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Makeshift, by Sarah Campion (1940)

Charlotte Herz is not a model human being. She has no patience for people she disagrees with and no qualms about telling them so. She has an affair with the husband of a kindly Englishwoman who hires her to care for her children. She chooses not to have an abortion when one is offered and then abandons the child on a train and flees.

And yet, through the almost 400 pages of Makeshift she is a riveting narrator. We meet her in a nursing home in New Zealand, recovering from … well, as we only learn many chapters later, the measles. She is anxious to leave. For one thing, she hasn’t much money. She suspects her genial doctor of padding her bill: “To Miss Charlotte Herz for Professional Services, 20 guineas: for Professional Smile, 10 guineas.”

She is bored and irritated with the bland pleasantness of New Zealanders, their country, and their ceilings. For weeks, she lay flat on her back, staring up:

This nursing home is far too efficient to have ceilings with any incident in them: there are no interesting cracks that could be imagined into men’s faces, no damp marks the mind could conjure into little cats. Simply a high remote acre or so of impeccable whitewash, faintly changing with the faintly changeful sky.

Improved, she can now sit outside in the sunshine, “eyes goggling downwards” at the perfect green lawn, “a happy picture of convalescence.” And so, she decides, she must write. She has a great deal of anger and hatred to get out of her system: “I cannot forever struggle with myself, forever gnaw serpent-like at my own tail, nor swallow my own venom.”

How she came to be in New Zealand and how she came to harbor such venomous thoughts and emotions is the story she tells. It starts in Berlin, just after the end of the First World War, “in that brief Indian summer after the war; that little time, between the occupation and the inflation, when we in Germany had hope.” A very little time.

Within months, Charlotte and her sister are huddled under their father’s old ulster coat in an unheated room they rent from a bitter anti-Semitic landlady. Having grown up in a prosperous bourgeois family, Charlotte and Mitzi are now near the bottom of Germany’s new postwar food chain: orphans, near-penniless, lacking any employable skills — and Jewish. Before the Kaiser’s empire collapsed, they would have considered themselves assimilated: secular, never setting foot in a synagogue, unfamiliar with Jewish rites and rituals aside from an occasional funeral.

But even before Hitler is a name seen in the Berlin papers, being Jewish is enough reason to be kicked a rung or two down the social ladder. “Whether we like it or not,” in this Germany, “we are nothing less than Jew.” The only way for the sisters to climb back up is simple: marry into wealth. Mitzi meets a dull but adoring American, son of an industrialist, marries, and is soon off to the safety of Pennsylvania.

Charlotte, however, is a creature of her own mind and heart. Her Tante Clara, one of the few relatives still with a little money, offers her a room. But it’s strictly a business proposition: “I was to marry something rich as soon as possible.”

Instead, she falls in love with her charming cousin, Kurt, and one hot afternoon in the tall grass of the Grunewald, gives herself to him. Unfortunately, where Charlotte is a romantic, Kurt is a realist. She heads to the Alps for a holiday, courtesy of American dollars from Mitzi; he marries an heiress.

One thing I found fascinating about Makeshift was how effectively Sarah Campion depicts a world in which women almost — but not quite — had an independent life within their grasp:

Even now, as I waddled swollen between the parting Grübl grasses, I was blazing a new brave trail for womanhood, for single women: establishing the right of even’ woman to motherhood without any of the boredoms of marriage. After all, why not? If men were sexual free-lances, why not women? It all seemed so simple, so gloriously obvious.

Once she gives birth, however, Charlotte makes a much grimmer estimate of her future. “Life in Germany for a battling spinster was even then hard enough: what should I do with a child?” Her only hope would be to find a man dumb or conniving enough to accept a single woman with an illegitimate child:

After that, a married life begun on shame, continued in boredom and stuffy closeness, made up of lustful unloving nights, nagging days, brats begotten in pure animal fury coming year after year to be suckled, clothed, washed, endured—all on a foundation of my shame and my rescuer’s brief nobility simmering down to a reminder of my shame. He would unendingly want gratitude. I hated gratitude then, I hate it still.

If she rejects this choice, she knows she will soon run out of what little money she has and have nothing: “Nothing is a ghastly word, even more devastating in German than in English.” So, she takes the one other choice open to her, the one terrible choice always open to desperate people. She runs away. She steps off the train taking her back to Berlin and leaves her baby daughter behind.

Makeshift is a remarkable account of the choices one Jewish woman makes to survive in a hostile world. After a favorite uncle is fatally injured by a group of SS thugs, she flees Germany for England. There, she is taken in by the Flowers, distant relatives living in a comically comfortable cocoon:

After four square meals, and any number of such unconsidered trifles as elevenses with cream cakes, cocktails before dinner and Horlicks at 11 p.m. to fend off the alleged horrors of night starvation, any Flower could go to its bed, bury its nose in the pillow as soft as a swan’s breast, and sleep like a log. In case by any dirty chance sleep were for a while denied, each Flower had by its bed a little table bearing reading-lamp, the latest worthless fiction, and a chintz-covered box brimming with digestive biscuits.

(Ah, to be a Flower!) But at heart, the Flowers are as mercantile in their thinking as Tante Clara. It’s lovely having Charlotte for a visit, but she needs to sort this business of getting a husband, and quickly.

Charlotte ultimately arrives in New Zealand via South Africa and Australia, but it’s a route we can recognize from Goldilocks and the Three Bears. At each stop, Charlotte tries out a new bed and then rejects it. Should she marry a stolid Cape Town farmer and resign herself to “a little folding of the hands to sleep, to the good, earthy sleep of the intellect women enjoy in that fruitful land?” Should she marry Harry, the congenial, adoring older man she meets on the boat to Sydney? Not after he has a near-fatal hemorrhage and becomes an invalid.

Having bounced from uncomfortable bed to uncomfortable bed, Charlotte comes to a conclusion both utterly selfish and utterly pragmatic: that she is a woman “who now was no longer in love with anything but her own comfort, her own assured future.” Years after she rejected the advice of Tante Clara and the Flowers, she recognizes the ugly, essential necessity of choosing survival over self-actualization.

Though the only scene of overt brutality against Jews is Onkel Hans’s beating by a few young SS men, still a year or two before Hitler comes to power, though the war is still a year or two from breaking out as Charlotte sits in the peaceful garden of her nursing home, Makeshift is a Holocaust novel. One of the more unusual Holocaust novels, perhaps, written before Auschwitz had been built, before scenes of Buchenwald had been displayed in newsreels around the world, but still a story about how one survives when homeless, unwanted — and fully conscious of the threat hovering just over the horizon:

While the spectators sit around in a sodden mass, no more than mildly uneasy, the bull is slaughtered in the ring, the blood flows, the torn flank gapes, the entrails drop sluggishly. In Wolfenbiittel the maddened Jew rushes upon barbed wire, away, away, anything to get away, and hangs there, a screaming bloody mass, till there is no more noise. In Berlin there is a pogrom to avenge the death of one man killed by a youth as mad as Hitler but more obscure. So once more, in Berlin, blood flows from the Jews. The smell of blood—oh, my God, the smell of blood!—once more fills the air.

“Comfy?” the man Charlotte has decided she will marry asks her immediately after this passage.

No, Charlotte knows she will never really be comfy.

Makeshift is a work that synthesizes experience and imagination. Born Mary Coulton, the daughter of Cambridge historian G. G. Coulton, Sarah Campion (her pen name) attended a teacher training college, and after graduating with honors, spent years traveling around Europe until she landed in Berlin in 1933. There she taught English and came to know families like the Herzes. In fact, she left Germany 1937 when she was being pressured to identify her Jewish students to the Nazi authorities.

Like Charlotte, she spent time in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, but in her case, she was vocal and overt in her political and social views, establishing a lifelong commitment to activism, and returned to England around the start of the war. She married New Zealand writer Antony Alpers and the couple eventually settled in Auckland. Though they divorced, she remained in New Zealand, where she continued to organize in support of liberal causes. Alpers/Campion must have been a woman with superpowers of empathy, a capacity for getting inside another human’s skin: the source, perhaps, of the imaginative energy that radiates throughout this book.

Incredibly, most of her fiction was written during the years in which she was traveling and working abroad. Makeshift was her sixth novel; she wrote six more between 1940 and 1951. Even more amazingly, she managed to write three novels set in rural Australia, including Mo Burdekin, her only book to have been reissued to date, despite spending less than a year in the country. In fact, she is still occasionally referred to as an Australian writer.

Much of Campion’s work has become extremely hard to find. Worldwide, there are just 19 copies of Makeshift available in libraries worldwide, according to WorldCat.org. Fortunately, the book is available electronically on Internet Archive. I highly recommend it. In Charlotte Herz, Sarah Campion creates a narrator whose intelligence, humor, and ruthless honesty — about herself more than anyone — makes for a thoroughly rewarding reading experience. Definitely my favorite book of the year so far.

Makeshift, by Sarah Campion (Mary Rose Coulton Alpers)
London: Peter Davies, 1940

Cloudy Trophies, by Anne Goodwin Winslow (1946)

Anne Goodwin Winslow was born during Reconstruction and died not long after the launch of the first ICBMs. She was 71 when her first novel, Cloudy Trophies, was published. To say, therefore, that this is a novel enriched by a lifetime’s worth of living is an understatement.

But then, if there is anything that characterizes Winslow’s work, it is understatement. She came of age when daughters of good families, particularly in the South, were raised in a manner not that different from that experienced by Jane Austen’s heroines. There was no formal schooling and social graces and embroidery were considered as or more important skills for young women to develop than literacy. From the shelter of her family’s estate, Anne Goodwin entered into marriage with a promising West Point graduate (first in his class), Lieutenant Eben Winslow, descendant of a Winslow who arrived in America on the Mayflower. With him she spent twenty-five years as an Army wife, mastering the art of surviving a series of posts almost airless in their social rigidity.

By the time she took up writing, however, first a little poetry and later a memoir (The Dwelling, and finally fiction, that world had largely been destroyed in two wars, revolutions, and a depression. More to the point, the intricate Victorian prose styles of Henry James and George Eliot had been given way to a variety of modernist styles, from the lean words of Hemingway to the visceral complexities of Joyce and Woolf.

What this meant for Winslow is that her sensibilities had not changed — but her sentences had. Where James might have used a paragraph or page to dissect the nuances of a character’s entrance into a room, Winslow chose to confine herself to a sentence or just a careful choice of adjective or verb. Or simply to leave it to the reader to discern the significance of a gesture or a statement from its context. She had, after all, spent decades in social circles where what was not said often spoke louder than conversations that had the substance of a butterfly’s flutter.

The events of Cloudy Trophies include a child’s death — possibly a murder — and a mother’s death — likely a suicide. Neither is taken head-on, though. On the other hand, they also aren’t tip-toed around. Instead, there is at most a stroke or two of the pen … and the assumed intelligence of the reader. Winslow writes like a classical Japanese painter paints, with light strokes instead of layers of colors. And for this reason, her fiction can given a reader the impression that nothing happens.

When Orville Prescott reviewed Cloudy Trophies for The New York Times, he wrote that Winslow “Promises much, but produces little. The beauty and the wisdom and the wit it offers would have been ever so much more effective if condensed into a short story or elaborated in an essay.” The charge is not entirely unfair: Cloudy Trophies is much more about what doesn’t happen than what does.

Richard Steele is a Senator from the South. Carolina? Georgia? Alabama? We don’t know and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it’s a wounded land, where “often they would pass a place where the house had burned down, only the tall brick chimneys left standing.” The Senator’s time at home at the manor of a former plantation is consumed by trying to sustain a fragile network of sharecropped farms and an estate falling into increasing disrepair.

His wife, Laura, is considered an elegant jewel of Washington society. This is Washington society at the height of its elaborateness. Is this the 1880s, the 1900s? We’re never told, but when she and the Senator are in town, in their house facing Lafayette Square and a short walk from the White House, her mind is consumed with “calling, or staying where they could be called on, when the proper days rolled round.” And with “the Cabinet and the Supreme Court and Congress and their own days — the Senate — and the Legations,” almost every day is a proper day.

Laura is stifled by the vacuity of Washington society, compared to what she sees as the authencity of life in the country. “She still found herself saying, ‘Isn’t it a pretty day?’ to people who had evidently not noticed whether it was or not.” By contrast, “In the country the weather was more important than almost anything else.” To Laura, “Not mentioning the weather seemed a loss somehow. It was like not noticing the moon.”

Laura and Richard have lost a child, their only child, a son, Rickie, drowned in a pond near the manor. She suspects it may have been an act of vengeance by a disgruntled sharecropper. Richard, however, dismisses this as unlikely, irrational, and most important, a failure to move on. Unlike Laura, he craves his time in Washington. The demands of his job and the superficiality of Washington society offer him ways to escape from his pain.

One could read Cloudy Trophies and see it as a quadrille, an elegant dance in which the characters come together and part, never touching more than fingertips, following precise and predetermined steps, and conclude, with Orville Prescott, that it’s a short story padded out to 230-some pages.

But that would be mistaking the brush strokes for the picture. This is a story about how the death of a child can destroy a mother and father, can leave them shattered, fragments of themselves, struggling to find ways to survive. But it’s not Anne Goodwin Winslow’s way to jab her finger at the heart of her story and shout, “This is what it’s about!” Despite her relatively unadorned prose, hers is still a Jamesian sensibility. She aspires to be a person on whom nothing is lost, and she expects the same of her readers.

Cloudy Trophies is the third of Winslow’s novels I’ve read, and while her inexperience with the form shows in some aspects of the book’s construction, I remain in deep admiration for the assurance of her artistry and her respect for the intelligence of her readers. Hers is the kind of quiet art that is perhaps the easiest of all to become overlooked and forgotten.

Cloudy Trophies, by Anne Goodwin Winslow
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1946

Perplexities, by E. R. Leigh (1932)

Cover of Perplexities by E. R. Leigh (1932).

As much I base most of my choices for this site on research, my heart belongs to my first neglected book love, the browsing of library and bookstore shelves in search of unfamiliar titles. As physical used bookstores become ever rarer in the U.S., I have to resort to online equivalents. A favorite technique is to select a publisher and date range and simply scroll through the listings that come up on one book site or another.

Which is how I came across Perplexities, a book I suspect I would never have found through research or physical browsing. It came up, quite simply, as the cheapest copy of a Faber & Faber title from the early 1930s I could find on AbeBooks.com. So I ordered it. I was pleased when it arrived with its dust jacket relatively intact, since this usually drives up the price.

Now, frankly, given my inveterate book buying, I tend to place my new arrivals in one of the teetering stacks scattered around my office and only return to them months or years later. But the writing in Perplexities is so spare, so lacking in artifice — so naked, if you will — that I began reading immediately:

I must write. It may be a way of fixing my mind on a logical sequence of ideas. It is ridiculous to allow one’s thought’s to run round within a desire like a squirrel in a cage.

I am the slave of an emotion, whereas I believed, not so long ago, that I had won freedom.

Perplexities’ unnamed narrator is, we learn, a French-born woman living in London and in love with a man from the North named Peter. In love — but not head over heels. No, she has seen too much for that. And so she tries to examine this new love, this new relationship, this possible future, in the context of the loves and relationships of her past.

The first of these, of course, is with her mother. A vain, beautiful Parisian, a widow holding herself to a higher standing than her husband’s legacy can support. And aspiring to a higher romantic standard as well. Protective of her prospective suitors, her feelings to her daughter are early on complicated by jealousy and a ferocious defense of her primacy as the object of desire in the house. “Whoever loved my mother ceased to know freedom for as long as they loved her.” For longer, in fact: “After she had lost the power to confer joy she retained the power of inflicting pain.”

Her mother is, in today’s vocabulary, an expert emotional abuser. “Her strength was in her tongue. She could hurt amazingly with her tongue.” Yet she also positioned her daughter to maintain and, indeed, improve her social and economic status: a good Catholic education in convent schools, proficiency in English with time spent with an English family, the Giffords.

Observing the Giffords adds to her understanding of the minefield of emotions lurking at even apparently placid family dinner tables. “Mrs. Gifford was a hard-working, devoted, conscientious wife and mother,” the narrator acknowledges. “I often wondered why her family did not leave the house in a body.” For Mrs. Gifford’s husband and children live in abject fear of her ability to inflict guilt in retribution for the smallest perceived slight:

I believe that more pain and suffering have been inflicted in the name of love than under the frank panoply of hate. Hate, at least, does not paralyse its victims by calling on their chivalry at the same time as it strikes. An enemy does not use as a shield the loud warning that he himself will be hurt if we are not careful.

This is, I think, an observation of striking insight — and striking currency. This is precisely why the damage done by parents who abuse through martyrdom is fundamentally different from that inflicted by direct abuse.

The narrator of Perplexities is in her early 40s. Her husband, an Englishman she married for love, was killed in the war over a decade earlier. Her two children, to whom she admits she was at best only adequate as a mother (“The passion of motherhood is a closed book to me”), are grown, living their own lives, and not looking to her for emotional or financial support. Nor does she expect it: “To expect gratitude seems a commercial appreciation for returns which has nothing to do with love.”

She has a job — and likes it:

I thoroughly enjoy work myself. I can enjoy almost any kind of work, provided it aallows me to put into it the whole, no more (not for long at least), but no less.

Her male colleagues, she thinks, fail to understand this balance. Some try to fill their time away from work with hobbies, seeking fulfillment they lack at work. Others are what we would now call workaholics:

I think one of my colleagues, Smith cannot fail to return after his death, day after day, to his desk, to watch his successor going on with his work. Smith loves the office, he loves coming to it in the morning, he is the last to leave it at night, he does not know what to do with unexpected holidays, he is always ready to postpone the expected ones.

It is the independence she has won through work, widowhood, and given her own children their freedom that ultimately allows her to recognize the trap that a relationship with Peter, her Northerner, would be. He is not an equal opportunity lover: “Mutual pleasure in sex does not enter Peter’s calculations.” Even worse, he’s a thirty-something man walking around with an umbilical cord. Proposing a seaside holiday, he adds that his mother, of course, will be joining them.

Perplexities is, effect, one woman’s inventory of her experiences of love and life in an attempt to decide what to do with the rest of it. And her choice is a courageous one: “Above all, I must try to conquer fear before I die.” This, she believes, is “a crusade on which all the remaining forces of a solitary woman with a love for freedom might well embark.”

