a “tour de force that completely comes off,” but had reservations about the consequences of Crawford’s choice: “Nevertheless, even the greatest novel seen through a child’s eyes can never, I believe, be more than a tour de force.” “The vision is too limited,” he argued. “What the author gains by the brilliance of imposing this limitation accurately, he loses in the intellectual and imaginative scope of what can be told.”
To me, this is the objection of a writer who simply could never see himself making the same choice. Every narrator — even supposedly omniscient ones — is, in effect, a lens that focuses or disperses light in a particular way. In this case, I think Crawford has chosen a lens that accurately captures the experience of finding oneself in the midst of chaos. People say of such an experience that everything happens in a blur. But that isn’t true. Many things seem to be in a blur, while a few things stand out in perfect focus. And that was very much the feeling Mary Crawford conveys in No Bedtime Story.
No Bedtime Story by Mary Crawford London: Putnam, 1958
Sense and Sensuality is a novel caught somewhere between Queen Victoria and Dr. Kinsey. Richard and Laura, a young upper-middle class couple living in London in the late 1920s consider themselves sophisticates in taste and morality. Richard, a publisher, recognizes the growing appeal of modernism and Laura knows this means one should appreciate the work of Gertrude Stein, though she can’t find the patience to read it.
Had they existed in real life, Richard and Laura would undoubtedly have been a part of the Bright Young Things, and they will remind some readers a good deal of Tony and Brenda Last of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, though that novel came five years later. They are out almost every night at parties or clubs while a servant takes care of the tiresome details of raising their child. Laura in particular adores the company of the ever-changing cast of handsome young men. “When she was jolly and happy, she enjoyed kissing strange young men. And it never occurred to her to have a bad conscience about it.”
Laura enjoys playing the coquette, though at times she has a hard time knowing “how much was pretence and how much was true.” Richard, on the other hand, is a bit suspicious of many new ideas like psychoanalysis (“It’s too easy, somehow”). Yet they both feel themselves almost obliged by modern mores to experiment. One of Richard’s friends tells him that “One ought to have three women. One for a companion. One to feel romantic about. And one to make love to.” “It sounded silly,” he thinks, “but as a matter of fact it also contained a good deal of truth.”
In reality, what appeals to him is less a modern notion of an open marriage than the good old-fashioned double standard of chauvinism. So, when he begins an affair with April, a pretty younger woman a bit in awe of his worldliness, he considers it “a bit off” when Laura objects. And so she, in response, begins an affair with the shallow but funny Julian.
But neither is prepared to accept infidelity as just another part of modern life, like air travel or jazz. Julian is a better dancer, a better lover, than Richard, but somehow Laura longs for her husband’s solidity. Richard enjoys playing with April but would never for a moment think of ending his marriage to be with her. Laura struggles to make sense of the situation: “The Victorians thought they ought not to commit adultery, and did! We think we ought not to be jealous and are!” “Am I just being a suburban wife?” she wonders.
Critical acclaim for Sense and Sensuality.
To the give-and-take drama between Richard and Laura, Salt adds an updated version of the Greek chorus in the form of letters from Daisy, their maid, to her friend Nellie:
The drawing-room here has got pictures of naked women. I suppose it all depends on what one likes. I was never one to like that sort of thing. It’s not that I’m what you’d call narrow-minded, but I’ve got my feelings like anyone else and I never did like dirt. I believe Mrs. L. would run about the house without a stitch on. She’s not sensitive like I am.
Nellie isn’t terribly upset at Laura’s carrying on an affair (“with some women, one man is never enough”), but she doesn’t think much of her choice in lovers (“He’s got something sly in his face”).
How to resolve this situation? Around the time that Sense and Sensuality was published, Evelyn Waugh and his first wife dealt with it the “modern” way: they divorced. Salt, however, reached back to a tried-and-true denouement from the Victorian era: tuberculosis and tragic death. And for all its cleverness, Sense and Sensuality is ultimately undermined by Salt’s apparent preference for the mores of the previous century. The first time Laura coughs, you know where this story is headed.
Sarah Salt was the pseudonym that Coralie Von Werner Hobson adopted in the late 1920s for some reason. She’d already published several somewhat well-received novels under her own name, beginning with The Revolt of Youth in 1919. She’d previously used it as a stage name when she’d spent a season as part of a touring theatrical company — an experience she twice put to fictional use: once with Revolt and the second time with Joy is My Name (1929) (published as Sarah Salt). She published several more books as Salt, ending with Murder for Love in 1937. She died in 1946 at the age of 55.
Sense and Sensuality, by Sarah Salt (pseudonym of Coralie Hobson) London: Victor Gollancz, 1929 New York: Payson & Clarke, 1929
“In the dry places, men begin to dream. Where the rivers run sand, there is something in man that begins to flow.” Wright Morris’s The Works of Love opens “West of the 98th Meridian,” in the part of western Nebraska that was sparsely populated in the late 1800s and that remains so today. In the land “where it sometimes rains and it sometimes doesn’t….”
As I’ve written before, Wright Morris is one of the great American novelists of the 20th century, but he tends to get labeled and limited as a regionalist. And it’s due in part to sentences like those above. I have to admit, though I have loved and admired The Works of Love since I read it forty years ago, I mentally tagged it as a Midwestern novel myself. I recalled it as a story set mostly in lonely places, in railroad stations where the express trains from Omaha to Denver don’t stop, in towns where a single hotel serves as the one place where travelers can sleep, eat, and drink.
The train station in Kearney, Nebraska, around 1910.
And it’s true that this is where Will Brady is born and where The Works of Love, which traces the path of his life, starts out. Will’s father dies when he’s still a boy, likely a suicide worn down by failure and the emptiness of the land. You can’t really say that Will is raised here. His mother leaves him and Will makes his way on his own, starting out as a railroad station agent. He gradually works his way east, until he finds himself the owner of a large egg-producing operation outside Omaha.
He also finds himself a father and a husband, in that order. After falling into a sort-of relationship with one of the whores in his town’s brothel, he receives a basket a year or so later containing “a sausage-colored baby” and a note saying, “My name is Willy Brady.” He then weds the widow of the owner of the town’s hotel, not so much out of love as out of a sense that a wife is one of the things with which a man’s meant to furnish his life.
On their first night together after the wedding, Will finds his wife laying in bed, “wrapped from head to foot, as mummies are wrapped.”
It occurred to him that something like that takes a good deal of practice, just as it took practice to lie, wrapped up like a mummy, all night. It took practice, and it also took something else. It took fear. This woman he had married was scared to death.
The wife wrapped up and protected from her husband is an image that stays with anyone who reads The Works of Love. It symbolizes how Will Brady is cut off, shut out, isolated from the people he loves. Which is part of what makes the book one of the most powerfully sad stories in American literature.
But what I didn’t recognize when I first read this book as a young man was that The Works of Love is, fundamentally, a work of absurdist fiction. In an analysis of The Works of Love published in a 1968 issue of Western American Literature, Joseph Wydeven wrote that critics such as Granville Hicks dismissed the character of Will Brady as a cipher, “a person moved paradoxically by an absence of motivation.” They argued that he “seems to exist at times as little more than a receptor of sensual stimuli, unable to convert perception into perception.”
Men outside the train station in Omaha, Nebraska, in the early 1920s.
But so is Gregor Samsa of Kafka’s Metamorphosis or Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. To Will Brady, much of life is a baffling mystery. He knows how to perform the tasks that his work puts before him and he does them well, attaining a level of wealth and comfort that others envy and are attracted to. After his first wife leaves him, he manages to persuade a good-looking younger woman to marry him, but she leaves him for “a Hawayan” vaudeville performer while they are still honeymooning in California. He provides for his son’s care but lives apart, often thinking of writing him a letter but rarely managing to send one.
He sees himself as “a traveler, something of an explorer” — except that the foreign land through which he travels is the land of other people:
It was one thing to go to the moon, like this foreigner, a writer of books, but did this man know the man or woman across the street? Had he ever traveled into the neighbor’s house? Did he know the woman who was there by the lamp, or the man sitting there in the shadow, a hat on his head as if at any moment he might go out? Could he explain why there were grass stains on the man’s pants? That might be stranger, that might be harder to see, than the dark side of the moon.
Morris based his story somewhat on his own relationship with his father. A man who struggled with depression and went through a string of unsuccessful marriages and lonely railroad station jobs, he, too, left his son in the care of strangers and seemed to forget about him for years. Morris told of saving up to buy an old pocket watch from a pawn shop, a watch he then proceeded to wrap up and leave under the Christmas tree in the Omaha house where he was staying, so that he could open it on Christmas Day and pretend that it was from his father.
For Morris, bottled-up men like his father and Will Brady were representative men. As he once told the critic Wayne Booth:
When I say, What is there to say about a man with so much of his life left out? I mean the reader to understand there will be plenty, however strange…. Without knowing, and in a sense without really having adequate reason to feel so, I was absolutely confident … that in Brady’s emotionally muted relationships and his failure to relate to others there was the drama, however submerged, of much American life.
Will Brady ends up playing the part of the most benevolent and friendly father figure known to American children. He takes a job as Santa Claus at the Montgomery Ward store in downtown Chicago, and buys a sun lamp to give himself the appropriate rosy complexion. But the harder he chases after the image he thinks the children want, the more his actions become self-destructive, the further he distances himself from others. He no more succeeds in making a connection with other people than Gregor Samsa succeeds in breaking out of his cockroach shell.
Morris worked in concrete, specific images and sensations. His prose is taut, his scenes immediate. He didn’t indulge in flights of fantasy. And so, it’s easy to think of him as a realist.
But rereading The Works of Love, I saw that I had fallen into a trap of thinking of the book as a realistic novel. We don’t make this mistake with Kafka. Though he gives the reader convincing details that help us feel the plight of Gregor Samsa as he lies helpless, unable to shift his cockroach body, unable to make speechlike sounds, we understand throughout that we’re reading something fantastic. But the realism of Morris’s writing is meant to achieve the same effect: to make us believe there is a man as cut off and bottled-up as Will Brady. So, it would be easy to diagnose him, using today’s terminology, as operating somewhere along the autism spectrum.
Seen symbolically, however, seen in the context of Kafka rather than Theodore Dreiser, Will Brady doesn’t have to be diagnosed. Morris wasn’t really telling the story of a man we’re expected to believe in as a fictional counterpart to any real person — not even his father — any more than Kafka meant us to think of people we knew who’d become cockroaches overnight. Will Brady’s story is a lens through which Morris means to show us something about “the drama, however submerged, of much American life.” When Brady buys a sunlamp, he’s no different from the guy who buys a new truck or bigger TV: they’re both trying to buy some form of happiness. And where it leads him is where all such behavior leads: still standing apart, still wondering why he’s no happier.
