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What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960, by Gordon Hutner

Cover of 'What America Read'“Why are so few novels remembered while so many thousands forgotten?” This is the question Gordon Hutner, professor of English at the University of Illinois, takes up in his new book, What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960, due out this month from the University of North Carolina Press. In it, Hutner surveys four decades of American fiction from the viewpoint of the reading public and the mainstream critics of the time, and reveals just how shifts in the currents of critical tastes can leave many good works stranded and quickly forgotten.

“There is no critical conspiracy to keep these books from being read,” Hutner writes. Instead, he shows how mainstream critics such as Bernard deVoto, Clifton Fadiman, and Henry Canby were eclipsed by a younger, more politically-oriented generation with the likes of Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, and Dwight MacDonald, who favored modernism over realism and the marginalized over the mainstream. With their rise, writers such as John Marquand, who had enjoyed both popular and critical success, came to be considered hacks and reactionaries.

Hutner does not claim that there are dozens of lost masterpieces to be found among the books he surveys. He merely argues that their neglected ultimately represents our own “impoverishment, since their fiction reveals the epic story of a nation’s self-invention as a modern society through the filter of middle-class experience.” Although he doesn’t single out any title for special attention, opting instead for a comprehensive survey, Hutner did mention a few noteworthies in a recent interview:

Really there are just too many! I gained a great appreciation for many women writers I had never heard of before, like Margaret Barnes, who won a Pulitzer for a novel about the rise of Chicago [Years of Grace, winner of the 1931 award–Ed.]. I also liked Josephine Lawrence, who wrote in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s! Her novels were smaller affairs, written to be read in an evening, dealing with problems like how to manage a budget or how to deal with the aged in a world before the Social Security Act. (Reviewers sometimes asked why she wasn’t more highly esteemed.) Margaret Culkin Banning wrote similar novels about women a rung or two higher on the social ladder. Caroline Slade wrote some interesting books about women in the Depression and the sex trade. Maritta Wolff wrote terrific novels in the 40s, including the very best one about women’s experience with returning GIs called About Lyddy Thomas; a posthumous novel of hers came out a few years ago [Scribner’s has reissued three of Wolff’s novels–Whistle Stop, Night Shift, and the posthumous Sudden Rain–Ed.]. I also liked Margaret Halsey’s comic writing: With Malice Toward Some is a delight. She wrote a novel and a nonfiction book about black GIs and race relations, drawn on her USO stint, but the nonfiction book is more trenchant.

There were good books by plenty of men too, and I would be remiss if I did not mention Michael Foster’s American Dream. With such a title, the book better be good, and it is. I really developed a taste for John Marquand too, especially Point of No Return. I also “discovered” wonderful novels by African American writers—Waters E. Turpin’s migration novels of the 30s [These Low Grounds (1937) and O Canaan! (1940)–Ed.] may be known to specialists but scarcely make their way onto many syllabi in twentieth-century African American fiction.

I plan to add Hutner’s book and a list of many of the titles he discusses, to the Sources section on this site later this month, but the above sample provides an excellent start. I highly recommend What America Read to any fan of 20th century realistic fiction.

The Rules of the Game, by Georges Simenon

Cover of UK paperback edition of 'The Rules of the Game'Ah, there’s nothing like a dose of Georges Simenon to remind us of the worms lurking just beneath the surface of normality. He really was a master of finding that loose thread that can unravel the whole fabric of one’s existence with a simple tug.

The Rules of the Game, one of the dozen of so novels set in the U. S. that he wrote during the ten years he lived there, is a perfect example. As the novel opens, Walter Higgins, manager of the local Fairfax supermarket in Williamson, Connecticut, father of four (with another on the way), school board treasurer and assistant secretary of the Rotary Club, finds out his application to the local country club has been rejected–for the second time.

“The application meant so much to him. It was important for his family’s place in Williamson society, in society in general.” He takes it hard. “I’ll kill them!” is his immediate, silent response. The rejection undermines his entire sense of self. “They were telling him he wasn’t worthy of belonging to the community,” he thinks. It strips away the facade of respectability he’d worked so hard to establish: “He was simply ashamed, as if he had found himself stark naked in the middle of the supermarket, among his employees and outraged customers.” “That was, in fact, a dream he had often had,” Simenon adds, tellingly.

He begins to question everything around him. He begins to speculate on silent conspiracies against him, on hushed conversations held behind his back. “Somewhere in Williamson, there was at least one person who must be chuckling contentedly at the thought of the clever trick he’d played on Higgins.” The fact that no one mentions the black-balling, that no one reacts or even seems to know of it, offers no reassurance. “It was almost as though everyone was deliberately behaving normally, giving him nothing to latch on to.”

Simenon then reveals just what Higgins has been trying for years to cover up. His mother, an alcoholic, is reporting missing from her rest home and then found dying in a gutter. He returns to his home town in New Jersey to retrieve her and is reminded of everything he’s worked to put behind him. The squalor of the tenement apartments he’d grown up in. The shiftlessness, drunken neighbors. The petty thieves, shirkers, and child-beaters. His own mother, reeling from binge to binge, often abandoning him to sleep alone, cold, and hungry. It’s as if the country club men of Williamson have always been able to smell the poverty he’d managed to escape.

It’s a nightmarish experience that drives the tee-totalling Higgins to drink and to a short breakdown. But he pulls himself up again and returns to the supermarket and his facade of fitting in. Now, however–in apt Simenon fashion–he no longer believes in what he is doing:

He didn’t have all the details worked out yet, but he was sure he was on the right track. The reason people thought he didn’t count was because he didn’t know the rules of the game. Yes, it was a game–like the games of his childhood. He hadn’t known that, maybe because he’d had to start too young, or too low, he, the son, as his mother said sarcastically, of Louisa and that scum Higgins.

But that wasn’t the main thing. What was important was to conform to the rules, certainly, but most of all, to know it was all a game. If you didn’t know that, you could make things impossible for other people.

This, to me, sums up what is so perfect about Simenon’s American novels: this is very much the American dream viewed through the eyes of a European. It’s not a dream of self-advancement, of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps: it’s a game. A slightly different game from the European game of success, with its older and more intricate rules of religion, property, nobility, and class, but a game nonetheless.

Simenon’s view is certainly cynical, but it has something of the attractive bitterness of a glass of Campari. I wouldn’t drink one every night, but these short, intense novels have that same effect of bringing your senses to attention.

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The Rules of the Game, by Georges Simenon
Translated by Howard Curtis
New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1988

If It Prove Fair Weather, by Isabel Paterson

I had mixed feelings as I started If It Prove Fair Weather: I looked forward to reading another novel by Paterson and regretted that after this, there would be no more–at least, no more except for her lesser historical novels. If there’s one writer I’ve come to feel, since starting this site, whose work has been most unjustly forgotten, it’s Paterson.

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'If It Prove Fair Weather'Paterson’s three novels published between 1933 and 1940–Never Ask the End, The Golden Vanity, and If It Prove Fair Weather–are marked with an intelligence, humor, and keen sense of feminism that would seem to be a natural fit for many readers today. She writes with a distinctive voice–ironic, self-deprecating, wistful yet pragmatic. Her heroines are women who’ve never defined themselves based on whether there was a man in their lives, even though each has a romantic streak and an attraction to the company of men. These are women who enjoy having a man hold her hand, and yet wonder at men’s utter cluelessness.

If It Prove Fair Weather presents just such a woman, Emmy Cruger, an associate professor of mathematics at a Manhattan college, in her mid-forties, single, happy to own her own apartment: “… the only refuge she had ever owned. Once she was inside, nothing could get at her until tomorrow.”

Out of nowhere, James Wishart, a publishing executive Emmy has known for years, approaches her at a cocktail party and asks her to dinner. Despite the fact that Wishart is very married and very conservative, she has sensed some mutual interest for years. Now, however, he seems to want to take things further.

Or does he? Even in the privacy of Emmy’s apartment, something holds him back. They kiss and embrace, but then he leaves in haste, concerned not to be seen returning to his hotel too late. There are several rounds like this, each stopping short of Emmy’s bedroom.

Emmy deconstructs each encounter with her friend Christine Jackson, trying to understand Wishart’s motivation and intent. The problem, as Emmy see it, is that Wishart is so bound up in convention he himself has no idea. She compares him to a medieval burgher in some painting by Breughel: “The medieval face was squarish, cautious, set; it connoted the land-bound man, who kept within limits, by mark and custom, on the traveled roads, whatever their turns and windings. He feared death and the judgment, comets and portents and plagues; he walled himself in and accumulated things of substance….” “He’s got himself so surrounded by precautions that it leaves him completely exposed,” Emmy concludes.

These would-be lovers are separated by oceans: marriage, convention, inexperience, and, above all, sex. Wishart is a terrible kisser: “When he kissed her mouth, she thought, he doesn’t know how. Like a child….” Women are an utter mystery to him. “Is there any difference–between one woman and another?,” he straight-facedly asks Emmy at one point–a question she chooses to ignore. He has no idea of how to play the game of love: “… [Y]ou didn’t think of me again till yesterday?,” Emmy asks him one evening together.

“Sometimes,” he said. “I thought about your knees. They bothered me a good deal.”
My knees, Emmy thought, blankly astonished. How can any woman understand a man either? … Women don’t think like that. Never. I thought about–I thought about him.

Wishart is such a stranger to himself he doesn’t even know he’s ticklish. In a friendly tussle one evening, Emmy reaches around and sets off a fit of giggling. Wishart is dumbfounded at his reaction. To herself, Emmy wonders what this says about the emotional and physical coldness of Wishart’s marriage.

The trouble is, after half a dozen evenings together, this is still where things stand. Then, as if to signal just how lost he is, Wishart mails Emmy a clipping about himself from a trade journal, along with a note saying nothing more than, “Sincerely, JNW.” “Why did he take the trouble to write and say nothing?,” she wonders.

Slowly, the truth dawns on her. Wishart wants to have an affair–but he wants her to make the first move. He takes it for granted that she is the more experienced party in such things: “He wants me to. An excuse. To make him do what he wants…. No chance.”

She gives up on Wishart and moves on. Huntley, another married executive–trucking this time–shows an interest. Unlike Wishart, however, he has no hesitation. Their second evening ends with them in bed, Huntley exultant and Emmy mildly amused. She appreciates the contrast and feels a certain physical attraction, but no more. After a few months the affair fizzles out in mutual disinterest.