Perplexities was marketed as a novel, but even Faber & Faber struggled to classify the book. “Whether one regards it as fiction or a transcript from real life, Perplexities is a very unusual book” declares its dust jacket. Too unusual for some reviewers: “There is some championing of the cause of prostitutes and perverts, a great deal of muddled thinking, rather tediously recorded, and a complete absence of a sense of humour,” observed B. E. Tood in The Spectator.

The Bookman’s critic was one of the few to acknowledge that the narrator’s perspective was more common than some might think: “Many women will share the author’s perplexities, and will enjoy a sense of fellowship in reading this book. A sensitive, critical mind is brought to bear upon the peculiar problems of modern life, especially women’s problems, which are discussed with such sincerity and common sense as should help to clear fresh paths through the tangles of convention.”

In some ways, Perplexities anticipates by almost fifty years Alice Koller’s An Unknown Woman, another book written in an attempt to take stock of a life and decide whhere to go with it. Koller had foresaken romantic love after an early failed relationship while in graduate school and was already intellectually prepared to embrace a solitary life (though with a German shepherd as companion), and it was a path she stuck to until her death almost forty years later. But as much as I admire Koller’s book, I have to say that I suspect more readers today would respond to the simple, succinct prose and the fearless candor of Perplexities.

E. R. Leigh, according to copyright records, was the pseudonym of Jeanne Berthe Julie Rigaud, a French woman born in Paris in 1881, who married Harry Footner, a civil engineer, in 1902. Like her narrator, Jeanne Footner had two children, both of whom were in their twenties when she wrote her book. And like her narrator, she lost her husband in the war — on August 1, 1916, one month to the day after the start of the Battle of the Somme. She took her pseudonym from her husband’s middle name, Erlegh. Perplexities was her only book. Perhaps, also like her narrator, its writing helped her reach some decision. She never remarried and she died in Portsmouth at the age of 70 in 1952.

Perplexities, by E. R. Leigh (pseudonym of Jeanne Rigaud Footner)
London: Faber & Faber, 1932

The Fly, by Richard Chopping (1965)

Cover to the first edition of The Fly by Richard Chopping

I often stumble across a particularly intriguing forgotten book while on the trail of a different one. Recently, I was looking for information about a novel by Henri-François Rey called The Mechanical Pianos when I came across this blurb from Arthur Calder-Marshall in a Secker & Warburg ad in the Guardian: “The most interesting failure I have read for years.”

From the Secker & Warburg ad in The Guardian, 29 January 1965.

For anyone who loves odd books, a phrase like “the most interesting failure” will set off alarms. I abandoned The Mechanical Pianos (pardon, Henri-François) and went in search of Mr. Chopping’s The Fly. The reviews I found made it clear that this was not just an interesting failure but a book with a uniquely off-putting power for many critics:

E. D. O’Brien, The Illustrated London News
“prurient, scatological, corrupt and sickening.”
B. S. Johnson, The Spectator
“much gratuitous nastiness conveyed by means of an overwritter, convoluted progression of cliches…. Quite revoltingly self-indulgent and pointless.”

Seymour Simckes, The New York Times
“progresses toward a total sullying of life, toward the harshest realities of grotesque death and grotesque madness.”
Adrian Mitchell, New Statesman
“This spleeny story of office life is dominated by snot, shit, semen, and pus. Why should anyone bother to write about the interesting, fairly virgin, subject of people who pick their noses and eat the pickings if all he can say about it is an implied ‘ugh’?”
Iain Hamilton, The Daily Telegraph
“His sardonic descriptions are informed by a disgust so acute that it might even be called exultant.”
Sunday Times
“Rarely have the filthy, petty particularities of loneliness — the Camembert among the hairbrushes, the menace of a tattered usherette — been give such a thorough going-over.”

“The Camembert among the hairbrushes”? Exultant disgust? This was clearly a book worth investigating.

The first few dozen pages of The Fly feature some of the most compelling writing I’ve come across in a long time. “The perpetual silent witness of the events in this unpleasant narrative,” Chopping informs us, is a fly. A common house fly. But a fly with “nacreous glistening body,” “vicious soft proboscis,” two “many faceted globes” to observe its world. And not a mere observer but a “servant of the Eumenides,” “the miniature personification of evil, neat, fast, deadly.”

US paperback edition of The Fly by Richard Chopping

Mr. Chopping may not know his flies like an entomologist, but he clearly does exult in his descriptions. But this is just the first page. Turn it, and we and the fly are transported outside, to a gutter wet with drizzle, in which, “breaking the surface, lies a used condom.”

At least one reviewer pulled the red cord at this point.

He may not, therefore, have witnessed what happens on the third page. A young girl reaches into the gutter with a twig and produces the condom for her brother’s inspection: “‘Ere, Leslie, look at this!”

To call Jennifer –the girl — and Leslie street urchins would be to sully the fine name of street urchins. These are two of the dirtiest, nastiest, most malignant children in fiction. But they are paragons compared, in Chopping’s eyes, to what’s in the push-chair Jennifer is dragging along with her other hand:

Half lying, half sitting it gazes fixedly out at the world through still eyes, squinting and protuberant. It has been so battered into obedience by Jennifer that it knows better than to utter a sound. Its bloated appearance and its immobility are further accentuated by the lower half of its body being encased in faded blue woollen rompers, bulbously overstuffed with nappies. Its arms stick out straight in front of it as if they were articulated together on a wire through the upper part of its doll’s body. The hands are swollen, mottled blue and scarlet from bad circulation. Its head is concealed in, and its face framed by, a soiled white pixie cap. From this push-chair there arises a soursweet odour of stale urine and old milk. This object is called Brenda — Leslie and Jennifer’s baby sister.

“This object” — clearly Chopping is not a man with the milk of human kindness running through his veins. But he does not single out children with his animus: he is an equal opportunity misanthrope.

Jennifer, Leslie, and Brenda play in the street outside the Office. Although Chopping doesn’t identify where his novel is set, but it could be any overcrowded, squalid grey industrial English city of its time. The purpose of the Office is never mentioned, and it doesn’t matter. It’s a place full of desks and telephones, typewriters and file cabinets, ashtrays and pale-faced mediocre clerks, secretaries, and managers, all of them grey, miserable, and frustrated.

Mr. Gender most of all: “In adolescence, he was already a grey man in embryo.” Poor Mr. Gender does get his share of abuse from his creator. His encroaching baldness is examined under the fly’s microscope: “It saw damp thinning strands of hair, carefully trained across a putty-coloured skull; oiled fronds of seaweed across a dead fish’s belly.” His grossest behaviors are put on display for our revulsion: “going back to a childhood habit, he was feeding himself with the pickings from his nose with the eager rapacity of a hungry fanatic.”

Chopping has turned the tables on the reader, in other words. It is his fly who is the noble creature, the diligent agent taking note, acting on behalf of the gods. It is his people who are held up for our repulsion. There is not a line in these pages that does not make the reader want to take a shower and give himself a vigorous scrub down.

And yet, and yet.

Within a few dozen more pages, we discover the truth in Arthur Calder-Marshall’s words. For those willing to follow Richard Chopping into this cesspool he has created, The Fly is a journey filmed in Technicolor and Cinemascope. But as a novel, it ultimately fails in design and structure.

Balzac understood something that Chopping doesn’t: if you’re going to write about nasty people, it’s the nastiest ones who have to be the stars. By far the nastiest piece of work in the Office is the cleaning (there’s an irony!) lady, Mrs. Macklin. Her superpower is spotting everyone else’s vulnerabilities, which she then probes with her rustiest, filthiest instruments. And she’s not above shoving a corpse into the building furnace to avoid awkward questions. While Chopping may have prided himself on his choice of the fly as his witness, this book would have been much more effective seen through Mrs. Macklin’s hatefilled eyes.

Structurally, The Fly is several chapters too long. We follow everyone in the Office for an annual outing to the zoo. Chopping takes us home with several of the Office’s employees, as if test-driving them as protagonists, ultimately choosing to build his climax around Mr. O’Flattery, an anxious clerk whose only distinguishable feature is his being Irish, who works himself into a breakdown not so much by Mrs. Macklin’s machinations as by the anticipation of them — and even this process is drawn out too long. Chopping’s exultant disgust loses its joyous intensity, turning into tedium and, finally, weariness.

The Fly was Richard Chopping’s first novel. Trained as an artist, Chopping was best known for his trompe-l’œil covers for the original UK hardback editions of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Several years later, Chopping published a second novel, The Ring, about a gay man who finds himself consumed in London’s rough trade world. This was a world Chopping knew intimately, so I am interested to see if the subject tapped into his design aesthetic better than did the grey workers in The Fly‘s Office.

The Fly, by Richard Chopping
London: Secker & Warburg, 1965

The Woman’s Harvest, by Anna Floyd (1916)

The Woman's Harvest by Anna Floyd

This was the most surprising book I’ve read in a long time. I was initially interested in The Woman’s Harvest because, having been published in 1916, it appeared to be the first English novel to deal with the situation of women on the home front in World War One. And at first, that’s what it proved to be.

Harvey Brunsdon is a floorwalker in a department store on Kensington High Street when the war breaks out in August 1914. Married and with an infant daughter at home, he decides it’s better not to volunteer for the Army out of purely practical concerns: how will his wife manage on 12 shillings a week when they’ve been living on £170 a year — or worse, on 9 shillings a week if he gets killed? After being shamed as a coward by a young woman presenting him with a white feather, though, he and his wife decide it’s better to do the patriotic thing.

Harvey enlists and his wife leaves the child in the care of her mother goes back to work. The independence and power of being an income earner seems to compensate for her loneliness — more than compensate for it, in fact: “If Elsie Brunsdon could have analyzed her tangled emotions during the autumn of 1914 she must have admitted that, contrary to all her expectations, she was enjoying every moment of her life.”

When Harvey is mustered out and returns, he finds it hard to return to the dressed-up interior work of the store and he seeks out the widow of his regimental commander, who has an estate in need of farm workers. Despite his lack of experience, he moves the family to the countryside. He takes to it like Oliver Wendell Douglas in Green Acres, while Elsie is less enthusiastic. In the course of a year, hard work and good old English pluck turn Harvey into a proven landsman.

Then, in Chapter IX, as Elsie is finally warming to rural life, Anna Floyd throws in this bombshell:

A disbanded regiment, nearly all young students and professional men, mustered in civilian clothes in Trafalgar Square, marched in silence down Whitehall, and hanged four members of the Cabinet on the lamp facing the entrance to Downing Street. The ringleaders, a major, two sergeants, and a private soldier, surrendered themselves and were arrested at once. They were sentenced to death, and on the evening of their trial four more prominent politicians dangled from the same lamp. The Prime Minister, arrested in his own official residence, was taken to see the bodies and informed that whilst the four men lay under sentence, four politicians would hang punctually every evening.

I did not see that coming.

Ad for The Woman's Harvest by Anna Floyd
Ad for The Woman’s Harvest by Anna Floyd.

Floyd goes on to tell us that England then experiences a renaissance of the land and within two years achieves near-total self-sufficiency in food production as thousands of veterans turn their swords into ploughshares, with commensurate benefits for Harvey Brunsdon as an early adopter, and we are back into his story, the most violent and tumultuous revolution since Oliver Cromwell having been introduced and passed over in the space of three pages.

But wait: there’s more.

At this point, we are precisely at the halfway point in the book and can be excused for wondering where this is all going.

And the answer is … polyamory.

Over the next 100-some pages, two of the local women disappear for months at a time — to France, to a clinic for “fatigue” — and return with infants of mysterious origin. A foundling. A dead cousin’s orphan. We learn that Harvey has been sowing his seeds in more than the land. In fact, there’s a third affair well underway. When Elsie finally figures this all out, Harvey chastises her. It was her own fault: “You’ve never offered me love of your own free will.” And it’s certainly not the fault of the other women: “They’re victims of the war. You ought to feel sorry for them. You are the fortunate one amongst your unfortunate sisters.” Elsie needs to understand that Harvey is merely doing his patriotic duty — and chill. Turn your head and think of England, in other words.

Though she was writing when the war had been raging for less than two full years, Anna Floyd seems to have been certain that it would result in the loss of a generation of English men and that her country’s future lay in a massive return to an agricultural economy and a massive embrace of sexual freedom … for men. And thus we discover what she meant by The Woman’s Harvest.

I was hoping this book would be a glimpse into how English women, recently emboldened by the Suffragette movement, responded to the early effects of the war. Silly me. The critic Gerald Gould called The Woman’s Harvest “unreadable.” I found it highly readable, blazing through in little more than a day. Highly readable — and highly ridiculous.

The Woman’s Harvest, by Anna Floyd
London: T. Werner Laurie, Ltd., 1916

French Polish, by P. Y. Betts (1933)

French Polish by P. Y. Betts
Christopher Hawtree’s copy of French Polish.

This is a guest post by Christopher Hawtree.

SWISS MOUNTAINS AND WELSH HILLS

“I guess if you thought a little more about sex your circulation would be a whole lot better; there’s nothing like sex for keeping a girl warm.”

No, this is not Bridget Jones or one of her ilk but Virginia Odell, a young American at a Swiss finishing school which occupies much of P.Y. Betts’s novel French Polish, published by Victor Gollancz in 1933. To read it again is to be as startled as I was when first doing so, early in 1985, in the Round Reading Room, as it then was, at the British Library. I could not help but give whoops which startled sedulous thesis-writers either side of me.

Diligent curiosity had brought me to this seemingly frivolous perusal of a long-vanished novel — and would take me far from that sedentary perch in Great Russell Street. That winter I was at work compiling and introducing an anthology from the weekly magazine Night and Day, which lasted for only the second half of 1937 in a bid to be a London equivalent — with equally wonderful cartoons — of The New Yorker. Its demise is often attributed to a lawsuit brought against it by Twentieth-Century Fox after co-editor Graham Greene had written in no uncertain terms about the sexual stance displayed by nine-year-old Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkie. In fact, funding had been low from the beginning, with modest fees paid to an array of authors who would, around the world, become better known down the years.

There were also some who faded from sight after appearing in such glittering company where they, too, made an equal showing. Among these was P. Y. Betts who wrote entertainingly about French life and food, as well as supplying “A Snob’s Guide to Good Form”, which anticipated Nancy Mitford’s U and Non-U controversy by two decades. What could have become of such a talent? Try as I might, I could not discover anything much about her — and lamented this en passant in the long introduction to the volume which appeared later in the year.

Naturally, this anthology, with the first republication in five decades of Greene’s film review, brought interest from the hills around Los Angeles -– and, with the publication a few years later of Shirley Temple’s splendid memoir Child Star, her saying that Greene had in fact been accurate in his description of her sultry parading in that film and two others. That made a pleasing symmetry to the work on the anthology (if I say so myself, I am thanked in Child Star). Meanwhile, and perhaps all the more exciting, Michael Davie in an Observer column had picked up my reference to the seemingly fugitive P.Y. Betts. This led to the biographer of publisher Edward Garnett (the friend of Lawrence) getting in touch with an unpublished letter in which Garnett, as a reader for Jonathan Cape, had taken against Samuel Beckett’s early Dream of Fair-to-Middling Women (“I wouldn’t touch this with a barge-pole!”) but urged that the publisher take P. Y. Betts’s novel.

No sooner had I read about this unexpected literary confluence than Lady Eirene White got in touch from the House of Lords to say that she had been at St. Paul’s Girls’ School with Betts (as she was known) and that after growing up near Wandsworth Commons before the Great War, Betts had travelled around the world in the Thirties before joining the wartime Land Army which she quit around 1944 to live, alone, in a remote Welsh smallholding which she had never left.

And she was still there.

By this time, not only had electricity been installed there (in 1970), but also a telephone. Never had I thought that I should be talking upon it with somebody whom I had – dare I say it — thought might easily be dead.

Her conversation across those hundred of miles was as vivid as her writing.

Hearteningly, a little later, Veronica Wadley of the Daily Telegraph (and herself now in the Lords) readily agreed that I should travel there for an interview. This was quite a journey, without signposts through narrow lanes with high hedges in a motor-car at low gear (top gear was always a novelty for a window-flapping Citroen); when I did see anybody and asked directions, there was astonishment that I was going to visit P. Y. Betts (“we’ve heard of her but never seen her!”). Eventually I got there, at one end of a long track where I was greeted by a goat of an uncertain disposition and, after a struggle between tyres and mud, parked beside a low, thick-walled cottage from which, followed by a cat and dog, Betts emerged with pails in hand to feed others of the various animals which lived upon her tranche of hillside.

A far cry from the afternoon when Shirley Temple’s husband telephoned me about her imminent memoir (which she wrote herself). This was quite a place. We soon ate, while her talk roved across a Great War childhood near Wandsworth Gaol (an early memory was of watching people walk along the pavement to be in time to stand at its gates when a hanging was due) and looped around life in the Welsh hills, many tales of which reached her in that seclusion (the area was a redoubt of those who had returned from a flower-power trail along the road to Katmandu). As she went out again, the sky darkening, to feed the animals, I scribbled notes of all this, and her words echoed through my mind during the long journey back. There was something marvellously heartening about her conversation borne of long experience (and visits by the mobile library where she put in for so many new books); she was savvier about the world than those who are eternally, wirelessly connected. All of this I wrote up, and it appeared complete with a photograph of her beside one of those animals: a seemingly stray peacock.

And that was not that.

One morning I received a telephone call. A woman said, “Mr. Hecht would like to speak with you.” All right, I replied, puzzled, curious. This turned out to be the owner of independent publisher Souvenir Press, whose outwardly elegant office, chaotic within, was opposite the British Library on Great Russell Street. He had chanced to see the Telegraph piece – and wondered whether Betts would like to write a second book, one about the upbringing she had described to me.

This was an inspired notion, to which she readily agreed, and she wrote it – People Who Say Goodbye — through a Welsh winter. And, as chance also had it, this was published around the same time as Shirley Temple’s book. I asked Greene if he would give a quote for the cover, which he happily did, and, one way and another, the book got about: it was read in eight instalments on national radio, which, one Saturday, also sent an interviewer to her, while Dirk Bogarde (a man whose film career had begun a few years after she took up that life in the hills), who had found it in a Chelsea bookshop, made it one of his books of the year. It went into several paperback incarnations and is still in print.

She died in her nineties, after a stroke, which meant that — after living alone for so long — she had, ever pragmatic, to agree to a carer in that cottage where, as I found on another visit, there were now fewer animals but her spirit was still vivid — as it remains, so wise, so funny, and this sequence of events always makes me thankful that I had made the initial foray to the Reading Room.

