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Short Reviews

Short Notices

Shorter reviews of neglected books.

Mundome, by A. G. Mojtabai (1974)

cover of Mundome by A. G. Mojtabai

When you reach the end of Mundome, you may think you’ve misunderstood it completely and need to go back and read it again. That’s not only the sign of a great book about insanity but exactly what A. G. Mojtabai had in mind.

Mundome is about Richard, a sane, sober, faithful brother, and Meg, his sister trapped in some form of madness that leaves her in a near-catatonic state. Released after twelve years in an institution, Meg is now living with Richard. Each day, he struggles to pull Meg out of her fugue. He sits her at their dinner table despite the fact that her hands are bunched into fists so tightly that she cannot even hold a fork, let alone bring it to her mouth. He tries to engage her in conversation about the events of his day even though she stares ahead blankly. He sits Meg in their living room as if the two of them were an ordinary couple reading quietly after dinner, though they’re clearly not:

That evening Meg sat in the green armchair, the lamplight flaking round her shoulders. On her lap I placed the latest copy of Life magazine, open. On the page facing the story of interest was a luscious lobster dinner, a mayonnaise advertisement, complete with potato salad and pickle. Meg stared at the ad with some fixity, pursing her lips and raising the page closer to her eyes. Then she began to help herself, diving into the salad, tearing it to bits and stuffing her mouth with it. Clacking, chewing, coughing and spitting followed. I forced my hand into her mouth and cleared it, then ripped the magazine from her hands.

To distract himself from Meg’s stony isolation, Richard takes up writing, but he never gets past the beginning of stories that seem really to be about himself: “I am living at the bottom of a well. It is really very comfortable here and I see no point in moving.”

His job is another daily battle with insanity. Richard is an archivist at a city library. The library itself is stuck in limbo:

The acquisitions department continues to select books, to fill in the myriad order blanks, white, pink, green and yellow, to make out the invoices; they are as busy as spiders spinning, but the orders are never sent, the invoices are only filed away.

“This place is a warehouse, cold storage,” one of Richard’s colleagues tells him. “No action, nothing moves. It’s dead. Unreal.” Patrons die as they sit looking emptily at books and are only discovered at closing time. Answering reference desk requests, Richard finds himself going down endless threads of cross-references:

… see Marianna, an Idyll. Formed by an English Hand.
Marianna: see An English Hand.
An English Hand: see An Hue and Cry after the Funda mental Rights and Duties of Englishmen.
An Hue and Cry: see Hymn to Wealth, a Satyr.
Hymn to Wealth: see….

He chronicles the histories of the librarians before him who sat at the desk he now occupies: “Ada Nog. December 1958-May 1959…. After an uneventful day at work, Miss Nog put on her wrap, said goodnight, went home and put her head in the oven. No explanation offered or sought.”
Yet despite this atmosphere of ennui, the library staff is taut with anxiety at the rumor of a visit from an efficiency expert, a ruthless streamliner who will cut through their ranks like a man with a scythe.

All this is driving Richard to his own form of breakdown. One night, as he looks at himself in the mirror, he makes hopeless attempts to restore his connection with his emotions: “I spent the better part of an hour making faces at myself, practicing love, hatred, anger, fear, envy, lust, grief, feeling none of them but giving a careful rendition just the same.” Meg’s psychiatrist becomes concerned with Richard’s mental state, hints at the possible need for hospitalization.

All along, your heart goes out to Richard. He’s a decent, serious individual fighting to overcome powerful forces of madness and chaos.

Or is he?

As one account of Mundome puts it, “The novel has two settings — inner and outer — which fuse at the end, and only one main character, or perhaps two main characters who fuse at the end.” Are Richard and Meg, in fact, two sides of the same person? Mojtabai later said that she meant all along to leave the reader in doubt, yet until the last few pages, we accept the explanation that most fits with our sense of what’s normal. Her design becomes more obvious when we know how Mojtabai approached writing her novels: “I work backwards from the ending,” she told an interviewer. “I usually begin with a haunting final image — a recognition scene — and proceed by unpacking the implications of that image as I go.”

Mojtabai came up with her title by fusing together two words from a Latin saying: In hoc mundo me extra me nihil agere posse, which she translated as “In this world I can affect nothing outside myself.” As she notes in an introductory comment, “Mundome is a deliberately ungrammatical construction, a forced juxtaposition of words that cannot fuse without some connective of action or relation.” Which is not unlike what she does with Richard and Meg, two characters who appear polar opposites until Mojtabai forces us to see the possibility that they might actually be the same person.

The Washington Post’s reviewer Jonathan Yardley, who called Mundome one of the best novels of 1974, described the book as “an intelligent whodunit,” but admitted that was a misleading label: “One is left in the end not with the answer to whodunit, but with a complex of questions that linger in the mind.” Even if some reviewers were irritated at the book’s lingering ambiguity, most saw Mundome as an exceptionally well-constructed and written first novel. Margaret Atwood called it “an extraordinarily pure novel, pure as the contained landscapes inside glass paperweights in which the snow falls endlessly on minute figures, preserved from dust and decay by the absence of air.” Time’s reviewer said the book “erupts with dramatic clues that flare backward and forward through the narrative like thin, ignited trains of gunpowder,” and the Antioch Review called it “The most remarkable first novel published in America during the past several years.” (Mojtabai was, for the record, an Antioch alumna.)

A. G. Mojtabai, 1976.
A. G. Mojtabai, 1976.

Mojtabai drew inspiration for the novel from two sources. While an undergraduate at Antioch, she worked one summer as an intern at the Chestnut Lodge Sanatarium in Rockville, Maryland. There, she dealt with a woman diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia who’d been a patient at the clinic for over twelve years. Mojtabai found her sense of the woman transformed over the weeks of dealing with her. Shocked by her condition, she then began to think her more sane than the clinic’s staff, capable of moments of striking clarity. But later, Mojtabai came to distrust her own impressions. “Again and again,” she later wrote, “I had to confront the fact that my attempt to understand her condition was a devious way of probing my own condition. When I left the job, I was in a very shaky state and my patient was no better.”

Mojtabai was also a veteran of the strange world of a large metropolitan library. After her divorce from an Iranian man she met at Antioch, she returned with her daughter to New York City, where she taught at Hunter College before taking a job as a librarian at Columbia, where she earned her MLS in library science in 1970. She was working at the library of the City College of New York when she wrote Mundome, her first novel. As she told UC Irvine professor Dr. Carol Booth Olson, Mojtabai based her descriptions of Richard’s library and its patrons on her observation of the daily activities of the main branch of the New York Public Library.

A. G. (for Ann Grace) Mojtabai went on to write eight more novels after Mundome. Her most recent, Thirst was published by Slant Books in February 2021. It draws upon material from both her 1994 novel Called Out, about a Catholic priest dealing with the aftermath of an airliner crash outside a small West Texas town, and Soon, a collection of sketches based on Mojtabai’s own work in a hospice.

Mundome is available on the Internet Archive: Link.

Mundome, by A. G. Mojtabai
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974

Crime Pays Royalties: the Autobiographies of Thieves

The exploits of George Manolesco, "Prince of Thieves," from the Pittsburgh Press, 20 September 1905
The exploits of George Manolescu, “King of Thieves,” from the Pittsburgh Press, 20 September 1905

Ever since Daniel Defoe published his novel Colonel Jack (1722), readers have been fascinated by the lives of career criminals. Although, as Defoe spells out in his lengthy original title of the book, his hero “was made Colonel of a Regiment” and resolved “to dye a General,” the core of Jack’s story was the “Six and Twenty Years” he spent as a thief.

Thieves’ stories appeal to both the sinner and Puritan in us. Neglected Books fan Tony Baer describes a curious homegrown example from early 19th Century America titled Narrative of the Life of John Allen, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the Highwayman, Being His Death-bed Confession to the Warden of the Massachusetts State Prison (1837):

Short, surprisingly readable, unapologetic, plain language life story of a burglar. It’s surprising to see that people were actually able to write in fairly modern American English in 1837. Mainly a series of stories recounting various crimes and time in prison. Unfortunately, he died about 2/3 of the way through the story, so the end of the book is written in the 3rd person by the warden. According to Wikipedia, and probably more interesting than any content in the book, is this factoid: “The book is most often associated with the copy in the collection of the Boston Athenaeum. This copy was bound in the author’s own skin, tradition holding that Allen requested that a copy of his confession be bound in his skin and given to John A. Fenno, who had earlier resisted Allen’s attempt to rob him.”

[For the long and strange history of binding books in human skin, see Megan Rosenbloom’s recent Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin.]

The Autobiography of a Thief, by Charles Reade
An early edition of The Autobiography of a Thief, by Charles Reade

The Autobiography of a Thief has been a perennially popular title, used, by my count, at least six times since Defoe. Charles Reade, who once competed with Dickens in terms of popularity with Victorian readers, took it for a short novel: The Autobiography of a Thief (1857). Reade, who was an advocate of social reform throughout his life, was careful to correct his narrator’s commentary. When the narrator writes that he “took with me three pounds ten shillings” from an Edinburgh baker after finding the work there too hard, Reade footnotes,

“Took with me.” No such thing. “Stole” is the word that represents the transactions. Always be precise. Never tamper with words; call a spade a spade and a picklock a picklock; that is the first step towards digging instead of thieving.

Cover of Jottings from Jail by Rev. J. W. Horsley
Cover of Jottings from Jail by Rev. J. W. Horsley.

A more authentic autobiography of a thief can be found in the opening chapter of Jottings from Jail; Notes and Papers on Prison Matters, by the Reverend J. W. Horsley (1887). Horsley, who served as chaplain at Clerkenwell Prison, collected oral histories and letters from inmates he came to know there. Horsley carefully annotated these accounts to help his readers decipher the criminal argot, such as in this inventory of the clients of a pub in Shoreditch popular with the East End’s underworld:

The following people used to go in there — toy-getters (watch-stealers), magsmen (confidence- trick men), men at the mace (sham loan offices), broads- men (card-sharpers), peter-claimers (box-stealers), busters and screwsmen (burglars), snide-pitchers (utterers of false coin), men at the duff (passing false jewellery), welshers (turf-swindlers), and skittle-sharps. Being with this nice mob (gang) you may be sure what I learned.

W. L. Hanchant later reprinted this autobiography in his 1928 book, The Newgate Garland; or, Flowers of Hemp, which collected poems, songs, and letters from London’s most notorious prison.

Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief by Hutchins Hapgood
Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief by Hutchins Hapgood

In 1903, journalist Hutchins Hapgood collected the oral history of a New York City pickpocket and petty thief in The Autobiography of a Thief. Many were sceptical of whether Hapgood’s thief was real or imaginary. He was probably a little of both. But the book was rich in details of how small-time crooks of the Bowery operated. Here, for example, is how “molly-buzzing” — stealing women’s pocket-books — worked:

We worked mainly on street cars at the Ferry, and the amount of “technique” required for robbing women was very slight. Two or three of us generally went together. One acted as the “dip,” or ” pick,” and the other two as “stalls.” The duty of the “stalls” was to distract the attention of the “sucker” or victim, or otherwise to hide the operations of the “dip”. One stall would get directly in front of the woman to be robbed, the other directly behind her. If she were in such a position in the crowd as to render it hard for the “dip,” or “wire “to make a “touch,” one of the stalls might bump against her, and beg her pardon, while the dip made away with her “leather,” or pocket-book.

Although it was never published in English, the autobiography of a thief who styled himself as royalty in the criminal world appeared in Berlin two years after Hapgood’s book. George Manolescu’s Ein Fürst der Diebe. After leaving his native Romania, Manolescu quickly developed a taste for high-end burglary and specialized in robbing jewellers and jewel owners, particularly from their suites in the finer hotels of the Riviera, Baden-Baden, and other stylish watering holes. Manolescu’s book is said to have inspired Thomas Mann’s unfinished masterpiece Confessions of Felix Krull.

Cover of I was a Bandit, the Crime Club edition of Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook
Cover of I was a Bandit, the 1930 Crime Club edition of Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook.

Two decades later, another international thief, Eddie Guerin, recounted his adventures in his 1928 book Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook. Tony Baer describes it as follows:

Amazingly well told autobiography of a career criminal who specialized in bank robberies.

Eddie grew up in Chicago in the 1860’s to the 1880’s. He published the book in 1928 at age 67, motivated in part by a desire to counteract his portrayal by his former flame in her book published slightly earlier: Chicago May, Her Story, by the Queen of Crooks.

There’s plenty of adventure, including blowing the safe of the American Express building in Paris, only to be double crossed, caught and sent to Devil’s Island in French Guyana to serve a life sentence. He later escaped and returned to the States, Canada and on to London where he continued a life of crime, narrowly escaping assassination by Chicago May and her new boyfriend.

What I dug most, however, was Guerin’s ‘underworld vernacular’ (his phrase—not mine—tho I suppose I’ll steal it now from this long dead thief).

The prose is precise, hardboiled, and terse. Just how I like it. He does not tell you. He shows you. With efficiency and enough flair to entertain without being at all showy or pretentious.

What I am now quite perplexed about now is whether the hardboiled school of writing was really drawn from Hammett and Hemingway, as we were always led to believe—or whether it was more some part of the zeitgeist. There appears to have been an underworld vernacular shared by cops and robbers and hoboes and day laborers alike. A dirty realism that people spoke around that time that finally made it pen to paper in the late 20’s.

Highly recommended. A real joy to read.

Cover of Stealing Through Life by Ernest Booth
Cover of Stealing Through Life by Ernest Booth

Around the same time, Alfred A. Knopf published two closely-related criminal memoirs. Grimhaven, by Robert Joyce Tasker (1928), is an account of a convicted burglar’s time at San Quentin Prison. Tasker took up writing while in prison and eventually sold a number of articles about his experiences to Mencken’s American Mercury. While at San Quentin, Tasker met another inmate, Ernest Booth, a veteran thief in for a failed bank robbery. Booth decided to try his hand at writing as well. As Tasker recounts in Grimhaven, the two men decided to avoid competing with each other:

In the end we drew up an oral compact that I would write only of prisons, and he would write only of criminals not yet in prison. We talked of the various things my experiences had taught me and decided that he should write the story of a bank-robbery, giving it every detail, with every emotion recorded.

Booth’s own book Stealing Through Life appeared less than a year after Tasker’s. With a record far longer than Tasker’s, Booth took a rather Nietzschean view of the criminal class:

There are those of us — thieves and poets — who are born intact. Complete. The stern realities of life are inverted and become only so many evidences of unreality. Within our selves we have a complete world of our imagination…. Within this realm of our own possession we retreat when confronted with things that do not fit into our preconceived scheme of things-as-they-should-be.

“We are the odd ones. The criminals, the geniuses, the builders of Utopias,” he boasted.

Cover of Angels in Undress, the US edition of Low Company by Mark Benney
Cover of Angels in Undress, the US edition of Low Company by Mark Benney

In 1936, three-time convicted burglar Henry DeGras published his account of growing up in the London underworld of prostitutes and “wide boys,” Low Company: The Evolution of a Burglar, under the pseudonym of Mark Benney. Released in the U.S. a year later under the odd title Angels in Undress, the book received wildly enthusiastic reviews, including from such notoriously tough critics as Rebecca West and George Orwell. Although his publisher Peter Davies touted Benney as “the man who committed a hundred burglaries,” Benney’s crimes had been mostly minor felonies. His last conviction was for skipping out on installment payments for a phonograph. Benney went on to write several novels about the world he’d grown up in, most notably The Big Wheel, discussed here recently.

Cover of Hustler! The Autobiography of a Thief by Henry Williamson
Cover of Hustler! The Autobiography of a Thief by Henry Williamson.

In 1965, R. Lincoln Keiser edited the memoir of a petty thief, Henry Williamson, Hustler! The Autobiography of a Thief. A case worker for Cook County, Keiser got to know Williamson, a recent parolee from the Illinois State Penetentiary, and taped over a hundred hours on interviews which he condensed into this book. Although its cover appealed to a general audience, Keiser’s account was more sociological in nature and included commentary from Dr. Paul Bohannon, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University.

Cover of Killer: A Journal of Murder
Cover of Killer: A Journal of Murder, by Thomas E. Gaddis and James O. Long.