Wishart appears one more time, to say, in his own clumsy way, that there can never be anything more between them. His wife is suffering from cancer. The perfect moral way out–or at least so Emmy recognizes Wishart’s own view of the situation. This last demonstration of emotional ignorance and cowardice seals the deal, in Emmy’s eyes.

Still, even as she happily parts from this clod, she also mourns the loss of the inexplicable bond she and Wishart felt in some way from their very first meeting. There was, and always could be, some undeniable spark, some attraction that existed on a completely different level from anything she felt with Huntley. Some “… happiness they had no power to resist while they were together, because it consisted simply in being together….”

This affair that ends without ever really taking place would be a pretty thin foundation for any novel, and were it not for the pleasure of seeing it all through the eyes and voice of Emmy–which really means the eyes and voice of Isabel Paterson. It’s a little unfortunate that Stephen Cox’s 2004 biography, The Woman and the Dynamo, has led to a minor rediscovery of Paterson as a libertarian icon, since it leaves her far more substantial literary merit in the shadows.

Paterson was one of the funniest and smartest writers of the 20th century. Employed for several decades as the principle book reviewer of the New York Herald Tribune, Paterson was among the best and most widely read people of her time. The novel’s title comes from an old poem by Sir John Suckling, “The Constant Lover”, in which the poet admits at the end that,

Had it any been but she,
And that very face,
There had been at least ere this
A dozen dozen in her place.

As with Never Ask the End and The Golden Vanity, Paterson riddles If It Prove Fair Weather with snatches of poetry, folk song, and stories that reveal with incredible richness of her reading. I took the time to track down every quote in the book, and this sample from the first 100 pages gives a good indication of how intricately interwoven literature high and low must have been with her own thoughts:

  • “The Corruptible”, a poem by Elinor Wylie (an acquaintance and contemporary of Paterson’s)
  • “To a Woman Young and Old”, a poem by John Keats
  • “Memoirs of the Jukes Family”, a humorous piece by Will Cuppy, one of Paterson’s closest friends, that appeared in The New Yorker in 1931
  • A variation on “Peter Bell”, a poem by William Wordsworth, that appeared in works by Shelley and Charles Lamb
  • A story about Ninon de l’Enclos that appeared in the memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon
  • “I’ll go no more a’roving”, an English sea shanty
  • “Ulysses”, a poem by Alfred Tennyson
  • “To a Lady Asking Foolish Questions”, a poem by Ernest Dowson
  • A deathbed quote from the Emperor Hadrian, as adapted by Elinor Wylie

Further on, we encounter bits from Browning, T. S. Eliot, Kipling, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Yeats, Tin Pan Alley, Cocteau, Sappho, and King Harald of the Danes. What is most impressive is that Paterson had to have been working purely from memory–almost every other quote proves to have a word or two wrong or omits a line, just as they would if recalled from years of reading.

She is also a writer who drops in wisecracks and aphorisms as easily as punctuation. Here are just a few from among the many pages I dog-eared:

  • Fame means that one-tenth of one per cent of your fellow citizens have heard your name; not that they care.
  • By the time we know what to do with time there is no more.
  • Friendship exists, complete and absolute from the beginning. You don’t make friends, you recognize them.
  • The fact that other people have their separate being and may continue to exist without us, appears as a kind of treason.
  • Perhaps no man listens to any woman. He understands only that she is amiable or out of humor, as if it were fair or stormy weather.

And, sadly for Emmy Cruger, her true love proves not to understand even this much.

I closed If It Prove Fair Weather with mixed feelings like those I started it with. It was a genuine treat to share Isabel Paterson’s company for 300-some pages, and it was sad to know there would be no more new Paterson novels after this. And it was frustrating to realize that it will soon be seventy years since this book was in print.

Won’t someone PLEASE do America a favor and republish this wonderful woman’s work?

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If It Prove Fair Weather, by Isabel Paterson
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940

Excellent new article on Jetta Carleton and The Moonflower Vine

Harper Perennial’s reissue of Jetta Carleton’s The Moonflower Vine has garnered coverage in a number of newspapers, but by far the best to date–in fact, the most substantial piece on Jetta Carleton’s life and work yet published–appears this week in the St. Louis Riverfront Times: “Moonflower Resurrection.” Staff writer Aimee Levitt penned a long and sensitive article that gives considerable due to both the novel and Carleton’s life and work before and after its publication. I recommend it highly to any fan of this site.

H. M. Pulham, Esquire, by John P. Marquand

If Ford Madox Ford hadn’t already used the line, I might say that this is the saddest story I have ever heard. And there are at least a few strong parallels between H. M. Pulham, Esquire and Ford’s masterpiece, The Good Soldier. Both novels are related in the first person by unreliable narrators–unreliable primarily due to the incredible strength of the cultural and social blinders they’ve grown into–and both narrators are utterly oblivious to the fact that their wives are having affairs with men they consider good friends.

Cover of first U.S. edition of ' 'H. M. Pulham, Esquire'Compared to Ford, however, Marquand is more craftsman than artist. His prose style is never much more than workmanlike, and he has at time a tendency to fill pages more for the sake of providing his audience with a good thick read than for shaping his story. But observation, not artistry, is Marquand’s long suit. He is an ideal observer–a novelist of society, perhaps America’s best after Edith Wharton. Like Wharton, he is both immersed in society, having been raised in family highly sensitive to–if not highly placed in–Boston society, and able to detach himself and note its many ironies and shortcomings. And H. M. Pulham, Esquire is a perfect example of what he could accomplish at his best.

Pulham, gives us a year in the life of Harry Pulham, graduate of St. Swithins School for Boys (think Choate or Andover) and Harvard as he nears 50. Roped into organizing his college class’ 25th anniversary reunion, he narrates the book as one long contemplation on what he’s going to tell his classmates about the course his life has taken.

In his time, Marquand was considered a satirist, but his sensibilities are far more nuanced than that. One could read Pulham, and conclude that Harry Pulham is a one-dimensional man utterly lacking in irony. I use irony here in the sense so well discussed recently by Roger Scruton: “a habit of acknowledging the otherness of everything, including oneself.”

After all, the result of a year’s worth of Pulham’s meditations is a vapid piece for the reunion book with such stereotypical statements as, “I do not believe that either Mr. Roosevelt or Germany can hold out much longer and I confidently look forward to seeing a sensible Republican in the White House.” And, even more strikingly, after being everything but told outright that his wife and best friend have been having an affair, he writes that he “never regretted for a moment” his marriage “since our life together has always been happy and rewarding.”

What is remarkable about Marquand’s accomplishment, though, is how deftly he manages to bring out a number of subtexts in Pulham’s apparently superficial narrative. One is the story of a life defined by the road not taken–the advertising job in New York City he left to return to Boston when his father fell ill, the attractive and challenging woman (“a good deal more of a person than I was, more talented, more cultivated”) he fell in love with and left behind as well. Pulham has based most of his most important choices on what was expected of him:

Romantic novelists have created the illusion that it is hard to find someone to marry. From my own observation I think they are mistaken. There is nothing easier than doing something that nature wants you to do, and there is always someone ready to help you. Before you know what it is all about, you are selecting cuff links for the ushers.

Nature, in Pulham’s case, is society, specifically the proper social elite of Boston. Being a member of that society means belonging to the right clubs, sending your children to the right schools, summering in the Maine isles, and conforming to a narrow pattern of behavior:

I met Cornelia Motford at the Junior Bradbury Dances, the second series that started close to the cradle and ended in the vicinity of the grave. In fact, only two years ago Cornelia and I were asked to subscribe to the Senior Bradbury Dances. If we had accepted we would have seen the same faces that we had seen at the Baby Bradburys almost thirty years before.

Another subtext, then, is the story of a man whose life was defined for him. Of course he married a girl from his own class, a girl he’d know socially since childhood: what else could he do? How could he describe the confines of his life as a prison or straitjacket if there were no other choices offered him?

But if Harry Pulham is not a cardboard conservative, neither is he a pathetic victim. and this is not the saddest story I’ve ever read. Probably the thing I like most about Marquand’s books is how remarkably grown-up a writer he is. He understands that the number one reason you don’t chuck it all in and run off with the secretary or your old girlfriend or rebuild your life from ground up is that it would hurt the people you love.

Pulham is not completely lacking in introspection. He might write to his rah-rah classmates that “life together has always been happy and rewarding,” but to himself he has the capacity to admit, “It might have been better for us both if we had been frank instead of nursing a sort of reticence, and a fear that one would be defenseless if the other knew too much.”

It’s hard to believe, for example, that Pulham is not well aware of the tongue-in-cheek humor of the following:

I was never reminded so much of death as I was when we were engaged. There were certain pieces of furniture that we could have now, but it was necessary to remember that there were lots of other pieces–rugs and sofas and tables and pictures–which we would have when Mother and Mrs. Motford died. When Mrs. Motford died we could have the large Persian carpet with the Tree of Life that was in the parlor. When Mother died we could have the Inness, and it would be much better to plan on having these things some day; and yet when we actually did plan, both Mother and Mrs. Motford would always resent it. They would say that Kay and I talked as though they were dead already, and neither of them was going to die just to please Kay or me; and once Mother said that I wanted her to die, and Kay told me that Mrs. Motford had said the same thing.

And throughout the novel there are wonderful little moments when Marquand gives us wonderful little glimpses into Pulham’s awareness of his own passage through time:

We came into Providence, and the car grew dark and gloomy because of the train shed over it. Then it moved out into the afternoon and the cold rays of the sun came through the left-hand windows and I saw the state capitol. Once long ago when we had to change cars at Providence on the way to some place like Naragansett Pier, Mother had taken Mary and me into the capitol, and we stood in the rotunda, looking at the flags brought back from the Civil War. I might pass that building a thousand times without ever setting foot in it again.

OK, À la recherche du temps perdu this ain’t, but neither is it Babbitt. Pulham is a rich and realistic account of one man and the society and world he lived in by a man with a rich sense of irony. I remember thinking when I read The Good Soldier, “This would be considered a tour-de-force of narrative voice if it were being published today,” and I often had the same thought while reading H. M. Pulham, Esquire. Once again, I have to say that with Marquand’s being out of print and out of favor, a very respectable and interesting body of work is being unjustly neglected.

