I Want is a lovely collaboration between the Liverpool poet Adrian Henri and the novelist/playwright Nell Dunn about the forty-some year affair. Upper-class Dolly Argyll and Albert Hodgkin, a Merseyside lad taking a first step up the social ladder by attending a red-brick university, meet through friends, or friends of friends, in the 1930s. She is attracted by Albert’s raw “authenticity” and he by her passion and perfection, and soon they have their first tryst in the shade of the great forest on her family’s estate — a tryst whose secrecy and subterfuge comes to symbolize their relationship.
We know from the outset that their paths will soon diverge. The story is told through a series of letters, Albert’s written by Henri and Dolly’s by Dunn, and in the first Albert complains about being frustrated and exhausted from taking care of his second wife, who is now bedridden. Dolly is living comfortably in what we can guess is a quaint but well-furnished country cottage.
They have kept up a correspondence over the years, though Albert has had to hide Dolly’s letters from both wives. And, we learn, they have met from time to time, usually in some modest seaside hotel outside Liverpool, for an afternoon. For Albert, these are escapes. Having taken his degree, he ended his climb up the ladder one rung up by joining the engineering staff at the same factory where his father worked, a post he remains in for the next thirty-five years. Although happily married to his first wife, Albert knows his occasional rendezvous with Dolly are his only chance to leave the life he has signed onto.
Dolly’s motivations for continuing their relationship aren’t as clear. She doesn’t see Albert as her one great love. But it’s clear that she’s also not comfortable with surrendering completely to a way of life that’s so thoroughly bound up with appearances, customs, and property. As their correspondence develops, Albert becomes less lover and more confidante.
Henri and Dunn do a marvelous job of portraying a lifelong, if melancholy, relationship. But there is more going on her. For while Albert and Dolly do more than “stay in touch” through the years, there are suggestions that theirs is a relationship built on illusions. Dolly sends Albert and his first wife an expensive basket of good from Fortnum and Mason, not realizing that it raises questions he will struggle to answer or that they have little interest in champagne and pâté. He wonders if he hasn’t simply used Dolly as an outlet for sympathy and sex. They meet for the last time at the funeral for Albert’s second wife, Joan. Surrounded by family and friends, Albert can barely acknowledge the strange woman among the mourners.
Adrian Henri and Nell Dunn around the time they wrote I Want.
One wonders if Albert and Dolly were alter egos for Henri and Dunn. Henri was stubbornly and proudly bound to his Liverpool working class roots, while Dunn, daughter of a baronet, granddaughter of an earl, has been strongly associated with working class situations and characters, despite her upbringing. In their collaboration, they managed in barely 100 pages to create a picture of a relationship with enough shades and suggestions to fill a much longer novel.
I Want, by Adrian Henri and Nell Dunn London: Jonathan Cape, 1972.
I stumbled across a brief item about this book some months ago that so intrigued me that I tracked down and read it, despite the fact that it’s in French and my reading ability in French is passable at best. Silhouettes crépusculaires is a memoir of a remarkable journey that Carola Ernst undertook in the fall of 1914. Working as a volunteer in a Belgian hospital in Charleroi whose wards were filled with wounded French, Belgian, and English soldiers, she came to know André Sinclair, a French artillery captain blinded in combat. She was able to convince the city’s German garrison commander that Sinclair’s condition effectively made him a noncombatant and therefore that he ought to be exempt from being treated as a prisoner of war. Even more astonishing, she got him to agree to issue an order directing other German units to allow Ernst and Sinclair to make their way back to France so that he could rejoin his family.
The journey recounted in Silhouettes crépusculaires took place at an exceptional moment, as the two sides were just beginning to dig themselves — literally as well as psychologically — into the 500-mile line of trenches that came to be the Western Front for the next four years. Having raced through Belgium, pushing the Allies nearly to the gates of Paris, the German Army was still organizing itself to serve as an occupying power. Policies and procedures were still being put in place, and Ernst benefited from the fact that no one had yet declared that what she was proposing was prohibited.
Within a few months, perhaps weeks, the restrictions would be set in place to make movement of just about any sort by Belgian civilians, let alone enemy soldiers, fit or not, just about impossible. At several points along their way, in fact, the German officer in charge of the garrison controlling a town they had to pass through calls a halt to their travel out of sheer dismay that there wasn’t a rule for or against what they were doing. To avoid extending their authority too far into unknown territory, however, each commander only goes so far as to sign an order allowing them to go on to the next garrison down the road. Even without official restrictions, however, their journey wasn’t easy. There were almost no automobiles that hadn’t been confiscated for military use, let alone fuel. Several legs of their route through Belgium involve riding for hours in the back of a horse-drawn wagon.
Once they arrived in Germany, the situation changed dramatically. Although Germany was by then effectively under military government, the attitudes of the military authorities responsible hadn’t had time to set in their prejudices. As Ernst, who was fluent in German, and Sinclair, who spoke none, made their way from Aachen to Cologne and then down along the Rhine to the border with Switzerland, the German officers they encountered were mostly amused by the novelty of the pair’s venture and treated Sinclair with full military courtesies.
And they were still willing to look the other way rather than attempt to seek direction on how to deal with a situation no one had yet anticipated [the translations are mine]:
“I am only saying that a French officer in Germany now is a prisoner of war, and that there is no exception to the rule.” “Here is one though.” “Get to the point: what do you want?” “That you allow us to leave Cologne tomorrow, without going through the police.” “I allow nothing at all, nothing at all. Allow! But, see! … Is he in uniform, your Frenchman?” “No, in civilian clothes. There were German officers who advised us to cover the uniform so as not to not attract attention.” “Has your case been submitted to the Kommandantur in Aachen?” “Yes; and here is a note addressed to the Commandant of Fribourg, to facilitate our proceedings at the Swiss frontier. If you want to see it?” “It’s useless.” “So you give me your permission?” “Well! … Let’s say I haven’t seen you. Otherwise, I should arrest you.” A pause. “No, it’s good,” he declared gruffly. “We shall say that I am unaware of your presence here. Now, take advantage of it!”
They make their way from Cologne to a German town across the Rhine from Basel in the course of a single day. There, a garrison sergeant sets them up in a hotel room while he arranges for a car to take them into Switzerland. The hotel’s chef exclaims in dismay when he encounters Sinclair: “‘Good Lord!’ he shouted, raising his arms excitedly. ‘What happened! You are not going to tell me that it was the war that did this!’ and he pointed to the blindfold.” The reality of the war’s cost in dead and wounded had not set in.
Their passage through Switzerland goes even more quickly, despite the delay from the desire of the Swiss Army regiment in Basel to take in the spectacle of an actual casualty of the war they would take no part in.
“Captain,” said one of the officers who had received us on arrival, as he entered, “our colonel will be happy to greet you; he’s downstairs, by the car; when you allow it, I will lead you to him.” “Whenever you want, sir.” There was a coming and going of uniforms and a clanking of weapons: our departure set everyone in motion. On both sides of the staircase, the people had massed. Everyone was trying to see; they jostled each other, stretched their necks to see us.
Within another day, Ernst and Sinclair have made their way to Normandy, where Sinclair is reunited with his family.
Then the most difficult part of the journey begins. As a Belgian with parents in Brussels, Ernst does not want to linger in France. Retracing her steps, however, is not an option: she has no letters of passage, no reason why any German authority would allow her to even set foot across the border again. She is forced to take a circuitous route, from France to England and then, via the Netherlands, back to Belgium. Now there is no longer novelty or the bewilderment of bureaucrats to provide comic relief. She is merely a civilian attempting to do something for which almost all enabling mechanisms have been dismantled. Over the course of several weeks, she manages to get back to the hospital in Charleroi, but it is a journey marked by frequent unexpected stops and endless hours of waiting for transportation whose existence is often only speculative.
If there is one predominant mood to Silhouettes crépusculaires, it is one that has become all too rare in today’s world: courtesy. Ernst wrote the book soon after her return to Belgium in 1915, but she chose not to publish it until 1921, when, as she writes in her introduction, it had become a “sketch of an autumn twilight, of an end of civilization”: “It evokes the smile of the isolated individual, of the simply good man who holds out his hand to the passing stranger, without ostentation, without pay.” Ernst offers to take Captain Sinclair back to his family as a simple act of one human helping another. No matter how pleasantly or unpleasantly disconcerted are the various officials of different nations she encountered, Ernst was treated with respect and deferment. It was a mood that would not survive the war.
Silhouettes crépusculaires, by Carola Ernst Brussels: Maurice Lamertin, 1921
By March 1917 Britain had her back against the wall in a way she had never dreamed, nor expected even at the outbreak of War in August 1914. Then, people said it would all be over by Christmas, with the Germans bloodied and suing for peace. By the spring of 1917, for the first time since 1066 the “sceptred Isle” with its great Empire, unequalled industrial muscle and naval strength was facing an existential threat. Tens of thousands of young men had already been killed in France and Belgium, thousands more returned mutilated, shell-shocked and disfigured by new industrial and chemical warfare. On the Home Front, Zeppelin air raids across east and southeast England were showering death from the skies upon women and children. After the first attack, over Great Yarmouth on 19 January 1915, people living under the flight path of those vast, silent whales “flying high with fins of silky grey”, as the writer Katherine Mansfield described, felt exposed as never before. Street lamps were dimmed, blackout curtains were put up and people shrank as shadows passed overhead. While rationing would not be brought in until 1918, already sugar and meat supplies were under Government control to feed the Army first. People were foraging for gulls’ eggs, songbirds and fern bracken roots as alternative food sources. Restaurants stopped providing sugar shakers: a small thing but hugely symbolic of the new bewildering reality. Nearly three years in, and there seemed no way out.
Poets had at first welcomed the war, revelling in this opportunity for glorious self-sacrifice in England’s cause as in Rupert Brooke’s 1914 sonnets. Ironically, Brooke was one of the first to die, making a small corner of the Greek island of Skyros “forever England”. His fellow ‘War Poets’ quickly changed their tone seeing it as their role to tell people the truth about the horrors of the trenches, since the Press was not doing its job. Robert Graves’ ‘A Dead Boche’ (1916) showing the stinking, scowling, green-hued unburied German corpse in horrible close-up provided sobering correction to the Daily Mail’s upbeat accounts of biffing ‘The Hun’.
Novelists too tried to make sense of the new reality but paper shortages and the novelist’s need for reflection meant that few British ‘War’ novels were actually published before the Armistice in 1918. H. G. Wells’ Mr Britling Sees it Through (1916) portrays the confusion of the civilian population who on the one hand read in newspapers that the Germans “had been mown down in heaps” but that in the same papers, these same defeated Germans were advancing on Paris. Mr Britling and his doomed son Hugh spend a desperate Sunday afternoon examining maps of France trying, yet failing to work out the confusing and contradictory information. Similarly, the Home Front civilians in Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and Others (1916) can barely tell the difference between truth and lies, sharing fake news about Russian soldiers landing in Scotland with snow on their boots, along with real news of babies being killed in Zeppelin raids. Readers would have to wait for Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1929), or Storm Jameson’s Company Parade (1934) for more fully worked out meditations on how we had got into this mess and what the War was doing to the national psyche. Yet there is one neglected novel, published in March 1917 at the War’s darkest hour, that is well worth reading for the light it sheds on English social and political life on the eve of War and during its first two years.
Stephen McKenna, from Authors of the Day by Grant Overton (1924).
At its heart, Stephen McKenna’s Sonia: Between Two Worlds is a devastating critique of a spoiled, complacent and too-wealthy ruling class that partied through “the years of carnival”, as he calls them, before August 1914. Too busy drinking champagne, making money and gossiping about the latest unfortunate debutante who had failed to catch a man in her first season, these representatives of the governing class pay heavily for their complacency. But so do hundreds of thousands of young men who had no say in political decision-making, with many working-class men, as well as all women, still unable to vote. About halfway through the novel George Oakleigh, Liberal MP and the novel’s narrator, looks back to those years of plenty (for the ruling classes at least): “I look back to find an infinite littleness in the artificial round we trod during my idle early days in London,” he writes. The world was “clattering into ruins” but just months before the cataclysm, he and his peers, even those with seats in the Lords or Commons, were too busy writing their names on pretty girls’ dance cards to notice.