P. Y. Betts’s inscription.

You never know what might happen. And so it is that I have now gone back to that novel French Polish which she wrote in her early twenties, and can again hear that voice from decades later. She gave me a copy of it and signed it – a novel now exceedingly hard to find (many have tried to do so after relishing People Who Say Goodbye).

For its first half or so, events take place in that Swiss finishing school before an excursion takes some of the girls with one of the mistresses to life in a pensione – and that amatory imbroglio which had been so much a source of discussion and speculation by the girls during days and evenings when they were meant to be pursuing regular studies. As Betts herself must have done, for the narrative finds room for quotations in several languages as well as extracts from one of the girl’s anthology-in-progress (“anything remotely lunar will do”) about references to the Moon, whose varying appearances in the night sky make it very much a character in a novel where due emphasis is also given to such matters as “those privy to the esoteric abracadabra of contraception” and a page of improvised stream of consciousness.

Time and again, one finds such descriptions as “when she laughed she opened her mouth so wide and displayed teeth so long and white and powerful that it was almost with a sense of incongruity that one glimpsed behind them a squat human tongue and not the darting scarlet tatter of a flop-eared puppy”. That very word “tatter” has one reaching for a dictionary of slang, and, to say the least, the novel is a repository of words and phrases which would make Anthony Burgess redouble his efforts to impress.

To pick out some, here are a “bourden of voices”, “dispharetic travelling”, and in a nightmare towards the end one of the teachers had seen a woman “apparelled in scarlet and monstrously mounted upon that heptacephalous progeny of hell”. And of course, in the opening pages, it is said of one of the girls that “a rufous challenge sparkled in her eyes, and her hair flamed like a November sun in the shadowy room”. There should be a revival of this expression for removing one’s dress: “she skinned it over her head”. And one could discuss until humans beings cease to exist the subsequent observation “have you ever noticed that people who are quite disintegratingly beautiful in the nude are often dreadfully pedestrian in clothes?”

And what can one say of Penelope “who had discovered that morning at prayers that j’ai sucri did not mean ‘I have sugared,’ but was French for Jesus Christ”? With all the precocity of youth, one is informed that ballet and ballade share a root. Amidst the current British crises, can it any longer be given credence that “they had such beautiful pink skins that Penelope thought they must be Etonians”? One such character, when asked if he is growing a moustache, replies, “at present it is only visible in certain lights, like the sheen on velvet”.

One reads on avidly, while pausing to ponder “coprolitic spirals” – and with passing time and “scrannel spirit”, one must marvel at the protracted metaphor made from the speed of life being akin to the long outer grooves of a 78-rpm disc shortening as the needle reaches the label: “on the record the last two inches really are covered in less time, though the tempo remains the same”. Once again, two pages in, here is that paragraph which, in the Round Reading Room, had me reading on. “Here, from a central parting of impeccable rectitude, uniform waves of iron-grey hair flowed towards the orderly roll at the back of the head with the beautiful inevitability of creation moving to one far-off divine event.”

Now, when Katherine Mansfield is rightly lauded, it is an interesting point of view that, a decade after her death, one of the precocious adolescents could say of her that she “bores me frightfully. She’s so conceited and vapourish, taking it for granted that everybody will be interested to read that on such-and-such a night she woke up and felt passionate. She was a beast to the Gaudier-Brczeskas, anyway.”

No apology for quoting so much from the novel. Otherwise how could readers gain a taste of something which led me to traverse all those miles, making it across the Severn Bridge, in a vehicle whose windows flapped open at the slightest breeze? The novel is sought after, and yet there are those who might cavil at its reappearance. The opening section lays some emphasis upon a Black woman’s arrival among the School’s pupils for a while. “On her ears were gold earrings of about the bigness of half-crowns and a coruscation of bracelets of strikingly extra-European workmanship gauntleted her bare forearm almost to the elbow.”

Some will decry this, and an element of debate would be that many others are regarded askance, such as a teacher who “had only once put her foot down, when a young man from Milwaukee had raped from her chalet a lavatory seat elegantly intagliated with edelweiss entwined with bells of gentian, with Alpenrose and the modest camomile. Since this incident, unique of its kind, Americans had not been encouraged”.

What place would such a lavatory seat find in “A Snob’s Guide to Good Form”?

Christopher Hawtree is a writer and editor. You can read more on his website, ChristopherHawtree.com, and follow him on Twitter (@chrishawtree).

French Polish, by P. Y. Betts
London: Victor Gollancz, 1933

Breathe Upon These Slain by Evelyn Scott (1934)

Cover of the first US edition of Breathe Upon These Slain.

I had the chance to speak recently with David Madden, whose anthology Rediscoveries was a primary inspiration that launched my quest to seek out neglected books and authors decades ago. We talked about the fact that I completed an MA program in biograpy and creative nonfiction at the University of East Anglia a few years ago, which led, inevitably, to mention of W. G. Sebald and, in particular, his masterpiece The Rings of Saturn. And this, in turn, led to his suggestion that I read Evelyn Scott’s Breathe Upon These Slain (1934).

In October 1932, the American novelist Evelyn Scott and her second husband, the English short story writer John Metcalfe, having grown sick of life in London, moved to Lowestoft on the coast of East Anglia and rented a cottage from a spinster named Miss Henderson. As they settled into the cottage for the winter, Scott began to wonder about the family whose pictures hung in every room. Some of the pictures were prints of such once-popular subjects as the death of Cock Robin or the ride of the Bengal Lancers.

But there were several family photographs — one in the east bedroom of four little girls, all dressed alike, from sometime in the previous century; one in the west bedroom of just three girls — older, in their teens. And her novelist’s imagination began to work.

I am not here to write stories, but to rest, and my knowledge of Suffolk is small — my knowledge of these people, nothing! — yet I feel queerly urged to give the four little girls their names.

“The four sisters shall be called: Cora, Ethel, Tilly and Margaret,” she decides. And with little more than observations of places and people around Lowestoft, a bit of history, and her powers of empathy, Scott created a story of their lives. The story of the Courtneys.

Not the story. Although she speculates that the Miss Henderson who collects the rent and occasionally checks in corresponds to one of the girls in the photographs, Scott wasn’t concerned with the facts. The term was decades from being coined, but what Scott decided to create was what we would now call a metafiction (or meta-nonfiction?). She never hides herself from the reader, nor does she ever pretend that the stories she tells about the family aren’t inventions.

Evelyn Scott, around the time of Breathe Upon These Slain. [Marks on the original.]

The absence of the youngest of the four girls from the photograph of the three older girls Scott explains through the story of Tilly. One drizzly autumn day when the coastal town is socked in with one of those grey mists that rise off the Broads and cut to the bone with a chill more penetrating than much colder winter frosts, Mrs. Courtney, a fastidious but impatient woman, sends Tilly outside to gain herself a bit of piece. Just seven or eight, Tilly obliges and heads out to the seaside strand, where she walks up and down for hours until soaked to the skin and near hypothermia. And promptly contracts pneumonia and dies.

This is just the first tragedy to befall the Courtneys. Ethel and Cora marry — Ethel to Patrick, a naval officer whose infatuation with her she never quite believes, Cora to a Harley Street surgeon. A brother, Bertram — another invention of Scott’s taken from a single photograph of a young man, a proud sahib someplace in India — is attached to the Indian Civil Service but finds he lacks the stiffness of upper lip it requires. Mrs. Courtney never sees how her fastidiousness in morals as much as manners drives her daughters off, Mr. Courtney — the owner of a fish packing company — never recognizes the unbridgeable gap that exists between himself and the shopkeepers and fishermen he lifts a pint with at the New Crown.

What blows the Courtneys to smithereens, though, is the First World War. Ethel’s husband’s ship is sunk by a German torpedo when cruising in waters that were considered submarine-free. Bertram, returned from India, is mowed down in one of the many pointless assaults during the Battle of the Somme. Devastated with grief over his son’s death and brutally isolated when he realizes that no one in the town can see beyond his status as “Courtney of Courtney’s Fish” to empathize with him, Philip Courtney takes his life. And Mrs. Courtney and Margaret — Meg, the spinster — are forced to sell their grand four-story house on the Strand and retreat to the cottage now occupied by Scott and Metcalfe. Yet even as try to build up a new world around this cottage, what comes back to haunt them is not Patrick or Bertram or Philip but little Tilly, who comes to seem a sacrifice offered up to the gods of Victorian conventions.

And Miss Henderson, who comes by bicycle to collect the monthly rent, is she Meg? No, Scott admits:

There has never been a Meg. And sometimes it seems as if there were, for each, only the idea lodged in a brain we term “actual” — the idea which can draw even modest men to murder and call themselves just!

While there is a certain daring in Scott’s willingness not just to acknowledge the artificiality of her invented lives but to insert her own presence in the Lowestoft cottage as a reminder that we should not fully suspend our disbelief, there is also a cost. Readers will admire Author Scott’s ingenuity in projecting her photographs into life-sized semblances, but they will not agree that she has made these foreigners completely lifelike. Breathe Upon These Slain is a longish book — just a hair under 400 pages — and many of those pages are devoted to reflections on these character Scott has created as constructs rather than people.

Yes, all fictional characters are constructs. But the reason we love fiction and its characters is that in the hands of a good storyteller, we willingly take the leap of faith and believe in their existence, at least within the framework of the novel. As Time’s reviewer wrote, “Readers will admire Author Scott’s ingenuity in projecting her photographs into life-sized semblances, but they will not agree that she has made these foreigners completely lifelike.”

Breathe Upon These Slain could easily be compared to Virginia Woolf’s The Years, which came out just a few years before and which follows another family, the Pargiters, through a similar span of time. But what separates The Years from Breathe Upon These Slain is that whatever ideas Woolf was attempting to demonstrate are always subordinate to her story and its characters, making her work a masterpiece where Scott’s is only an experiment. A remarkable experiment, and one that is often fascinating in its perspective and details. And while certainly one worth further study as a milestone in the development of metafiction and creative nonfiction, it too often lacks the breath of life it needs to rise to the level of a major work. Breathe Upon These Slain, Scott’s title commands. Yet, in the end, one has to conclude that it’s Scott who has slain the Courtneys.

Breathe Upon These Slain, by Evelyn Scott
New York: Smith & Haas, 1934
London: Lovat Dickson, 1934

The Skin of Dreams (Loin de Rueil), by Raymond Queneau (1948)

Cover of the 1948 New Directions edition of The Skin of Dreams.

Jacques l’Aumône and Walter Mitty are twin sons of different mothers. Both men escape from what they consider dull lives by fantasizing themselves in extraordinary situations. Their two creators, however, took very different approaches to their subjects. Thurber mined Mitty’s situation for its comic power, the absurdity of the contrast between the milk toasty Mitty (whose wife literally feeds him milk toast) and the dangerous adventures he imagines himself in.

Queneau, on the other hand, attempted to integrate James Joyce, surrealists like Andre Breton and Boris Vian, and French and American pulp fiction into the world of his hero. When we first meet Jacques l’Aumône (l’aumône being French for alms or charity), he’s the teenaged son of a hosery manufacturer living in Rueil, a suburb of Paris that must be associated with shrunken lives and stifling boredom (the original French title was Loin de Rueil or Far from Rueil. Watching a western with one of his friends, Jacques — called Jackie by his parents — does more than become involved with the film. He transmogrifies into the film:

Jacques and Lucas held on to their seats with two hands as if they were on that mount they saw there before them, inverse and planimetrical. Thus they are shown the mane of the soliped and the breeches of the booted one, and then they are shown the pistols in the belt of the breeches-wearer, and after that they arc shown the powerfully circular thorax of the bearer of fire-arms, and finally they are shown the mug of the guy, a dashing buck, a burly fellow for whom men’s lives were of no more account than a louse’s, and Jackie is in nowise astonished to recognize in him Jacques l’Aumone.

A founding father of the Oulipo movement, Queneau once described himself as a rat who constructed mazes from which he planned to escape — which is an apt way of summarizing what he does for Jacques l’Aumône in The Skin of Dreams.

But anyone who’s read a bit of Queneau knows that what sets him apart from the surrealists and other Oulipians is his simple humanity. So, Jacques doesn’t just indulge in escapism. He also projects himself into other lives — walks a mile in other men’s shoes, as the saying goes. When he encounters the husband of his building’s concierge, for example, a man who’s down on his luck and somewhat out of his head with illness, the same transformation that put him in the saddle up on screen in the cinema takes place:

He then perceived with a fresh eye the whole course of his life, behind him: his happy childhood, his mad ambitions, his bitter disappointments, his career as a bureaucrat, his expulsion for negligence, his marriage to a bag, and finally, after many increasingly unbrilliant trades, that of janitor, an old canker putting an end to this sad life, ugh! alas! To complete the resemblance he shook his hands like old dead leaves that a gentle rainy November wind does not yet wish to tear from the tree that bears them. Jacques found pleasure in this situation, after all perhaps he himself would never attain a joy comparable to that which he bad in his role of a decayed Cerberus endlessly stuttering those words “Things riding high, my way, really riding high”, all the more so since the other, contemplating himself in this human mirror, smiled widely and began shaking even more violently, as if insisting on the profound meaning of his inconsistent babbling.

Joan Miró poster for the original French edition of Loin de Rueil.

Queneau was inspired by Joyce’s manipulation of words, both the simple collages like snotgreen sea and wavewhite wedded words in Ulysses to the splicings and graftings of Finegans Wake (schutschum and tragoady). Which makes him a challenge for any translator. H. J. Kaplan, a novelist himself (and later press secretary for the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace talks with the Vietnamese), fares well if perhaps a bit stiffly with Queneau’s wordplay. But even the most ham-fisted translator can’t interfere too badly when working with a writer so obviously enjoying his wordplay:

He was examining little bits of doryphoras through the microscope, for the problem was to increase the efficiency of the Baponot Doryphovore [a pesticide manufactured by Jacques’ employer], the insufficiency of which in the business of doryphorotrucidation was beginning to be known among all the farmers of the region.

An anastrepha doryphoros, by the way, is a fruit fly, but mouche des fruits is far too mundane for Queneau’s purposes.

Jacques’ talent for assimilating into the things he sees evolves to such a degree that eventually, it takes over Queneau’s book itself. Near the end, an American movie comes to Rueil’s local cinema. It stars James Charity (see above) and turns out to be both the actor’s autobiography and the synthesis of all of Jacques’ past fantasies:

He is seen to appear now as an explorer, now as an inventor, now as a boxer, now as a thief. He makes an excursion to the land of the Borgeiros, particularly wild Indians. At San Culebra del Porco he meets a young actress, Lulu L’Aumone. Both will go to Hollywood to get a look at what can be done there. And very quickly comes success, glory, triumph. James ends by marrying Lulu L’Aumone and while he kisses her on the mouth he signs (with his free hand) a royal contract for his polyglot talking picture The Skin of Dreams.

Queneau was a mathematician by training, and it’s likely that he studied differential geometry, which is one of the more mind-warping fields of math, since it deals with how spaces of X dimensions are mapped into spaces of Y dimensions — or, if you will, how one reality transforms into another. The Skin of Dreams is something of an experiment in differential geometry in fiction. And having studied differential geometry myself, I promise you: reading The Skin of Dreams is not only a realistic simulation of that particular form of mathematics, but a lot more fun.

The Skin of Dreams, by Raymond Queneau, translated by H. J. Kaplan
New York: New Directions, 1948

The Biff and Netta trilogy, by N. Warner Hooke (1934 -1938)

Close of Play by Nina Warner Hooke
Cover of U.S. edition of Close of Play, the second book in the Biff and Netta trilogy.

I wish I had more time to write this piece, for this trilogy not only amounts to nearly 900 pages but represents one of the most unusual stories I’ve ever come across. When Striplings (1934), the first volume, appeared in America, it was acclaimed as a comic masterpiece. “A rare combination of Wodehouse and Rabelais!” declared the president of the American Booksellers Association. Reviews were so enthusiastic the book went into five printings in less than a month.

I can’t imagine anyone comparing the trilogy to Wodehouse, Rabelais, or anything remotely funny if they knew how its story ends. Though I am not usually one to take care to avoid spoilers, in this case I won’t go into details, except to say that the final pages of Own Wilderness (1938) are the most heart-breaking I’ve read in many years.

In her foreword to Close of Play, the second volume, Nina Warner Hooke wrote that she felt compelled to continue the story of Biff and Netta after being asked to so many times by readers of Striplings. “I do not yet know what is going to happen to my striplings…. Perhaps there will be more to come. Perhaps not,” she concluded. Yet to me, the narrative arc — hell, the narrative momentum — seems inevitable and irresistable, as certain as the fact that two leaves that fall into stream will be pulled downstream by its current.

So, who are Biff and Netta? Biff, eleven, is the son of Hugh Tamlin and his wife Georgina. Hugh, who “used to have something to do with the Rubber World,” now spends his days cloistered in a workshop in his estate — The Place — in Sussex, supposedly working on inventions but in reality simply hiding from the truth that his world is crumbling around him. The fine house in London he has inherited is now rented to a family of Greek Jews whose monthly checks are almost the only income he has left. He can no longer afford repairs on the buildings or grounds of the once-grand Place, is in arrears with his property tax, and has had to reduce the staff to almost nothing.

His marriage is in even worse shape. His wife Georgina has taken a lover, Henry Arthur Pybus-Glanville, known as Uncle Pi, who lives at the estate on weekends and is the only functional adult in this highly dysfunctional family. And even his affair with Georgina is largely a thing of the past, as her only interest is in riding around the country on Warrior, her prize horse, likely the only asset of real value remaining. The only part of the affair not left in the past is Netta.

Netta, eight, is the spit and image of Uncle Pi. “She had his blunt features. His nondescript hair. His throaty laugh. So there is was.” Rounding out the cast is John Johns, the sour chauffeur/gardener/handyman, and Miss Mudford, the governess. Muddy had once been a good governess, but now she is prisoner of her demons: bad teeth, “muddy skin, muddy voice, and muddy mind,” and “given to secret masturbation an pornographic literature.”

In their decay, the Tamlins have become isolated from much of the world around them. Hugh continues to receive copies of trade magazines but no longer bothers to read them. “Not many people ‘knew’ the Tamlins these days. Things were said about them. None too savoury things. The servants were a queer lot. And then there was Uncle Pi.”