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H. M. Pulham, Esquire, by John P. Marquand
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1941

Robert Phelps featured in The American Scholar

The American Scholar‘s Spring 2009 issue includes two features on Robert Phelps, who co-founded the Grove Press, edited numerous collections of the writings of Colette, Glenway Wescott, Ned Rorem, and others, was called “the best book reviewer in America” by Garry Wills, and struggled for 30 years to produce a second novel to follow his well-received 1958 debut, Heroes and Orators. The first, “Dawn of a Literary Friendship”, features the first dozen of over 200 letters exchanged between Phelps and the novelist James Salter between 1969 and Phelps’ death in 1989, an irresistable taste from what will be a future collection of their correspondence edited by John McIntyre.

Writing to Salter on Christmas Eve, 1969, Phelps gushes with admiration for Salter’s 1967 novel, A Sport and a Pastime (“my own favorite American novel of the ’60s”), his script for “Downhill Racer”, and his direction of the film, “Three”. Salter replied with praise for Phelps’ compilation of Colette’s autobiographical writings, Earthly Paradise: “I’ve given many copies away. Everything about it is beautiful. I love to pick it up.”

Salter was just hitting his stride as a writer. As Phelps struggled to create something original of his own, Salter slowly but steadily built up an oeuvre and a critical reputation as a writer who, in the words of Richard Ford, “writes American sentences better than anybody writing today.” Composer and diarist Ned Rorem has described Phelps’ letters as “witty, lewd, sage, generous, gossipy, aggressively self-effacing, montrously opinionated without bitchery, engrossed by the literary life in general while being always directed to a unique recipient, and generally weaving something extraordinary out of something ordinary.” As this first sample shows, the combination of Phelps’ and Salter’s talents and genuine mutual affective and admiration promises to represent one of the most interesting and enjoyable collections of American letters of the 20th century.

The second piece, “I wanted to Be Robert Phelps”, by Washington Post critic Michael Dirda, shows Phelps both as a man of tremendous erudition and enthusiasm for writers and artists of past and present. Phelps’ study and office in his Manhattan apartment was, in Dirda’s eyes,

… the perfect room. The wooden floors had been stained black, the walls completely lined with bookshelves. Curtains were always kept drawn, blocking out the day and night. A pole lamp stood next to a rather high-tech chrome and leather easy chair, while extension lights were clamped to the corners of bookcases. On a coffee table in the middle of the room there always lay page proofs, literary magazines, publishers’ catalogues. Instead of a sofa, a daybed butted up against the back of a freestanding bookcase and was covered with pillows embroidered with scenes from classical mythology (Becki’s handiwork). Near the music corner—lots of Stravinsky, Poulenc, and Ravel LPs—stood a long low set of white shelves on top of which rested more books, some heavy tumblers and a big bottle of Tanqueray gin.

Beneath the cultured lifestyle Dirda admired, however, Phelps struggled to with his own demons. He suffered from Parkinson’s disease for years, was prone to drinking at times, and agonized over his sexuality, which was one aspect of Heroes and Orators praised by critics such as Leslie Fiedler. And he constantly took himself to task for failing to produce “worthy books”. As he once wrote Salter,

As it is, for 20 years, I have only scrounged at making a living: a low standard of survival and hundreds of articles, reviews, flower arrangements of other people’s prose, etc. Not a good form of hell at all. This has become terribly clear to me in the past 6 weeks when I have been going through sheaves of old printed matter with a view to making our publisher a book called Following. I have been appalled by the waste, the thousands and thousands of irretrievable words on which nevertheless I worked long and hard and sometimes until 5 a.m. No. Somewhere I took a wrong turning. I should not have tried to earn my living with my typewriter. I should have become a surveyor, or an airline ticket salesman, or a cat burglar. As it is, I am far far beyond the point of no return and such powers as I once counted on—the ability to write to order and out of my own battiness, so to speak—are suddenly gone.

Instead of writing more novels, Phelps collected, annotated and edited. Colette’s writings. James Agee’s letters. Glenway Westcott’s miscellania. Ned Rorem’s first diaries. And The Literary Life; a Scrapbook Almanac of the Anglo-American Literary Scene From 1900 to 1950, which one reviewer called “a loving elegy, a larky swansong, a doting, dotty, but undaunted Souvenir Album for books, books, books, and for all the men and women who ever believed in making them.” And Dirda says of it, “I’ve since carried the book with me my whole life; it has been on my bedside table wherever I have lived. I have read it over and over.”

He also taught writing, mostly at the New School, and inspired dozens of his students. Dan Wakefield portrays Phelps as his primary influence in his memoir, New York in the Fifties, as does Derek Alger on the online magazine, Pif.

Perhaps Phelps just didn’t recognize–or value, at least–the talent he seems to have genuinely had, even though he admitted it in one of his early letters to Salter:

Scrapbooks, footnotes, almanacs, letters, diaries, questionnaires, marginalia, memos, alphabets…how I love them. Pasolini once called himself a “pasticheur.” I think I am an annotator. The story exists for the scribbled notes in the margin.

Certainly the warm spot Phelps’ pastiches of Colette and others continues to hold in the hearts of their readers suggests that his energies may have been better spent in creating them than in writing novels that might well have been forgotten as quickly as Heroes and Orators was.

A Big Man, a Fast Man, by Benjamin Appel

“I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve ever done. You don’t get to be big without pulling a couple of fast ones. That goes for anybody. A big man is a fast man.” This quote is blazoned across the top of the paperback edition of Benjamin Appel’s A Big Man, a Fast Man, along with two contrasting views of a man: the “Big Man” addressing a crowd of men; the “Fast Man” contemplating a buxom brunette in a slip.

When I start to read an old paperback with a garish cover like this, I always wonder: Is it going to better than the cover–or worse? I think it’s safe to say that a lot of what got published back in the 1950s and 1960s in paperbacks with such teasing covers is worse.

In this case, however, it’s quite a bit better, and not just because the cover’s pretty tame by the standards of the time. A Big Man, a Fast Man is the story of Bill Lloyd, a veteran labor organizer and now president of the United Suppliers Terminal Workers, a union with over 800,000 members. Lloyd’s union is under Federal investigation for corruption. The union’s founder and past president, Art Kincel, recently committed suicide and the head of the East Coast branch was found dead under suspicious circumstances.

Seeking a little relief from all the negative publicity, Lloyd approaches a public relations firm in search of some “dramatic publicity” to distance him from his predecessors. His ideas: a TV series, articles in the Saturday Evening Post, or “an autobiog similar to best-sellers on movie stars/other glamourites.” So one of the firm’s execs sits Lloyd down and lets him tell his life story while the tape recorder is rolling and the rye is flowing.

This aspect of the novel already distinguishes it from the run of the mill. The book consists of six tape transcripts, framed by a series of short memos from the exec to the firm’s head. It’s also a discontinuous narrative, as each tape deals with different periods of time–the current controversies; Lloyd’s childhood as the son of a coal miner; his rise in the union after World War Two; his experiences as an organizer in the steel and warehousing industry.

Appel demonstrates a certain amount of art in his sequencing of Lloyd’s recollections. By his own account, his hands are fairly clean, at least as far as the current problems go. But we also learn that one of the reasons the union was in trouble was that Kincel had been colluding with industry management to downplay worker unrest in return for substantial baksheesh. And that Lloyd himself had seen this sort of backstage dealing on a smaller scale when first working for the union in the 1930s.

As Appel plays out the story, Lloyd went into the labor movement out of inspiration by a few idealistic early organizers, but somewhere along the way, he chose to favor realism over idealism:

It was too much for me, worn out like I was. A fellow can’t stay up on that cross forever. Got to be a Jesus to do that. I tried to calm her down, but go calm down a fanatic. She had her religion even if it was a red one with a red Jesus. What I did was go for the bottle of rye…. Think too much of what a world this is and you go nuts.

Even though he proclaims, “I stayed in the labor movement. I stuck to my principles. By God, I stuck,” you get the strong sense he’s flailing. The audience most in need of some positive publicity is Lloyd himself. Overall, Appel is effective in capturing the tone of a man becoming disoriented as he wanders through his past. Some of it’s the booze, but more of it is Lloyd’s own struggle to understand just how he got to where he is now.

Overall, A Big Man, a Fast Man is better than the average novel of its time, if not quite a significant piece of literature, and certainly better than that cheesy cover.

Cover of paperback edition of 'The Raw Edge'A Big Man, a Fast Man is one of two novels wrote in the late 1950s about the labor movement. The other, The Raw Edge dealt with the conflicts and corruption of the Longshoreman’s Union in New York City, the same territory explored by Elia Kazan in “On the Waterfront.”

Benjam Appel, around 1955Appel’s career as a writer spanned five decades and his work ranged from serious fiction such as A Big Man, a Fast Man to a series of children’s history books with titles like We Were There in the Klondike Gold Rush and science fiction satires such as Funhouse.

His best known work, Brain Guy, is the story of a smart, business-minded gangster, into crime and real estate–rather like a 1930s version of Stringer Bell from “The Wire.” Stark House Press reissued it a few years ago, packaged in volume with Plunder, a 1952 novel about G.I. hustlers in the Philippines. And earlier this year, Stark House reissued two more hard-boiled Appel novels from the 1950s, Sweet Money Girl and in one volume.

Find a copy

A Big Man, A Fast Man, by Benjamin Appel
New York: William Morrow, 1961

Life in the Crystal Palace, by Alan Harrington

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Life in the Crystal Palace'Life in the Crystal Palace may, one day, come to seem a little like one of those prehistoric bugs preserved in resin, as it captures a way of life and work that in many ways has already become a thing of the past.

Based on Harrington’s experiences over three years working in the public relations department at the headquarters of an unnamed firm–one of the largest in America at the time, with over 34,000 employees worldwide–the book is almost an anthropological study of mid-fifties corporation life. This is the real-life equivalent of the World Wide Wicket Company of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”.