The novel follows the lives of a group of young men from their schooldays at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign through to the mid-point of the First World War. They are products of Melton, a fictional public school, the finest in the land, that produces future MPs and prime ministers, generals, Whitehall mandarins and captains of industry. Melton is Westminster School, McKenna’s own alma mater, transported to somewhere in Wessex, that quasi-mythical old English Kingdom, once ruled by Alfred the Great. Centuries of English history and legend weigh heavily on the weathered old stone. At Melton the boys learn discipline, loyalty, Greek and Latin but also the cruel system that permits older boys to enslave and beat younger ones who step out of line. They learn that, as the apex of the English social class system, they are inheritors of the Earth. Into this centuries-old world of cloisters and courtyards, well-stocked libraries and finely clipped cricket pitches steps David O’Rane, a youth endowed with epic gifts of intellect, physical strength and rebelliousness. He can recite, perfectly, 30,000 lines of Greek poetry and take on 10 older boys in a fist fight. The Irish surname is no accident. He’s also gorgeous, with large dark eyes, chiselled cheek bones and dark flowing Byronic locks. The other boys would all fall a little bit in love with him, although would never admit to such weakness: the closest they get is to describe him as looking “like a girl”. Receiving regular beatings for refusing to support the school football team, O’Rane forces the other boys to reflect on whether their system is in fact, fit for purpose at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Daily Mail review of Sonia from 7 March 1917.
They don’t reflect for long however, so keen are they to get to Oxford and spend the next four years punting, drinking and deciding whether they’ll go to the Bar or not before they become MPs or take up their hereditary seats in the House of Lords. McKenna, who also attended Oxford and whose uncle was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, was well placed to observe the ruling elite in its process of formation. There is also a great love story that runs through the novel and the roller coaster passion between Sonia Dainton and David O’Rane caught the nation’s imagination so much that in the autumn of 1917, there was, according to the Manchester Guardian something known as “Sonia Fever”, a “pleasant malady” that made McKenna briefly famous. The book inspired the film director Denison Clift to make a silent movie version starring Evelyn Brent as Sonia in 1921 although it has since been lost.
Sonia is not great literature: the characters are two-dimensional and O’Rane is simply unbelievable in his all-round perfection. There is an affecting moment towards the end of the novel though, that captures the horror of the time. O’Rane, once invincible, returns from the trenches a broken man, his blindness a metaphor for his generation’s lack of foresight. A door slams shut by an unfelt gust of wind: there is no clear way out; incoherent rustlings and mutterings could be the ghosts of all those lost young. It is this rare literary focus on the war in the midst of the cataclysm that makes Sonia both unusual and powerful. The Manchester Guardian reviewer at the time made the point that Sonia was perhaps a “rather irritating reminder of mistakes and futility” when everyone was getting on with the job of survival. But this is precisely Sonia’s great strength: it is as a critique of contemporary British society a full decade before the great postwar novels like Parade’s End ventured to tackle the subject. As well as the feckless aristocracy, McKenna blames the new mass media for leading the public to believe false stories of German atrocities and for encouraging hatred, rather than understanding of, the enemy. Written with passion at the point of maximum danger, it thoroughly deserves another outing.
Sonia Between Two Worlds, by Stephen McKenna London: Methuen; New York: George H. Doran, 1917
Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, popular German-language authors were experiencing a resurgence: Gunter Grass, Heinrich Boll, Hans Fallada, Wolfgang Koeppen, Ernst Junger — even the old stager Erich Maria Remarque — were all active and writing books which are still remembered and probably still read now.
But one author outsold them all during this time. Hans Helmut Kirst had his books regularly in the German best-seller lists, with sales of his forty-eight titles usually hitting around half a million copies each in the domestic market and with over twelve million copies in total worldwide. Yet today Kirst is largely forgotten.
Kirst’s output of fiction was prodigious but he was driven. He was also scriptwriter for eight films produced for the German market (six of which were from his own books); a documentary film-maker; and, on at least one occasion, an actor in a tv series. One of his books was made into a (not very good) big-budget film: The Night of the Generals starred Peter O’Toole, fresh from his success in Lawrence of Arabia. (The script had many notable contributors, including Gore Vidal, Paul Dehn and Joseph Kessel; O’Toole was apparently reluctant to take the part but felt an obligation to the producer Sam Spiegel, because of Lawrence).
Hans Helmut Kirst’s Gunner Asch novels in UK Fontana paperback editions.
Despite all this work, if he is remembered at all, Kirst‘s name is usually linked with his creation, Gunner Asch. In a series of four books, the adventures of the titular hero picked up on the literary exploration of the absurdity of military life that has accompanied conflict, from Alphonse de Vigny in the Bourbon restoration through good soldier Schweik’s adventures in the Great War to Hawkeye and Trapper in M*A*S*H.
His books (twenty-four of which were translated into English) fall into four broad categories. First, there are the humorously cynical army novels (like the 08/15 series about the misadventures of Gunner Asch), written from 1955 onwards. Then the historical thrillers, usually based in a military context (Night of the Generals, which appeared in 1963; Officer Factory, also 1963; The 20th of July, 1966; Night of the Long Knives, 1976) which are more serious explorations of the brutalising effects of military life. Then come the later novels, set in contemporary Germany and often crime-based in some way to reveal the seamy side of the post-war German ‘economic miracle’ (Undercover Man, 1970; A Time for Scandal, 1973; A Time for Truth, 1974; A Time for Payment, 1976). Finally, the outliers: the apocalyptic No One Will Escape, 1959 — like Shute’s On the Beach but grimmer; and The Fox of Maulen (published in the U.S. as The Wolves), 1968 – a bit like Fallada’s Alone in Berlin but a little less bleak.
This last title is undeservedly forgotten not least because it can stand as an archetype for Kirst’s “anti-war” books. It also has a timelessness as a fable of the corrupting effects of power.
The story revolves around what happens in the (fictitious) village of Maulen in the (real) region of Pomerania between 1932 and 1945. It follows the rise, fall and collapse of the local Nazi party seen through the eyes of one man, Alfons Materna, who is a shrewd, self-reliant and independent local farmer.
The plot is simple, although there are numerous characters. Written in four parts, the story follows the path of Materna’s political awakening. The first two parts deal with his transition from disinterested hostility to active opposition to the bumptious and malign leaders of the local Nazi party. Then through the third section, the period of the Nazi’s grip on the village, Materna has to wriggle ethically to survive. In the final section, the collapse of the village’s existence is traced as Russian tanks roll across the Pomeranian farmlands.
Materna is intrinsically hostile – but initially passively so – to the discipline that the local Nazis want to impose on the villagers and merely wants to get on with his life without interference – and (initially) without interfering in the lives of anyone else. Since the death of his wife, Materna has been used to being left alone to live his life, unmoved by the swirls of political argument, local or national.
His passivity disappears when his younger son is killed in a bungled weapons practice run by the local SA. Seeking some adventure as an alternative to their dull rural existence, both of Materna’s sons had joined the local party for the opportunities it offered for supposed comradeship, possible whoring, and certain excessive drinking. Then, when the effects of the Nazi’s racially-inspired policies begin to encroach upon the farm that Materna’s forefathers have owned for generations, his world is threatened and he feels forced to act.
Spurred by personal dislike of the strutting local Nazi leaders, Materna moves from passivity to individuals to outright opposition to the Nazi party in the village – brought about mostly by a mix of his grief, an innate contrariness to authority, and a streak of basic decency. His weapon (initially) is not sustained political argument (for he has no articulated opposition to what is going on) or even overt violence but barbed flattery, pricking the pomposity and incompetence of the local Nazi functionaries.
Later, as Materna’s contempt for the individual members of the local party grows, he increases the tempo of his campaign and progresses to using ridicule, blackmail and jealousy. Based on marital discord and prompted by unfounded rumour, he tries to wreck the relationships inside the structure of the SA. The story is told to show how Materna (always with his own interests at the forefront) brings down the ambitions of individuals with less guile, cunning or foresight. Materna is no saint. He is both greedy and generous, hard and sentimental, morally upright and debased at the same time.
At first, Materna’s low-key rebellion is purely a matter of self-interest. His farm workers – who often came from those parts of society that the Nazis wanted to eliminate – are crucially important to his business. But as they become demonised and persecuted, he begins to feel a sense of identification with the injustice, and organises a sort of underground railway foe the persecuted, which gradually comes to dominate his life. He reluctantly helps more and more people, often ones previously unknown to him, to escape to less dangerous places (in the mid-1930s even Poland seemed safer than turbulent Germany).
This underground railway becomes a business in itself and towards the middle of the book Materna has to realise that it is now longer possible to run it safely, together with the farm. And so he bargains with the local SA chief to authorize the travel of two “undesirables”: one of his trusted workers – a Jew – who will take charge of the other end of the railway; and a disabled woman he has come to love, whose life would be threatened were she to stay.
Although Materna could have left with the departing group, he chooses to stay to fulfil the economic terms of the bargain. He also explains that he wants to stay “to see what happens and have some fun,” a desire he explains is activated by both personal animosities and by a growing dislike of what is happening to his (specifically) local world.
Of course, as the book draws to a close Materna cannot escape his fate any more than can the other villagers of Maulen. Kirst’s ingenious ending is in keeping with the moral ambiguity of his characters.
But there is a deeper – and troubling — aspect to the book beyond the explication of the moral ambiguities and compromises in the story. The novel deals with moral choices, ethical dilemmas and personal deceits. A book about moral dilemmas cannot be judged without examining the moral record of the author himself. Here the evidence is not clear cut.
Kirst was born and grew up in the district of Masuren, a backwater of the then-German region of Pomerania. He joined the German Army in 1933, at the age of 19 and in the pit of the Great Depression. He became a member of the Nazi Party soon after. So, while it can be assumed that he bases the characters in his book on real-life acquaintances, it’s clear that Kirst was not describing his own experiences.
By the middle of the war, Kirst had risen from the ranks to the level of lieutenant in an anti-aircraft artillery unit. Although he never saw front-line action, he was appointed as the political instruction officer for his unit — entrusted with explaining, justifying and proselytising for Nazism and its policies.
After the war, Kirst claimed that he had confused the party of National Socialism with the country of Germany, and that he had been unaware that “one was in a club of murderers”. But can that really be so, given his record and position? Who can say from this distance whether Kirst repented and purged his guilt through writing or whether he just sublimated his experiences? Certainly, he went through a process of formal ‘de-Nazification’. Unlike others – Gunter Grass for instance — he never sought to conceal his past. But since Kirst never let a good idea have only one outing he employs the basic idea of subversion from The Fox of Maulen again in his later novel Party Games (1980), although this time with less poignancy and broader humour. The question then arises “Is the repetition evidence not of repentance but just commercial exploitation of experience?”
Kirst’s books were often criticised for subordinating the horror of events in Germany during the reign of the Nazis to a sequence of humorous incidents at a local level, which consequently glossed over the wider social and historical context. Some critics saw this as partly an act of self-exculpation. Kirst was writing — and his books were published — at a time when the problem of the recent past and the taint that had on the New Germany were matters of constant public discussion.
In one way or another, all of Kirst’s books deal with the effects on individuals as they shift from being members of a turbulent civil society prior to the rise of Hitler to followers of (or resisters against) doctrinaire Nazism and finally survivors or victims of the de-Nazification process .
Coincidentally — deliberately? ironically? – The Fox of Maulen was first published in Germany as Die Wolfe (the US edition carries the original title, The Wolves) in 1967, a year after Kurt Kiessinger became Chancellor of West Germany. Kiessinger was the first prominent former member of the Nazi party to achieve a high office in the West German government, having been a lawyer in the Kammergericht, the highest state court, for the city-state of Berlin, between 1935 and 1940, and having joined the Nazis in 1933).