The only vitality left at The Place resides in Biff and Netta, who spent their days foraging around its two hundred acres. They swim in its ponds, climb its trees, trap its rabbits and ferrets — they are almost feral in their freedom. Biff spends the summer in a single pair of shorts, literally unable to wash them unless he spends a day naked in bed. They are “extravagant children.” “They did everything with an extravagant largeness and a total disregard for consequences. They were extravagantly fond of one another.”

Too fond. Their mutual attraction is both a thing born of genuine innocence and love and one of the worms at the core of this apple, an apple destined to rot and disintegrate in a manner that is both horrifying and gripping to witness over the course of the trilogy.

If Biff and Netta are Warner Hooke’s Adam and Eve, their problem is not that they haven’t tasted the fruit of knowledge. It’s that Netta, at least, doesn’t care:

“You know I shan’t ever marry anyone but you!”
“We can’t be married, you fathead!”
“Why can’t we?”
“Because we’re related. We’re not allowed to. There’s a law about it.”
“Not allowed to? Why ever not?”
“Because we should have queer sorts of things for children.”
“Oh, Biff, what sort of things?”
“Well, things with two heads. Or six toes, or something. It’s called inbreeding. It happened to the chickens last year.”

Netta is not deterred. “We might have something with eyes all over its stomach. We might make a lot of money out of it. We could show it at Church Fêtes and charge tuppence to have a look.”

As Biff and Netta near puberty, the adults at the Place rally one last time. Uncle Pi agrees to pay for Biff and Netta to be sent off to boarding schools. Their experiences are very different. Biff grows leaner, harder, stronger — but is an outcast, treated as an oddity by his schoolmates, nursing his hatred of them, and longing to be reunited with Netta. Netta, on the other hand, no longer malnourished, puts on weight, fits in, makes friends, develops schoolgirl crushes.

When they meet again during the first school holiday, civilization in the form of conventions and moraes have intruded. Netta confides that her breasts are being to grow. “Let me feel,” Biff demands. “He thought he had never felt anything so soft.” Yet when he reaches out again, Netta draws back: “‘Don’t,’ she said.” “For the first time in their lives, they felt that a veil had descended between them.” The extravagance of their affection may have diminished, but the strength of their attraction never does. Biff abandons school, gets work as a farmhand, then runs away when he learns that Netta plans to spend her summer holiday with a classmate.

This is where Striplings ends. It’s hard for me to take Warner Hooke’s claim that she didn’t plan to carry on with the story seriously. In one of the rooms of The Place, there is a mural of a scene from a Greek myth slowly falling apart. Early in the book, Netta and Biff take guesses as to when the next piece will tumble to the ground. There are too many pieces in Warner Hooke’s narrative left dangling, about to fall, to treat it as a completed work. Or perhaps it would be better to say that she closes the book on the crash before we’ve had the chance to count the victims.

The pieces begin to fall in Close of Play:

Fifteen months later, early in the summer holidays, the horse Warrior put his foot in a rabbit hole and fell heavily, breaking his neck and Georgina’s back. Careless of Warrior. One would not have expected him to do a thing like that.

The dispassion in those lines hints at one of the peculiar qualities of Warner Hooke’s writing. She has a knack for eliciting our sympathies for Biff and Netta in all their rough tenderness — and yet can, a few sentences later, poke at her characters with the disinterest of a scientist examining a specimen under a microscope. Most of Warner Hooke’s later work were stories about animals written for children, and her instincts seem to be those of a naturalist rather than a novelist.

Nina Warner Hooke, from the New York Times, 1934.

One of Stripling’s American reviewwers, Herschel Brickell, wrote that “Very few of the considerable number of contemporary novels that have attempted to explore the strange world of the young of the human species have been so honest, so forthright and so understanding….” And the American edition of Close of Play included a letter from birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger to its publisher in which she called it “one of the most real books I have ever read and the truest study of children and adolescence I’ve had the pleasure of reading in fiction form.”

The realism of Warner Hooke’s treatment of Biff and Netta’s story is all the more striking for the utterly bizarre reality of their situation. Working as a navvy on a construction site in Brighton, Biff hears of Georgina’s death and returns to The Place. Now taller, stronger, and callous of hands and manners, he is bound to act as an accelerant in what is already a highly combustible situation. Though Netta is in the midst of a teenage romance with a neighbor, Rodney Fletcher, she finds herself drawn again to Biff. And though Biff has been living in the roughest of workman’s lodgings, he can see that The Place is on the brink of collapse. Much of its forest has had to be sold off for lumber, and Hugh, referred to the children as D.M. (Deaf Mute, for his near-total lack of interaction with anyone), is almost catatonic in his isolation.

A child-man, Biff exudes a certain confidence and power that attracts followers, and both Rodney and Netta go with him when he decides to leave The Place again. He returns to his room in Brighton and the three settle in together. They have almost nothing, yet he ensures their basic needs are met through intimidation:

Biff they feared. He subdued them from the outset. They surrendered to him because they had no alternative. If he required an extra blanket or another cup, there was little use in stating that it was not available. He went downstairs to fetch it. And if the excuse proved to have been founded on fact, he went out and bought what he wanted and charged it to Ma [the landlady].

Of course, three into two won’t go, as they say, and after a few months of pretending to be a simple working man and attempting to understand the complexities of Netta’s relationship with him and Biff, Rodney returns to his familiar middle-class life. Rodney is hands-down the most normal character we will come across. No wonder he’s destined to be among the wounded.

At this point, Close of Play ends. The last book, Own Wilderness, opens in London, where Biff and Netta are boarding with a greengrocer and his family. Netta helps out in the shop, while Biff cycles through a variety of jobs, not all of them legal, until he settles in as a delivery truck driver. Warner Hooke’s cast grows to take in the whole family and the power of the narrative is weakened somewhat as she loses the tight focus on Biff and Netta.

That is, until Hugh dies and leaves The Place to them. Saddled with debts, its buildings now so decrepit as to be barely habitable, it still has the attraction of Eden to Warner Hooke’s strange Adam and Eve. Foraging, once their pasttime, now becomes their means of existence. And now that they are both of age, Biff and Netta begin to become aware of what their neighbors are saying about their relationship.

It’s enough at this point to say that we’ve left Wodehouse and Rabelais behind long ago. We are now deep in Thomas Hardy’s territory. How we got here isn’t entirely clear, and I’m not sure it was to Warner Hooke, either. She probably didn’t work according to a plan, probably didn’t know from one chapter to the next when Biff and Netta were going to lead her. But we should be grateful that she stuck with them.

In some ways, taken together, Striplings, Close of Play, and Own Wilderness resemble a 19th Century English novel more than a modernist one. Biff and Netta’s path meanders from time to time and Warner Hooke occasionally suffers from the naturalist’s tendency to note all phenomena, even the unimportant, when some details ought to be omitted. But taken together — and as hard as these books are to locate, I cannot overstress how important it is to read the three as a single work — this trilogy is a work of stunning power, and I just regret that I am giving it less than its due with such a relatively brief assessment. Absolutely unjustly neglected; absolutely worth tapping into your local Inter Library Loan service to get your hands on. (Note: Own Wilderness is avaiable through HathiTrust.org, if you have access.)

The Biff and Netta Trilogy, by Nina Warner Hooke (credited as N. Warner Hooke)
Striplings
London: Faber and Faber, 1934
New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1934
Close of Play
London: Putnam, 1936
New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1936
Own Wilderness
London: Putnam, 1938
New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1938

The Zemganno Brothers, by Edmond de Goncourt (1878)

The Zemganno Brothers by Edmond de Goncourt

The Zemganno Brothers is Edmond de Goncourt’s love letter to his dead brother and collaborator, Jules. Together, the two had written six novels, several plays, and even more works of history and criticism, in addition to keeping a journal that is considered the most candid (and savage) account of mid-19th century Parisian life and society. Jules died from the effects of syphillis at the age of 39. Edmond carried on as a writer but never considered his own work anything but second-best to what he’d accomplished with Jules.

In 1876, over six years after Jules’ death, Edmond confided to his journal, “I want to depict two acrobats, two brothers who love each other has my brother and I have loved each other.” His idea was that these brothers would not only work together as he did with Jules, but literally support each other: “Their spines are, so to speak, common property” and they would strive to develop their strengths and skills to the point that they could perform feats previously considered impossible.

Edmond visited the Cirque Olympique in Paris while writing the book, and was particularly taken by the act of the Hanlon-Lees, whose blend of tumbling, juggling, and knockabout clowning the French called entortillage. The Zemganno brothers achieve acrobatic feats to rival those of the Hanlon-Lees, but instead of juggling, they incorporate the playing of violins (which was probably easier to describe than it would have been to perform).

The Zemganno brothers mirror the de Goncourts: Gianni, the elder, is able and temperate; Nello, the younger, is more talented and hot-headed. But they commit to their partnership and a vision of becoming legendary performers when still young, and work their way up, from a humble circus traveling around France by wagon and cart, to an initial attempt to join a grand circus in Paris and then, when that fails, to London, where they spend years studying the English form of highly physical clowning and tumbling. Finally, having worked on a series of tricks in secret, they return and are quickly taken into the troupe of the Deux-Cirques, the premier indoor circus in Paris.

Their act is a combination of comedy, melodrama, and physical magic. At its climax, Gianni appears to humiliate Nello, who falls to the ground and lays there prostrate. Then, suddenly, he is transformed:

His muscles worked in a way beyond their normal powers and danger-point, his loins became hollows, his shoulder blades jutted fantastically, and his spine took on an unaccustomed curve, archied like the crop of a wading bird strayed from another planet. His muscles were one mass of quick, tiny ripples, like those seen beneath the flaccid skin of a snake. All that the audience could see now was a creature flying without wings, a crawling, unearthly, demon-haunting quality of movement associated with beasts of ill-omen and horrible fables. But at last the demon was driven out of the sprite’s bosom.

Despite their successful, however, outside the ring, they lead “a quiet, orderly, intimate, sober and chaste life.” Their focus, their passion is to push the limits of their bodies and continue to master ever-more-difficult stunts.

When an American trick rider, la Tompkins, joins the circus, however, the bond between Gianni and Nello strains. Not so much out of romance as the realization that la Tompkins’ act is of a level of polish and mastery that puts theirs to shame. And this drives Nello in particular to attempt riskier leaps. Anyone who’s seen a circus movie knows where this leads.

The Zemganno Brothers is that rarity, a 19th century novel that is neither novella nor three-volume behemoth. Under 200 pages in its excellent English translation by Lester Clark and Iris Allan, it’s as lean and swift as the Zemganno brothers themselves. While certainly not a masterpiece, it’s a memorable story and a moving tribute from one brother to another.

The Zemganno Brothers, by Edmond de Goncourt, translated by Lester Clark and Iris Allan
London: Alvin Redman, 1957

The Twelve Days of Christmas, by Venetia Murray (1968)

The Twelve Days of Christmas by Venetia Murray

Venetia Murray’s novel The Twelve Days of Christmas (1968) has a reputation for being a cult novel, though I suspect that’s largely due to a certain passage that’s been quoted several times in potpourri books by Jilly Cooper and others. It comes from a scene in which two lovers are laying in bed in a discreet Paris hotel after making love. “I need some new pants,” the woman tells the man, which leads him to do a quick bit of the kind of mental calculus that’s one price of carrying on an affair:

After all, having committed himself to all this expenditure, he might as well get the best of it. And pants cost less than some things. But he was not looking forward to the moment when they would walk together down the Faubourg St Honoré. A happy thought occurred to him. Tomorrow was Sunday and the shops in the Rue St Honoré would be closed both on Sunday and Monday. This Sarah had forgotten. He realized this meant that he would have to keep her in bed for most of today.

Sarah is Sarah Yeates, in line to become Lady Yeates whenever her grandfather the Earl dies. The man is Simon Burford, a married publisher who’s told him wife that he’s attending a French publishing conference in Lyons. Which is just the sort of thing that French publishers organize … five days before Christmas.

But amorous complexities and moral quandries are the warps and woofs of Venetia Murray’s fictional fabric in The Twelve Days of Christmas. Sarah is divorced from her third husband and has had so many affairs that during her Paris getaway she has to stay two steps ahead of herself to avoid leading her current lover into someplace she’s been with one of the others. For Paris and London are small towns when it comes to people of their class and amatory habits:

There had been a memorable occasion in some restaurant in the King’s Road, where too many people who had crossed currents in their lives too often, had all run into each other having dinner at separate tables. Henry’s ex-wife had been there; she had been with a man with whom Suzy had once had an affair. Catharine had been there with someone she should not have been there with, since she was supposed to be a respectable married woman even if her husband was once again away. Some irrelevant Italian girl was there.

With so many matchings and mismatchings going on, some irrelevant man or woman is bound to find themselves the leftover in such scenes. When Simon flies off to Paris — sorry, Lyons — Catharine, his wife (second marriage for each) heads off to a psychedelic party at the Ritz and winds up falling for Mark, a novelist and leftover man. The party is being thrown by Catharine’s ambiguously trans(Atlantic) friend Elizabeth, who’s wealthy enough to persuade the management of the Ritz to look past the stoned half-naked bodies that litter the floor of her suite at the end of the party.

The Twelve Days of Christmas is certainly an artifact of the Swinging Sixties, but the irony is that the lion’s share of the licentiousness is in the hands of the monied/salaried/mortgaged thirty-somethings. Perhaps this is because the book is very much a roman à clef. According to Murray’s obituary in the Guardian, it was “a thinly disguised and pungent portrait of young, spoilt marrieds playing around in London in the early 1960s.”

Venetia Murray in the mid-1960s.

At the time Murray wrote the book, she was between her second and third marriages and was part of a social set whose interconnections — marital, sexual, familial, and professional — were easily as intricate as any in the novel. The granddaughter of the renowned classicist and humanist Gilbert Murray and daughter of the journalist and politician Basil Murray (rumored to be the model of Evelyn Waugh’s character Basil Seal), Venetia Murray had been among the more privileged child evacuees of Blitz, spending most of the war living with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and his wife in Washington, D.C. and attending the exclusive Potomac School for girls.

When she was 18, she stayed with the novelist Nancy Mitford in Paris so she could attend a gala ball. Mitford wrote of Venetia to Waugh:

I’ve got a Beauty of 18 coming tomorrow which is a lovely treat, she came with her mother to buy a ball dress, which she has duly done, & I’ve persuaded the mother to leave her with me for a few days. She is called Venetia Murray, daughter of my dear old drunken cousin the late Basil M & she is an old fashioned Beauty, that is to say rather large & in a perpetual state of puppy like ecstasy which I find very attractive — like a puppy which wags itself rather than its tail.

Murray attributes to her character Sarah an incident that took place during her stay with Mitford:

Once upon a time when Sarah had been very young and in Paris she had been allowed, though only sixteen, to go to a ball with some young people. But she had been told to be back by twelve. She had been staying with her god-mother, a witty and well-known novelist but not a connoisseur of the behaviour of young girls. Sarah arriving back from the ball at five — in face she had only been having fun, not doing anything that in those days people like her god-mother would have called “wrong” — had run across the large courtyard in her ball gown, aware of how late she was. Her god-mother had been waiting up, worried that Sarah, in her charge, might have done something “wrong.” Her god-mother had said, “What is the use of running the last hundred yards when you are five hours late?”

I suspect that anyone familiar with the goings-on of London literati in the 1950s and 1960s could find many other examples of Murray’s appropriation of real-life characters and situations. Simon and Catherine rent a bedroom in their North London house to Suzy, an arrangement that sounds similar to the one Murray and Sally Newton, daughter of the actor Robert Newton, had in the house owned by poet and cricket writer Alan Ross. An annotated edition of The Twelve Days of Christmas would, in fact, likely be a valuable piece of social and literary history. As a work of fiction, however, it’s amusing but superficial — in its way as dated as a Regency romance (Murray later became a historian of the Regency) — and not a 1960s counterpart to Waugh’s early novels about the Bright Young Things of 1920s London.

The Twelve Days of Christmas, by Venetia Murray
London: Collins, 1968

The Case is Altered, by William Plomer (1932)

Dust jacket from the first US edition of The Case is Altered.

This is a guest post by Christopher Hawtree.

The Figures in the Boarding-House Carpet

Many a novel has sprung from a paragraph in a newspaper. Notable among them was that New York Times snippet about a houseful of murder victims in the Midwest which Truman Capote chanced to see — and so began the trail that led to In Cold Blood. Three decades earlier, William Plomer returned to London after a weekend away when his eye was caught at the railway station by something larger than a paragraph: posters announced SHOCKING BAYSWATER TRAGEDY.

The newspaper revealed to him — in late-November 1929 — that this tragedy had taken place in the very house where he lodged. It was a narrow escape, for it is likely that he would have joined his landlady in the mortuary had he not been out of town. She was the common-law wife of a man given to the obsession that she would succumb to any man who paid her court. Mania turned into murder as he set upon her with an open razor while their child looked on; with her dead, the man looked for Plomer, but the police were soon on the scene, samples taken — and, in due course, the returning novelist cleaned up the remaining mess.

Hardly surprisingly, that friendship with his landlady and the encounter with the blood which had spurted from her veins were to haunt him. Two years later, in the summer of 1932, he published his third novel The Case is Altered. After the South Africa of Turbott Wolfe and the Japan of Sado, this was a raw but deeply felt account of those clinging onto life by dint of a rented room in somebody else’s house.

Since his childhood, split between South Africa and terms at Rugby School, Plomer’s life had since been varied, and he knew such humble lodgings as well as Patrick Hamilton, who was to make a career from boarding houses, with such works as Hangover Square. Another boarding house novel, Marie Belloc-Lowndes’s The Lodger, inspired not only Plomer but also Norman Collins, whose London Belongs to Me has recently won new attention. One might also think of works by Muriel Spark, Emeric Pressburger, Tennessee Williams and Sarah Waters as examples of the continuing fascination of such settings, which provides dramatic unity while characters move in and out the shadows of rooms whose carpet is no longer as fresh as the time when it had been obtained on an instalment plan.

Cover of the Hogarth Press edition of The Case is Altered.

The Case is Altered proved to be Plomer’s most popular novel, one of the bestsellers of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, as had been Orlando, Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians and Saturday Night at the Greyhound. The last, by Plomer’s friend John Hampson has something in common with The Case is Altered: set in a pub, its timescale is limited and to the fore is a cruel husband.