The University of Nebraska Press began reissuing Wright Morris’s work in the early 1970s and has shown exceptional support by keeping these books in print for decades as part of their Bison Books paperback series. But though the Press made it possible for generations of readers to discover and come to love Morris’s writing, it also helped reinforce the perception of Morris as a regionalist. The Works of Love was originally published by Alfred A. Knopf. Had Knopf or a similar major New York City publisher reissued The Works of Love, I strongly suspect that we would now recognize it a novel that deserves to stand on the same shelf with Invisible Man, Herzog, and Something Happened.
‘NOVELIST LECTURER VANISHES’ announced a headline in The Sheffield Telegraph on Wednesday, June 26, 1963. ‘What has happened to Kathleen Sully, the writer who should have arrived in Sheffield yesterday to lecture at the Sheffield Arts Festival?’ the reporter asked. Sully, then at the height of her career, had been invited to lecture on ‘The Modern Novel’ as a highlight of the festival held at the University of Sheffield.
She was looking forward to it. ‘They think a lot of me up there,’ she had written her friend, the director Lindsay Anderson, a few days earlier. ‘Know the Heads of Languages and they set my work for 3rd year students.’ Instead, she failed to show up. No explanation was ever given. Two members of the faculty appeared in her place and discussed Sully’s writing. It may have been the last time anyone discussed her work in a public form. For although she continued to publish for another seven years and lived nearly forty more, as far as English literary history is concerned, Kathleen Sully has vanished completely.
Her name means nothing to you. I can say this with confidence because it meant nothing to me and I have been studying English novels and novelists great and obscure for over forty years. I first saw Kathleen Sully’s name in a list of 100 or so English woman novelists of the 20th century, a list running from Margaret Atwood to Virginia Woolf. It was the only name I didn’t recognize and given my hobby of tracking down forgotten books and writers, that fact immediately set me searching for more information. I quickly determined that she had written over a dozen books, that none of them were in print and few used copies were still available for sale. I located an electronic copy of her 1958 novel Merrily to the Grave on the Internet Archive and began reading.
Merrily to the Grave opens as Harold and Melanie Thydes, an elderly couple with ‘three small suitcases full of odds and ends, and each other,’ are wandering along the promenade in Brighton, cold, tired and desperately looking for a cheap place to stay. A policeman befriends them and takes them to Hesta Blazey’s. Hesta’s rooming house is not a desirable address: ‘It smelt of kippers, dust, onions, hair-oil, soap, turpentine, bath cubes, floor polish (though nothing looked polished), human sweat and cat.’
But it is a refuge of sorts. Whether pensioner, two-bit performer, shop girl, prostitute or thief, one thing unites the residents: failure. Rejected long ago by a fiancée returning from the Great War, Hesta expresses her love through acceptance. ‘Not all of us can withstand the inequalities of life: its buffeting, its knocks,’ she maintains. Though her tenants have reached rock bottom in the eyes of society, some of them learn there are even lower depths to which a person can sink: ‘other kinds of poverty, other kinds of nakedness, other kinds of crime’—the depths where the quality of compassion is lost.
Kathleen Sully’s writing is almost addictively readable. Her prose is spare, unstudied, brisk. She relies heavily on dialogue—but not on deep conversations. Scenes move quickly. Emotions run close to the surface. Merrily to the Grave was fuelled by a raw energy, a brutal honesty I’d only seen in Orwell or Patrick Hamilton. I was eager to go further. I located cheap copies of more novels, gulped them down, posted my initial reactions and became obsessed with learning more.
These were not like anything I’d read before. There were hints of Joyce’s rawness, of Lawrence’s bluntness and, in Sully’s use of dialogue, of Ivy Compton-Burnett, but only hints. Her first novel, Canal in Moonlight, opens: ‘Bikka’s rats are large, fierce and tenacious. They find rich pickings in the garbage of the extravagant Bikka poor which nourishes bodies and whet appetites for yet more.’
Canal centres on the Hoppes, a family with sixteen children living in a filthy house with a broken toilet and a pregnant goat in the kitchen. Horace Hoppe is soft-headed and idle, his wife Belle a fat sloppy former prostitute. Their children run wild. They steal. A little boy comes home with a ball smeared with the blood of a murdered young woman. Even the Dyppes, the ‘proper’ family next door, is dysfunctional: Mrs. Dyppe torments her spinster daughter about maintaining an upright reputation, all the while concealing the fact that Mr. Dyppe had committed suicide after learning he’d caught a venereal disease from his wife. This was beyond kitchen sink realism: this was toilet bowl realism.
Kathleen Sully’s 1960 novel, Skrine, set in the aftermath of some unspecified global apocalypse, opens with a woman murdered for a pack of cigarettes. A Man Talking to Seagulls opens—and closes—with a body lying dead on a beach. In Through the Wall, little Celia Wick shivers outside while her parents fight, throwing plates and punches. ‘The Wicks were the scum of Mastowe: drunkards, loafers, petty thieves, and worse,’ Sully writes. And yet through this grim world flows a current of magic and spirituality. At night, Celia rises up from her miserable bedroom and flies above her street, up into the moon, ‘a million years away to where tigers ate apricots, and birds, honey-coloured and smelling of wall-flowers, flew in and out of her heart.’
The nameless madwoman in ‘The Weeping and the Laughter,’ one of the short novels in Canaille, tells how she used to ‘flow through the top of my head, go to the window, jump off into space and fly about like an owl.’ In A Man on the Roof, a dead husband comes back to his wife as a ghost and the two carry on as if nothing had happened. One of Sully’s later novels, A Breeze on a Lonely Road, is about a solicitor searching for the people and places he dreams about each night. As a man stands over a dead body at the end of A Man Talking to Seagulls, he suddenly realizes ‘that he beheld a husk—that the man was elsewhere—no matter where—but somewhere—and that life was life and could not be denied or extinguished—ever.’ The only equivalent I knew to this combination of realism and the fantastic was the magical realism of Latin American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez—but Sully began publishing a decade before these works were known in England.
Seeing how little had been written about Kathleen Sully’s work, I decided to carry through to the finish. I tracked down the rest of her books, locating the rarest—Not Tonight (1966)—at the British Library, one of just a dozen libraries worldwide still holding a copy. It was clear that Sully followed in no one’s footsteps. This uniqueness unsettled reviewers when her books first came out; now, it was what intrigued me. Even relative to my own extensive knowledge of neglected writers, the extent to which Sully’s work had vanished seemed astonishing.
So, I began looking into Kathleen Sully’s life and critical reputation, trying to understand why she had gone from being such a prolific and original writer to being utterly forgotten. Aside from contemporary reviews when her books were first published, critical assessments of her work are virtually non-existent. Walter Allen, part of the bedrock of the English literary establishment of his time, considered her work worth mention alongside that Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and future Nobel Prize winners William Golding and Doris Lessing in his 1960 survey, The Novel To-day. Ironically, Allen’s short paragraph on Sully is still the only critical consideration of her work to appear in print in the last nearly-sixty years. Her name appears in no encyclopaedia, in no dictionary of biography, in no other survey of the English novel.
One reason for her critical neglect is that she didn’t fit in—a reflection of the institutional prejudices of the English literary world. She was a woman writing when writing was a man’s game—not just a man’s game, but a public school/university-educated man’s game. She was the wrong age: too young for the generation of Greene, Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen, too old for the likes of Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch and the Angry Young Men. Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson, then rising stars in a new wave of gritty, ‘kitchen sink realism’ theatre, were so impressed with her early novels they chose her first play to initiate a bold new series of Sunday night ‘productions without décor’ at the Royal Court Theatre in London—but remembered her years later as a ‘middle-aged woman standing in the wings.’
She didn’t write the sort of domestic dramas and comedies that were considered standard middlebrow fare. There is not a lot of tea being served in china cups and saucers in her books. Sully’s characters ate bread and drippings huddled around the kitchen table. They didn’t fit the mould of other fiction of her time. ‘Her people constantly say the untoward thing, move strangely against conventional furniture,’ as one reviewer put it. But they weren’t rebels, either. Sully’s novels are utterly a-political and virtually a-historical: while they’re mostly set in mid-20th century Britain, they provide few references to events that might allow one to pin the story to a specific time.
And her work itself didn’t fit in. ‘Every now and then a novel comes along which appears to possess outstanding merit, and yet to fit into no known category,’ read the fly-leaf blurb, and for once the publisher’s statement wasn’t hyperbole. ‘Bizarre? A nightmare prose-poem, a lyric nightmare? How shall one describe Canal in Moonlight?’ asked Elizabeth Bowen in The Tatler. ‘I have never read anything like it,’ John Betjeman wrote in the Daily Telegraph. John Davenport, in The Observer, was equally baffled: ‘I don’t, quite honestly, know what to make of it.’
As further books followed, reviewers seemed to reach consensus on two points. First, that Sully was a powerful storyteller: ‘It is impossible to stop reading Miss Sully, who takes a vice-like Ancient Mariner’s grip on your nerves and feelings,’ wrote Siriol Hugh-Jones of her fifth novel, Burden of the Seed. And second, that no one knew how to take her. ‘Kathleen Sully beats me,’ Karl Miller confessed in reviewing Shades of Eden for The Observer. Even after she’d published nine books, they remained stumped. ‘Kathleen Sully is another mystery, which on the evidence of her new novel [The Undesired, 1961] I can’t solve,’ confessed Ronald Bryden.
In his survey, Walter Allen precisely assessed the cost of her uniqueness: ‘Kathleen Sully is a novelist very much on her own, which may account for her comparative lack of critical recognition.’ By her eleventh novel, The Fractured Smile, The Times Literary Supplement—‘that British bastion of highbrow book culture,’ as Publisher’s Weekly once called it—seemed to have found a way to deal with her: ‘Miss Sully has established a reputation as something of an eccentric among novelists.’ By her 14th novel, the TLS simply stopped reviewing her work entirely.
A selection of Kathleen Sully’s novels.
Sully did little to ensure her own legacy. She donated no papers or manuscripts to any archive for eventual research. If she had any friendships with other writers of her time, none of them considered her worth mentioning in their own letters or memoirs. I looked through biographies of the literary figures of her time, from Kingsley Amis to Angus Wilson, and found not one mention of her. And from the story about the Sheffield Arts Festival we know that she didn’t show up on the one occasion when her work was publicly recognized by academics. Whether she was flouting the school, taken ill, caught up in some personal crisis or simply the victim of an automobile breakdown doesn’t matter now—she never got another opportunity.
Kathleen Sully lived for over thirty years after her last novel, Look at the Tadpoles, was published in 1970, and yet at that point, as far as the literary world was concerned, she vanished forever. Even her own literary agency lost track of her. In 1986, the Curtis Brown agency published a notice in the Times trying to locate her in connection with the renewal of American publication rights.