Regardless of the motive, by reducing the focus to the local and personal, Kirst was able to show the impact of huge events on the individual lives of those who were “ordinary” – often resentful of the hand life had dealt them, not usually particularly active politically, not especially well-educated and not influential. He could take characters who, despite their handicaps of class or status or lack of wealth, saw opportunities to achieve their ambitions when their society developed in a different political direction. His stories thus became fables of lasting relevance, illuminating with mordant humour the havoc created by flawed characters placed by chance in positions to become agents of influence. His novels entertain and instruct (for those who are alert to the parallels). Change the names and the contexts and the basic stories in many of Kirst’s novels (and especially The Fox) can be applied to many other political events of the years of this century – never mind the events of 70 years ago. This, to me, is the mark of a novel of lasting value.
The Fox of Maulen is both the high water mark of Kirst’s writing and the high water mark of his examination of the morality of resisting or rejecting — making accommodations to survive in a world where moral choices cannot be resolved into simply black or white.
As an ex-journalist and writer of academic texts, Stephen Bloomfield is baffled why so many excellent books become neglected.
The Fox of Maulen, by Hans Helmut Kirst London: William Collins, 1968
I don’t remember how many years ago I bought this book, but it sat on the shelf long enough to have escaped my notice until I took it down to kill a few minutes while waiting for my wife to get ready to go out. One of the downsides to reading and writing about books all the time is that one loses touch of that magical experience of opening a book and commencing to read without any prior knowledge to cloud one’s judgment.
If I ever knew much about I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye, I’d forgotten it long ago. I suspect it was nothing more than the loveliness of the title that made me buy it in the first place. So I was naively putting myself in Madeleine Masson’s hands, knowing that I would be setting it down in a few minutes, perhaps not to pick it up again for a matter of years, if ever.
“It was a beautiful day in June 1940” opens the first chapter, “Paris — June 1940.” Of course, we know enough history to realize that a beautiful day in Paris in June 1940 is not going to end beautifully. Masson’s lover arrives to persuade her to leave for Switzerland with him. As a Jew, she understands the risks she faces. “They say that the Germans will be entering Paris at any moment,” her anti-Semitic landlady announces with undisguised delight. Masson chooses not to go to Switzerland but carries on packing up, prepared to join the flood of refugees leaving the city for … well, any place else.
We understand by the end of Chapter One that Masson’s title is a lie, which gives everything that follows a certain poignancy, rather like that one feels in watching the silly bourgeosie in Jean Renoir’s masterpiece La règle du jeu. And Masson herself could easily have been one of the characters in Renoir’s film. Raised in South Africa by a French father and Austrian mother, she came to Paris in 1934 with her mother, who was hoping to establish her own salon and effectively separate from her dull diamond broker husband (if not from his money).
For Masson, however, Paris is a different kind of escape — from her mother, in fact. She quickly finds herself a job as secretary to a wealthy American dowager and a room of her own in a pension, and begins to assimilate into a peculiar cross-section of Parisian society. At the high end, she meets the idle rich and idle not-so-rich (the latter often of noble descent) through her enployer and mother. At the low end, she meets people like Madame Tricon, the patronne of her pension:
She told me that she was one of the first women in Paris to have eyelashes made from the hairs of her current lover’s legs. “Imagine, ma petite,” she said, batting two black centipedes at me, “Imagine to yourself the voluptuousness of giving him Japanese kisses with his own hairs.
At one of employer’s soirees, Masson meets Baron Renaud Marie de la Minaudière, who plies her with food and drink and by the end of the evening declares himself desperately in love. She takes quick stock of his character: “lazy, amoral, deeply religious, sentimental, and selfish.” Nonetheless, when he proposes, she accepts.
Then she discovers that she is the third player in a duet. The Baron is in thrall with the Marquise de Rastignac, a fifty-ish noblewoman his mother enlisted to introduce her son into the mysteries of sex. Some twenty years later, the two are still carrying on their affair, aided in part by the fact that the Marquise is footing much of the bill for the Baron’s playboy lifestyle. Masson’s account of the Baron and the Marquise is just one of the nuggets of la vie Parisienne pluperfect that are studded throughout this book:
The Marquise’s finest hour, L’heure bleue, was her hour of triumph. From 5 to 7 p.m. was visiting time for French lovers; and in love nests all over the country, and in Paris particularly, men were taking down their trousers and heading for the Louis XVI style bed where lay la petite amie in a frilly négligée. Tearing off this garment was part of the ploy. I could never visualise the Baron’s Laure frivolling naked on what the Baron called with some respect the battlefield. For this lady, who to me resembled a Roman matron, had amisleading air of impenetrable virtue. Her clothes appeard welded to her massive frame, and her large handbags and tiny feet were as much a legend in Paris as was her vanished beauty.
Not long after Masson and the Baron are married, the Marquise pays a visit and informs the new bride that “Renaud is my life and I don’t propose giving him up.” Masson’s job is to produce an heir and interfere as little as possible in the status quo ante matrimonium.
This is also the view of the Baron’s family, who don’t bother to hide the contempt they feel towards a pretender with three strikes against her: a Jewess, a foreigner, and a commoner. They refuse to even acknowledge her existence. The shock of her rejection on all fronts causes Masson, now pregnant with the Baron’s child, to miscarry. And this, ironically, then enables Masson to get the marriage annulled through some intricate maneuvers through the Byzantine processes of the French bureaucracy and the Catholic Church.
Madeleine Masson in 1942.
For proper Parisians, there is no difference between an annulée and a divorcée. Official recognition as a wanton woman, however, frees Masson to explore less-sanctioned aspects of Parisian society. She takes a series of lovers, some who fall for her, others whom she falls for, none of them remotely suitable. Early on, she is aided and abetted by Lucy de Polnay (sister of the author Peter de Polnay, whom Neglected Books fans may recall). Lucy instructs her in the fine art of judging a lover, dismissing one for having what she called “the postman’s knock method”: “three sharp rat-a-tats, put it in the letter box, and away.”
Masson also comes to know — intimately or briefly — many of the celebrities of Paris of the 1930s: Colette, Nathalie Barney, Anaïs Nin, Suzy Solidor, Marie Laurencin. So, if you’re not satisfied with savoring Masson’s delicious tales, you can also feast upon pages rich with vintage Parisian gossip, including their “curious sexual appetites and habits.” (Masson could never share Count Serge Cheremeteff’s “passion for the whip and the rod,” for example.)
And, as we know from the start, there is the tragic goodbye to all that, as Masson tries to find a way out of France with thousands of other refugees. The streets of cities like Tours and Bourdeaux “black with people, like flies on a wound.” Just what happens to her in the end, however, is unclear. In the book, she writes that she managed to book a passage to South Africa from Marseilles. Her Wikipedia page, on the other hand, suggests that she stayed and became involved with the Resistance. After the war, however, it’s clear that she married again (a Royal Navy captain), had a son, to whom the book is dedicated, settled in England, and became a biographer and playwright. She died in 2007 at the age of 95.
I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye is as insubstantial as an éclair — and every bit as irresistible.
I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye, by Madeleine Masson London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978
One reason why the demise of the mass market paperback is a great American tragedy is that with them went the custom of listing other titles from the publisher in the back of the book. It’s not only enlightening to see what else was available at the time whatever book you happen to be looking at was published, but often a good way to learn about books that have fallen by the wayside.
Cover of Macfadden Books edition of Quarry.
I recently purchased a 1968 paperback edition of Jane White’s Quarry, which we will be reissuing in May 2023 as part of the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press. In the back, there is a list of 17 other books available from Macfadden Books. “MACFADDEN-BARTELL NOVELS OF DISTINCTION” announces the banner above the list.
This list was particularly intriguing for several reasons. First, there is the publisher itself. The Macfadden name came from the firm’s founder, Bernarr Macfadden, America’s first body builder celebrity. Born just after the Civil War, Macfadden claimed he had been wasting away from working in an office job when he restored himself to health and an impressive muscular physique through a a vegetarian diet and vigorous exercise with dumbbells. In 1899, when he was just 31, he founded the magazine Physical Culture to promote his ideas, and it was so successful that he went on to establish some of the most popular magazines of the first half of the 20th Century: Liberty; True Detective; True Romances; and Photoplay. By the late 1940s, however, Macfadden’s board forced him out and brought in a less unconventional firm, Bartell Media Corporation, to manage the publishing empire. Around the time that Macfadden died in 1955, the firm launched Macfadden Books, a cheap paperback line.
Second, it was an imprint that never seemed to have a clear identity. Although the simple “MB” logo stood for Macfadden-Bartell and the title page always announced it was a Macfadden-Bartell Book, the copyright page always states that it’s just a Macfadden Book. And the lack of focus was always evident in its catalogue. Some paperback imprints were tied to one of the major publishing houses and you could see how titles flowed from hardback to paperback in their lists. But Macfadden’s lists wandered all over the place, from the 1930s to the 1960s, from best-sellers to completely unknown books. I suspect that the chief criteria for selecting a book for the Macfadden catalog was that the paperback rights were available cheap.
Finally and rather oddly, the list omits the name of the author of ten of the seventeen titles. Further evidence that Macfadden’s authors didn’t hold the upper hand in their deals, but also further incentive to a finder of the forgotten. Who wouldn’t want to learn the identity of the author of The Satyr and the Saint?
With this in mind, let’s take a look at some of the “Novels of Distinction” in the list in the back of Quarry.
• A Circle of Sand, by Richard Karlan
Richard Karlan was a veteran Hollywood actor who appeared in over 50 films as well as television series such as The Untouchables.
Richard Karlan and Barry O’Sullivan in No Questions Asked (1951).
This was his first novel, first released the year before, about a retired bullfighter forced to return to the ring. The Fresno Bee’s reviewer wrote that Karlan “knows his tauromachy” [someone had the thesaurus out that day] and The Arizona Republic’s critic agreed that it was a solid introduction to the world of bullfighting. She added, though, that as a novel, it lacked “depth of emotion, characterization, style and polish,” which makes you wonder what was left over.
• Lost Morning, by Du Bose Heyward
Best known as the author of Porgy, the novel that George Gershwin used as the basis of his opera Porgy and Bess, Heyward was a white writer who made his name with books about black life, something he became familiar with working as the foreman of a cotton warehouse in North Carolina. Originally published in 1936, this is that story of a middle-aged Southern artist who’s sold out to commercial success but regains inspiration when he falls in love with a younger assistant, it appears to have included many of the worst cliches about artists in fiction: “Artists are different. Their heads are always in the clouds. They can’t take care of themselves like other people.” When the assistant hurls herself out the window in despair over their failed romance, however, he manages to keep his feet firmly planted to the floor.
• Lions Three: Christians Nothing, by Ann Borowik
A classic novel of the swinging Sixties, Lions Three: Christians Nothing is about the affair between a Broadway actress (married) and a professional footbacl quarterback (aging). They liaise all around Manhattan while her jealous husband resorts to ever more insane ways to: (a) catch them in the act; (b) punish them for their transgressions; and (c) win her back. Well, two out of three ain’t bad.
The New York Tims’ Charles Poore loved the book: “Ann Borowik shines brightly among the new young American novelists of the macabre and th absurd. Let others sweat to overthrow moral standards. She only wants to enjoy the revolution.” Poore wrote that Borowik “treats the standard plots of modern soap operas’ melodramas as Andy Warhol treats the standard packaging of modern soap.”
Definitely a subject for further research.
• Europe, by Robert Briffault
Europa is something of a warhorse in the world of pulp paperbacks. Since it was first published in 1935, it must have had at least a cat’s worth of lives in cheap paperback editions. The Catholic Church in Ireland banned the book and it was soundly condemned by Catholic World and similar journals when it came out, but it’s hard to see what the fuss was about.
Briffault did not lack for ambition and some critics were caught up in that spirit. Louis Kronenberger wrote in The New York Times that the book was “Here is Proust’s world spread over an entire continent.” But Briffault lacked Proust’s ability to see the world in more than just black and white. His protagonist, Julian Bern, wanders in and out of salons all over Europe, counting, weighing, and finding everyone but his perfect love Zena wanting. And if that makes him sound like an insufferable prig, you’re right.
