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Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices, by George Leonard Herter and Berthe E. Herter

I flew back to Seattle this week to help settle my father’s affairs. Sorting through his books I kept an eye out for anything out of the ordinary but didn’t find much. When I was a kid, the mainstays of the living room bookshelves were titles from the Book of the Month Club. There were a few exceptions, most notably several Grove Press hardback editions of Henry Miller–the Tropics and Black Spring, which were probably considered hot stuff and discussed with arched eyebrows in the mess.

Then I happened to glance up at the cookbooks over the fridge and spotted the distinctive metallic gold spines of Herter’s Bull Cook books and knew I’d struck gold (pardon the pun).

My dad went through a big huntin’ and fishin’ period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and one thing you could always find in the reading basket next to his chair was a copy of the latest Herter’s catalog.Herter’s was a big mail-order hunting and fishing goods store in Minnesota, and every single item in the catalog had some hyperbolic write-up. There was something of a formula to these things. First there would be some dismissive mention of popular assumptions (“Carborundum is widely believed to be the finest material for sharpening the blade of a knife”). Then this notion would be tossed aside as poppycock in favor of some alternate theory that was far-fetched on average and downright absurd on occasion (“In truth, you will find no sharper edge than can be obtained from vigorous application of duck fat”). I’m making these examples up, but I’m really not far off the mark. Finally, there would be the pitch to convince you that buying an 8 oz. tin of Herter’s rendered duck fat was not merely the smartest choice you could make but the least that could be expected to demonstrate your fitness to remain walking the streets instead of bouncing off the walls of some rubber room.

Herter’s also sold a few books in the catalog, and somewhere along the way my Dad ordered two volumes of their most famous title: Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices (Volume Two added the subtitle, “Plus Famous Restaurants and Night Clubs of the World”).

'Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes'These were not at all like my mom’s cookbooks. These were cookbooks written for men by a guy without a shred of doubt about his studliness. What cookbook written by a woman would put “Meat” at the front, on the very first page? And lead off with, “How to Make Real Corned Venison, Antelope, Moose, Bear and Beef”? The last is just a concession to the little ladies, I’m sure. The author, George Leonard Herter, provides a short preface explaining the public service he is about to perform:

I am putting down some of these recipes that you will not find in cook books plus many other historical recipes. Each recipe here is a real cooking secret. I am also publishing for the first time authentic historical recipes of great importance.

For your convenience, I will start with meats, fish, eggs, soup and sauces, sandwiches, vegetables, the art of French frying, desserts, how to dress game, how to properly sharpen a knife, how to make wines and beer, what to do in case of hydrogen or cobalt bomb attack. Keeping as much in alphabetical order as possible.

I know I for one am relieved that someone finally thought to include nuclear attack survival tips just after the recipes for Prunes Maxim’s and “How to Make Puff Pastry or Flaky Pastry Dough.”

For the record, the first tip for surviving an attack is to “Get in any kind of cave, ditch, or valley as far away from buildings as you can and lie on the ground face down.” In case you missed the point, Herter adds, “If at all possible get in a cave.” Staying in your house means “the water pipes will burst and flood the basement drowning you like rats in a trap.” So find that cave–got it?

Helpfully, two pages before the list of H-bomb tips is a short article on the “Norwegian Method of Getting Rid of Rats.” The recipe? Simple and lethal–plain white bread, spread with lye, then topped with syrup. Just make sure the kids know not to confuse it with French toast. Serves 4-6.

A few readers will recognize this oddball classic, a genuine “pure product of America,” as Fitzgerald would put it. Among the cognoscenti, George Leonard Herter is treasured as one of the great American nutcases of all time, a man who never let nonsense like facts or objective sources tarnish the immaculate lunacy of his notions.

And who managed to turn his ravings into a fairly profitable business, at least for a couple of decades or more. Herter’s catalog copy went from three-ring binders passed from hand to hand in the early 1960s to editions of 3-400,000 copies by the time my dad got into them. And the Bull Cook went through something like fifteen editions between 1960 and 1970. The little business George Herter started in 1937 was on a par with L. L. Bean (which also, somewhere back in the dark ages, was mostly a supplier for hunters and fishermen) before the whole thing went bust in 1981 and Herter was forced to file for bankruptcy.

Recall that Herter promised to keep things in these cookbooks “as much in alphabetical order as possible.” It doesn’t take more than a few pages of the Bull Cook to make it clear that Herter’s sense of order is on a par with Joyce’s ability to tell a story in straightforward manner. Had Herter lived about 200 years earlier, he might have produced Tristram Shandy ahead of Sterne.

By the way, to pop back to nuclear holocaust for a sec, make sure to note the item on page 337 explaining that, “Red Pepper Good for Radiation and Upset Stomach.”

“Everything you know is wrong”, declared the Firesign Theatre on an early album. Their inspiration was, of course, George Leonard Herter:

• Never Use Charcoal for Broiling

The “fumes given off as the briquets burn are extremely toxic.” The right answer: hard coal. “The use of hard coal instead of charcoal in Minnesota for broiling has always been the accepted practice.” Which is why, of course, Minnesota ranks #1 among the states for fine restaurants.

• A real old buck past the sexual urge stage makes the best eating venison

However, Herter does admit that, “I have never known an Indian who would not trade ten times the weight in deer meat for either beef or pork or for that matter, although this may seem strange to you, dog meat, which is also good meat.” And you thought they were pets. Bonehead!

• Avonnaise–“the only new sauce invented since mayonnaise was invented”

You take mayonnaise and mash it up with an avocado. You should use it on “fruit salads, lettuce salads, and on baked potatoes instead of sour cream sauce, on roast beef instead of gracy or Bernaise sauce, on hamburgers use lettuce, pickles, and avonnaise.” It “was invented by famed Belgian cook, Berthe E. Gramme.” “Once you have tried this sauce you will be using it often.” You may now invent your excuses for not knowing this.

• The Swedish Method of Preparing Rutabagas is “the only correct way ever invented to prepare them”

Mash two thirds boiled rutabagas with one third boiled potatoes. “Served in this manner they are one of the finest vegetables you can serve with any meal.” And how have you been fixing them? In shoestring fries, I suppose. Sad.

If one volume of Herter’s ramblings on food is not enough, you need to locate volume two, which weighs in at over 750 pages and includes meditations on restaurants throughout the world and anecdotes of world history I’ll bet you’ll never find in any textbook. Herter sticks to his proven formula. The first page is, of course, “Meats.” This time, however, he adds a half-page grayscale of the Toulouse-Lautrec painting, “Two Friends”.

'Two Friends' by Toulouse Lautrec

Herter misnames the painting as “Friendship,” then adds a sly comment that, “The name of this painting is probably one of the greatest understatements ever made.”

You fellas all get it, right?

This to introduce “Toulouse Lautrec Chicken,” which Herter claims was something ol’ Henri often pined for. I won’t bother to summarize it: the fact that it involves a chicken breast cooked for one and a half hours, one quarter pound hamburger, and six strips of bacon is enough to suggest that we’re not exactly in Eric Ripert territory.

Yet a thousand-plus pages on food did not begin to exhaust George Leonard Herter’s capacity for airing his crazy ideas. There are at least five other Herter books to be found, including such irresistable titles as Herter’s Professional Course in the Science of Modern Taxidermy (which failed to spark a wave of D-I-Y critter stuffing); Secret Fresh and Salt Water Fishing Tricks of the World’s Fifty Best Professional Fishermen Plus the Professional Secrets of Fishing Rods and How Fishing Rods Are Made (Revised Fourth Edition); How to Get Out of the Rat Race and Live on $10 a Month (move to Alaska; zap fish with car batteries or bags of quicklime); George the Housewife (with such handy tips as, “Be Careful to Avoid Touching Synthetic Cothing with a Gasoline Lantern”); and the ode to marital bliss, How to Live with a Bitch. Although his catalog business went bust in 1981, he kept beavering away for over ten more years, mostly inventing inventions such as a Rube Goldberg-esque process for refining petroleum, before hitting his last carriage return in 1994.

Paul Collins brought Herter’s work back into the spotlight in late 2008 with a fond tribute to “The Oddball Know-It-All” in the New York Times. But don’t settle for second-hand Herter. Get the pure product in all its insanity, uncut and unashamed:

IF YOU TAKE TRANQUILIZERS OR SEDATIVES BE CAREFUL OF THE KINDS OF CHEESE THAT YOU EAT. THE WRONG KIND OF CHEESE CAN KILL YOU. Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices, volume two, page 733

You’ll thank me when the Big One drops.

Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices, by George Leonard Herter and Berthe E. Herter
Waseca, Minnesota: Herter’s, 1960

Irvin Faust

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Steagle'“Opening this book is like clicking on a switch: at once we hear the electric hum of talent,” Stanley Kauffmann wrote in his New Republic review of Irvin Faust’s first book of fiction, Roar Lion, Roar. And if there’s one characteristic of Faust’s work, it’s energy. For over 45 years–30 of them working nights, weekends, and vacations while holding down a regular job as a a high school guidance counselor–Faust has written some of the liveliest, noisiest, most vibrant prose published in America:

Vegas. Ocean’s Eleven. Sinatra. Judy. Thirty thousand a week. Sun. Desert. Red neon. One-armed bandits. Action. Faites vos jeux. Les jeux sont faits. Nothing Monaco. Nothing Reno. Pools. Tanfastic. Bikinis. Action. Vegas.

That’s from Faust’s first novel, The Steagle (1966), about a college professor who suffers a psychotic breakdown over the Cuban Missile crisis and goes blasting off around the country on thrill-seeking spree. Of Faust’s most commercially successful book, the 1971 novel, Willy Remembers, Elmore Leonard wrote (in his introduction to the 1983 Arbor House reissue, reprinted on his blog):

There’s no one in American literature quite like Willy T. Kleinhans. And there is more sustained energy in the telling of what he remembers than in any novel I’ve ever read.

Willy Remembers takes off within the first two sentences, climbs, swoops, glides, does loops-all effortlessly-and doesn’t touch down again until he’s told us how things were. Really were.

It’s beautiful. More than that, Saturday Review describes it as “a great, big, beautiful hunk of Americana,” the New York Times calls it “a Book of Wonders.”