None of the journals that reviewed her novels noted her death at the age of 91 in September 2001. When I began to investigate Kathleen Sully’s life for a biographical entry on Wikipedia, I soon found that the fifteen years she spent as published novelist were an anomaly: aside from her books and their reviews, there seemed to be nothing. If I wanted to find any record of her life beyond the books, I would have to look in other places: genealogical databases, census records, civil registers and telephone directories. I would also have to locate surviving members of her family, if there were any.
By picking through public records, one can sketch the bare facts of Kathleen Sully’s first thirty-two years. The second of seven children, she was born Kathleen Maude Coussell in a poor neighbourhood on the south side of London in 1910. Her father Albert was a skilled mechanic, credited in a 1910 issue of The Engineer with the design of an automotive device, but that didn’t appear to have improved his family’s economic status. Between 1911 and the 1929, the family moved at least six times—mostly back and forth between poorer parts of London (Peckham, Lambeth, Camberwell) and market towns in Cambridgeshire (Wisbech) and Norfolk (Downham Market).
If Sully’s fiction contains any traces of her childhood, it suggests the Coussell household was poor, overcrowded, and chaotic. Canal in Moonlight centres on a family with sixteen children living in squalor with dogs, cats, rats, goats and even a broken-down horse. Overcrowding and families with odd assortments of generations and relations are constant themes in her early books. These were, in fact, among the first aspects of her work to draw the attention of reviewers. ‘[T]he house in it stinks of goats, blood seeps under the garage door for a child to bounce his ball in, and the warehouse rats are as big as cats,’ Isabel Quigley wrote in her Spectator review of Canal in Moonlight.
Children in her books are often left to fend for themselves. In Through the Wall, Celia Wick sleeps on a filthy sack of straw, has one pair of dirty, ripped underpants, and is handed over to another woman to raise when her mother remarries. Stephanas in Burden of the Seed steals from a pair of senile aunts to buy food for himself. Sully may have taken liberties in her fiction, but families living in poverty on the fringe of society are such a constant in her work it seems reasonable to assume that she experienced something of the same in her own childhood.
At twelve, Sully was sent to the Barrett Street Trade School, where she studied dressmaking. She left the school at fifteen and worked in a garment factory in East London. She was still living at home when she married Charles Sully, a skilled mechanic like her father, in 1932. Within a year, she gave birth to a daughter, Victoria, and a second daughter, Shirley, followed in 1934. Charles and Kathleen carried on with the itinerant lifestyle she’d grow up with. Victoria (Vicki) was born in Paddington, Shirley in Billericay in Essex. In the 1939 register, they are listed in Weston-Super-Mare on coast of Somerset. Then a civil register records the birth in 1942 of a son, Fraser, listing Charles as the father, in Southend-on-Sea—back in Essex.
From here, the facts are hard to find and harder to verify. Many of the official records that could provide dates and addresses to trace her life over the next sixty years have not yet been released. Much of the rest of the available information came from Sully herself. In a short ‘About the Author’ sketch printed on the dust jacket of Canal in Moonlight she reported that ‘At 38 years of age’—around 1948—she attended Art College for two years and then ‘went on to a Teacher’s Training College to take a teaching post (Art and English).’ A biographical sketch taken from Sully’s response to a questionnaire included in Contemporary Authors (1966) further specified ‘Art College’ as Taunton Art College and St. Alban’s Art College and ‘Teacher’s Training College’ as Gaddesden. This last fact helps narrow the timeline somewhat, given that Gaddesden Training College operated just from 1946 to 1951.
This list of dates and places would not have been particularly illuminating had it not been supplemented by an email I received from Paul Hunt, Vicki’s son, in March 2019. He had seen my posts about his grandmother’s novels and confirmed that the information in her Wikipedia entry was correct to his knowledge. ‘I think I can help in explaining why she faded,’ he wrote. According to Paul, Kathleen and Charles Sully’s marriage was ‘rancorous’ and marked by separations. Sometime before the start of World War Two, Kathleen took the girls to a cottage in Paignton, Devon, where she tried to run a dress shop. She then reunited with Charles and they lived in Weston-Super-Mare as recorded in the 1939 register.
Not long after, the couple had ‘a furious row’ and Kathleen took the girls to Denbigh in Wales. Charles pressed to be allowed to visit his daughters and Kathleen relented. She would regret this decision. As Paul wrote:
My mother remembers the event clearly. They were living in a small cottage in a village close to Denbigh. Her father came to visit and when her mother left for work, he threw the children’s clothes into a suitcase and then rushed them to the station. She believes they left by train. He had nowhere to live and so his mother came and cared for the children. They all lived for some time in a room in a house in Hereford.
‘Much as I loved my grandfather, I knew him as an uncompromising person and I could imagine him doing this,’ Paul added. This account also seems credible considering a few other facts: Vicki married in Newbury, Berkshire in 1957; Charles died there in 1997; and Shirley died there in 2008. So, Charles stayed in Newbury for decades, while Kathleen moved from place to place, almost always near the sea, always miles from Newbury. In Kathleen Sully’s entry in Contemporary Authors, it states, ‘children: three.’ There is no mention of her marriage.
If the story of Charles abducting the girls is true, it does raise questions about Fraser Sully. If Charles was father, as stated in the birth register, why didn’t he take Fraser as well? Or did the incident take place before Fraser was born? Was Fraser illegitimate, as Paul speculates, conceived in an affair that took place afterward? Regardless of the boy’s paternity, however, picturing Kathleen Sully as a single mother raising a son—possibly without any financial support—provides a context that helps make sense of the few available facts about her life after 1942. Financial considerations and the need to care for her son, for example, would likely have been her foremost concerns after 1942.
With no family money, no university degree, and a young son to look after, Kathleen Sully would have few options. ‘Almost every mother of fatherless children has to find work to help in their support,’ Leonora Eyles wrote in her1947 book Unmarried but Happy. ‘On the whole, it is better if a single woman with children can earn money in the home,’ she continued, recommending child-minding, typing, keeping a small shop, dressmaking, graphic arts and writing as possible ways to earn money working in the home.
In her ‘About the Author’ sketch, Sully devoted the most space to listing the many jobs in her ‘varied career’: ‘domestic, lift attendant, dress model, dress cutter, dress designer, dress-shop owner, professional swimmer and diver, canvasser, bus conductress, cinema usherette, free-lance artist and writer, tracer in the Admiralty, dressmaker.’ She later repeated this list in her Contemporary Authors questionnaire, adding ‘owner of antique shop and now full-time novelist’—which correlates with a remark in her June 1963 letter to Lindsay Anderson: ‘I have finished with shops and all else other than setting down the human agony and joy.’
Looking at this list alongside Eyles’ Unmarried but Happy, I wondered if Sully had her own copy of the book. My suspicions only increased after reading the following: ‘There is only one art that is blithely taken up without training, without discipline and without the appreciation of difficulty with which one approaches even the learning of knitting, and that is the art of writing.’ We know that writing was one of Sully’s first ventures as a working single mother because her first book wasn’t published in 1955 but in 1946, when Edmund Ward, a children’s book publisher, released Small Creatures and Stony Stream, listing Kathleen M. Sully as the author. Small Creatures contains two stories, about a dormouse and a dragonfly; Stony Stream is about fish. Neither the stories nor the style is noteworthy, but the books did get reprinted at least four times each. They appear to be her only attempts at juvenile fiction.
How did Sully get from ‘It was a warm day in Spring, and the East Wind blew gently through the grasses growing in the meadow’—the opening line of Stony Stream—to the fierce and tenacious rats that greet the reader of Canal in Moonlight? Perhaps she found, in her arguments with Charles, in their separations, in having her daughters stolen from her and in her effort to support herself and Fraser, that she had to be fierce and tenacious herself. In her June 1963 letter to Anderson, she reassures him, ‘You will find me much changed: not so arrogant and childish,’ and closes by saying, ‘it is so good to hear from one who was my first friend.’ Did she really spend those years before the success of her first novels friendless? Or did she attack would-be friends like one of Bikka’s rats?
Kathleen Sully, from the dust jacket of Merrily to the Grave.
A clue to Kathleen Sully’s temperament—and stunning evidence of the anger and pain wrapped up in her separation from Charles—can be found in a poem that Vicki shared with me. Written in the late 1980s after she attempted to visit her mother, who was by then living in Camborne in Cornwall, it was part of Vicki’s extraordinary effort to restart her life after her traumatic childhood and an unhappy early marriage. I reprint the poem here in full (and with Vicki’s permission) because it reveals so much that lies beneath the sparse facts.
Lost Person
The first time I lost her I was six in a whitewashed cottage in Wales my father came to visit he said but he threw my sister’s and my things into a suitcase and rushed us to the station
the second time came after twenty years I found her on the back of a book a middle-aged woman and the name was right I wrote her letter said why see me now I am successful and not before
the third time my son tracked her down and she said I could meet her too with her dark eyes and beauty she resembled my sister not me my mentally ill sister both with long white hands not like my gardening ones
she told me of her struggles, her travels in Spain and her achievements she didn’t ask about mine she said my hair and clothes were wrong she gave advice on diet and lifestyle I must put castor oil on my eyes to prevent cataract I was drowning in words when my letters went unanswered I knew I had lost her again years later I found her new address and phoned she said I could visit rain was forecast and the air was heavy with sour scent of cow parsley as I drove the pre-motorway tangle of roads to her terraced house in Camborne weeds straggled over her doorstep when I knocked, a ragged curtain jerked at the grimy window the front door inched open
hunched over a frame her eyes glittered up at me and with a voice reverting to the cockney of her youth she said I have two things ter say ter yer one is Go Away and the other is Piss Orf the door slammed shut cold rain began to fall and I left
In this poem, ‘the first time’ is clearly Charles’ abduction of Vicki and Shirley; ‘when I was six’ fixes the time as late 1939 or early 1940. The ‘second time’ would have been around 1959 or 1960, after seeing Kathleen’s photograph on the back cover of Merrily to the Grave—the only book on which it appeared. If Sully did write ‘why see me now I am successful,’ one can hardly imagine a more ‘arrogant and childish’ response by a mother to her long-separated daughter.
Paul Hunt incorporated the ‘third time’ into Mahogany Rose, the novel loosely based on his family that he published as ‘Paul Sully.’ I say loosely because Paul merges the stories of his grandmother and mother into his character Suzy. Much of Suzy’s story—living in Ghana at the time it attained independence, working in a defence laboratory, participating in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – comes from Vicki. But there is also the visit to Kathleen at the house in Cornwall and elements of the bitter relationship between Kathleen and Charles.
Vicki’s poem offers some further clues into Kathleen Sully’s life and the family’s emotional traumas. Vicki refers to ‘my mentally ill sister’—Shirley. Looking for more information on Shirley Sully, I located a letter she wrote in 1986 to an imaginary lover named Frederique, which the artist Lisa Marie Gibbs posted on her blog in 2016 in tribute to ‘My mentor, my friend, my inspiration.’ Gibbs confirmed that Shirley lived with her father and struggled with mental illness as an adult. Shirley’s letter quotes Stevie Smith’s poem ‘The Frog Prince’—‘I have been a frog now/for a hundred years’—and adds, ‘As I have not had a family to look after, I have tried to make as many things as possible–my clothes, sculptures, paintings.’