Europa is not helped by Briffault’s style, which reads like Theodore Dreiser without the finesse. [Go read some Dreiser if you don’t get that joke.] So, why did it get reissued so many times? Well, let’s remember that there was a time when Dreiser was considered scandalous, even risque, for writing books like Sister Carrie in which unmarried young women visited married men … in their hotel rooms … alone! This is about the level to which Europa rises, but nothing makes a book more attractive than a good banning. Though it’s hard to imagine anyone getting a thrill from Europa when Macfadden published its edition in 1967, that didn’t keep the firm from cautioning readers that it was about “Sadistic Violence on the Riviera!” Sadly, the only violence was to the reader’s sense of aesthetics.
• The Satyr and the Saint, by Leonardo Bercovici
Subtitled “A Novel of the Roman Film Colony,” The Satyr and the Saint is a spoof of the world of Fellini, Antonioni, De Sica, and all the stars and denizens of Cinecitta. Bercovici learned about the Italian film scene after he was blacklisted from Hollywood in the early 1950s and moved to Europe to continue working as a screenwriter. The satyr of the title is Rudolfo Urbani, a renowned film director and rival of Casanova. Urbani hires a young Sicilian novelist whom he learns is still celibate in his late twenties — hence the saint. A satire about Italian manners and mores, it is definitely a candidate for further research.
• Gina, by George Albert Glay
Gina is an international hodge-podge. Written by an American while living in British Columbia, Gina is about a beautiful American adventuress who lands in the Philippines just before the start of World War Two to marry a Filipino landowner, then spends the war attempting to avoid imprisonment by keeping a series of lustful Japanese officer on tenterhooks. Glay may have been under the influence of Balzac’s Cousin Better, since Gina is described by one reviewer as “a heroine who not once in 400 pages has an unselfish, wholesome, human impulse.” Does she get away with it? Read it and let me know what you find out.
• The Other Girl, by Theodora Keogh
Now we’re getting to something good. A granddaughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, Theodora Keogh debuted to New York society in 1937, worked through the war as a dancer in a series of nightclub acts, then moved to Paris with her husband Tom Keogh, a costume designer. She proceeded to write nine short odd novels, of which this is the last. Keogh’s sense of love and sexuality might be summed up by Woody Allen’s phrase: “polymorphously perverse.” In her books, young women fell for very old men, women for women, men for men, and, in the case of The Mistress, an entire family falls in love with a fashion model. Some of her books have been brought back to print from time to time for their shock value, but increasingly Keogh is being recognized as a pioneer of fluid gender fiction.
The Other Girl was Keogh’s last novel, though she lived for another 46 years. In it, she offers an interpretation of the famous Black Dahlia murder case from Los Angeles in 1947, featuring a lesbian romance among would-be Hollywood starlets. The book only came out in hardback in the U.K., where it put the reviewers to the test. Julian Mitchell called it “Way ahead of the field in the competition for silliest novel”
But in the Guardian, Norman Shrapnel understood Keogh’s unique talent better: “With a selective calm that would put to shame German abnormal psychologists, Russian mystics, and minor Elizabethan playwrights, Miss Theodora Keogh turns from the subject of the incestuous passion of twins [Gemini] to the theme of homicidal lesbianism.” Shrapnel admired what he called Keogh’s “spare and fastidious manner of writing,” quoting her description of Los Angeles as “an atmosphere at once hysterical and languid.”
Whether you choose The Other Girl or one of Theodora Keogh’s other books, she work is very much worth a try.
• The Stockade, by Kenneth Lamott
Originally published in 1952, The Stockade may be the only novel of the war in the Pacific to look at how the Americans treated the Japanese as prisoners. A veteran of Tinian and Okinawa, Lamott spent fifteen years living in Tokyo as the son of an American missionary, so he came to the war, and to the experience of writing this novel, with a far different understanding that the average G. I.. In the book, a Marine lieutenant struggles to maintain order over a compound of 5,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians. He shows how poorly equipped combat soldiers are to act as prison guards, and how the dynamic between prisoner and captor leads to the same kind of brutality that American prisoners experienced at the hands of the Japanese. Lamott was the father of the poet Anne Lamott.
• Catherine & Co., by Edouard de Segonzac
A translation of a French novel, Catherine & Co. is a tale about the commerce of love (or the love of commerce). A sexy young Parisian sets up a cartel with some of her wealthy lovers. The book was later made into a 1975 French comedy by the same name starring Jane Birkin and Patrick Dewaere — which would have pleased de Segonzac, who spent most of his life working as a film executive in France and the U.S..
Option one: you publish nearly 100 novels and stories – many bestsellers – in your lifetime. You make a good living from your writing and have some impact, particularly within the burgeoning women’s equality movement, as many of your female protagonists are strong, independent and clever. Highbrow critics, suspicious of your copious output however, ignore you. A century after your death, not one of your novels is read, beyond the odd specialist scholar. The occasional mildewed cloth-bound first edition turns up in second hand bookshops and anyone who takes the chance to read your effortless prose is amazed they hadn’t heard of you. But you’re never going to be canonical, not even in this current revival period when forgotten women novelists are being exhumed more rapidly than the dead rise up in a zombie apocalypse. There are just too many of you.
Option two: you publish a handful of well-received literary novels, a couple of which, 100 years after your death are still in print, having made it onto university English studies reading lists. One, about turn-of-the-century English rural life, that critics considered your best (though you didn’t), is turned into a costume drama starring, I don’t know, Benedict Cumberbatch or Alicia Vikander. In your lifetime you’re never quite solvent and never quite satisfied, but you have a kind of immortality, even in a fleeting film credit.
Which would you choose? Or back then, being a writer on a vast production line with very little agency, could you choose at all? So many late-Victorian novels have sunk without trace, victims of what was recognised even at the time as “over-production”. But this is of course what this site is for, to find gems such as those that disappeared under what the Daily Mail described in 1903 as “the flood of fiction”. The Mail complained that of the 1600 novels published each year, barely any would survive the season and that “women are the worst offenders if over-production be an offence.” One estimate is that 99.5% of all nineteenth century novels printed, read and relished in their tens of thousands have vanished into what Franco Moretti called ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’.
Adeline Sergeant, from Notable Women Authors of the Day, by Helen C. Black (1893).
So, now we come to the case of Adeline Sergeant (1851-1904), named and shamed in the Daily Mail as one of the women culprits who wrote too many novels. She wrote 90 novels and stories in her lifetime, her output increasing with her years – publishing six a year 1901-1903 and eight in 1904. Even popular newspaper reviewers expressed fatigue at having to read yet another of her novels, one critic complaining: “Adeline Sergeant, like the poor, will always be with us.” She was so prolific that fourteen novels were published after she died, presumably of writing fatigue, in a boarding house on the south coast of England where so many English spinster novelists went to die. Her productivity meant that reviewers couldn’t keep up and only a fraction of her output received any critical notice. Many of her novels were sensational pot-boilers with romance or crime at their heart, often with a moral, heavily influenced by her religion – she moved from committed Methodist to committed Catholic through her life – and with titles like The Failure of Sibyl Fletcher and The Claim of Anthony Lockhart.
From the Daily Mail, 25 April 1901.
But even in cases like Sergeant’s, there is always the one that got away.
The Work of Oliver Byrd slipped out, unnoticed, in 1902, between The Master of Beechwood and Barbara’s Money. Very different from her other novels, it is remarkable for capturing the lives of early professional women living alone in London and negotiating social opprobrium for not accepting the chosen path laid for them of marriage and motherhood. While post-Second World War writers like Margaret Drabble and Muriel Spark are held to be the first to depict the lives of professional women, Sergeant and other forgotten women writers of the turn of the last century were doing this some fifty years earlier. The popular writer Dolf Wyllarde, for example, goes into great detail on lives in women-only boarding houses right down to the choice of wearing dark colours to disguise ink stains in her novel The Pathway of the Pioneer (1906).
Advertisement for The Work of Oliver Byrd
As Virginia Woolf acknowledged in Three Guineas, the only area of work where women were allowed to compete with men, because of its low pay and prospects, was the world of writing, the world Sergeant chose for herself. The Work of Oliver Byrd records the lives of professional women writers at the turn of the twentieth century and is to some extent, a feminist response to George Gissing’s famous critique of the writer’s life, New Grub Street (1891). Where the literary men of New Grub Street have to battle with populist taste, uncomprehending publishers and critics and lowbrow journalists, the women in Sergeant’s novel have to start by deconstructing their very selves. Women who want to be taken seriously as writers either have to marry a publisher against their better judgement or to conceal their feminity and write under a male pseudonym. The Work of Oliver Byrd follows two women who explore these routes to pursue their writing, the act of which is presented as a grand passion, a vocation that none who is called can resist, no matter the risk. And the risk, with a predatory, exploitative male editor, is great. While these women writers accept being under-paid, even plagiarised, , the worst risk is that of being found out to be a writer at all. For while women were indeed able to scratch out livings with their pen, the woman writer still attracted social opprobrium, hence the widespread use of male pseudonyms at this time. Oliver Byrd, it is no spoiler to reveal, is actually a woman called Avis Rignold, who goes to great lengths to disguise her indentity, using Post Office boxes, false addresses and avoiding in-person meetings.
There is a great detail of autobiography in the novel: while writing it Sergeant was living at the Chenies Street Ladies Chambers in Bloomsbury, a haven for single, intellectual women including the Quaker campaigner Emily Hobhouse, archaeologist Mary Brodrick and the historian Charlotte Fell-Smith. The most important room in the apartment of one of the professional women in the novel is described by Sergeant in loving detail:
It was lined on two sides with books – heavy, ponderous, learned-looking tomes, the bindings of which were darkly, yet richly coloured like leaves in autumn, lit with gleams of gold. A substantial writing-desk, with drawers and pigeon-holes innumerable, stood near the middle of the room, and before it stood a circular-backed, leather-seated armchair, which formed Eleanor’s usual seat when she had work to do.
Be still my beating heart. Perhaps, with the exception of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic poem Aurora Leigh, I haven’t read an earlier depiction of the woman writer at her desk, striving to call words down from the heavens to translate onto paper:
What should she write about tonight? What had she to say? Her head throbbed, her eyes burned: she wanted to lie down quietly and go to sleep. But the wants of the public had to be satisfied and for this she must take up her pen and weave together laboriously the light fancies, the vague dreams of her better hours…she threw on a dressing-gown, turned up the gas and sat down to write.
There is a feminist message to the novel: the women writers are presented as either serious campaigners for justice or as uniquely able to capture “knowledge of the human heart”, while the dastardly male editor only seeks to repress them or pass their work off as his own. Written at a time when few women writers – including Sergeant herself- were taken seriously, it is a passionate plea to women to be proud of their work and continue fighting the fight. I wonder if Oliver Byrd, written towards the end of Sergeant’s life is some kind of letter of regret, that she didn’t allow her talent or novels to breathe, instead chasing one after the other after the other in a phenomenal sense of urgency that prioritised quantity over literary immortality. For she certainly could write – her prose is as easy and pleasant to consume as a jar of warm honey – and her novels are bursting with sparkling and contemporarily urgent ideas on social justice, women’s equality and the plight of the poor in wealthy imperial London. Maybe, like Avis Rignold, she didn’t quite have the courage to say: “This is who I am, and no one else.”
The Work of Oliver Byrd, by Adeline Sergeant London: James Nisbet and Co. Ltd., 1902
Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.
“Have you heard of the lady who writes under the name Edith de Born — an Austrian-Hungarian-Jewess I suspect – married to a French banker called Bisch?” Evelyn Waugh asked his friend Nancy Mitford in 1953, adding “She writes in English quite beautifully.” Waugh had spent several days as a guest of the Bisches in their elegant apartments opposite the Parc Royal in Brussels. Jacques Bisch was then a director of the Belgian office Société Générale, one of the leading French banks. Waugh confided that he had mistaken Jacques Bisch for a Belgian for most of the visit and had “dropped brick after brick” in his typically less-than-circumspect comments about the French.
Waugh’s suspicions about Mme. Bisch, however, were right on the mark. He probably had no idea, though, why she had chosen to write novels in English. It was a decision that came about, more than anything, through the disruptive effects of history.