It’s so good I wouldn’t blame you if you stopped right here and turned to the first page, because all I’m going to do is tell you why I think it’s great.

A World War Two veteran who served in both Europe and the Pacific, Faust took advantage of the G. I. Bill and became a teacher in the New York Public Schools. 1954, while teaching math and English in Harlem, he decided that, “I wanted to relate to [kids] differently from the way I could in a classroom,” so he returned to school, earning a doctorate in Education at Teachers College. He returned to public schools and worked a regular Monday-to-Friday job in high schools around the New York City area for the next thirty years.

Irvin Faust, 1966As he told Don Swaim in a 1985 interview (available on the wiredforbooks.org website), he had been jotting down story ideas for years, and in the mid-to-late 1950s, he began submitting stories to a variety of small magazines. His first book, Entering Angel’s World, however, a casebook for practitioners, was based on his doctoral research and early experience as a guidance counselor. Faust once told an interviewer,

Guidance counseling hasn’t slowed me down. Actually, in many ways it has helped me to produce by getting me into the mainstream of life….

Both of these things are terribly important to me, and I love doing both. One is introverted, the other extroverted, and these are aspects of my personality. I’m very lucky to have found two things that work together for me and turn me on. I couldn’t give up either one, really.

Both Faust and his wife, Jean, were working professionals, and early in their marriage agreed that Faust would devote his precious spare time away from work to his second career as a writer. Faust’s quiet routine of working and writing has always provided a striking contrast to the vibrant, often chaotic tone of his fiction. “This pop novel pops so violently that it cannot safely be perused without welding goggles,” Time magazine’s reviewer wrote of The Steagle.

Popular culture is one of Faust’s primary energy sources. His characters revel in it, tossing in song, dance, movies, television, radio, tabloids, magazines, celebrities, and historical figures great and small with more Bam! than Emeril with a pepper shaker. A Time magazine reviewer once wrote that Faust’s protagonists “are consumed by a world of mass-produced trivia and popular mythology. They generate authentic obsessions about the inauthentic.” Again, from The Steagle:

He decided to pub-crawl and play it by ear on the outside chance of running into Selznick, who might be looking for new properties. He began drinking at eight at the hotel and worked his way along the Strip. At Lou’s Century Club he won a dance contest with a little white-haired lady who said you’re cute as a bedbug, Mr. Rooney. In the One Two Three he asked if he could sing with the combo and did “Rose Marie,” “High, Wide and Handsome,” “Don’t Give Up the Ship,” “The Piccolino,” and “Mairzy Doats.” At ten he called Selma Zorn and said baby, I’m in an all-night story conference at Metro and may have something very big. Get this: an American girl from Ohio is smuggled into Havana on a yacht owned by Harry Morgan and she does this Hayworth bit in a local bistro called Rick’s and Castro see her, and well, you get the picture, Mata Hari and Florence Nightingale, see … No, baby, I’m sorry, not tonight. No, I’m sorry. Listen, babe, listen … Selma, I’ll call you.

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Roar Lion, Roar'In the title story of Roar Lion, Roar, a Puerto Rican boy’s obsession with the New York Lions football team blurs into fantasies of becoming gridiron star himself, and much of Faust’s work is devoted to the shifting lines between reality and fiction. The very first two sentences of Willy Remembers demonstrates how easily memory can jumble up facts and create its own version of history: “Major Bill McKinley was the greatest president I ever lived through. No telling how far he could have gone if Oswald hadn’t shot him.”

Reflecting on his writing in an interview from 1975, Faust remarked,

It seems to me that thus far my work has dealt with the displacement and disorganization of Americans in urban life; with their attempt to find adjustments in the glossy attractions of the mass media”-movies, radio, TV, advertising, etc.–and in the image-radiating seductions of our institutions–colleges, sports teams, etc.. Very often this “adjustment” is to the “normal” perception a derangement, but perfectly satisfying to my subjects.

Yet while his characters take off into flights of fantasy at the drop of a hat or the first bar of a melody, Faust has always kept his own two feet solidly on the ground. Willy Kleinhans may have confused McKinley and Kennedy’s assassins, but Faust clearly recognizes that Willy’s reveries are closer to psychotic fugues than cute, if muddled, nostalgia. Although Willy Remembers was marketed as the comic memoirs of an eccentric but lovable old man, at the core Willy’s story is full of sadness. His recollections are his escape from the grim reality of a man growing old without the comfort and company of his wife and son, who died many years before.

Sad things happen to Faust’s people, but sadness is certainly not the mood one takes away from his writing. Not everyone might be so accepting of how his characters choose to cope with their realities, but it works for them, and–with the possible exception of Faust’s 1970 novel, The File on Stanley Patton Buchta, which Jerome Charyn called “a curiously humorless book”–it usually sparkles with invention and passion.

All of Faust’s novels and short story collections are currently of a print, but all are easily available for as little as $0.01 on Amazon and elsewhere. And if you happen to wonder into a used book store that actually has inventory older than the clerk behind the counter, you shouldn’t have any trouble locating his books–they’re the ones you see glowing and buzzing on the shelves.

More on Irvin Faust

Irvin Faust’s books

The Great Fake Book, by Vance Bourjaily

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Great Fake Book'It pains me to start 2010 with two pans in a row, but few books have disappointed me as much as Vance Bourjaily’s little-known 1986 novel, The Great Fake Book. As an amateur jazz player, I was attracted by the title, a reference to fake books, the cheat sheets many working musicians use to memorize popular tunes. [Barry Kernfeld wrote a short history of them, The Story of Fake Books: Bootlegging Songs to Musicians, a few years ago.]

Bourjaily’s name often pops up on lists of neglected and underappreciated novelists. Despite a career spanning six decades and a nomination for the National Book Award (for his 1970 novel, Brill Among the Ruins), none of his books are currently in print. [Amazon reports that Doubleday will be publishing Brill in hardback at $7.95 this month. Probably a data entry error–but if not, grab it! When’s the last time you could get a new hardback copy of a good book for $7.95?] One reason for this lasting reputation, particularly among other writers, was his 23-year stint at the influential Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he mentored numerous young writers of the 1960s and 1970s.

Though Bourjaily wrote The Great Fake Book while in his sixties, the book certainly demonstrates that his appetite for narrative experimentation hadn’t diminished over the years. To tell the dual stories of young Charles Mizzourin and his father, Mike Mizzourin, a newspaperman and jazz musician who died in an auto wreck before Charles was born, Bourjaily uses letters, phone calls, archival documents, oral histories, and even a novel-within-a-novel. He switches decades, narrators, perspective, and tone as fast as Charlie Parker could play changes on “Cherokee.”

Unfortunately, Bourjaily’s experiment is doomed from the onset by unreliable ingredients. The correspondence between Charles Mizzourin and John Johnson (one of the few believable names in the book) that opens the story tries to create the impression of a fencing match between a child of the 60s and a man of the Establishment but just comes off as an inept tussle between two patently made-up stereotypes. We are led to think there is some kind of mystery behind Mike Mizzourin’s death and perhaps also his flip-flopping between journalism and jazz, perhaps having something to do with the Red Scare and McCarthyism–or perhaps not. Frankly, after finishing 100-some pages, I gave up caring and shelved the book. Not, regrettably, before coming across what I truly believe to be the most stomach-turning passage of prose I’ve ever read:

“Hello?”
“Is that my finger-lickin’ chicken?”
“Hello Darlene.”
“Whompsie, did you get an answer from your friend Mr. Johnson?”
“I just found it in the mailbox.”
“I got one, too. To my li’l physical description of you.”
“That right? What’s he say?”
“He sent me his Style Book, and a bill for three dollars.”
“Going to pay?”
“What’s your letter say?”
“I’m about to pour me a drink and sit down with it.”
“Be sure it’s not a letter bomb. You’ll get vodka on your podka.”
“Night, Darlene.”
“Night, light.”

And that’s not the only saccharine attack from Bourjaily’s Kewpie doll creation. I kept hoping Charles would take a lesson from Groucho Marx and warn Darlene, “If icky baby keep talking that way, big stwong man gonna kick all her teef down her fwoat!”

No such luck.

Jo Walton Stirs Up a Hefty List of Neglected SF/Fantasy Authors and Books

Source: “Neglected Books: the list,” at http://www.tor.com.vhost.zerolag.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=58654

SF novelist Jo Walton put out a call for recommendations of “authors that should be getting the sales and the attention and yet remain obscure” on the SF/fantasy website, Tor. It generated a tremendous number of responses, which she’s compiled into a list organized into four categories:

  • Books and authors Jo’s reviewed elsewhere on Tor (with links to her reviews)
  • Books and authors she’s read but not reviewed
  • Books and authors she hasn’t read
  • Books and authors that are well known and shouldn’t be on this list

Cover of early U.S. paperback edition of 'Children of the Atom'The last shows that Walton’s kept a discriminating filter on her list. Of Steig Larson’s novels, which someone nominated, she writes, “These are a stupendously successful non-genre best sellers. The opposite of obscure.” I’ve seen them on the end caps of airport bookstores in Belgium, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. in the last two months: definitely NOT neglected.

On the other hand, she notes, “Other times I was surprised to find an author I’d never even vaguely heard of who published several books. I read a lot, and I’ve spent a lot of time online and in conventions hanging out talking about books.” Two authors in particular she cites are Wilmar Shiras and Wilhemina Baird.

Shiras’ short story, “In Hiding,” is considered one of the best SF short stories of the 20th century. She later incorporated it into her 1953 novel, Children of the Atom. Children, which was something of a precursor to the X-Men series, is back in print in a fine facsimile edition from Red Jacket Press, although cheaper copies of several different paperback editions can be found on Amazon.

Baird is the pen name of Joyce Carstairs Hutchinson, a Scottish woman who quickly turned out four “cyberpunk” novels in the mid-1990s and then stopped–at least for the moment–publishing. Her first book, Crashcourse anticipated the rise of reality TV.

What Became of Anna Bolton?, by Louis Bromfield

I picked up a copy of Louis Bromfield’s 1944 short novel, What Became of Anna Bolton? at one of my favorite bookstores, Magus Books, during a Christmas visit to the U. S.. Magus, located just a block from the University of Washington campus in Seattle, opened while I was going to school there 30-some years ago, and it’s one of an ever-diminishing number of bookstores where it’s still possible to find interesting old paperbacks from the 1960s and earlier.