Vicki shared with me a set of poems that she wrote after Shirley died. Through these, we can trace not only Shirley’s troubles but the parallels between her and Kathleen. In her ‘prologue’ Vicki writes,
we sisters shared a map shared the haemorrhage of streaks and runs and patched-up places
After taking the girls from Kathleen in Wales, Charles – who was working as a contractor for the Royal Air Force and moving from airfield to airfield – left the girls in the care of a Mrs. Crane, ‘the lonely woman/who cared for us/a bit/when she was sober.’ Vicki married, mostly as a means of escape, she says, and Shirley was left to deal with Charles, who was, according to Vicki, an angry, controlling, and violent man. She displayed a talent for art and was able to get work in London, where she soon fell in with a group of friends as full of vices as they were of promises.
She also began suffering from a combination of alcoholism and mental illness and was forced, on more than one occasion, to beg Charles to return to live with him. During these years when Shirley’s life was punctuated by various crises, she made contact with Kathleen and even went to stay with her in Cornwall briefly. This must have been in the late 1960s, for the sole dedication in all of Kathleen’s 17 novels appears in 1969’s A Breeze on a Lonely Road. It reads ‘For Shirley—My Daughter.’
Kathleen Sully letter to Lindsay Anderson from June 1963, courtesy of the University of Stirling archives.
It’s not clear if Kathleen Sully ever shared the loss of her daughters with people who knew her as a writer. There is no hint in her few letters in Lindsay Anderson’s archives that she had any children but Fraser. In her June 1963 letter, she writes that Fraser is finishing his first year at the University of Manchester, which meant ‘I am free to go where I like and do what I like.’ Fraser’s attendance at university might also explain why she could be ‘finished with shops and all else,’ and why there was a break of nearly four years between the publication of The Undesired in 1961 and The Fractured Smile in 1965.
Did the furious rate at which she first published—ten books in the space of less than six years—have something to do with Fraser’s situation? Was Sully paying for school fees? In my copy of Canal in Moonlight, I found a short letter she wrote from Brighton in early 1957 and was able to confirm that the address had been a rooming house at the time—possibly the inspiration for Merrily to the Grave—suggesting she might have been living alone while Fraser was at boarding school. Her June 1963 letter to Anderson, on the other hand, was sent from a house in The Lizard, a hamlet at the southernmost tip of Cornwall, which she had recently purchased as ‘a permanent home (retreat).’
This period between books may also have been when she took ‘her travels in Spain’ mentioned in Vicki’s poem. Two of her subsequent books—Horizontal Image and Island in Moonlight—largely take place in Mediterranean settings. Within a year or so of failing to show up for the Sheffield Festival, however, Sully resumed writing at an even more fevered pace, publishing another seven novels in just five years.
There is a noticeable difference in these books from her first ten—a difference in tone and in intensity. The Fractured Smile is an infidelity farce, Dear Wolf a limp comedy about a small-town Lothario. Not Tonight was described as a ‘whimsy, flimsy piece of sugary shockingness’ by one reviewer. Christopher Wordsworth, in The Guardian, found that The Fractured Smile ‘meanders artlessly’ and Dear Wolf displayed ‘a rather simpleton humour.’ Mary Holland was scathing in her assessment of Not Tonight: ‘At best it is the novel one might expect from an aunt who had been told once too often: “You write such droll letters, you should put it all down in a book.”’ By 1968, when Horizontal Image was published, The New Statesman’s reviewer complained, ‘She is prolific and seems to have created a standard expectation in her readers—the deadliest way of paralysing critical faculty.’ Both Sully and her critics were, it seems, becoming exhausted. Where her early books were reviewed in major periodicals by top-flight reviewers, her last few barely received notice.
Why does the list of books end in 1970? Did she lose her readership? Did her publisher lose interest? She didn’t stop writing. On New Year’s Day in 1992, she informed Anderson ‘Am still writing—but you know how things are in the publishing business—and my work has become more controversial.’ In the same letter, she mentions that Fraser ‘is very well—works full time and held on as a member of staff’ and implies he is living with her. This letter is addressed from Camborne, very likely the same terraced house mentioned in Vicki’s poem. Paul Hunt believes that the reason Kathleen stopped publishing was that her energies became consumed in dealing with Fraser’s schizophrenia. Mahogany Rose includes a conversation in which Matt (Charles Sully) tells Paul’s fictional counterpart that Fraser (whose name, interestingly, is not changed) hung himself in his bedroom in the Camborne house. Paul did later acknowledge to me that ‘I never met him [Fraser] so I could not be sure of this fact.’
Paul’s disclaimer raised my suspicions because, at the time, I’d been unable to find any record of Fraser Sully’s death. When I ordered a copy of Kathleen’s death certificate from the General Register Office, I decided to search for Fraser’s as well, and soon obtained information that both disproved and proved what Paul had written. Fraser Sully did not commit suicide. He died of heart failure at the age of 76 in May 2019, just two months after Paul’s email. However, according to his death certificate Fraser died at Woodtown House at Bideford in Devon, a care home that, according to its website, ‘provides nursing care and rehabilitative support for 28 adults experiencing complex mental health needs.’ Although the staff at Woodtown House could not discuss Fraser’s condition, they did acknowledge that he’d been living in the home for nearly twenty years—probably from the time that Kathleen entered the care home in Camborne where she died. It’s safe to assume that Fraser’s care would have consumed much of his mother’s time and energies in the years before she had to seek full-time care for herself.
So perhaps Paul was right, after all. Perhaps the reason Kathleen Sully vanished from the literary world had less to do with institutional prejudices and more to do with the simple fact of a mother struggling, with few resources and little support, to cope with her son’s mental illness. ‘Not all of us can withstand the inequalities of life: its buffeting, its knocks,’ Hesta Blazey says in Merrily to the Grave. Kathleen Sully had been isolated from her family for decades. She had few connections to the literary world to start with. Her few letters to Lindsay Anderson may, indeed, represent the only ones to have survived the buffeting and knocks that would have been the daily life of an aging woman caring for an adult son with schizophrenia. Orwell said that history is written by the winners. It’s easier to win when you’re not isolated, out on the margins, old and out of print. Perhaps, in the end, there is no mystery why Kathleen Sully vanished.
I thank Vicki Sully and Paul Hunt for their generous cooperation in my research on this article.
Advertisement for The Journey in Publisher’s Weekly.
Of all the muses you might expect a young woman novelist to be channeling in 1933, Henry Fielding is among the last. Yet the closest parallel one can find to Rose Caylor’s second novel, The Journey, is The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling. In both books, a young innocent, a tabula rasa personality, travels to a great city where that blank slate is scribbled over by various forms of iniquity and sent home sadder and wiser.
But plot isn’t the primary point similarity between Tom Jones and The Journey. It’s the authorial voice. Tom Jones would be about a third as long and not one-tenth as enjoyable were its fairly thin story enriched by Fielding’s gentle, amused, and worldly-wise commentary. By the time Rose Caylor sat down to write The Journey, she’d been a newspaper reporter, PR agent for the American Medical Association, business report publisher, and actress in the Leo Dietrichstein’s traveling company, for which she had jumped into stage volcanoes, got shipwrecked on a desert island, and flounced around in crinoline and hoop skirts as “the Spirit of the Old South.” In his memoir Gaily, Gaily, Hecht compared Caylor to “a combination of Laurette Taylor, Sarah Bernhardt, and Geronimo.” Not quite the same as Fielding’s years as a magistrate and founder of the Bow Street Runners, but close in terms of street savvy, I suspect.
The actual story in The Journey could easily be squeezed onto about five pages without much abridgement. A Chicago reporter names Jimmy Dyrenforth sweet-talks Caryl Fancher, a typist in his father’s office and the two get married on a whim. Coming out of City Hall, Jimmy panics and rushes to a pay phone, where he talks the friendly editor of a New Orleans newspaper into giving him a job. Jimmy bolts for the first train to New Orleans, leaving the virginal Caryl to her own devices, hoping she will give up on the marriage before it’s even started.
Instead, she assembles a trousseau and heads off to New Orleans in pursuit. Though Jimmy meets her at the station, his welcome is mostly intended to persuade Caryl to leave as quickly as possible. Whether obstinate or just obtuse, she persists as he variously ignores and insults her, and eventually the two hop in bed and Caryl ends up pregnant. Though Caylor wrote her share of happy endings as a playwright and Hollywood screenwriter, there’s none to be found here. Caryl gives up eventually and heads to New York for an abortion after brow-beating Jimmy into borrowing $200 from his father.
So much for the narrative arc. What you can’t get from this synopsis, however, is any sense of why this book is 483 pages long. Perhaps an excerpt from Caylor’s introduction of the reader to Jimmy will help:
We take it that the reader will be glad at length to meet one of our characters who is not a fool. However, the reader may well turn and ask “What is her?” In attempting a valuation of our favourite masculine character, we must first state some of our concepts and premises, to which he must measure up. Thus:
To have convictions –! that is the true, the high, human importance. To feel that one’s beliefs matter, to attain them through moral force, to give them up with a struggle when one has become convinced they are false, that is living a worthy, possibly even noble, life. We truly believe that convictions, hard won and hard relinquished, are the only possessions that lend a passing importance to man, and dignity, etc., to his transitory estate. Our hero, however, hadn’t any hard-won convictions or any he wouldn’t give up at the drop of a hat. Opinions blew through his head like drafts. He no more bothered to knew where he got them than were he got a cold in the head, and he no more knew the reason why he gave them up than he could give the reason for a sneeze.
This is followed by nine pages of further reflection on Jimmy’s character, its development, and the nature of modern man, while Jimmy and Caryl wait side-by-side in a cab for the plot to move along. The Journey may take place in a time of trains, planes (well, a few), and automobiles, but its pace is solidly grounded in the 18th century. Thirty pages later, the couple is just sitting down to their first meal together. The consumation of their marriage is still at least three hundred pages off.
And this, in a nutshell, is the dilemma faced by a reader who decides to take Caylor’s journey. One reviewer called the book “irritating and entertaining,” and that’s precisely the mixed bag it offers. This is not a book you read for the story or even much for the characters, so if you don’t fall in love with Caylor as tour guide, I can’t imagine you’re likely to hang in past Chapter Two.
I think we have to accept that Caylor miscalculated how far she could stretch her story’s thin fabric over its complex scaffolding of commentary. I stuck with her to the very end because reading books like this is part of the price of my obsession. Given how rare this book is in the first place (perhaps a dozen copies in libraries worldwide and zero copies available for sale), I suspect few who even bother to read this far are likely to track down The Journey for themselves.
