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Alexander Saxton, historian and novelist, dies at age 93

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Grand Crossing'The New York Times yesterday published the obituary of Alexander Saxton, a radical historian and novelist. Although Saxton published a number of well-regarded works of history after earning his PhD at the age of 43, he first came to critical attention when he published his first novel, Grand Crossing, in 1943. Though only 24 at the time, Saxton had already lived a varied life. He attended Harvard and the University of Chicago, and then dropped out to take on work he felt more directly useful to the world. He got a job as the brakeman on a railroad crew and began writing a column for the Daily Worker.

Although Grand Crossing had its share of a young man’s pontifications, the book was bold, ambitious in scope, and full of energy conveyed, in part, by the title of its French translation: “Chicago-Triage.” As a fan of great big Chicago novels like The Death of the Detective, I picked it up recently and it’s been sitting in my “to read” stack. I certainly must read it now.

Alexander Saxton, 1948Saxton’s most-acclaimed novel, though, was The Great Midland, which he published in 1948. Midland is even more ambitious in its scope, covering thirty years in the lives of a man and woman deeply involved in the labor movement of the 1920s and 1930s. The University of Illinois Press reissued the book in 1997 as part of its “Radical Novel Reconsidered” series.

Saxton’s last novel, published in 1958, Bright Web in the Darkness, was somewhat shorter than the other two, and more mature in both perspective and structure. It dealt with the experiences and relationship of two women–one white, one black–who meet while training to become welders in a defense plant in World War Two. Bright Web in the Darkness was reissued in 1997 by the University of California Press as part of its excellent “California Fiction” series.

In reviewing the reissue of The Great Midland, one writer noted that, “the novel’s exposition is at times flattened out by the writer’s documentary calling.” Other critics observed that few of the characters in Grand Crossing were more than symbols or stereotypes. It may be no surprise, then, that Saxton found his natural voice more as a historian than a writer of fiction. In an email interview conducted just two years before his death, Saxton commented, “The novel claims only a brief span in human culture and may not continue to play a key role.” Still, one may fairly claim that Alexander Saxton’s three novels merit being written of and studied every bit as much as those of his better-known contemporaries such as Nelson Algren and John Dos Passos.

Events Leading Up to the Comedy, by Elliott Nugent

Cover of U.S. paperback edition of 'Events Leading Up to the Comedy'The first half of Elliott Nugent’s memoir, Events Leading Up to the Comedy, is pretty forgettable. Nugent, a classmate of James Thurber at Ohio State University, is probably best known for The Male Animal, the play he co-wrote with Thurber. The son of two professional actors, Nugent first hits the boards at the age of eight, and after his graduation from college, became an actor himself.

He soon expanded into writing, and quickly gained a hit on Broadway with Kempy, in which he co-starred with his father and sister. He married a fellow player, Norma Lee, and became a producer and director as well.

In 1929, MGM picked up an option to use him in their movies, and his first starring role was in “Wise Girls,” the film version of Kempy. Then, starting with “The Mouthpiece” in 1932, he became a film director as well. He went on to play in over twenty movies and direct over thirty–few of them much remembered today, however.
Elliott Nugent, 1947
Despite its rich potential for anecdotes, though, Nugent relates his story in an uninspired, “this happened, and then this happened” manner that would have led me to set the book aside after a few chapters had there not been a promise of something remarkable to come.

That something is an account of his battle with an illness he never actually labels, but which has all the signs of manic depression. Starting in the mid-1940s, Nugent’s pace of activities reached a frenzy. At one point, he watched in make-up the opening act of a play he was producing, then cut across the alley and took his first entrance in another play he was performing in. Aggravated by too much drinking and too little sleep, his few reserves of patience and perspective were exhausted and he began acting erratically.

He would go for days on end from work to parties to spur-of-the-moment trips, spending wildly, accosting strangers, and launching into angry tirades against long-standing friends. Then, days later, he found himself toying with the idea of suicide:

I scribbled a note to Norma, shoved it deep in a trouser pocket, got in my car, and drove to the Roosevelt Hotel. I remembered a certain fire escape on the tenth floor and in the back of the building, near the room my father used to occupy.

I checked my hat and coat downstairs, then rode up in the elevator, nodding to the operator as if I were one of the guests in the hotel. I pulled open the hall door to the fire-escape door, went outside, and closed it, then peered over the railing to the alley ten stories below. Instead of climbing the railing, I lighted a cigarette and sat on the railing, experimentally teetering a bit. In another moment, I might have toppled over backward, but the door opened and a stranger emerged. He gave me a curious look.

“It’s getting colder,” I said casually. “I don’t think I’ll stay out here very long.”

I offered the man a cigarette, bu he refused and went inside. I imagined that he could see me through the Venetian blinds of my father’s old room. Abruptly I rose and went downstairs, almost without thinking or making any decision.

Nugent’s behavior reached a point where his wife resorted to having him committed to a Connecticut mental hospital known as the Institute of the Living. There, he was subjected to most the known treatments of the day short of electric shock: drugs, wrapping in cold towels, spending nights in tepid baths, and insulin shock. The latter finally brought him to a level of self-control that convinced his wife and psychiatrist to release him.

Within months, however, he was back on a high. This time, he headed off on a cross-country tear that landed him in jails in Palm Springs and Hollywood and nearly got him drowned in riptides off Acapulco. His wife finally tracked him down after he returned to New York and checked into four different hotels under four different names–all in the course of one day. This time, he was sent to Bellevue Hospital and then a reputable facility upstate.

Nugent’s account of his bouts of manic depression reminded me very much of those of Washington Post publisher Phil Graham–as seen from the perspective of his wife, Katharine, in her memoir, Personal History. Except that Nugent survived where Graham took his life. Both men’s illness was ineptly treated, though they had access to the best care available, and endured by their bewildered family and friends.

Written in 1965, nearly twenty years after the start of Nugent’s illness, Events Leading Up to the Comedy comes to a rather abrupt end. Aside from the need to “try to forgive myself,” Nugent takes no great lesson from his experiences.

Perhaps, as a writer of light, comedic plays, Nugent lacked the darkness of imagination to really convey the terrors of his depressions. The passage above, for example, is utterly matter-of-fact–no different in tone, really, from that of the rest of the book. And so, in the end, Events Leading Up to the Comedy amounts to an interesting but not particularly moving account of mental illness.

Nugent, whose stage and film career ended by the late 1950s, wrote one other book after this memoir. Of Cheat and Charmer tells of the end of a Hollywood film director on a bout of drinking and fighting and womanizing that must draw heavily on Nugent’s own adventures while on manic highs. Nugent died in New York City in 1980.

Events Leading Up to the Comedy, by Elliott Nugent
New York City: Trident Press, 1965

There’s One in Every Town, by James Aswell

Cover of 1952 Signet paperback edition of 'There's One in Every Town'
Cover of 1952 Signet paperback edition of "There's One in Every Town"

“Completing engrossing on every page,” proclaims a plug by Erskine Caldwell on the cover of the Signet paperback edition of James Aswell’s short novel, There’s One in Every Town (1951). It appears beneath a James Avati cover featuring a wary brunette in a Carmen blouse (is there any other kind in a James Avati cover?). So we know we’re in Tobacco Road country, where beautiful white trash girls have a Viagra-like effect on all the men in town. Not surprisingly, as Aswell was an old college classmate of Caldwell.

In this particular instance, Jackie Vose (nee Cvasek) gets a reputation as a fast girl, but a few men believe her to be an angel at the core. One is her neighbor, who narrates the story, and the other the town’s doctor. The doctor eventually falls for her, to the town’s censure, and the two come to an end that reminded me of those Nancy Reagan fables that National Lampoon used to publish: where, no matter what sin the protagonists had committed, they always ended up run over by a runaway schoolbus.

Aswell, the son of a congressman, hailed from Baton Rouge, and published a number of novels about life down in the steamy South. Several of these also got picked up by Signet and graced with a dramatic Avati cover: The Young and the Hungry Hearted (Signet 116) and The Birds and the Bees (Signet 1121). The Midsummer Fires, however, only rated an Avon paperback release with a cartoonish cover–this despite the fact that a Natchitoches reviewer considered it to have beat out novels by Caldwell and James M. Cain as “the most nauseating book of 1948.”

Aswell died in 1955 of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 48.

There’s One in Every Town, by James Aswell
Indianapolis: Bobbs -Merrill, 1952

P. A. L., by Felix Riesenberg

Cover of first U.S. edition of P. A. L. by Felix RiesenbergFelix Riesenberg (1879-1939) worked in the Merchant Marine, was part of two unsuccessful attempts to reach the North Pole by airship, served as a civil engineer for the state of New York, ran the New York Nautical School (now the State University of New York Maritime College), and was Chief Officer of the U. S. Shipping Board. He also wrote several books about the sea, including the manual, Standard Seamanship for the Merchant Service (1922).

And then, around the age of 44, he decided to write a novel.