I decided to take Anna Bolton along as my flight reading when we returned to Europe a few days later. From the title, I expected the story would be something about her disappearance or miraculous transformation. Taking the voice of David Sorrell, an American foreign correspondent, Bromfield introduces us to Anna Bolton at a London soiree in 1937. The widow of an American inventor and industrialist, she has come to London to work her way up the social ladder.

Sorrell, it turns out, knows Anna from their days growing up together in Lewisburg, Ohio. Anna–then Anna Scanlon–came from the wrong side of town, the daughter of a house cleaner and a town drunk. She falls in love with Tom Harrigan, from one of the better families in town. When Anna becomes pregnant, Tom elopes with her against his family’s wishes and they set up house in Pittsburgh. A year or so later, Tom dies in a car wreck and their baby follows soon after. It takes Bromfield about twelve pages to blitzkrieg through these first twenty years.

Sorrell next crosses paths with Anna some years later in the lobby of a pricey New York hotel, on the arm of Ezra Bolton, a fictional hybrid of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. A year or so after hiring her as a secretary, Bolton marries her as a trophy wife (although the term hadn’t been invented yet). The marriage is an arid sham, but luckily for Anna, Bolton dies before it gets too tedious for her. Millions in hand, she takes off for Europe.

Hitler’s invasion of France puts a crimp in her plans for social ascent. Caught up in the tide of refugees from Paris, she catches the Joan d’Arc flu and adopts a village of the homeless and helpless as her cause:

The truth was that Anna had found something to do. She had great health and great energy and great ability as an executive, and now setting up a canteen gave her an outlet for all these qualities. She liked the trips to Lyons, to Orleans, to Paris, even as far as Marseilles and Geneva to buy soap and medicines, chocolate and cigarettes.

Clearly, Bromfield had not a clue about life in occupied France. At this point, the book was halfway over and nothing of interest had really happened. Yes, a number of events were related, but Bromfield hadn’t managed to make Anna Scanlon/Harrigan/Bolton much more than a cut-out doll. “I’ve seen you grow a soul,” Anna’s paid companion, Miss Goodwin, tells her after a few months of the humanitarian relief. Miss Goodwin’s eyes were sharper than mine. But for another six hours of flying, I would have given up.

In hindsight, I wish I had. Anna continues her black-market magic, manipulating an S.S. officer who’s convinced he’s in love with her. “I want to marry you,” he tells her, “because I am tired and sick and corrupt and you are strong and healthy and young.” No, I am not making that line up. She meets Jean Lambert, a handsome Russo-French officer who’s the spitting image of Tom Harrigan. After a bit of pallid “Taming of the Shrew” nonsense, they marry, then escape to Algiers to avoid imprisonment after the U. S. enters the war. Sorrell meets Anna again and finds her transformed. We have to take his word for it.

When I got back home, I did a little research and learned that Edmund Wilson gave What Became of Anna Bolton? a right bashing when it was first published.

Louis Bromfield used to be spoken of as one of the younger writers of promise. By the time he had brought out Twenty-four Hours, it was more or less generally said of him that he was definitely second-rate. Since then, by unremitting industry and a kind of stubborn integrity that seems to make it impossible for him to turn out his rubbish without thoroughly believing in it, he has gradually made his way into the fourth rank, where his place is now secure.

Cover of later paperback edition of 'What Became of Anna Bolton?'Although he began by calling the book “one of his [Bromfield’s] most remarkable achievements,” after devoting about four times as much text to a recap of the novel’s plot with only an occasional dig, Wilson then dismissed it as, “a small masterpiece of pointlessness and banality.”

To which I can only add, “Amen, brother!”

Despite the book’s utter lack of interest and distinction, What Became of Anna Bolton? managed to be reissued at least five times in paperback. Which just proves again how right Bo Diddley was when he sang, “You Can’t Judge a Book by Looking at the Cover.”

What Became of Anna Bolton?, by Louis Bromfield
New York City: Harper and Brothers, 1944

Jonathan Yardley’s Second Readings added to Sources

Source: Second Readings, from the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/19/LI2005041903474.html

In early 2003, Jonathan Yardley, dean of the Washington Post’s book critics began what was modestly called, “An occasional series in which The Post’s book critic reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past.”
Jonathan Yardley
Ever month or so, Yardley would set aside his stack of review copies of new books to take up one that had been in or out of print for a decade or more–“books I remember with affection and admiration but have not read in many years, books I would like to encourage others to discover.”

His first piece dealt with John P. Marquand’s H.M. Pulham, Esq., also featured on this site about a year ago. His choice of Marquand, as Yardley put it, was motivated not because, “His are not the best books I’ve ever read, but they are among the books I love most, and the neglect into which they have fallen is a literary outrage.”

When he concluded the series almost seven years later, with a fond revisit to The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor, he wrote,

With that, this series of Second Readings comes to an end. It began in February 2003 and has covered nearly 100 books. Probably it could go on a while longer, but it’s best to quit before you start repeating yourself. Let me say by way of wrapping things up that except for a couple of the books I’ve written, nothing in my career has given me so much pleasure as these reconsiderations, not least because they have elicited such warm, generous responses from you, my treasured readers. I hope that I’ve steered you to a few good books you might otherwise have missed, and that those books gave you as much pleasure as reading and writing about them gave me.

Not all of the books Yardley covered can be considered neglected–certainly not such fixtures of the literary canon as Pride and Prejudice or The Catcher in the Rye. But he did often reach beyond the limits of the well-known and well-remembered to bring back to light titles such as Edwin O’Connor’s novel of a veteran vaudevillean,I Was Dancing (“I’d be hard-pressed to say that any book discussed therein is more undeservedly neglected than this one”), and The Second Happiest Day by John Phillips (pen name of Marquand’s son John Phillips Marquand, Jr.). He even took time to consider a book such as Philip Wylie’s rather dated critique of American society of the mid-20th century, Generation of Vipers to demonstrate that sometimes the test of time is a fair judgment of a book’s merit.

I’ve added the full list of books Yardley reviewed as a new Source list on the left.

Season’s Greetings, by Herbert Clyde Lewis

It’s fitting that the last book I feature this year is Herbert Clyde Lewis’ Season’s Greetings. His work–particularly his first novel, Gentleman Overboard, which I reviewed here back in July, has been one of the best discoveries and pleasures of this year. I only regret not getting this piece written a few days ago, since Season’s Greetings, his third novel, takes place on Christmas Eve.

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Season's Greetings'The story takes us through the day in the minds of the residents of a rooming house in the Greenwich Village – Lower Fifth Avenue area of Manhattan. Mr. Kittredge–we never learn his first name–is a depressed, dyspeptic, world-weary World War One veteran who plans to commit suicide that night. Betty Carson is a young girl from Cape Cod, now working at Macy’s. Betty has discovered that she’s pregnant, by a man named Joe Henderson who left a month ago and hasn’t contacted her since. Having given up hope of seeing him again, Betty has decided to visit an abortionist after work.

Hans Metzger is a German Jew, a refugee stuck in limbo–unable to return home, unable to join his surviving sisters in South America. Minnie Cadgersmith, a widow in her seventies, suffers from a variety of ailments and has determined that she will die in her sleep that night after paying a visit to her three grandchildren. And Flora Fanjoy takes pride in having saved her pennies over the years and managed to rise from serving girl to own her own humble but upstanding rooming house.

As might be expected of any story set on Christmas Eve, each of Lewis’ main characters experiences a revelation of one sort or another in the course of the day. Soon after her tenants leave, Flora is struck on the head by a falling can of cleanser and falls down her basement stairs, landing paralyzed and unable to speak. Her only witness, her cat Flossie, soon abandons her to roam the neighborhood, and Flora gradually becomes aware that she will, in all likelihood, die before anyone comes to look for her. Lewis provides a fine passage describing how Flora learns “that there were tones and shades of blackness”:

It was nighttime, Mrs. Fanjoy realized. When first she opened her eyes the blackness had been gray, so that she had been able to discern dimly above and ahead of her the flight of stairs leading to the first floor hallway. The eyes of Flossie her cat had shone milkily opalescent in this gray blackness, she remembered. But after a while Flossie had gone away, and Mrs. Fanjoy, straining her eyes at the stairs, had watched their color and the color around them change imperceptibly to brown black, so strikingly brown black that it seeme she was lying in the center of a chocolate world. She had watched the brown black then, watched it fearfully a long time, until without warning it had vanished in the surrounding gloom, and a new color, a majestic, funereal color, had appeared to take its place. This was purple black, a blackness of such incredibly pure purple that it made each stair on the staircase stand out solemnly and distinctly from the others. And Mrs. Fanjoy had looked at the purple black, looked at it and dissected it and mentally run her fingers through its rich thickness, for a timeless time of endless minutes and hours, until, at last, she had seen it start to fade. She had watched it fade, watched it thicken and solidify and drop down into the well of darkness around her, until the last hard fleck of it was no more, and then, all of a sudden, it was black black, and Mrs. Fanjoy knew what time it was.

This quote may offer a hint of a prevailing feature of Season’s Greetings. Coming it at just over 400 pages, it’s over twice as long as Lewis’ three other books. In writing of Gentleman Overboard, I remarked that, “It’s been said that a true artist knows when to stop–and does. By this criterion alone, Herbert Clyde Lewis proves himself a true artist….”

Well, by the same criterion, Season’s Greetings proves something less than a work of art. There are plenty of places where a healthy application of blue pencil would have enabled Lewis to make his points with the kind of subtlety and grace one finds throughout Gentleman Overboard.

On the other hand, one of the great pleasures of the novel is the space it can offer the writer, the space to stretch out and explore alleys and sideways that run off the course of the main narrative–detours that can’t be afforded in a more economical form like a short story. And Lewis constantly goes wandering off into the maze of streets and lives one finds in Manhattan. He devotes a whole chapter to the thoughts of Mrs. Fanjoy’s cat, Flossie, as she leaves her owner’s side, looks around the house for food, then heads out to the tiny, barren backyard–her kingdom. Metzger befriends a bum who relates much of his life’s story, full of travel to seaports around the world and violent struggles in the early days of labor.