Yet, I must remind you that irritating was only one of the adjective used to describe this book. The other was entertaining. For, in the midst of many pages of reflections and discursions that often made me grumble, “Oh, just get on with it!”, there are also wonderful set-pieces. Like the literary discussion where a roomful of New Orleans belles dames debate whether Gulliver’s Travels is “fornographic” and gush over their latest reads, the titles and authors of which none of them can quite bring to mind. Or this description of the earnest authoress Rose Entwhistle and one of her attempts at research:
Today, Miss Entwhistle is very tired, and for a most perlexing reason. Having heard a salesgirl remark the other day, in answer to her own statement that a department store was very fascinating, that it was “a good place to learn human nature,” she had immediately (quite secretly of course and incognito) obtained a job in this same store and for that very purpose. Today, having worked a week there, having been rather disappointed in human nature, and having quit the day before, she suffered greatly in her feet, but especially there was a strange disquiet in her memory. Famous for her many stories dealing with department store life, she was beginning to wonder whether it was not she herself who was the author of that statement about department stores being “a good place to learn human nature,” and could it be that she had been taken in by a quotation from herself?
And, on occasion, Caylor can be refreshingly telegraphic in her approach. Take, for example, Chapter 32, which reads, in entirety, “We have no room in this book for the savageries of Caryl’s sister-in-law, Hazel.”
The Nation’s reviewer, Florence Codman, loved The Journey in all its digressive beauty, dismissing her own brief description of the book as “an offering of nickels where millions are to be enjoyed.” Well, perhaps not millions, but something in the mid-hundreds at least. Do these make The Journey worth the investment of a couple of weeks to read it? I guess that’s why I get paid the big bucks to help with these decisions.
The Journey, by Rose Caylor New York: Covici, Friede (1933)
Back in the 1990s, I was browsing my way through an independent bookstore in Saskatoon (now, sadly, defunct) and came across a title I hadn’t heard of, by an author whose name was unfamiliar to me.
I’ve always been drawn to war novels (I’m something of a history buff) and this one had, as its backdrop, the grim, bloody trenches of the First World War. I read a few paragraphs and decided to purchase The Poppy Factory, a leap of faith that paid big dividends as the book remains a favorite to this day.
It impressed me to such an extent that, some years afterward, when I was guest at a science fiction convention in Vancouver, I brought up The Poppy Factory during a panel of on “Neglected Books” that also included my Canadian colleague Spider Robinson.
No one in the audience recognized the book, so I stoutly defended its literary qualities, at one point cracking open The Poppy Factory, reading an excerpt from about thirty-five pages into the novel. The protagonist, Captain Adrian Garrard, is lying in “no man’s land” after an abortive attack. Wounded, semi-delirious, at first he can scarcely credit his senses:
I shall never find peace in the moonlight again, only fear, because it was then I saw the first of them.
It appeared over the lip of the crater, crouching on all fours, its black head twitching rapidly from side to side, sensing danger, scenting prey. It began to crawl through the mud toward me…
… I heard the sickening, sucking sound as its legs drove it closer and closer through the clinging mud and could not look. And then I heard laughter. Harsh, grating, wild, only just recognizable, but laughter.
I forced my eyes open.
The creature had risen onto its rear legs and, still bent forward, was clutching my revolver between its forepaws. Only they weren’t paws, they were earth-blackened hands, and the creature was not an animal but a man, his head shrouded in a cowl of filthy sacking, his clothes blackened rags…
…I lay still, feigning death. The claw-like hands ripped at my clothes. Perhaps this was death….
The reaction to that reading was most gratifying. I could see people writing the title down for future reference.
William Fairchild, with Simone Simon (L) and George Baker (R) on the set of The Extra Day in 1955.
My investigations over the years uncovered some biographical details about The Poppy Factory’s author, William Fairchild. He served in British Naval Intelligence during World War II, and subsequently enjoyed a fairly lengthy and successful tenure in the British film industry, scripting and directing a number of movies. His best-known efforts were Malta Story, featuring Jack Hawkins, and Star!, with Julie Andrews.
So, it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s a strong cinematic feel to The Poppy Factory; visually it’s quite evocative and compelling. As part of his research, Fairchild personally toured the Ypres battlefield in Belgium, spurred by a rumor (I’ve never been able to confirm its veracity) that at one point in the conflict two hundred men from both armies lived underground between enemy lines.
William Fairchild died in 2000 at the ripe, old age of eighty-two.
Sadly, he never lived to see his novel translated to the big screen.
But it’s never too late to rectify that oversight….
Cliff Burns has been a professional author since 1985, with 15 books and scores of published short stories, essays, reviews and poems to his credit. He lives in western Canada with his wife, artist and educator Sherron Burns. He also writes the Beautiful Desolation blog.
The Poppy Factory, by William Fairchild London and Toronto: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1987 Also published as No Man’s Land in the U.S. by Bantam Books, 1988
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece titled “The Mystery of Jessamy Morrison” that surveyed four of the six novels published between 1963 and 1972 by a writer of that name. Aside from the fact that the British Library’s catalogue listed “Jessamy Morrison” as a pseudonym, I hadn’t been able to determine anything more about Morrison’s true identity. Indeed, although the pioneering lesbian critic and publisher Barbara Grier considered two of Morrison’s early books, The No Road (1963) and The Girl from Paris (1965) among the best books on gay themes in their respective years, certain aspects of the books made me wonder whether Jessamy was, in fact, male.
Soon after I posted the piece, the British novelist and editor Eric Brown emailed me. “Now this is a long shot,” he wrote, “and I suspect it might come to nothing — but I wonder if there is a possibility that Jessamy Morrison was a pseudonym used by Peter de Polnay?” Eric felt the descriptions of Morrison’s novels seemed “like synopses of works by Peter de Polnay: upper middle-class characters, continental settings, unpleasant female characters, and sex.”
I’ve been fascinated by Peter de Polnay for some time and wrote de Polnay’s Wikipedia biography several years ago. Born into a Jewish-Hungarian noble family, he and his sisters were raised mostly by governesses and caretakers in Switzerland and England. After a series of misadventures in Austria, Argentina, and the French Riviera, de Polnay settled in Paris and began writing novels in English. His first book, Angry Man’s Tale (1939), was described by one critic as “a curious and effective blend of James M. Cain and Noel Coward.” De Polnay tried to blend into the woodwork when the Germans occupied Paris in 1940 but eventually chose to flee, making his way south through Spain to Gibraltar, from where he was evacuated to England — an experience he recounted in his 1941 book Death and Tomorrow.
De Polnay tried to assume the life of an English country gentleman, renting Boulge Hall, formerly the home of the poet and translator Edward FitzGerald (responsible for the hugely popular English translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam). He soon found this lifestyle unaffordable and after his first wife died in 1950, he spent most of the rest of his life circulating through Spain, France, and southern England. And all the while, he wrote like a demon, amassing something like 80 books under his own name before his death in 1984.
Peter de Polnay.
I’ve written about several of de Polnay’s books. All that I’ve read are short, spare, speedy, and utterly cynical, leading me to refer to him as “a poor man’s Georges Simenon.” Poor because de Polnay is not quite the master that Simenon can be at his best. As a novelist, de Polnay lacks something of Simenon’s ruthless efficiency. None of the de Polnays I’ve read so far is without an extraneous character or two, or a narrative detour down what proves to be a dead end. And unlike Simenon, de Polnay was not working in his native language (which he’d probably say was French rather than Hungarian, in any case). Now, that alone is not necessarily a handicap (viz. Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov to name just two who put many native English writers to shame), but combined with the speed with which de Polnay wrote (averaging 3-4 books a year), it led so some stylistic tendencies that Eric Brown felt might offer further hints to Jessamy Morrison’s identity.
The moment I read Eric’s first email, I knew he had to be correct. “It seems obvious now that I think about it. Many similarities. Many,” I replied. However, I was also checking with other sources to see what I could find. The Humanities staff of the British Library diligently looked through their records but found no further clue to why their catalogue listed Jessamy Morrison as a pseudonym. The Society of Authors drew a blank as well, and so did several agencies I contacted.
I sent Eric a selection of chapters from Morrison’s novels to aid in his comparison with Peter de Polnay’s prose. “I’m convinced it’s Peter de Polnay,” he wrote back a few days later:
Even if we were to disregard the many stylistic similarities, it ‘feels’ like de Polnay: the narrative is leisurely and slapdash, interspersed with often irrelevant asides concerning the narrator’s relatives or acquaintances (a typical de Polnay trait.) The milieu is pure PdP. At the start of The No-Road he mentions shooting (he was a keen shooter) and the specialist phrase ‘walk up partridges’ – which has echoes with a character in his 1970 novel Spring Snow and Algy. He’s casually disparaging about stout women, and garrulous swearing women, who often crop up in his books.
Eric’s comparison of de Polnay’s prose with Morrison’s added to his conviction:
The stylistic similarities are telling. The prose is littered with ugly sentence splices; there’s an under-use of commas; minor characters are described coming and going to no real effect; he employs ‘whereby I mean’ and ‘As a matter of fact’ and ‘In short’ which crop up again and again in DpD’s novels; he combines in the same paragraph dialogue attributed to different characters which other novelists would lay out on separate lines; there are one or two instances of the absence of a comma between verb and gerund, a DpD trait; in dialogue, characters are oddly off-hand with each other.
Like de Polnay, Morrison had a predilection for splicing sentences:
We had a couple of hours to kill, Clarissa went off with the children, I called in on my club, and then we all met at the air terminus.
Like de Polnay, Morrison composes with a slapdash brush, introducing, as Eric put it, “willy-nilly, background detail into a section of dialogue, thus wrong-footing the reader when returning to the dialogue”:
My father had been a shipbroker in Leadenhall Street and my brother John and I inherited the business. In furtherance of our business I went abroad from time to time to places like Antwerp and Rotterdam and Hamburg. “That doesn’t come into it,” I added. Clarissa remembered she had something or other to do, so left the room, and if I come to think of it she never thanked me properly for agreeing to the holiday in Majorca.
And, like de Polnay, Morrison’s stage directions can be haphazard:
I said I intended to settle in the town. Before he could make some appropriate remark an ill-dressed old woman, in a not too clean apron, waddled in and asked for ten Woodbines. Meanwhile the man in the green hat had left. The landlord served the woman, the door closed on her and we were alone.
“He likes having minor characters wander off set for no reason!” Eric observed.
By this point, I was convinced as well. So, I wrote to Peter de Polnay’s son Greg, a retired actor now living in France. I’d interviewed Greg for the Wikipedia article on his father. “Yes, indeed Jessamy Morrison was a pseudonym of my father’s,” he replied. “But I had no idea he had written so many novels.” Greg de Polnay’s relationship with his father had been difficult at the best of times — as evidenced by the fact that Peter de Polnay never mentioned his son in any of his autobiographies.