P.A.L.–the resulting book–does start at sea, with the dramatic wreck of a beat-up Russian freighter carrying refugees in a storm off the coast of Washington State. The writing certainly demonstrates Riesenberg’s familiarity with the ways of ships and the sea.

By page 10, however, the sea is left behind, never to be revisited. Lieutenant Dimitri Marakoff, master of the ship at the time of its sinking, is washed ashore with other survivors, and, taken for an Englishman, listed as D. Markham. Given a new set of clothes, a few dollars, and a referral to a businessman named P. A. L. Tangerman, D. Markham is sent off to Seattle to make his way.

In Seattle, he learns that Tangerman is the entrepeneur responsible for introducing the Cudahy Vacuum Dome. Not knowing whether that’s “a mountain or a mine,” he goes to see Tangerman. A brash, cigar-puffing man clearly assured of his own ingenuity, Tangerman accepts Markham as an Englishman without a second thought, and takes an immediate liking to Markham. He offers him a job as some kind of private advisor and sends him out the door with referrals to a haberdasher and a boarding house.

Only then does Markham see the dome, being demonstrated in a downtown storefront: “an immense bulb of bright aluminum” with “the outlines of an exaggerated coal-scuttle helmet.” Copper pipes connect it to a vacuum motor: “The great invention was intended to cause hair to sprout on bald heads, by relieving the air pressure above the cranium.” In other words, an elaborate gimmick for curing baldness.

No one, however, doubts the genius of Tangerman or the certain success of the dome. And Tangerman has other enterprises: Vim Vigor V. V., a vitamin tonic; Glandula, a miracle elixir made from sheep glands; four different brands of cigars and cigarettes, all made from the same tobacco. Hailed as a titan of American industry, Tangerman works into the wee hours jotting down the secrets to success.

It’s all heady, exciting stuff for Markham and the many others in his orbit. Only no one ever sees much in the way of cash. And when the dome is accused of blowing up and injuring a customer, everyone from the haberdashers to the office furniture store start taking back their goods.

This proves a temporary set-back, though, and soon Tangerman and Markham are off to Chicago to make an even bigger splash. Tangerman founds a correspondence course school, a publishing house for cheap editions of the classics, and several magazines. One of them, Marcus and Aurelius, aims at being the most outrageous bundle of claims around–a precursor of the Weekly World News. It celebrates all of Tangerman’s gimmicks and more:

[F]ly traps, stills, liquor flavors, beer powders, trick sets, face lifting, jumping dice, depilatories, deodorizers, whirling sprays, installment diamonds, eye brighteners, nose straighteners, stammering cures, permanent curls, lip sticks, blush controllers, dimple makers, gallstone removers, self-bobbers, liquor agers, tape worm expellers, rubber underwear, hair restorers, finger print messages, sleuthing secrets, pyorrhoea, lucky rings, hypnotism, halitosis, pimple cures, lover’s secrets, pile removers, racing tips, dancing steps, etiquette, and short story courses.

“Print dirt, but don’t dose it with perfume,” is the editor’s maxim.

Tangerman buys land along Lake Michigan, builds an enormous mansion with its own power plant, buys a great yacht on which he throws wild parties with plenty of bootleg booze. He keeps surfing from one wave of speculation to another, all of based on little or no hard capital. And though he marries a sweet girl from Seattle for who Markham carries a torch, he keeps up a steady stream of mistresses, including the psychic, Countess Voluspa Balt-Zimmern.

Tangerman’s ventures also keep spiralling up from the ridiculous to the insane, culminating in a secret pact with a lunatic miner with a box full of gold in fine sand form. The miner claims to have found a huge deposit of the stuff off in some unnamed desert in the West, and Tangerman and all his fellow speculators become drunk on the possibilities of the world’s greatest gold find.

As one might expect, the bubble eventually pops, and with devastating–and in Tangerman’s case, fatal–results.

Felix Riesenberg, 1936 - Photo by Arnold Genthe courtesy of the Library of Congress
P.A.L. is reminiscent of two novels from twenty years earlier: Frank Norris’ The Octopus and The Pit, both of which attacked the blind destructiveness of speculation. But it’s also very much a novel of the 1920s and wild stock speculation, which ultimately led to the great market crash of 1929. Riesenberg’s work has less of Norris’ young man’s passion and more of the perspective and humor of a middle-aged man who’d already been through more than his share of adventures. Although Markham, his narrator, never seems to know what’s going to happen from moment to moment, the reader can’t help but catch the whiff of impending doom early on, and it’s no great surprise when it comes.

What I find most interesting about this book is simply the notion that a man with almost thirty years’ experience of working at sea, mastering the craft and sciences of navigation, sailing, propulsion, shipbuilding, and civil engineering, would pick up a pen and write this rollercoaster ride through the world of hype, gimmicks, and entrepeneurship. Riesenberg revels in the absurdity of Tangerman’s ventures and seems to have delighted in being able to pick the names of his characters: Punderwell Moore; Springer Platterly; Chauncey Wilber Tambey; Saxe Gubelstein; Jesspole McTwiller. (No one ever does find out what the initials P. A. L. stand for, though).

And then from this first novel, Riesenberg went on to write at least four others, all of them sweeping in scope, with dozens of characters up and down the social strata, and several (particularly Endless River) fairly experimental for their time.

While I don’t think P.A.L. should be considered a neglected masterpiece, it is a lively and self-confident novel than stands (in terms of literary merit) only a step or two back from Norris’ books (neither of which are really masterpieces, either, but better known for their historical importance). I’ve picked up three other Riesenberg novels, along with his 1937 autobiography, Living Again, and plan to spend some of the next months reviewing the fictional output of this remarkable man.

P. A. L.: A Novel of the American Scene, by Felix Riesenberg
New York City: Robert M. McBride & Company, 1925

Presidents Who Have Known Me, by George E. Allen

Cover of 'Presidents Who Have Known Me,' by George E. AllenWhen I spotted Presidents Who Have Known Me on the shelves of the Montana Valley Bookstore, I knew I had to get it. With a title like that, the book was either going to turn out to be a classic of egocentric bombast or an enjoyable exercise in self-mockery, something along the lines of Spike Milligan’s Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall.

Instead, it turns out to be a little of each and not enough of either to recommend to anyone but a historian desperate for an anecdote about some figure or other from midcentury American politics. George E. Allen’s Wikipedia entry describes him as a “political operative,” and based on his book, it’s a good way to sum him up. A Mississippian who had a few unsuccessful years as a small-town lawyer, Allen managed to work his way through a variety of jobs, including lobbyist and hotel manager, until he became a staffer for Pat Harrison, the senior Democratic senator from Mississippi and a key Roosevelt ally in Congress. With Harrison’s support, along with that of FDR’s press secretary, Steve Early, he managed to get appointed as one of the commissioners running the District of Columbia–a post he held for most of the 1930s.

He also wangled his way into a variety of official and unofficial positions in the Democratic Party, which led him to work (if mostly intermittently and on the margins) with FDR and Truman. His were one of a number of hands through which the notorious series of hand-written notes from FDR that eventually led to Truman’s selection of the Vice Presidential candidate in 1944. Later, he became involved with Truman’s re-election campaign in 1948. One recollection of this experience manages to illustrate how Allen attempts to be self-deprecating and self-celebrating at the same time and manages to flub the whole thing:

Almost all the political experts, both professional and amateur, were wrong in their predictions about the outcome of the last Presidential election [1948–Ed.]. But not one of them was more wrong than I. Indeed, I was even wronger than George Gallup.

To make it worse, I was, at the time of the campaign, a sort of self-appointed unofficial advisor to President Harry S. Truman. I was in a position to tell him how is campaign should be run, and I did so. All through the campaign Mr. Truman ignored my advice, and all through the campaign I kep promising myself that when he lost to Thomas E. Dewey I would remember to be generous and not say, “I told you so.” When it was all over and he had won, I told him that I had been supremely confident of his defeat.

“So was everybody else,” he confided, “but you’re the first one who’s admitted it.”

In case we fail to get his point, Allen makes it again, and as obviously as humanly possible: “My point is that whereas almost everybody was wrong on this occasion I managed to rise above the pack and get credit for being outstandingly wrong.” Why do I get the feeling that George Allen had a tendency to repeat the punch line when a joke failed to get a big enough laugh?

Allen–whose chief assets appear to have been an endless supply of jokes and ready availability as an extra hand at poker and bridge–didn’t come from Missouri, but that aside, exemplified the band of card-playing buddies Truman kept close at hand for advice and support. Allen fit in well with the likes of Truman’s old World War One Army pal, Harry Vaughan, who was promoted to General and appointed as the President’s Military Aide on the strength of similar achievements.

Indeed, when Truman appointed Allen to a seat on the board of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Washington Star broke the news with the headline, “Appointment of Allen to RFC Board Called Worst Choice Made by Truman.” Allen’s face made the cover of Time magazine, with the caption, “George E. Allen: For the President: jokes, cheers.” Despite the outcry of influential columnists such as Drew Pearson and Walter Lippmann, all of whom noted that Allen was utterly unqualified for the job, a circle of Democratic Party supporters, led by Senator Alben Barkley (who went on to become Truman’s running mate in 1948), arranged to get the appointment confirmed. Allen acknowledges his lack of qualifications but insists that he had to go through it for Truman’s sake. In the end, he resigned the post after a year, having done almost nothing. This he seems to consider an illustration of his personal integrity and loyalty to the President. One wonders why he didn’t try harder to talk Truman out of making the appointment in the first place.