Harrington saw that corporate employee as a new species, one that “may be distinguished from other American working people at least in one way, by an absence of nervousness.” This was the era when people could join a company and talk about having “a job for life”

Life is good, life is gentle. Barring a deep depression or war, we need never worry about money again. We will never have to go job-hunting again. We may get ahead at different speeds, and some will climb a bit higher than others, but whatever happens the future is as secure as it can be. And the test is not arduous. Unless for some obscure reason we choose to escape back into your anxious world (where the competition is so hard and pitiless and your ego is constantly under attack) we will each enjoy a comfortable journey to what our house organ calls “green pastures,” which is, of course, retirement.

Harrington joined the Crystal Palace, as he calls the firm in the book, just before it moves into its new headquarters in the suburbs outside New York City–“a fabulous place–a great office-palace on a hilltop surrounded by fields and woodlands.” There, he worked on advertising campaigns, promotional films, and other publicity.

He calls himself a “poodle of journalism” for his work on the company’s monthly newsletter, the Palace Voice:

Nearly every big company has a paper of some kind, and it is certainly reasonable that such publications exist. But why must they be so dull? The answer to that is easy: because they mustn’t contain the smallest hint of controversy or present any idea that is not pleasing and soothing–“all the news that’s print to fit.” Every story in the Voice has to be checked by higher authority to make sure that it is free of roughage. In the end, therefore, the house organ is like the food in the dining hall–smooth, bland, and creamy.

It’s really just a polite form of propaganda, Harrington concludes, closer to Pravda than The New York Times.

Like the Communist Party at its height, Harrington’s corporation wants its members (employees) to believe: “Like the Church, my Crystal Palace removes the burden of belief from me. It removes my need for decision. I have found my rock. I believe only in the company.” And like in the Party, success is less a matter of talent than of learning how to succeed at the organization’s game:

What cannot be learned that quickly is the corporation minuet–the respectful dance with the right partners. The watchful corporation man gradually finds out who is important and who is not; what is acceptable and what is not; what type of project will advance his fortunes and what is not worth bothering about. Experience for him mainly adds up to learning how to behave. The secrets of gaging and responding to the power of others–superimposed on a normal intelligence–will move him slowly upward.

Even though “job for life” corporations started fading from the scene like dinosaurs in the recessions of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, some of Harrington’s observations still ring true for anyone who’s worked in a white-collar organization. Like his assessment of the job of administrators: “After watching scores of them in action, I could swear that their duties consist mainly of frowning over sheets of paper, consulting with others, and then passing on the job-to-be-done to a specialist.”

Or his definition of the disgruntled employee, or “incomplete rebel”, as he calls him: “The incomplete rebel is someone who resents his situation but can’t find the means to improve it.” Or of daily lunch with co-workers:

When we first moved to the Palace a general memorandum (abetted by the Voice) encouraged headquarters personnel to mingle in the dining hall and get to know each other. The idea was that you should not necessarily eat with members of your own department, but sit with people doing other kinds of work. This suggestion has largely been ignored. We eat with about the same companions day after day. The result is to pile incestuousness on incestuousness, and our lunch conversations are for the most part, again, as bland and creamy as our food. I do not mean to say that we are duller than anybody else, but try lunching with the same group day after day. Conversation becomes a sort of filler, a means of avoiding silence.

Even at the height of the great, sheltering corporation, there were signs that this kind of artificial world could not last:

Corporate practices involve a fundamental inconsistency. Management wants simultaneously (a) performance from everyone and (b) protection for everyone. But the impulse to perform and the impulse to protect yourself cannot exist as equals. One must gain ascendancy over the other. To perform, move, swing, the self goes out and takes chances. The reflex of self-protection produces subservience to the group, a willingness to spread responsibility until it doesn’t exist, a binding horror of chance-taking and obseisance to the system. How can these two drives exist together in equal strength?

Alan Harrington, 1959Late in his time at the Crystal Palace, Harrington prepares a number of suggestions aimed at injecting a stronger sense of accountability into the company’s way of working, but then tosses them aside, recognizing they had no chance of being adopted. He had become, in his own words, “a thoroughly tamed playboy.” “Spiritually, my net worth was zero.” Only a lucky offer from Cary McWilliams, editor of The Nation, to write about his experiences finally offers him a way out. The article, and a grant from the Fund for the Republic, led to this book.

Life in the Crystal Palace is not the only book by Alan Harrington worth rediscovering. It’s remarkable, in fact, that he managed to survive three years in the Crystal Palace, since much of his oeuvre reflects a man who consistently approached life from a unique angle:

• Revelations of Dr. Modesto

His first book and novel, which is a sharp, satiric poke at the conformist nature of American life in the 1950s. Dr. Modesto’s revelations are that conforming, taken literally and to the extreme, in fact, is the one true path to happiness.

• The Immortalist

“Death is an imposition on the human race, and no longer acceptable.” Harrington takes this implausible premise as the basis for an essay on the large and necessary role that death plays in human live.

• Psychopaths

Again, Harrington takes an irony view of the misfit in society: “Drunkards and forgers, addicts, flower children . . . Mafia loan shark battering his victim, charming actor, murderer, nomadic guitarist, hustling politician, the saint who lies down in front of tractors, the icily dominating Nobel Prize winner stealing credit from laboratory assistants . . . all, all doing their thing” and sees them as new men, model characters rather than rejects.

• The White Rainbow

His last novel, about two characters Benjamin DeMott described as a ”rich, leukemia-battling, Yankee-hating Mexican radicalized at Columbia in the Mark Rudd days” and ”Harvard’s wunderkind in his mid-30’s, gifted linguist, man of Viking beauty.” The New Times Book Review picked it as one of the notable books of 1981.

Find a Copy

Life in the Crystal Palace, by Alan Harrington
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959

Brooks Peters recommends The Gilded Hearse, by Charles Gorham

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Gilded Hearse'Brooks Peters, who writes one of the most consistently interesting blogs around (www.brookspeters.com), passed along a plug for Charles Gorham’s novel, The Gilded Hearse, which sounds like a terrific guilty pleasure:

It’s not exactly unknown but seems to have been overlooked lately. Perhaps “forgotten” is a better word since I can’t imagine too many people putting it on their top ten lists. It’s a rather scathing look at the publishing business just before the early beginnings of World War Two. Set in Manhattan in 1938 (but published in 1948), it details a traumatic day in the life of a book exec named Richard Eliot who battles his own demons while depicting his circle of friends and business associates in a very unflattering light. The day is set against the backdrop of the Munich compromise which is not too subtly broadcast throughout the text whenever someone happens to turn on a radio.

The firm, Hutchinson’s, could be several well-known publishing houses of the era, complete with the white-shoe editors, the burly, brusque, hard-drinking salesmen and the neurotic, ambitious “suits” who handle the brash marketing side. None too subtle (the writing style is sort of a cross between Grace Metalious and A. J. Cronin) , it is nonetheless very revealing of past attitudes and mores, as well as a fascinating relic of a time when the publishing world was just beginning to turn corporate.

Gorham nails the ambiance of New York in the late 30s, the jazz bars, the sleazy saloons, the drunken book-signings in overly perfumed department stores, the overt anti-Semitism within polite society (in contrast to the genocide on the horizon in Germany), the sad, listless Village bohemians, and throws in a few hilariously drawn “fags” and “fairies” and one appalling lesbian stereotype to give the story some typical pulp grit and edge. One effeminate book editor named Graham Fatt, who swishes amid his Oriental art, keeps “a large jar of KY” in his purple-hued bathroom.

There’s also plenty of sex between heterosexuals, abortions, lecherous cads, adulterous wives fornicating on trains. One character admits she went “to bed” with a colleague, then corrects herself by saying “to berth.”

Cover of 'Make Me an Offer'The Gilded Hearse was also published several times as Make Me an Offer. Time magazine’s reviewer took a great big haughty sniff when the book first came out:

As an indictment of the book business, The Gilded Hearse is neither good burlesque nor significant exposure. Few readers will be surprised to learn that book salesmen often haven’t read the books they sell, that salesgirls in bookstores are often dumb, that book publishers are increasingly less concerned with literature than with bestsellers. Those with the kind of taste that Gorham deplores will be quickest to see that The Gilded Hearse is just superficial enough, spiced with just enough bedroom business, to make it a likely Hutchinson book.

Brooks sums up just why what Time dismissed as trash seems like a bit of tarnished gold today:

… I thought I’d share the title with you in case any of your readers are eager to take a trip back in time to an era when the book business was a relatively insular world, dominated by a lost generation of self-hating alcoholics and men on the make. All in all, a fun, if purely nostalgic, read.

“He Lived for Money, Women, and Power” trumpets the cover of one paperback reissue of The Gilded Hearse. Toss in drinking, classism, and bigotry to boot–ah, the good ol’ days.

Brooks also recommends another Gorham novel and promises a future post on his own site about Gorham’s life and works.

Gorham also wrote the early gay-themed novel McCaffery, about a lusty male hustler, which is equally graphic. I’m a big fan of his lurid style. It’s pulp fiction with a trenchant eye for detail and nuance, and an insider’s perspective. Gorham’s life story itself reads like one of his novels. I’ve been in touch with Gorham’s daughter Deborah, a noted scholar, about doing a piece on him for my blog, but have been wrapped up in too many things recently to give it my full attention. I hope to get it done soon.

1500 Books added to Publishers List

Thanks to a visitor’s Amazon purchase, I discovered an admirable venture into republishing neglected classics: 1500 Books. Founded by two veterans of the publishing business, Eileen Bertelli and Gavin Caruthers, 1500 Books’ list is devoted to the art of the memoir: “We believe memoirs—when it’s a good story, well told—can be some of the most compelling reading you will ever experience.” Their star release so far is the reissue of Lucy Norton’s three-volume 1967 English translation of one of the juiciest memoirs ever written, that of King Louis XIV’s advisor, the Duc de Saint Simon: 1691-1709: Presented to the King; 1710-1715: The Bastards Triumphant; and 1715-1723: Fatal Weakness. As sober a source as the Catholic Encyclopedia remarked of these memoirs, which were last available from the late Prion Lost Treasures in the UK, “Whatever the historical value of the ‘Memoirs’ may be, they are, by their sparkling wit, one of the most original monuments of French literature.”

 

The Man Who Lived Backward, by Malcolm Ross

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Man Who Lived Backward'This is the most confusing book I’ve ever read. 400-plus pages and my head still hurts when I try to make sense of it.