Chances are that Peter de Polnay adopted the pseudonym of Jessamy Morrison for two reasons. First, to avoid saturating the market. But more importantly, to avoid incurring the wrath of the Catholic Church, which still maintained its index of forbidden books. De Polnay had converted after marrying his third wife, Maria del Carmen Rubio y Caparo, daughter of a Spanish theater director and a devout Catholic.
And, by 1963, he had become accustomed to using a pseudonym. As Greg confirmed, his father published a number of novels for W. H. Allen under the name of Rodney Garland. Rodney Garland was itself a pseudonym, adopted by a fellow Hungarian emigre named Adam Martin de Hegedus. De Hegedus was a journalist and commentator who’d published several works of nonfiction between the late 1930s and early 1950s. He took the pseudonym when W. H. Allen published his 1953 novel The Heart in Exile (recently reissued by Valancourt Books). Now considered a landmark book for its candid and positive portrayal of the relationship between two gay men, The Heart in Exile risked condemnation, if not censorship, given the fact that homosexuality was still illegal under English laws.
De Hegedus died in October 1955, though the circumstances of his death are still in doubt. Soon after his death, W. H. Allen published a second Rodney Garland novel, The Troubled Midnight, which was undoubtedly by de Hegedus. Over the course of the next ten years, however, W. H. Allen published three more novels by “Rodney Garland”: World Without Dreams (1961); Hell and High Water (1962); and Sorcerer’s Broth (1966). Greg de Polnay has confirmed that the last two were written by his father. I’m waiting on a copy of World Without Dreams to see if it passes the subject/style test.
So, there we have it: Jessamy Morrison was Peter de Polnay. I shall have to amend his Wikipedia page now.
Prayer: “Let us throw back our heads and laugh at reality.” Response: “Which is an illusion caused by mescaline deficiency.”
N. F. Simpson wrote those words in his play A Resounding Tinkle, and they are as true today as they were then, which is to say as true as anything else. Simpson, born Norman Frederick but known to everyone as “Wally” – a play on the name of Edward VIII’s lover, of course – was a great writer, an influence on Cambridge comic writers like Peter Cook and John Cleese, and a popular and critically-acclaimed playwright from the 1950s onwards, admired both by Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. Wally wrote mostly for the stage, but also for television and cinema and, on one exceptional occasion, as a novelist. He was able to outdo Lewis Carroll by thinking of a million impossible things for breakfast but, unlike his contemporaries who could make their work only absurd, he could also be as funny as a writer he admired greatly, P. G. Wodehouse. More philosophical than absurdist, Simpson nevertheless created surreal worlds whose logic was as rigorous as that of Aristotle, only much more hilarious.
N. F. Simpson, around 1976.
In his long career – his work was first performed at the Royal Court in London in 1957, and his last new work for the stage, If So Then Yes, debuted in 2009 – N. F. Simpson produced many extraordinary works, from A Resounding Tinkle and One Way Pendulum (the latter filmed by Peter Yates in 1964) to television work as diverse as episodes of the ITV serial Crown Court (which vehicle Simpson subverted to near-breaking point) and Elementary My Dear Watson, a 1973 TV play in which John Cleese played Sherlock Holmes.
An illustration from Harry Bleachbaker.
Harry Bleachbaker, published 1976, is not his only prose work, but it is his only novel and, being an N. F. Simpson novel, is very little like anything else in fiction. Based, at times so closely as to be verbatim, on his 1972 play Was He Anyone, Harry Bleachbaker has very little in the way of plot and an enormous amount in the way of diversion, rumination and side-tracking. Its plot, which unfolds over a hundred or so pages with the speed of a Galapagos tortoise making its mind up, is extremely simple: a man named Albert Whitbrace has fallen into the Mediterranean and plans are put into motion for his rescue. Or rather, plans to make plans to rescue him are put into motion, or if not put into motion, then discussed. The whole thing reads – probably intentionally – at times like the minutes of a very tortuous civil service meeting. Practicalities are weighed up, pros and cons are debated, issues are raised, and all the time Albert Whitbrace remains floating in the Med. There are footnotes, there are illustrations, there are sections rendered in dialogue but the thrust of the story is never out of focus: Albert Whitbrace is in the sea and he must be got out. And eventually, a decision is made.
At times Harry Bleachbaker (the titular character remains obscure) reads like Flann O’Brien, at others like Samuel Beckett, and at still others like an extended Monty Python sketch, but always it is pure N. F. Simpson: a world gone mad which is nevertheless ordered by the strictest rules of logic. Simpson, who laughed at reality, nevertheless went to great pains to replicate it faithfully at the same time as he was mocking it. And from the very first page of Harry Bleachbaker, nothing is safe. The Author’s Note at the beginning warns the reader:
This is an uneven book, parts of it having been deliberately made more boring than was in itself strictly necessary in order to highlight those parts which are less so.
Even the blurb cautions, “This is not, it goes without saying, a book to be read through from cover to cover at one sitting, or even at several sittings. It is not, indeed, a book to be read from cover to cover at all….” Simpson’s own biography lacks the usual elements of self-promotion and enthusiasm: “He was born in 1919, though without having first gone into the thing properly to see what it was likely to entail. Had he done so he would not be here now.”
The whole thing sounds quite daunting, and the lack of a conventional storyline doesn’t help the casual reader. Simpson’s lack of interest in narrative, he explained in the radio documentary Reality Is An Illusion Caused By Lack of NF Simpson, was caused by stems from the death of his mother when he was a child: ever since then, he seemed to imply, nothing had made sense. But the book, whether dipped in from time to time or read from cover to cover in a manic burst of brain-frying, is fantastic. Simpson’s ear for dialogue is incredible. His ability to capture the details of human selfishness (for this is not a book about Good Samaritans) and the tangled mess of bureaucracy (this is also a satire on the modern age of red tape) creates a world where the reader, who should feel like ALBERT WHITBRACE that they are drowning in a sea of madness, is buoyed up by laughter and a sheer helplessness at the force of Simpson’s imagination.
As an introduction to Wally’s work, Harry Bleachbaker is accessibly hilarious as well as being fairly easy to find online. As a stand-alone novel, there is very little like it, however you choose to read it. Be careful, though: it will lure the reader into the world of N. F. Simpson, from which, thank God, there is no escape.
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.
Harry Bleachbaker, by NF Simpson London: Harrap, 1976
Back in August 2021, when I interviewed Michael Walmer about his independent press MichaelWalmer.com, which has reissued dozens of fine neglected books, he asked if I knew anything about the 1960s British author Jessamy Morrison: “I’m wondering whether or not you’ve looked into her,” he wrote — “Who she actually was — if indeed it was only one person. My searching so far has revealed nothing.”
The name was completely new to me, and that in itself is an increasingly uncommon thing.
Well, having since tracked down, purchased, and read four of Jessamy Morrison’s novels and awaiting a fifth to make its way from South Africa, I can answer Michael’s inquiry. I’ve looked into her, who she actually was.
And my searching so far has revealed nothing.
According to the British Library’s catalogue, Jessamy Morrison is a pseudonym. Having checked with the Society of Authors, Penguin Random House (which now owns the backlist of Morrison’s original publisher, W. H. Allen), and several major literary agencies, I’ve been unable to find any record outside library catalogues and a handful of bookseller listings.
What’s worse, I’m no longer even sure that Jessamy Morrison was, in reality, a she or a he. Or both.
Three of Morrison’s books have male narrators, which in itself offers no clue. Plenty of women have written novels with male leads and male narrators.
Of the very, very little that was written about Morrison’s books even when they first came out, the one thing consistently mentioned in reviews was the “unusual” nature of their subjects. Given that these books came out when England was just learning how to swing, that was undoubtedly code for homosexuality. W. H. Allen dropped a big, unsubtle hint on the cover of Morrison’s first novel The No-Road (1963) by announcing it as “A brilliant new novel in the tradition of The Well of Loneliness” — Radclyffe Hall’s one-scandalous novel of lesbian love. And that’s confirmed through the rave reviews that Barbara Grier, a pioneering lesbian writer and publisher, wrote for The Ladder, a 1960s lesbian journal, in her identity as Gene Damon.
Grier delighted in the ways in which Morrison puts the reader into the minds of men who consider themselves urbane and intelligent and then demonstrating beyond all doubt that they’re as thick as bricks when it comes to understanding women.
Gerald Milton, for example, acknowledges at the very start of The No-Road that he failed to see what was going on with his wife Clarissa: “One needs detachment in order to know. Detachment is easy when one isn’t involved.” He admits that he was “involved up to the neck,” yet still prides himself in thinking that “I retained my detachment to the last.”
Gerald and Clarissa are a fairly conventional upper-middle-class English couple. He is a shipbroker whose business to various European ports and Clarissa’s primary passion is for horses. They enjoyed a very British sex life, “neither of us attaching too much or too little importance to sex.” Gerald does share with the reader that he takes the occasional opportunities that arise on business trips through “a drink too many but never by planning or premeditation.”
On a holiday to Majorca, the Miltons encounter a boisterous group at a restaurant that Clarissa suggests are probably gay men and women but that Gerald dismisses as simply loud and unpleasant. One of the group, a self-confident woman named Diana Upton, however, befriends Clarissa on the beach and soon the two are inseparably. After their time on the island, though, the Miltons return to London on schedule.
Within a few weeks, however, Diana Upton arrives in London and begins making frequent calls on the Milton house. The two women go out riding together. Gradually, even Gerald starts to realize they’re having an affair. Though he puts all the blame of Diana as the devious seductress, he condemns Clarissa as a deviant:
I know, I said to myself, there are women homosexuals the same way as male homosexuals, but I know too that society has to defend itself against them. In my own nest was an enemy of society and to my misfortune the enemy happened to be my wife. And what she had down was in my eyes, and according to my sense and rules or morals, almost as illegal as murder. There are no extenuating circumstances for sexual depravity.
Clarissa agrees to end the affair and Gerald agrees to bring in Jill, a rather plain and dumpy woman in her thirties, to help with the children and household matters in consideration. And all is forgotten, bygones easily becoming bygones.
And so, this particular story might end, were it not for Gerald’s indominable obtuseness. For him, Clarissa’s affair was a disgraceful but forgivable dalliance. For her, it was a transformative experience. As John Lee Hooker’s mother observes in “Boogie Chillen,” once the boogie-woogie’s in someone, “it’s got to come out.” Or, to put it another way, three into two won’t go. And it’s not Gerald the Upright who fails to live happily ever after.
Herbert Brownlow, the narrator of Morrison’s next book, The Wind Has Two Edges (1964), is equally obtuse but perhaps a bit less hypocritical in his propriety. Herbert has retired from civil service to a flat in a Channel-side town neither too touristy for comfortable nor too dull to be deadly, where he intends to write the definitive history of administration.