In 1970, Thomas E. Gaddis, best known for The Birdman of Alcatraz, his 1955 story of prisoner and amateur ornithologist Robert Stroud, collaborated with James O. Long and in compiling the recollections of a truly nasty piece of work, the serial killer Carl Panzram. Robberies were the least of his crimes, but there were plenty of them. As Tony Baer describes it,

Prior to his execution in 1930, Panzram and his death row guard became friends, and Panzram made a parting gift of a short autobiography, first published in 1970 as Killer: A Journal of Murder by Thomas Gaddis, who fills in gaps in the narrative with chapters written in the 3rd person.

The first-person confessions from Panzram to be the most compelling bits of writing. He is completely unapologetic, yet recognizes his own monstrosity. He is not trying to leverage the confession for profit, titillation nor commutation. He recognizes that publication will come after death, and thus seems pretty liberated to simply tell his tale in simple unadorned prose.

The writing is lean and uses common no frills language. He does terrible things out of misanthropy and greed. But basically just feels like he’s “paying it forward” on the ill treatment he’s received from others.

Panzram was a textbook example of recidivism: “What time I haven’t been in jail I have been either getting out or getting in again,” he wrote. His coldly amoral voice is chilling:

In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all these things I am not the least bit sorry. I have no conscience so that does not worry me. I don’t believe in man, God nor Devil. I hate the whole damned human race including myself.

Cover of The Thief, the Autobiography of Professional Thief Wayne Burk
Cover of The Thief, the Autobiography of Professional Thief Wayne Burk.

The Thief: the Autobiography of Wayne Burk, Professional Thief (1971), an as-told-to book written by Los Angeles Times reporter Ted Thackrey, Jr., is perhaps the most insufferably self-satisfied of all these accounts. Burk claimed to have stolen over $15 million, though that number is hard to believe after I located a few stories of Burk’s exploits, such as his 1948 stick-up of the bar at the Hotel Il Trovatore in Bakersfield, California, where he made off with a whopping $185. Burk’s moral calculus is notable for its relativity:

Nobody in this world can ever say they starved because of anything I ever did. I don’t rob poor people; they ain’t got enough money to make it worth the trouble. I never screwed around with the stock market; there ain’t no one in this world can say I make their father jump out of a window because of something I pulled with a stock to make myself richer while everyone else in the country loses. I never made a motorcar that was so cheap and crappy that it got the people who drove it killed. I never put out a medicine that crippled people or gave them cancer, and I sure never shot some poor guy just because I didn’t happen to like his looks. If I put anybody out, I had a good reason — money!

Which sounds a little like the man who boasts that he’s screwed a lot of women but never messed around with anyone’s daughter.

Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief, by Andrew Keith Munro
Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief by Andrew Keith Munro

Alexander Keith Munro’s The Autobiography of a Thief (1972) proved to have been a work in progress. Less than three years after writing, “I had a tremendous amount of excitement out of being a burglar,” Munro apparently found the call of adventure irresistable and was sent up for stealing £23,000 in valuables from the country home of Sir Kenneth Clark, the art historian and broadcaster.

Excitement seems to be a common theme in these autobiographies. In The Boxman: A Professional Thief’s Journey (1972), Professor William J. Chambliss’s case study of a career burglar, Harry King shares the profound observation that, “It’s exciting and I really believe that it’s the excitement that makes it appealing.”

Cover of Where the Money Was by Willie Sutton and Edward Linn
Cover of Where the Money Was by Willie Sutton with Edward Linn

The most purely entertaining of all these memoirs is the legendary bank robber Willie Sutton’s Where the Money Was (1976), which he wrote with Edward Linn after his release from Attica State Prison in 1969. Like Munro and Harry King, Sutton found the thrill of planning and committing robberies more addictive than their rewards:

Why did I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life. I enjoyed everything about it so much that one or two weeks later I’d be out looking for the next job. But to me the money was the chips, that’s all.

As imaginative as some thieves may be, they continue to stick to traditions when it comes to titles. When Bruce Reynolds, the mastermind behind the 1972 Great Train Robbery came to tell his story, he called it — you guessed it — The Autobiography of a Thief (1985)

Sam’s Song, by Shirley Schoonover (1969)

Feature on Shirley Schoonover from the <em>Democrat and Chronicle</em>, Rochester, New York, 1 August 1971.
Feature on Shirley Schoonover from the Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, New York, 1 August 1971.

“Are you a lesbian?” a man asks the narrator of Shirley Schoonover’s novel Sam’s Song.

“No,” she replies. “But I’ve been called a unicorn. A zebra. I have a cousin who is an onion.”

Whatever Sam is, the only thing that’s certain is that’s she’s not happy with it. “I don’t quite know who I am,” she thinks. “Even after thirty years of living with me, I don’t feel familiar with myself.”

Everything about Sam’s Song is wildly out of place. Sam, the thirty-something mother of three who’s separated and in the final stage of divorcing her husband, in her own skin. “I find myself to be a bitch. But in a world of bitches, I don’t want to hand on to my children the ugliness that is in me.” She’s out of place in her community. Having chosen — unfathomably in the eyes of most of the people she knows — to leave her children in her husband’s custody, she’s the woman that other women talk about at cocktail parties.

Yet she’s unwilling to let her soon-to-be ex’s new girlfriend get ideas: “I’ll kill you, you bitch, before you’ll mother my children.” Restless and horny, she picks up men in bars knowing they have no interest in staying with her: “I can make love. Fuck, if you will. But, my God, I have the secret knowledge that I have been fucked with shit.” When they ask her name, she answers, “I am no-name.” She even dresses up as a man and goes to bars where gay men hang out. “I smell cocks and peacocks, cut booze, and brothers lusting for their brother’s cocks.” She drinks — hard. “You use up Scotch like other people use water,” observes Martha, Sam’s last remaining friend.

They fucked her up, her mum and dad. She’s Sam, not Samantha, because they wanted a boy, not a girl. “Girls are no good on a farm,” her father said. She admires men for their ability to take what they want, material or sexual. That same selfishness is one of the few things she’s sure of about herself. “Yes, I am selfish,” she admits to her son one afternoon as they swim together. “Fuck you,” he replies.

That stops me. I tread water again, looking at him. He stays out of my reach; I read his eyes. He knows I can feel his anger. At this moment he feels hate. He hates me because I left them with their father. No, just because I left them.

Which reminded me of something Nora Ephron once wrote: “You give kids a choice — your mother in the next room on the verge of suicide versus your mother in Hawaii in ecstasy, they’d choose suicide in the next room.” Yet as confused and unhappy as Sam may be, she’s clear-sighted when it comes to the potentially toxic effect she could have on her kids if left responsible for their day-to-day care.

Not that Sam is in ecstasy, let alone in Hawaii. Nor does she expect her life to be turned around by the freedom of the single life. “Living alone, unloving, I will shrivel and dry into an ancient sterile turd,” she thinks.

Cover of Sam's Song by Shirley Schoonover

As these quotes suggest, Sam’s Song is a long way from the safe, nice housewives of 1960s sitcoms. When she wrote the book, Shirley Schoonover was herself the mother of three, living in Lincoln, Nebraska and in the process of divorcing her husband. That didn’t mean that the book was autobiographical, though. “I didn’t go to bed with any sailors, I didn’t pick men up off the street, I didn’t have a homosexual lover,” she later said. “But the anger was real,” she warned. And so was her frankness. “We Finns are very blunt,” she told an interviewer. “We come out and say, no tact whatsoever, what we have to say. I guess a lot of people don’t understand that.”

Schoonover and her husband met in Iowa, where she had studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first novel Mountain of Winter (1965), about a young Finnish-American girl growing up rural Minnesota, was closer to autobiography. Born Iliana Waisanen, she was given the name Shirley by her mother, who loved Shirley Temple and who wanted her daughter to seem “more American.” Schoonover hated the name.

Mountain of Winter was generally well-received. Bernard Bergonzi wrote that “its humanity, its breadth of feeling, and range and exactness of observation of men and nature, place it well above the ordinary run of first novels (or second or third novels, come to that).” The book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and folks in Lincoln were so proud of her accomplishment that the manager of her local IGA grocery store even cleared space on an endcap for a display and hosted an autograph party.

She joked that a few of the customers, as they picked up a copy along with five or six cans of Campbell’s soup, that the book might be “dirty.” “Well, it was very frank,” she later said, “but not nearly as potent as Sam’s Song .”

Headline from the <em>Lincoln Journal Star</em> review of <em>Sam's Song</em>, 2 March 1969.
Headline from the Lincoln Journal Star review of Sam’s Song, 2 March 1969.

When Sam’s Song came out, however, it was another story. “Sam’s Four-Letter-Word Symphony” proclaimed the headline of the Lincoln Journal Star review. “If it had not been assigned to me for review, I would not have read past the first 15 pages.” The reviewer — a man — judged that Sam “is as abnormal as any woman could be” and that her language “is worse than any attributed to the wharves of Liverpool.” He did, however, admit that the book might be useful for students of vocabulary: “If there is a four-letter word used to describe sex in its most perverted form, it can be found in this book.”

Coward-McCann’s dust jacket blurb didn’t help. It promised that the book featured “sexy sex, sick sex, homosexual sex, racial sex, even religious sex.” The Journal Star’s reviewer wrote that Sam’s Song “ranks with the stuff that is sold under the counter in shops which deal with pornographic works.” Most Lincoln bookshops preferred not to stock the book at all, on or under the counter.

Martin Levin, then one of the New York Times’ lead reviewers, argued that those who wrote off Sam’s Song as pornography were missing the point: “When is a dirty book not a dirty book? When it is a cri de coeur, in which whatever detritus there is exists as part of the structure of personality.” Contrary to the Lincoln Journal Star’s reviewer, he considered Sam “a thoroughly homogenized mixture of ambiguous urges, detoured maternal feelings, sharply bitter humor, and ethnic (Finnish) traces.” It seems that the bigger the city, the better the chances of Sam’s Song getting a favorable review. When the novel came out in paperback in early 1970s, the Chicago Tribune’s book editor observed cynically, “It is one of the most revealing books ever written about a woman. Which is probably why the hardcover edition vanished without a trace.”

If anyone picked up Sam’s Song in search of a thrill, they were bound to be disappointed. Sam is certainly profane, but it’s not pornographic. Sam does not “discover” herself through her sexual liberation. Sex is more like booze, a source of temporary relief from pain. Sam’s Song is more a four-letter-word rap than symphony: Sam’s profanity is visceral, a sign of the pain, anger, and unrest always simmering, always on the brink of boiling over. It may be the rawest book written by a woman in the 1960s.

By the time the book was published, Schoonover was ready to leave Lincoln. “I literally felt like a zebra in a herd of horses,” she later said. When her divorce from her first husband, Leroi Schoonover, was finalized, she headed to New York, where she joined the faculty at the University of Rochester. She took revenge on Lincoln with a “Letter from Nebraska” that was published in the New York Times after she’d moved to Rochester. “If you don’t love Willa Cather’s work you are not included in the literary life of the university.” Sam’s Song is nothing like My Antonia: it’s closer to Last Exit to Brooklyn.

When it came to Nebraska as a whole, Schoonover concluded that, “As far as I can tell, there is no literary life in Nebraska.” “You ask if writers talk to each other,” she wrote her imaginary correspondent. Since Karl Shapiro, who’d been the editor of the university’s long-running literary quarterly Prairie Schooner had left Lincoln in the mid-1960s, she replied, “I’ve been talking to myself; and you know that can become agonizingly lonely. That’s Nebraska. Beautiful but killingly lonely for the writer.”

After a few years at Rochester, Schoonover moved to Missouri, where she taught at Webster University in St. Louis. While there, she published her last novel, Winter Dream (1979) a folk tale set in Finland in the 15th century. “I wrote it for the child in me,” she told a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. “I wanted to write something people could enjoy and whose characters they could love.” Schoonover moved to Teaneck, New Jersey in her later years to live near her son Noel. She died in 2004.

Sam’s Song, by Shirley Schoonover
New York: Coward-McCann, 1969

The House Without a Roof, by Joel Sayre (1948)

Cover of The House Without a Roof by Joel Sayre

“Before the all-out bombings of Berlin began in November 1943, there were six houses on the Hofmann’s street,” Joel Sayre writes. “Now, in July 1945, there were, by official reckoning, one and a half, of which the house that Lilo lived in was reckoned as one.” Though it looked like an intact house from the street, its roof had been destroyed by an RAF incendiary bomb in early 1944 and the attic floor served in place — except when it rained hard or long.

The House Without a Roof is a story of how ordinary people survive under desperate conditions. But unlike other books about the early years of Germany’s recovery from the war, such as James Stern’s The Hidden Damage (1947) and The Smoking Mountain (1951), this book is as much about survival under the Nazis as it is about survival after their downfall.

That the Hofmanns made it through the rise of the Nazis and the war with their home and selves relatively intact was due to a combination of luck and wit. Hedi, the wife, was the daughter of a Jewish soldier killed on the Western Front in World War One, which made her, under the Nuremberg Laws, a Mischling — half Jew, half Aryan, and thus prohibited from numerous rights. Neither Hedi nor Fritz supported Hitler’s policies, but they soon found it necessary to avoid being singled out for retribution.

In turn, Lilo, their daughter, learned to blend in. One day, Lilo came home, upset that the grace she’d become used to saying at lunch had changed. Instead of the traditional,

Come, Lord Jesus,
Be our guest,
Let these gifts
To us be blessed.

The pupils were instructed to say,

Fold your hands
And bow your head,
To Adolph Hitler pray;
For he gives our daily bread,
And all our wants he doth allay.

Lilo asks to be moved to a different school, but Hedi knows that under the Nazi’s scheme for standardizing the Nazification of German institutions , the Gleichschaltung, every kindergartener would now be saying this prayer. So, Lilo simply has to accept and go along. “Remember that it’s very, very dangerous to say that you don’t like Hitler, so you mustn’t ever tell our secret to anybody, ever, ever.” Just keep reminding yourself, Hedi tells her daughter, “Das Wunder ist ein Schwindel” (This miracle is a fraud).

Luck often brings the Hofmanns under its umbrella. One of tenants in their apartment house is a sculptor whose heroic busts are favorites among the Nazi elite and the other residents enjoy the protection accorded him. One day, a nurse in a neighboring apartment takes Lilo to visit the hospital where she works, where she meets Frau Ley, wife of Reichsleiter Robert Ley, one of the highest ranking members of the Nazi party. The Reichsleiter arrives, clearly drunk, and becomes enraged when he spots a crucifix on the wall. He rips it down and begins smashing the fixtures. Lilo is quietly escorted out and told the matter is not to be spoken of.

Berlin in early 1946
Berlin in early 1946.

Their greatest ordeal, however, comes when Fritz Hofmann, a strong, tall, and Nordically handsome man with a university degree, is invited to become a member of the SS, the most elite — and most extreme — element of Nazi Party. The idea sickens Fritz, but he recognizes this is an offer he cannot refuse. After considering the limited options before him, Fritz and Hedi — with the help of a friendly doctor — contrive a solution: Fritz will go mad. He benefits from having seen how his own father behaved (and was treated) when he went insane years before.

In the longest section of the book, Sayre recounts the extraordinary lengths and intricate maneuvers involved in convincing the doctors and SS officers that Fritz is, indeed, insane while avoiding becoming a victim of the state’s mental health system. The key to Fritz’s performance is his taking a pro-Nazi position more extreme and passionate than even the most fervent follower. He takes to drawing his visions of the ultimate triumph of the cause:

His masterpiece was an SS Armageddon on top of a mountain in the Urals, under a lowering sky. The central figures were Himmler — winged, of course — and Jesus Christ shaking hands…. About the two central figures stood a hierarchy of Heydrich, Kaltenbrunner, Sepp Dietrich, the Waffen-SS general, the smiling Standartenführer who had offered Hofmann the commission, and many others. Here and there, a wounded SS angel heiled Himmler and Jesus from the ground.

One comes away in awe of Fritz Hofmann’s ingenuity and stamina.

The Hofmanns also survived the almost constant Allied bombing that Berlin endured from 1943 on. Lacking a robust and deeply-buried subway system like London and Moscow, Berlin had few good options for sheltering its residents. The choices were hunkering down in a trench or huddling in a crowded basement with neighbors. The government began providing free postcards for contacting friends and relatives:

We are living
We have had deaths
We have been [half]/[considerably]/[totally] bombed out

These statements were thought to be sufficient to cover all situations.

The House Without a Roof is a remarkably light and sane account of a dark and crazy time, which is a tribute to the character of both the Hofmanns and Joel Sayre. Though none of his work is in print today, Sayre was considered one of the very best of The New Yorker’s exceptional team of reporters. As editor William Shawn later wrote of Sayre, “he had a strong individual style, his writing had humor, warmth, deep feeling for people, and great vitality.” My copy of The House Without a Roof came from the collection of James and Tania Stern and bears the following inscription from Joel Sayre:

To Jimmy Stern and his delightful missus whose first name, heard in a moment of booze, unfortunately escapes me. In sincere admiration.