No, actually, by the time one reaches this point in the book, the whole affair seems to sum up Allen’s character. After all, he uses the Time magazine portrait for the cover of his own book.

Allen’s ambiguous role in Washington politics seems to have rapidly grown smaller after the RFC stint, and the book may have been an earnest attempt to keep his name in the spotlight a bit longer. Although he assures his readers that, looking ahead to the growing struggle between democracy and communism, “the men who emerge as our leaders will have the incalculable advantage of knowing me,” the evidence shows that his principal patron after 1950 was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, with whom he regularly lunched and went to the horse races. One may take some consolation that other American leaders failed to take advantage of Allen’s acquaintance.

Presidents Who Have Known Me, by George E. Allen
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950

A Sunset Touch, by Moira Pearce

Cover of US paperback edition of 'A Sunset Touch'I found A Sunset Touch in the Internet Archive, which is interesting, as the book was published in 1960 by Scribner’s, so you’d think its copyright would have been renewed. A cursory check of the online U. S. copyright catalog failed to locate any registrations for Moira Pearce or this book in particular, however, so it seems legit. It’s one of dozens entered into the archive from the collections of Osmania University in Hyderabad, India. These include titles such as Sinclair Lewis’s late novel, Cass Timberlane and John Hersey’s 1960 novel, The Child Buyer that certainly are still under copyright.

In any case, legal or not, here is a perfect example of a forgotten book. A Sunset Touch was published by a major mainstream house, earned favorable, if not exceptional, reviews in Kirkus Reviews and a few other national publications, and was reissued as a mass market paperback. Now, the paperback publisher, Macfadden Books, has also since become forgotten, but at the time it was putting out best sellers such as Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative. Pearce published one other novel, Upstairs at the Bull Run, in 1971. Kirkus placed this book “in Josephine Lawrence country” (no doubt comparing it to Remember When We Had a Doorman?) and was equally positive in its assessment. But her second book earned no paperback release and appears to have marked the end of her publishing career. Since then, if anyone took any note of her work in print, I’ve been unable to find it.

I probably wouldn’t have given A Sunset Touch a second look had the book’s first paragraph not seemed too likeable and eccentric to pass up:

The church in Leicester wasn’t an old one, having been built in the 1920s after the original had burnt down. Designed by an architect who soon afterwards turned to farming, it was constructed inexpensively out of the local stone, which, happening to be marble, lent it a certain dignity. Neither inside nor outside had it much beauty or grace. On this breathless July day the presence in a coffin of Medusa Nash gave the church a certain interest macabre perhaps it didn’t otherwise have.

Medusa’s friends note the contrast between the body in the open casket and the woman they had known, the result of the handiwork of Mrs. Greef, the undertaker’s wife and self-taught beautician:

…[T]he thick, wildly curling hair that was responsible for her name and that Medusa during her lifetime had seldom, if ever, submitted to a hairdresser, preferring the more individual look she achieved herself with a pair of nail scissors, this hair was now pressed flat to her skull and set with an iron in
tight, formal waves. She had been vain of her long eyelashes and customarily coated them heavily with mascara, outlining the lids with black pencil, but since the idea of eye makeup had never impinged on Mrs, Greeff’s consciousness Medusa’s face now appeared for the first and last time in public without it.

In the course of Medusa’s service and funeral, we are introduced to most of the major characters in the book. They are a mix of wealthy and middle-class–but all middle-aged–residents of an area of rural Massachussetts popular with weekend visitors and escapees from Boston. Together, they indulge in a heavy amount of drinking, a moderate amount of commentary on the local yokels, and an occasional venture into adultery.

In the course of two hundred-some pages, not much really happens. There is a weak attempt at an affair, and several attempts by Medusa’s sister-in-law to dump her brother, the surviving spouse and a partially-disabled stroke victim, on one of the group. And there are several parties where the idiosyncracies of the various friends are displayed:

Cora, though she loved all her dogs passionately, did not believe in ruining their figures by providing them with more than one sketchy meal a day, that is, if someone remembered to set it out. Aristocratically lean in the haunches they would sit at your feet and watch you gloomily as you ate canapes. Occasionally,
summoning up a burst of energy, one would slap a grimy paw onto your knee and pant up at you in a desperate plea for a handout before lapsing back into its anemia-induced torpor.

In one way or another, most of them spend some time contemplating what lies ahead on their lives’ downhill slopes. Throughout the book, there is a grim, grey backdrop to its otherwise lightly comic tone:

Where another woman might call on the vet for assistance in putting down the excess animal population, she took matters into her own hands. “After all,” she’d tell you briskly in her flute-like accents, “animals have no souls, what is the use of getting sentimental about them?” Also, the vet, with his fancy gas chambers and humanitarian injections, ran into money. So every so often Cora got out a certain sack,
filled it with puppies or kittens and descended, cheerfully humming a hymn tune, to finish them off in the brook below the house.

In the end, no one is much changed or much the wiser, and the story just sort of fades out.

So is this a justly or unjustly neglected book? I guess it depends on whether one decides based on literary merit or reading pleasure. On the first criterion, A Sunset Touch is certainly no milestone in the development of the novel. Aside from a certain post-Peyton Place relaxation of morals, it could have been written twenty or thirty years earlier. There are no stylistic risks taken and the omniscient narrator’s perspective is essentially the same as that taken by Tolstoy a hundred years earlier. And the book is weak from a structural standpoint, as Pearce constructs a promising opening around Medusa’s funeral and then dissipates its potential in following the various characters down a series of paths that lead nowhere in particular.

On the basis of reading pleasure, however, A Sunset Touch represents about four hours’ worth of intelligent, amusing observations of people and all their minor flaws and foibles. On the comic spectrum, it sits to the right of Wodehouse and to the left of Jane Austen–not quite ridiculous, not quite elegant. And perhaps its moderation is the reason A Sunset Touch has been forgotten.

After all, the economics of book-buying and book-reading hinge on perceptions of relative value. It’s rarely a question of, “To read or not to read?” Instead, it’s a question of “Do I read this or do I read that?” And mildly amusing and mildly thought-provoking books are just too easy to pass over. Moira Pearce had no prior work on which to base a reputation, as as the paperback cover above demonstrates, even her publishers didn’t know how to pitch this book. Had she written it thirty years before, she might have at least gained the critical support that the Saturday Review and other journals put behind the works of Humphrey Pakington (who?)–another writer of mildly comic novels I plan to feature sometime soon.

If you’ve stayed with me this far, then you’ve probably had enough of a taste of A Sunset Touch to make your own relative judgment. For my part, I can say that I enjoyed finding out just what kind of a book it was, and I will be happy to pick up a copy of Upstairs at the Bull Run if I ever stumble across one. On the other hand, I won’t just go right to Amazon and order it, as I have a great stack of other books that appear to have equal or higher relative value. But I’m sure that I’m not the only one who won’t regret setting aside a few hours to discover this fine but forgotten book.

A Sunset Touch, by Moira Pearce

New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960

The Inside Story of an Outsider, by Franz Schoenberner

Cover of first edition of "The Inside Story of an Outsider, by Franz Schoenberner"Although Franz Schoenberner was a man of letters for his entire adult life, aside from a short time of service in the German Army at the end of World War One, he was over fifity before he wrote his first book. Throughout the 1920s and up to Hitler’s taking power as Chancellor of Germany in early 1933, Schoenberner was a journalist and editor–most notably of the satirical (and anti-Nazi) weekly, Simplicissimus. As such, he was an archetypal European intellectual of the golden days of transnational humanism–the world of Stefan Zweig, Jules Romains, and André Gide. Not surprisingly, then, when he did come to write his first book–a clear-eyed and self-deprecating account of that period–he titled it, Confessions of a European Intellectual.

When the Nazis began cracking down on all forms of political opposition following the Reichstag fire in February 1927, however, Schoenberner quickly realized that the only options available to him were exile or imprisonment. Taking a few belongings and a little money in a backpack, he crossed into Switzerland in March 1933 and began life as a refugee. The Inside Story of an Outsider, his second book, published in 1949, is his account of eight years of living as an outsider.

From the time they set foot in Switzerland until their acceptance as long-term residents of the United States in 1941, Schoenberner and his wife, the novelist Ellie Nerac, existed in a political and economic limbo. For most of this time, their passports were in the hands of the local police. They could not leave without visas and sufficient funds to gain entry to another country, and they could not return to Germany without risking certain imprisonment or death in a concentration camp. Their status did not allow them to hold down regular jobs, and no one in Switzerland or France needed an editor of a liberal German-language magazine. Nazi laws had made it almost impossible to get any of their funds out of their German bank accounts or to sell their remaining property, and what small royalties they could get out of selling an occasional article in a Swiss or French magazine often took months to make it through a complex chain of bank transfers.