His sole acquaintance is Stephen, a fellow civil servant who seems, upon their meeting again, to have become somewhat too louche and fond of drink for Herbert’s taste. Stephen has also made friends with two young, noisy, and brutish brothers named Alan and Michael. They spill drinks, jostle tables, make lewd comments about girls, and generally unsettle Herbert when he tries to have a quiet drink in the pub with his old friend.
Herbert becomes particularly offended by the brothers when they begin toying with the affections of Beryl, the beautiful and apparently strait-laced granddaughter of his landlady. In hopes of putting affairs back into good order, Herbert ends up thoroughly entangled in lives his entire worldview makes him ill-prepared to deal with. He attempts to play matchmaker, then peacemaker, and finally, the knight in shining armor to resolve matters in what, to him, seems a straightforward and rational manner.
Unlike Gerald Milton, however, when the facts of the situation — which include the efforts of several gay men and women to love as they choose without running afoul of the law or their community — are make clear to him, it is Herbert who adapts his values and put friendship ahead of such labels as “deviant” or “enemy of society”: “If you want to give it a label, Beryl had said on that unfortunate morning, then call me a lesbian. I could not. For I remembered only two nice and happy girls who in their harmonious way had given me a delightful meal.”
His error in trying to make sense of affairs deliberately convoluted to disguise the actual sexual orientation of its participants, as he admits in the end, was failing to consider “the human element.” The Wind Has Two Edges reminded me very much of Kathleen Sully’s novel Merrily to the Grave, similarly set in a house in a Channel-side town and similarly about how a collection of society’s outcasts and misfits can find community and acceptance together.
If The Wind Has Two Edges ends in a sort of sadder-and-wiser sunset glow, Morrison’s third novel The Girl from Paris (1965) opens with a scene certain to offend conventional British proprieties of its time. Duncan Diplock (which sounds like a name out of Catch-22) is trolling the streets of Montparnasse after midnight in search of a prostitute. Not just any prostitute, however, and not, as you might expect, for sex. Duncan is on a recruiting trip. He’s looking for a suitably attractive and refined prostitute to bring back to London and install in his mate Martin’s call-girl service. Duncan and his wife will host her as, ostensibly, an au pair to fool the immigration authorities, while she earns a small fortune for Martin by bringing in a better class of client.
Duncan selects Josette, a stunningly beautiful widow on the stroll to pay for her daughter’s care in a safe and respectable country home. After her initial surprise when Duncan starts talking business instead of hopping into bed, the wheels in her head begin turning and she negotiates a tough bargain: she will take the job for just one year and at a higher than planned rate.
Once settled London, though, Josette proves an agent of chaos — sexually, emotionally, financially, and practically. Martin the pimp falls in love with her, Duncan’s wife Wendy is seduced by her, a wealthy and shallow young lord contemplates marrying her, and Duncan simply struggles to keep it all from attracting the attention of the police. Josette, as he slowly realizes, is calculating and acting at a level of self-interest that makes the rest of the cast look like hapless amateurs. While their lives fall to pieces, Josette is able to return to Paris with a tidy sum to open a dressmaking business with — her intent all along.
The Girl from Paris is not a particularly profound book, but Morrison is quite effective in making Josette’s highly unconventional position seem more balanced than that of any of the lovestruck or simply bewildered English men and women around her. And as with all of the Morrison novels I’ve read so far, it flies like the wind. You keep turning the pages in each out of fascination, wondering just where this is all going.
I haven’t located a copy of Morrison’s rarest novel, Rusty (1967), which seems to be about the affair between a wild ingenue and a prominent author, and I’m still waiting to get my copy of The Office Party (1967), which was the only one to be widely reviewed. But the sixth and last novel, The Widow (1972), offers a few hints that clarify, if not solve, the mystery of Jessamy Morrison.
The Widow has, again, a male narrator. Nigel Hood is a successful art dealer dealing with an exclusive network of artists and clients. While in Durban to arrange a sale, he runs into an old Oxford friend, a South African poet named Roy Banting. After great initial fame and critical success, Banting has become something of a has-been, spending much of his time building an elaborate garden on a country estate and looked after by his adoring wife Charlotte Ann.
When Roy dies suddenly of a heart attack, Nigel finds himself enlisted into the roles of executor, counselor, and problem solver. The root of the problem is that Roy and Charlotte Ann’s marriage was a fake. He’d married a sexy but troubled undergraduate while teaching in the U.S. and never managed to secure a proper divorce. And now Charlotte Ann is pregnant with Roy’s child. So, will the child be a bastard or will Roy be revealed as a bigamist? This leads Nigel to devise an elaborate charade with all the complexities of a Feydeau farce and none of the humor.
Morrison spins out the tale with the usual flair for convolutions, but this time around it’s a little like listening to a very long-winded explanation of a situation you weren’t much interested in to start with. “Yes, yes,” I found myself saying, “get on with it.” If the real author behind Jessamy Morrison gave up publishing after The Widow, it may simply have been that he or she ran out of ideas.
I say he or she because I found it difficult to convince myself that The Widow was written by anyone but a man. Not only is there not the slightest hint of anything but good old-fashioned heterosexuality going on, but the book is riddled with one of the most notorious tells of male writers: a fixation about breast size. Nigel makes sure the reader knows that Charlotte Ann is well-endowed while Nancy, his long-time girlfriend, is not. He even makes sure we are forced to witness a scene in which Charlotte Ann lactates for his edification.
Perhaps this alone is not enough to prove that Jessamy Morrison was, in fact, a male author, but it certainly raises questions. Why would a man take a woman’s name and then publish novels written from a man’s perspective? The Wind Has Two Edges aside, is the lesbian element in two of the other three novels a serious attempt to stimulate a conversation about the complexities of gender and sexual preferences, or is it simply a literate version of the very old story of a guy trying to talk his wife or girlfriend into a threesome with one of her friends?
I still hope to unravel the mystery of Jessamy Morrison, but at this point it’s more out of curiosity than any interest in trying to bring a lost-lost talent back to light. Three of the four novels discussed here may have some value as artifacts of a time when sexual mores in England were beginning to change, but only The Wind Has Two Edges has more than average merit.
I welcome any assistance any reader of this piece might be able to lend in solving this mystery. It would still be nice to know what was going on with these books. If nothing else, they are certainly atypical for their time.
The No-Road, The Wind Has Two Edges, The Girl from Paris, and The Widow were all published by W. H. Allen in London.
The ways that we discover what we read are various. Sometimes we are led to a book by its reference in another book. Sometimes we hear mention of an unfamiliar author on the radio. I’ve heard that there are some brave souls who will pick up a book at a bookshop simply because the cover is too interesting to pass by.
In this case, I happened to be watching a book review on PaperBird’s YouTube channel. The always illuminating reviewer was discussing the works of James Purdy and then mentioned a young Chicago writer, Wendell Wilcox. Wilcox, he said, was “… just starting to find his way, but then in 1957 mysteriously just stopped publishing altogether, which is weird because around that same time is when James Purdy started appearing in print.” Something about the phrase, “mysteriously just stopped publishing,” piqued my interest. Perhaps it was only because, deep down, I love a good mystery. In any case, I decided to seek out Wilcox’s novel, Everything is Quite All Right, thinking that it might lead me down some rabbit hole but would end with me knowing why he stopped publishing.
Bernard Ackerman, Inc. published Everything is Quite All Right in 1945. On the back cover, there is a brief author bio: “Mr. Wilcox was graduated from the University of Chicago in 1929 and he has been married since 1931. He has lived in Chicago since he was five years old, and the scene of EVERYTHING IS QUITE ALL RIGHT is a great unnamed middle western city on the shores of Lake Michigan.”
In the 1930s, Wilcox became a friend of Gertrude Abercrombie, Chicago’s “Queen of the Bohemian Artists.” Abercrombie was an influential Surrealist painter and her vast network of friends and acquaintances included painters like Karl Priebe and Sylvia Fein, jazz musicians such as Charlie “Bird” Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and writers Thornton Wilder and James Purdy. She regularly hosted parties, gatherings, and jam sessions at her house in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, where artists from diverse backgrounds mingled. These gatherings acquired a reputation for attracting the most interesting talent in Chicago and beyond, as many traveling musicians and artists frequently stopped by. As for Abercrombie, she loved being the center of attention. Her gregariousness was legendary and the get-togethers continued even when she was too ill to get out of bed.
Abercrombie was not only a respected painter; she was also a talented jazz pianist. When jazz musicians improvised in her living room, it wasn’t uncommon for Abercrombie to join in on the piano. She had such strong friendships with so many musicians that she even inspired a couple of tunes: Richie Powell’s “Gertrude’s Bounce” and Roy Kral & Jackie Cain’s “Afrocrombie.” She made her home into an environment in which the music never stopped and its halcyon atmosphere was later recalled fondly by Saul Bellow and Studs Terkel. Abercrombie’s wide-ranging bohemian crowd was connected through her prevailing personae. In a way, these gatherings were comparable to the Paris literary salons hosted by another Gertrude.
Gertrude Stein surrounded herself with painters, poets, novelists, composers, and playwrights who visited her and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, at their Paris home on Saturday evenings. Stein also brought together artists who would influence each other and eventually have an effect on the broader culture. Although she is inextricably linked with Paris, Stein did feel the pull towards home. In 1934, she was invited to lecture at the University of Chicago and she returned in 1935. Thornton Wilder was teaching at the school’s English department at the time and he invited his friend Gertrude Abercrombie to attend Stein’s lecture, “Poetry and Grammar.” Abercrombie asked if she could bring along her friend, Wendell Wilcox. And, as Wilder put it, “…so began a romance of Wendell and Miss Stein.”
Wilcox had first read Stein’s work when he was an undergraduate and was quite taken with her poetry collection, Tender Buttons. After attending her lecture, the two writers began a correspondence that lasted until the end of Stein’s life. She was fond of his letters and the celebrated author encouraged the young Chicago writer to pursue his passion.
Wendell Wilcox, a portrait by Gertrude Abercrombie, circa 1930-1936. Oil on Masonite.
In her 1937 memoir, Everybody’s Autobiography, Gertrude Stein mentions Wilcox, and writes that he “…has a feeling for meaning that is not beyond what the words are saying and of course that does make more brilliant writing and that is what he is doing.” This take on Wilcox reminded me of the English literary critic Cyril Connolly’s distinction between two styles of literature: vernacular (or, realist) and Mandarin. Of the Mandarin, Connolly says, “It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs….”
After publishing short stories in Harper’s Bazaar (his first story, “England Is in Flames,” appeared in 1941), Story, and The New Yorker, as well as having his stories included in anthologies like, Best American Short Stories and 55 Short Stories from The New Yorker, Wilcox succeeded in having his debut novel accepted for publication.