And he spins out many prose poems to Manhattan itself:

Very slowly the city came to life on this morning of the day before Christmas. The sun rose out of the ocean, out of Queens, out of Brooklyn, and shone listlessly through the heavy black clouds upon the slush-covered rooftops, the dirty windows, the grimy east sides of buildings, the sooty smokestacks, chimneys and air vents. Slowly the noises of the city came to life, autos shifting gears, horns honking, doors slamming shut, trains rumbling underground, machines chugging and whirling, feet tramping, babies wailing, children shouting, peddlers calling their wares. Slowly the smells of the city came to life, coffee brewing, bacon frying, garbage stewing, chemicals churling in cauldrons. And men who had a talent for putting one stone on top of another built towers into the sky so they could look down upon all this.

Needless to say, a book set in Manhattan leaves its author with no shortage of excuses to indulge in such descriptive flurries, and you’ll find them here by the dozens. Perhaps a few too many for some readers, but I was usually happy to follow along whenever Lewis strayed from his course.

Lewis had devoted much his first two books–Gentleman Overboard and Spring Offensive–to coldly watching his protagonists die alone. And even though Season’s Greetings is a Christmas story and most of his characters reach the end of the day at least a little happier than they started, Lewis retains a bit of his trademark dispassion. As most of the other characters come together in the rooming house, Mr. Kittredge calmly walks to Washington Square, finds a secluded park bench, and blows a hole through his chest.

No one heard the loud report or saw Mr. Kittredge half rise from the bench and topple over onto the snow. A motorist driving under the arch on Fifth Avenue thought for a moment he had heard a shot, but decided it was only an auto backfiring. Around the whole windswept park, in all the apartment houses and brownstone mansions and college buildings, not a single window opened and not a single person looked out.

Lewis’ theme is, as one character puts it, “the problem of loneliness in a city of eight million people.” While Hans and Mrs. Cadgersmith find its solution in the company of others and Betty Carson is reunited with Joe Henderson instead of left alone to recover from an abortion, Lewis is too much of a realist–he was at one point a crime reporter for the New York Herald Tribune–to let Christmas miracles fix everyone’s problems. Frank Capra would undoubtedly left Mr. Kittredge out if he’d filmed Season’s Greetings.

Ironically, Liberty Films acquired the rights to another Christmas story by Lewis, “It Happened on Fifth Avenue,” intending it to be directed by Capra. Although Capra opted for “It’s a Wonderful Life” instead, a film version of Lewis’ story was released in 1947. Starring one of the best character actors of the 1940s, Victor Moore, “It Happened on Fifth Avenue” is something of a neglected film classic and earned Lewis an Oscar nomination for his original story. Lewis worked in Hollywood for about six years in the mid-forties, becoming friends with Humphrey Bogart and others, but he returned to New York City around 1948 and joined the editorial staff of Life magazine. He died of a heart attack in 1950, leaving behind a wife and two children. Some years later, somewhat inexplicably, a fourth novel, The Silver Dark was published as a paperback. All his work has been out of print for over 50 years now, and Season’s Greetings is so scarce that Amazon.com doesn’t even list it.

Here’s hoping a Christmas miracle might come to one of Herbert Clyde Lewis’ books soon.

Locate a Copy

Season’s Greetings, by Herbert Clyde Lewis
New York: The Dial Press, 1941

The Sun’s Attendant, by Charles Haldeman

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Sun's Attendant'

After receiving a long message from Charles Haldeman’s brother, Richard, in response to my piece on Charles’ second novel, The Snowman, I decided to try his first novel, The Sun’s Attendant, which received enthusiastic praise in the Times Literary Supplement:

To finish a new novel by an unknown author with a sense of complete satisfaction is rare. To come across one that compels instant second and even third readings is far rarer. The Sun’s Attendant suggests itself as something more than a fresh and accomplished work of fiction. It arouses the kind of puzzled excitement that can sometimes mark the entrance of an outstanding writer. At the very least, Mr. Haldeman has a most original mind and a set of unusual gifts.

Such praise raises questions: If true, how is it that The Sun’s Attendant has vanished from any critical account of 1960s American fiction, gone unnoticed after its initial release? Or did the reviewer simply get it wrong?

The Sun’s Attendant is nothing if not ambitious. Although it’s just over 300 pages long, it’s dense with difficult, challenging writing. Joyce, Gide, and, I suspect, Günter Grass, are noticeable influences. There is little conventional narrative that runs for more than a few pages.

As Marvin Mudrick described the book in his New York Review of Books review,

It is an enormous collage of fragments: isolated jokes, apothegms, parables, riddles, letters, notebook entries, newspaper articles, fairytales; a journal introduction, written in a clever pastiche of the high-collar rhetoric by which French intellectuals (even Camus) find it too easy to convince themselves of their sincerity (“My only hope is that in laying these strange pages in the hands of others, I shall perhaps have begun to reopen some long-closed windows in myself”); lengthy passages of interior monoloque; passages of stage-dialogue: each of the fragments headed by a title barely indicative, helpfully informative, or cryptically sardonic; abrupt dislocations from one character or milieu to another.

Haldeman also chose an overt and apparently symbolic structure. Subtitled, “A Diptych,” the book has two main sections–Left Panel and Right Panel, with a short linking section called Hinges. Each panel is divided into three sections named after positions of a planet as it orbits the sun: Summer Solstice; Aphelion; Autumn Equinox, etc..

All this deliberate artifice is meant to give weight and depth to the story of Stefan Brückmann, a half-German, half-Gypsy boy who is caught up in the turbulent history of Germany from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. Born to an itinerant Roma family, he loses his parents when their wagon falls through the ice while crossing a river somewhere in Central Europe. Taken in by his German uncle, he rebels against Nazi conventions and spends his time with other Roma and outcasts on the margins of Berlin.

Swept up in a late round-up of unwanted non-Aryans in 1943, he is sent to Auschwitz. On his sixteenth birthday, as he is about to resign himself to being sent to the gas chambers, he is yanked out of the huts thanks to his German bloodline and sent to be an attendant in one of the camp’s SS barracks. Stefan refers to the SS men as “the priests.” There, he is befriended by Hannes, a slender, blonde homosexual a few years older, who is also working in the barracks.

Cover of first U.K. edition of 'The Sun's Attendant'As the Russians approach, Stefan and Hannes are moved, along with other inmates, towards the West. They manage to escape when an Allied plane attacks their train, causing it to derail, but Hannes is wounded and soon dies. Stefan is interned again, this time by the Americans, as a displaced person. An American G.I., a Southerner named Moon (more symbolism), takes a liking to Stefan and eventually adopts him. After a brief spell in South Carolina, full of atmosphere straight out of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Stefan returns to Europe.

In Paris, he meets up with a French intellectual, Immanuel de Bris, who ends up taking him along on a lecture trip to Heidelberg. There, de Bris introduces him to Barbara Speer, recently widowed by the suicide of her husband, a promising young poet and critic. The twists and turns of Stefan and Barbara’s relationship, as they come together, wring hangs over their respective losses, encounter various artists and intellectuals in postwar Germany, part, and, finally, come to some kind of reconciliation, fills the second half of the book (Right Panel).

I stuck with Haldeman to the very end of The Sun’s Attendant out of simple faith in his artistic aims. He did not set himself an easy task. He clearly wanted to take on profound questions about life and death, playing out his story against a backdrop where death is everywhere and on a large scale. And he lacked no courage when it came to embracing absurdity. Great personalities come to ridiculous ends in his story. And the reader regularly gets exposed to short bursts of what I can only suppose is meant to be purely absurdist prose:

Merchants are no longer sure of Canada: its puppet strings were snipped by Vichy scissors. Spectacles, hats and rings went down with boots.

Only the blank uncounted Sunday flies fill their ears like inedible puddings.

Swollen prunes and spilt milk mingle with the natal flow and the honey of Canaan.

As well as great clumps of weighty thoughts:

But just as life, as a wound, depends on death, as a body, for its sustenance, Man himself could not begin to realize himself until his fall had wounded Eden. Man will return at once to his original home, which has never ceased to exist, in the very moment that his wound becomes irreversible–that is, when life is no longer healable by death.

There’s a little of everything here: Brechtian dialogues, rabbinical , dry analyses auf die Akademie, pensees worthy of Satre’s review, Les Temps modernes, Gypsy folktales, even snatches straight out of Kerouac:

I began to wander, from town to town, always farther inland. I reached the Rockies and, repelled by them, turned southward and back. Two years I drifted, sometimes working, mostly not. I avoided trains and seldom hitchhiked; usually I took buses, with endless accordion tickets, go off in unlikely places, stayed an hour or a day and go back on, in and out of a kind of sleep-read-sleep-talk-stop-start-sleep, on and on through the slow transitions, the wastes, the geographical paradoxes, the dry primitivity, through the inexplicable familiarity, freak electricity and sudden clarity, the named placelessness of the American continent, transported by an absurd, fluid, heart-breaking dream of distance.

Do all these fragments amount to something as significant and serious Haldeman seems to have intended it to be? Serious–yes. As Stanley Kauffmann wrote in his review for the New York Times, “We are always conscious of the author’s utter seriousness of purpose, that he is less engaged in display than in the fulfillment of his themes.”

Charles Haldeman, 1963'Significant, though? Sadly, The Sun’s Attendant suffers from the tendency of many inexperienced writers to mistake serious for profound. Giving Stefan Brückmann an interesting story does not make him an interesting character. The book’s end comes as a relief, not a revelation.

As Kauffmann put it, “[W]hat we are left with is the work of a young writer … who is able and attractively ambitious but who has attempted subjects not yet within his grasp.” Mudrick reached much the same conclusion: “The energy of the novel dissipates itself in local effects–comments, technical surprises, aphorisms, short-lived intellectual fireworks of impressive diversity and inventiveness–and nothing is left for the long run.”

After finishing The Sun’s Attendant,I picked up another of Eric Hatch’s novels, Road Show, and the contrast reminded of Coleridge’s line about Fielding (“To take him up after Richardson, is like emerging from a sick room heated by stoves, into an open lawn, on a breezy day in May”). I can’t imagine turning back, like the TLS critic, for a second and third read of Haldeman’s book. But then the TLS’s man may have been a better reader than I, Gunga Din.