Born on her family’s estate outside Vienna in 1901, Edith Ausch Kemengi was raised in the privilege of the most prominent members of the Austo-Hungarian court. Like the narrator of her semi-autobiographical novel Felding Castle, hers was “a world so different from that of my grandchildren that it might have been several hundred years ago.” Her father came from noble families in Hungary (Kemengi, more often spelled Kemenyi) and Austria (Ausch) and was a counselor and lawyer to the royal household of Emperor Franz Joseph. Sixty years after the fact, she remembered watching her father marching in one of the annual court parades from the window of their house in Vienna. Her mother was Jewish, but from a family of sufficient wealth and distance from the Orthodox faith to be considered acceptable in court society.
After the end of World War One and the collapse of the Hapsburg dynasty, however, Count Kemengi found himself land rich and cash poor and put most of his estate up for auction. Société Générale, like other French banks, saw the opportunity to swoop up some choice real estate for almost nothing and sent a young agent, Jacques Bisch, to bid on them. He took away with him not only the title to thousands of acres of Austrian land but also the Count’s daughter. By then, Edith had begun working as a writer, publishing theater reviews and short stories in Vienna and Berlin under the name of Edith Ausch.
She put her writing career on hold for the next twenty years, however, concentrating on assimilating into Parisian society and performing the role of wife and hostess in support of her husband’s career. Jacques Bisch rose quickly in the bank. The couple spent the early 1930s in London, where they were leading members of the colony of French expats. When King George V attended the memorial service for French president Raymond Poincaré at Westminster Cathedal in 1934, the Bisches were in attendance.
Their comfortable life in Paris was discrupted when the Germans invaded in 1940. Despite Edith’s Jewish ancestry, however, they remained. Edith put her language skills in service of the Resistance, having become fluent in French and English in addition to German. She translated communiques to and from the Special Operations Executive, an experience she later said gave her confidence in handling the nuances of English prose.
Her first novel, Gaëtan, or The Stock-Taking, was published in 1950 and demonstrated her ease in navigating the ways of European society. Most of the book consists of a conversation between Irina, the Russian-born widow of Gaëtan, a Frenchman of some high social standing, and Marie, his Swiss cousin. Marie has invited Irina to her villa above Lake Geneva out of courtesy, but really to probe Irina’s intent regarding what she considers an estate belonging to Gaëtan’s family as a whole. Soon, however, the topic shifts from property to love. Marie, it turns out, was in love with her cousin and crushed by his decision to marry a Frenchwoman (Irina is his second wife).
I thought Gaëtan quite a fine short novel when I wrote about it back in 2019, but it received only mildly positive reviews. Her next novel, The Bidou Inheritance (1951), her first published in the U.S. as well as England, made a bigger splash. The story of a small town French shopkeeper and the intrigues regarding his estate won glowing praise from Harper’s chief reviewer, Katherine Gauss:
Miss de Born, an Austrian married to a Frenchman, writes in almost flawless English with quiet distinction, and there is a classic sense of tragedy in the way in which she shows, through two generations, how the child against its own will apes what it most hates in the parent. She is a most perceptive and able new novelist
The Saturday Review put the book to a severe test by assigning it to Henri Peyre, then professor of French at Yale. Peyre noted that the subject of family members keeping a protective eye on a potential inheritance had been “a favorite of French fiction since the Revolution.” His assessment of de Born’s strengths and weakenesses may be the most succinct and accurate from all the reviews her subsequent sixteen novels received:
If she cannot be called a great writer, or at least not yet, she is undoubtedly a skilful one who, with great simplicity and artistic restraint, without any of the “modern” features of philosophy, any delving into the subconscious, morbid eroticism, fiashy juggling with time and logic, has composed a wellmade, a convincing, and an honest work of fiction.
While wellmade, convincing, and honest are admirable qualities, they tend not to be those that assure a writer’s place in literary history.
De Born’s skill in writing fiction in English was often, at least in the first decade of her career, considered the most notable feature of her work. The novelist Francis King, who became a close friend of de Born, recalled his own reaction to the book:
When the author presented me with a copy of the book (The Bidou Inheritance) some twenty years ago, my first astonished thought after devouring a single page was “How beautifully this woman writes!” Why astonished? The answer to that is that Born was an Austrian, who married a Frenchman (Jacques Bisch) and lived much of her life in Belgium, but like Conrad, Nabokov and Julian Green, she miraculously wrote better in her adopted language than most people in the language to which they were born. My second, much later thought was that she dealt with the cupidity of the French bourgeoisie with all the vividness of a Francois Mauriac or a Julian Green….
King later learned that Edith relied on help from a friend in England, the wife of a Norfolk vicar, to clean up and copy-edit her prose, so that unlike Conrad and Nabokov, her English was not a solo production. However, she shared with them what King called a sense of “foreignness”:
… though it is impossible to point to any one passage and declare: ‘No one English could have written that.’ This foreignness is not a matter of vocabulary or syntax — each of these writers has a far more varied vocabulary and far firmer command of syntax than many a native-born novelist — but of rhythm. In the case of Edith de Born, this rhythm seems to be one, not of her native German, but of the French which (so I am told) she speaks with such precision and fluency.
Still, de Born’s prose was good enough to impress Waugh, whose own is considered some of the best of his time. Waugh reviewed her third novel, Daughter of the House (1953) — before staying as her guest — and found it her most mature novel so far:
Madame de Born has already attracted the admiration of the fastidious by her two previous works; brief, severly elegant, classical contes. In Daughter of the House she has spread her wings full span. It is a haunting, highly original story; an authentic work of art, classical in form and . Without once transgressing her self-imposed limits, the author produces an effect of breadth and intensity quite unusual in a modern novel, and worthy of comparison with the masters of her craft. It is a complete book, from which nothing could be taken and to which nothing could be added, without loss.
Over the next twenty-five years, Edith de Born published at a steady rate. Seven novels in the 1950s, seven in the 1960s, and four more in the 1970s. Two of her novels — Felding Castle (1959) and The House in Vienna (1959) — came closest to her own experience. In the first, a young girl named Milli has her first romances in the days just before the outbreak of World War One. The second takes Milli forward a decade, to a Vienna where noble families are now scraping by. Those who have some property left are selling it off, like de Born’s father did. Those still young enough to hope are leaving for Berlin or Paris or America. And many, desperate and bankrupt, are forced, like Fraulein Hertha von Branner, to write begging letters in hopes of finding work:
I have heard that you seek a gouvernesse for your children and so allow myself herewith to offer you my services. I write you in Englisch because it is a langwitsch which I have always spoken and written with great plaisure. My dear Father was two years at Eton, the famous Englisch school…. I mention him only as a guaranty for my standing, he was a Sektionschef in our Ministry for the Inside. Naturally I am ready to furnish you with every otherwise desired reference.
Although Felding Castle and The House in Vienna were advertised as the first two books of a trilogy, the next book she published, The Flat in Paris has no connection with their stories. Indeed, The Flat in Paris is one of her stodgiest books, perhaps because she forgot that she wrote at her best when the themes of love and property were intertwined. When she wrote of love alone, the result reads somewhat like the experience of driving a car with underinflated tires. One can reach the destination all the same, but it’s a tedious and inefficient journey.
Francis King once observed that like Edith Wharton, de Born “belongs to the world that she describes and yet has been distanced from it by an exceptional sensibility,” adding that,
Edith de Born’s books have almost invariably been concerned with civilised, if not intellectual, people, who have no difficulty in expressing themselves richly and succinctly. To write about such people — tended by devoted by dwindling bands of servants in large houses often full of objets d’art in the taste of a bygone age — is something that few novelists can now do with any conviction.
And the kind of adjectives reviewers used to describe de Born’s work lead one to think that she belongs in the school of followers/imitators of Henry James: “mature, authoritative, and genuinely sensitive”; “sensitive and delightful”; “lightly and subtly done”; “curiously tantalizing”; “elegant fable.” Peter Ackroyd wrote that one of her later novels, Mutual Observation, was “written with great intelligence and charm,” then closed, cuttingly, “and one can recommend it to one’s grandmother.” Anita Brookner, who often mentioned de Born as a writer she admired, also watered down her praise with such remarks as “These novels are long out of print and perhaps need not be revived” and that de Born “writes like a lady.”
But though de Born certainly knew exactly which fork to use in any dinner service, as well as which wine to serve with any dish, she was willing to delve into subjects that would not have been considered proper for conversations at her table. The Penalty of Exile (1964) is about a 14-year-old child prostitute whose mother — also a prostitute — is found murdered in her dingy flat near Brussels’ Gare du Midi. State of Possession (note the reference to property and ownership in the title) is about a woman attempting to prove herself the mother of her illegitimate child.
In The Imperfect Marriage, Roger Warnier, heir of a wealthy family in the industrial north of France, returns from years as a prisoner of war in Germany and informs his wife that he is now in a relationship with one of his fellow prisoners and intends to remain so. Already unhappy with the grey life in their factory town, after growing up in the vineyards of the sunny south, she considers leaving but decides in the end to live in a form of coexistence that maintains a fine veneer of propriety — as well as her status in society. It was not surprising, Christopher Wordsworth once observed, that William Trevor sang praises for de Born’s work, “since both are considerable specialists on what survives and seethes under the surface of apparently extinct lives.”
De Born did return to her unfinished autobiographical trilogy, if indirectly, in her 1968 novel Scars. Although the lead character is now Mitzi, not Milli, the two women share similar histories. Mitzi is now an older woman, living in London, cut off by the First World War from the Austria she knew as a child, cut off from many of her Jewish relatives by the Second. As was de Born herself in Brussels, Mitzi’s may be a comfortable exile, but it is an exile nonetheless, an exile in both time and space.
In the book, a visit by an old Viennese friend forces Mitzi to reflect on the life she had left behind when she fled Austria following the Anschluss. But she also finds that she and Egon, the friend, share more than a past. They share the experience of being refugees:
They had crossed psychological as well as geographical frontiers and experienced the fact that national achievements could not be carried from one land to another. Famous men in German-speaking countries were asked elsewhere to spell their names; others, normally in a position to grant favors, were reduced to begging for the smallest privilege. People who had refused all forms of compromise were forced to accept the most uncongenial surroundings and humiliating conditions in order to subsist.
De Born understands, however, that losing one thing in life often means gaining something else. Having survived the tragedy of disrupted lives,
… they had become aware of new realities. Obliged to revise their standards of thought and value, both of them had developed from exiles into explorers of new moral fields. They had become pioneers of a world in which the nation was an anachronism. Gradually the frontiers they had crossed were replaced by unforeseen invisible boundaries, which could reveal wide chasms between people who still persisted in thinking in terms of the past and others who belonged to the future.
Although Edith de Born wrote and spoke English fluently, hosted the likes of Evelyn Waugh, and became a close friend of the historian Alethea Hayter, she never lost her sense of foreignness in the eyes of the English literary establishment. A critic as esteemed as V. S. Pritchett might say that her novel The Engagement was “An uncommonly good novel,” but the general assessment was that she was, at best, a minor novelist of manners. Someone to read between doing the shopping and mending socks, as a character in Jane Gillespie’s Envy does, and not, as in Anita Brookner’s dismissive judgment, someone whose novels need to be revived.
Indeed, it’s ironic to see Brookner making this judgment, given the significant role that the experience of exile plays in several of her novels. It’s hard to think that Brookner failed to see that it was precisely this experience, which was purely second-hand to her, that gave Edith de Born the power to see what “seethes under the surface of apparently extinct lives.”
Edith de Born published her last novel, The Negligent Daughter in 1978. She and her husband moved from rue Royale to a grand townhouse in the rue Marteau decorated with priceless paintings by Picasso, Miro, and Paul Delvaux and run by superior Flemish housekeeper. She died in 1987.
It’s not every day that you might turn on a television without referring to any guides and get to see a dramatised documentary based on a mystical, blind and deaf poet. That programme, ‘The Different Drummer’, in Easter 1980, was my introduction to Jack Clemo. I was spiritually and literary smitten by his unusual story. He saw himself as a poet, novelist, autobiographer, short story writer and Christian witness. The latter description as important as all that preceded it.