Even so, Schoenberner and Nerac were able to get by, living in cheap apartments in the south of France and devising countless ways to economize. These he recalls in a charming chapter titled, “How to Live Without Money.” “Having lived so many years almost exclusively by miracles, I feel obliged to relate for the personal benefit and encouragement of my readers some of these experiences and even some of the practical techniques which, as I have found, are likely to create the practical and psychological preconditions for such miracles to happen.”

Schoenberner is the first to admit that what he and his wife experienced–even the months of internment with thousands of refugees in filthy camps run with gross incompetence by the Vichy French–hardly compared with the fate of millions of other victims of the Second World War. Even among his fellow internees, some found their situation too much to bear. Schoenberner recounts the fate of his friend, the poet Walter Hasenclever, in the Camps des Milles, outside Aix-en-Provence:

Only when, getting up at dawn, I suddenly heard that Hasenclever could not be awakened, I knew that his good night had been a last good-by. He was still breathing when two stretcher bearers brought him to the infirmary. But a last look at his face–so deadly pale and deadly quiet–made me feel sure that any attempt to save him would be in vain. An empty tube of veronal had been found in the straw of his sleeping place. He probably had taken all the twenty tablets shortly after going to bed, and I knew enough of medicine to be certain that after eight hours the stomach pump could not remove the poison from his body. … If he reused to take this chance, it was because his will to live, as well as to create, was exhausted, and the new struggle seemed no longer worth while to him. If all he wanted was peace, life should not be forced upon him. In our times more than ever, life would always mean the opposite of peace, and everyone had to make his choice, Since he had decided for peace, it should not be disturbed.

Schoenberner had the advantage of a tremendous internal resilience–and of just enough recognition outside Germany–based largely on the reputation of Simplicissimus–to win an occasional favor with a French official–such as a release from a internment camp outside Bayonne just a day or so ahead of its being taken over by German forces.

Franz Schoenberner, 1949He and Nerac also benefitted from the support of their friend, the German novelist Hermann Kesten, who was active on the Emergency Rescue Committee in the U.S.. Eventually, with the help of Varian Fry, the committee’s representative in Marseilles, who was responsible for the release of thousands of refugees from Vichy France, they were able to pull together the necessary paperwork and enough funds to gain passage to New York via Lisbon.

Having made it to the safety of the United States did not, however, mean that all their worries were over. They still faced the challenge of adapting to a new language and culture and finding a way to make a living. Fortunately, standing alone and stranded with their few suitcases in a customs shed on Staten Island, they sought out the help of woman wearing a Red Cross uniform.

This woman turned out to be a member of the local Unitarian Church, and her generosity in taking them in, offering room and board for weeks, helping them find a place to stay in Manhattan, setting them up with connections for work, and simply offering much-needed compassion and support to two very tired and uncertain people, makes you wish that all refugees coming to this country could experience the same kind of welcome.

As do many writers trying to tell a story with a happy ending, Schoenberner struggles a bit in the final chapters of The Inside Story of an Outsider. He throws in a tribute to the work of Thomas Wolfe that has little to do with the rest of the book–particularly given that Schoenberner never met or knew Wolfe personally. Although he is able to gain a position with the Office of War
Information and is persuaded to write Confessions of a European Intellectual, which wins very favorable reviews, he does not believe that the peace achieved at the end of the war represents anything but an ugly compromise. Schoenberner is unwilling to attribute any special meaning to his experiences or his choice to record them aside from the imperative for a writer to be “an incorruptible witness.”

I hope I’m not being too rude when I say, however, that, for a German intellectual, Schoenberner’s style and outlook are surprisingly light and optimistic. One might say he possesses an almost Gallic charm. And it is the pleasure of spending some hours in the company of a remarkable narrator–intelligent, compassionate, humorous and self-effacing–that makes The Inside Story of an Outsider a book worth seeking out. Over the last few days, I’ve always enjoyed picking it up, even if just for a few minutes, and regretted setting it down. Considering the book’s subject, that’s quite a recommendation.

The Inside Story of an Outsider, by Franz Schoenberner
New York City: The Macmillan Company, 1949

Breaking Up, by W. H. Manville

Cover of first U. S. edition of "Breaking Up," by W. H. Manville

I was tempted to tag this post Justly Neglected?, as Breaking Up, W. H. Manville’s 1962 bizarre novel of obsessively apathetic love is really quite bad. But out of respect for the fine work of graphic arts legend, Tony Palladino, who also designed the cover for Robert Bloch’s novel, Psycho, I’m listed this under “Covers.”

For Breaking Up, Palladino came up with a simple, striking image: an upside-down aerial shot of midtown Manhattan. It worked its magic with me, as it was the cover rather than the jacket blurb that led me to buy and read the book. Well, that and the setting: I’m always a sucker for books set in Manhattan, particularly when the protagonist works on Madison Avenue. And one could imagine Bill, the husband whose wife leaves him in the opening chapter, working alongside Don Draper–although it’s clear he lacks any real talent as an ad man, sculptor, or lover. His creative director sums up his character succinctly:

You want to be the American Rembrandt of the sculpture guys, you want to succeed in this business–you’ll wake up to the fact you want the dough as much as anyone one of these days–you want to have the greatest love story of all time with your wife, you want to be the guy who can beat the system, who can do all the other things, too. All without working at any of them. You want all that. Result: you get paralyzed.

Which reminds me of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s wonderful assessment of one of his acquaintances, Barry Pink: “Pink wants to sit on six stools at once, but he only has one arse.”

For a good two-thirds of the book, the reader has to follow Bill around as he wrestles with that timeless question: does he, or doesn’t he? His eyes are eventually opened to the anguish his wife has suffered trying to reconcile herself to the fact that her husband is an apathetic lump (he helps her pack when she moves out). He comes across her diary from the months before the break-up:

He is teaching me sculpture. It is hard for him to do and I pretend not to be too eager. He feels it is his own and as if he is giving part of himself away to me. And he is–at last.

Bill, I’ve been starving for you.

He finds in it a refuge. Sometimes I’m glad he has something in which he is not locked up and incoherent, but it frightens me in him. So remote.

Thus the angst of the remote Bill, seeking an outlet in his art, is channeled and magnified by his wife. My own feeling about Bill can be summed up by a quote from Tom Lehrer: “I feel that if a person has problems communicating, the very least he can do is to shut up.”

Somehow the revelations of the diary trigger a burst of action from the clod, and in the final chapters, in the course of one frenetic night, he tries to win her back, tries to destroy the tubercular male model she’s hooked up with, tries to orchestrate a con by which his agency’s key account can be saved, and tries to win a big account on which he and the above creative director can set up a new agency of their own. It’s not only completely unbelievable but technically inept: it’s not too entertaining when the juggler is running around the stage chasing after dropped balls.

It’s a good thing I read this on board a transatlantic flight: it forced me to withstand the temptation to toss the book out the window. Breaking Up is one book that deserves to sleep with the fishes.

Breaking Up, by W. H. Manville
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962

The Patriot, by Harold Bienvenu

Cover of Avon paperback edition of "The Patriot" by Harold BienvenuWhen I picked up an old paperback edition of Harold Bienvenu’s 1964 novel, The Patriot, I was hoping it might turn out to be a forgotten gem. From the cover blurbs, it was clearly a scathing view of right-wing Southern California politics from the heyday of Barry Goldwater. A young public relations man sets up shop in a fictional version of San Bernardino or Riverside, and stumbles into a connection with right wing minister. Together they decide to form the American Patriots, a group blending the tenets of the John Birch Society, the NRA, and Senator Joe MacCarthy.

“I am an American Patriot. I believe in a Supreme Being. I believe in the American Republic. I believe in the American Constitution. I believe in the American Enterprise System. I am an American Patriot.” So goes the group’s oath. At first it’s little but a flag-waving version of the Rotary, but with the help of a local millionaire (modelled on Walter Knott of Knott’s Berry Farm) and the PR man’s hard work, it soon becomes a force in local politics and business. Stores are pressured into sponsoring the group and displaying American Patriot cards. A not-too-subtle boycott is organized: “No member who is an American Patriot would trade with any professional man, or any businessman, who is ashamed to proclaim himself a patriot.”

At this point, The Patriot could have developed into something promising. But having created the situation, novice novelist Bienvenu (a professor of economics by trade) quickly loses all control, and the story spirals off into lurid silliness. In the course of a few chapters, the PR man dumps his lounge singer girlfriend, agrees to become a bagman for a Howard Hughes-like billionaire in return for a shot at the local Congressional seat, and rapes and then marries the Knott-like millionaire’s lesbian daughter. Bienvenu might have started out with the aim of writing a serious book, but he caught the Harold Robbins mojo and ended up with a gawdawful mess.

Hands down the worst book I’ve read this century.

Ads from the Saturday Review of Literature

I had the chance to pick up an assorted lot of bound issues of the Saturday Review of Literature from the 1920s to the 1950s and have been going through them in search of well-regarded but since forgotten books.