The House Without a Roof, by Joel Sayre
New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948

The Decade of Illusion: Paris 1918-1928, by Maurice Sachs (1933)

Cover of The Decade of Illusion by Maurice Sachs

If Maurice Sachs deserves to be remembered today, it’s almost entirely for his effusive memoir, Witches’ Sabbath, reissued last year by Spurl Editions. As I wrote at the time of its republication, Witches’ Sabbath is not only a classic autobiography but an essential reference for anyone interested in French art and literature between the world wars: “Sachs knew everyone who was anyone in the world of French literature between the two world wars. Knew everyone, slept with many, stole from a few.”

Sachs’ first book, The Decade of Illusion, published in the U.S. almost two decades before it appeared (posthumously) in France. Sachs wrote the book during his stay of roughly two years, probably to cash in on his brief celebrity as a traveling lecturer. He’d come to New York City in 1931 at the invitation of his friend Lucien Demotte, who hired Sachs to run a Manhattan art gallery filled with French art. Unfortunately, the art market had dried up as a result of the stock market crash and the two men soon parted ways.

Notice for a talk by Maurice Sachs on Proust on New York radio station WRNY.
Notice for a talk by Maurice Sachs on Proust on New York radio station WRNY.

Ever the opportunist, Sachs reinvented himself as an expert on French culture and soon began appearing as a lecturer at lady’s clubs and art societies and on radio. Despite being homosexual, he married a socialite and aspiring writer named Gwladys Matthews. Within months, Sachs had deserted Gwladys for a handsome young man, while the couple were together, Sachs wrote, and Gwladys translated, this breakneck run through the cast of players in French culture and society of the 1920s.

As one reviewer put it, Decade is a “kaleidoscopic parade, staged in the smart salons, attics, theatres, studios and by-ways of France (mostly Paris), which includes in its dramatis personae practically every well known painter, composer, musician, poet, politician, dressmaker, critic, author, book seller, art dealer, and publisher who has gravitated to Paris in the last ten years or so.” And as such, it’s probably still of some interest to scholars of the period. Sachs’ Who’s Who is a good starting point: in the space of barely 250 pages, he manages to squeeze in enough names to fill 11 double-spaced pages in the index, for a rough total of 700 people.

But this is cultural history People magazine style. It’s full of gossipy tidbits and asides: the young pianist Arthur Rubinstein, “So strong, so powerful, he was like a bull on hind legs: when he took a woman’s hand, one imagined the rape of Europa.” Henri Matisse, the movie fan: “He goes each evening, no matter what the film. What appears on the screen does not interest him; he closes his eyes and listens to the murmurs of the neighboring crowd.” André Derain “loves auto racing” and collects landscape paintings by Corot. Maurice Utrillo was a drunk.

As anyone who’s watched an hour of any American newschannel knows, the chief qualification of any successful commentator is a ready supply of opinions, well-informed or not. Maurice Sachs would have been a superstar in this world, for he tosses off judgments as other writers use punctuation. “In all American universities,” he intones, “one worries first about the moral reasons of written works — which certainly would be the last consideration of a young Frenchman.” Good taste makes for bad paintings: “Nothing is more deplorable than a delicious arrangement.” French cinema lags far behind that of America because French film-makers lack “the American mind, less lively, more deliberate and analytical, like the German” — a statement I can’t imagine any film historian agreeing with.

Though several reviewers praised Sachs’ “amazingly superficial chit-chat style,” the fact is that he managed to write a book-length work by filling large gaps between his chit-chat with windy pontifications. But perhaps this was not entirely inappropriate for someone who at one point took vows and began to train as a priest (a gig he soon lost after a wealthy woman complained about the Sachs’ interest in her teenage son).

Bookplate of Adeline Lobdell Pynchon

In some ways, more interesting that the book itself is what came along with the copy I purchased. As the bookplate shows, it came from the library of the heiress and art enthusiast Adeline Lobdell Pynchon. Sachs first met her soon after his arrival in New York City, when she was still married to Henry Atwater. By the time the book was published, she’d moved back to her hometown of Chicago and married Harold Pynchon, a wealthy businessman.

Included in the book was a letter Sachs wrote her in November 1931 — shortly before her marriage to Pynchon — asking whether “there would be any possibility” for him to deliver lectures in Chicago similar to those he was in the process of giving in New York. He needed the work: “The Art season has started rather badly and since you ask me, I confess that I have not so much hopes for sales this year.” “But nevertheless, who knows?” he concluded optimistically.

Letter from Maurice Sachs to Adeline Atwater, November 17, 1931.
Letter from Maurice Sachs to Adeline Atwater, November 17, 1931.

His call for help was heeded … eventually. In March 1933, the Chicago Tribune reported on a “delightful lecture” that Sachs gave to the Arts Club on “The Decade of Illusion.” Sachs was hosted, according to the article, by “Mrs. Harold Pynchon” and accompanied by Henry Wibbels, “a young painter from California who is with him here at the Ambassador East.”

It was Wibbels for whom Sachs had left his wife, and the two men sailed for France a few weeks after their stop in Chicago. They remained together for nearly four years — some of the worst in Sachs’s life, when he fell prey to alcohol and drugs. In the end, they parted. As Sachs later wrote, “Life played tricks on us because we were trying to play one on it. We had to separate before we were entirely annihilated, Henry by dependence, I by drunkenness and lying.” Adeline Lobdell Atwater Pynchon, on the other hand, remained a fixture of Chicago society and an active patron of the arts until her death in 1975.

The Decade of Illusion: Paris 1918-1928, by Maurice Sachs
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933

THE Ride to Khiva, by F. C. Burnand (1877)

Cover of THE Ride to Khiva, by F. C. Burnand

For a place deep in the heart of Central Asia, Khiva got a lot of traffic from English visitors in the 19th Century. In 1875, Captain Frederick Burnaby braved crossing the lines of a Russo-Turcoman to journey to the city, returning in triumph to tell the story in his best-seller, A Ride to Khiva. In 1899, Robert L. Jefferson, author of Roughing It in Siberia, repeated the feat (“as a sportsman”) and wrote about it in his imaginatively titled A New Ride to Khiva.

Between them, however, came the most daring traveler of all, F. C. Burnand (later Sir Francis), then editor of Punch. As he explained in his definitively titled THE Ride to Khiva, unlike Burnaby, he proposed to travel both to and from Khiva. And to travel not with Burnaby’s spartan 85-pound backpack but with saddlebags loaded with provisions and cooking utensils, a semi-grand piano fitted up with a comfortable bedroom, a store of American beef, and a cellaret full of beer and champagne (Pommery and Greno très sec). And finally, to stay in constant contact with his editors back in London, his own private wire (which at various times in the book is a telegraph, a means of escape, and former soldier named Wire).

Of course, all this kit costs a fortune. Luckily, Burnand manages to assemble a list of subscribers from those interested in his going — those interested in his not coming back.

The list of subscribers to Burnand's expedition to Khiva
The list of subscribers to Burnand’s expedition to Khiva.

“A. S. S.” on the list is, no doubt, Burnand’s poke at one of his perennial antagonists, the novelist Albert Smith, author of The Adventures of Mr. Ledbury and his friend Jack Johnson (1866), of whom the playright Douglas Jerrold once said, “When he signs his initials he only tells two-thirds of the truth.”

Scaring off the wolves with a portrait of Gladstone
Scaring off the wolves (in sheep’s clothing) with a portrait of Gladstone.

Traveling through the backlands of Russia brings its fair share of hazards. Burnand is chased by wolves, attacked by Tartars, thrown in jail more than once. He even spends a night in a pig stye — but comes away with a piglet who proves an invaluable ally. He teaches the Pig alphabet as well as to play numerous card games … perhaps too well:

This evening played two games of Double Dummy with the Pig. He won the last rubber. If he repeats this, I shall watch his play closely. The Sleigh-driver backed the Pig. I begin to suspect collusion.

Though the Pig goes on to rescue Burnand from several near-death experiences, the air of suspicion is never entirely lifted. “There is a twinkle in his eye that I don’t half like,” Burnand confides to his journal. Still, the Pig compares favorably to the mouse he befriends while on one of his stays in Russian jails: “An apt pupil, but possessing neither the solidity nor the gravity of the Pig.”

Despite bragging early on that he’d found a more direct route to Khiva than Burnaby followed, Burnand’s journal suggests otherwise. He reports crossing the river Oxus on page 26, but over the course of the following weeks, manages to cross it at least 20 times more. At least he thinks it’s the Oxus. “I suppose,” he confesses, “judging by the position of the stars, as I’ve lost my maps.” He accidentally wanders into Persia at one point, forcing him to backtrack for hundreds of miles.

Burnand's map of his ride to Khiva
Burnand’s map of his ride to Khiva.

As the map he provides in the book clearly shows, Burnand’s ride to Khiva ultimately involved more digress than progress. If, that is, he ever actually made the trip. The editors close the account with a suspicious note that Burnand reported that, “Khiva is a very charming place, and, from his description, not totally unlike Margate.” Burnand was a long-time resident of Ramsgate and perhaps Margate seemed journey enough for the busy editor.

THE Ride to Khiva originally appeared as a serial in Punch. There appear to be just three used copies available for sale, but fortunately you can find it in electronic formats for free on the Internet Archive.

The Ride to Khiva, by F. C. Burnand
London: Bradbury, Agnew & Co., 1877

Catch a Brass Canary, by Donna Hill (1965)

Cover of Catch a Brass Canary

Serendipity continues to be one of my best guides to neglected books. While access to libraries and bookstores is restricted due to the pandemic, I’ve been turning to strolls through the Internet Archive as an alternative. I’ll either use the text search feature to see what titles pop up in response to a phrase like “he hailed a cab” or “she sipped her cocktail” or do a search using one of the metadata fields. Catch a Brass Canary came up when I went looking to see what books were published by J. B. Lippincott between 1950 and 1980.

Something about the dustjacket illustration and its description of the story, set in an aging upper West Side branch of the New York Public Library, made me want to keep reading. Catch a Brass Canary was Donna Hill’s first novel and I soon saw that neither her prose style nor her characterizations were of particular note. But Hill, who’d earned a Masters in library science from Columbia and spent eight years working for the NYPL before moving to Hunter College, knew her subject, the day-to-day running of a library and the variety of personalities among its patrons and staff, and the story doesn’t lack for authenticity.

The branch in Catch a Brass Canary is aging and changing along with its neighborhood:

… when the neighborhood had been prosperous not long ago, the branch had served genteel readers of Thackeray, Browning and Scott. Now it was hard-working and practical. Along with Dante, Shakespeare, and the Greek philosophers, it offered books on child rearing, home economics and other skills to help with daily life and stacks of mysteries and Westerns for escape from it.

Having grown up as a regular denizen of the Seattle Public Library — both its fine Carnegie-era Greenlake branch and the Central library in the days when the chairs in the ground floor fiction section were usually filled by dozing homeless men — I felt some pangs of nostalgia to read of a card catalog, load slips, and newspapers on wooden rods.

Hill’s fictional formula is pretty simple: take an unstable mix of people and insert a catalyst. In this case, the catalyst is Miguel, a Puerto Rican teenager looking to earn some money and put himself on the right track after a taste of gang membership and an unhappy stay in juvenile detention. Some of the staff welcome Miguel as new blood, a fresh connection with the community. Some see him with the same narrowed eyes as the Jets saw the Sharks in West Side Story. Like old Mrs. Ethelbald: “Completely unreliable. I knew it the minute I laid eyes on him. He’s one of those hoodlums, horsehide jacket and all the rest of it….”

If this were all there was to Catch a Brass Canary, it would simply be a predictable novel on the borderline between young adult and adult fiction. What spices things up in the insertion of a second disruptor: a mad patron with a mission. Rupert, a disturbed young man, is surreptitiously trying to excise racism from the library shelves.

When he first surfaces, it’s in search of an old children’s book “Epaminondas?” he asks the Reference librarian. “Theban general,” the librarian snaps. “I mean the little Negro boy, you know, who steps in pies,” Rupert replies, referring to Epaminondas and His Auntie, by Sara Cone Bryant and Inez Hogan.

An illustration from <em>Epaminondas and His Auntie</em>

I was interested to follow Hill’s handling of Rupert and his quest. On the surface, he is the sole of liberal compassion. “How beautiful they are, the heterogeneous children of this neighborhood,” he says to the librarian:

“Dark and fair, Asiatic, Puerto Rican, Negro. Did you ever watch them in the children’s room? How well they’ve started out in life together; no racial malice, no envy, no fear. They’re charming, I allow, but they spread evil attitudes like a disease. Among the children it’s most insidious, you know. Especially in a neighborhood like this.”

Having grown up in the South, Rupert stings from the memory of his family being ostracized and driven from their town after his father invited a black man to have dinner at their home. Now, having dropped out of college, he is squatting in a basement and trolling the shelves of the public library to find, borrow, and cut out the offending pages from books he considers racist.

He sees himself as a modern-day knight and peoples his world with medieval characters: “… that sturdy little abbess who works by the window, that young squire who shelves books with such verve, always smiling.” They are all fine-featured, chivalrous, and pure as in a romance. His is a mission to cleanse the world. “I’m devoting my life to racial empathy, to justice for the racially oppressed,” he asserts.

Rupert defends his actions by quoting Milton (“he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself”) — implying, by corollary, that he is justified in destroying bad books. And he demonstrates commitment to his principles when he rescues Miguel from a savage beating by members of his former gang.

But Miguel himself responds to Rupert’s argument by referring something he’s learned from working at the library: “All points of view should be in libraries for people to learn about and choose. Nobody should decide for other people what to read and think.” (Miguel refers to Article II of the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights: “Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”)

In a way, Hill was anticipating later debates about how libraries should deal with materials that are clearly offensive to some or all patrons. In the article about Epaminondas and His Auntie linked to above, David Pilgrim, the curator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University, writes “In January 1971 the City Council of San Jose, California voted to remove Epaminondas and His Auntie from general circulation in the city’s libraries and to place the book on reserve.” A few months later, however, the Council reconsidered and removed restrictions on the book. Pilgrim argues that there is value in “having racially offensive objects in the public so the objects can be used as tools to facilitate healthy, sometimes painful, dialogue.”

If Hill’s narrative construction is somewhat obvious, her sincerity in trying to tell her story honestly and in fairness to all her characters is genuine and gives Catch a Brass Canary the kind of simple decency that readers find in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Donna Hill 1965
Donna Hill, from the dustjacket of Catch a Brass Canary

After Catch a Brass Canary Donna Hill set adult fiction aside for over 20 years. She wrote a manual on managing visual materials in libraries titled The Picture File that was updated in the 1970s, and then a doorstopper biography of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, in 1978. She retired from Hunter College in 1984, wrote several children’s books and young adult novels, then produced Murder Uptown (1992), a mystery set at a women’s college in Manhattan (roman-à-clef?).

Catch a Brass Canary, by Donna Hill
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1965

The King and the Queen, by Ramón J. Sender (1949)

Cover of The King and the Queen by Ramon J. Sender

Ramón J. Sender’s 1949 novel The King and the Queen (El rey y la reina) demonstrates great big subjects are sometimes best dealt with through very small situations. In this case, Sender condenses the Spanish Civil War into a battle of wills between the Duchess of Arlanza and Rómulo, her gardener.

One day in 1936, shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, Rómulo is enlisted, in the butler’s momentary absence, to take a message to the Duchess. A woman whose very being is imbued with entitlement, the Duchess is in the daily habit of swimming nude in her palace’s indoor pool. The Duchess’s maid stops him outside the entrance to the pool, then goes inside to warn her. Dismissively, the Duchess tells her to bring him in.

“My Lady, it’s a man,” the maid cautions.

“Rómulo a man?” the Duchess replies. She listens to the message while slowing swimming on her back in front of him. A peasant from Andalusia, Rómulo has been subservient all his life. Working in the garden of a large palace in Madrid has only introduced certain nuances to that attitude.

But this brief incident plays on his mind in the days afterward. He comes to understand the Duchess’s response as more than just the treatment of an subordinate by a superior. “Rómulo a man?” questions his very existence as anything but a mindless, soulless beast of burden.