I will not, however, give up my faith in Mr. Haldeman. I have ordered his last novel, Teagarden’s Gang, which, according to his brother Richard, “was unable to find an American publisher because a main character was too closely identified with J. Edgar Hoover, still powerful and living.” Written ten years after The Sun’s Attendant, it may just deliver on his promising ambitions.

Find a Copy

The Sun’s Attendant, by Charles Haldeman
London: Jonathan Cape, 1963
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964

A humble introduction, from Freedom in a Rocking Boat, by Geoffrey Vickers

Geoffrey VickersA lovely acknowledgement from the introduction to Geoffrey Vickers’ 1970 book, Freedom in a Rocking Boat:

An introduction is the place for acknowledgments; but my sense of indebtedness leaves me dumb. Socialized and humanized by being claimed from birth onwards as a member of so many communicating human groups; ushered into self-awareness through a language, every word of which resonates with the meanings of ancient usage; heir to several cultural traditions, each far too abundant for my assimilation–how can I name or number or know the living and the dead who have shaped my thoughts and me?

Freedom in a Rocking Boat, by Geoffrey Vickers
London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1970

Five Days (AKA Five Nights), by Eric Hatch

In the 1951 reference book, American Novelists of Today, it says of Eric Hatch, “He writes entertaining popular novels which are enlivened by a pleasant vein of humor and by light, satirical characterizations.” This is a polite academic way of saying, “Eric Hatch writes screwball comedies.”
Cover of 1948 Bantam paperback edition of 'Five Days'
Screwball comedies such as “Bringing Up Baby” and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” were staples of Hollywood film-making in the 1930s and 1940s and a few are now considered among the finest examples of the art. The situations of screwball comedies were usually ridiculous–mistaken identities, cross-dressing, assumed crimes (the same sort of things that worked for Aristophanes and Shakespeare)–but there is one constant: silly idle rich people.

Well, this is exactly the same raw material Eric Hatch mined in nearly 20 novels written between 1928 and the early 1970s–most of them in the first twenty years of that time. It’s no coincidence that the one novel for which Hatch is likely to be remembered today–My Man Godfrey–was made into one of the greatest of all Hollywood screwball comedies. Five Days (later retitled Five Nights when issued as a Bantam paperback in 1948, mainly to play up the sex angle) is a perfect example.

As the book opens, Beadleston Preece, known in the papers as the “Millionaire Sportsman”, sits dejected on the terrace of his Long Island mansion as night falls. The auctioneers’ men haved just hauled off all his belongings. For reasons he little comprehends, his fortune, so his broker tells him, has evaporated in the stock market and he is now penniless. He begins to think his only recourse is to go up to his bedroom and hang himself when he turns to find a man holding a gun on him.

He turns out to be a burglar all set to rob the house. Preece breaks the bad news to him and soon Swazey (Lionel Stander, if Hollywood had gotten around to filming this) is commiserating alongside. “Say,” Swazey interjects, “did you beat up dis guy what lost your chink for you?” And soon, thanks to Swazey’s immoral leadership, the two are sneaking onto the stock broker’s estate and stealing his fifty-foot yacht.

Over the course of the next five days (or nights, depending on which edition you’re reading), Preece and Swazey manage to accumulate a small band of fellow runaways, including an Episcopalian bishop, a debutante, a girl from the Jersey waterfront, and the unhappy husband of patent-medicine heiress. Their ramblings around Long Island and New York City waters takes them to such fixtures of East Coast society as the Harvard-Yale Regatta and a lavish dinner dance in Newport. And there a few more crimes, such as a break-in at a fancy Newport dress shop, all pulled off with the lightest of excuses and consciences, and lots of hot and cold running booze.

As I read Five Days, I kept picturing the unmade film version. Preece would have to be played by someone with the right touch of naivete–Joel McCrea, probably. Mary from Jersey would have to be young and a bit street-smart–Ginger Roger would be too old, Betty Hutton too young. Bishop Hartley would have to someone with a nice balance of propriety and mischief–Edward Everett Horton, maybe. Lewis Stone, probably not–not mischievous enough.

Eric Hatch, author of 'Five Days'

“Move over, Wodehouse! Make room for Eric Hatch,” wrote a reviewer of one of Eric Hatch’s early novels, and there’s a lot of truth in that statement. P. G. Wodehouse’s reputation is now well-fixed in the literary firmament, despite the utterly frivolous nature of all his work and that bit of unpleasantness during his time in Nazi-occupied France. Yet one can easily argue that much of Hatch’s work shares the same characteristics that have enabled Wodehouse’s work to survive the test of time. The classic Wodehouse novel sits somewhere in the ambiguous zone between the end of the Great War and the start of the Great Depression. Hatch’s period sites about a decade or so later, between the end of Prohibition and the introduction of television. Both build on a solid bedrock of silly, idle, but fundamentally good-natured and tolerant rich people and working class characters with rough exteriors and hearts of gold.

Hatch’s characters aren’t quite as prim as Wodehouse’s. They drink and smoke and break a law or two along the way. And I can’t imagine a Wodehouse woman muttering “Itch-bay” to a shrewish wife, as one of Hatch’s does. But Hatch’s novels have the same sense of being fixed in a particular period while managing to seem timeless, and I have to say I did actually find myself chuckling at a number of points throughout the book. If things in the world were just, which they aren’t, we would see Five Days, Road Show, and Little Darling sitting a few feet down the shelves from The Inimitable Jeeves. But if the rest of the world can’t manage to figure this out, that won’t keep me from giving a few more of Eric Hatch’s novels a try.

Five Days, by Eric Hatch
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1933

Reach to the Stars, by Calder Willingham

I included Reach to the Stars on my Editor’s Choices when I first created this site, based mostly on a fond memory of reading the book back in the 1980s. I was going through a lot of black (black meaning dark, nihilistic) humour at the time (Burt Blechman, Bruce Jay Friedman), and Willingham’s novel seemed very much an early example of the genre. Willingham shows no compunction about making fun of alcoholics, gays, and the aged in this book.
Cover of 1953 Signet paperback edition of 'Recah to the Stars'
If anything, on second exposure, the book seems rawer than any of the 60s examples of black humor. There is no one remotely likeable. Dick Davenport, Willingham’s protagonist from his 1950 novel, Geraldine Bradshaw and the central figure here, is an asshole with laughable pretensions of writing ability. Mr. Fletcher, the hotel’s assistant manager, is a sexual predator. The manager totters on the edge of sanity. The lead bell-hop is a rapist and thief. The newstand girl is a prostitute. The best-known of the hotel’s resident film stars are, respectively, a nymphomaniac, a closet homosexual, a drunk, and an abusive loud-mouth. And here’s a sample of Willingham’s empathy for the aged:

Mrs. Jameson, Mrs. Wheeler, and Mrs. Werby looked almost as old as Penny, and their state of health was as bad. Mrs. Wheeler and Mrs. Werby often carried walking sticks to help them get around, and Mrs. Jameson always carried one. Mrs. Jameson and Mrs. Wheeler had arthritis and liver trouble, and Mrs. Werby had dizzy spells. Mrs. Jameson also had dizzy spells. All of them had moustaches, especially Mrs. Wheeler, and they all had indigestion, nightmares, skin trouble, and other things.

And nothing good happens to anyone in the book. Willingham’s Hotel Goncourt is a high-priced sanctuary of degradation, excess, and decay in the midst of wartime America and it’s hard to see why anyone would put his life at risk to defend it. In fact, nothing much happens at all.

The life continued as always, but to Davenport it seemed that nothing was happening, or if it was it had no significance. Nothing seemed to have any effect on him; it was a dream , a dream of chaos in technicolor, and the painful flashes of reality that illuminated the scene from time to time were like heat lightning and seemed to make no difference at all. He was indifferent, and shrugged his shoulders and went to sleep standing up at the bell stand.

After several months at the hotel, Davenport takes off again, headed for New York. What do we or he learn from the experience? Not much.

Every few chapters, Willingham tosses in a few pages from a science fiction story: “Nelor the Andallian stared attentively at the telescreen, waiting for the first faint buzz to stop….” Why? Perhaps these are meant to be samples from the stack of SF magazines Davenport’s roommates is constantly reading. Perhaps they are meant to suggest that the world of the Hotel Goncourt is as artificial as that of bug-eyed monsters and space patrolmen. Or perhaps Willingham just put them in as an experiment. Since I’m feeling in a generous mood toward the book, I’ll chalk it up as the last, but I wouldn’t stake my reputation on it.

Throughout his career, Willingham’s fiction tended to split critics and readers into two camps. A few critics and fans, such as Tom Wolfe, considered him a bold, savage satirist and a forerunner of some of the more radical fiction of the 1960s. Newsweek’s reviewer called his 1963 novel, Eternal Fire, one of the finest works of post-war American writing. Others–and their numbers grew over the decade as he published such novels as Providence Island (1969) and The Building of Venus Four (1977)–dismissed him as a hack whose material should stay in the pages of Playboy, where it often appeared. I suspect the truth lies somewhere in between the two views. Certainly no one appears to be clamoring to bring his work back in print.

But I have to say that despite the fact that I found Reach to the Stars a bit more of a mess than I remembered, I nevertheless enjoyed its unrepentent meanness. It’s appropriate that Dick Davenport is, in the end, no better than anyone else at the Hotel Goncourt. It would be an insufferable book if any character had any claim to higher moral ground than the others. Instead, everyone is wallowing in the muck. And since I’m feeling so generous, I might even propose that Reach to the Stars could rank as an American counterpart to the work of Louis-Ferdinand Céline: negative, nihilistic, and gloriously nasty. If you’re going to wallow in the muck, why do it halfway?

Reach to the Stars, by Calder Willingham
New York City: The Vanguard Press, 1951

Meg Rosoff recommends Sylvester Stein’s “Second-Class Taxi”

Meg Rosoff, award-winning author of such novels as How I Live Now, What I Was, and The Bride’s Farewell, wrote to recommend Sylvester Stein’s novel of life in South Africa under apartheid, Second Class Taxi:
Cover

Published by Faber in 1958, it was banned in South Africa for twenty years. The audacity of a white man writing in the character of a dispossessed black South African only works because the voice is so hilarious and tragic and true; as editor of Drum Magazine, an important figure in the early days of the anti-apartheid movement and a supporting member of the ANC, Stein had a unique perspective on the absurd world he describes. It’s a wonderful book.