However, just as interesting as the reviews have been the ads–particularly the personal ads, which became a regular feature of the magazine somewhere in the early 1930s. These are touchingly open and naive, amusingly pompous, cryptic, or–often–downright bizarre. Here are a few examples:

  • Correspondence invited concerning social patterns, individual reactions, one more script, the country, pox, or your favorites. By mature man. Box 520-D.
  • AMIABLE MALE wishes employment based not solely upon his 23 years. Some education (art), much erudition; deep love of music. Long fingers, but firm palms. Though no derring-doer, worn or untrod paths considered. Box P-973.
  • HEY GALS! Let’s swap hats! If your friends are tired of seeing you in that hat send it to us with $3.00 and we will send you a new-to-you sterilized hat. What can you lose? No junk, please. Hat-to-you, 816 Broad St., Chattanooga, Tenn.

  • TO JUNKETS—alone and palely loitering. Yes.—you were saying… .? SANS MERCI.

So, to share some of these wonderful snippets of past lives, I put together a Tumblr site that will offer up other samples once or twice a day:

saturdayreviewofliteratureads.tumblr.com

There’s enough of a supply to keep this going for a year or so. Check it out.

Keeper of the Flame, by I. A. R. Wylie

Cover of Popular Library paperback edition of "Keeper of the Flame"

This Popular Library edition of I. A. R. Wylie’s 1942 novel, Keeper of the Flame, dates from the early 1960s. There are some remarkable titles to be found among the best-sellers, bodice-rippers, and dreck that Popular Library released in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I wrote about a few of them about a year ago in the post, Digging into the Popular Libary at the Montana Valley Book Store.”

This is a particularly odd example. MGM purchased the film rights to Keeper of the Flame when the book was still unpublished. It was then published by Random House before the film was released, but subsequent runs featured a dust jacket with a still shot from the movie.

The film is best remembered today as Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy’s first, but it and the novel are nothing like their usual comedies. Steven O’Malley (Tracy), a celebrated foreign correspondent of the Quentin Reynolds-Vincent Sheean-John Gunter school, recently returned from Europe, takes an assignment to write the life story of Robert Forrest, a New England governor who’s inspired a nationwide populist movement. Forrest is considered a Lincoln-like figure, the great hope of the nation, but as O’Malley investigates, he finds there are some curious figures in Forrest’s household–including his wife.

I won’t spoil the ending, but let’s just say that Forrest proves to have been a little more like Lincoln Rockwell than Abraham Lincoln.

Aside from the unusual story, Keeper of the Flame–both the novel and the film–are far more interesting seen in the context of their external connections and references. One watches the film looking for hints of the budding attraction between Hepburn and Tracy. One reads the novel in light of the figures such as Charles Lindburgh and Father Coughlin who inspired popular movements in America in the 1930s and 1940s–movements we now see as having a darker side.

Having written recently about Wylie’s memoir, My Life with George, I was impressed by two aspects of the book. First, it’s hard not to think that Wylie wrote it for the screen: there are at least a dozen scenes that play out exactly as filmed, and the whole sequence of the narrative matches that of the film so tightly it could have been a novelization after the fact. Second, despite the many superficial and clichéd characterizations, it’s obvious that Wylie was a very world-smart woman: if she played down her intelligence, it was because she’d had, by the 1940s, also thirty years’ experience of making a living with her writing.

Walter Mehring

At the moment, Walter Mehring’s poems, essays and novels are out of print in both German and English. Mehring’s The Lost Library:The Autobiography of a Culture is, like Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, a paean to the humanist culture of Central Europe before the rise of Hitler.

Walter Mehring

You can read a short bio at Wikipedia and an obituary from the New York Times.

A number of Mehring’s poems were set to music. You can listen to several on YouTube: “Charité”, performed by Wacholder, and “American Riesenspielzeug”, sung by Joseline Gassen.

Herbert Clyde Lewis’ Gentleman Overboard Reissued–in Spanish

Several years ago, Diego D’Onofrio, one of the partners in La Bestia Equilátera, a small press located in Buenos Aires, contacted me asking for suggestions of neglected books that might be of interested to his readers. La Bestia Equilátera, which translates literally to “The Equilateral Beast,” had already published the works of a number of English-language authors that qualify as neglected–or at least until-recently-neglected: Julian McLaren-Ross; Alfred Hayes; David Markson; Ivy Compton-Burnett; and Lord Berners.

Cover of 'El caballero que cayó al mar' translation of 'Gentleman Overboard'After a quick check of La Bestia’s catalog, I knew just what to recommend: Herbert Clyde Lewis’ Gentleman Overboard, which I’d just featured on this site. Gentleman Overboard is a small masterpiece, a marvel of precise writing and imagination. One reader on Goodreads describes it as “Wodehouse meets Sartre”–which is an excellent précis. It starts out as a restrained comedy and evolves into a profoundly moving meditation on existence.

I didn’t hear from Diego again until a couple of months ago, when he contacted me looking for some more recommendations. To my surprise and great pleasure, he informed me that La Bestia Equilátera had, in 2010, published El Caballero que Cayó al Mar: a translation in Spanish by Laura Wittner of Gentleman Overboard. Diego reported that the book had sold well and earned some good reviews from critics and bloggers. They had even put together a fun little website dedicated to the book: elcaballeroquecayo.com.ar, where you can read the first chapter.

Diego was kind enough to send me a copy of the book, along with two others from La Bestia that deal, at least in part, with lesser-known books. Siluetas, by Argentinian writer Luis Chitarroni, an editor at La Bestia, is a collection of essays and reviews of a wide range of authors and their works. Many are fairly well-known, even best-sellers such as P. D. James. However, there are also a few that will appeal to any fan of neglected books–including William Gerhardie, Flann O’Brien, Logan Pearsall Smith, and Oliver St. John Gogarty. Informes de lectura/Cartas a Montale is a collection of letters written by Roberto Bazlen, a lifelong resident of Trieste, to friends, writers, and publishers about books. Bazlen was a voracious reader, fluent in a number of languages, and he was constantly championing the works of writers from far and wide. Bazlen was, in particular, a friend of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Eugenio Montale, and the second half of the book is a selection of letters Bazlen wrote to Montale between 1925 and 1930.

I won’t mention the books I recommended when Diego contacted me again in May, for fear of jinxing them, but one of them was one of Isabel Paterson’s three amazing novels from the 1930s. I notice that all three are available now from Amazon in Kindle format, but when the heck will someone reissue one or all of them in paper?

Americans in Glasshouses, by Leslie James

Cover of Americans in Glasshouses by Leslie James

“What’s so funny ’bout Peace, Love and Understanding?,” Nick Lowe once asked in a song. But there’s nothing funny about them, of course, which is why there are times in each of our lives when Hatred and Intolerance bust through our better selves like the Tasmanian Devil. Which is usually a mistake.

But there are rare times when giving in to our lower devils is as satisfying as picking at a scab and watching it come off clean. I suspect Leslie James felt that way throughout the entire process of writing this book.

Americans in Glasshouses is a straight-faced dissertation, written in the voice of a dispassionate scholar, on the subject of what is wrong with Americans and why. The situation, as James saw it back in 1950, when the book was first published, was, at the root, very simple:

    AMERICANS feel they are the most insecure people on earth. That is natural, because they have:

    1. A highly competitive culture in which no one can feel himself to be permanently successful.
    2. A compulsive need to consume.
    3. An unhealthy and woman-dominated family-structure.
    4. No culture.
    5. A political system which no mature people would tolerate.
    6. No souls.
    7. Much more than their just share of the world’s goods.

Ah, to have the confidence of such unadulterated prejudices.

Of course, sixty years later, this is still both stereotype and uncomfortably close to the truth.

James’ aim is “to standardize the diverse impressions about America in European minds.” There is such nonsense written and said about America in Europe, argues this serious-minded academic, and it leaves too many merely confused. If only Europeans could gain a real understanding of America, then they would be able to teach Americans to conduct themselves properly. And what is proper conduct? Why, “in the manner English gentlemen thought other Englishmen should conduct themselves, when England was the leading Power in the world,” of course.

James writes with the power of authority, authority gained from close study and painstaking analysis. He is familiar with all the latest research and an experienced traveler who has seen every corner of the country. This is why he can assure, as he does in one of the many scholarly asides footnoted on almost every page, that, “All people who do not read The New Yorker are forced to live in the suburban equivalent of city slums, referred to as ‘the wrong side of the tracks.’ Those who do not read the Reader’s Digest either, are forced to live on the tracks. Neither group is permitted to own a station-wagon or join a country club.”

This is, of course, utter nonsense, and if you’ve made it to this point in the book, you’ve already figured out that this is a book-length counterfeit, as fake as a three dollar bill. And as deft and successful as a hat trick.