The Man Who Lived Backward tells the story of Mark Selby, to whom author Malcolm Ross endows a unique form of time-travelling:

“At dawn each day,” he began again, “I awake and enjoy my breakfast. I go about the business and pleasures of the day. I lunch. I dine. I talk with a friend, as I am doing now, and go to my bed secure in the knowledge that the sun will rise to a new day. As you, I have no idea what the day will bring forth. The only difference between us is this: when you awake tomorrow it will be April 18; with me it will be April 16.”

In other words, Mark Selby goes through each day normally, starting in the morning and going through the day to night. But then he goes to bed and wakes up on the morning of the day before.

This is not a work of science fiction. Ross only uses this arrangement as the pretext to take use through a series of historical situations–the siege of Paris in 1871, Pennsylvania steel strikes in the 1890s, the Spanish-American War. He wastes no energy trying to work out the logic of the situation.

I just couldn’t get past it, though. If he has “no idea what the day will bring forth”, then how is he able to have friends? Wouldn’t all his acquaintances be meeting him for the first time in their lives, even if he’d known them for decades ahead? And how is he able to avoid waking up on top of someone else the next day? He spends most of his nights in hotel rooms. How the heck does he pay for them? OK, so he could remember the day before to book a room so that he could wake up there the day after. But how does he change rooms? Wouldn’t that mean that overnight he travels through space AND time–but only when he changes locations? And he sails back and forth across the Atlantic a few times: how does that work? He travels through space AND time and coordinates his trajectory with the path of the ship?

All this is, of course, pointless speculation. As I said, time travel is just a pretext for Ross, and some readers will find enough else in the book to look past this shaky construct. There are several dozen long entries that record, verbatim, conversations Selby has or overseas as he wanders back through time. Three British clubmen discuss liberty in the 1890s, when that concept didn’t even fully apply to all white men, let alone another sex or race. He spends a good deal of time with Walt Whitman and John Burroughs, to the point that he seems to become something of a Whitman groupie. He tells us about the fine and horrible things that were served up to eat during the siege of Paris.

In the hands of a fine raconteur, these diversions would provide excuse enough to go along on any journey, whether backward, forward, or sideways through time. The problem is that Selby himself lacks a distinct enough character to offer much in the way of color, bias, perception, or any other distinguishing flavor to his observations. As a protagonist, he seems more instrument than human creation.

And, to drive one last nail in this book’s coffin, Ross manages to slap not one, but two framing stories to his work without either adding much in the way of narrative tension or interest. First, Ross presents Selby’s diary as an artifact found in the estate of a wealthy New Englander by his grandson. Long suspected of having made his fortune through some sort of under-handedness in the wake of the Civil War, the grandfather is revealed to be the lucky Union soldier to whom Selby passes along some valuable investment tips on the eve of his fatal attempt to thwart Lincoln’s assassination.

Second, there is Selby’s unique love affair with Helen, who somehow passes twenty-some years in a relationship with Selby–one that starts in her young womanhood and ends at his infancy. Theirs, we are repeatedly assured, is a great love story, but for some odd reason, Ross elects to leave almost all of it out of the book. Only chunks of Selby’s diary are included, and none of them directly covering the years of their time together.

Malcolm Ross, 1950'Fiction was not, I should note, Malcolm Ross’ forte. He spent most of his working life as a journalist and labor relations expert, serving as chairman of the Fair Employment Practice Committee through most of World War Two. His first book, Machine Age in the Hills, was one of the first works to address the hardships and near-bondage of Kentucky coal miners. And his 1939 autobiography, The Death Of A Yale Man, is still considered one of the more revealing memoirs of the New Deal era.

If any of Mark Selby’s tale strikes a familiar note, it’s probably because you’re thinking of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” or its recent film version. Even though it’s one of Fitzgerald’s lesser works, it still towers over The Man Who Lived Backward: it’s got a simpler and sounder fictional premise, a more elegant prose style, and a couple hundred thousand fewer words.

After all, if you have to read a lesser work, make it a short one.

Find a copy

The Man Who Lived Backward, by Malcolm Ross
New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1950

Making Institutions Work, by Geoffrey Vickers

Excerpt

In an increasingly interdependent world, each of us becomes inescapably a member of many systems, each of which makes its own demands on us, as well as giving its own assurances. These demands conflict. If we acknowledge them all, we have to resolve or contain a mounting load of internal conflict. It we deny any, we disrupt some relation on which we depend. Every human association makes some demand on its members for responsibility, loyalty, and mutual trust. We are unaccustomed to respond to, perhaps incapable of responding to so many and such conflicting demands as are generated by our increasing inter-dependence on each other. The memberships we acknowledge fall increasingly short of those we need to acknowledge, if we are to sustain all the relations on which we in fact depend. The conflicts of our day reflect our failure to meet the demands of our multiple memberships.

So we have either to increase our capacity for resolving or containing conflict or to simplify the world (or allow it to simplify itself) by cutting down what we expect of it, or each other, and of ourselves to the measure of our capacities. War, famine, and pestilence will do the second except in so far as we succeed in doing the first.

Editor’s Comments

Cover of first edition of 'Making Institutions Work'“I have an unpopular answer to an unwelcome question,” Geoffrey Vickers writes at the start of Making Institutions Work:

The question is posed by two familiar but staggering changes of the last hundred years. One is the escalation of our expectations; the other is the escalation of our institutions. The two have combined to make demands on each of us ordinary men and women … which few have begun to notice, still less to accept as valid and inescapable. The question is how, if at all, these demands can be met and at what cost. Since these costs are the price we shall have to pay to maintain the systems which now sustain us or any viable alternative, I describe the theme as the price of membership.

I don’t suppose that I can manage to get too many readers excited about a thirty-six-year-old collection of sociological essays from academic journals with such dry names as Policy Sciences, Human Relations, and The Wharton Quarterly. Yet for me, Making Institutions Work has easily been one of the most stimulating books I’ve read a long time, one whose pages I’ve dog-eared, whose lines I’ve underlined, whose passages I’ve been tempted to grab people and force them to listen to. In many ways, it seems to me to be the closest thing I’ve found to a manual for how we need to operate if we have any hope of avoiding having all our conflicts settled by war, famine, pestilence, and climatic disaster.

Sir Geoffrey VickersSir Geoffrey Vickers led a remarkable life. He joined the British Army in 1914 and spent as much time as perhaps any other officer serving in the trenches on the Western Front, earning the Victoria Cross and numerous other combat medals for his bravery. After the war, he returned to university, took a law degree, and worked as a solicitor. He served again during World War Two and as an administrator and board member in government and industry. In his sixties, he turned to writing, particularly on the topic of social systems analysis, and became a leading contributor to the development of systems analysis and thinking, particularly as they related to human society. Making Institutions Work collects eleven articles and lectures Vickers gave in the late 1960s and early 1970s and focuses on the specific issue of how we can learn to deal effectively in a world where we are at all times members of multiple and overlapping institutions–family, culture, nation, organization, religion, teams, clubs, neighborhoods, and others.

I work in an institution. From the day I stopped mowing lawns for money and went to work part-time in a university library, I have worked in one institution or another. And now I work in an instituion–NATO–where competing and conflicting demands of membership can be seen in every activity. The tensions between commitment to the objectives of this alliance and national loyalty are palpable in every meeting of every committee, working group, panel, board, and forum. In NATO, the fundamental mechanism of decision-making is consensus: if one nation does not agree to a decision, the decision is deferred or redefined or taken off the table.

In a consensus-driven institution, no single member ever wins all or loses all. Everything tends to favor not the most popular solution but the least objectionable one. As a result, all solutions that are supported by consensus tend to be sub-optimal. For anyone with the professionalism and pride to strive for well-crafted plans and efficient designs, the experience of working in NATO is one of constant frustration. Military officers, who comprise a good percentage of NATO’s staff at the headquarters level and below, find it particularly frustrating as they have spent their careers trying to boil things down to clear, simple, and quickly-executed orders: defining the shortest path between today and their mission’s objectives. In a consensus-driven institution, the shortest path is almost always guaranteed to lead nowhere but into a brick wall.

Vickers is the first writer I can recall to acknowledge that frustration is part of the price of competing membership demands. He identifies, in fact, “[T]he ability to tolerate greatly increased frustration without lapsing into apathy or escapism or erupting into polarised conflict,” as one of the essential survival skills for life in a world of overlapping and competing memberships. We long ago ran out of frontiers into which we could escape and, psychologically at least, pursue the myth of pure self-sufficience. But relative to the long run of human existence, this situation is still something of a novelty:

This institutions of today carry a far greater load than human institutions have ever carried before. Men are more dependent on them and make greater demands on them than ever before. Their performance is far more exposed to view and is judged by far higher standards than before. They are no longer supported in their task by being regarded as part of a natural order and for the same reason their critics are no longer muted.

Still, Vickers argues, institutions are here to stay: “[A]ny world which generations younger than mine may create or preserve on the other side of the dark decades ahead will include an institutional dimension and will make the same demands on us as players both of institutional and of personal roles.” Since these roles will inevitably create conflicts such as those I see every working day in NATO, there is an increasing need, in Vicker’s view, for what he calls (in a perhaps less than fortunate phrase) “institutionalised persons”:

By an institutionalised person I mean one who accepts the constraints and assurances of membership in all the systems of which he forms part and therefore with the responsibility for managing his share of the conflicts which they involve.

This begins to capture a distinguishing characteristic of many of the people and processes that I encounter working in NATO. Time and time again, when conflicts arise, the value that tends to win out most consistently is that of the importance of preserving the ability to work together again tomorrow. And in this way, this frustrating, multi-national, multi-lingual, bureaucratic, consensus-driven institution seems, like the U.N., the European Union, the U.S. Congress, and many of the other collaborative political institutions we frequently curse, to represent the most realistic approach to dealing with conflict in this hot, flat, and crowded world.

Ironically, the most memorable statement in the whole of Making Institutions Work is not Geoffrey Vickers’, but the epigraph, which comes from an even more obscure paper by Saul Gorn, a pioneer in computer science:

We spend the first year of our lives learning that we end at our skin; and the rest of our lives learning that we don’t.