As Clemo highlighted in his first autobiography, Confession of a Rebel, he was, from a conventional point of view, unschooled. I myself was a partially schooled poet and wrote from an explicitly Christian point-of-view. As far as I knew, no evangelical-yet-literary poet, like Clemo, existed in Ireland.
I wanted to connect with him, so I wrote, enclosing a small chunk of bog turf as something illustrative of Ireland, just as the Cornish clay was an important symbol to him. Soon I got a reply about the dilemmas and challenges of being both convinced Christian and poet:
… Very few poets since Hopkins have felt this tension between Christianity & art, & I can see why my books & the TV film of my early struggle must have made special appeal to you. When one looks at the general cynicism & triviality of most modern poets, it’s clear that only a faith in redemption, personal guidance & victory in Christ can free a poet from illusion & disillusion…
In time I went to visit Clemo in his small stone cottage, at Goonamarris Slip, Cornwall, where he had been born and lived. The gloomy landscape was all concrete grey. Hills of clay tips surrounded his cottage. Clay dust discoloured everything. However, he turned that stark and ugly landscape into many meaningful metaphors in his prose and poetry.
Jack Clemo in the 1980s.
You may wonder how I communicated with this blind and deaf poet and author. His wife instructed me how to communicate, spelling out sentences letter-by-letter on his rough skinned palm , each sentence requiring a telegram like full stop, for clarity.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but I did not expect such immediate and intimate contact! Clemo’s roughly-accented replies were difficult to decipher at first. After a few hours of my tactile tracing of words and his guttural verbal responses, I got exhausted. Then we continued many conversations on Christian faith, literary hopes and my upcoming marriage, using manual typewriters instead. We exchanged a hundred letters between 1980 and 1994. As far as I know, I became his sole protégé.
After a few false starts, Clemo’s unusual literary breakthrough came when his first novel, Wilding Graft, was published by Chatto and Windus in 1948. It sold an impressive 2,000 copies in the first week in UK. Not at all bad for a first publication.
The plot precis of Wilding Graft:
Set in the clay mining country of Cornwall during WW2, Wilding Graft turns on two characters, Garth Joslin and Griffiths. At the start of the book, Garth has just returned from his mother’s funeral. His relationship with his fiancée, a somewhat frigid and ill-matched girl named Edith, has been disintegrating as his mother’s mental illness has developed, and has finally ended – taking with it Garth’s good reputation in the area—after a flirtation with Irma Stribley, a London girl on a brief visit to relatives in Cornwall.
Garth’s mother, broken from nursing her husband through his final illness, had attempted suicide at the time of Edith’s marriage to another man, and had spent the last four years of her life in Bodmin mental asylum.
Garth, being (unconventionally) Christian concludes that there must be some divine plan working itself out through all that has happened, and determines to wait for it to become plain: to wait for Irma to be brought back to Cornwall.
As L. A. Thompson wrote in his thesis, Jack Clemo, 1916-55: The Rise and Fall of the ‘Clay Phoenix’:
Wilding Graft was written to show how God works and triumphs over atheism, paganism and worldliness… Clemo believed the novel was ‘given to [him] by God as a prophecy for [his] own life’ and as such it developed extra significance. He did not consider it to be a projection or fantasy, but his own future fictionalised: first healing and then marriage, with both just around the corner.
The original publisher’s blurb invited comparisons with Hardy and Powys, and very few reviewers failed to acknowledge the similarities. Expressions of Clemo’s Christian faith caused both praise from Professor of English Mary Ellen Chase and consternation from Maurice Lane Richardson.
Chase, writing in the New York Times, praises Clemo on a number of fronts, and has great sympathy for his Christian outlook. She stated that Wilding Graft an “should deserve attention both from those who like an excellent story and from those who are interested in the novel as a form of art…” She also goes on to say that: “the slow, exhaustive and yet tense treatment of tremendous human conflicts belong to the the 19th rather than 20th century novel….(giving) a certain stature seldom seen in distinctly modern fiction.”
However, writing in the Times Literary Supplement on 27 March 1948, Richardson praised Clemo for his depiction of the region and recognised his potential, but criticised him for including too much ‘mystical religiosity’ and not enough ‘humanism’. As Luke Thompson wrote in his thesis:
It was as though Clemo had been caught between the desires to write a popular potboiler, such as many of the working people used to enjoy, and a literary work of artistic value. As it is, the novel stands alone, a unique and powerful gesture, a page-turning romance with an undercurrent of divine interference and a surface of realism uncommon in writing about Cornwall….
I would be lying to say I enjoyed Wilding Graft’s regional and rather stilted plot. Rather, I read it as a unique accomplishment by a disadvantaged author who saw life through a Biblical lens of hope.
In 1981, at 65, Clemo received an honorary literary doctorate from the University of Exeter. Not bad for a blind and deaf autodidact author who went against the tide and who attended no college.
By the time of his death, in 1994, Clemo had published ten poetry collections of poems. He also had published a second novel, Shadowed Bed, as well as two autobiographies, Confession of a Rebel and Marriage of a Rebel. His third novel The Clay Kiln was published posthumously.
The University of Exeter, UK holds an archive of his manuscripts and papers.
Louis Hemmings worked for much of his life in various bookshops: second hand, religious and a mall bookshop. He also sold used theology books online from 1994 until 2014. His writing has principally been poetry but after a late entry into college, at the age of 62, discovered he could write credible fiction. His third and last novella, A Boarding School Boy’s Regrets will be self published September 2022. Louis collaborates with photographers and artists for his WordPress and Youtube channels. Louishemmings.com.
When it comes to books, good things often come in misleading packages. This is particularly true when it comes to pulp paperbacks from the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these were sold at newsstands and drug store check-out lines, where the key to a sale was more about catching the eye than conveying truthful information about content. And the demand for new titles to push into those display racks meant that publishers tended to be undiscriminating about content.
Sometimes, this means the content is pure formula, nothing more than a rush-job assemblage of one-dimensional characters, hackneyed plots, and ineptly written prose. Sometimes — not too often, but sometimes — this means the content is pure gold. A masterpiece in disguise. And sometimes, this means the book is just, well, interesting.
Interesting. Yes, that’s the word our mothers taught us to use when we couldn’t think of anything nice to say. But to me, interesting hasn’t lost all its meaning. Interesting here means that the book is perhaps not fully successful yet still worth reading, often because it leaves me wondering about what might have been.
The minute I saw The Girl in the Gold Leather Dress (1961), I knew it would at least be interesting. “Ginsburg – Kerouac – MORHAIM” announces the banner at the top of the back cover. Morhaim? you ask. So did I. But this was a somewhat rare (for Signet Books) original novel, not a reissue of something from a major publisher, so it looked promising.
And promising it certainly is. The girl of the title is Rena, an undergraduate at UCLA (or something like it) who’s unhappy with the choices that life is presenting her. Which is understandable, given that we first see her heading off to a frat party with a superficial honor student too dumb to realize what an unusual woman he’s with.
For one thing, while he’s wearing the same sportscoat/tie/loafers combination as every other male in sight, Rena is wearing a hand-tailored dress made out of glove leather the color of wheat. She’s a knock-out in it and she knows it. So she’s not surprised when Tom, a football player and one of the alpha dogs of the fraternity, tries to steer her into his bed. The scene is the same pathetic melodrama played out every Friday night by undergraduate men all over the world:
“Oh, honey, help me, help me,” he said. His voice was as spoiled as a child’s begging candy. “Help you what?” “You know.” “Say it.” He struggled for a moment, not wanting to verbalize his desire. Then he said, “I’m so excited.” “You want to …” began Rena, pausing for him to finish the sentence. “… make love,” he said. “That’s a lie,” said Rena, her face showing scorn. “You don’t want to make love, you want to screw.”
Rena rejects him, pointing out that football is “merely a society-approved sublimation of homosexual impulses.” This happens in the book’s first ten pages. I knew I wanted to see where Victoria Morhaim would take Rena.
Rena is at an experimental stage in her life. She’s willing to sleep with a man when she feels the attraction (as with the maker of the gold leather dress) and just as willing to turn them down. She will drink or smoke pot if she’s in the mood or toss someone from her apartment for offering either when she’s not. That apartment reflects the unsettled state of her life: “At times Rena would suddenly see the tangle of things and feel a desperate need to straighten them out, but that desire never lasted long and the apartment remained untouched.”
Her parents are ready for the experiment to end. Actually, her mother is more than ready. After calling Rena a slut, her mother ejects her from their house, telling her to “Take the stench of your way of life and your mind with you. Don’t ever come back here again.”
As many young people discover, knowing what you don’t want doesn’t necessarily get you any closer to knowing what you do, and this is both Rena’s dilemma and the source of Morhaim’s difficulties in turning The Girl in the Gold Leather Dress into a coherent work of fiction. If one had to predict what will happen after the first few chapters, it would be natural to guess that Rena will go through a series of relationships that will ultimately lead to either happiness (with some form of Prince Charming) or wisdom (with some form of acceptance that Prince Charming doesn’t hold the key to happiness).
And while that’s essentially what does happen, the problem lies in the execution. At several points in the book, Morhaim switches from Rena’s point of view to that of one of the men she’s involved with. These transitions are neither well-executed (the men are names without character) nor useful for advancing the narrative.
Part of the problem, I think, is that Morhaim doesn’t trust her own creation. Rena lacks no confidence when it comes to her opinions. When Dr. Altman, an older “more sophisticated” history professor, invites her to his home, he proudly displays his collection of books on early American history, expecting her to be in awe. Instead, she’s in shock:
“Look at this, this collection of prints.” Rena lifted the leather cover. “It’s pornographic. Look at those pictures: scalpings, burnings, murder, mutilations.” She flipped the pages of the book. “Look, look here.” She pointed at one particularly gory print. An Indian was in the process of decapitating a pioneer woman. “This is the most perverse thing I’ve ever seen.”
Yet within another twenty-some pages, we see Dr. Altman coming to Rena’s rescue, calling her “Rena girl” as she begs, “Help me, Leonard. Please. Help me.”
A similar problem exists with Morhaim’s second novel (also a Signet original), The Girl Who Had Everything. Here, she offers us a portrait of a woman a few years older than Rena but none the wiser. Samara — Sammy to everyone — is a former homecoming queen from the San Fernando Valley now working for an electronics firm in San Francisco. Though she’s “just” a secretary, she is, in fact, the administrative glue that holds the marketing department together, and not long into the book is offered the job of running it.
Unfortunately, Sammy has completely bought into the idea that a wedding ring is the key to happiness. Worse, she also accepts wholeheartedly the myth that men have all the brains in business.
Around the same time that the door to career advancement opens, Sammy meets the perfect man. Charles runs his own company, owns a fabulous home with a bay view, knows the maître-ds at all the best restaurants in town, and — very much a stereotype of the “sophisticated man” in those days — confidently knows what to order for Sammy without asking her. She’s as giddy as a baby on a swing when he asks her out for the first time.
“Yippeeeeeeee,” she screamed. “My God, what was that?” Maxine appeared suddenly in the doorway. “That, Maxine,” said Sammy, “was a man. Man, man, man!”
To which we can only respond, “Oy, oy, oy!”
Things too good to be true usually are. Beneath Charles’ man of the world mask is a petty, violent, jealous boy. So it’s no surprise when, suspecting Sammy of having another lover — her gay interior decorator, of course, because jealousy rarely improves discernment — Charles shows her that he must be the only one to control her in a predictably adolescent way: he rapes her.
Once again, Morhaim makes her heroine weak and unstable. Sammy has been seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Rolfe, on a regular basis for over five years. “He helps me live through the week. I don’t think I could make it without him,” she tells a friend. In truth, Dr. Rolfe is a model of the kind of shrink who turned a generation or more of women into therapeutic co-dependents. When Sammy tells him about meeting Charles, he dismisses her enthusiasm:
“No, my dear girl, that is not the answer. You don’t need another man right now. You need something to get rid of all that hostility that is in you…. I have told you many times that it does no good to be angry at me. I am only the voice of your conscience.”