It’s clear within a few pages that this is all tongue-in-cheek and artfully pompous. And if that’s all it were, this would have been better done as a three-page piece in Punch. What makes Americans in Glasshouses worth reading after sixty years is that it’s still a good old-fashioned hoot. James’ stereotypes are occasionally a bit long in the tooth (though I guess that cocktail parties are sort of coming back), but always so overblown that it’s hard not to smile:

As is well-known outside America, Americans lack souls. This makes them even simpler to understand. It makes them both simple and simple-minded. (Souls are notoriously correlated with complexity, and therefore with higher mental development.) It is therefore unnecessary to go below the surface to learn about Americans, because most of them only live on the surface.

And it’s impossible for James’ windbag scholar not to let more than a few equally amusing stereotypes about the English slip in:

Everyone in Europe knows that American children are badly brought up. This is because their parents bring them up themselves instead of using nannies and boarding schools.

Thus, reading Americans in Glasshouses comes to seem like a guilt-free vacation from tolerance and understanding.

Copies of Americans in Glasshouses are available on Amazon for as little as $1.98, but you can get electronic versions free at the Internet Archive: http://archive.org/details/americansinglass000094mbp.

Americans in Glasshouses, by Leslie James
New York City: Henry Schuman, Inc., 1950

“The Pearls of Publishing,” from the Saturday Review

Back in November 1949, a three-part series called, “The Pearls of Publishing” appeared in the Saturday Review. “In the hope of increasing and prolonging the public’s interest in deserving books,” the magazine’s editors asked American publishers “to think back over the books issued during the past year and select two titles–one issued by their own house, one by another firm–which, in their opinion, failed to get the response they deserved.” This did not have to mean the book was a flop: simply that it “failed to achieve the full impact” it should have.

Despite good sales and critical acclaim that eventually led to its selection as the 1949 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, several publishers still named James Gould Cozzens’ Guard of Honor, which was featured in the early days of this site. Elizabeth Charlotte Webster’s Ceremony of Innocence, a Candide-esque satire on religion and conventional mores that I stumbled across in the great Montana Valley Book Store last year, was nominated twice.

While a fair number of the books were too topical (Strategic Air Power for Dynamic Security) to expect anyone to remember them today, a fair number of intriguing titles pop up in the course of the three articles. Here is a sample:

• Olivia, by Olivia

Kurt Wolff, a legendary figure in publishing and then working at Pantheon, nominated Olivia, an anonymous novel published by William Sloane Associates: “A very beautiful and subtly written account of adolescent experience, which has lost nothing of its intensity by maturing in the cellar of memory…. It combines fine writing with moving content, and is a thoroughly civilized book. The anonymous author was later identified as Dorothy Bussy, nee Strachey–one of Lytton Strachey’s sisters. The book was about a young schoolgirl’s crush on the headmistress of her boarding school and was based on her experiences at the school run by Marie Souvestre before she founded Allenwood, where Souvestre had a profound influence on the young Eleanor Roosevelt.

• Mr. Preen’s Salon, by Robert Tallant

Theodore Purdy of Appleton-Century-Croft called this Doubleday novel, “A witty and delightful picture of New Orleans life … a good antidote to the innumerable lush and overheated books on that city which have been published in recent years.” Tallant was something of a scribe of New Orleans, with other titles such as Voodoo in New Orleans and The Pirate Lafitte and the Battle of New Orleans to his credit.

• The Golden Warrior, Hope Muntz

With four mentions, this historical novel about the Norman Conquest was the favorite among those polled. LeBaron Barker of Doubleday wrote of the book, “Miss Muntz’s success with the chronicle form, to my way of thinking, is going to have a decided effect on the whole historical-novel categoy,” and Edward Shenton of Macrae-Smith called it “a stark, somber story, written with great restraint but with a depth of feeling and power that set it apart from most books of its kind.”

• The Willow Cabin, by Pamela Frankau

“One of the finest novels I have read in a long time. The writing itself should stand as an example for young novelists, and the characters come alive in a fashion that very few novelists have been able to achieve. There is little or no sensationalism, no extreme exaggeration or histrionics; yet the story and the people have stayed with me very clearly since I read it.”–W. E. Larned, Whittlesey House

• The Witness, by Jean Bloch-Michel

Kurt Wolff recommended this French novel, which Pantheon published in translation, as did George Pellegrini. “Its central theme–the destructiveness of moral solitude–is of timely and universal interest. Though hailed by a majority of critics as an outstanding piece of sober, fine and compelling writing, sales have nor corresponded to our expectations.” Pellegrini called it, “The kind of book that people talk about once they’ve read it.”

• Trials of a Translator, by Ronald Knox

Marigold Hunt, an editor of Sheed & Ward, a publisher specializing in Catholic books run by novelist Wilfrid Sheed’s father, recommended this account of Knox’ struggles in translating the Bible: “Msgr. Knox’s own explanations of the kind of translation he was aiming at, and his replies to his foremost critics would have had a much wider appeal than has so far been the case. It isn’t as if he was the stuffy kind of scholar, or as if, at this date, anyone was likely to suppose him to be: Trials of a Translator is not only instructive, but exceptionally good fun.”

• Napoleon: For and Against, by Pieter Geyl

Conceived while a prisoner at Buchenwald, Napoleon: For and Against was one of the first works of meta-history–an assessment of how Napoleon was viewed by a series of French historian, and a fine illustration of Geyl’s view of history as an “argument without end.” Nominated both by its own house, the Yale University Press, and an editor from the rival Princeton University Press, who wrote, “The message–for all of us, not just for historians–is that we should search our souls pretty thoroughly before claiming that we have discovered objective truth.”

• Last of the Conquerors, by William Gardner Smith

Robert Haas of Random House recommended this novel from Farrar, Straus: “A fine novel … about a Negro in our Army of Occupation in Germany … a disturbing commentary on the way democracy sometimes fails to work. Extremely well written and with something really important to say.”

• Late Have I Loved Thee, by Ethel Mannin

Frank Bruce of Bruce Publishing compared this to Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain: “Conveying a message of deep significance for all, in the vein of ‘What profiteth a man if he gaineth the whole world, etc.’–a philosophy which many have completely ignored–Ethel Mannin’s book is a masterful work which could do an immense amount of good in its revelation of today’s basic problem.”

• The Man Who Carved Woman from Wood, by Max White

John Fischer from Harper & Brothers picked this as his firm’s best under appreciated title: “Admittedly not a book for every reading taste but those of us here who like it for its odd and spirited blend of fancy and humor are convinced that there are fifteen or twenty thousand readers in the country who would enjoy it.”

• The Saracen’s Head, or, The Reluctant Crusader, by Osbert Lancaster

“A ‘children’s book’ which should really be read for pleasure by ‘children from eight to eighty,'” wrote John Fischer of Harper & Brothers. This account of a knightly equivalent of Ferdinand the bull was the first of three, which chronicled the history of the the Littlehamptons of Drayneflete from prehistory to 1940. They were ultimately collected as The Littlehampton Saga. The other titles were Drayneflete Revealed and The Littlehampton Bequest. Lancaster, who illustrated Nancy Mitford’s novels and created cartoons for Punch filled his drawings for these books with Easter eggs for those familiar with odd bits of English history and architecture.

• My Place to Stand, by Bentz Plagemann

John Farrar of Farrar, Straus nominated this from his own catalog: “One of the finest accounts of the overcoming of a physical handicap ever written. It has tenderness, honesty, and spiritual overtones, and a personal narrative. It has taste. It has made more friends and will make more, but it is difficult to understand why they have not been quicker to discover one of the books of the year that has wisdom and hope in it.”

• Cream Hill

This account of life on a Connecticut farm, written by editor and weekend countryman Lewis Gannett, led a usually-sober Kirkus Review to gush, “This opened a new door & me — a peek into the past of our countryside, a realization that it is not only in manmade things that we are the melting pot of the world. For here–along our roadsides–are flowers and grasses, shrubs and trees, immigrants from all parts of the world… It is a potpourri of Connecticut’s countryside natural history, the flowers and trees and shrubs, the vegetables, the wild plants he grew–and the ones he couldn’t grow. There’s nature lore, too,–the tomato has a wholly new personality for me. The thrill of his fern garden is contagious. And the seasonal round of week-end country living was alluring for its likes and its unlikes to our own, not very many miles away.”

James Agate on Emil Ludwig’s Beethoven: The Life of a Conqueror

January 4, Thursday (1945)

Dipping into Emil Ludwig’s Beethoven: the Life of a Conqueror, I find this on the G major Piano Concerto:

At the beginning the piano emerges gently from dreams; this is truly Beethoven improvising. Two romantic themes, renunciation and hope, are gradually developed. When, after an orchestral interlude, the piano is heard again solo, it is as if a butterfly rose ecstatically from its cocoon. There are no fortissimos here, and when the call to new adventures sounds, the butterfly sinks back, dreaming. The whole thing is wrapped in dark-red velvet. . . .

And about the C minor Concerto, that it begins with

stormy scale passages three octaves long, like a roaring lion appearing suddenly with threatening mien in the midst of the orchestra.