Soon, however, the Duke is called away to lead his troops in support of Franco and the Nationalists. He is captured by the Republicans, who also commandeer the palace as a barracks and training center. The Duchess is assumed to have escaped, but Rómulo discovers her hiding in a remote part of the palace accessible through a passageway known by few of the servants.

Seeing his duty as that of protecting the Duchess, Rómulo gradually recognizes that the balance of power has shifted. With just a word to one of the Republican officers quartered in the palace, he could send her to prison, perhaps even the firing squad. But the Duchess’s sense of superiority is too strong to give in to what might only be a temporary inconvenience. Thus, Sender plays out the bloody conflict between the Nationalists and the Republicans in the cat-and-mouse game between the noble captive and her humble — but increasingly cunning — servant.

The King and the Queen is short — just over 200 pages — tight, and strong as a sinew. Written while Sender was living in the United States after the fall of the Republic in 1939, it reduces the atmosphere and complexities of the Spanish Civil War to their essences, resulting in a story that could well be read as a fable or surrealist tale, something along the lines of Julien Gracq’s The Opposing Shore or Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe.

Sender began writing in this vein with The Sphere (1947) (La esfera), which starts as the tale of a refugee from the Spanish Civil War — not unlike Sender’s — and evolves into an Animal Farm-like story of fascism played on the small set of a passenger ship on its way to an unspecified destination. This abstraction actually makes The King and the Queen less an artifact of the Civil War and more a lasting story about the tensions between the weak and the powerful — the same topic that Elizabeth Janeway dealt with so well in her Powers of the Weak.

The King and the Queen, by Ramón J. Sender (English translation not attributed)
London: Grey Walls Press, 1949

Behind the Net Curtains, by Allan Turpin (1976)

Cover of Behind the Net Curtains by Allan Turpin

“After all, he’s not a young man,” Dorothy Rutherford’s mother advises her. Dorothy, in her early thirties, working as a bank clerk and living with her parents, has the limited options available to many lower-middle-class women one hundred years ago. She can continue at the bank, after which, as her mother tells her, “You’ll have to live out your old age in one room on a tiny pension.”

Or she can marry. Unfortunately, at her age, handsome or even passable eligible suitors are no longer looking her way. Her one offer comes from Frank Chappie, a red-faced, twice-widowed retired furniture store owner. His merits, as Mrs. Rutherford assess them, come down to two: “He must be seventy, if he’s a day — you’ve only got to look at his neck. Well — mind you, one would never wish anything to happen to anybody — but it’s obvious he can’t last very long.” And once he’s gone, “You’ll be rich — and free.”

And so, Dorothy agrees. And soon learns that “can’t last very long” is, in fact, insufferably long. Mr. Chappie (never Frank) is demanding. “Girlie!” he calls to his wife whenever she’s out of sight for more than a minute. He is tight-fisted. And he is ardent. Turpin captures the horror of the old man’s kiss:

“My darling,” he murmured, folding her soft form in his bony arms and pressing his hard, thin lips against her full, naïve ones. He kissed insatiably as if he were trying to drain the fountain of youth and beauty. Then from between his lips she sensed the stealthy advance of a little serpent that was trying to insinuate itself into the privacy of her mouth.

Like any prisoner confined against her will, Dorothy seeks relief in fantasy. In desperation, she latches onto Tommy, a driving instructor and cheap version of Ronald Colman. Lessons with Tommy provide Dorothy’s one furlough from Mr. Chappie’s funerary passion. Working on commission, Tommy is happy to encourage Dorothy’s demand for more and more frequent sessions behind the wheel, even if at the price of an older woman’s unwonted advances. He has “a predator’s streak of cruelty. He liked to keep his victims, conquests, until, as he expressed it, they almost cut their throats themselves.” Among other things, “This saved recriminations.”

With Dorothy’s ever more frantic longings for Tommy, Tommy’s ever mor cautious manouevering to thwart them without losing a client, and Mr. Chappie’s increasing suspicions and unrelenting desire for proof of her affection, the situation spirals upwards. In a French or Italian opera, this would all culminate in a great coloratura aria. In this tight-laced English novel, nary an antimacassar is disturbed. Instead, all the dramatic tension resolves quietly, efficiently, and without the slightest risk of embarrassment in the eyes of the neighbors.

Though Behind the Net Curtains is set in the 1930s, it could just as well — and often seems to be — set during the Edwardian era, or even — aside from the crucial role automobile driving lessons play in the plot — in the late 19th century. As seen in The Laughing Cavalier, Allan Turpin wrote in the 1960s and 1970s novels set in the 1920s and 1930s that rang with the features and attitudes of the decade before his birth — demonstrating, perhaps, the truth of V. S. Pritchett’s observation of “how long the shadow of Victorianism was, how long it takes for a century to die.”

Turpin might well be considered a male counterpart of Ivy Compton-Burnett (if somewhat less prolific), writing over and over tight-knit family dramas that — no matter when written — always seem to take place in some ambiguous period between the 1880s and the death of King Edward VII. And like Compton-Burnett, the pleasure of Turpin’s small dioramas is his cold-blooded and sharp eye for hypocrisy in all its subtle manifestations. You don’t care to know any of his characters, but you enjoy watching them set to their paces.

Behind the Net Curtains, by Allan Turpin
London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976

Hallelujah, I’m a Bum: What to Read After Waiting for Nothing

Hobos being moved out of Los Angeles, c. 1933

The Glasgow-based independent publisher the Common Breath recently reissued the Great Depression classic of homelessness, Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing, and the initial response of readers has been quite enthusiastic. I think a lot of today’s readers may not have been aware before now that there was a wealth of good writers beyond John Steinbeck who dealt with the impact of an economic and social catastrophe that reached as far back as the mid-1920s. So, I wanted to take this opportunity to mention some of the other remarkable books written in the 1920s and 1930s that focused specifically on life “on the bum”: the experience of the homeless, unemployed, and often desperate men and women who drifted about America in search of something to hope for.

The grandfather of all American hobo books is probably Ralph Keeler’s Vagabond Adventures (1870), which I wrote about in one of my earliest posts back in 2006. Keeler got around by steamboat instead of railroad, but his life of wandering and casual labor set the pattern that thousands would follow. Vagabond Adventures is so old that it predates the word hobo, which seems to have sprung up in the 1890s and which, according to etymologist Anatoly Liberman, has an uncertain origin. By the 1893 edition of the Funk & Wagnall dictionary, however, the establishment had already passed its judgment on the hobo: “An idle, shiftless wandering workman, ranking scarcely above the tramp.” Tramp, in fact, was the label preferred by poetic types, starting with W. H. Davies’s The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) and continuing through Harry Kemp’s Tramping on Life: An Autobiographical Narrative (1922). Kemp’s book, however, also marked the end of the romantic notions about life on the bum.

Cover of Beggars of Life by Jim Tully

• Beggars of Life: a Hobo Autobiography, by Jim Tully (1924)

Jim Tully was probably the first to celebrate the hobo-cum-hobo life, though by the time he published this autobiography, he’d been off the road for over a decade. Still, he worked hard to cultivate his image as a bruiser and built upon it through a series of novels about boxing, carnies and circus performers, thiefs, and prostitutes. A lot of the tough-guy literature of the 1930s drew its inspiration from Tully.

Kent State University Press has reissued a number of Tully’s books, including Beggars of Life, Circus Parade, Shanty Irish, and The Bruiser, as well as the biography Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover, Hollywood Brawler by Paul Bauer and Mark Dawidziak.

Cover of You Can't Win, by Jack Black

• You Can’t Win, by Jack Black (1926)

Jack Black spent most of his life on the wrong side of the law. The novelist and historian R. L. Duffus claims that Black was credited with over half the robberies that took place in the first year after San Francisco was hit by the 1906 earthquake. In between stick-up jobs and break-ins, however, Black preferred to travel like other hobos, at the railroad’s expense. Though he doesn’t actually use the word hobo in the book, there are plenty of stories about swinging into empty freight cars and run-ins with railroad bulls. It’s likely that Black decided to write his autobiography after seeing the success of Jim Tully’s, but Black has inspired his own followers, including William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, and Black is sometimes described as “the original beatnik” (a word that’s probably just as archaic as hobo by now).

There are several different reissues of You Can’t Win available now, including a Kindle edition and an audiobook.

Cover of Bottom Dogs, by Edward Dahlberg

• Bottom Dogs, by Edward Dahlberg (1929)

Bottom Dogs, Dahlberg’s first novel and largely autobiographical novel was written in Brussels but centers on the year or so that he spent bumming around the West after he was discharged from the Army. Dahlberg’s alter ego, Lorry, is what country songwriters call a ramblin’ man: “He didn’t care if he never saw any grub, he wanted his freedom, he wanted to knock about, hit the road whenever he felt like it, bum around the country.” And he arrives in a new town in typical hobo fashion:

… [H]e looked down; the train was rattling away at forty anyway; he wasn’t sure; but he knew he couldn’t jump. He’d have to wait till they got outside the yards of Ogden, Utah. He’d have to lay low, too, when he got in; he might get picked up in the streets. He wasn’t quite sure what he would do yet. Pulling into the yards outside of Ogden, Lorry jumped, hitting the coal cinders. He went down solid, bleeding at the hands and knees, and limped out of the railroad yards, stumbling toward the Lincoln Highway. He trudged along, half-heartedly hailing passing autos; he was too dirty; his shoes half off him; cinders in his ears; soot through his hair; no one would stop for him; they might think he was a stick-up.

Dahlberg was the first to test the appetite of critics and readers for a fictional equivalent of Tully and Black’s memoirs. Despite a foreword by D. H. Lwawrence, Bottom Dogs got a less than stellar reception. For Saturday Review, it seemed “to represent the vanishing point, the reductio ad absurdum of the naturalistic ‘low life’ novel,” that it amounted to ‘sub-animal reaction reported by sub-animal itself.’ “We doubt if the book helps one to understand any considerable or significant part of anything,” its reviewer sniffed.

Bottom Dogs is out of print now, but copies of the collection of Dahlberg’s first three novels that was published by Crowell back in 1976 can be picked up cheaply on Amazon and elsewhere.

Cover of A Hobo's Hornbook by George Milburn

• The Hobo’s Hornbook, by George Milburn (1930)

More cultural artifact than story, The Hobo’s Hornbook reprints dozens of hobo rhymes and songs, including classics such as “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.” George Milburn, then a budding young folklorist, collected them from a variety of sources, including interviews with hobos in towns around the Midwest. “The idea that hoboes, as a class, were imbued with the spirit of the medieval troubadours first occurred to me in 1926 when I was living on the outskirts of Chicago’s hobohemia,” Milburn wrote in the introduction. “A short distance away was Washington Square, known to staid Southsiders and suburbanites as ‘Nut Square’ and to hoboes the nation over as ‘Bughouse Square.’ In that oasis speech is free and the hoboes make the most of it. There it was that I found my first hobo elocutionists….”

The text of The Hobo’s Hornbook is available online at https://www.horntip.com/html/books_&_MSS/1930s/1930_the_hobos_hornbook__george_milburn_(HC)/index.htm.

Cover of You Can't Sleep Here by Edward Newhouse

• You Can’t Sleep Here, by Edward Newhouse (1934)

In You Can’t Sleep Here, Newhouse’s first novel, the hobo life is not a matter of personal choice but economic necessity. In the novel, a newspaper reporter loses his job and quickly drops through what little social support net existing in those early Depression days — getting evicted from his apartment, sleeping in flophouses and park benches, standing in soup kitchen lines, and finally sharing a crate in a Hooverville. The novel reflects the energetic radicalism with which Newhouse and many others responded to the economic devastation that followed the Stock Market crash. As one reviewer wrote, “Starvation has a remarkable effect on the intellect; the latter becomes susceptible to ideas to which, in the pride of its security, it had been stubbornly closed.”

You Can’t Sleep Here is extremely rare now, but you can find it online if your library has access to HathiTrust.org: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006498559.

Cover of Boy and Girl Tramps of America by Thomas Minehan

• Boy and Girl Tramps of America, by Thomas Minehan (1934)

Despite its somewhat childish title and a certain simple-worded prose style, this is a serious anthropo-/socio-logical study of the tens of thousands of young people made homeless, destitute, and itinerant by the Depression. Minehan spent several summers riding the rails and collecting observations and interviews in places like Chicago’s Bughouse Square. The New York Times’ reviewer was grateful for Minehan’s factual approach: “Congratulations are due to Thomas Minehan that he did not attempt to make literature out of the material he has put into this book. The stark, brutal, vivid, uncompromising realities of life he has set down in it are more important for his purposes, and for any use that could be made of them, than any literary product into which they could have been transformed.”

Boy and Girl Tramps of America is available on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/boygirltrampsofa0000unse

• Somebody in Boots, by Nelson Algren (1935)

Algren’s first novel, it drew upon his experiences in Texas, where he lived for a year or so after graduating from college. While there, he became so destitute that he stole a typewriter and landed in jail for a spell. The book sold poorly when first published and Algren preferred to draw attention to A Walk on the Wild Side, the 1956 novel into which he worked a number of elements from the earlier work. Of Someboy, Algren later wrote, “This is an uneven novel written by an uneven man in the most uneven of American times.

Still, it’s full of details that demonstrate that Algren was no dilettante when it came to his time on the bum. He records verses like those found in Milburn’s collection:

The roundhouse in Cheyenne is filled every night
With loafers and bummers of most every plight ;
On their backs is no clothes, in their pockets no bills.
Each day they keep comingfrom the dreary black hills.

He also recounts the tales that hobos tell each other about railroad bulls and sheriffs to avoid — like Seth Healey in Greenville, Mississippi:

He’ll be walking the tops and be dressed like a ’bo, so you’ll never know by his looks he’s a bull. But he’ll have a gun on his hip and a hoselength in his hand, and two deputies coming down both the sides ; your best bet then is to stay right still. You can’t get away and he’ll pot you if you try. So give him what you got and God help you if you’re broke. When he lifts up that hose-line just cover up your eyes and don’t try any backfightin’ when it comes down — sww-ish. God help you if you run and God help you if you fight; God help you if you’re broke and God help you if you’re black.

Somebody in Boots has been reissued a number of times, most recently in 2017 by IG Publishing, with an introduction by Colin Asher, author of Never a Lovely so Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren.

Cover of Hungry Men by Edward Anderson

• Hungry Men, by Edward Anderson (1935)

In this, Anderson’s first novel, an unemployed musician travels around America as a hobo until he stops in Chicago and forms a band with other homeless musicians. They get arrested after a fight breaks out when they refuse to play the Communist anthem, the “International.” Anderson was skeptical of the likelihood that the Depression would lead to revolution: “”Every idle man becomes economic-minded. He starts wanting to know why this man has a chauffeured Packard and he can’t get his three dollar shoes half-soled? But the American isn’t going to turn socialist or communist. At least not in this generation.”

This may accounted, in part, for Tom Kromer’s disdain when he reviewed Hungry Men for The New Masses. Kromer found it paled beside his own novel: “You will see no Jesus Christ looks in the eyes of Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men, no soup-lines that stretch for a block and never start moving, no derelicts dying of malnutrition on top of lice-filled three-decker bunks while the mission sign outside flashes ‘Jesus Saves’ on and off in the dark. In a word, you find no Hungry Men.”

According to Anderson’s biography, Rough and Rowdy Ways: The Life and Hard Times of Edward Anderson (Tarleton State University Southwestern Studies in the Humanities (Hardcover)) by Patrick Bennett (1988), however, Anderson spent two years “in the twilight world of vagabonds, riding the side-door Pullmans across the nation — San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, Boston. Now and then he turned to riding his thumb along the highways, although he felt that hitchhiking was ‘like sticking your tail out and every time somebody passes they kick it.'”

The University of Oklahoma Press reissued Hungry Men in the early 1990s, but it’s out of print now. A Kindle version, however, is available from Amazon. Anderson’s second novel Thieves Like Us, which was filmed by Robert Altman in the 1970s, has been included in the Library of America’s volume Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s.

Cover of A Horse in Arizona, by Louis Paul

• Horse in Arizona, by Louis Paul (1936)

This is a picaresque novel by the long-forgotten novelist Louis Paul. Though the story centers on the travels of two ex-doughboys after World War One, Paul incorporated elements from the life of his better-known friend, John Steinbeck. It’s perhaps less of a hobo book than a book of many unsuccessful attempts to be hobos. The lead, one Resin Scaeterbun, accompanied by his Army buddy Copril Ootz, wind back and forth across the States in search of idleness.