Banned in South Africa, out of print for most of the last fifty years, Second Class Taxi is now available “in a brilliant new staple-bound A4 format” from the one-title Nononsense Press. It tells the story of Staffnurse Phofolo, a “non-person” who lives in a drain-pipe, hangs out in illegal bars (shebeens), participates in protests, and generally lives outside officially-sanctioned society. While savaging the practices of the South African government, Stein maintained a sly, gently-mocking tone akin to Hasek’s in The Good Soldier Svejk. Stein left South Africa in the late 1950s when state censorship made editing the integrated magazine a near-suicidal endeavor, taking with him the manuscript of this novel.

Stein’s most recent book, Who Killed Mr. Drum? (2003), is still in print from Corvo Books.

“The Best Books You Haven’t Read,” from The American Conservative

Source: “The Best Books You Haven’t Read,” from The American Conservative, 1 December 2009 issue (http://amconmag.com/article/2009/dec/01/00018//).

Kevin Michael Derby passed along the link to this article, in which 15 conservative writers, critics, and academics offer their nominations of worthy books their readers have probably overlooked. As seems to be typical of such efforts, there are intriguingly novel titles–and a few that leave any true fan of neglected books wondering if the nominator’s sole criterion is that the book’s not currently on an end cap display at Waldenbooks. How else could Jeffrey Hart suggest that Winesburg, Ohio is underappreciated?

Some of the more interesting titles and comments from the article:

• Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics 1918-1945, 2nd Edition, by John Wheeler-Bennett

Nominated by Jacob Heilbrunn, author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons and a senior editor at The National Interest: “No doubt it’s been superseded in many areas by the latest scholarship. But what Wheeler-Bennett possesses, in contrast to many of his successors, is the ability to transform the corruption of the army by the Nazis into a beautifully written, tense drama, complete with majestic and convincing judgments about the individuals who speeded or tried to resist Germany’s descent into totalitarianism… Once opened, Wheeler-Bennett’s massive history is almost impossible to put down.”

• Roger’s Profanisaurus, from the pages of Viz magazine

Nominated by Alexander Waugh, grandson of Evelyn and author of Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family and The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War. “The Profanisaurus is essentially a dictionary of filthy words and idioms compiled with so much cleverness, wit, and complicated cross-referencing that the reader who consults it for one definition finds himself browsing indefinitely. Profanisaurus brings tears to my eyes and is honestly the funniest, most enlightening, and most enlightened book I know.” Viz, which makes Mad magazine look prim, is the most successful humor magazine in the U. K. (a sample from a recent issue: “A Kettering Man’s Appeal to Space Aliens: ‘Please Leave My Arse Alone!'”). Which is one reason why this volume is probably most often found in the one-seater library. U. K. readers may be happy to learn that a paperback version of the book has recently been released with the title, Magna Farta.

• The American Beaver and His Works, by Lewis Henry Morgan

Nominated by Peter W. Wood, author of A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now. “It is what it sounds like: detailed observations on a bucktoothed rodent that devotes itself to hydraulic engineering. The writing is anything but fanciful. Morgan was a serious man with a scientific purpose. But his book grows and grows from mere external characteristics of beavers to a fugue on beaver dams and lodges, culminating in a chapter on ‘manifestations of the animal mind.’ He ultimately sees the beaver not just as a creature of instinct but as a ‘reasoning’ animal.” You can purchase this book from several print-on-demand houses, but why not just download it yourself from the Internet Archive?

• The London Dialogues, by David Hirst

Nominated by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, former editor of the Sunday Telegraph. Easily the rarest title on the list–unavailable from anyone but the author (David Hirst, 24 Kidmore Road, Caversham, Reading, Berkshire, RG4 7LU, England). “About 30 years ago, I gave a rave review to a book called The London Dialogues, which, in spite of most profoundly and originally addressing all the important issues of this or any other age—love, property, beauty, art, science, sex, equality, populism, race—has scarcely been read at all. The trouble is that the author, David Hirst, did not so much contradict all the current intellectual fashions as rise above them, or rather look down upon them. The effect on me was like breathing fresh air—immensely bracing and refreshing if shockingly politically incorrect.” I’m assuming this is the same David Hirst who once wrote for the Guardian and published one of the best-regarded books on the politics of the Middle East, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East.

Books to Watch “Mad Men” By, Part 2

I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d really tapped the vein of Madison Avenue books in my first post on books to watch “Mad Men” by, so I returned to the coalface and started digging some more.

It turns out that by the time of “Mad Men”, the early 1960s, most of the literature of the New York advertising world–not that much of it deserves the “literature” label–had already been written. 1958, in fact, appears to have been the highpoint of Mad Lit, as this article from Time magazine suggests, which surveys a half-dozen novels published that year set in and around the advertising business. Although the reviewer dismisses most of them as easily interchangeable with camp science fiction with a simple switch of scenery–“the bug-eyed monsters will be replaced by tyrannical clients, the clean-cut spacemen by bright-eyed space-buyers, and the half-dressed blondes by other half-dressed blondes”–his description of their heroes sounds remarkably similar to that of the protagonists of “Mad Men.” “They are drumbeatniks who brood during a few drinks about the morality of what they are doing, then get over it.”

Here, then, are some more sagas of Scotch, sex, and sales campaigns for those who can’t get enough from a weekly session on the tube.

• A Twist of Lemon, by Edward Stephens

“A young man’s desparate scramble up the cold and treacherous plate-glass cliffs of Madison Avenue,” according to its dust jacket. Here is a book that Barry Goldwater would love. What’s wrong with being a Mad Man is not the business, which in the end only “honestly and intelligently and faithfully advertises sound products to people who are glad to know about them. And that, after all, is what makes the economy go around.” What’s wrong is doing it in the plate-glass cliffs, which is why the hero heads to Phoenix to set up his own mom-and-pop ad company, in a steel-and-stucco cliff, one assumes.

Cover of 'Pax'

• Pax, by Middleton Kiefer

Harry Middleton and Warren Kiefer, one-time PR men for Pfizer, stick it to the Man with this novel about false promises and misleading advertising in the pharmaceuticals business. It’s pure coincidence that SmithKline Beecham later adopted the name Paxil for their successful anti-depressant. It is a fact, however, as shown in the cover of the paperback version of Pax, that there was a brief period in 1958 when advertising executives enjoyed dressing up as airline pilots.

• The Admen, by Shepherd Mead

Mead, who’s best remembered now because his 1952 book, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, was the basis of a successful Broadway musical and a fun 1967 starring Robert Morse (resurrected forty years later to play Bert Cooper in “Mad Men”), was a Man Mad himself, VP of Benton & Bowles. Mead, who wrote a slew of mostly ephemeral satirical books (The Big Ball of Wax, The Carefully Considered Rape of the World, Free the Male Man!, How to Get to the Future Before It Gets to You), considered this his best book. Time’s reviewer had a different opinion, well and truly skewering it: “This time the author does not try for laughs, instead achieves a notable first: a novel whose characters will have to be deepened before they are translated to the screen.” The book did earn Mead one of the Establishment’s highest forms of recognition, though: it was issued as a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book.

• The Detroiters, by Harold Livingston

Set in Detroit rather than Manhattan, but an ad-biz saga nonetheless. “Call-girls, debutantes and wives–the big novel about big operators, big deals, and beautiful women” trumpets the cover of this novel–and who would deny that fascination with a time when blatant sexism was not just tolerated but encouraged is part of the attraction of “Mad Men”? Livingston displays the schizophrenia of his fellow ad-man writers: “Good writers … look down their noses at advertising. They’d rather starve. So what does it get them? Self-respect? Integrity? Try paying your bills with integrity.” You thought that last line was a cliche, right? Nope, someone actually wrote it. I believe Livingston later attempted to copyright “Try paying your bills with integrity.”

Cover of A Really Sincere Guy

• A Really Sincere Guy, by Robert van Riper

Yes, that really is the book’s title. Riper, who worked for the prominent PR firm, N. W. Ayer, wrote several novels about the intersection of PR and politics. In this one, his PR man hero sets aside his principles to tout a louse running for governor, fools around with a fast woman, then straightens his life out. Straightening his life out consists in returning to his wife, dumping the louse, and setting up his own mom-and-pop PR company. Probably a case where the cover is better than what comes after it.

• The Insider, by James Kelly

Kelly, an exec with Compton Advertising, once wrote an article titled, “In Defense of Madison Avenue” for the New York Times magazine. The Insider earned the best reviews of all the books on this list–“told thoughtfully, and is worth reading,” wrote Time; “Not only a very good first novel but solid evidence that Mr. Kelly is a writer of perception and skill,” concluded Saturday Review. Perhaps, in part, because he chose an anti-hero–an amiable account exec married to a drug company heiress who suddenly has to make some real decisions for the first time in his life–rather than a “man of principles” like most of the other novels’. And in Kelly’s case, it was he, rather than his protagonist, who left Manhattan and headed off to the Southwest, settling in New Mexico.

• The Golden Kazoo, by John G Schneider

When published in 1956, this satire about Madison Avenue finding a candidate and getting him elected as president (in the far-off year of 1960) as easily as it could pitch “a can of beer, a squeeze tube of deodorant, a can of dog food” seemed far-fetched enough to be considered as material for a Broadway musical. Now, of course, it’s business as usual.

Cover of 'The Advertising Man'

• The Advertising Man, by Jack Dillon

This 1972 novel, by a VP of the legendary Dane Doyle Bernbach, was well-received by some critics. Time’s reviewer offered this left-handed compliment: “If this were a polished writing job, it would be one more of those slick commercial novels about an ad agency. Instead, it is clumsy, serious and painstaking, and perhaps as a consequence, considerably more enlightening.” It’s essentially a familiar story: work too hard and the rest of your life will eventually go on the fritz–but rich on authentic Man Med atmospherics.

• Chocolate Days, Popsicle Weeks, by Edward Hannibal

Just recently reissued by the Authors Guild epublishing service, iUniverse, this 1970 is, in the words of a Times reviewer, “a rung-by-rung” account of climbing the Madison Avenue ladder in the late 1950s. It won Hannibal a Houghton-Mifflin Literary Fellowship and became a best-seller. The title comes not from advertising, but from its protagonist’s first job, working in an ice cream factory–days making chocolate-covered bars were tougher than those making popsicles. In keeping with its time and the formula for most of the novels discussed here, Hannibal’s ad exec eventually decides to drop out and pursue life away from the rat race–not, however, by setting up his own mom-and-pop ad firm.