I have nothing with all this stuff about cocoons, red velvet, and roaring lions. Presently I read, “Beethoven dedicated his adagios to women.” And I say that the man who can read sex into the slow movements of the Hammerklavier Sonata and the Ninth Symphony would believe that Wagner’s Venusberg music is a Hymn to Chastity! Next I read that in the F major Rasoumowsky Quartet, “the cello continues to exude platonic wisdom.” Feeling that this amateur has exuded enough nonsense, I open the window and neatly drop his book on to a passing lorry’s tarpaulin’d top.

From The Later Ego, by James Agate

A Dream of Treason, by Maurice Edelman

Cover of UK paperback edition of 'A Dream of Treason'Elected at the age of 34 as the member for Coventry in the Labour wave that swept Churchill out of as Prime Minister after VE Day, Maurice Edelman served in Parliament until his death 30 years later. And while he may not have enjoyed the historical fame of Disraeli or the sales of Jeffery Archer, he may be the supreme representative of that exclusive class, the British MP-slash-novelist. Between 1951 and 1974, he published over a dozen novels, along with a handful of non-fiction works.

While I wouldn’t call him a great writer, Edelman was certainly adept at producing novels that managed to be both entertaining and intelligent. His paperback publishers tended to slap racy covers on his books in blatant attempts to convince unsuspecting browsers into thinking them essentially indistinguishable from other shelf fodder. One can picture copies of A Dream of Treason or Shark Island or Disraeli in Love next to the finest works of Erle Stanley Gardner, Mac Bolan or Barbara Cartland. Had he been more of a publicity hound, he might even have been able to boost his numbers into Jeffery Archer’s range.

If you were to judge by their covers–and if they weren’t pandering, they were just boring–you’d think Edelman’s books fully deserve their fate today: utterly forgotten and disregarded. But good things sometimes hide behind terrible packaging. Flip past the title page of any of his novels, and you will find material far more subtle, sophisticated and intelligent that you’d have reason to suspect.

A Dream of Treason, his third novel (1955), is a perfect example. Its protagonist, Martin Lambert, is a mid-level civil servant in the Foreign Office who appears to be doomed to spend the rest of his career in mediocrity. Lambert is married to an alcoholic who’s spent her recent years hopping into Lambert’s colleague’s beds, spending months in institutions, or making scenes at embassy affairs–in other words, a frightful liaibility for an aspiring diplomat. Too unstable a property to risk putting her husband in more prominent positions.

Until he’s approached by Brangwyn, the brash and ambitious new Foreign Secretary, with a proposal to pass some controversial state papers to a radical French journalist. It is a patently treasonous act, and Brangwyn has marked Lambert as someone just desperate enough to do it, in return for a posting that will give his career a second wind. The deal is made, and Lambert makes the drop in a quiet room of the National Gallery, looking forward to a move to Tokyo.

And then Brangwyn dies in a plane crash, leaving Lambert with no posting, no protector, and no alibi. The leaked material makes the expected splash in the French press, and the Foreign Office security officers begin hunting for its source. Lambert is quickly suspected but the investigation is pursued with typical bureaucratic deliberation–which means he is allowed to spend days wondering about his fate and his options. Edelman is quite effective in portraying the plight of a man who is about to be caught and has no good way out.

But he is at his best in capturing the intricate interplay between politics and bureaucracy that defines the workings of British government. The permanence of the Civil Service and the transcience of part-led governments creates an environment where the leaders can often find themselves subordinated to the people who are meant to follow them. Lambert’s biggest mistake, the Permanent Undersecretary–the senior civil servant in the Foreign Office–points out to him, was to put his faith in a politician rather than in his own kind:

“I’ll tell you this, Martin. The politician’s never been born who in the long run can stand up to a determined Civil Servant. Oh, I know that some tough Minister can come along and throw his weight about. He’ll stir up the Department study the functional diagram say he wants this and that. And then he’ll have to go off to a dinner or a conference or to a Cabinet meeting. And in the meantime, the Civil Servant will be co-operating with his great ally inertia. Inertia: it’s eminent among the graces.”

Edelman is at his worst, however, when he wanders from office and club into the realm of sex. There is a romance, between Lambert and a girl of nineteen. It is veddy British and veddy icky: “He put his arm around her waist and from there, under her left armpit, and they walked together slowly and with out speaking towards the light of the postern-gate, while beneath his fingers, he felt her breast, firm and pendant in the rhythm of their motion.” This is low, not love.

If you can overlook the ham-fisted attempts at romance, A Dream of Treason is remarkably successful as a thinking person’s entertainment, the sort of thing you read as a nice break between weightier books. I’ve ordered a couple more of Edelman’s novels for just such occasions.

You can find electronic copies of A Dream of Treason online at the Internet Archive: http://archive.org/details/dreamoftreason001478mbp.

A Dream of Treason, by Maurice Edelman
New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1955

The Red Monarch, by Yuri Krotkov

krotkov - red monarch pb

In his 2002 book, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, Martin Amis wrote, “it has always been possible to joke about the Soviet Union, just as it has never been possible to joke about Nazi Germany.” When Penguin released the paperback edition of Yuri Krotkov’s 1979 novel, The Red Monarch: Scenes from the Life of Stalin, the cover featured a pencil sketch of Stalin topped by a big red clown’s nose, clearly demonstrating that the Soviet dictator had already reached the point where he could be treated with ridicule.

Krotkov’s purpose in writing The Red Monarch was not comic, though the book is full of moments of gallows humor, schadenfreude and even a few authentic jokes. Born within days of the October Revolution, Krotkov grew up surrounded by the image and impact of Stalin. “I never met Stalin and I never talked to him,” he writes in his introduction, “But for thirty-five years I lived with this man, day and night, voluntarily and involuntarily, thinking about him and knowing that my destiny depended on him and his personal reasoning.”

In The Red Monarch, combines historical fact and personal imagination to create a series of set pieces, each depicting an incident involving someone confronting Stalin at the height of his powers. The first date from the middle of the Second World War; the last deal with his death and its aftermath.

The famines, the first waves of the Great Terror, the show trials and the worst days of the German invasion are all behind him at this stage. Everyone who deals with Stalin–including men like Beria and Vlasek, who control much of the terror system and know the worst that it has carried out–come into his presence a bit like a lowly feeder into the cage of a great lion with violent instincts and hair-trigger reactions.

Krotkov does a marvelous job of conveying the ambient sense of terror that could turn a conversation about something as mundane as a pair of slippers into a veiled threat of being sent off to a firing squad or the gulag:

“And what is that on your feet, Comrade Shaposhnikov?”
“Night shoes … my wife brought them from Leningrad … as a gift.”
“Ah, that’s what they are … slippers.”
“No, Josif Vissarionovich, they are not slippers,” Shaposhnikov corrected Stalin, “they are night shoes. Slippers usually have no backs, but these …”
“No, Comrade Shaposhnikov, they are slippers, slippers.” Stalin repeated stubbornly, “and do not argue with me.”
“So they are slippers …”
“If I say they are slippers, Comrade Shaposhnikov, that means they are slippers. Right?”

But it is not enough to prove that night shoes can only be slippers. Stalin must draw out the most insidious intent from them:

“When she gave me these night shoes …”
“Slippers, slippers!”
“… she said, ‘Wear these in good health, so you will be comfortable when you are on guard, and so there will be no unnecessary noise when you walk up to Comrade Stalin at night to cover him or fix his pillow.”
“Thank your wife, Comrade Shaposhnikov, for her double consideration, for you and for me. How was it that Seraphima put it: ‘So that there will be no unnecessary noise when you walk up to him at night….’ Interesting. What had your wife in mind, Comrade Shaposhnikov?”
“Felt absorbs noise. That is, in these … slippers, it is possible to come up to a person and he will not hear you.”
“Will not?”
Stalin’s mustache twitched slightly and his right eye suddenly squinted. But Shaposhnikov did not notice this.
“You said, Comrade Shaposhnikov, that it is possible to come up to a person so that he will not even suspect it. Is that not so?”
“That is so,” Shaposhnikov answered.
“In other words, in these slippers it’s possible, in your view, to come up to a person from behind and kill him during his sleep. And, in your view, it’s quite easy to do. Right?”

Krotkov’s Stalin is almost feline in his pleasure in toying with his victims as they lay before him, paralyzed with terror. In a number of the episodes, he lets the victim go, confident that he can repeat the torture at a moment’s notice.

Krotkov, a writer with KGB links who defected to the West while in the UK on a tour in 1963, grew up in Georgia and had many Georgian friends, including the actor Mikhail Gelovani, who played Stalin in numerous films such as The Fall of Berlin. This gave him an advantage in depicting Stalin, and the book includes several pieces focusing on Stalin’s relationships with Georgian colleagues and friends–which were even more complicated than those with Russians. Even Gelovani features in a chapter titled, “The Two Stalins,” in which Stalin repeatedly teases the actor: should he be praised for the accuracy of his portrayal? Or attacked for caricaturing Stalin?