Hoping to garner attention for the first-time novelist, Wilcox’s publisher asked permission to use the quotation from Everybody’s Autobiography and requested that Stein expand on what she meant by the comment. Ever the supportive friend and mentor, Stein sent a letter stating: “I am genuinely interested in his work. He has perfection, delicacy and persistence … all three good things.”
Everything is Quite All Right does not resemble the modernist writings of Stein. Wilcox’s writing is clear and straightforward and the plot itself is quite simple. As the back cover states, it concerns “…ordinary people living dull, uneventful lives.” We are introduced to the repugnant (and racist) Mrs. Korg as she has fired yet another “girl” that she and Mr. Korg have hired to clean their home, prepare their meals, and care for their baby. They have gone through eleven helpers in the past year.
We then meet the soon-to-be-twelfth, seventeen-year-old Elsie Singer. Elsie’s parents are struggling to provide for their five children on their Michigan farm. With the idea that she might be of some help, Elsie is sent to live with her recently widowed aunt in the city. Elsie is sweet and innocent by nature, but her mere presence grates on her Aunt Norah, who would prefer to remain in her ways. “For her the happy cheerful state was one of soft funereal gloom.” It was in the evenings just as the sun went down that Elsie’s presence was especially unwelcome. Every night, Norah would sit in the dark and, like clockwork, the presence of her late husband would arrive and together they would commune in the empty apartment.
Elsie is not an intellectual (characters refer to her as “slow” and “stupid”), but she is observant and instinctively kind. She cannot help but notice that her aunt does not really want her there. She is also aware that her presence back home was financially trying for her parents. Norah decides Elsie should find a job. So, with some prodding and some assistance from her aunt, Elsie finds work as a maid for Mr. and Mrs. Korg.
The scenes where Mrs. Korg makes impossible demands on her new maid are memorably uncomfortable. Mrs. Korg is perpetually frustrated with Elsie and she feels a sense of superiority which she frequently indulges. Meanwhile, Mr. Korg tries rather awkwardly to soften his wife’s harshness. For the most part, though, he goes about his work and stays out of the way. He is a meek fellow and he is ultimately convinced that life is merely “just doing ordinary things and having good or bad feelings about them.”
The Korgs’s marriage has some noticeable fissures and as the pressure continues to build, it seems that something will soon change:
Every war, they say, has its causes, those stated and those actual, and then there is always some event that precipitates the whole affair. Without this obvious event the war could never begun. The same is true of the main events in the lives of people.
After offering to give her a ride home, Mr. Korg takes Elsie on a drive to Lake Michigan. There, while the two sit on a rock overlooking the water, they share a kiss that inaugurates a love affair. We know, of course, that this cannot end well. And along the way, Elsie learns to follow her own heart. She leaves the Korgs, her aunt, and the city, and moves back to her family’s house in the country. But soon, Elsie finds herself getting to know the young man living just one farm over. At the end, the reader is left thinking things might actually be quite all right.
It seems clear why Stein championed Wilcox’s writing. His sentences move along quickly and, consequently, both humor and pathos are met so suddenly that their effects are just a little bit delayed. That delay often makes the laugh louder and the sigh longer. The novel is also full of irony. Characters are constantly doing things that they just admonished someone else for doing — such as when Mrs. Korg shouts at Mr. Korg that his outburst might wake the baby. Characters do self-serving things that they tell themselves are for the benefit of others: Elsie’s mother suggests that Aunt Norah take in Elsie not because the Singers need one less mouth to feed, but because her lonely, grieving sister needs some company. And the novel’s title, of course, is exactly what one says when everything is not quite all right. It really is no surprise that Wilcox’s writing drew comparisons to James Thurber’s domestic satires. And it is no surprise that his stories were featured in The New Yorker, as his writing has the clean, efficient, neat style that one associates with the magazine.
There’s little information about Wilcox’s life after his novel was published. He contributed a few more short stories to The New Yorker –the last piece I could locate (“No Larger Than Life”) was printed in the November 17, 1956 issue. After that, it appears that he dropped off of the proverbial literary map and that promise that Gertrude Stein saw in him was never fully realized.
The remembrances of Samuel Steward — poet, professor, pornographer, and tattoo artist — offered one clue as to why Wilcox drifted into anonymity. In The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward: Recollections of an Extraordinary Twentieth-Century Gay Life, Steward writes,
In 1945, my good friend Wendell Wilcox had a novel published, Everything is Quite All Right, and planned to write a new novel about his great passion, the Latin poet Catullus. But Wendell made the mistake of detailing his carefully researched plot to Thornton [Wilder], and sometime later, Thornton’s The Ides of March appeared. Therein, alas! Wendell found his plot. After that, Thornton discovered many of his friends in Chicago disappeared or grew cool as the story about Catullus gained wider circulation. I was one of those friends who vanished.
However, Penelope Niven, author of Thornton Wilder: A Life, discredits this claim. Wilder was well established by the time Everything is Quite All Right was released. With four novels and three Pulitzer Prizes to his name, Wilder had little need to resort to plagiarism. Niven adds, “Wilder’s correspondence confirms beyond question that he began conceiving and planning the novel as early as 1922, soon after his first trip to Rome.”
Wilcox visited Paris in 1949, seemingly with the desire to write. In a letter, Alice B. Toklas mentions his visit:
I’d only seen him once at one of the lectures Gertrude gave at the University of Chicago in ’35 and seeing him now has been a pleasure…Wendell wrote a short but not uninteresting novel a few years ago — he cant [sic] get to work easily though writing is as natural as living to him—he wants to stay a bit and get to work here.
Justin Spring, in his biography of Samuel Steward, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Poet, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade, states that Steward and Wilcox reconnected in 1976. Through their correspondence, Wilcox painted a bleak picture. He was struggling with alcoholism, a recent colostomy, and liver cancer. His wife, Esther, was a librarian and the financial provider in their marriage. When she passed away, Wilcox had a tough time making ends meet and he admitted to Steward that he had long since given up writing.
In 1986, The Paris Review printed “Gertrude Stein: Letters to a Friend,” with commentary by Philip Galanes. Stein’s friend was Wendell Wilcox. The article gives us a glimpse into his later life: “… Wilcox settled in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he worked as an archivist at the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina. He died in 1981.”
James Purdy captured those old days of bohemian Chicago in some of his novels. He would occasionally use a friend’s likeness in his works throughout his career. In his 1959 novel, Malcolm, a Gertrude Abercrombie-like character plays a pivotal role and she does again in his 1967 novel, Eustace Chisholm and the Works, and in his 1996 novel, Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue. On James Purdy’s Wikipedia page, his 1977 novel, Narrow Rooms, is referred to as “…a personal communication looking back some 25 years to Wendell Wilcox, a failed writer in the Abercrombie circle. Wilcox, who had once enjoyed a degree of success, stopped publishing at the very moment Purdy began commercial publication.”
When an author gives up writing, it puts their previous work in a peculiar light. One can’t help but see a trajectory of rise and fall. And in that light, we might see the previous work as presaging that failure — as if the works were stepping stones towards a destination that never existed. Should we consider Wilcox a failed author? I think the notion that he failed disregards his achievements. To have his work published in some of the most celebrated literary magazines, to have his novel published, to have the respect of his peers—maybe that was not enough, but all of that was not nothing. The reason for the decline of Wilcox’s writing career is still murky. Personal issues aside, the publishing world can be difficult and sometimes unfair. Most published writers have to live the life of Scheherazade. Sure, maybe your last story was good, but that doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to finish telling your next one.
In his final published story, “No Larger Than Life,” recently widowed Mrs. Tanner discovers a letter addressed to her from a cousin that her late husband never delivered to her. The letter was meant to heal a wound in their relationship and the cousin is pleading to just forget about the conflict and make amends. Mrs. Tanner becomes so upset that she is nearly ill with the thought that her cousin waited for a reply and never received one—what if she is seen as stubborn or unforgiving? She can’t bear the thought of her cousin thinking less of her, so she decides to write a letter that will explain why she did not reply and say that she, too, would like to make amends. This decision eases her mind. But, months later, when asked if she sent the letter: “‘No. I put it off, and then I forgot, and then when I remembered again, I got to thinking how mad she’d made me,’ Mrs. Tanner said.”
That Wilcoxian style occurs in the way that a character finds fault in the actions of others yet they are incapable of seeing that same fault in themself. His characters are often blind to their own motivations and so their behaviors contradict their beliefs. The humor emerges when the contradiction is expressed, as it is by Mrs. Tanner.
There are clear connections between his final published story and his novel. Most of the action takes place in dining rooms and living rooms. What we learn of the characters arises from what they say and what others say to them. The domestic settings, the snappy dialogue, the cutting satire, the comedy born of a character’s folly, the spare, colloquial prose, they all formed the hallmark of Wilcox’s fiction.
Returning to Cyril Connolly’s distinction between the vernacular style of writing — simple, terse, and idiomatic — as opposed to the Mandarin. There is nothing in the vernacular, he argues, that we would not find in everyday speech. In other words, it is unadorned writing; as a principle, it avoids ornamentation. Connolly references Samuel Butler’s dictum: “A man’s style in any art should be like his dress—it should attract as little attention as possible.”
Everything is Quite All Right would undoubtedly fall into the vernacular camp. Wilcox had a knack for the realist style. He had an ear for everyday speech. He was talented enough to create work that has a distinctive charm. The interesting thing about the vernacular style is that it often encapsulates the work in its time. Wilcox’s novel is unquestionably of its time.
I was curious if Wilcox continued to write, despite not having anything published after 1956. Although he admits to eventually giving up writing, I wondered how long after publication he made that decision. I was curious if his style evolved. I was also curious if he made peace with writing for his own pleasure or if he only wrote for the purpose of publication. Some of these questions will likely remain unanswered. However, it appears that not all of his unpublished writings have been lost.
The Princeton University Library is home to the Wendell Wilcox Papers. There are decades of letters to and from his wife Esther, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Abercrombie, Thornton Wilder, and other writers and friends included in the collection. His published and unpublished short stories are collected, along with his manuscript of Everything is Quite All Right. And there are also manuscripts of three unpublished novels: The Color of Darkness, Rock Me to Sleep, and Helen.
For anyone interested in the American literary milieu of the 1940s, Everything is Quite All Right might be worth seeking out (although a recent glance at BookFinder.com only revealed four copies for sale). I found Wilcox himself to be more interesting than his novel. I’ve come to think of him as a kind of case study of a writer who once showed promise only to be forgotten in his own time. It was undoubtedly an interesting cultural place that he occupied: his connections with the art scene in Chicago and his bonds with Gertrude Abercrombie and Gertrude Stein. For me, the value of the novel was what it did and did not reveal about its author’s promise.
Andrew Guschausky lives in Boise, Idaho.
Everything is Quite All Right, by Wendell Wilcox New York: Bernard Ackerman, 1945
Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.
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 