According to Plomer, the houses in his fictional Cambodia Crescent “have the self-righteous air of a selfish and uncultivated person who thinks that he is a good and wise, and the ornamentation around the doors, windows and chimneys forms a lasting insult to the beauties of natural stone and careful craftsmanship”. As this is in hailing distance of Kensington Gardens, one can be sure that Plomer’s house would now command cool millions.

Almost a century ago, it had simply been spotted by Mrs. Beryl Fernandez (with her impoverished and ailing common-law husband Paul), who thought that with care, it could become a profitable enterprise. She planned to run with the help of her friend Mrs. Gambits, “who belonged to that numerous and depressing class of women who are not exactly of the kind known as decayed gentlewomen, but whose chief aim in life is to be taken for decayed gentlewomen”. This was an era when even Mrs. Fernandez’s modest funds could stretch to the hiring of a manservant, Mr. Empringham “with grey hair and rather a puzzled expression on his face, as though he couldn’t quite make out why life had treated him quite the way it had, or what it was likely to do to him next”.

Among the lodgers are a couple, the Rudds, forever in hope of winning crossword competitions and siring a child. They are joined by Constantia Brixworth who is down on her luck after losing her money in an American railroad scheme. She is friendly with Frances Haymer, a former explorer, to whem she regularly entertains with tales of her fellow residents, whom the writer regards with all the curious avidity that she had showed in chronicling foreign tribes.

This is a finely-observed novel. Plomer describes Miss Haymer when she ventured out, as she “used a stick with a rubber end, and tottered along on heels that were rather too high, supporting, like some caryatid, a large, oldfashioned hat, decorated with a bird or two and some fruit, as in her heyday.” Of particular interest to both Miss Brixworth and Miss Haymer is young Eric Alston, who works in a greengrocer’s “and had a very fresh complexion, as if his cheeks were reflecting a rosy glow from the apples and peaches which it was his work to sell”. Eric is walking out with a girl who works in the kitchen of a clothes shop which, called Pélagie, proclaims itself as trading in “Robes and Modes”.

And so the scene is set for lives of aspiration running into frustration and worse — none blessed with “that assurance which the possession of money brings with it”. The novel’s title has a double meaning. A Miss Brixworth says to Alston (to whom she offers tea and omelettes), “When I had more money, I used to have an ordinary afternoon tea and late dinner, but now the case is rather altered…”. And nearby the house is a pub with that very name: a plaque relates that “it was originally called The Three Cranes but in the eighteenth century a famous highwayman was caught there unawares by a young lord whom he had robbed. ‘Now, sir,’ cried the peer as soon as he had made sure of his capture, ‘it seems the case is altered!”‘

William Plomer in 1932.

Briskly told in nineteen chapters across some three hundred pages, the novel has something of the “tea-tabling” manner for which Christopher Isherwood praised his and Plomer’s mentor, E.M. Forster. Despite a cinema fire, dramatic incident is rare; everything turns around the simmering of domestic matters, one small table-side event knocking into another much as a billiard ball sets up a chain reaction across the green baize. Worthy of Forster, or Proust, is the observation of Paul Fernandez who chain-smokes in the dead of night, the night-lamp’s shadows an emblem of his maniacal anxiety. “The idea of cruelty (which is only a diseased form of sympathy) was beginning to exercise a fascination over his thoughts. Not content with love, and love fully requited at that, he wanted power as well, he wanted to command more love, a stronger, more intense kind of intimacy than is humanly possible, and so he began to seek how he might obtain such power.”

And so begins a descent which will take down many with it against a background which forms an indelible view of the Thirties, whether in spiritualist gatherings, a mediation upon the nature of conscience, a suggestion of the homosexuality which had been to the fore in Sado, or advertisement hoardings “covered with huge posters. Each of them showed a gigantic human figure, and each figure seemed to live in a strange world of the imagination. A giantess in evening dress was in raptures at having discovered a new tooth paste to apply to a set of teeth that looked like the keys of a piano”. Whether observing people’s tendency to walk towards a window when contemplating the future or a man who “indulged in none of those humorous sallies which are so important a part of an auctioneer’s technique”, Plomer shows those powers of description which made people relish his letters’ arrival (would there were a collection of them).

Rather than dwell on the murder which was its inspiration, one relishes The Case is Altered for its life:

an immense murmur made up of the traffic of human beings going about their business and pleasure, a rich and subtle and continuous sound which it takes more than motor-cars to make, for it must contain as well the cries of infants, the ranting of demagogues, the tapping of the blind man’s stick, the happy laughter of young girls, the vomiting of drunkards, the stirring of squirrels in their sleep, the fall of leaves, the growth of trees, the threats of blackmailers, the solicitations of whores, the shuffling steps of lecherous old men, the banter of soldiers, the coy shrieks of housemaids, the shy kisses of young lovers, the worm in the bud, and the millionaire’s last words.

The novel put Plomer’s quiet life in good stead, although he was not to know such success again until its very end, in 1973, when his sequence The Butterfly Ball was illustrated by Alan Aidridge, who brought a similar style to his work in The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics. FThough his satirical and lyrical poems are a particular delightr, Plomer may now be best known as the publisher’s reader who, in the face of opposition, persuaded Cape to take on the first of Ian Fleming’s James Bonds novels, Casino Royale, and worked closely on the rest of them.

How has the equally if differently thrilling The Case is Altered fallen from print? It last appeared half a century ago in a hardback series called the Landmark Library. Perhaps some have balked at another aspect of the Thirties. As early as page twenty-six, one learns that “even if Miss Brixworth had not been able to see at once that Mrs. Fernandez was a Jewess, it would be soon have been able to tell that she was one, by the way she began over-emphasising her partiality to bacon for breakfast”. Two pages later, she “launched out into a sea of Jewish visions of luxury and comfort far beyond her means” and further in, there is “that Jewish impulse towards grandeur so noticeable in Mrs. Fernandez”.

Plomer was a humane man. These are the tropes of an era, similar to the first edition of Brighton Rock, which featured a Jewish Mr. Big in a seafront hotel (later editions turned him into an Italian, as if that made it all right). The narrator of The Case is Altered notes that “you can never make out whether the Jews want to be aristocrats or socialists. Half-way between East and West, they maybe somewhere near the truth, if the truth really lies in paradox. Jesus Christ was the greatest and most paradoxical of the Jews. He had the most aristocratic nature imaginable, and yet he lived with the lowest of the low. He was unique, and yet expressed himself in terms of what is ordinary and universal”.

For all that “Jews kiss and kill at the same time, just as a sportsman may feel a real affection for the game he slaughters”, The Case is Altered has a power which impressed its first publisher, Leonard Woolf, a Jew. As felicitous as it is raw, here is a novel which remains as provoking as when it appeared in 1932.

Christopher Hawtree is a writer and editor. You can read more on his website, ChristopherHawtree.com, and follow him on Twitter (@chrishawtree).

The Case is Altered, by William Plomer
London: Hogarth Press, 1932
New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1932

The Death of a Nobody, by Jules Romains (1911)

Cover of the Signet Classics edition of The Death of a Nobody.

The Death of a Nobody was Jules Romains’ attempt to answer to an apparently simple question: when does a person die? Jacques Godard is a retired and widowed railway engineer who lives quietly in a little apartment in Paris. He visits his wife’s grave each week, occasionally joins his old colleagues at the bar, and otherwise mostly keeps to himself. Not long after climbs the stairs to the top of the Pantheon to look out over Paris — something he’d never done — he feels a sharp pain in his back, and after a few days of weakness and discomfort, he experiences something quite new and strange: “Something which was in him, which had served no purpose but to hold his life together, something contractive, elastic, formative a sort of mainspring suddenly let go, relaxed, expanded, and with a shiver of released vibrations lost itself m space.” And just as he realizes what is happening, he dies.

Yet Romains proceeds to argue that this was only his physical death. For a little while later, his apartment building’s porter finds the body and has to make the initial arrangements — sending a telegram to Godard’s aged parents in the Auvergne, informing the medical officer at the maison communale, telling the other residents. All of which bring Godard to mind for dozens of people, either as a memory or as an image of the person he may have been.

And later still, when Godard’s father has made the wearying overnight journey to Paris and the small crowd gathers to accompany his casket to the ceremony, he comes to life again in their thoughts:

No one could tell exactly how much of Godard s spirit had been saved by this close-packed gathering. When a servant-girl carelessly breaks a full bottle which she is carrying her hands come together quickly as if trying to catch the spurting wine, and a moment after nothing is left but a few reddish traces m the folds of her palms and a smell as of vomit. The sudden huddhng together of human beings was just like this; they were like fingers curling up to catch the essence escaping from the broken flesh. But they were not sure of having caught anything; and when the coffin was in position and the hearse lurched forward, the people walking in the procession felt an obscure sense of disillusionment.

Bit by bit, those thoughts of Jacques Godard evaporate. His mother dies, then his father, then there is no one who remembers him as a child. And soon the only person to think of him is the young man who took that telegram to his parents — and for him, Godard is nothing more than the idea of a person who was once alive. Yet this is still enough to make him wonder, “What will be left of the thing that I am?”

Recently, in rereading Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage as part of a reading group we’re running this year, I came across the following line: “No man, or woman, can ever engage the whole of my interest who believes, as you believe … that my one driving-force, the sole and shapely end of my existence is the formation within myself of another human being….” Richardson’s protagonist, Miriam Henderson, is arguing with her would-be lover, Hypo Wilson (a fictional counterpart for H. G. Wells), who maintains that a woman’s primary obligation is to have children — indeed, that she cannot become a mature writer until she has had a child.

Except, I misread the key phrase as “the … end of my existence is the formation of myself within another human being….” And ever since then, I’ve wondered if that might, in fact, be as valid a premise as anything else one might come up with. Jules Romains, at least, would agree.

The Death of a Nobody, by Jules Romains, translated by Desmond MacCarthy and Sydney Waterlow
London: Howard Latimer Limited, 1914

Mort de quelqu’un

The Day’s End, by Pamela Bright (1959)

Cover of the first U.K. edition of The Day’s End.

My friend Robert Nedelkoff recommended this book to me after stumbling across a reference in a 1980 collection of Ronald Firbank’s prose titled Firbank: Memoirs and Critiques edited by Mervyn Horder. In Horder’s preface, he dismisses the notion of dramatic death scenes, writing, “We are assured by a competent technical observer of the subject that people tend to meet the moment of their death in the same manner as they live — the self effacing quietly in their sleep, the egocentric giving the maximum trouble to all concerned, the theatrical speechifying away con brio, the athletic with one foot out of bed, and so on.”

Horder’s competent technical observer, we learn from a footnote, was Pamela Bright, whose The Day’s End he describes as “a neglected book of 1956” — which of course caused Robert to reach for the Neglected Books phone. It sounded like the real deal, and I was delighted to find it awaiting patiently on the Internet Archive (link).

The Day’s End is a study in how we die. Set on the cancer ward of an unnamed women’s hospital on the western edge of London, the book takes us through two days on the ward as seen by its head nurse (Bright, though she never identifies herself in the book). There are old women and young, some there just for an exam or two, others doomed to spend their last days within its walls. Bright confirms Horder’s paraphrase above, but more from the perspective of a nurse:

The ways people die are as varied as the pictures on the wall ofa gallery, and each death remembered for a different reason: one for its setting; one for its atmosphere and whether there was summer in it or frost, or darkness and an oxygen cylinder; one for its human characters, for its peace, for its distress, and whether it was in the order of things or sudden in its unexpectedness.

At the time Bright wrote the book, she had been a practicing nurse for over 18 years. Earning her cap just after the outbreak of World War One, she served in military hospitals in Palestine and, after the D-Day invasion, trailing the British Army through northern Europe. The latter experience she described in her first book, Life in Our Hands (1955), and there are flashbacks to her time in Palestine throughout The Day’s End.

Also throughout the book are mentions of the stress of being responsible for a ward full of patients and a team of nurses and orderlies that almost seem like Bright’s reminders to herself: “it demanded constant wariness, the habit of keen observation, the noting of others’ moods and tempers, the habit of explaining, and the ability to learn the knack of not always depending on the advice or backing of others, but of believing in one’s own judgment and ability.” As she rides the bus home after her shift, her thoughts scroll through the patients — who’s improved, who’s failing, who may need to be shifted to one of the side rooms where a patient nearing death can have some hours of privacy and peace — and which nurses need to be encouraged or restrained the next day. She acknowledges, though, that she gains a form of comfort from that stress: “Although theoretically I abhor the business of being busy and in a hurry, yet I must confess that often it is in that condition I find myself happiest — it is a drug, and one can forget.”

Caring for a terminally ill patient proves among the most demanding of a nurse’s duties because it represents, in effect, a failure. So, on top of the inbred discretion of the English middle class there is a reluctance to draw attention to the obvious: “However acute a patient’s illness, we never admitted the signs of impending death.” Some of this reluctance stems from the difficulty of admitting how much about death remains unknown to medical professionals, but some also results from having seen the process repeated hundreds of times. “A dying man rarely looks death in the face,” Bright reports, “and who are we to tell him the truth? Why should he not go on building castles in the air when to some extent he has been doing it all his life?”

What makes The Day’s End memorable, however, are not such generalizations but Bright’s portraits of her patients. Mario, the dashingly handsome Italian soldier in her hospital in Palestine, who insisted on wearing a pink hairnet each night to keep his long, oiled black hair from getting mussed — until the night when he no longer called for it and Bright knew he would not last until morning. Or the lonely woman whose sad tale takes less than a sentence: “Miss Smart, for instance, who had had not a single friend and who couldn’t be forgotten when she died, for no one remembered her while she was alive….” And especially Mrs. Ferrett, possessed of a malevolent intensity worthy of a character in Balzac:

Her face seemed crudely sculptured, following the curves of a gargoyle on some cathedral front; and as one invariably gazes with delight upon such goblins and the workman’s freedom of expression, so one had to smile at Mrs. Ferrett. When she sat in bed she was coiled up in the smallest possible space, her chin almost resting on her knees, her hands close to her sides, like a child in embryo: when she was on her feet she moved softly and half inclined sideways like a crab: when her sharp eyes glistened, she pierced the ward from end to end and gleamed upon her neighbours, nurses, visitors, indeed everything. Mumbling, or munching peppermints; crabbed and cranky, she would gaze upwards at the plain corners and downwards at the dust, and in silent glee hug to herself some fearful secret.

She occupied the first place among the simplest. But she occupied it with such force, daring and calm that none of us would have thought of taking it away from her. This selfish, wicked woman bewitched even the people least susceptible to such influence: us nurses and the doctors.

Bright chronicled her career in a total of five books: Breakfast at Night (1956), about her training at an Edinburgh hospital; Life in Our Hands about her service in Europe during the war; The Day’s End, which found her in mid-career; A Poor Man’s Riches (1966), about her experiences caring for Palestinian refugees in the early 1960s; and Hospital at Night (1971), a fictionalized account based on her time as chief nurse of a busy metropolitan hospital. After retiring from service, she wrote a biography of her ancestor, Dr. Richard Bright, a pioneering surgeon who first described the ailment of the kidneys that now bears his name. She died in 2012 at the age of 98.

The Day’s End, by Pamela Bright
London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1959

All the Brave Promises, by Mary Lee Settle (1966)

cover of US edition of All the Brave Promises by Mary Lee Settle (1966)

When Studs Terkel titled his 1984 oral history of the American experience in World War Two The Good War, he meant it ironically. Terkel’s book is full of accounts of G. I.s and civilians who could still, decades afterward, think of themselves as casualties. Thanks, however, to Tom Brokaw’s hagiographic 1998 bestseller The Greatest Generation, however, the honeyed glow that Terkel refused to give his portrait of the war is now once again well-established and part of the current dementia among some Americans for a history that’s all nice, clean, and guilt-free.

If you count yourself among these folks, Mary Lee Settle’s 1966 memoir of her time in the Royal Air Force, All the Brave Promises, is not for you. Indeed, Settle opens the book with a salvo designed to eradicate any inclination a reader might have of looking on that time nostalgically:

We are accused of being nostalgic. We have been. What we have remembered are events. The Second World War was, for most of us, a state, a state of war, not an event. It was a permeation, a deadening, a waiting, hard to recall. What we have told about is the terrifying relief of battle or the sweet, false relief of leave.

These were not the causes of a psychic shock from which a generation of people are only now beginning to emerge. For every ‘historic’ event, there were thousands of unknown, plodding people, caught up in a deadening authority, learning to survive by keeping quiet, by ‘getting by,’ by existing in secret, underground; conscripted, shunted, numbered. It took so many of them, so many of their gray days and their uprooted lives. It taught them evasive ways to survive. These ways, dangerous to the community and to the spirit, have been a part of the peace.

“It taught them evasive ways to survive” is not how Tom Brokaw wanted us to look on the experience of American veterans of World War Two. But it’s the sort of bracingly brutal respect for honesty that makes Mary Lee Settle’s writing seem at times like a slap across the face. Not an insulting slap — a “Wake Up!” slap.

Settle came to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, the women’s arm and second-class component of the Royal Air Force by a circuitous route. After marrying an Englishman named Rodney Weathersbee in 1939, she followed him to Canada when he joined the RAF and was sent there for training and delivered their son Christopher while still there as a military wife. The marriage soon fell apart, though, and she headed back to West Virginia, where her parents took over the care of Christopher while Settle headed to Washington, D.C. to get involved in war work.

During that period before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it wasn’t easy for an American woman to get into the British forces. She started by applying at the British Embassy in Washington, where she was aided by the young Roald Dahl and the playright and World War One veteran flyer Ben Travers. Then it was a matter of getting to England, which she finally did in October 1942, along with a boatfull of Roayl Navy and RAF trainees.

Through Weatherbee and her embassy friends, a posh welcome was arranged and Settle spent a week enjoying the finest comforts wartime London could offer. But then she reported for duty and the fun part came to an end.

Her first day as a WAAF was a foretaste of what much of the next 13 months would be like. With her foreign accent, refined looks, and High Street clothes, Settle was quickly labelled an outsider by her fellow enlistees, most of whom came from poor families in the East End. They stuck together like a chorus, commenting savagely on the faults of their superiors and anyone else who wasn’t “their type.” For Settle, “It was the first glimpse of the stratification, almost Chinese in its complication and formality, which covered everything from a hairdo to a state of health to sugar in tea and by which each Englishman holds himself apart, himself his castle, from his fellows.” Although she did manage to establish a few weak friendships during her time, Settle son grew accustomed to her permanent position in the eyes of the other WAAFs as an undesirable and untrusted alien.