In Vicker’s view, this task, more than anything else, is a matter of learning to pay our dues:

Those who depend so completely as each of us does on our membership of many human systems cannot afford to withhold the dues which they demand and need from us if they–and consequently we–are to survive and function. These dues are payable not merely in money–though the money dues also will have to rise–but in all the qualities which are needed to resolve or contain human conflict; in responsibility, loyalty and mutual trust; in intellectual effort and informed debate; in extended sympathy and tolerance; in brief, in a dramatic extension of the frontier which divides self from other and present from future.

And to that extent, one can find few better guides to this lifelong task than Geoffrey Vickers.

Find a Copy

Making Institutions Work, by Geoffrey Vickers

New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1973

The Changing Face of New England, by Betty Flanders Thomson

Jack Ayer, professor of law emeritus at the University of California Davis and author of the Underbelly blog, writes to recommend Betty Flanders Thomson’s 1958 book, The Changing Face of New England. In a recent post on cellarholes–the remnants of long-abandoned New England farmhouses–he includes a long quote from Thomson’s book. An even longer excerpt can be found in the online archives of American Heritage magazine.

Nearly twenty years after her New England book, Thomson published a study of the landscapes of the Midwest, Shaping of America’s Heartland. Both titles are now long out of print, unfortunately, as they are highly regarded for their quality of writing and science. Indeed, Connecticut College still remembers Thomson with an annual award for its best student in botany.

Joseph Epstein on I. J. Singer’s The Brothers Ashkenazi

Cover of first U.S. Edition of 'The Brothers Ashkenazi'The Wall Street Journal published one of the very few, I’m sure, pieces in its history devoted to an out-of-print and neglected book recently. Titled “A Yiddish Novel With Tolstoyan Sweep,” the piece, by Joseph Epstein, describes the novel by the brother of the more famous Isaac Bashevis Singer, as “the best Russian novel ever written in Yiddish.” Epstein, former editor of the American Scholar and one of the best essayists of the last forty years, calls The Brothers Ashkenazi I. J. Singer’s best-known work–which tells you how well the rest of his oeuvre is faring these days. Depicting the contrasting careers of two Jewish brothers attempting to get ahead in the Russian Pale of Settlement before the First World War. It ends with a horrific pogrom that leaves the city of Lodz, in Singer’s words, “like a limb torn from a body that no longer sustained it. It quivered momentarily in its death throes as maggots crawled over it, draining its remaining juices.” Such, he leads us to believe, is the fate of a city that “knew that with money you could buy anything.”

Although Singer’s characters do not find the same solace in religion as many in his brother’s works do, the novel is not all bleakness and despair. Still, Epstein credits I. J. Singer for foregoing “a happy ending to render instead a just one.” One hopes this long-out-of-print novel finds some interest among today’s publishers through this rare mention of a neglected book in such a prominent outlet as the Wall Street Journal.

A much earlier piece from Commentary magazine by Dorothy Rabinowitz, about Singer’s 1943 novel, The Family Carnovsky, can be found on the Featured Books section of this site.

Sideman, by Osborn Duke

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Sideman' by Osborn DukeI probably would have filed Sideman under “Justly Neglected” if it weren’t for the fact that it’s about a trombone player in a big band. As an occasional trombone player in a big band myself, I had to give this book a couple of bonus stars.

Sideman portrays a few weeks in the life of Bernie Bell, a trombonist who drops out of college in Texas to take a job with Matt MacNeal’s big band. MacNeal’s band is in the midst of an extended gig at a dance hall near the Pacific Park pier in Santa Monica. Bell’s real reason for joining the band is the chance to study with an Arnold Schoenberg-like modernist composer living in L.A..

Even though the novel comes in at close to 450 pages, the world it describes is a microcosm. All the scenes take place in one of a half-dozen or so sites–the dance hall, the hotel where most of the band members stay, the shack Bernie rents so he can compose on an old piano–close to Santa Monica Beach. Aside from a few marginal characters, most of the interaction is among a few of the band members and a couple of their wives. Although Duke doesn’t lay out a clear timeline, from start to finish the story can’t take longer than four to six weeks. That much is a given, since this is the early 1950s and few working big bands had the luxury of staying off the road very long.

The plot is equally slim: Bernie arrives and tries to fit in with the other band members. He starts in on his composition studies. He gets attracted to the free-spirited wife of a fellow trombonist and agrees to write some original dance music for her. She accidentally poisons herself. Everyone starts whispering about a love triangle and the band’s manager fires Bernie. Bernie heads off to New York City to meet up with an old girlfriend. The end.

In hindsight, I’m not quite sure how Duke managed to fill up so many pages. There is a lot of talking, but not much of it is of any substance. There are lots of details about the life of a working sideman in the big band days. Duke was a trombonist himself and played with Bobby Byrne and Sammy Kaye’s bands after serving as an Army musician in World War Two. The details are probably the main reason anyone would want to pick up this book today–I suspect it’s about as accurate an account of what went on before, during, and after a typical big band performance back in their heyday. But it will linger in memory no longer than one of the lesser numbers that these bands relied on to pad out their books.

There are other autobiographical streaks in Sideman. Like his protagonist, Osborn Duke grew up in Texas and attended college in Texas. Sideman was his one and only published novel, and other than a couple of short stories and television scripts, his list of credits is short. It appears from his obituary that he spent most of his working life as a corporate writer and industrial filmmaker for General Dynamics. His papers are kept in the Special Collections of the University of North Texas, which is one of the premier centers of jazz education in the U. S..

Locate a Copy

Sideman, by Osborn Duke
New York City: Criterion Books, 1956

Neglected Books gets a mention in Publishers Weekly

Source: “Web Site and Author Rescue a Forgotten Book,” by Lynn Andriani, Publishers Weekly, 2/2/2009 (http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6633740.html)

In anticipation of Harper Perennial’s forthcoming reissue of Jetta Carleton’s The Moonflower Vine, Publishers Weekly recently included a story about how the book can to be republished. It turns out that the Neglected Books Page had something to do with it:

The Moonflower revival began when a small press contacted Carleton’s grandniece, Susan Beasley, telling her it wanted to reissue Moonflower, which is set on a farm in western Missouri during the first half of the 20th century. Beasley got in touch with agent Denise Shannon, who didn’t know the book but Googled it and wound up on NeglectedBooks.com, a site launched in 2006 that features thousands of books that have been, according to the site, “neglected, overlooked, forgotten, or stranded by changing tides in critical or popular taste.”

The Moonflower Vine is due out from Harper Perennial on 24 March 2009.

This Is On Me, by Katharine Brush

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'This Is On Me'“This is a new kind of book,” proclaims the dust jacket of This Is On Me, and the statement is still true nearly seventy years later. There is yet, as far as I know, another book like this. Time magazine described it as “scrapbook-diary-letter-what’s it-autobiography.” The New Yorker called it “autobiography-cum-short-stories-cum-articles, complete with anecdotes, divertissements, and funny sayings.” Brush herself said that when she started working on the book, it was a “sort of a kind of an autobiography” and at the book’s very beginning, she refers to it as a “vast hodgepodge” and a “shambles.” What it is, more than anything else, is a memoir of Brush’s life as a working writer in the 1920s and 1930s, studded with great chunks of what she wrote.

Brush started working as a writer from the moment she left school. She wrote a daily movie column for the Boston Herald and Traveler, which she admits usually consisted of “short squibs which I clipped out of the press sheets sent out by the movie companies, and rewrote.” After a year or so, she married Stewart Thomas Brush, whose father owned a string of small-city papers, moved to Ohio, and gave up writing. For about two months. But then she bought a second-hand typewriter and started in again. She went back to rewriting movie publicity under the banner of “Prattle About Picture Plays by Barbara Blake.” “I am even afraid that I thought that up myself,” she confesses.

She started sending stories to magazines. Her method was straight-forward and efficient. She took down a list from The Manuscript Market Guide and started sending out manuscripts:

Enclosing stamped, self-addressed envelopes for return, I mailed the manuscripts out as fast as I wrote them; and as fast as they came back, which was as fast as trains could carry them, I ticked the name of each unappreciative market off on the list, and tried the next one. As the manuscripts began to show first signs of wear and tear, I ironed them out with a lukewarm flatiron (another helpful hint culled from the writers’ magazines). When the pages became really tattered I retyped them.

Eventually, Brush sold a bit of comical verse to American Golfer for $5.00. By the end of 1923, she’d made a total of $84.75–most of that thanks to her first story sale, for $50, to Yippy Yarns. In 1924, she suddenly hit her stride, selling a story titled “Pity Pat” (“Oops, sorry!” she writes) to College Humor. Over the next few years, she wrote over forty stories and two novels for College Humor, perfecting the worldly, wise-cracking comical sense that matched the spirit of “Raccoon coats, flapping galoshes, hip flasks, jazz, bobbed hair, petting and necking, flivvers, Flaming Youth, and Mr. Scott Fitzgerald.”

Her first novel, Glitter, written in installments for College Humor, was published in 1925, and Brush was launched into the world of book publicity:

And I learned about reviewers, clipping bureaus, copy-readers, Book Fairs, mistake-finders, and the sweetly well-intentioned people who seek to make an author’s heart rejoice by telling him that they have lent their copy of his book to nineteen friends, just think of it…. The author does just think of it. He broods, to put it bluntly. He says to himself, “Nineteen potential buyers gone to glory, well, that’s fine, that is.”

On the bright side, thanks to an industrious agent, Brush manages to sell Glitter eleven different ways:

American serial, book and movie–that made three. English magazine serial and English book–that brought it to five. Translations into German, Italian and Danish–eight. Newspaper reserialization in America–nine. The book was then reissued in a seventy-five cent (reprint) edition; this was a separate transaction, making ten. And more than a decade after the sale of the silent motion picture rightsm the talking picture rights (which hadn’t been provided for in the original contract because of course they hadn’t been dreamed of at that time) were sold. That was only last year, and it was divine, in a small way. Pennies from Heaven.

Katharine Brush, 1940At the same time as she starting placing stories, Brush also started getting more substantial newspaper reporting jobs, thanks in part to her husband and father-in-law’s connections. Most importantly, though she didn’t think so at the time, was a string of sports reporting assignments, which included the 1925 World Series, college football games, and the Jack Dempsey-Gene Tunney heavyweight boxing championship fight. “I wasn’t much good on the Dempsey-Tunney fight story,” she admits, but a few years later she recycled the material to good effect as the opening to her biggest-selling novel, Young Man of Manhattan.