Dr. Rolfe’s answer to Sammy’s problems: “Why don’t you join a dramatic group?” And with that, he sends her on her way, reminding Sammy, “Don’t forget the check next time.”
Instead of encouraging Sammy’s development into emotional independence (she has, after all, already achieved financial and social independence), Dr. Rolfe’s guidance ultimately sends her into a literal regression. She returns to her parents’ house and, digging through her high school and college souvenirs, reverts to Homecoming Princess and “Queen Samara, SDM Fraternity,” imagining herself in a white ballgown, descending the staircase to awaiting admirers: “All the best, the blond and the dark and the young.”
Morhaim’s trilogy of conflicted feminism concludes with the most misleadingly packaged of her books, Casebook: Nymphomania — “Based on Actual Case Histories,” the front cover declares: “A Book that Probes Beneath the Skin of Four Women Ruled by Sexual Compulsion.” The book includes an introduction by Dr. Albert Ellis, then a prominent psychotherapist and prolific author on sexual topics, to encourage the reader to think this is some sort of clinical text.
It would be more accurate to describe Casebook: Nymphomania as a collection of four linked short stories, four sketches of women for whom sex is a major source of unhappiness. Unhappiness because each, in her own way, seeks fulfilment or advancement through sex, only to find the resulting relationships shallow, unsatisfying, or downright harmful.
Whether what any of them exhibits is a form of nymphomania is beyond my ability to answer, but if any reader was expecting to be titillated or shocked by Casebook: Nymphomania, they were certain to be disappointed. The book is about as sexy as a manual on venereal diseases. These not four vixens. These are four miserable women.
“Angelique Adams,” for example, the first story in the book, tells about an ambitious and calculating beauty who sleeps her way into Hollywood stardom, starting by allowing a powerful agent to rape her at the age of fifteen on his proverbial casting couch. Angelique considers herself an opportunist, choosing her partners and the occasions based on the advantages she expects to realize as a result. Unfortunately, she has no exit strategy, and at the ripe age of 38, finds herself more and more isolated: like “she was living in an elevator — going up and down endlessly, but never getting off at any floor, never exploring the world beyond the confines of the elevator.”
“Lois Love,” Morhaim’s second subject, grows up in a family that has apparently arrived at emotional exhaustion without ever venturing to any other destination. Morhaim’s description of a Love family dinner is grim:
Mrs. Love sighed deeply as she reached for the bowl of stew. It was not that she had worked hard to prepare dinner and was now sighing over the quick disappearance of so much labor … no, she had opened several packages of frozen stew, and heated the contents a quarter-hour before the meal; rather, she was sighing over the rapidity of the entire operation. She prepared, the family ate, and then each disappeared to his own corner. But she, herself, was incapable of bringing any warmth to the ritual of dinner and so she submitted, with that sigh, to the machine-like process of feeding her family.
With no model to ground it in, Lois’s initial attempts to find love are unsuccessful, if not self-destructive. Where Rena pretty ruthlessly rejected the football star, Lois goes along with a good-looking boy at a frat party and ends up being gang-raped. She bounces through several other short affairs until she ends up in an awkward arrangement with a wealthy bisexual man named (creepily) Dad. In the end, the most satisfying relationship she experiences is with a cross-dressing lesbian she initially mistakes for a man.
The writing in Casebook: Nymphomania is often strong. Carefully chosen words, striking images, little muddling around in making a point. We cannot help but feel sympathy for these four women. But I found it unsettling how consistently Morhaim treats her women as victims. To her credit, she does not suggest that there is a single or common reason they become victims. To paraphrase Tolstoy, she believes that every victim is victimized in her own way. Taken together, these three books offer a comprehensive catalogue of the factors oppressing the lives of women in the early 1960s. But in none of them do we see women moving beyond victimhood or exploring other ways of staking out an identity for themselves. And so, I would argue, Victoria Morhaim’s fiction from the early 1960s is of greater sociological than literary interest.
Morhaim went on to publish further under a variety of names. As Victoria Kelrich, she wrote two pulp paperbacks, Charades (1978) and High Fashion (1981). As Victoria Reiter — taking the name of her second husband — she published another thick soap opera-ish novel, Big Hawaii in 1977, and then translated several of the novels that Daniel Odier published under his pseudonym of Delacorta, including Luna (1984) and Vida (1986).
The Girl in the Gold Leather Dress New York: Signet Books, 1961 The Girl Who Had Everything New York: Signet Books, 1962 Casebook: Nymphomania New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1964 All by Victoria Morhaim
Peter Kerr writes from New Zealand to recommend Albert Segal’s first (and apparently only) novel Johannesburg Friday:
This must be regarded as a “neglected book”. I came across it by chance in my grandfather’s bookcase.
Set in Jo’burg, possibly in the early Fifties, the book presents the points of view of four members of the Leventhal family on the Friday before a long weekend Yom Kippur. They are parents, Sophie and Sydney and the middle two of their children, Laurie (an apprentice druggist) and Jessie (a law clerk). The book has four chapters devoted to each. Each is beset by personal, spiritual, familial and societal considerations that are often at odds with the turbulent and tense struggle to maintain one’s ground in the big city; in this case it’s Jewish culture and religion that is at stake.
The mother is devoted to family but this devotion brings worries about status, money and its scarcity, her husband’s health and the decline in his fortunes, scandal and gossip and finding suitable Jewish matrimonial matches for her kids. She treats the Bantu servant, Sixpence as “too much of a nonentity to be regarded as a person”, vilely.
Laurie, the middle son, has caused consternation on two fronts. He wants to give up as an apprentice pharmacist and take up writing. This is anathema to parents who have scrimped and sacrificed to send him to college and, on qualifying, on the way to a status job (although not in the same league as a surgeon or medical specialist). The other front is Poppy Harris, a Gentile young woman who was once a boarder with the family. They are desperately hot for each other and desperate measures are adopted. Poppy is another source of loathing and denunciation for Mrs. Leventhal.
Mr. Leventhal is yet another cause for concern. As a young man he has prospered in real estate as the Witwatersrand gold fields burgeoned. Once married he rediscovers his religion. It brings him his greatest comfort and guidance. He has given away his prosperous career and now finds solace and a retreat in owning a shabby book-store in the city. He is aware that his decisions have brought economies to his family, about which he is concerned, but it is his Jewish faith and culture that predominate. He is a sad and fading personality.
Unlike the daughter, Jessie, who is fully alive, intelligent and capable in a variety of jobs in a male dominated commercial world. She works in a lawyers’ office, one of whom acts for Africans who suffer daily indignities. She is in love with the lawyer’s son, but this relationship has run into a Jew/Gentile impasse that causes her grief and resignation, at least from her job.
This is a very good book; it is a first effort for Segal, about whom I know nothing. The only disappointment is that no story can develop because the book’s structure is bound by the confines of a single day. The detailed characters embodied in the novel cry out for a plot or plots.
It’s interesting to know that Jo’burg was a tough dangerous city well before the 1970’s when the townships erupted in revolt. The likelihood of uproar and dispute in the street is ever present. We’re aware of an overriding suspicion between the different cultures and peoples who have washed up there. The same unease infects the Leventhal family. There’s a sense that it’s all a temporary set up. Unspoken thoughts will one day be realised.
I’d love to know more about Albert Segal. Did he write anything else? What became of him?
Albert Segal, from the dust jacket of Johannesburg Friday.
Peter thought that readers of NeglectedBooks.com might be able to shed some more light on Segal’s life and work.
There are at least a dozen copies of Johannesburg Friday available for sale, most of them fairly cheaply. The book was published in the summer of 1954 by Geoffrey Bles in the U.K. and McGraw-Hill in the U.S.. McGraw-Hill must have given its edition respectable marketing support, because reviews appeared in newspapers across the country as well as in a number of national magazines like Saturday Review.
In the New York Times, Ann Wolfe called it “Less of a novel than a Joycean close-up of a self-contained family,” a book in which Segal’s purpose was “to stage the inner drama of a simple family’s life,” but one enriched by its setting in a country where there were such dramatic differences in how different peoples were treated. The Kirkus Review credited Segal for a portrait of the Leventhals that was “virtually a biopsy” but concluded, “The fact remains that Segal has yet to learn to tell a story of some kind.”
Some reviewers were even more brutal. In The Baltimore Sun, Lynwood Kniesche called it “a singularly unremarkable book in almost every respect.” And he castigated Segal for how little about he incorporated his setting: “It may very possibly be that Mr. Segal, who was born and raised in this city, has, as a consequence, become either blind or blasé” to it. On the other hand, Barbara Merline of The Los Angeles Times, thought Segal had been very aware of the larger life of Johannesburg: “These four lives are ingeniously threaded into the seething torment of the city — a city driven by fear and hatred, a city in transition. The author keeps a fine balance between his characters and background in a warm and moving story.”
One noteworthy review appeared in the September 1954 issue of Jewish Frontier. In it, Harold U. Ribalow compared Johannesburg Friday with Nadine Gordimer’s first novel, The Lying Days. Of Gordimer, he wrote, “In her novel she revealed an unusual talent and showed once again that she wrote not only as a lyric artist, but as a woman aware of her Jewishness and the situation of the Jew in South Africa.” He was more critical of Segal’s book:
Nadine Gordimer indicates that she may yet produce the novel of Jewish life in South Africa. Although Albert Segal tries to do that in Johannesburg Friday, he does not quite manage it.
For one thing, Mr. Segal has attempted to write a novel with as little dialogue as possible. This makes for static story-telling and, alas, some dullness. Nevertheless, Mr. Segal is a talented writer and his characters do come to life….
Mr. Segal, in describing the cross-currents attacking Jew and Gentile, white and black, never forgets to reveal that his Jews are uneasy, uncomfortable and, in a deep sense, unhappy in South Africa.
Another interesting perspective is offered by the several reviews in journals aimed at black readers. In Jet magazine, its reviewer wrote:
Although Segal points up the plight of the African, he is overly careful in his handling of the European’s treatment of the black majority. An African is caught stealing a purse from Jessie and is turned loose at her request. An African servant rapes a white girl and is sentenced to the gallows, but the judge sympathizes with “any man whose passions might be whipped up during the course of his duties,” and breates white women’s behavior before African men. Johannesburg Friday is rich in excursions into Jewish living, but the telling is in such detail that action sometimes drags, interest lags.
In Phylon, a literary journal from the historically black Clark University in Atlanta, John Reinhardt wrote:
Segal has deliberately minimized externalities and concentrated on the com- plex emotions sustaining the seemingly trivial actions. The introversion and rigidity of Mrs. Leventhal, the ambivalence and paranoia of Max, and the estrangement and anxieties of son and daughter determine the life of this family and at the same time seem to symbolize the seeds of turmoil in a seething continent. Especially is this true when the passions and impulses of whites and blacks are juxtaposed. The native servants remain inscrutable to the Afrikaners, despite the certainty of the latter that oversimplified and obvious assessments suffice to account for the African’s bitterness. Not always satisfied by easy appraisals, Mrs. Leventhal longed for “an insight into the workings of their minds.” And in their minds resides much of the worth of Johannesburg Friday, though it is by their brawn that Johannesburg judges all issuing from the Zulu- land kraals. That her servant, Sixpence, represents more than a simple cluster of biological facts never occurs to Mrs. Leventhal. “If ever she believed him to be a human being, endowed with feelings and impulses and sensitivities, she disguised it from both herself and him.”
In the Journal of Negro Education, Mark Watkins of Howard University wrote:
The lives of these people are affected by much of what is Johannesburg, especially the struggles of the Jewish minority in the face of the ill-concealed disparagement of the gentile majority, the problem of the Bantu in the city, and the general turbulence of the times. This is a realistic exposure of human problems in a modern industrial and ethnically complex community. It is focused on Jews in the local setting of South Africa’s great commercial center, but it also is a rather good portrait of human nature and personality in general.
I’ve been able to find no trace of Albert Segal after the appearance of Johannesburg Friday (though I have not attempted to see what might be available through South African sources). If anyone knows more, please let us know using the comment feature below.