I’ve read a fair number of books about Stalin and the Soviet era, such as Orlando Figes’ Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, but The Red Monarch impresses me as the most succinct summation of the bizarre web of intrigue and fear that Stalin was able to create around him. It’s sharp as a razor, and like a razor, not to be picked up without due care and respect. I recommend it, as well as The Nobel Prize, Krotkov’s similar mediation of the experiences of Boris Pasternak following the international acclaim of Doctor Zhivago.

The Red Monarch: Scenes from the Life of Stalin, by Yuri Krotkov
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979

My Life with George: An Unconventional Autobiography, by I. A. R. Wylie

Cover of first US edition of 'My Life with George'I. A. R. Wylie subtitled her book, My Life with George, “An Unconventional Autobiography,” and the adjective was appropriate in more than one way. George, she tells us in an opening paragraph, is that “factotum … known to the general public as our subconscious.” Given the Gay Old Nineties illustration on the book’s dust jacket and the sly reference to Clarence Day’s then-recent best-seller, Life With Father, it appears that Wylie and/or her publisher were playing a little joke on buyers, who probably assumed George was some character from the author’s past.

But Wylie’s title is also appropriate because her life itself was unconventional, particularly by the standards of the America and England of 1940. Aside from a few years in a boarding school in Brussels, she was largely self-educated, and she was certainly largely independent from an early age. She pedalled her way back to London from a family holiday at the seaside when she was just ten years old, spending a night along the way.

This trip was, in fact, her father’s suggestion, and he was the first reason her life was so unusual. Alec Wylie was, if his daughter’s account is accurate, a volatile and manic personality, who managed to flout Victorian conventions by a combination of charm, luck, and the kindness of strangers:

From the day of his birth to the hour of his death he never had a penny that he could legitimately call his own. If by some strange chance he had earned it, he already owed it several times over, and it was only an additional reason for borrowing more. Quite often he didn’t have a penny of any sort, and there were days in our large absurd house in London when there was no food for anyone except the bailiff occupying our one completely furnished room. But in the nick of time Father would run into some fine fellow who understood his situation perfectly, and we would be in funds again. The bailiff would be wined and dined and sent on his way rejoicing and proud to know us, and the furniture vans would begin to arrive with expensive, unpaid-for furniture–quite awful stuff because Alec’s taste was Victorian in its last most ponderous convulsions.

Ida–named quite literally after her parents, Ida Ross and Alec Wylie–was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1885, the first child of Wylie’s second marriage. Having married, and fathered two children, he divorced his wife and fled England with creditors at his heels, pausing only to propose to his ex-wife’s sister Christine on the way to the docks. He sweet-talked his way into a marriage with Ida Ross, the sad and plain daughter of a wealthy businessman, but quickly grew bored in Australia. On the pretext of pursuing a law case in England involving his father-in-law’s firm, he cashed in the return tickets for luxury-class one-way fares and took his wife and newborn daughter back to London.
Alec Wylie, father of Ida Alexa Ross Wylie
Alec resumed his erratic affairs in London and his wife soon wasted away and died, knowing she would never see Australia again. Fortunately for young Ida, though, not before striking up a deep friendship with Christine, the woman Alec had once tried to marry. In an extraordinary example of loyalty, Christine took on the primary responsibility for making sure that Ida was clothed, fed and cared for, despite the vagaries of Alec’s fortunes, until the girl was in her late teens. Christine was just the first of a line of women who proved far stronger and more reliable than any man in Ida’s life.

This life was also unconventional for its time because Wylie’s precocious independence didn’t stop with solo bicycle rides. Having spent many hours playing by herself and filling the time by making up her own stories, she took easily to writing fiction, and, at the age of 19, sold the first short story she sent off to a magazine editor. From that point on, she was able to support herself–and eventually, Christine as well–as a writer.

She did it, in part, because she was always driven by a pragmatism that may have been a reaction to her father’s fantastic behavior. Rooming with another young English woman who had been raised in colonial India, she wrote and sold several stories based her roommate’s recollections: “At the end of my first year Esme rejoined her parents in India but she left behind her enough sahibs, memsahibs, Bo-trees, ayahs and compounds to furnish me with all the necessary ingredients for an Anglo-Indian novel which I wrote when I was twenty-one.” She went on to write at least five books based in India–The Native Born, or, The Rajah’s People (1910); The Daughter of Brahma (1913); Tristram Sahib (1915); The Temple of Dawn (1915); and The Hermit Doctor of Gaya (1916).

Along with her tales of faux India, Wylie also had considerable success with a series of books based on her experiences of living in Germany in her early twenties: My German Year (1910); Rambles in the Black Forest (1911); and The Germans (1911). Although she returned to England in 1911, she kept in touch with German friends and tried to offer a more balanced view of the German people against the jingoism of British propaganda during World War One. Her novel, Towards Morning (1918), was perhaps the first in English to suggest that not all Germans were evil imperialists (one character is shot for cowardice after refusing to take part in a particularly vicious attack).

In England, Wylie continued to go against the tides of convention by joining the Suffragette movement and providing a safe house where women who had been released from prison to recover from their hunger strikes were smuggled away from police surveillance. As she tells in the book, one of her allies in this effort was another young Englishwoman named Rachel.

After the war, Wylie and Rachel travel to the U.S., where Wylie’s books and stories have enjoyed commercial success. Despite having no driving experience, they buy a car and spend over a year travelling all over the country, from New York City to San Francisco and southern California. Wylie has her first encounter with Hollywood, which had already begun to mine her catalog for stories. Unfortunately, she was hired as a color consultant for “Stronger Than Death”, based on her Anglo-Indian novel, The Hermit Doctor of Gaya, and had to confess that she’d never actually been to India.

That didn’t keep the studios from continuing to hire Wylie. Over thirty movies made between 1915 and 1953 were based on her works, including “Torch Song” and “Phone Call from a Stranger”, which feature great scenery-chewing performances by Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, respectively. Her story, “Grandmother Bernle Learns Her Letters,” published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1926, was filmed twice–by John Ford in 1928 and by Archie Mayo in 1940, both times for Fox. Ford called “Grandma Bernie,” which portrays the four sonds of a German family divided between sides in the First World War, “first really good story” he ever filmed. The best-known film made from her work is probably “Keeper of the Flame” (1942), which is usually remembered as the one non-comedy that Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn made together.

Anyone reading My Life with George today will have no trouble identifying one unconventional aspect of Wylie’s life: her sexuality. She mentions a number of women with whom she spends time and shares homes, although she never even remotely suggests any physical aspect of these relationships. She does, however, admit,

I have always liked women better than men. I am more at ease with them and more amused by them. I too am rather bored by a conventional relationship which seems to involve either my playing up to someone or playing down to someone. Here and there and especially in my latter years when there should be no further danger of my trying to ensnare one of them I have established some real friendships with men in which we meet and like each other on equal terms as human beings. But fortunately, I have never wanted to marry any of them, nor with the exception of that one misguided German Grenadier, have any of them wanted to marry me.

She also acknowledges that many of her women friends refer to her as “Uncle,” and her choice of being credited as “I. A. R. Wylie” instead of Ida Wylie was certainly an attempt to downplay her gender in publications.

I. A. R. Wylie, around 1940Somewhere in late twenties, Wylie became friends with Josephine Baker, a pioneer in the field of public health. The first director of New York’s Bureau of Child Hygiene, Baker had helped locate “Typhoid Mary” and introduced the first programs of publically-funded pre- and post-natal care in the country. Neither Baker nor Wylie ever declared themselves openly as lesbians, but according to Dr. Bert Hansen’s article, “Public Careers and Private Sexuality: Some Gay and Lesbian Lives in the History of Medicine and Public Health”, the two women were partners.

When Baker retired in the mid-1930s, she, Wylie, and another pioneering female physician, Dr. Louise Pearce, bought Trevenna Farm, outside Skillman, New Jersey, and lived there together. Baker died in 1945; Pearce and Wylie in 1959. The farm, coincidentally, went up for sale again recently.

The literary merit of My Life with George diminishes as the book goes on, though. With all the events of her young life and her own ironic commentary, the first two thirds is terrific. It’s fast, funny and vibrant demonstration of how resilient some children can be in the face of staggering adult neglect.

After her first circuit of the U.S. with Rachel, however, Wylie loses focus. Editorial opinions are poor substitutes for first-hand observations even when fresh–and they don’t stay fresh long: “I would wise with all my heart that in the coming struggle between Good and Evil–for me it amounts to that–America would stand full-armed, shoulder to shoulder with nations who for all their shortcomings are the defenders of civilization against barbarism.” The last book staggers through its last 50-60 pages loaded down with such baggage.

Aside from direct-to-print copies of her works now in public domain and a couple of library reissues, Wylie has not had a book in print since the early 1960s. Her last novel, Claire Serrat, was published in 1959, as was praised by one reviewer as “the book of the month.” Interestingly, Ben Brady used a scenario based on Claire Serrat as the centerpiece for his 1994 book, Principles of Adaptation for Film and Television.

Locate a copy:

My Life with George: An Unconventional Autobiography, by I. A. R. Wylie
New York City: Random House, 1940