As Paul told an interviewer, “They want to become bums, to give their whole souls to the art of bumming. But they find themselves circumvented and defeated on every hand.” But, he complained, “In a competitive economy, it is very hard to avoid work.” Instead, Resin finds himself at various times a bootlegger, fight promoter, poet, reporter, pornographer, and screenwriter, ending up in the thoroughly disgraced profession of bookseller. One reviewer wrote that Paul “writes as Rube Goldberg draws cartoons, with a delicious sense of the ridiculous.”

Horse in Arizona was published in England as Hallelujah, I’m a Bum. I’ve got to track this one down.

The Hiding Place, by Robert Shaw (1959)

Covers of The Hiding Place by Robert Shaw

The Hiding Place opens with Hans Frick putting on his Nazi party uniform, preparing his breakfast, and taking a tray with meals down to the two RAF airmen imprisoned in his cellar. While they eat, he tells them a story about a British bomber shot down outside Karlsruhe. The crew, having been rescued after parachuting into the Rhine, were summarily shot by the local Gauleiter. He then heads upstairs, changes out of his uniform and into a suit, and bicycles in to work.

“The date was June the twelfth, nineteen fifty-two.”

Well into the 1950s, the Soviet Union was returning its last surviving German prisoners from World War Two. For several decades after 1945, stories would appear from time to time of Japanese soldiers who emerged from the jungles of Pacific islands after hiding out for years, unaware the war had ended. But in The Hiding Place, Robert Shaw imagines the plight of two British airmen held in isolation, ignorant of the outside world aside from the stories of victories on the Russian front, amazing new German weapons, and the continuing futile attempts by Allied bombers to attack Germany.

This is not, however, an alternate history like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Instead, it’s a tightly-focused study of the psychology of prisoners and their jailer that anticipates by over a decade the phenomenon known as Stockholm syndrome. Connolly and Wilson, having bailed out when their Lancaster bomber was hit on a raid over Bonn, are taken prisoner by Frick, a civil defense auxiliary. To keep them from being lynched by an angry mob, he ushers them to his nearby house and locks them in the bomb shelter that’s been built in his basement. Thanks to his late mother’s fears about being buried alive, the shelter is extremely strong and completely soundproofed.

As the first hours pass, however, he realizes the quandary he’s in: he cannot take the men to the Gestapo without questions about the delay; neither can he set them free. He soon decides the only solution is to keep them prisoner in his house. And so he enters upon a fiction that, once started, he can’t figure out how to end.

Shaw manages with remarkable success in convincing the reader that Frick could continue to convince his prisoners that his fiction is their reality. In part he does this by careful attention to the necessary practical details, but more is the result of his understanding of how prolonged captivity, particularly in relative comfort compared to what the typical Allied POW in Germany could expect, erodes the will to resist.

Covers of The Hiding Place by Robert Shaw

The monotony of their existence also saps their initiative. After an argument over Connolly’s latest idea for overtaking Frick and escaping, the two men stop suddenly:

After a moment, Connolly and Wilson felt the whole of the previous conversation had been incomprehensible: neither of them could remember what had been said; surely they had said it before; it seemed to bear no relation to anything whatsoever; and in what order had the sentences fallen? They didn’t know if it was exactly similar to hundreds of other conversations, or significant in some tiny detail, some fresh twist. Connolly swayed again. He felt so weak this morning. Wilson felt as if he had been improvising the same tune at a piano for years, and now, asked to play the original, had forgotten what it was. What had they been talking about?

Wilson endures their confinement better than Connolly. A lawyer in civilian life, he early on convinced Frick to supply pencil and paper so he could practice translating remembered English texts into German. When his memory ran out, his imagination took over. Gradually, Connolly becomes “aware how much Wilson was changing — how much he was beginning to enjoy writing — how much there seemed for him to do.”

Eventually — and quite by accident — Wilson and Connolly do escape, and in some ways what happens next forms the most interesting part of the book. Interesting because the reader wonders where Shaw will take the story. After all, the men think the war is still going on, that they are in the midst of enemy territory. So, even after getting away from Frick, Frick’s fiction remains with them: they are, indeed, actively resisting being set straight.

Frick also struggles to adapt to his new reality after the escape, for he has become as emotionally dependent upon them as they have been physically dependent upon him. Despite the inhumanity of Frick’s actions, Shaw makes him seem sympathetic in the end. The Hiding Place manages to be both thrilling and tender and — despite the very specific conditions upon which the story is premised — also somewhat timeless. It could almost as easily have been set during the American Civil War or on another planet as science fiction.

Richard Basehart and Trevor Howard in the US television production of The Hiding Place

The Hiding Place was twiced staged as a television play: once in the U.K. with Shaw himself, along with Sean Connery, as the airmen, and once in the U.S. with James Mason as Frick and Richard Basehart and Trevor Howard as Wilson and Connolly. Unfortunately, neither one of the productions received positive reviews. Then in 1965, Gottfried Reinhardt, son of the legendary theater director Max Reinhardt, decided to turn it into a comedy, Situation Hopeless … but Not Serious with Alec Guinness as the jailer and Mike Connors and Robert Redford as the airmen, now Americans. One IMDB reviewer wrote that the movie “was sheer torture to watch”; another, that it was “the strangest Alec Guinness film out there.”

Robert Shaw 1958

The Hiding Place was Robert Shaw’s first novel. And though he’s now primarily remembered as an actor, he wrote a total of five novels between 1958 and 1969. His second, The Sun Doctor (1961), won the Hawthornden Prize and is becoming rather rare and expensive. The Flag, is something of a realistic parable, perhaps along the lines of William Golding’s The Spire. The Man in the Glass Booth (1967), inspired by the Adolf Eichmann trial, was adapted with considerably more critical successful both for the stage and film. A Card from Morocco (1969), about two British expats on the prowl in Spain, bears traces of Anthony Burgess in its corrupted sense of humor. All, sadly, are long out of print.

The Hiding Place, by Robert Shaw
London: Chatto & Windus, 1959

Five A. M., by Jean Dutourd (1956)

Cover of US edition of Five A.M. by Jean Dutourd

A contribution to the 1956 Club.

This ought to be one of the rediscovered classics of this pandemic. Like Fernand Gérard Doucin, the narrator of Jean Dutourd’s novel Five A. M., many of us have found ourselves wide awake in the early hours of the morning, staring at the ceiling, our mind wandering along the edge of an abyss of despair:

Catastrophe: not the least little bit of sleep between my eyelids! My mind is as clear as at noonday. The room has grown considerably lighter, too. I can hear the muted ticking of the alarm clock hidden in the closet. Panic! I am filled with panic.

Like Doucin, we find our thoughts “revolving in [our] lucid brain like those acrobats known as riders of death, spinning on their motorcycles round and round the inside of a huge drum.” And like Doucin, we drag ourselves into the waking world “haunted by the thought of not having had enough sleep.”

In 1956 (or 1955, when Five A. M. first appeared in French as Doucin, the global spectre was not disease but the atomic bomb. Comparing his trivial accomplishments with those of Homer and Shakespeare, Doucin reflects, “Besides, the atom bomb may destroy everything in fifty years’ (or fifty minutes’) time. In which case, farewell Homer, good-by Shakespeare, good night Balzac, adieu Doucin (Fernand and Gerard).” Born a few years after Doucin was having these thoughts, I can still remember how, as a child, upon awakening to the flash of lightning outside my bedroom window as a kid, my first thought was that a nuclear war had begun.

But in Doucin’s case, it is less global destruction than the minutiae of his own life that fill his thoughts. A thirty-year-old bank clerk, bachelor and largely lapsed Catholic, he worries about money, his weight, about his smoking, about his baldness. While the last of these could be seen as mere vanity, Dutourd recognizes something I’ve been saying ever since I went bald myself — namely, that being bald requires one to stare death in the face each morning.

Perhaps as a symptom of his profession, Doucin is a calculator. “How many people in the world care about me, alive or dead? How long will they talk about me after my death?” he wonders. Not many of them will be women. As a lover, Doucin is more hunter than collector. Even as he feels his attraction to a new mistress, his thoughts race ahead to the moment when he will grow bored and have to break with her.

Smoking is easier to quantify. “How many cigarettes have I smoked in sixteen years?” he wonders. “Possibly 150,000.” Of these, nothing remains — except, of course, the collective damage they’ve done — are still doing — to his body. Unlike the narrator in Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, however, his last cigarette is nowhere in sight: “I can’t stop,” he despairs. “As night closes in, as the lights come on, my frantic need to smoke grows more intense.”

As a realistic description of insomnia, Five A. M. is a success. But it fails, in the end, as a piece of literature. Doucin is too much of an empty shell — or rather, the emotion at the core of his being is one unlikely to compel much sympathy from the reader: boredom. “I am convinced that I know the world inside out. Everything bores me. I know everything in advance. Love, war, the passions, money, all disgust me like a sauce gone bad.”

Even though the word love appears three times more often in the text than boredom and its variations, the spirit that fills the pages of Five A. M. is paralysis. “A man who loves boredom,” Doucin reflects, prefers it “to diversions, pleasures, happiness, everything.” He will refuse to go to a cafe, refuse to call his friends, refuse to move: “He will stay at home for weeks on end, sprawling on a sofa, all alone with boredom.” As Time magazine’s critic responded callously, “Author Dutourd writes as dry ice feels, but his chilling message is only half true. A man’s lifetime is invariably more than the sum of what he thinks and feels in the small, black hour of the hoo-ha’s.”

Jean Dutourd, 1956
Jean Dutourd, 1956

Perhaps Five A. M. was only a therapeutic exercise. “I used to wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning filled with morbid thoughts,” he later claimed, “and said to myself that the best way to fix that was to write a book. I wrote it with the utmost pleasure, in just a couple of months, and have slept soundly since.” Even so, French critics thought well enough of Doucin to nominate Dutourd for the Prix Goncourt (he lost to the now-forgotten novelist Roger Ikor’s novel Les eaux mêlées, later published in English as The Sons of Avrom).

At the time he wrote Five A. M., Dutourd was undergoing an ideological sea change. Having been an active member of the Resistance — narrowly escaping execution after being captured by the Gestapo in 1944 — by the mid-1950s, he had forcefully declared himself as a Gaullist, writing an enthusiastic review of de Gaulle’s memoirs and writing The Taxis of the Marne, which was partly a memoir of his wartime experiences and mostly a brooding reflection on the state of France as he saw it.

It’s not a pretty read in light of today’s world. “In 1935, with her institutions, her cabinet ministers, her soldiers, her severe court of justice, her sparkling navy, her strict prefects, her Pacific empire, her cruel colonists, and her State patriotism, France was a lion,” he declares. To protest against this state, even at the smallest scale, he argued, “was noble and courageous.” “But the France of 1956 is a weak and divided country,” he continued. “The anticonformists are donkeys kicking a dying lion.” His preference to the campaigns of the left, was patriotism. And “By patriotism,” he wrote, “I mean active, intolerant, cruel and effective patriotism.” Orville Prescott, The New York Times’ usually conservative book editor found The Taxis of the Marne “crammed with fine, mouth-filling denunciation, drenched with eloquent cries of lamentation and despair.” And the equally conservative Paul Johnson noted ironically, “Dutourd remarks, correctly, that too many Frenchmen regard their memories as rights; but his whole book is a convincing demonstration that he himself shares the fallacy.”

Dutourd’s shift continued over the course of the next decade until, by the late 1960s, he showed himself sympathetic to royalism in his novel Pluche, or the Love of Art (1967). Eventually, he grew so identified with the establishment in France that he became a target of radical leftists. In the early hours of Bastille Day in 1978, Dutourd’s apartment on Avenue Kleber in Paris was wrecked by a bomb planted by a so-called “Franco-Arab refusal section” that wanted “to destroy the lair of the provocateur Jean Dutourd, a man of the pen at the service of the Jewish press.”

Dutourd was by then writing a column for the evening newspaper France Soir in which he often mocked the pretensions of the left. His cynicism, particularly of leftists still taking favorable positions toward the Soviet Union, would prove prescient. As he wrote just a few days before the bombing, “In a few years’ time, the proletarians and intellectuals will perceive that the fatherland of socialism is nothing other than a military empire.”

Five A. M., by Jean Dutourd
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956

Diana Trilling’s Neglected Favorites

Lionel and Diana Trilling
Lionel and Diana Trilling in the 1940s

Diana Trilling started writing weekly book reviews for The Nation magazine in early 1942 and kept at it for most of the next seven years. Collected in her 1978 book, Reviewing the Forties, her reviews offer a fascinating glimpse into the state of English-language fiction at mid-century.

She came to the job in part through the reputation of her husband Lionel Trilling, but she came well-prepared, having been Lionel’s copy writer for over a decade. As Paul Fussell wrote in his preface to this collection, “as a critic, Diana Trilling has range; she is not satisfied to leave literature sitting there uninterpreted in its fullest psychological, social, and political meaning, for she perceives that “literature is no mere decoration of life but an index of the health or sickness of society.”

She also had strong opinions. Reviewing Natalie Robins’s 2017 biography The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling for The Nation, Vivian Gornick wrote:

Books, for Diana, were either decent or indecent, vulgar or civilized, responsible or irresponsible. Forget the hundreds of skewered writers who have gone down into oblivion; routinely, she also took apart the likes of John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Evelyn Waugh, Arthur Koestler. Reviewing Truman Capote’s debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, in 1948, she wrote: “I find myself deeply antipathetic to the whole artistic-moral purpose of Mr. Capote’s novel…. I would freely trade 80 percent of his technical virtuosity for 20 percent more value in the uses to which it is put.”

As Tobi Haslett wrote in The New Yorker, also reviewing Robins’ book, Diana Trilling’s “gimlet-eyed assurance that has not always aged well.” Trilling was already developing a reputation for being, as Marjorie Perloff put it, “a difficult, at times unpleasant woman — self-absorbed, arrogant, catty and competitive — who managed, sooner or later, to alienate just about everyone she knew.” Not that she couldn’t be entertaining when she had her knives out. I love this assessment of that domesticated English favorite, Angela Thirkell:

Advertised as a pleasant bundle of froth, Angela Thirkell is in fact quite a grim little person. For all her gentle voice, she is one of the great haters on the contemporary fictional scene. She hates sex, the movies, and the lower classes, except an occasional half-wit mechanic. The cousin of Rudyard Kipling, she hates “natives” and foreigners; she hates servants, except the governess who can frighten the grown son of a peer by asking him if his hands are clean.

Trilling’s standing as a critic has fallen considerably since her death. She is dismissed for having slammed the likes of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jean Stafford, Saul Bellow, and Christopher Isherwood, while praising a few number of now-forgotten novelists.

It’s this point, however, that interested me in Reviewing the Forties. While many seem to think that Trilling’s criticism of books now considered classics such as 1984 imply that she was also dead wrong about the writers she liked, I’ve read enough to know that forgotten-ness is never a reliable indication of whether a book is worth reading. Here, then, is a sample of some of the now-neglected books that Trilling gave her thumbs-up to:

Cover of Weather of the Heart

• Daphne Athas’ s The Weather of the Heart

… written when Miss Athas was only twenty-two, her first published work, is strikingly talented. It is also an admirable attempt to put sensibility at the service of growth rather than of self-pitying retreat.

There is much fantasy in our literature of sensibility but it is predominantly narcissistic, unable to move beyond the range of the writer’s self-love. The fantasy in Miss Athas’s novel is almost frighteningly unhampered. On the one hand, Miss Athas can generate large dramatic conflict out of something as seemingly trivial as the murder of a pet canary. On the other hand, she can match Faulkner in the imagination of aberrant behavior. Her story is set in Maine and even her descriptions of landscape and weather are free and bold. It is only in her statement of the source of Eliza Wall’s sexual fears that Miss Athas works by rote, looking to the textbook.

• Caroline Slade’s Lilly Crackell

A social-work novel, despite the fact that it is unsparing in its criticism of that profession, Lilly Crackell is the most estimable novel I have read this week. A story of America’s lower depths, Lilly Crackell traces the career of a young girl raised in the squalor that is so apt to fringe American prosperity. When we first meet Lilly it is 1918; Lilly is a lovable child of fourteen, about to become the mother of an illegitimate baby. Twenty-four years later Lilly is the mother of six children and still the victim of almost unbelievable misery and privation.

Mrs. Slade … writes barely and factually with none of the “literary” overtones that make poverty good reading: it is unlikely that Lilly Crackell will have a fraction of the popular appeal of The Grapes of Wrath. But the book is no less courageous: it takes courage to make explicit the meaning of the war for people who have never had a chance to be anything but a drain on society.