The year or so Settle spent in the WAAFs included some of the grimmest days of the war. This was the long, slow, unthrilling buildup to D-Day and beyond. Settle was assigned to RAF Hullavington, the Empire Central Flying School, where much of the RAF’s basic flight training took place, There, she was assigned as a radio operator, spending hours each day in the darkened control room and trying to communicate with pilots over weak and heavily jammed signals. It was like staring into a solid fog hoping to make out the faintest shapes, and it eventually led to aural hallucinations that nearly drove her mad.

cover of UK edition of All the Brave Promises by Mary Lee Settle (1966)

The food was bad, the showers cold, the barracks largely unheated, and the days full of damp, grey, chilly English weather. The WAAFs were at the bottom of the station’s pecking order, lower even than the kitchen staff, some of who were prisoners of war. To make matters worse, any possibility for camraderie was undermined by the fact that WAAFs were assigned to positions individually, rather than as a formation. As Settle puts it,

It showed even in the language — one was ‘attached’ to a station, each new place approached without knowing a soul, so that to be posted off your station was a thing to be feared and in it was a vague sense of punishment. Such isolation among the vast majority of the ground crews bred an unseen poisoned miasma, secret beneath the structure as sex was secret to authority.

Her work and the living conditions proved exhausting, relentless, and utterly thankless. Any sense of contributing to a greater cause was life. On the other hand, as she realized one afternoon off as she cycled through some nearby villages, being treated like a cog in the war machine brought a novel, if odd, sense of freedom:

[For] the first time I sensed an irresponsibility, an ease of letting go. My uniform was issue, my bicycle was issue. I was utterly without worry about where my food was coming from. So long as I did what I was told, kept silence and remained acquiescent, I had freedom from decision, freedom from want, freedom from anxiety for survival. That, too, seemed out of my hands—the deci- sion of an abstract, an order from “above.” For a few minutes the rose hedges swept past me; I felt an almost mystic contentment. Then, even in the sun, cold fright caught me and I pedaled faster, as if I could ride away from the space of that feeling. I had experienced the final negative freedom, that of the slave.

There’s another one of those Settle slaps: “the negative freedom … of the slave.”

After a particularly long and demanding shift, Settle collapsed and was diagnosed as severely underweight and malnourished. She was sent to London to recouperate and quickly realized that her talents and temperament were better suited for work with the U.S. Office of War Information. The OWI arranged for her separation from the WAAF and her induction — as a major, though without uniform — into the U.S. Army.

The framing facts of Settle’s story — her marriage, her son, her escape into the OWI — are missing from All the Brave Promises. It took her much longer to provide these facts, in her unfinished memoir Learning to Fly, which was published shortly after her death in 2005. All the Brave Promises is not, however, a book that depends on external context to succeed. Her aim, as she later wrote, was simply to document how thousands of young English women were used by their country and to counter what she called “the official peacetime bravery … the self-congratulation of it, its terrible mistakes.” “It was such a tiny arrow thrown,” she acknowledged, “But it was all I could do.”

With an aim as keen as Mary Lee Settle’s however, even tiny arrows can be deadly. If you should ever find yourself giving into notions of the romance of war, I recommend All the Brave Promises as an antidote.

All the Brave Promises: Memories of Aircraft Woman 2nd Class 2146391, by Mary Lee Settle
New YorK: Delacorte Press, 1966
London: Heinemann, 1966

An Update on the Recovered Books Series from Boiler House Press

The Recovered Books logo.

I haven’t made much noise about the Recovered Books series I’m editing for Boiler House Press, but as we will soon release our sixth title, Gertrude Trevelyan’s Two Thousand Million Man-Power, I thought it was worth sharing a look back at our first year and a look at where we’re headed for 2023 and 2024.

After I finished my dissertation (thesis in the U.S.) on Virginia Faulkner for the MA Biography/Creative Non-fiction program at the University of East Anglia and while my wife and I were awaiting the end of COVID lockdowns to make our move back to the U.S., I approached Nathan Hamilton, the publisher at Boiler House Press and director of the University Publishing Project at UEA, and offered to help with any publication chores he had. As an ‘in at the deep-end’ training exercise, he asked me to usher the first four titles in its Beyond Criticism series to publication and I was able to see them through to release in May 2021.

While working on this project, I asked Nathan if he would be interested in publishing one of my favorites of the hundreds of books I’ve featured on this site: Herbert Clyde Lewis’s Gentleman Overboard. I had already confirmed with Lewis’s son Michael that the book was in the public domain and I felt it could fine a small but receptive readership based on the success of its Spanish edition from La Bestia Equilatera in Buenos Aires. “Why not do a whole series?” he responded. He invited me to put together a proposal and with him to form an editorial board.

Luckily, Nathan had done some groundwork already with two UEA professors, Thomas Smith and Hilary Emmett. Working with Tom and Hilary, he’d devised a project whereby, through an undergraduate module led by Thomas and Hilary studying 19th century American children’s literature, they were preparing to publish Susan Coolidge’s novel What Katy Did. Although well-known in the U.S., the book hadn’t been available in the U.K. for some years.

So, we agreed to join forces and establish Recovered Books as a series covering both adult and children’s book. As announced in The Bookseller in July 2021, the aim of the series is to bring “unfairly forgotten books of exceptional merit and resounding relevance to the attention of today’s engaged readers.” We set to work on getting What Katy Did and Gentleman Overboard ready for printing and distribution, but also on a production plan for further titles in 2022 and beyond.

We were fortunate to be able to work with some of UPP’s network of terrific book designers. Nathan arranged for two designers who’d worked on other UEA Publishing Project publications. Emily Benton worked with Thomas and Hilary’s students to design What Katy Did for maximum accessibility by a variety of readers, including those with reading challenges such as dyslexia, and Louise Aspinall worked with me to adapt the Boiler House Press fiction design and come up with the logo for Recovered Books.

Even though no joke is improved by an explanation, I will point out that the logo has a couple of them. It shows a book with the letters RE on the cover (RE-covered, see?) and the lower right edge (the pages) incorporates the “smokestacks” logo of Boiler House Press. The smokestacks commemorate the first building erected on the UEA campus: the heating plant (boiler house).

Building further on elements of Boiler House Press’ branding, Louise helped us establish a template for the series that maintains a consistent look and feel while including a variety of elements unique to each title. The cover design is the most obvious variable, of course. Louise created a modern adaptation of the original U.S. dust jacket for Gentleman Overboard that conveys in simple, powerful terms the predicament of the novel’s forlorn hero, Henry Preston Standish. It’s a design, I’m happy to announce, is being used for the German edition of the book, Gentleman über Bord, due out from Mare Books in March 2023.

The cover designs of the 1937 (left) and 2021 (right) editions of Gentleman Overboard.

Other design elements that vary with each title include a full-page photo of the author opposite the title page and a glyph (the life preserver on the title page) used throughout the book as a divider.

The facing and title pages from Gentleman Overboard.

We also included two-page images for the endpapers at the start and end of each book, images that convey a sense of the narrative or the spirit of the book. In this case, an advertisement for a cruise of the type Standish takes from Honolulu before his unfortunate accident and a barren moonlight seascape — the emptiness left after he goes under for the last time.

The front and back endpaper illustrations from Gentleman Overboard.

For me, the biggest challenge was laying out the plan for 2022 and beyond. Or rather, carrying out the plan. For each title, unless it’s in the public domain — and most of our Recovered Books titles are not — three contracts have to be established: one for the legacy permissions, one for the book’s introduction, and one for its afterword. With the legacy permissions, the primary obstacle is often the difficulty in locating who has the legal authority to sign such an agreement. I have been lucky in most cases so far, but a number of the books I’d most like to reissue are still on hold as we continue our hunt for the responsible legatees.

One of our aims for the Recovered Books series is to help current readers discover these wonderful books, and a short introduction by a contemporary writer with some name recognition is part of how we do that. We’ve been lucky in attracting the support of writers such as George Szirtes, Vivian Gornick, Julia Blackburn, and Rachel Hore to this end. But another aim is to encourage further study and research, to help enrich the understanding of the canon by bringing these neglected books and writers back into English departments. And for that, we’re recruiting scholars such as Dr. Paula Rabinowitz, professor emerita of the University of Minnesota and Dr. Nicola Darwood of the University of Bedfordshire, to write afterwords placing each book in its historical and literary context.

This May, we released two titles in the series. Stella Benson’s Pull Devil, Pull Baker is a book that’s fascinated me ever since I stumbled across it a Missoula bookstore back in 2007 and wrote about it here. It’s easily one of the least classifiable books I’ve ever come across: part memoir, part fantasy, part criticism, part melodrama, part revisionism — really a book that anticipates by decades the sort of fiction/nonfiction hybrids that are regarded as uniquely 21st century inventions. Pull Devil, Pull Baker is so odd that after Julia Blackburn, who generously agreed to consider writing the introduction, first read it, she wrote me asking if I would release her from the commitment. Fortunately, I convinced her to take another look and she reached a perhaps grudging truce with Stella Benson’s mercurial creation.

Our second May release proved unexpectedly satisfying. I had been in contact with the journalist and Oscar-winning filmmaker Peter Davis after writing about Life Signs, a novel written by his first wife Johanna Davis. Peter is the son of the film producer Frank Davis, one of Irving Thalberg’s right-hand men, and Tess Slesinger, who wrote several works of fiction before moving to Hollywood, becoming a screenwriter, and marrying Davis, and he confirmed that his mother’s short stories, which had been collected several times, were out of print. Peter was delighted to work with us to publish a new collection and suggested that we look into Slesinger’s uncollected work as well. With help from UEA’s library, I was able to obtain copies of all Slesinger’s uncollected stories and sketches, which appeared in magazines ranging from The New Yorker and Vanity Fair to small magazines such as Pagany and This Quarter. He also agreed that we would use the title of Slesinger’s first collection, Time: The Present, instead of that of the 1971 collection he helped edit (On Being Told That Her Second Husband Has Taken His First Lover and Other Stories). I think it’s safe to say that the result is the single best introduction to Tess Slesinger’s short fiction and a collection that merits a place in the American literature section of any college library.

We had a bit of a puzzle over the cover for Pull Devil, Pull Baker. The title comes from an expression connoting a contest between two opposing forces, but in this case, the opposing forces are Stella Benson’s sense of truth and the significantly more fantastic sense of her devil, the down-and-out Russian nobleman Count Nicolas de Toulouse Lautrec De Savine. Louise Aspinall came up with a simple, striking image of a knotted rope caught midway between unseen hands pulling against each other. I found the photo we used for Slesinger’s Time: The Present as an illustration for “For Better, For Worse,” a story that appeared in a long-defunct women’s magazine called The Delineator, but it was Louise who had the brilliant idea to tint it a deep, dramatic purple. I fell in love with it the moment I first saw it attached to her email.

Covers for the Recovered Books editions of Pull Devil, Pull Baker and Time: The Present.

This month, we have two more books coming out. From Thomas Smith and Hilary Emmett we have Five Little Peppers & How They Grew by Margaret Sidney, again with design and editorial approach led by their undergraduate students. And we are bringing out what I hope will be the first of three or four titles by Gertrude (G. E.) Trevelyan, a writer I’ve been championing since learning of her work back in 2018. Despite its awkward title, Two Thousand Million Man-Power, which I wrote about here, is probably Trevelyan’s most accessible title, a realistic account of the lives of a couple, Katharine and Robert, from New Year’s Eve 1919 to the funeral of King George V in 1936. Trevelyan was influenced by John Dos Passos’s U. S. A.trilogy and incorporates snippets of newspaper headlines and radio reports into her text, creating a vivid picture of English life during this period. At the same time, it’s a caustic view of life in a capitalist society, one as radical in its outlook as George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. I hope that Two Thousand Million Man-Power will build upon the interest in Trevelyan’s work that started with the Abandoned Bookshop’s reissue of Appius and Virginia two years ago.

Covers of the Recovered Books editions of The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew and Two Thousand Million Man-Power.

Looking ahead, we have a full plate of reissues lined up for 2023. In May, we will release two books:

• Quarry, by Jane White
I wrote about this, White’s first novel, published in 1967, a year ago. Having read the book again several times in the course of preparing the text, I can say that this is among the most unsettling books I’ve ever read. White manages to combine a story full of evil and violence with a tone that’s almost eerily normal and dispassionate. It will not be a book people like. I do think, though, it will be a book that gets under the skin — and a book that revives interest in one of the more challenging English novelists of the 1960s and 1970s, a writer long overdue for recognition. Anne Billson is writing the introduction and Dr. Helen Hughes of the University of Sussex (and White’s daughter-in-law) the afterword.

• The Sanity Inspectors, by Friedrich Deich
This black comedy about the moral and intellectural difficulty of trying to remain good in an evil system was brought to us by Dr. Chris Maloney, a member of our editorial board and a psychotherapist with deep experience in social causes. The book was first published in 1955 and translated soon after into English. We were honored that the Hoffnung Partnership agreed to let us reuse Gerard Hoffnung’s original dust jacket illustration for our own cover. Chris Maloney wrote the afterword and the historian and novelist Sinclair McKay contributed the introduction.

In September 2023, we’re publishing two books:

• William’s Wife, by Gertrude Trevelyan
I will be eager to see how this book is received. Trevelyan’s story of how Jane Chirp goes from being a lady’s companion to scavenging for discarded produce in the gutters and dustbins of London’s markets is unlike anything I know of in English fiction of the 1930s. It’s one of the most powerful accounts of psychological breakdown I know of, and all the more so because so much of the damage is self-inflicted. Pritchett and PEN/Ackerley prize winning author Alice Jolly will provide the introduction and Dr. Ann Kennedy Smith is writing the afterword.

• Selected Poetry and Prose, by Genevieve Taggard
I discovered Genevieve Taggard’s work back in 2015 and wrote a long piece about it here. Taggard is certainly the most neglected of the major American modernist poets. Her work is full of powerful images and rooted in both a love of nature and a passion for social justice. In addition, she wrote a number of autobiographical and critical essays that are just too strong and good not to be in print. And yet, since her death in 1948, there has been no comprehensive collection of her work. I’m pleased to be working with Dr. Anne Hammond, who’s editing and providing critical commentary for the collection and the poet and biographer Terese Svoboda, who’s providing the introduction.

In November 2023, we’re bringing out three books:

• Stories by Lydia Maria Child
This collection of children’s stories by an American abolitionist and activist for the rights of woman and indigenous people will be produced by Thomas Smith and Hilary Emmett’s undergraduate programme.

• No More Giants, by Joaquina Ballard Howles
I’m really excited about this title. A story about a young woman growing up on a rance in remote northern Nevada belongs on the shelf beside Joan Didion’s early novels of California — yet it’s never been published in the United States. As I wrote here in 2021, No More Giants was published in England as part of the Hutchinson New Authors series in 1966 and quickly forgotten. The subject probably held little interest for English readers, and so the book vanished. I hope that Howles, who is in her nineties and living in London now, will be able to see her book reach U. S. readers for the first time. Judy Blunt, who directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana is writing the introduction and Dr. Nancy Cook, an expert in literature of the American West, is writing the afterword.

• Time Stood Still, by Paul Cohen-Portheim
This account of Cohen-Portheim’s confinement in England as an enemy alien during World War One is, in my opinion, one of the truly great works of humanism. A man who worked as a theatrical designer, Cohen-Portheim was not physically abused or singled out for mistreatment. Yet as he shows in moving terms, the fact of being imprisoned for no crime other than having been born in the wrong country was a punshment of a thousand little cuts: “The worst tortures of camp life were due to the small failings of one’s fellow creatures everlastingly in evidence, and to unimportant little tricks endlessly repeated.” We are fortunate to have this little classic introduced by Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps and other books, and an afterward written by Dr. Panikos Panayi of DeMontfort University, author of Prisoners of Britain: German Civilian and Combatant Internees During the First World War.

We’re still working on the details of our plan for 2024, but I can announce at least the following titles:

• Mortal Leap, by MacDonald Harris
I first discovered this book back in 1980 and as I wrote here, Mortal Leap was one of the works that convinced me that there were riches to be found in unknown and long-forgotten books. Mortal Leap has a small but passionate following on Goodreads and used copies have become almost impossible to locate.
• A new translation of Else Jerusalem’s 1909 novel Der heilige Skarabäus
After I wrote about the first English translaton of this book as The Red House, I was contacted by Dr. Stephanie Ortega of the University of Texas, who is currently finishing a new translation. This version will, for the first time, make the complete text of Jerusalem’s novel about a house of prostitution in Vienna available to English readers.
• Broken Images, by John Guest
Over the years, I’ve had several friends pull out of copy of Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek and read from it in a fever of excitement over the power and beauty of its prose. I’ve had that same feeling about Broken Images since I first read it in 2014. As I wrote in my essay about it, Broken Images shares with its reader “a sensibility to life that never, despite all the drudgery and monotony of Army life and all the strains and fatigue of combat, seems anything less than fresh and alert.” I like to call it the most beautiful book written about World War Two, despite that seeming an oxymoron. I’m delighted to be able to bring this back to readers.
• Trance by Appointment, by Gertrude Trevelyan
This was Trevelyan’s last novel. Looking back at what I first wrote about this book in 2019, I can see how much has changed. “I’m not sure what the point of this post is,” I wrote then, gloomy about the prospect of ever seeing Trevelyan’s amazing books back in print — or even noticed. Now, I can say that it looks like six out of Trevelyan’s eight novels should be back in print by the end of 2024, just five years later. I am eager to see if other readers find her work as stunning as I did when I first encountered it.

We have yet more candidates in development, but it looks like Recovered Books is slowly becoming what I hoped it could be when Nathan Hamilton invited me to put the series together: a small but significant project in bringing lesser-known books and writers back to the attention of both readers and scholars.

A Check List of Good Books from 1931

“A Check List of Good Books” from Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1931

I’ve long wondered about one of the longest modernist novels ever written, Evelyn Scott’s A Calendar of Sin (1931), an epic of the Reconstruction and after that took two volumes to encompass its over 1300 pages. When I stumbled across a copy with the original dust jackets at a reasonable price recently, I grabbed it. But I have yet to read it, so this is not about A Calendar of Sin.