Stewart Brush got a job working for the New York Herald Tribune in 1926, and the couple moved to Manhattan just in time to catch the heyday of the Jazz Era. Katharine kept writing and selling, in part to keep up with the increased cost of life in the Big Apple. “I must make vast sums,” she told her mother, “and with no further delay.” Unfortunately, she found that, “Let me need money, really need it badly, and the only stories I can write will run to uncommercial themes, invariably.”

She produced a story called “Night Club.” Six editors in a row rejected it. “It’s all women.” “It has no central theme to hold the reader’s interest.” Then Harper’s accepted it in September 1927 and soon she was getting calls from other editors asking, “Wouldn’t you do us a story on the order of ‘Night Club’?” “Night Club” went on to become an anthology favorite through much of the late 1920s and 1930s–to the point that Brush complains that, “any letter I get with the name of a college or university on the upper left-hand corner of the envelope is going to be from the English professor of that college or university, who wants permission to use ‘Night Club’ in a textbook he is compiling.”

Stewart and Katharine Brush divorced in 1927. During a trip to Europe in 1928, she met Hubert “Bob” Winans, a stockbroker, and they married in 1929, a few weeks after the publication of Young Man of Manhattan. Honeymooning in Paris, they were greeted one morning with the news of Black Monday on Wall Street. Winans lost his job. For the next two years, they camped out on a couch and two chairs in the palatial apartment they had just bought before leaving for Europe. “All it needs,” quipped a friend, “is six or seven Cadillacs.”

Brush became the main bread-winner, which turned out to be a rare lucky break. Young Man of Manhattan was one of the top ten best-sellers of 1930, and her next book, Red-Headed Woman sold nearly as well and was made into a successful movie starring Jean Harlow. Brush tells a little anecdote about the writing of Red-Headed Woman:

Throughout the writing of the first half of the book, I didn’t know what the last half was going to be, and couldn’t decide. (And that’s what comes of letting short stories grow into novels, by the way.) But then one evening in a Broadway night club I heard a girl at the next table quote another girl as having said, “Just look at all these diamond bracelets–and I’ve only been in New York a year!” So there it was, in sixteen words, and that’s the way I wrote it.

Winans’ fortunes rebounded and soon the couple was able to buy a Connecticut house and regular trips back to Europe. But Brush hit a wall when it came to writing: “Now the novel I was trying to write from my restless seat in the lap of luxury was called Don’t Ever Leave Me–and it practically never did. It took me three whole years.” “Now the book progressed a little,” she writes, “and now it lay down in its tracks and wouldn’t budge, and now it crawled away somewhere and tried to die.” The book did not improve with age. Even though she did manage to finish it and get it published, Brush admits that “time and leisure and freedom from financial strain” did not prove the boons she expected them to be:

Any story becomes a habit, after its third year on the ways; it becomes a fixture there; and the wretched author has so long ago passed the point where he should have stopped fussing with it that now he simply can’t stop. He just goes on and on–and of course he thinks he’s improving it, but or course he isn’t doing anything of the sort. He’s just throwing extra monkey wrenches into what were once the works.

The experience left Brush drained. She eked out a couple of stories and took a couple of jobs writing stories for Hollywood. She started another novel and gave up after fifty pages. Finally, sitting in the Persian Room with John Farrar and Stanley Rinehart of Farrar & Rinehart and listening to Eddie Duchin playing, “Get Out of Town,” she pitched the idea for This Is On Me. It was going to be just a collection of new short stories. Farrar or Rinehart suggested she write some informal pieces to “tell the story of each story.”

When she started to write these introductions, however, bits of autobiography kept “creeping in.” Finally, the publishers gave in and what emerged was This Is On Me. Brush says she kept the “serious part” of her life out of the book, but “the rest is here.”

Early in her writing career, Brush sent some samples of her work to then-renown editor William Lyon Phelps, asking for his constructive criticism. “Dear Katharine,” he wrote back, “I have read your story and while it shows cleverness and skill I think you try to be too ‘snappy.'” It would be hard for the reader who makes it through the 400-plus pages of This Is On Me not to come to the same conclusion.

Many of the stories included in the book are very much relics of their time. One of the first in the book, “Football Girl,” was considered something of a comic masterpiece in its day. Today it’s merely stereotyped and silly. A number of others are just as bad. Brush’s other forte was the poignant glimpses of the human situation, like “Home,” about a boy returning from boarding school to divorced parents. These hold up better than the comic stories, but are not significantly better than the average magazine fiction from the time. At the time the book was published, Time’s reviewer thought the stories could just as well have been left out. After reading a few of them, today’s reader would have to agree.

Left on their own, however, the autobiographical sections would wear out their welcome, too. Brush seems so concerned with keeping up a steady stream of wisecracks and self-deprecating remarks that you want to shake her and yell, “Calm down!” at points. It’s almost disturbing at times. I kept thinking of pianist Roger Kellaway’s comment about his fellow musician, Frank Rosolino, who came to a very tragic end: “When somebody cracks four jokes a minute, we all should have known there was something wrong.” Katharine Brush was hardly suicidal, but her book would have been far more effective if she had been able to relax and not tried so hard to be “snappy.”

Still, this book is a fascinating account of how one writer made her way through two decades of professional ups and downs. Despite Brush’s sometimes strenuous comic tone, it’s the closest thing to a 20th century equivalent of Anthony Trollope’s Autobiography and a lot more fun.

Brush continued to work for over a decade after publishing This Is On Me. She published several more collections of stories, along with a collection of newspaper columns she wrote during the 1940s under the banner of “Out of My Mind.” She died in 1952 while undergoing surgery. Her son, Thomas Brush, helped establish the library that bears her name at Loomis Chaffee, a private school in Connecticut.

Locate a Copy

This Is On Me, by Katharine Brush
New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1940

The Secret, by James Drought

Cover of Avon paperback edition of 'The Secret' by James DroughtI was intrigued when I can across The Secret in the stacks of a used book store in Seattle. “At long last, something real on the American literary scene; very powerful,” Paul Pickrel of the Yale Review was quoted on the bright yellow cover. “The only trouble with The Secret is that it makes me feel inferior,” it also quoted from a review by Paul Jennings in the Observer.

Now, I’ve spent many hours scanning through shelves of used paperbacks, so it’s not too often now that I come across something truly new and unknown to me. Naturally, my eyes pricked up at this sight and I bought the book. When I sat down to read it for the first time, however, I quickly grew tired of it and set it aside. That bold banana yellow jacket kept catching my eye, though, and finally this week I sat down and dedicated myself to a discovery of Mr. Drought’s genius.

It was dedication alone that stayed my hand the dozen or more times in the last few days that I felt like hurling this book across the room. This is not a novel. Mr. Drought himself referred it The Secret as an “oratorio.” “Screed” is probably a more accurate term.

If Mr. Drought possessed any genius in this book, it’s of the ilk of that of Dr. Gene Scott or Joe Pyne or the guys I used to run into on the 1AM bus home from downtown after working swings. Here, for example, is Drought’s take on youth’s first realization that success is not all it’s cracked up to be:

For the young, it is like seeing a lovely lady, refined by a fine family, slip out one night in all her silk finery and walk into a woods erect and noble, where suddenly she crouches, rips a bird to pieces and eats it raw, shits in a hole and then kills another refined lady whom she meets at an appointed spot.

It’s that second killing I don’t get. OK, illusion of civilization revealed in its primal barbarity. I get that. But then killing a fellow refinee with whom she’s made a rendezvous? Survey a thousand kids a year out of high school and none of them will come up with that image.

The Secret loosely follows the lines of James Drought’s own life: raised on the outskirts of Chicago, a bit of a loner and rebel. An unsuccessful time in college, then a stint in the Army around the time of the Korean War as a paratrooper. Somewhere in between he meets and marries a beautiful, wonderful woman, and they raise a boy and a girl. He becomes a writer and eventually produces this book, which is intended to reveal to all American youth the secret that the world is out to kill you:

You have to conclude that your country has run amuck, that the people responsible are insane, that you can not trust your leaders, your President, your general, your parents, your friends, your neighbors, you co-workers, your police, your town, your state, your country, anymore because it is liable to turn upon you for no reason at all, except that for its own security it needs a scapegoat, any scapegoat including you, and there is no appeal possible.

The problem, you see, is that virtually everyone Drought’s nameless narrator meets is a shell, a stereotype, a craven one-dimensional drone:

Money was the king in those days; it was the goal for which people used up their lives, it was the prize by which they judged their accomplishments, the energy that made their institutions grown, it was the rationale, the reality, the ring of truth, the religion, it was the one single thing that everyone wanted, respected, cherished, needed, it was the spark, the spirit, the soul of an entire age in America and there was nothing else, no dream that could match it….

It goes on from there, but I’ll spare you the trouble.

Perhaps one of the reasons I found this relentless hammering away at the Great American Myths particularly tiresome was that Drought chose to make his narrator the most insufferably superior being to inhabit a book without the slightest redeeming scrap of humor. Early on, we learn that he and only he is the master marksman and hunter among his fellows:

I found most difficult the very idea I had to accept that my friends could not do these things well, and although I made many excuses for them, soon I had to cease blaming fate and put the blame on their clumsiness, and afterward I could do nothing but smile with boredom as they discussed their theories on how to fish, snare and trap, urging me to try some so they could see if any worked. I shot squirrels out of trees, and I had to admit I was a better shot, either because of a gifted eye, a steadier hand, a determination, or what, but more did fall to the ground, brother, when I shot than fell when my friends fired away hitting limbs, leaves and ticking distant houses, swearing that something was wrong with their goddamn sights, their sleeve caught, something was in their eyes, the gun was bent, etc. so I couldn’t ignore their clumsiness and my skill for long.

Which just goes to prove once more that the one downside to being better than everyone else is that it’s so tiresome having to put up with everyone else’s inferiority. The narrator goes on to tell us that there, along the deserted creeks outside Chicago, he caught or killed “catfish, possum, coon, trout,” “dove, pigeon, a buck, and once on a weekend a deer with arrows, and another time a bear with three arrows.” I can remember guys in junior high school telling whoppers like that. It was always those little details they’d chosen so carefully to impart that final pinch of verisimilitude that tipped you off that it was all a bunch of B.S.. “On a weekend.” “With arrows.” Yeah, right.