• Edita Morris’s My Darling from the Lions

Mrs. Morris has published a volume of short stories but I am unacquainted with the earlier work. Her novel is set in Sweden where she was bom, and has two heroines, the sisters Anna and Jezza, who tell their firstperson stories in alternating chapters. Both girls are excruciatingly precious, and precious to themselves; self-love seems to be a concomitant of sensibility in women writers, and Mrs. Morris is one of those oh-the-aching-wonder-of-it-all literary women for whom a snowflake or a sausage is equally an occasion for ecstasy. Yet whatever my dislike of so much quiver, I have to admit Mrs. Morris’s talent. Cumulatively, her sensibility loses some of its exacerbation and even begins to take effect; after the first hundred pages I found myself acutely aware of the charm of her village in northern Sweden, almost as nostalgic for it as if I had myself known it. And it is certainly no denigration of Mrs. Morris’s gifts to say that she frequently invites comparison with better writers than herself: for example, her gallery of decayed gentlewomen — Anna and Jezza’s aunts — is suggestive of Chekhov, and the spiritual stature which she can give to the life of privacy suggests Isak Dinesen.

• Edward Newhouse’s The Hollow of the Wave

[It] wears no air of importance, is entirely understandable and even lively, it must be singled out from the run of current fiction: these are rare, if relative, virtues. It is some time since I have read a novel whose author comes through his book so attractively. Even where Mr. Newhouse’s manner is less than striking and his characters less dimensional than is their human privilege, we see the former fault as a defect of modesty, the latter as a defect of kindliness.

• Enrique Amorim’s The Horse and His Shadow

Like most good South American fiction, The Horse and His Shadow is a revolutionary novel but unlike the revolutionary fiction of our own country, it is subtle, fluid, deeply concerned with the drama of human relationships. The action moves between the estancia of Nico Azara, outside Montevideo, and the community of Polish refugees and poor natives who live on the fringes of Nico’s lands. On the estancia itself there is every shade of political opinion. In addition to the peons at the one extreme, and the arrogant Nico at the other, there is Adelita, Nico’s wife, an aristocrat of decent liberal opinions; there is Bica, her servant and illegitimate half-sister, who lives in lonely severity among the men ranchers; there is Marcelo, Nico’s brother, sought by the government for his part in smuggling refugees into Uruguay. Mr. Amorim doesn’t measure either the decency and courage or the weakness of these people by the famihar yardstick of their social-political views….

Even the poor people in Mr. Amorim’s novel, the gauchos and the struggling refugees, are shown naked of grandeur in an amazing scene in which two of their number steal the services of Don Juan for a broken-down mare. What Mr. Amorim is saying is what is too seldom said in fiction these days, that it is by both the new and the old, by the mixture of good and evil, by the progressive and the retarding, that society must advance, and he says it in the only way fruitful for the novelist, through drama and even melodrama.

• Ira Wolfert’s Tucker’s People

[T]he surprise literary package of the season, the most thoughtful and talented novel I have read this year. Mr. Wolfert is correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance, a Pulitzer prize-winner in reporting, and author of The Battle of the Solomons but he turns out to be that rare creature, a newspaperman with a notable gift for creative writing. Tucker’s People is an outstanding novel, the simple statement of whose theme—the numbers racket in Harlem—gives no hint of its emotional and intellectual scope. Tucker’s People is a study in gangsterism; its characters are racketeers, politicians, hangers-on, police, and their families. But this is no Damon Runyonesque novel of the underworld; Mr. Wolfert talks out of his head, not out of the corner of his mouth. He views gangsterism as an aspect of our whole predatory economic structure and at least by implication his novel is as much a novel of legitimate American business as it is of racketeering.

In the sense that Mr. Wolfert is attacking the entire system of capitalism, he has of course written a “radical” novel, but it is in the sense that his method is the method neither of pamphleteering nor of rabble-rousing but the method of anatomizing society by anatomizing people that his novel is truly radical.

• Gontran de Poncins’s Home Is the Hunter

…although not so direct in its romantic appeal as Kabloona, the same writer’s account of his stay among the Esquimos, is still one of the notable books of recent years, shining out of the mist of most current writing with the full light of M. de Poncins’s remarkable personality. To read the books of M. de Poncins is to be unusually aware of their author: he seems at once very worldly and very internalized, monastically intense in spirit. One has the impression of an intelligence peculiarly of the French aristocratic tradition, and indeed Home Is the Hunter is a reconstruction — or a commemoration — of the almost feudal background against which, we can guess, M. de Poncins was himself bred. It is published as fiction but it is not strictly a novel. Rather, it is both elegiac poetry and penetrating sociological research into a culture which was already vanishing glory when the author was a small child before the first war.


The writer Trilling singled out for her greatest praise was a favorite of neglected book fans: Isabel Bolton. Of Bolton’s debut novel, Do I Wake or Sleep, she wrote:

Isabel Bolton’s Do I Wake or Sleep is quite the best novel that has come my way in the four years I have been reviewing new fiction for this magazine. Small, anonymous in the welter of current books, it might very well have escaped my notice had Edmund Wilson not called attention to it in the New Yorker: the possibility of such an oversight will now become my reviewer’s nightmare. Mr. Wilson’s high praise prepared me, however, only for a work of exceptional talent. It did not prepare me — nothing but reading the book could — for the extraordinary process of revelation that Miss Bolton’s novel turned out to be.

Opening as a minor work of poetic sensibility, the kind of writing which Miss Bolton herself goes on to describe as achieved with the nerves rather than with the deeper centers, Do I Wake or Sleep gradually deepens to become a work of compelling insight; then the story progresses a bit farther, and the intelligence that one has hitherto noted simply as a restraining force upon poetic excess slowly proclaims its dominion over the novel’s whole conception; finally one confronts the real shape and intellectual strength of the book, and recognizes the source of and response to a major fictional experience.

I have no idea who Miss Bolton is: the jacket of the novel is provocatively uninformative. Whoever she is, she is the most important new novelist in the English language to appear in years. Whatever her literary apprenticeship, her book—it is a long novelette, really, rather than a novel—is the achievement of a fully matured artist.


When Bolton’s second novel, The Christmas Tree, came out three years later, Trilling proclaimed that Bolton had established herself “as the best woman writer of fiction in this country today”:

Miss Bolton works like a mosaic-maker, piecing together bits of scenes and persons—but it is a full panorama and a full cast, though given us in such tiny fragments—until finally, in unbelievably small compass, the whole pattern and intention are laid out before us. By what miracle of selection and organization she catches in 212 pages all we need to know of four generations of her Danforths, a story which in the hands of any other writer would have been a giant tome, is a not-to-be-fathomed secret of her craft. She could not have done it, one is sure, had she used a different narrative manner. The reader may be too conscious of, even irritated by, her long Proustian sentences but they admirably connect past and present, and permit Miss Bolton to recollect, create, and comment upon, all at the same time and with greatest economy.

Having been reissued several times with Bolton’s third novel Many Mansions as New York Mosaic, Do I Wake or Sleep and The Christmas Tree have, sadly, been out of print so far this century.

The Wreck Out on the Highway: Novels and Auto Accidents

The wreckage of James Dean's Porsche, September 30, 1955
The wreckage of James Dean’s Porsche, near Cholame, California, September 30, 1955

It only takes a second. One moment, everything’s fine; the next, everything’s shattered. A friend of mine said her father once told her, handing over the keys to the family car, “When you get behind that wheel, you’ve put your finger on the trigger of a loaded gun.” For decades, “Road injury” has, according to the World Health Organization, been one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide. As irrational as America’s obsession with gun ownership is, the fact remains that most of us don’t own one and gun violence affects far fewer of our lives than death and injury from automobile accidents.

It’s the dramatic potential — and here the meaning of potential in mechanics is also relevant — in an automobile accident that has tended more than a few novelists to use it as a catalyst or centerpiece. It’s probably no coincidental that most of these novels appeared between the late 1940s and mid-1960s: these were the years when American cars were big, fast, and almost completely lacking in any safety measures aside from the driver’s attention and skill. Freeways hadn’t yet overtaken two-lane blacktop highways as the primary conduit for travel of any distance, and any kid with memories from those days will be able to recall wincing as soon as their dad started to move out to pass some truck or car driving too slow for his taste.

Covers of The Descent by Fritz Peters

One of the first of these novels was Fritz Peter’s The Descent (1952). Peters spent his teenage years living in the loose community of followers around the mystic George Gurdjieff, arriving not long after Gurdjieff suffered a near-fatal car accident outside Paris and often wheeling him around the grounds in those first months — one of the memories recounted in his Boyhood with Gurdjieff (1964). It’s not surprising, then, that his experiences with Gurdjieff and the philosopher’s interest in man’s ability to control his destiny led him to use a multi-car accident on a mountain highway in New Mexico as an instrument for illustrating how its outcome might or might not be affected by the actions or thoughts of its victims. Peters captured the disruptive effects of an accident:

Reality, the fundamental, basic reality of life, had been imposed upon everyone involved in the accident for at least a short time. The dreams, illusions and enchantments, the superficial aims and purposed, desires and wishes, of the victims and the spectators were stripped away by the shock, leaving only the human essentials. The veneer of civilization that passes for human dignity had — for a time — ceased to exist.

Peters takes a Ship of Fools/Grand Hotel approach, leading up to the event through the eyes of a dozen or more of the people involved — victims as well as those who have to clean up the mess. For some, the accident quickly becomes a faint memory or statistic, but for those responsible and injured — physically or emotionally — their lives “continue to reverberate to the consequences.”

Covers of The Accomplices by Georges Simenon

Joseph Lambert, the rich businessman who kills a busload of school children when he’s focusing on the hand up his mistress’s skirt than the one of the wheel of his Citroen in Georges Simenon’s The Accomplices (1955), has his own sense of predestination in the first moments after the impact:

It was brutal, instantaneous. And yet he was neither surprised nor resentful, as if he had always been expecting it. He realized in a flash, as soon as the horn started screaming behind him, that the catastrophe was inevitable and that it was his fault.

As Simenon was often wont to do, he takes morbid pleasure in compounding the sins involved in his hero’s downfall. Not just a hit-and-run accident, but adultery, corruption, cover-up, collusion, and good old-fashioned hypocrisy. The sinister possibilities of the situation, in the hands of a master of human fallibility, make The Accomplices one of Simenon’s all-time best romans dur.

Covers of Juice by Stephen Becker

In Juice (1958), on the other hand, Stephen Becker’s focus is less on the psyche and more on the system. When Joe Harrison, heading home after three martinis and feeling no pain, runs down and kills a pedestrian on his way home, the system of business and justice in Southern California kicks in. The head of a chain of newspapers and television stations, Joe is in too prominent a position for those with a stake in his reputation to sit idle. The chairman of his board steps in, hires an expensive Hollywood lawyer, and mounts a campaign of public and private persuasion — the “juice” of the title — to swing a verdict of innocence. Becker caves in to his sense of justice in the end, which prevents Juice from being quite as juicy as it could have been.

Covers of Be Silent Love by Fan Nichols

Fan Nichols is an unjustly neglected woman “hard case” novelist who had a unique take on a hit-and-run story in Be Silent Love (1960) (also known by its unsubtle pulp paperback title The Girl in the Death Seat). Here, the focus is on the passenger, not the driver or the victim. Riding alongside her married boyfriend on the way to their weekend hideaway along the Hudson, Kay Hubbard begins to realize that adultery isn’t the worst thing he’s capable of after he clips a teenager and decides to drive away, hoping that no one has seen the accident. For a while, she plays along — it was her car, after all — but gradually understands the inevitable domino effect of compounded lies.

Ironically, though, Nichol’s most convincing character is the boyfriend, David Drake, a mass market paperback version of Richard Yates’ Frank Wheeler from Revolutionary Road. On the one hand, he’s full of his own superiority, smugly satisfied that he has managed both to wed a Congressman’s daughter and to bed a gorgeous redheaded girlfriend. On the other, no matter how high up the ladder he might rise, he can never stop looking down in fear:

Everybody was jealous of his success and he had to fight for what he wanted; he had always had to fight everybody, the ones trying to pull him down, step on him, knife him, crush him, all the bottom dogs of the world after him, snapping at his heels to stop him from climbing a ladder they could never, never climb.

Unfortunately, to resolve the predicament she’s created, Nichols has to turn Drake into a psychokilling machine and plausibility flies out the door by the third or fourth murder-to-cover-up-the previous-murder. Well, at least the pages fly by.

Covers of Accident by Elizabeth Janeway

In Elizabeth Janeway’s The Accident (1964), the young spoiled son of a wealthy importer runs into a tree at 97 miles per hour. He walks away with a few scratches; his college friend in the passenger seat is disabled for life. The accident sparks a previously faint sense of conscience in the young man. His family, on the other hand, responds in a variety of unhelpful ways: denial (his mother); corruption (his father); abandonment (his father again). Janeway introduces the wreck into their lives like a tiny drop of acid on a set of poorly-finished welds, and soon the connections are all coming apart: the center cannot hold when there’s nothing there in the first place. The New York Times gave the book to Frederick C. Crews, hot off his moralistic bestseller, The Pooh Perplex, and his verdict was predictably castigating. He called The Accident a “very adult soap opera” and found it typical of the genre of soft-hearted liberal literature whose “distinctive aspect … is its morbid sympathy for human weakness; any weakness will do.” Janeway, whose Powers of the Weak cries out to be rediscovered as a guide to help us rebalance the allocation of power and navigate out of the mess America’s in, was anything but soft-hearted, but Crews wasn’t the first or last man with an agenda to employ something a woman had written as a soapbox to hector from.

Covers of The Pursuit of Happiness by Thomas Rogers

Though published just four years after The Accident, Thomas Rogers’ The Pursuit of Happiness (1968) in some ways seems the more dated book. There are more than a few parallels between the two novels. In both, the driver at fault is a college student and son of a wealthy family. Janeway’s Steven Benedict destroys the life of his friend; Rogers’ William Popper kills a black woman on the streets of Chicago while’s chatting away with his girlfriend. Both men take responsibility, if not immediately — Popper going to jail for manslaughter, though he eventually decides to escape to Mexico. Both families respond in a variety of ways — protective, abetive, supportive.

But The Pursuit of Happiness is very much a novel of its particular time: 1968. William Popper’s classmates would be marching against Mayor Richard Daley’s police a few months later and the living rooms of his parents and aunts and uncles would be filled with images of dead soldiers in Vietnam and race riots in Watts and Detroit. Rogers took his epigraph from the Nichomachean Ethics: “There is a general assumption that the manner of a man’s life is a clue to what he on reflection regards as the good — in other words, happiness.”

This book came out around the time that you could buy a poster with Charles Schultz’s Peanuts character Linus and the slogan, “Happiness is a Warm Blanket.” And that, in the end, appears to have been William Popper’s own definition. The book is unquestionably well-written, well-constructed. It’s a classic of a certain spare, dispassionate style of fiction. Marian Engel found it “a novel remarkably free of cant,” wrote that the book “gains its stature from its honesty, its truth to patterns of speech and feeling, its accurate and free rendering of the conundrums of human relationships”: “There is no clumsy exposition; there are no purple passages; nothing is particularly quotable.”

And this, I’d argue, is what ultimately undermines the book. William Popper is the epitome of the well-bred, well-educated, well-fed white American who wishes everyone well as long as there isn’t too much discomfort involved for himself. His answer to the American dream is to escape America — which leads me to agree with The New Statesman’s reviewer, Vernon Scannell: “Well, that’s all very fine, I suppose, if you are living on unearned income with a smashing bird in sunny Mexico, but it doesn’t help those millions doing time in the big gaol of the USA.” If the USA is something of a car wreck itself right now, running away from the scene might be an easy answer, but it’s probably not the right one.

This Little Hand, by Pamela Kellino (1941)

Cover of first UK edition of This Little Hand by Pamela Kellino

Should Pamela Kellino have written this book? Set in the East End of London and narrated by the pretty but not very bright daughter of a cleaning woman and a fairly useless former soldier, it’s a grim but vivid story of the bad things desperate people can do. The sins and crimes committed range from petty theft to grand larceny, from white lies to false accusations, from prostitution to illegal abortion, from hot- to cold-blooded murder. A book with few nice things and no nice people, This Little Hand is a long way from your typical middlebrown English novel of its time.