On the back of the book, however, as was often the practice of publishers in those days, there appears “A Check List of Good Books,” which lists thirty titles then available from Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith. Cape & Smith was a brief and unsuccessful joint venture between the veteran British publisher Herbert Jonathan Cape and the American Harrison Smith. Established in 1928, the partnership lasted just three years. Smith left to form his own house and Robert Ballou, the former literary editor of the Chicago Daily News, who’d been the treasurer, took over and the firm reformed as Jonathan Cape and Robert Ballou. This incarnation was even briefer, closing its books in 1933.

The Cape & Smith check list, however, is an interesting mix of classics and the now-forgotten. The books by William Faulkner, Sigmund Freud, Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence, and Evelyn Waugh have remained in print and are well-established as 20th century classics. Several others (Maurice Hindus’s two books, Louis Fischer’s study of Soviet foreign policy, Charles Yale Harrison’s biography of Clarence Darrow) are too contemporary not to have been superseded by other studies. But let’s take a quick look at a few of the less well-known titles. A number of these have been reissued from time to time — Plagued by the Nightingale, for example, was a Virago Modern Classic. But these are the sort of almost-classics that never quite manage to stay in print without the support a champion or two.

• A World Can End, by Irina Skariatina
A candid, if at times disingenuous, account of the Russian revolution as seen by a member of the aristocracy. In his review for The Spectator, Graham Greene wrote:

“Here is death as we might ourselves experience it, not death in the desert or the jungle, but death in the drawing-room, the bullet that smashes the familiar picture…. The sufferings of her family, of her deaf old father, the General, who could not be stopped from criticizing the Revolution at the top of his voice until at last he was struck down in a street brawl, of the old Princess, her mother, married to an Estonian gardener that she might be allowed a passport to leave Russia, then dying when she crossed the frontier, are described with a freedom from prejudice, even with some sympathy for the Revolution, which makes her story the more terrible. If this is the best that can be said, one wonders at the worst.

Skariatina was able to leave the Soviet Union and come to New York, where she married an American, Victor Blakeslee, an experience she wrote about in a sequel, A World Begins. Shortly afterward, she and Blakeslee visited Russia and she published an account of their trip with the somewhat boasting title of First to Go Back.
Skariatina’s memoir was based on her diary, which gives the book an immediacy — but also a certain amount of undiguised naïveté, as in this entry from early 1917:

On my way home this afternoon, just as I left the hospital, I saw a wretched little dog perishing of cold and hunger. Its bones were sticking out in the most ghastly way and as for its eyes — the anguish in them cannot be described! Right next to where the little thing lay was a grocery store — so I dashed into it, bought an enormous sausage and was just about to feed the beastie, when all of a sudden passers-by, of the kind one sees in the hospital district, began to stop and stare and grumble out loud: “Look at her feeding a dog, when Christians are hungry nowadays. Ugh, those idle rich!” … Nothing like it ever happened to me before. It proves that there is a feeling of hostility among the poor that is ready to crop up at the slightest pretext.

• Juan in America, by Eric Linklater
Juan in America tells the story of Scotsman Juan — the name is meant to evoke Byron’s Don Juan, though it’s a loose connection at best — and his adventures in 1920s America. As the summarized it, Juan encounters “gangsters bootleggers, wenches, bean-wagon proprietors, Carolina negroes and Hollywood deities. He runs rum from Windsor to Detroit, rides a mule for twenty-four hours down a flood-swollen river, invades a beer baron’s Everglade retreat and seduces his daughter, and accompanies these adventures with a running fire of commend and ribald laughter.”
Linklater wrote the book after spending two years in America, so it’s filled with dry British satire of American customs and manners. The book is often cited as an example of a modern picaresque novel, and it stands (or falls) on the strength of its episodes rather than its narrative arc. Juan in America has been a perennial favorite of reissuers, coming out several times as a Penguin Modern Classic and within the last twenty years as a Capuchin Classic. At the moment, it’s available as an eBook from Bloomsbury in the U.S., but not in England.
Illustration from Mad Man's Drum by Lynd Ward
Illustration from Mad Man’s Drum by Lynd Ward.
• Mad Man’s Drum and Gods’ Man, by Lynd Ward
Two wordless novels, in which the story is told through a series of full-page woodcuts. The form was pioneered by the Belgian artist Frans Masereel, and these, Ward’s first two attempts, are far more interesting as art than literature. Both suffer from excessive abstraction, with every character treated as symbol rather than individual. Susan Sontag considered God’s Man so awkward that she listed in her Camp canon in her milestone essay, “Notes on Camp.”
By far Ward’s best graphic novel was his last, Vertigo (1937). In his introduction to the two-volume Library of America edition collecting all seven of Ward’s novels, Art Spiegelman writes of it,

“Genuinely novelistic in scope, it is a difficult work that grapples with perilously difficult times. As emblematic as Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, as ambitiously experimental as Dos Passos’s U. S. A/ trilogy, as apocalyptic as Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, it is a key work of Depression-era literature, and useful in understanding what is being down to us right now.”

If you are interested in sampling Ward’s novels but reluctant to go for the magnum opus, budget versions of God’s Man, Mad Man’s Drum, and Vertigo are available from Dover Books.

• The Wave, by Evelyn Scott
When The Wave was published in 1929, Carl Van Doren called it “the greatest novel on the American Civil War.” At the time, with five novels to her credit, Scott was considered one of the premier American modernists. In fact, publishers Cape & Smith touted a novel by another of their Southern-born writers by saying, “The Sound and the Fury should put William Faulkner in the company of Evelyn Scott.”

In his 1950 study The American Historical Novel, Ernest Leisy wrote that The Wave “marked a new advance in the technique of historical fiction, and in an article from 1964, Robert Welker asserted that the book should be seen as “the standard measure against which novels dealing with the war were tested, and perhaps more than any one book, it is responsible for opening up the materials of the Civil War to fiction. It is unique in American fiction.”
Peggy Bach, whose advocacy of the novel, along with that of her frequent collaborator David Madden, wrote of The Wave in a 1985 article in Southern Literary Journal,

Scott’s style is elaborate; her sentence structure is complex and often convoluted. Her characters, even when they are the great men about whom much Civil War fiction is written, exhibit particular human behavior in a particular situation. Upon the firm foundation of her intellect, her interests in various groups of people — Negroes, Jews, poor whites, politicians, military leaders — her strong compassion for the plight of women in the South, and her knowledge of history, Scott formed a novel unusual in content, character, tone, and structure.

Bach and Madden were responsible for the Louisiana State University Press reissuing the book in 1996 as part of the “Voices of the South” series. Since then, however, the book has, like much of Evelyn Scott’s work, fallen out of print again.

• Gallows’ Orchard, by Claire Spencer
Claire Spencer, the author of Gallows’ Orchard was, conveniently, Harrison Smith’s wife. Still, that doesn’t account entirely for the hyperbolic reception her debut novel received. As Harvard Crimson’s reviewer gushed, it “has everything and is everything necessary to make it an extraordinary good novel.” Amy Loveman, the Saturday Review’scritic, tried to chalk it up to that old stereotype, the natural born writer:

Every now and again there appears an author who is a novelist not by power of will, but as naturally as the bird is master of flight. Miss Spencer is of that happy company who write with so direct a vision as to seem to be improvising as they proceed. Her book has that appearance f unpremeditation which is the triumph of art. It has an urgency and immediacy of emotion that are the very accent of life, a sequence of happening as seemingly inevitable as the inescapable encounters of actual existence. Her narrative is electric with feel-ings -— quick with a passionate responsiveness to the beauty of nature, the pathos of dumb beasts, the calamities and complexities of the human heart.

Gallows’ Orchard tells the story of a Scottish girl who becomes pregnant by one man and marries another to save her name. When the truth finally comes out, her village takes its revenge in a manner, well, befitting Thomas Hardy … or Shirley Jackson.
Spencer later divorced Smith and married Mabel Dodge Luhan’s son John Evans. The poet Robinson Jeffers, with whom they stayed after Spencer obtained her divorce in Reno, wrote a friend, “You never saw a pair of such handsome creatures — in a strange unusual way & so different.” they lived in Luhan’s compound in Taos until they sold it in the late 1960s and moved to Maine. Claire Spencer Evans died in 1987 at the age of 91.
Gallows’ Orchard is available on HathiTrust (to those who have access).

• Brother and Sister, by Leonhard Frank
Leonhard Frank gained international acclaim for his first novel Carl and Anna, and American reviewers seemed inclined on the strength of that to give this account of a brother and sister who accidentally fall in love and marry (the old trick of long separation and a broken family). The New York Times thought that “so great is Frank’s art in portraying the love that is theirs [Constantine and Lydia, the two sibling/spouses], that one understand and sympathizes. One can no more censure them for what has happened than one can upbraid a mountain torrent for going out of its course and inundating ground that had hitherto slumbered in peaceful repose.”
But British critics were less enthusiastic. The historian E. H. Carr wrote in The Spectator, “If his intention was to write a modern realistic novel on these themes, he has stopped half-way in the attempt. He ostentatiously flouts realism by a Shakespearean use of the long arm of coincidence; and he adopts, both for narrative and for dialogue, a purely poetical style which sometimes achieves beauty and occasionally, at any rate in translation, descends from the sublime to the ridiculous…. The result is a powerful and striking book which will be widely read and discussed; but Herr Frank has not solved, has not even really faced, the problems which he raises.

• Bystander and The Magnet, by Maxim Gorki [Gorky]
I must confess that these two titles were unfamiliar to me. But they’re also just the tip of the iceberg, or, more accurately, the first half of The Life of Klim Samgin, a tetralogy that Wikipedia describes as “Gorky’s most ambitious work, intended to depict ‘all the classes, all the trends, all the tendencies, all the hell-like commotion of the last century, and all the storms of the 20th century.'” Bystander and The Magnet were followed, in English translations, by Other Fires in 1933 and Specter in 1938. The first two volumes in English were published by Cape & Smith; the second two by Appleton-Century. None of them has ever been reissued in English.
Among English-language readers, Maxim Gorki’s reputation has fallen dramatically since these books were published. Once considered the moral pillar of Russian literature after Tolstoy, Gorki had a problematic relationship with Lenin and even more so with Stalin, and his collaboration in the white-washing of the disastrous Belomor Canal, a pointless project to which thousands of Gulag prisoners were sacrificed has tended to outweigh his literary accomplishments since his death.
This is a work of massive scale. The four books add up to over 2,700 pages. If you really wanted to read them, you’d have to be prepared to shell out over $500. While there are plenty of copies of Bystander available for under $20, there is just one copy of Other Fires currently listed for sale, and it goes for over $400.
Whether it would be worth the effort in terms of reading satisfaction is another question. There was no difference of opinion among reviewers on one point: these are wordy novels. Gerald Gould, who reviewed Bystander for the Observer, was not a fan:

At first sight, one might merely wonder why this enormous book is not more enormous. Since the conversations seem endless, why not make them literally endless, especially as they all agree in finding nothing to agree about? But an artist of Gorki’s stature is entitled to his method, even when it involves tedium: and his book must be read for the impression of muddle it conveys. This, after all, is but the first volume of a trilogy: between the dissolution of this, and the Revolution that is coming, there may be an intention of violent contrast. Certainly the theory, so far, appears to be: “Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat.” The subject is the Russian Intelligentsia as it lived and talked — O how it talked! — between the assassination of Alexander II and the coronation of Nicholas II. The intelligentsia is unintelligent. Vagueness, vanity, morbidity, self-consciousness, lack of Ideals, a soft snow-drift of purposeless arguments and feckless delays, a sniffing at revolution — such is the picture: the few people who do anything quickly pass out of it: the hero goes on wondering about himself.

E. H. Carr put it more succinctly in reviewing The Magnet for the Spectator: “Gorki wields an amazingly fluent pen, but ‘the art to blot’ is one which he forgot at an early age.”

On the other hand, those who loved 19th Century Russian novels found much to love in this one. In the Saturday Review, Alexander Kaun wrote that Bystander was not a historical novel but an immediate novel:

…we watch the bewildering Russian panorama, not in its cosy remoteness, but as a disconcerting immediacy. We miss the comfort of a historical novel, in which everything has been made clear and definite by the obliging author. Rather do we share the discomfort of contemporary Russians who lived in the chaos of an unduly protracted period of storm and stress. We speed headlong from the spectacular ‘Seventies, reverberating with terroristic explosions and culminating in the assassination of Alexander II, through the arid ‘Eighties, drabbish with pseudo-Tolstoyan passivitv and Chekhovian whimpering, and into the mad ‘Nineties, when a hothouse industrialization was foisted upon a rustic, famished country in which erstwhile peasants, stolid and pious, turned overight into militant proletarians, when the intelligentsia tried to digest a chop-suey of Marx-Nietzsche-Ibsen-Wilde-Verlaine-PIekhanov-Lenin-Mikhailovsky-Chernov.

Kaun was willing to excuse much in consideration of the energy in Gorki’s narrative: “A tremendous canvas of Russian life unfolds before our eyes, dizzying in its colorfulness and multiplicitv of action and movement…. Perhaps he uses his faculty a bit extravagantly; the abundance of faces and objects may tax our receptivity. But then, we recall the dimensions of the canvas, its Homeric proportions.”

One wonders whether anyone will want to take on a new English translation (no one had good things to say about the first one). Is the work worth it? Or is The Life of Klim Samgin as justly forgotten now as the thick historical novels of Gorki’s contemporary Dmitry Merezhkovsky (who?).

• Plagued by the Nightingale, by Kay Boyle
This was Boyle’s first novel, written in part in anguish at her treatment by the Breton parents of her first husband, Richard Brault. Though mostly written between 1923 and 1927, it was not published until 1931, at which point she confessed to a friend, “I wrote [it] so many years ago that I feel it has nothing to do with me now.” In her review of the book, along with Wedding Day, Boyle’s first collection of stories, Katherine Anne Porter wrote,

The whole manner of the telling is superb: there are long passages of prose which crackle and snap with electric energy, episodes in which inner drama and outward events occur against scenes bright with the vividness of things seen by the immediate eye: the bathing party on the beach, the fire in the village, the delicious all-day excursion to Castle Island, the scene in the market when Bridget and Nicholas quarrel, the death of Charlotte, the funeral. Nothing is misplaced or exaggerated, and the masterful use of symbol and allegory clarify and motivate the mam great theme beneath the apparent one: the losing battle of youth and strength against the resistless army of age and death. This concept is implicit in the story itself, and it runs like music between the lines. The book is a magnificent performance; and as the short stories left the impression of reservoirs of power hardly tapped, so this novel, complete as it is, seems only a beginning.

After being out of print for decades, it was reissued in 1966 to launch the Crosscurrents/Modern Fiction series of neglected books from the Southern Illinois Press. In his introduction to that edition, Harry T. Moore wrote,

The novel that emerged is a variant on the Henry James theme of the clash between Americans and Europeans— and it may be asked, Who since James has handled this theme more skilfully? Indeed it can safely be said that Kay Boyle in her first novel portrayed a French provincial family far more convincingly than any other American writer, in her story of the American girl Bridget who has married a Breton and at- tempts to live with his fiercely clannisH family that dominates a village.

Madam, by Ethel Sidgwick (1921)

This is a guest post by Dr. Sarah Lonsdale.

As a long-time student of early twentieth century novels, I must confess to at first being utterly confounded when I started reading Madam. I couldn’t make head or tale of the prose and the cast of characters that spun in dizzying speed before my eyes in the early sections was so bewildering that I had to draw a diagram of their relationships just to keep up.

Ethel Sidgwick makes great demands of her readers. Her meaning is like a will o’ the wisp, darting in the darkness of her elliptical prose. She is always several paces ahead of the reader, who feels as if they are dully plodding behind, in danger of losing their way completely. Even a contemporary Observer reviewer wrote that Sidgwick was “more elusive than Henry James” and that “she seems to overrate our powers of intellectual sympathy”, unaware that while she is racing ahead, her readers are stuck somewhere far behind her. But like a will o’ the wisp, one feels that if one might only grasp it, and bathe one’s mind in its light, it might illuminate a greater truth.

Advertisement for novels by Ethel Sidgwick
Advertisement for novels by Ethel Sidgwick published by Sidgwick & Jackson.

Sidgwick was once regarded as a brilliant writer, “drawing the picture in firm, fine lines: never losing our attention, or ceasing to charm…it is supreme art,” wrote Reginald Brimley Johnson in Some Contemporary Novelists (Women) (1920). Madam is one of several novels Ethel Sidgwick produced between 1910 and 1926, earning praise for their literariness, wit and truths to be discovered under the sparkling wit of her prose. These novels, many with single-word titles such as Promise (1910), Succession (1913) and Restoration (1923) offered sharp and often humorous criticism of the manners of the British upper classes. Sidgwick enjoyed a few years of fame and popularity: regularly compared with Henry James, in 1919-20 she was offered that most glittering of accolades for an English author: a lecture tour of the United States, during which time she kept a journal that is now with her other papers held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Afterwards she dedicated the US edition of Madam, “To America. If she will accept so poor a thing in memory and in gratitude”. Her later novels, however, received less critical acclaim, being more popular and romantic. Despite having made considerable impact on both British and US reading publics, after long before her death in 1970, Sidgwick quickly had disappeared, virtually without trace. If she is remembered at all, it is only for her 1938 biography of her aunt who was an early principal of Newnham College Cambridge: Mrs Henry Sidgwick: a memoir by her Niece.

Published in Spring 1921, Madam follows the lives of a large cast of characters, from stable lads to landed gentry, in a narrative beginning just before the First World War, “the golden days, before the world lost its innocence”, and ending in the months following the Armistice. In the second half of the novel the traumatic effects of the War haunt the men who returned from the trenches, and those who were too young to fight. They are dogged not only by physical injuries but suffer an almost obsessive need to seek “fellowship with the dead”, their survivors’ guilt destroying any honest or meaningful relationship with the living. Like out-of-control pinballs, they careen wildly through London and county society, causing varying degrees of damage, from wrecking motor cars to breaking young girls’ hearts. A haunting study of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) decades before the term was even coined, Madam is, as the contemporary Guardian reviewer urged, worth sticking with until the second half fully reveals itself.