Ironically, The Secret proved to be a little American success story in itself, despite its message. Drought first published the book himself and sold it, along with several of his earlier novels, out of the back of his trunk. Eventually, Avon Books offered him a contract and released The Secret, as well as his earlier novels Mover, ii: A Duo, and The Gypsy Moths in paperback. The Gypsy Moths brought him greater fame, if still not much, due to the 1969 film version starring middle-aged Burt Lancaster as the hero and very young Gene Hackman as a sidekick.

Whatever else success did to Drought, it seems to have stilled his pen for a good ten years or more. Only in the late 1970s did he emerge into print again, with something called Superstar for president: An American satire–and on his own nickel once again. According to one biographical account, Drought was nominated by some European critics for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973. Now, according to the Nobel website, nominators can be any of:

  1. Members of the Swedish Academy and of other academies, institutions and societies which are similar to it in construction and purpose;
  2. Professors of literature and of linguistics at universities and university colleges;
  3. Previous Nobel Prize Laureates in Literature;
  4. Presidents of those societies of authors that are representative of the literary production in their respective countries.

My bet is on those wacky Académie française guys.

Should you care to sample Drought’s work despite the cruel drubbing I just gave it, you can find several of his works online and free to download, thank to the efforts of his children, who established drought.com a few years ago. You will find the texts of The Gypsy Moths (1955), Memories of a Humble Man (1957), Mover: a Modern Tragedy (1959), and, not least, The Secret (1962).

The Secret, by James Drought
Westport, Connecticut: Skylight Press, 1962
New York: Avon Books, 1963

People in Cages, by Helen Ashton

Cover of first U. S. edition of 'People in Cages' by Helen Ashton
Its cover (at least of the U. S. edition) may be the best thing about Helen Ashton’s 1937 novel, People in Cages. Ashton, a fine writer who can well be included with other “middlebrows” featured on Lesley Hall’s site, must have approached People in Cages as a set-piece, as its design is as intricate as the mechanisms of a watch.

The novel takes place within the space of a few hours on a hot July afternoon in London. Fate, family outings, and pure coincidence bring together a cast of characters within the confines of the London Zoo. Each person is linked to at least of few of the others, to the point that one almost needs a link analysis tool to keep track of them all. To give you a taste of this world where no one seems more than one degree of separation from anyone else, there are:

• John Canning

A former Army officer now wanted for some kind of business fraud and the brother of

• Mary Canning

Secretary to Dr. James Grayson, today accompanying

• Laura Grayson

Wife of Dr. Grayson, John Canning’s lover, and sister to

• Bunty MacIlroy

Socialite and gad-about engaged to

• Dennis Elliott

Arctic explorer and son of

• Colonel Elliott

John Canning’s former army commander and husband of

• Mrs. Elliott

who is being treated by Dr. Grayson for breast cancer.

Once Ashton herds her cast into the zoo, we trail along with one, then another, as they weave in and out of the exhibits, meeting or not meeting, sighting or being oblivious of each other. The narrative tension gradually builds as the police, unknown to Canning, gather and close upon him. And, at regular intervals, Ashton notes the parallels between the circumstances of the people at the zoo and the animals they are watching:

Through this rabble of vulgar and domestic pleasure-seekers the fugitive made his way, looking about him with his bold and shifty stare, thinking them all plain, shabby, harassed and undersized, resenting it when they pushed against him like wandering cattle, not looking where they were going; it seemed to him suddenly intolerable that he should be driven out of the comfortable world that he knew by the prejudice and stupidity of the herd about him….

“… I’ve turned her into a dried-up discontented creature, hungry and barren….”

“Laura is like a young golden lioness in a cage, vain, spoilt, nervous, afraid of her natural duties–and I’m like an old lioness, shut up behind bars, away from my kind, without a chance to breed, because the world is overstocked with us and the menagerie can’t afford another litter.”

… There was something wild and sullen about all these nocturnal creatures, thought the young policeman complacently; the cages were like a row of prison cells and the animals were like sentenced thieves and criminals….

“I don’t think we’ve any right to stand and laugh at them, just because they’re shut up and because they behave like human beings. We’re all in cages ourselves and some of our own performances must be very amusing to God.”

Unfortunately, Ashton’s theme of man as wild, trapped beast is undermined by the mechanical precision of her approach. She weaves her characters’ paths and thoughts together so intricately that the contrast between theme and structure is too stark and the reader soon starts spotting all the joints and hinges. In this zoo, no one idly glances at a stranger. If a policeman notices the “savage and startled gleam” in the eyes of a well-dressed man in front of the dingo cage, it has to be John Canning, of course. If another remarks upon a woman’s “brown and white leaf-patterned gown,” they will turn out to be former sisters-in-law. It’s all so airtight that it’s amazing any life manages to leak through.

Ashton would have been better served by chucking the choreography and letting her characters take the lead. As a creator of interior monologues, she skillfully manages to be true to class, gender, age, and circumstance, and to hop her way through nearly two dozen minds without missing a step. It may be that Ashton felt her readers needed to be guided through this web of interior monologues by a particularly obvious structure. Ashton’s novels were consistent best-sellers, and the expectations of readers for no surprises (“More, but just like the last one”) is a curse of best-selling writers.

In any case, despite my misgivings about People in Cages, I intend to give Ashton’s best-known novel, Doctor Serocold, a try. The admirable Persephone Books has also reissued Ashton’s 1932 novel, Bricks and Mortar.

People in Cages earned Ashton and her publisher a libel charge, by the way. E. M. Forster discussed the case on one of his BBC radio broadcasts, and it’s worth quoting here to illustrate (a) how ridiculously broad the English libel law of the time were and (b) how thin-skinned some people can be:

I’m glad to say that this year a libel action was brought that failed. It was over a novel called People in Cages. There was a villian in the novel and he got arrested in the zoo, and the authoress, Miss Helen Ashton made great efforts not to give the villain the name of any living person. But unfortunately she did not succeed. There did happen to be a very respectable gentleman who bore the same name. This gentleman had some friends of a humorous turn and they used to ring him up at all hours of the night, and make noises of animals at him down the telephone to remind him of his arrest in the zoo–quacking and growling and so on. He got cross; and he brought an action against the publishers, Messrs. Collins, for defamation of character. Well he lost, and I hope that this will be an earnest of saner decisions to come.

Find a Copy

People in Cages, by Helen Ashton
London: Collins, 1937
New York: Macmillan, 1937

What Makes a Book “Neglected”?

D. G. Myers, associate professor of English and religious studies, just posted a fine and admiring review of John Fante’s novel, Full of Life on his always interesting A Commonplace Blog. In passing along a link to the post, he remarked, “I don’t know whether a book is ‘neglected’ if it is still in print, but this is not usually said to be even his best novel (although it is).”

A few years after setting up this site may be a bit late to get around to defining its fundamental concept, but I thought I would take a moment to disclose the personal preferences that guide my selection of books to feature.

With an occasional exception, I focus on books that are out of print–and out of print for ten years or more. There are a number of fine publishers–Persephone Books, Pushkin Press, Crippen & Landru, and, of course, New York Review Books, to name just a few–that are doing a service to past, present, and future by discovering and reissuing a wide variety of books that have been out of print or just out of the mainstream for years or decades. And I do them all a disservice in not announcing their each and every release and regularly selecting a few for in-depth discussion.

But one of the privileges that comes with doing the work to create the content for this site and pay the bill for hosting it is the right to chose what I do and don’t cover. This is one of my hobbies. I wish it was profitable enough or my needs simple enough that it could be a vocation, but for the foreseeable future, I will have a day job to hold down, kids to raise, and no shortage of other time commitments. So I have to trust that these presses will succeed in getting the publicity, shelf-space, and display table exposure to keep the business of publishing neglected books profitable. And so I will devote my time to the ones they miss.

The fact that a book has been out of print for at least ten years is a pretty reliable indicator that very few people are asking for it at their local bookshop or online store. While it’s easier to locate a used book today than it ever has been in the history of printed books, it still remains, as anyone who’s tried to run a used bookstore can tell you, that far, far, far fewer people make the effort to do it. Most books that are now out of print will never be reissued.

And most of them don’t deserve to be reissued. Set aside all the out-dated reference books, manuals for obsolete machinery and processes, superseded textbooks and other examples of the many types of short-term utilitarian content that gets published between covers, and there still remain thousands of uninspired, unimaginative, unoriginal, and otherwise uninteresting books that barely justified publication in the first place. They may be pot shards for some archaeologist, but they’re no more worth reading than pot shards are worth carrying water in.

But the law of large numbers suggests that the vagaries of publication, book review assignments, display table selection, and publisher’s publicity mechanisms will result in relatively stable number of good books not getting properly noticed and evaluated each year. And just getting good reviews or even good sales is not enough to keep a book from quickly fading away into obscurity. Jetta Carleton’s The Moonflower Vine got fine reviews and made it into the New York Times’ best seller list and yet disappeared utterly from any critical discussion for over thirty years–until Jane Smiley covered it in her Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. Even then, it’s taken another five years for a publisher (Harper Perennial) to reissue it.

So it’s a sure bet that there are books out there that didn’t get their lucky break. Books like The Moonflower Vine. Books like Winds of Morning that got good reviews and sold OK, if not great, and disappeared. Books like Michael Frayn’s Constructions that got good reviews, never had a chance of selling more than a few copies, and disappeared. And books like W. V. Tilsley’s Other Ranks that got one paragraph in one paper, sold a handful of copies, and barely appeared in the first place, let alone ever attracted notice again.

They deserve better. And so that’s the coalface I’ve chosen to work at. I guess I’m like the kid in Ronald Reagan’s favorite joke:

Worried that their son was too optimistic, the parents of a little boy took him to a psychiatrist. Trying to dampen the boy’s spirits, the psychiatrist showed him into a room piled high with nothing but horse manure. Yet instead of displaying distaste, the little boy clambered to the top of the pile, dropped to all fours, and began digging. “What do you think you’re doing?” the psychiatrist asked. “With all this manure,” the little boy replied, beaming, “there must be a pony in here somewhere.”

With all those out of print books, there must be some ponies in there somewhere. My mission is to find a few.