Young Flo lives with her parents, sister and orphaned cousin Ol in what they consider a rather plush flat: two rooms and a kitchen. “We didn’t have any water and you had to go down to the end of the street to get any. It was about five blocks down — they had a lavatory there too. It was a wonderful building.” Ma does the morning cleaning at Greenaway’s, the local department store specializing in cheap and shoddy goods. Flo gets a job wrapping packages at Greenaway’s, and the store serves as the object and instrument of much that happens from then on. As with Raskolnikov’s old pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment, when you’re dirt poor, the most miserable enterprise can seem like Fort Knox.

One night, looking for a back-alley abortion for a friend, Flo meets Karam, an Anglo-Indian whose operations aren’t limited to helping out desperate young women. Flo is immediately attracted. “He was the last thing in the world I would have expected. He was so beautiful that tears had come in my eyes. He was an Indian, but lovely, lovely, like nothing I’d ever seen before.” Struck by Karam’s good looks, confidence, and smooth manners, Flo allows herself to be seduced and then drawn into his other shadowy affairs. From there, the story quickly swirls itself down into a vortex of corruption and violence that ends with Flo holding a knife to Karam’s neck.

This Little Hand could be seen as the distaff counterpart to Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, with Kellino’s Flo and Karam as parallels to Greene’s Rose and Pinkie. In both stories, an innocent — perhaps not truly good, but at least not overtly bad — is pulled over to the dark side by the strength of one truly corrupted and evil.

And yet I knew too much about Pamela Kellino to be fully drawn into This Little Hand. At the time she wrote it, Kellino was roughly the same age as Flo, but at that point their similarities end.
Kellino was born into wealth and comfort. Her father, Isidore Ostrer, was a banker who became own of the moguls of British film when he took over as president of the Gaumont British Picture Corporation in the 1920s. By the age of 24, his daughter Pamela had married twice: first the cinematographer Roy Kellino and then the actor James Mason. She’d also starred in a number of stage and radio productions as well as in a couple of films. Although she wrote two further books as Pamela Kellino and continued to use that name in films until the mid-1950s, she was known as Pamela Mason for most of her career (despite her contentious divorce from Mason in 1962).

Pamela Kellino and James Mason, 1940
Pamela Kellino and James Mason in The Bystander and The Tatler, 1940

So Pamela Kellino and Flo, the narrator of This Little Hand, lived at near-opposite ends of the social and economic spectrum in England. When Flo was being packed off to reform school, Kellino was being photographed for The Tatler and Bystander society pages. Which raises the question: should This Little Hand be criticized in the same way that Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt was?

In the letter that 142 American writers sent to Oprah Winfrey calling for her to pull American Dirt from her book club, they argued that Cummins’ novel was not “imagined well nor responsibly, nor has it been effectively researched. The book is widely and strongly believed to be exploitative, oversimplified, and ill-informed….” They acknowledged that “Many of us are also fiction writers, and we believe in the right to write outside of our own experiences: writing fiction is essentially impossible to do without imagining people who are not ourselves.” So their reservations about American Dirt were, in effect, about degrees. One has to assume that they wouldn’t have objected if the book had been imagined well and responsibly and effectively researched.

I’m at an even farther remove from Flo and her world as depicted in This Little Hand than was Pamela Kellino, so I’m not in a strong position to be passing judgment. But I could not shake a certain skepticism about the book when reading it, in a way that I never once considered when reading G. E. Trevelyan’s story of a London bag lady, William’s Wife (for the sake of comparison). Trevelyan immersed herself in the sensibility of Jane, her bag lady. Jane’s paranoia and extreme avarice becomes the reader’s. In the case of Flo, however, I had more the sensation of watching rather than experiencing — rather like looking at an animal through the bars of a zoo cage. Perhaps Pamela Kellino could have gone on to write better, more convincing accounts of the lives of people far from her experience had she been willing to commit as completely and intensively as G. E. Trevelyan did. But there is throughout This Little Hand an air of dilletantism that the stench of sweat and dirt from Flo’s East End never quite overcomes.

Other Reviews

• Times Literary Supplement

This Little Hand is the story of a young girl brought up in hideous slum conditions and of her introduction into the London underworld. Although it may seem a little too meaty towards the close, the reader is left with an impression of sober imaginative truth, of genuine power also, possibly as yet immature, to convey such truth.

• Edwin Muir, The Listener

[T]he book … is written with an astonishing passion and directness that burns up the squalor. Flo herself is an originally conceived character, a baffling but quite natural mixture of innocence and toughness, only seventeen when she stands her trial… [I]t is quite without the mechanical quality which goes with that kind of writing. It is the work of a sensitive writer whose mind is possessed by the extremes of human misery. As a mere story it is sometimes magnificent.

• Britannia and Eve

When I first met Pamela Kellino, the daughter of a film magnate, she was starring in her first film and was officially listed as a starlet. What she had learned since those days seems to be a lot about a very grim type of life, a London girl who goes to live with an Indian ‘doctor’ who performs illegal operations.

• Vernon Fane, The Sphere

It is all very tough and sordid, yet at the same time it has a warm and human quality, and it is Miss Kellino’s achievement that she never yields an inch in her sympathy for her tragic little heroine. There is a good deal of power in this book, and some signs that when certain immaturities can be overcome the author may have a long way to go on the literary road.

• A. P. West, The New Statesman

One has a feeling that this promising first novel is a failure because the author is writing about a world in which she has no first-hand experience: one recognises vestiges of a number of cases which were reported in newspapers in the narrative, one detects patches of guesswork. If Miss Kellino abandons the practice of dealing in second-hand experience she should become an interesting writer.

• Kate O’Brien, The Spectator

The merits of the book are its simplicity, its truth of dialogue and physical detail, its hurrying sense of life, and its clean, unshrinking characterisations. Its especial merit is in the central character of Flo, who all the way down to disaster never puts a foot wrong — that is to say, never blenches before herself, and never, in the thick of her temptations and sins, really loses love of life, or her curious, much-battered sense of moral obligation to it.

This Little Hand, by Pamela Kellino
London: Robert Hale Limited, 1941

The Penalty of Exile, by Edith de Born (1964)

Cover of The Penalty of Exile by Edith de Born

The Penalty of Exile demonstrates that although Edith de Born had a reputation for writing books that, in Peter Ackroyd’s words, “one can recommend to one’s grandmother,” she didn’t always stick to grandmotherly topics. Within the first 30 pages of the book, we find that its focus is a 14-year-old child prostitute whose mother — also a prostitute — has been stabbed to death. In an interview she gave about a year after publishing The Penalty of Exile, de Born expressed tremendous admiration for Nabokov’s Lolita, calling it one of the finest novels of the century and also characterising it as a love story. Knowing this, I found it hard not to read de Born’s novel as her own attempt to deal with the taboo subject of pedophilia.

Unfortunately, her sensibilities led her to take an indirect approach, telling the story of young Helga Vankammen primarily as seen by the two adults who become personally involved in her case after her mother’s murder. The first is Edgar Kermans, a wealthy Belgian businessman who encounters Helga on the streets around the Gare du Midi in Brussels. Helga is crouched on the sidewalk, gently caring for a ragged mutt of a dog. Struck by Helga’s beauty, despite her tattered clothes and dirty face, Kermans ends up buying the dog and getting some food for the girl.

He leaves her his business card, which is how he’s then contacted by the police after Helga’s mother is murdered. Kermans’ motivations are never quite clear. They seem to be part Good Samaritan, part infatuation, and part a belief that money can solve all problems. De Born sums up an entire slice of bourgeois society in her characterization of Kermans and his kind: “The distinctive trait they possessed in common was the firm belief that the only sure and efficient method of protection for themselves and their families against all potential risks and dangers was the acquisition and preservation of wealth.” (For more, viz. Capital by Thomas Piketty).

The other is Wilhelmina van Hemmen, a Dutch sociologist from a noble family, who takes Helga to live at her kasteel in the Netherlands and undertakes her rehabilitation. An erect, elegant, and iron-willed woman, Madame van Hemmen provides a safe and sheltered environment in which she begins to teach Helga about manners, culture, and trust. A bit like de Born herself, her attempts to work with Helga are awkward and unfamiliar. But de Born is at least capable of recognizing the limitations inherent in this kind of situation. Helga says to Wilhelmina at one point,

“You don’t really know whatmy life was. There’s no chance at all of my ever being happy like you say — through love.”

The last word was pronounced with an effort.

“You’re wrong, dear. I do know what your life was like and I know, and you do, that now it lies behind you. It is definitely past and over.”

Helga shook her head.

“You’ve never been in the middle of it. You’ve only seen it from above.”

Wilhelmina was at a loss to reply. It was a shaming truth that she had seen only from “above” the poverty, stupidity, vice and crime, protected as she was by money and her name; she was totally unaware of her innocence and goodness, an even greater protection than her position.

De Born’s story of Helga’s rescue and redemption is never fully convincing. Like Kermans and Madame van Hemmen, she recognizes the pain and violence that lies at the core of Helga’s experience but is at a loss for how to deal with it except through politeness and a diffident kind of empathy. The ingenue Helga grows up into a stunning beauty who becomes a top model in Paris, but she never sees that success as anything more than a matter of economics: “Once I was treated as a thing, and I’m still a thing, though a different kind put to a different use. Now I am a point of intersection for all sorts of commercial interests: textiles, dress-making, cosmetics, jewelry. I often represent a huge fortune; I never represent myself.”

To give de Born and Helga’s rescuers credit, kindness, comfort, and empathy can go a long way as substitutes for understanding. If The Penalty of Exile never descends into the belly of its beast, de Born once again proves a keen observer, particularly of the better sort of European — even if she does allow herself a very Belgian dig at the Netherlands, whose “insipid, badly-cooked food bore little resemblance to the cuisine on the other side of the border.”

The Penalty of Exile, by Edith de Born
London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1964

Spillville, by Patrica Hampl (1987)

Cover of Spillville by Patricia Hampl

Reading Spillville is a pleasant way to take a trip while cooped up in lockdown. It’s short, like the trip Patricia Hampl and artist Steven Sorman took in the summer of 1986, driving down from Minneapolis to Spillville, Iowa, where the composer Antonin Dvorák spent a summer with his family in 1893.

Back in 1893, Spillville was an enclave of Bohemia in northeast Iowa. “These people came to this place about forty years ago, mostly from the neighborhood of Písek, Tábor,” Dvorák wrote a friend in Prague. “All the poorest of the poor. And after great hardships and struggle, they are very well off here.” By the time Dvorák came to visit, the Czech emigrants had erected a fine church, St. Wenceslas’, and boasted a post office, park, and a ring of prosperous farms surrounding the town — although the Dvoráks still had to come by carriage from the nearest train station in Calmar.

View of Spillville, Iowa in 1905
View of Spillville, Iowa in 1905

Dvorák had been coaxed to Spillville by his secretary, Josef Kovarík, whose parents had settled there. He liked that Spillville wasn’t on the railroad: less noise to block out the birdsongs. The morning after the Dvorák arrived, Kova?ík’s mother spotted the composer walking around at 5 o’clock in the morning. Was anything wrong, she asked? No, he replied. It was just that for the first time in eight months since coming to America, he could hear the birds. Dvorák’s job as director of the National Conservatory of Music required him to take an apartment in Manhattan, where the noise of horse traffic, steam trains, ships, and crowds was a constant annoyance.

As Hampl rides in the backseat with Sorman’s daughter, she realizes how she’s shut herself off to the landscape. “Story is impatient with description, and therefore with landscape’s passive willingness to be framed into a picture.” “But now, passing through this spring farmland,” she observes, “the love of place creates a desire to pause for description.” Part of that, I think, is because the landscape around Spillville is rich but not overwhelming. I grew up in Seattle, where on any clear day you can look south as see Mt. Rainier looming massive and blueish-white. It is so much bigger than anything man will ever build, always reminding you that you are puny and short-lived.

Spillville, on the other hand, has under 400 inhabitants today and wasn’t bigger than that by more than a few dozen in 1893. Dvorák could easily walk from one end of town and back after breakfast, before settling down to compose. Although some claim he wrote his best-known symphony, No. 9, From the New World, in Spillville, that work was finished before he left New York. He did, however, write his popular melody “Humoresque,” a piano quintet (Opus 97), and his String Quartet No. 12, the American. He translated the song of the scarlet tanager he heard there into the scherzo of the quartet.

Hampl doesn’t try to analyze Dvorák’s work or extract more than is obvious from his experiences there. Though not a musician herself, she remembers from her piano lessons with Sister Mary Louis an essential lesson that any good musician has to learn:

“Count first, dear,” she urged. “Then work on feeling.”

Feeling was fine, feeling was indispensable — she granted that. Nothing wrong with feeling. But — this was her point — I had feeling. No need to work further on feeling.

Besides, she would say gently. always a reluctant corrector, there was no work to feeling. And music was work.

Not much beyond the compositions, long walks, and quiet evenings in the summer heat happened during Dvorák’s stay. There might have been some gossip about his oldest daughter Otýlie and one of the Indian men in town, but it died out once they left in September. Not much happens during Hampl and Sorman’s visit, either. They walk through St. Wenceslas, sit in the park with the Dvorák memorial, and tour the one showcase in town, the Bily Clocks museum, which occupies the first floor of the house the Dvoráks rented. The museum is filled with the elaborate wooden clock cases hand-carved by the bachelor brothers Frank and Joseph Bily over six decades. Then, like the Dvoráks , they head back up the highway to Calmar and home.

Barely 100 pages, Spillville is a pleasant trip to a small river town and the quiet that descends when the sound of the highway traffic falls away and there are just the crickets, the birds, and people softly talking.

Spillville, by Patricia Hampl
Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1987

The Least of These, by Celia Dale (1943)

Cover of first US edition of The Least of These by Celia Dale

Celia Dale is best known as an accomplished crime writer, winning, in fact, the Crime Writers’ Association Best Short Story of the Year award one year — but that’s a bit of a limiting label, similar to calling Georges Simenon an accomplished crime writer even if he’d never written a single Inspector Maigret policier. The police usually play a minor supporting role in the dozen or so “crime” novels she wrote from 1950 on. Instead, she focuses on what Eileen Dewhurst called the “atmosphere of understated menace pervading superficially normal lives.” In her last novel, Sheep’s Clothing (1988), for example, two women posing as social workers trick the old and slow out of their mattress-hidden fortunes — a story closer in mood to Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori than to something by P. D. James. She was at her best in noting what one reviewer called, “the minutely observed details of lower middle class life.”

These minutely observed details are at the heart of her first novel, The Least of These, which follows one lower middle class London family, the Sharps, through their experience of the Blitz. The widowed Mrs. Sharp would be certain to put the stress in that phrase on middle rather than lower. When they begin making their evening journey to sleep in their local Underground station, she notes that”there were not very many of the Sharp’s kind down there with them.” But she distrusts the Edwardian Baroque construction of their terrace house and loses what little faith she had in garden Anderson shelters after a near-hit almost kills a neighboring family.

The Least of These is really less a novel than a fictionalized account of life for ordinary Londoners during the Blitz. In early September, the first raids are more novelty than threat. “That Man’s here again,” a nightclub emcee announces as the sirens sound and the audience chuckles. Queenie, the middle daughter, rides along with a boyfriend, taking part in a Sunday caravan to see the damage from an early raid. “Slowly, foot by foot, the cars crawled nearer, and in every vehicle faces gaped at this inconceivable, this fantastic thing — a London shop, wrecked by a bomb. A bomb!”

As the raids continue, the disruptions they cause increase. “Travelling was queer, too, since the raids had started: you never knew where you would find yourself.” Buses are forced to detour through hitherto undisturbed neighborhoods, much to their consternation. “You would look out suddenly and find the bus lumbering diffidently down an avenue of villas, all shocked and shut away behind their outraged railings. Blocks begin to be pocked by ruins left by direct hits. The survivors “lowered their blinds and turned their eyes away, denying the unseemly.” Gaps appear in the assembly lines in factories. “Some of the workpeople were dead, some were in hospital; a few had packed it up and gone to relatives in the country.” Windows are boarded up. Tea is given up when a bomb strikes a water main. Still, they carry on as they can — “you cannot live without wages.”

But then a bomb hits the house next door to Mrs. Sharp’s eldest daughter Effie, her husband and children. “And in the timeless nightmare of a second, the Davises and Effie heard the bones of their house groaning and crunching above them … grinding and crumbling and sifting and interlocking” until the sounds fall away and dust falls like silent snow. As so Mrs. Sharp decides they’re best off spending their nights in the Underground.