• Madison Avenue, USA, Martin Mayer

Probably the one to read if you really want to soak up the atmosphere of “Mad Men.” Written in 1958, Madison Avenue, USA is one of Mayer’s specialties: factual, intelligent, and authoritative accounts of how an industry really works.

Spring Offensive, by Herbert Clyde Lewis

Spring Offensive takes place during the first twenty-four hours of the German attack against French and British forces along the Maginot Line in April 1940.

Cover of first U. S. edition of 'Spring Offensive'Of course, the Germans didn’t attack the French and British in April 1940, but two months later, in June, and when they did, they wisely bypassed the Maginot Line in favor of a blitzkrieg through the Ardennes and the Lowlands. This is a major reason why Herbert Clyde Lewis’ second novel, Spring Offensive, quickly flew from the new release stacks to obscurity. While the Phoney War dragged on, there was still an opportunity for a writer like Lewis to fantasize about what might happen when the shooting started. When it did start for real, events moved too fast for anyone to have time for fiction.

Peter Winston, Lewis’ protagonist, is a young American from outside Indianapolis serving with a British Expeditionary Force unit encamped in a small French town along the Maginot Line. He’d joined out of mixed motives–a bit of anti-Nazi fervor and a bit of self-pity. His girl had dumped him, he’d lost his job as a newspaper reporter, and his best friend had begun to avoid him as a hopeless loser. Readily accepted into the British Army, he now finds himself killing time in the most meaningless military drills.

One night, he decides to sneak out of the barracks and commit a small act of eco-vandalism. Taking a packet of flower seeds he’d obtained from a villager, he quietly slips into the barbed wire and anti-tank obstacles of the No Man’s Land between the Allied and German lines and spends the night planting seeds.

As dawn breaks the next morning, however, the sky is suddenly filled with the shriek of incoming German artillery shells. Winston injures his ankle in trying to run back to his unit. He takes a piece of shrapnel in his shoulder and winds up pinned down in a shell hole. Over the next few hours, he watches as the fearsome blood-letting of First World War battles like the Somme are re-enacted with faster-firing machine guns and deadlier explosives. Late in the afternoon, a young, frightened German soldier rushing forward in another futile charge bayonets him in the gut, leaving him to die in his muddy crater.

In many ways, Spring Offensive reworks the situation of Lewis’ first novel, Gentleman Overboard, which I covered here several months ago. Instead of a stockbroker slowly drowning in the Pacific, we have a young soldier dying in No Man’s Land. In each book, Lewis switches between the present and flashbacks to his protagonist’s past and between the mind of his unlucky hero and the thoughts of other people in his life. And in both, Lewis is quite effective in conveying the wavering emotions and wandering thoughts of a man consciously moving closer and closer to death.

Unlike in Gentleman Overboard, however, a rather abstract situation is replaced by one very much within the reality of his contemporary readers. In early 1940, the American public was torn between support for the Allies and the isolationist views of the “America First” movement. Some of the thoughts that run through Winston’s mind as he lays in his shell hole touch directly on that debate:

And he was wondering why he had come all the way across the ocean to fight when he might have stayed at home, right in Indianapolis, and fought there. There was a war to be fought in America, he thought, and what a war it was! He was not proud of having been a private in the B. E. F., but he would be proud to be a general in that other army. And millions of men would volunteer, brave young men with hard brave faces, men from the fields and the factories and city streets and country roads, men marching west and shaking their fists at the setting sun. Winston moaned softly and moved his head from side to side. He didn’t want to die; he wanted to live and go home and fight in America’s war, in the war to make American a Land of Promise once again.

Now it could be that this is only meant to be a last thought of a dying man, no more or less significant than his memory of slipping his hand around the waist of his old girlfriend. But it’s hard for me to separate this passage–which, by the way, goes on with yet more Hollywood-ish populist cliches (Lewis did go on to work for the studios)–from the general premise of the book: the young man going out to plant flowers and being caught in the crossfire of a vast, bloody, and largely pointless battle. Perhaps Lewis truly did not intend to take a stand against anything but war itself, abstracted from the context of Nazism, Antisemitism, and Fascism, and was not casting a vote with the America Firsters. He did, after all, demonstrate an ability to view the most desparate situation–a man drowning alone at sea–with remarkable objectivity in Gentleman Overboard.

If he did, then Spring Offensive must rank with one of the great examples in literature of bad timing. Within weeks of its publication, the statis of the Phoney War was replaced by images of Panzer tanks rolling across France and the Nazi flag flying under the Arc de Triomphe. And within a few years, the abstract image of anonymous young German soldiers was replaced by that of S. S. troops carrying out mass executions. Whatever Lewis’ intention, it’s impossible now to view this book outside the context of its time.

In the very last lines of Spring Offensive, a German shell lands directly on top of Winston. “… [A]nd when the smoke cleared away, he wasn’t there any more.” History appears to have had the same effect on Spring Offensive.

Spring Offensive, by Herbert Clyde Lewis


New York City: Viking Press, 1940

A few unusual items on John Cowper Powys’ List of 100 Best Novels

Obooki’s Obloquy recently published the list of titles from a 1916 book, One Hundred Best Books by the sometimes-neglected British novelist, John Cowper Powys. While many of the titles are tried and true standards of the canon–Pride and Prejudice, Faust, Leaves of Grass–there are a number that reflect the tendency of some works to get buried under the shifting sands of taste. So here, for those who might be interested in rediscovering them, are a few notes on the lesser-known items in Powys’ list.

• Sanine [also published as Sanin], by Mikhail Artsybashev

“Sanin is a thoroughly uncomfortable book, but it has a fierce energy which has carried it in a very short space of time into almost every country in Europe,” wrote Gilbert Cannan in his preface to the English translation of this book. “In Vladimir Sanine,” he continues, “Artsybashev has imagined, postulated, a man who has escaped the tyranny of society, is content to take his living where he finds it, and determined to accept whatever life has to offer of joy or sorrow.” In other words, a turn-of-the-century Russian take on the old hippy motto, “If it feels good, do it.” A new English translation by Michael Katz was published in 2001 by the Cornell University Press, which wrote that Artsybashev’s novels are “suffused with themes of sex, suicide, and murder.” Also available free from Project Gutenberg.

• The Disciple, by Paul Bourget

The Disciple is narrated by Robert Greslou, a private tutor and disciple of the renowned philosopher, Sixte. Based on a true story involving a young disciple of Bourget’s, it centers around an aborted double suicide–aborted by Greslou, after his lover has already taken the plunge. Greslou claims it was all inspired by Sixte’s theories. Contrary to prevailing attitudes today about the teacher-student relationship, Bourget lays most of the blame with Greslou rather than the influence of his mentor.

• Round the Corner, by Gilbert Cannan

Subtitled, “Being the Life and Death of Francis Christopher Folyat, Bachelor of Divinity, and Father of a Large Family,” this novel is, in the words of one contemporary review, “The story of the depressing fortunes of an English clergyman and his eight children, for whom happiness seems ‘just round the corner’ and out of reach.” It was also banned by the London censor, mainly for showing the clergy in such grim light. Canan’s first novel had the intriguing title of Peter Homunculus. It can be read online or downloaded in PDF format at the Internet Archive.

• The Flame of Life and The Triumph of Death, by Gabriele D’Annunzio

D’Annunzio’s literary reputation has taken a nose dive since Powys’ time. His becoming best buddy and court poet to Mussolini had a little to do with it. That and D’Annunzio’s own super-sized ego. His estate and mausoleum on the hillside above Lake Garda, Il Vittoriale, is a treasure trove of Art Deco and self-glorification, not to be missed if you’re in the area. The Encyclopedia Britannica (1911) describes one of his protagonists as “viciously self-seeking and wholly amoral Nietzschean,” but this could just as easily describe D’Annunzio himself. Like is too short for dreck like this. Probably justly neglected. I quoted a long and funny passage from “Lust and Leprosy,” Rudolph Altrocchi’s essay on one of D’Annunzio’s plays, elsewhere on this site.

• A Night in The Luxembourg, by Remy de Gourmont

When Night was first issued in English translation in 1912, the New York Times called de Gourmont “one of the most extraordinary and significant minds putting thought into print in the world to-day.” This short novel, full of atmosphere and symbolism, is said to have been a major influence on Lawrence Durrell when he started planning his Alexandria Quartet.

• The Song of Songs, by Hermann Sudermann

Another tale of a cad letting down a lover–this time, for the comfort and prestige of a marriage to a member of Berlin high society. It was made into a film in 1933, one of Marlene Dietrich’s early American films. In his time, Sudermann was better known as a playwright, but now he isn’t known at all. Thomas Hardy had little enthusiasm for the book’s first English translation: “… unfortunately, rendered into the rawest American, the claims that the original no doubt had to be considered literature, are largely reduced, so that I question if there is value enough left in this particular translation to make a stand for.”

Bookfinder.com’s Most Wanted Out-of-Print Books of the Last Year

Source: http://www.abebooks.com/books/rare-scarce/most-wanted-out-of-print.shtml?cm_mmc=nl-_-nl-_-h00-mstoopB-_-link1

From Abebooks.com: Bookfinder.com’s annual report of their most-requested titles from searches made from July 2008 to June 2009. A real mix of the obscure, the intriguing, and the utterly uninteresting (Mailer’s “Marilyn”–gimme a break!).

A couple of the more interesting samples:

• And I’d Do It Again, by Aimee Crocker

The memoir of an heiress to the San Francisco Crocker fortune, published in 1936. Written–according to Time magazine’s review–“with a lurid, Sunday-supplement archness,” it takes the reader to Asia, India, Germany, and Spain, with love affairs at each stop. ‘The impressionable young lady then returned to San Francisco, married, was almost killed in a train wreck on her honeymoon, got a divorce, hired a 70-ft. schooner and set out for the South Seas, scandalizing the missionaries in Hawaii on the way by taking part in an “orgy,” the precise details of which she does not disclose,’ Time’s reviewer continued. And that’s just the first decade or so!