The novel’s main characters are the jovial country squire Henry Wicken, who has lost a hand in the fighting and who gently subsides into what today would be called a nervous breakdown, and his former stable boy Mott Lane, who was too young to join up but who lost all five of his older brothers in the fighting. The effects of the war on Mott are more atrocious than on Henry: he suffers from a split personality, ruins everything he goes near: bicycles, motor cars, horses and young ladies. That is, until he meets Caroline, ‘Lina’ Astley, the ‘Madam’ of the title. She recognises Mott is damaged and through her patience and courage saves him from his demons and his desire only to be with the dead. Far from the dreary cliché of the angelic feminine, Lina helps Mott in a shockingly physical and criminal way. She confronts Mott’s at once cruel and pious mother (who used to interrupt her beating of him to read out verses from the Bible), slapping her hard on the face and stealing from her a memento of Mott’s beloved brother Christopher.

In meting out criminal and physical harm, fighting fire with fire, Caroline at once fractures the idealised image of herself as the gentle angel and smashes the tomb within which Mott has buried himself alongside his dead brothers. It is one of the few sharply defined moments of a novel swathed in obliquities and ellipses, a narrative style described by one contemporary reviewer as “typically feminine” and “liable to cause irritation”.

Such assertions call for evidence, so here we go:

Advertisement for Madam by Ethel Sidgwick
Advertisement for Madam by Ethel Sidgwick.

Because he simply longed to kill Mr Forrest with Miss Astley, last edition. The poor old surgeon really thought he knew her, that was the creamy part. She was probably sitting, every day, with her despatch-case, under his eye, just as usual; even though Lancaster had kissed her, and she had – No: it must be laid up in lavender for Forrest; for Miss Astley, final edition, was simply the sequel of all the other tales. Tell one, and you found yourself telling the others, inevitably wherever you were: it all followed on.

The novel is written entirely in this style and such questions as “what does ‘laid up in lavender’ mean?” and “what are earbobs?” and “why is the horse Titus starting to speak human language?” chase each other through the frantic reader’s mind. It is “a thing heavy with lightness”, as Sidgwick wrote of a character’s argument in the novel, but it could easily be applied to her own words, tricky to pin down “because there was nothing in it anywhere to grasp.” While pointing out her difficult style, contemporary reviewers nevertheless encouraged readers to persevere. “Through the greater part of his first perusal the reader has the sensation of being lost in a maze, or endeavouring (sic) to fit together the jumbled parts of a picture puzzle, or trying to work out the meaning of a code message without the key,” confessed a New York Times reviewer of Jamesie (1918). But those who stuck with the novel, even giving it a second reading, would be rewarded with its “fine literary quality” and “piquant character drawing”.

There is indeed something deeply resonant at the heart of this war novel. The male characters emerge from the smoke of Flanders so wounded and damaged that the question of how to make sure there is never again another war would be the contemporary reader’s chief conclusion. This was Sidgwick’s aim: born in 1877 into a progressive, literary and feminist family, she wrote for the pacifist Cambridge Magazine and was a lifelong supporter of the Save the Children fund founded by her friend Eglantyne Jebb. Sidgwick also lost her own brother, Arthur, killed in action at Ypres in 1917.

Because of its difficult style, Madam will not be brought triumphantly back into publication to enjoy a second literary life as have recently the works of her contemporaries Rose Macaulay and Elizabeth von Arnim. But if ever the curious reader were to chase its oblique meaning through the prose, they will be rewarded with moments of shuddering recognition of those early, shattered months after the Great War.

Madam, by Ethel Sidgwick
London: , 1921

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

Reporter, by Meyer Levin (1929)

Reporter by Meyer Levin

“I’m interested in flaws in works of fiction,” Amina Cain writes in her recent book on writing, A Horse at Night, “in why it is possible to love a book one finds flawed, maybe even more than a book that might be considered ‘perfect.'”

Meyer Levin’s first novel, Reporter, is for me a good example of a book I loved all the while that I kept looking past its many flaws. It’s a good illustration of the fact that chronology is not narrative, for example. Its timeline runs straight through a few weeks in the life of a journeyman reporter working for an unnamed Chicago daily. One thing happens after another through over 400 lively pages, but to no particular end.

The young man dreams of earning his own byline and getting choice assignments like bring sent to Tennessee to cover the Scopes trial over the right to teach evolution. He has unique instincts, he thinks, and within four months, he calculates, he’s bound to become a star reporter:

He had brains. He could write. He could write the most human stories in the paper. The way to do was to treat every story sympathetically. That made them real. With a great, troubled heart the young reporter would go forward to interview the souls that fell afoul of the city; his limitless love would surround them all, with all their petty sins and little evils. Humanly he would write, and his writing would bear the stamp of Personality. Inside of a month he would be writing the best stories in the column. He would receive offers from all over the country.
Because he would be sympathetic. Human. He had made a great discovery in journalism.

Instead, he leaves the book in much the same way he enters: dispatched on another story. “What cha got for me? …huuuuh? Little suicide? …Crawford …Uh? …Ummmmppppphhhh …Yeeaaah ….”

On the other hand, just that last quote gives you a hint of what Reporter has going for it. Levin was among the generation of writers for whom James Joyce had knocked down the gates of “proper” writing and inspired them to run free through the streets knocking the hats off the rules grammar and spelling. And so, Levin relishes his many opportunities to spice up his prose with fireworks and explosions, as in the reporter’s fantasy of the story he’d like to write about two bootleggers caught bribing jailers for special treatment: “The bootleg twins had chicken for dinner. (Eeeeeee!) They paid Eight Dollars for it. (IlrrrrrRRRRRR!) Hal had a toothache. (Lniiiieee!) George has a pillow. (Give him a rock!) Hal smiled. (Laughs at law!)”

Ad for Reporter by Meyer Levin
Ad for Reporter.

While Levin only occasionally indulged in use of Joycean wordglue (no references to the snotgreen, scrotumtightening Lake Michigan, though it can be both those things), he must have driven the typesetters nuts with the collages that make up a typical Reporter page. A headline rarely directly associated with the story shouts from the top of almost every one: “RAID 15 RESORTS, ARREST 400”; “GIRL BANDIT GETS TWO YEARS”; “VENUS BLINKS AT CHI GIRLS’ EYES”; “ROCKEFELLER GIVES CHILD DIME.” Two- and three-column stories interrupt conventional blocks of text. As the reporter awaits instructions, the city editor breaks off to yell at another, “Listen, Fifer, that woman was taken to St. Rosa’s –”. “yyyeaaaaa, I got all that half an hour ago,” Fifer replies, and Levin proceeds to share Fifer’s report.

DISAPPOINTED CREDITOR SHOOTS WOMAN, ESCAPES Mrs. Teresa Dapaglia, 47, a widow living at 494 W. Taylor st., was shot and seriously wounded today by a man identified as Tomaso Perugino. Her daughter, Maria Dapaglia, 18, was bruised as she fell down the stairs while chasing the assailant. Both are at the St. Rosa hospital. Perugino is said by neighbors to be one of those who lost mone through investments made with Mrs. Dapaglia's late husband.
Fifer’s story, from Reporter.

If the typographical cacophony of Reporter weren’t energetic enough, we can also partake of Chicago at the height of its Jazz Age frenzy, with gangland murders, flappers, Babbitt-like conventioneers, corrupt cops and politicians, steel mills and speakeasies, and cameos by celebrities such as Clarence Darrow and D. W. Griffith. The book opens as the city editor is trying to decide whether to run with the street shooting of the slick, handsome bootlegger Vito Manfredi or the sudden death of the president of the University of Chicago (no surprise which wins out). By the end, all three Manfredi brothers have been laid out in gardenia-laden coffins.

Reporter works as fiction only in the sense that the events and the names of the characters are made up. Otherwise, it is part experiment in what might be considered creative nonfiction and part a realistic account of what it was like to be an average reporter in those days. With Clarence Darrow about to depart for the Scopes trial, the city editor is eager to learn his defense strategy, so he sends our hero to camp out on Darrow’s doorstep. Which is exactly what he does. Sit in Darrow’s waiting room for hours, hoping for a clue, a glimpse of an expert witness, or a slipped remark by the great attorney. Instead, he hears the long and sad account of an old woman hoping to straighten out her dead sister’s estate. Darrow tolerates his uninvited guest, but at the end of the day the lad heads back to the office empty handed.

Taxis, we learn, are only for special occasions. “Taxis are only for when you’re on a hot story. Taxis are only for murders or suicides or rapes or morons or fires or bombings and only when they are very special murders suicides rapes morons fires or bombings at that.” Telephones are essential tools for command and control: the city editor doesn’t like a reporter to be out of reach for more than an hour or two. But they can also be tough to find in an Italian neighborhood or a Polish one.

And Levin, who worked his way through the University of Chicago as a stringer for the Chicago Daily News and later on the staff of the Chicago Evening American, knows the fundamental challenge faced by a reporter sent to assemble a first story in the wake of an event. Entering the emergency room after Vito Manfredi’s shooting, he recognizes that he is, effectively, going in empty-handed: “Everywhere surety: everybody, everybody, seemed to know everything, except him, the giver of information. Men, men—talking, explaining, arguing — all who? All relatives? All friends? All gang avengers? Go up to each with pencil to pad and ask who are you, why are you here?” “With the gangster in his last moments were …” he writes in his head, but not being a gangland specialist, the faces are just faces.

Fanny Butcher, who was at the time Chicago’s leading book critic, wrote of Reporter, “The business of being a reporter he has reported with skill and conviction and impressiveness. The business of being a human being aside from his job, he has fallen down on.” And it’s an accurate assessment of the book’s strengths and weaknesses. We’re told the reporter’s name several times or whatever he does when he’s not on the job, but it doesn’t really matter, anymore than his inept attempts to make a connection with women. The Rochester Democrat’s reviewer credited Levin for “at least an honest effort to reproduce the life of the city reporter in all its kaleidoscopic bewilderment,” and “kaleidoscopic bewilderment” sums up just why Reporter is flawed — and wonderful.

Portrait of Meyer Levin and announcement of John Day Co.'s withdrawal of Reporter.
Portrait of Meyer Levin and announcement of John Day Co.’s withdrawal of Reporter.

Reporter was no best-seller and would be tough to find a copy of today as it is, but to make matters worse, Levin’s publisher, John Day, pulled the book from bookstores and promptly announced that it would print no more copies about six weeks after it came out in the spring of 1929. No explanation was offered and neither Publisher’s Weekly nor Editor and Publisher made any further comment on the news. Concerns about libel, perhaps? It seems unlikely, unless there was something more to the book’s treatment of a story involving burglaries by some sons of Chicago’s wealthier families.

In any case, Levin was already on his way to Palestine to report on conflicts among the Arabs, Jews, and occupying British forces and had two further novels — Frankie and Johnny (1930) and Yehuda (1931) — in the works. No one seems to have written about Reporter since its disappearance. As Figtree Books, which republished his best-selling 1956 novel about the Leopold and Loeb case, Compulsion, puts it, “Levin was a constant innovator, reinventing himself and stretching his literary style with astonishing versatility.” He may not always have been successful in an artistic sense, but as Reporter demonstrates, Meyer Levin’s appetite for taking risks could lead him — and his readers — to some colorful places.

The 1929 Club (#1929club)>
This is my contribution to Karen Langley and Simon Thomas’s #1929club celebration..

Reporter, by Meyer Levin
New York: The John Day Company

Jenny, by Sigrid Undset (1911)

The Unknown Sigrid Undset

This is a guest post by Kristin Czarnecki.

I have known of Norwegian author Sigrid Undset all my life. My parents got my name from Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, a monumental achievement for which she won the Nobel Prize in 1928. The novels were still popular in the 1950s, when my parents met, and their mutual love of the trilogy’s eponymous heroine forged an early bond. I confess I didn’t read Kristin Lavransdatter until well into adulthood, but like my parents before me, I found myself captivated by the story of Kristin, a complex, headstrong, passionate woman struggling to live a life of faith and truth in 14th-century Norway. Kristin Lavransdatter has fallen in and out of fashion over the years and garnered renewed interest recently thanks to Tiina Nunnally’s fresh translation. The rest of Undset’s prodigious literary output remains less well known, however, including a previous medieval saga, a biography of Saint Catherine of Siena, a memoir of World War II, and novels about women whose convictions and desires conflict with societal expectations. One such novel is Jenny, published in 1911, first translated into English in 1921.

Jenny’s opening pages display a hallmark of Undset’s style: vivid descriptions of the material world that establish the scene for the story that follows. “The music surged up the Via Condotti just as Helge Gram turned onto the street in the twilight,” the novel begins, as Helge, a Norwegian graduate student newly arrived in Rome, absorbs the dizzying array of sounds, smells, and sights that surround him:

It was The Merry Widow, played at a preposterously fast tempo, making it resound like a wild fanfare. And small, dark-haired soldiers stormed past him in the cold afternoon, as if they were no less than part of a Roman cohort which, at a furious double time, was about to fall upon the barbarian hosts rather than peacefully return home to the barracks for supper. Or perhaps that was exactly the reason they were in such a hurry, thought Helge with a smile; for as he stood there with his coat collar turned up against the cold, an oddly historical feeling came over him. But then he began humming along—‘No, a man will never understand women’—and continued down the street in the direction where he knew the Corso must be.

The line from The Merry Widow that Helge hums proves prophetic when he meets two other Norwegian expatriates in Rome, Francesca Jahrmann and Jenny Winge. Soon he becomes part of their coterie of artists amid the warmth, flora, food, and drink of an idyllic Roman spring. While Helge initially, and timidly, pursues Francesca (who has changed her given name, the old-fashioned Fransiska, to the Italian spelling), her hot-and-cold demeanor and interest in other men prompt him to turn his attentions toward Jenny, with whom he quickly falls in love. One sunny day, Jenny and Helge wander away from a picnic with the others and settle down in the grass, Helge’s head in Jenny’s lap. Against her better judgement, she gives in to his relentless begging for a kiss, and although she has qualms about their becoming involved, she gradually falls in love with him, and they plan a future together.

From this point on, the novel unfolds through Jenny’s perspective, and she proves to be one of the most intriguing fictional women I have ever encountered. The narrative describes her as tall, pale, thin, and graceful, with long blond curls and gray eyes. She wears white, gray, or black dresses and adorns herself with a simple necklace of pale pink beads—a cool exterior that belies her inner turmoil. We learn that she had a difficult childhood and harbors complex feelings toward her mother, “who had been widowed at the age of twenty and had nothing else in life but her young daughter.” Jenny has no memory of her father and lost a kind stepfather to an untimely death when she was a teenager. She was isolated and lonely at school, although she admits that her own arrogance stood in the way of making friends. “Superior and indifferent,” the narrative states, “she had smiled at the taunts and scorn of the whole class, feeling a silent and irreconcilable hatred that set in between her—who was not like the others—and all the rest of the children, who for her became a uniform mass, a many-headed monster.” As an adult, her yearning for a life of emotional and artistic integrity butts up against disheartening realities.

Back in Norway, Jenny and Helge must recalibrate their relationship amid complex family dynamics. Helge lives with his parents, and Jenny feels smothered in the toxic atmosphere of their profoundly dysfunctional marriage. “If only they could spend some time together again—just the two of them,” she muses, but they cannot, for, as she and Helge are engaged to be married, she is expected to spend an inordinate amount of time with her future in-laws. “She tried to think about their spring in the south, and she remembered the heat and the green campagna and the white flowers and the delicate silver mist on the mountains and her own joy. But she couldn’t seem to pull up an image of Helge from those days—the way he had looked to her adoring eyes.” Matters grow increasingly complicated when Helge’s father begins visiting Jenny in her studio and asks her to keep their meetings a secret from his wife. Frustrated and fed up, Jenny takes solace in her painting and in her friendship with a fellow artist, Gunnar Heggen, with whom she has long conversations about history, art, women, and men.

Sigrid Undset in 1911.
Sigrid Undset in 1911.

These conversations, along with a series of grim events, perhaps shed light on why Jenny is not more widely read. When Jenny asks Gunnar for an update on Francesca, for instance, problematic ideas emerge on all sides. A married woman now, Francesca only half-heartedly pursues her art and proves to be an inept, slovenly housewife, according to Gunnar. “If they have any children—and I’m certain they will,” he states, “you can be sure that Cesca will be done with painting. And it’s a damned shame. I have to admit, I think it’s sad.” “Oh, I don’t know,” Jenny replies. “For a woman, having a husband and children . . . At any rate, sooner or later we start yearning for that.” Women are “by nature” meant to be wives and mothers, she claims, and she admits she would give up everything, including her painting, for the right man—because “that’s the way we were created—all of us!” she exclaims.

For his part, Gunnar expresses what even in 1911 must have been considered sexist notions. “I won’t even talk about female morals, because they don’t have any,” he tells Jenny, and he laments that women are only career-minded until they achieve their goal of marriage. If no suitable man turns up, however, “Then you start neglecting your work and go around looking worn out and unhappy and dissatisfied,” he says. Jenny nods. He later states, “Women don’t have souls—that’s a fact.” Most of the men in Jenny’s life infantilize her, calling her “little Jenny,” although she is 28 years old and fiercely independent when the novel begins. They treat her like a simple child nevertheless available for their sexual pleasure. Much to her mortification, she sometimes enjoys such oppression.

Unpalatable ideas, to be sure, but the novel addresses urgent questions of the time vis-à-vis changing gender roles, sexual double-standards for women and men, and the opportunities or lack thereof available to ambitious women. Jenny lets Gunnar do most of the talking during the aforementioned scene not because she has nothing to say but because she thinks before she speaks and chooses her words carefully. Throughout the novel, we find her solemnly contemplating matters relevant in any time, such as the role of art, the nature of love, wherein happiness lies, and how to know and be true to oneself. Undset imbues her characters, especially Jenny, with complex interiority and a longing for meaningful connection with others, which, sadly, often proves elusive.

My copy of The Unknown Sigrid Undset, in which Jenny appears, belonged to my mother. My father inscribed it and gave it to her for Christmas in 2001. Sigrid Undset remained a touchstone for my parents throughout their long marriage, and I think of them, both recently deceased, while on my own journey through her works. Kristin Lavransdatter is magnificent, but before it, there was Jenny, remarkable in its own right and worth getting to know.

Kristin CzarneckiKristin Czarnecki is the author of the memoir The First Kristin: The Story of a Naming. Her creative nonfiction, literary criticism, book reviews, and poetry have been published in a variety of venues, and she has a chapbook forthcoming from dancing girl press. She holds a Ph.D. in English and is past president of the International Virginia Woolf Society.

 

Jenny, by Sigrid Undset, in The Unknown Sigrid Undset: Jenny and Other Works. Edited and with an introduction by Tim Page, with new translations by Tiina Nunnally
South Royalton, Vermont: Steerforth Press, 2001