Latecomers, the Sharps find “no corners vacant, no merciful angled wall against which to build, sured that your back is guarded and unspied upon;” “All the angles and crannies were taken, old women sat there in stockinged feet, men lounged with newspapers, babies slept.” I’m no Blitz scholar, but The Least of These struck me as perhaps the most vivid account of what it’s like to shelter night after night on the platforms and stairways of an Underground station. As many of us are learning in this pandemic, people can adapt remarkably quickly to radical changes in circumstances if it means survival. Indeed, the abnormal soon becomes normal through habit:

On the Sunday some of the families left their children down there all day to make sure of keeping their places at night. The platforms and corridors filled up earlier than before, and there were more people, squashing tight together along the walls, voluable and busy and determined to live at least this night in safety. Children squalled and ran under the yellow light, like waxen animated dolls; old men, grey and threadbare as their clothes, hunched themselves between raucous mothers wearing pinafores beneath their shabby overcoats. Youths in jackets as loud as their laughter, slick as their slick hair, thrust and lounged about the corridors; the girls giggled together, prinking their Woolworth jewellry above their tight trousers. For as night followed night a sort of uniform had been evolved among the glamour girls of the tube stations — the full battlement of war-paint, jewellry, high heels, curled coiffures, all bravely worn and yielding not a fraction to the exigencies of death and its avoidance; and with it all, trousers, the sole acknowledgment of war’s existence.

People sheltering in the Elephant and Castle Underground station during the Blitz
People sheltering in the Elephant and Castle Underground station during the Blitz

Some take advantages of the changes. One of the Sharp girls, Reenie, gets involved with a gang that stops lorries along deserted roads and steals cigarettes and other rationed items. Prostitutes find it easier to set up trade in the remnants of ruined houses. Soon, “everything, everyone” is different. Queenie finds she “could hardly remember what their lives were like before the raids started. Cinemas, clothes, dances, fun, the scores of people bound up in that existence who had vanished utterly.” She imagines that even the German aircrews flying overhead each night growing bored with the routine, happy to head home “over the Channel, eating sandwiches, emptying their flasks of coffee, while down below the brittle crust of London is broken in a new place….”

The Least of These suffers some of the typical faults of a first novel. The narrative arc is a flat straight line running from early September 1940 to some months later with barely a diversion. We start with the Sharps and we follow along with them through a relentless chronology to an ending in which Dale, according to one reviewer, J. C. Trewin, “outdoes Elizabethan tragedy in a last paragraph which disposes of the entire dramatis personae in less than a dozen lines.”

But Dale was already demonstrating her remarkable talent for observation — for observing the fine telling details of individuals, their dress, manners, and thoughts; and for observing people in numbers, their simplicity and stupidity. She almost certainly spent just as many nights on the cold, crowded platform of a tube station, huddled close to hundreds of strangers, hearing the coughs, whispers, and snores, smelling the urine from the little boys whose tired mothers usher them to the edge of the platform (“‘At’s what it’s for, ain’t it?”), trying to shut out the glare of the lights overhead. And she knew the Sharps, or people like them, their fears and ambitions and favorite comforts. It’s this knowledge that makes The Least of These such a compelling book. It takes a crisis such as we’re experiencing now to remind us how universal some isolated and specific stories can be.

The Least of These, by Celia Dale
London: Hurst & Blackett Ltd., 1943
New York: Macmillan & Company, 1944

State of Possession, by Edith de Born (1963)

Cover of first UK edition of State of Possession

State of Possession represents Edith de Born at mid-career. Her first novel, Gaëtan, was published in 1950; her last (of 18), The Negligent Daughter, in 1978. And yet, having read all three books, I have to say that de Born seems to have reached a high level of maturity with her very first book and maintained it with remarkable consistency throughout. One of her strongest advocates, the novelist and critic Francis King, once called Edith de Born “a literary sport.” But if she is a sport, it would be more appropriate to compare her with Roger Federer or Cal Ripken: she never played to the point of burn-out, always held something back for the next contest. If you’re looking for flash and high drama, keep looking: you won’t find them here.

The story in State of Possession is really the least important aspect of the book. Elisabeth Vandernoot, a Flemish nurse, is contacted by a lawyer. Another Belgian woman, now married to an Englishman and living in London, believes that Lionel, Elisabeth’s son, is actually the child she lost in the chaos of the evacuation from the German invasion of May 1940. Elisabeth is compelled to prove that she did, in fact, give birth to Lionel.

One might think this is a simple matter of producing a birth certificate. But birth certificates are comparatively recent innovations. In many countries and for many years, there were no birth certificates; instead, the parents reported the birth to local town hall or mairie, where it was recorded in a register, often days later. That’s not really the issue in this case, however. Here, neither party can produce definitive evidence — and in Elisabeth’s case, it’s for reasons that are best left to be discovered by reading the book.

A single mother and never married, Elisabeth works as a masseuse. She prefers to call herself an aesthetician because of the seamy connotations of the word masseuse. De Born illustrates the problems Elisabeth faced when she first set up practice:

One man had strutted in and looked her up and down, his face clearly proclaiming that she was not to his taste. “Are you the only woman working here?” he had inquired. “Yes, Monsieur.” For a moment he had hesitated; then, with a shrug, pushing back the hat he had not removed, “O.K. A massage,” unbuttoning his greatcoat. As he began to fumble with more buttons, she had quickly asked, “Have you a doctor’s recommendation” “A what — ?”

Now she attends patiently exclusively in their homes. They are all several cuts above her own station: a retired ambassador; a Vicomtesse. They respect her professionalism and discretion — but they also see her as a non-entity, “describing their ailments at the greatest possible length as though the fact of lying naked before her compelled them to go further and turn themselves inside out.” On the other hand seeing them intimately, in their lavish houses and apartments, she in turn is provided with “a glimpse of worlds beyond her reach, with the result that she felt suspended in mid-air, with no solid ground left under her feet.”

Elisabeth has aspirations for her son Lionel. Having lost its colony, Belgium no longer has the Congo to serve as “a springboard for the lower classes.” The only options for Lionel hinge upon his exam results: with honors, he might get a lifelong government job; otherwise, he will have to go elsewhere — to South America or Africa — and work his way up through some multinational firm. Yet without property of her own — aside from Lionel himself — Elisabeth is also looked down upon by the Peeters, the brusque Flemish family she rents her flat from. One of the pleasures of this book is de Born’s deft and subtle depiction of the intricate dances of social positioning that go on in a small and crowded country like Belgium.

State of Possession is set in Brussels, where de Born and her husband lived for over forty years after the end of World War Two. De Born was a perfect example of the kind of meta-European one finds in Brussels, where the European Commission, NATO, SWIFT, EUROCONTROL and other international organizations bring together people with strongly cosmopolitan sensibilities. Born in Vienna, which she left after the Anschluss, de Born moved to Paris, where she married Jacques Bisch, a French banker and worked with him in the Resistance during the war.

One of her jobs in the Resistance was translating messages to and from British intelligence services, and she credited that experience with teaching her how to write clearly and precisely in English while still managing to preserve essential nuances that didn’t have simple equivalents in the vocabulary and syntax of the other language. She learned well, as many critics like King noted that, “as with Conrad and Nabokov, one receives an impression of infinitely meticulous care in the shaping of every paragraph and even of every sentence.” King wrote,”It is in English that all her seventeen novels have been composed. I use the word ‘composed,’ rather than ‘written,’ advisedly, since, as with Conrad and Nabokov, one receives an impression of infinitely meticulous care in the shaping of every paragraph and even of every sentence.”

Many of the Brussels-based institutions operate on the basis of consensus, where different positions and interests have to be balanced and integrated through a careful, time-consuming and often frustrating process of negotiation. This fosters environments where extremes are actively discouraged and moderation is considered an essential quality for both success and survival. What matters most is not the outcome of any one deal but preserving the ability to make another deal tomorrow. The same spirit can be found in de Born’s work. Her books never find easy answers to the questions they raise. They also display an acute sense of history. As Francis King wrote of another de Born novel, State of Possession “gives the impression of the pasts of its characters receding in a long perspective.”

Despite the comparisons to Conrad and Nabokov, however, Edith de Born’s closest equivalent is probably a native English writer: Anita Brookner. Like Brookner, de Born wrote slight novels that seem to have the substance of tissue paper yet managed to cut like razors. Brookner herself tended to ward of the association. In 2007, she told The Spectator she had been rereading de Born, whom she considered “a completely forgotten precursor, both in style and subject matter” not of herself but of Sybille Bedford. “Of cosmopolitan background — her books are set in Austria, France and Belgium — she demonstrates an intriguing combination of rootlessness and good manners.” Brookner added dismissively, “These novels are long out of print and perhaps need not be revived.” In her 1987 Paris Review interview, however, Brookner said she very much enjoyed de Born, finding her “much more stoical and less sentimental than English writers.”

All of Edith de Born’s novels have been out of print for over forty years, but many of them can be purchased from used book shops for under $15. I note, though, that prices on Amazon are creeping into the stratosphere, so try searching on AddAll.com instead.

State of Possession, by Edith de Born
London: Chapman & Hall Ltd., 1963

Angels in Ealing, by Eileen Winncroft (1939)

Title page of Angels in Ealing by Eileen Winncroft

After enjoying the headlong narrative sprint that is Eileen Winncroft’s first novel, Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! (1938), I took advantage of a recent visit to the British Library to scan the first few chapters of her second (and last), Angels in Ealing. I enjoyed reading them on the train home so much that I went ahead and purchased the one and only copy I could find for sale.

Winncroft — Henrietta Pryke Franckeiss Macloughlin in real life or Martha Blount in the pages of The Daily Express — must have gained tremendous self-confidence from her first foray into fiction, for in Angels in Ealing her omniscience doesn’t even draw the line at wandering through the mind of God himself (or the Most Beautiful One or the Holy One as he (it?) is referred to here). What sets this plot in motion is the Holy One’s exasperation at one particular resident of Ealing, Mr. Plantagent Jones. “I have been watching him for nearly forty-five years. And during that time he has never really tried once to behave properly,” he complains. “It has got to stop.” So, he dispatches the Archangel Michael to attend to it.

Jones — Plaggy to his wife and friends — is speeding down the Great West Road with his “under-nourished, under-exercised but very optimistic” nineteen-year-old new secretary, Vera, sitting next to him, on their way back from an afternoon drive in Surrey. Working with little more than the Holy One’s typically vague commission, Michael, at a loss what to do, sends down a great bolt of light into their path. In the resulting crash, Vera’s head is sheared off but Plaggy survives. Vera finds herself floating above the damage but soon loses interest: “she found she could move herself up and down as though in flight, and so she moved off in search of amusement.” Plaggy, however, is pulled from the wreck and soon finds himself on trial for manslaughter. When he pleads that he was only reacting to “the mighty finger of God” reaching down from the heavens, he is ruled insane and sent off to an asylum.

Relying on an act of God to kick off a story is always risky. In the real world, acts of God — or force majeure to use the contractual term — are often followed up by a great deal of cleaning up and fixing up: not exactly the sort of thing that allows a story to arc toward a climax. In the case of Angels in Ealing, the problem is compounded by the fact that the leading characters, Plaggy and his faithful wife Nellie, are so utterly conventional. Plaggy, the author notes, supports his wife “because everyone did support their wives unless they were cads. And he deceived her because he had no one else to deceive except himself, and being English deceit of some kind was essential to keep up appearances.” Though he goes off his head with a divine vision and Nellie soon finds herself in demand in high society as a fortune-teller, unusual spices rarely make up for bland base ingredients. Even Plaggy’s escape from the asylum is possibly the least exciting in all of fiction: after helping to open the front gate one day, he simply walks out and keeps going.

To liven things up, Winncroft introduces a counterplot involving something she had firsthand experience with: a Fleet Street reporter. In this case, it’s a very good-looking young man with a very well-respected family name — Prosper Haines, only son of a milk millionaire. Unfortunately, Prosper fails to make up through enthusiasm what he lacks in basic intelligence. His chief assets, in the eyes of his editors, are “his name and his connections and very often his photograph.” Without resort to divine intervention, the author puts him in the wrong corner of a love triangle, torn between the good-hearted but middle-class Joy and the empty-hearted but ever-to-stylish Julia. Winncroft devotes several chapters to the machinations among this trio, but clever asides aside, she manages to make them even less interesting than Plaggy and Nellie.

Ironically, it’s the eternally nineteen-year-old Vera who ends up experiencing the only substantial character development in the book. She devotes years to floating through most the the great homes of England, finding the inhabitants full of themselves but the interiors rich in thoughts and dreams: “Thoughts that had sunk deep into walls and dreams so strong and tenacious that they hung like a mist in the corners.” Finally, she looks in on her own family and decides to intervene. Although she manages to rescue her sister from the “horror and greed” of her parents, Vera discovers limits to her heavenly powers. She manages to coax a few neighbors over to have tea with her mother and make sure “that her father fell on something fairly soft when he did fall on his way home from the pub,” she is at a loss with her brother Henry:

He was so frightened of everything that she just couldn’t get hold of him at all. He was frightened of living and frightened of dying. Frightened of holding a job and frightened of losing it. Frightened of drinking too much and frightened of drinking too little and being thought a fool by someone else. Frightened of knowing nothing and far more frightened of finding out something. Just an ordinary normal half well-, half ill-, and half-developed young man, but with all the cunning of his kind to avoid knowing it.

This passage suggests where Winncroft’s real growth as a writer lay between Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! and Angels in Ealing. Gone is the relentless string of “And…. And…. And…” sentences. Where she uses repetition, she uses it sparingly and with good effect. And there are more than a few surgically-precise cuts into the hearts, minds and pretensions of English society of the late 1930s.

Eileen Winncroft
Eileen Winncroft, AKA Martha Blount, AKA Henrietta Pryke Franckeiss Macloughlin, 1938

Sadly, Angels in Ealing marks the end of Eileen Winncroft’s career in fiction. One can’t blame her for the unlucky timing of the novel’s publication. The war hadn’t gone on long enough in November 1939 for readers to have a healthy appetite for escape. Angels in Ealing did get a second printing, but soon disappeared from the shelves for good — and if WorldCat.org is accurate, there are fewer than a dozen copies of the book now to be found in libraries worldwide. A sad fate for a writer whose work is highly readable and certainly not lacking in satiric insights — or ambition.

Other Opinions

• Kate O’Brien, The Spectator, 5 January 1940

Angels in Ealing is another book which ought to entertain a good many people, if they can put up with, or skip, certain unlucky whimsicalities about God and the angels and their direction of suburban destinies. Leaving Heaven right out of it, Miss Winncroft had a good idea, and could have made it just as lightly entertaining, and kept in all her best jokes — some of which are better than you expect. But even as it stands this is an odd, lively little story of strange events in the lives of a middle-aged couple in Ealing.

• Frank Swinnerton, The Observer, 3 December 1939

Angels in Ealing is both more serious and more flippant. Those not offended by its arch glimpses of Heaven will find that in spite of poor invention and occasional descent into girlishness the tale has a sort of quicksilver charm…. Miss Winncroft has much talent, many scathing perceptions, and often a beautifully light touch. When she gives her mind to invention she will write a good novel.

• J.S. The Times, 24 November 1939

Angels in Ealing is a slighter and more fantastic work than Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent, and one is inclined to support that this was the earlier piece. Yet a straggling plot and artificial premises cannot conceal the original twists of this author’s mind…. Her comments on her people are often shrewd; her invention runs to a scene in which a Continental dictator has his fortune told; and her inconsequences have at least the merit of keeping the reader awake. What makes Miss Winncroft particularly engaging, however is the fact that she is never self-important.

• R. D. Charques, The Times Literary Supplement, 2 December 1939

A previous novel by Miss Winncroft was welcomed as a shrewdly entertaining piece of work. It is difficult to know what to say of this present venture save that it is a tangle of apparent inconsequence. Evidently humourous in intention, its occasional jocosities have a disarming flatness, while the element of fantasy signifies everything or nothing. Frankly this seems a rhymeless and reasonless essay in fiction.

• Time and Tide, December 1939

Miss Winncroft’s unusual novel can be read as an inconsequent gay review not pretending to rhyme or reason, or as an unorthodox morality play covering with a sparkling cloak of wit and satire a severe criticism of man’s selfishness and self-importance. In either case it makes an excellent entertainment of real originality.

• James Agate, Daily Express, 25 November 1939

This is as trenchant and witty as the first…. This is a brilliant novel which says more in half a page than most best-sellers say in 300.

Angels in Ealing, by Eileen Winncroft
London: Constable & Company Ltd., 1939