• Ticket to Ride, by Dennis Potter

A critically acclaimed novel from 1987. I was astonished to find it out of print in both the U. S. and the U. K., given Potter’s reputation and popular success for The Singing Detective, but even more astonished to find that–at least at first glance–ALL of Potter’s titles are out of print in the U. S. and less than a handful in print in the U. K.!

• The King Ranch, by Tom Lea

Lea, a fine novelist, painter, and illustrator, wrote this official history of the legendary Texas ranch in 1957. Issued in a two-volume boxed set illustrated by Lea himself, this is a fine piece of book publishing. But it turns out that it’s not out of print–you can purchase a commemorative reissue published on the book’s 50th anniversary from the King Ranch Saddle Shop.

On the other hand, I will pass on the Associated Press’ hagiographic tribute to JFK, A Torch is Passed: my Grammy sent me a copy back in 1964.

BBC Radio 4’s Neglected Classics Contest

BBC Radio 4 logoBBC Radio 4’s program, Open Book, recently launched a contest to rediscover “forgotten treasures of the literary world – books that have been overlooked or become inexplicably out of vogue.” The winner will be dramatized on Radio 4 sometime during 2010. You can find out more at the website they’ve set up: “Neglected Classics”.

To get their audiences’ thoughts cranking, Open Book is devoting two programs to discussions with leading U. K. authors on some of their own candidates for this prize. The first, broadcast last Sunday (18 October), can be heard online now at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n6z0d. The second will be broadcast on Sunday the 25th. The ten books proposed on the two programs can be found now at the “Neglected Classics” page.

Several U. K. papers and magazines have noted the contest and invited their own readers to propose candidates in their comments threads. The Times covered it in their 17 October book section with an article by Adam Sherwin and commentary by Erica Wagner. Wagner proposes several favorites of her own, including P. V. Glob’s The Bog People, reissued in 2004 by New York Review Classics, and a collection of essays and lectures, The Voice That Thunders, by Alan Garner, whose The Stone Book Quartet has been mentioned on this site before. The Guardian’s Alison Flood also commented on the contest (“Remembering forgotten classics”) the day after the first broadcast. And the Reader Magazine’s “Reader Online” site picked up the idea, also asking for suggestions. I look forward to a rich crop of new titles to investigate and share with fans of this site.

Transport, by Isa Glenn

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Transport'Reading Isa Glenn’s novel, Transport, I kept thinking of the refrain from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo. Only in the case of Transport, it’s round and round the women go, talking of every other soul trapped on a hot, slow steamer from San Francisco to Manila.

Transport is about a group of Army wives and children, along with a sprinkling of officers and enlisted men, traveling to posts in the Philippines some time in the 1920s. This was familiar territory for Glenn. The daughter of an Atlanta mayor, she married Brigadier General Samuel Bayard Schindel in 1903, when he was in his forties and she in her twenties. Glenn accompanied her husband on assignments to Philippines, China, Hawaii, and Panama, and learned well the hothouse atmosphere of rank, manners, and bottled-up ambitions and jealousies of these isolated Army posts.

After her husband died in 1921, Glenn began turning her nearly twenty years’ worth of observations into literature. Encouraged by Carl Van Vechten, she wrote her first novel, Heat, which was published by Knopf in 1926. Heat, which portrayed the failed romance of a young Army officer and an idealistic American teacher caught up in the exotic world of Manila, drew heavily upon her overseas postings with General Schindel, as did its successor, Little Pitchers (1927).

Transport was the last of her novels taken directly from her time as an Army wife. She and Schindel probably took much the same voyage when they were posted to the Philippines. It’s something of a tour de force, in that Glenn set herself a considerable technical challenge in setting the whole of the story within the confines of the promenade deck, dining saloon, library, and cabins and passageways of the transport ship and managing a cast of over twenty distinctly sketched characters. Her ability to weave their movements, conversations, and bondings and partings around her set is on a par with a ballet master’s.

And her talent for tracing the intricate fabric of Army society has something of the touch of Henry James in his later years. It’s a fine, taut, and airless weave that makes one glad to be far removed from it. Take the seemingly simple matter of selecting chairs on the promenade:

For only upon the deck of an army transport do humans act the splendid lie that all men are born free and equal. Passengers have their official assignments to staterooms, and to seatings in the dining saloon, strictly according to the Army List; but there there glorious prerogatives of rank cease. Upon the small deck there is waged a daily battle for the right to the shade, the right to the breezy side, the right to any space that any mortal could conceivably wish to occupy. Silent pressure is put upon the wary and the unwary. The wife of a high ranking officer may come to a halt squarely in front of the chair that you have risen betimes to snatch. Under her cold eye, you cast about in your mind the chances that one day her husband may be in a position to do your husband–or your brother, or your son, or yourself if you happen to be of the right sex from the military standpoint–dirt, or the reverse; and with this thought uppermost, you then do the graceful thing of arising and respectfully seating the lady in the desirable place wherefrom you had been lazily contemplating the day ahead.

However, as John Bradbury notes in Renaissance in the South: A Critical History of the Literature, 1920-1960, while Glenn’s themes, organization, and technique are “astonishingly Jamesian”, her style “is distinctly her own, sharp, pungent, often barbed with wit and satire.” While she understands the logic of Army life, she doesn’t for a second forget that it’s an artificial set of rules and rituals.

As might be expected with any volatile mix of ingredients that is bottled up and shaken about for three weeks straight, this tightly-wound little society eventually explodes. Worn down by the effort of putting up a stolid front, a passed-over major goes momentarily mad and reveals a horrifying secret he and his family have been keeping under wraps for years. The dancers retreat, regroup, and reinforce the pretences that keep this society running smoothly. By the time the ship pulls into Manila Bay, everything is back in order.

Isa GlennGlenn published a total of eight novels in the space of nine years. Two–Southern Charm (1928) and A Short History of Julia (1930)–drew upon Glenn’s early years as a budding Southern belle. Both dissected the pretensions of post-bellum Southern society as coolly and satirically as she dealt with those of the Army. East of Eden (1932) was set in the literary world of New York City she had become a part of, while The Little Candle’s Beam (1935) portrayed the “cave dwellers” of old Washington, D. C. society.

Glenn appears to have exhausted her creative energies by the end of this burst of work, for her later novels received far less notice and far fewer enthusiastic reviews. Although Bradbury calls her 1933 novel, Mr. Darlington’s Dangerous Age her “take on James’ The Ambassadors“, Newsweek dismissed it with a three-word review: “An average novel.” There are several references to a final novel, According to Mac Tavish, supposedly published in 1938, the title cannot be found in the Library of Congress or New York Public Library catalogs. She died in 1951. Most of her biographies list her birth year as 1888, which would have made her 15 when she married Schindel and 12 when she studied briefly under James McNeill Whistler. It seems more probable that she was born in 1874 as the New York Public Library’s catalog indicates. Her son, Bayard Schindel, published one novel of his own, Golden Pilgrimage, in 1929.

Transport, by Isa Glenn
New York City: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929

Books to Watch “Mad Men” By

Like millions of other viewers, my wife and I have been enjoying frequent plunges back into the early 1960s as we blast through the first two seasons of A&E’s “Mad Men” on DVD. I was born in 1958 and have remarkably strong memories from that period: the cars, kitchens, and clothes, in particular.

Though I’d hardly recommend a return to the stereotypes and prejudices of that time, I do feel a certain nostalgia for the style and certainty of the time. So I thought I’d take a moment to note a few titles that readers might find interesting if they’re in the mood for taking a deeper plunge back into the days of “Mad Men.”

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Hucksters'

• The Hucksters, by Frederic Wakeman (1946)

This best-seller from 1946 (OK, I’m stretching the boundaries of the era) was the first “expose” of the twisting and turning of the truth that was advertising back in the days before the FCC found its backbone. Its hero, Vic Norman, was an early anti-hero, refusing to kowtow to his boss while devising new ways to sell soap on the radio–a conforming non-conformist rather like “Mad Men”‘s Don Draper. Now out of print.

• Aurora Dawn, by Herman Wouk (1947)

Subtitled, “The True History Of Andrew Reale,” this broadly satirical novel tells the story of an utterly unscrupulous young man who scampers to the top of the corporate ladder in an advertising firm leaving more than a few victims along the way. Wouk always emphasized that he’d actually written his book before Wakeman’s, even though it was published a year later. Still in print.

• The Price is Right, by Jerome Weidman (1949)

Cover of early paperback edition of 'The Price is Right'Technically, this is a novel about getting ahead in the newspaper business, but it is set on Madison Avenue. Its hero, Henry Cade, decides that, “… you could no more want a little success than you could want a little love … To want less than everything was to get nothing.” “Mad Men”‘s Peter Campbell appears to share this philosophy.

• The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, by Sloan Wilson (1956)

Probably the best-known novel associated with the white collar WASP culture of the 1950s, the fictional counterpart to William Whyte’s classic, The Organization Man. Tom Rath, the hero, is in public relations rather than advertising, a distinguished war veteran, and faithful to his wife, Betsy. So maybe this isn’t the book to read while watching “Mad Men.”

• The Naked Martini, by John Leonard (1963)

This first novel by a man who would come to be considered by some “the best critic in America” was panned by Harrison Salisbury in the New York Times: “… it possesses a certain wry wit, but 255 pages seems a long, long journey with no better company than a young adman, his bottles and his babes.” Sounds like a much more promising candidate in this case, however.

Cover of paperback edition of 'From Those Wonderful Folks'

• From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor, by Jerry Della Femina (1971)

Jerry Della Femina has been called one of the “100 most influential advertising people of the 20th century.” This tongue-in-cheek memoir of some of his wilder adventures during the Mad Men era is full of laugh-out-loud passages. Interviewed recently by USA Today, Della Femina said of the time, “It was a business of drinking. The way we lived really would make the characters in “Mad Men” all look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. We drank and screwed around.”

• Confessions of an Advertising Man, by David Ogilvy (1985)

A more restrained but still occasionally outrageous memoir, this one by the most famous Mad Man of his time. A 1962 cover article in Time called Ogilvy a “literary wizard,” though some of his most memorable ads had more to do with visual impact (the Hathaway shirt man’s eye-patch) than his copy.