Johannesburg Friday, by Albert Segal London: Geoffrey Bles, 1954 New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954
“Pablo has confessed his love for me. I was stunned.”
We are, too, when we learn, a few lines further down the first page of Rosalyn Drexler’s third novel The Cosmopolitan Girl, that Pablo is a dog. The narrator, Helen, lives in the Hotel Buckminster in Manhattan. The hotel has a strict no-pets policy, but Helen has trained Pablo to walk on his hind legs and dresses him up in a man’s suit, wig, and hat. Pablo is “an intelligent dog, well coordinated and faithful” — which goes without saying, Helen reminds us.
He can also carry on a conversation and enjoys having Helen read to him from the newspaper. They share their most intimate thoughts and dreams. “I dreamt I was lying in the courtyard dead,” Pablo confides after a troubling night sleep. Helen promises to ask her mother what the dream means.
Helen’s mother is a psychic who changes her lovers more often than her sheets. Helen’s father is a fabulously wealthy herbalist. Neither parent is particularly concerned that their daughter is in love with a dog. It’s good to know she’s got a steady relationship.
It’s not without its difficulties, though. Helen notices that the roll of stamps is growing smaller and smaller and discovers that Pablo has been sending obscene letters to sex magazines. Also, her mother’s latest lover, Albert, is taking an interest in Helen. He tries to seduce her one night, but she finds the fact that he’s disguised himself as Gertrude Stein disconcerting. “I did not want to discover that yes, Gertrude did have a penis.” Well, who would?
Helen often gets her advice about romance from Cosmospolitan magazine. Cosmo tells her that “Anything goes” is the motto of her time: “Whether your ‘thing’ turns out to be of redeeming social importance is not crucial; it’s the passion with which you defend you view that’s important.” And so, she decides to sleep with Pablo.
The sex is not bad, but not great. Pablo’s nails leave deep scratches on Helen’s back and he seems unconcerned whether she enjoys it. Things grow even more complicated when Helen finds that an old man in the hotel is stalking her. When she visits his room to warn him off, the man introduces Helen to “your twin sister” — a life-size rag doll he’s dressed and made up to look exactly like her.
Rosalyn Drexler, from the dust jacket of The Cosmopolitan Girl.
It should be apparent by this point that Rosalyn Drexler was not looking to Zola for inspiration. Any pretence of realism is abandoned in the first paragraph of The Cosmopolitan Girl. Nor is this an example of magical realism in the fashion of Garcia Marquez and his Latin American colleagues. The clue to her approach can be found in two of the writers quoted on the back of the book’s dust jacket: Stanley Elkin and Donald Barthelme.
Elkin, Barthelme, and Kurt Vonnegut were the most critically and popularly successful American fabulists of the 1970s. For Barthelme in particularly, the aim of a piece of writing was more to achieve some formalistic coherence than to be realistic. No one thinks that the children in Barthelme’s The Dead Father are really dragging the giant corpse of their father across the landscape, but from a symbolic standpoint it’s an amazingly effective parable for the emotional burden that parents can leave behind.
By this standard, how does The Cosmopolitan Girl measure up? Well, one thing that Elkin, Barthelme, and Vonnegut all had going for them was a brilliant gift for comedy. I suspect that many people who read Barthelme’s stories in The New Yorker enjoyed his extravagantly absurdist humor without noticing the serious messages underneath the jokes.
And Drexler certainly holds her own in this regard. She takes full advantage of the playfulness that characterizes so much of American experimentalist fiction of this period. There are newspaper articles, letters, advertisements, dialogues from radio shows, to do lists, and a dozen other types of material included alongside passages of conventional narrative.
The Cosmopolitan Girl has 145 chapters in its 192 pages, but you can’t really say they’re squeezed into the book because some of them are just a sentence or two long. Take this example, when Helen is trying to write an article about incest for Cosmo:
103 Article going well. Already have four typewritten pages.
104 Article going well. Already have three typewritten pages.
105 Article may not be written. Should be able to begin on the fifteenth page, as one begins on the top floor of the Guggenheim to see the show. It’s too exhausting to begin on page one. It’s never any good. Has anything ever been written backward?
106 .reverof em evarc mih ekam dluohs amleS hserf fo etsat teews eht, ffo repparw ym sleep luaP nehw, nehT. wollamarc a ekil nat ni depparw nruter ll’I.
What, then, about Drexler’s underlying message? I’m tempted to reread The Dead Father now because I suspect there is more of a connection between it and The Cosmopolitan Girl than Barthelme’s blurb on the back. The Cosmopolitan Girl came out in 1974, The Dead Father a year later. Both deal with the complexities of the relationship between parents and children, particularly after the parents are gone.
And Drexler is also examining the nature of marriage and romantic relationships. It may be absurd that Helen finds happiness, at least for a while, with Pablo as a partner, but it’s really no more absurd that the notion that the stereotypical heterosexual American couple like Ward and June Cleaver were the ideal to which everyone should aspire. The Cosmopolitan Girl is not just a product of American experimentalism in fiction but of the wave of feminism and sexual liberation that was shaking up the country. (It’s telling that Gloria Steinem is one of the back-cover blurbers. It’s sad, however, that her quote appears second down the page after Norman Mailer’s).
The Cosmopolitan Girl is no more than a night or two’s read, and well worth looking for as both a very funny book and an illuminating artifact of its time.
The Cosmopolitan Girl, by Rosalyn Drexler New York: M. Evans & Company, 1974
“A hundred women came to paradise and a hundred angels fell” reads the tagline on the cover of the Red Seal/Gold Medal paperback original edition of Nancy Morgan’s 1952 novel City of Women. It was an obvious attempt to repeat the success of Gold Medal’s edition of Tereska Torres’s Women’s Barracks, a memoir of life among the women of the Free Free forces in London, down to its cover by Barye Phillips, the same artist, showing women in much the same variety of déshabillé.
Beneath the surface, however, the two books had little in common aside from the fact that both were clearly based on lived experience. In Morgan’s case, however, the experience was that of living in the large complex erected near Pearl Harbor to house the hundreds of civilian workers brought to Oahu after the declaration of war.
Lynn and her husband Mack have come from Kentucky on a ship full of troops and civilian workers. The idea of taking war work in Hawaii was entirely hers. Mack, we soon discover, is a small-minded, embittered man who should never have left home, let alone gotten married. Had Mack ever been happy? Lynn wonders soon after they move into a bleak, nearly unfurnished apartment in the married quarters. “Perhaps he had been before he married her. He had told her so many times that he was.” Mack is utterly out of place in Hawaii: “He hated it, the sun hurt his eyes, and he was affronted by the sensual warmth.”
Lynn, on the other hand, quickly comes to love her new situation. She’s good at her job, desired by the thousands of single men on the island, even desired as a friend by the women she’s become acquainted with on the ship.
Though Lynn decides to move into the single women’s quarters after Mack throws her clothes out the window in a jealous fit, it takes Morgan another two hundred pages to make their break permanent. For her part, the process is made easier by meeting a handsome, understanding lieutenant, though this only provokes Mack further into his fortress of surliness. She starts to receive anonymous letters: “Watch your step. We know what you’re doing and what will happen to you if you don’t stop seeing that lieutenant. You’re a filthy whore and we find ways to get rid of women like you.” “We” is clearly Mack and his buddy Toby, who probably resent most of all not having a nice basement to chain Lynn up in.
Much of the book is taken up with the other dramas that arise among Lynn’s barrack-mates, most of which we can predict. An unwanted pregnancy, a romance with a married officer, and a case or two of island fever. There is also the somewhat more “scandalous” element of a happily predatory lesbian, but Morgan is too unsure of, if not uncomfortable with, same-sex relations that it’s not much more than a novelty item. Neither does she treat her exotic setting as much more than a backdrop. Nancy Morgan may have been writing from firsthand knowledge of what it was like to be a civilian worker living in Hawaii during the war, but for all she makes of it, City of Women comes off as no more interesting than a week or two’s worth of General Hospital.
City of Women, by Nancy Morgan New York: Red Seal Books/Gold Medal Books (Fawcett Publications), 1952
In 1962, after eight years as a Police Constable 258 of the Metropolitan Police between 1951 and 1959, he published The Little White God, an early example of what later came to be called a ‘police procedural’ novel.
Why then, if he only published one novel, is he of any interest?
First, because Brock went on to publish some very good poetry – quite a lot of it – and two of his poems are among the most anthologized of the twentieth century. So, the novel is an interesting waystation on the path of his development.
Second, because the novel is worth something in its own right. After a shaky few opening paragraphs, it develops strongly and gives an intriguing view of an unusual episode in an ordinary copper’s life in a suburban division of ‘the Met’ during the post-war years. It describes the perpetual battle between an efficient police force and a justice system striving for fairness; it lays bare, very vividly, the universal battle between the ‘doers’ and the paper-shufflers in any organisation; and it analyses, softly and subtly as it goes along, some deep moral issues about right and wrong.
Brock was born in 1927 to a working-class family in the middle-class suburb of Dulwich in South London. Books were apparently few in the Brock household and the atmosphere was occasionally ‘turbulent’. Brock won a scholarship to the local grammar school but left after completing his school certificate, the family lacking the funds or ambition to push his education any further.
Too young to be ‘called up’ in the war years, he completed his National Service in the Royal Navy and ended up in Hong Kong waiting to be “demobbed’ in 1947. Listless and bored, Brock began to read anything he could get his hands on at the NAAFI (the British servicemen’s welfare organisation) library and, finally, was reduced to borrowing a book of poetry.
This proved to be the opening of a door. After reading the paperback poems, Brock knew he wanted to write. As his fellow poet, obituarist and friend, Anthony Thwaite, would put it later, Brock thought that most activity is a means of defining oneself; and for Brock, poetry was the best means, of doing that.
After leaving the Royal Navy, Brock secured a job as a trade journalist and used the free time it afforded to write poetry, most unpublished, as a way of developing his proficiency and style. He gradually accumulated publication credits in small, literary poetry magazines of the time. He married in 1949 and, with a young family needing the regularity and the prospect of increasing income, two years later he joined the Met. He continued to write poetry.
His break came when the editor of the Times Literary Supplement published a few of his poems, accepted on their merits, without any knowledge of who or what the author was. The TLS is famously intellectual, so publication caused quite a stir in literary circles, when his identity as a working policeman with no more than a grammar school education became known.
This led to a brief flash of celebrity. when a journalist from the Daily Express interviewed him and the paper’s editor gave the resulting piece a full-page splash. Far from the reprimand expected for giving an unauthorised interview,– which appeared in the Daily Express as ‘PC258 CONFESSES I’M A POET –THE THINGS HE THINKS UP AS HE POUNDS THE BEAT’ – Brock’s revelation was received tolerantly.
In 1959, he left the police and joined the advertising firm of Mather and Crowther as a copywriter. It was here that he mined his experiences “pounding the beat”, as the Express had it, and produced The Little White God. The novel was published by the prestigious firm of Hutchinson (no, unfortunately not Constable). The Little White God was never published in the USA, despite the American readerships’ appetite for police novels (although British readers were happy to lap up American crime fiction in all its forms) possibly because of some of the unfamiliarity of the context and the commercial risk associated with a first novel.
The Little White God describes the downfall of Detective Constable Mike Weller, a (generally) good and conscientious policemen, who, like most of his colleagues, is tuned in to the rhythms of the streets he patrols. He is an alpha male without being macho; aware that only a thin line of fate separates him as a policeman from many of the criminals he brushes up against, coming as they did from the same background. They drink at the same pubs, live in the same areas, marry women from the same background– and accept the rules that police, crooks, the courts and prison dance to in the game of justice in post-war Britain. But the men who join the police become “Little White Gods” and their downfall, if it comes, is even harder.
‘Like most of his colleagues’ does not mean all of them, though. Weller has the misfortune to report to a superior officer who does not have the tolerance Brock himself experienced as a PC. Although happily married, Weller cannot resist having an affair with the wife of a small-time criminal he has arrested for ‘sus” — suspicion of attempting to break into a locked shop. The relative triviality of this offence and the three-month sentence it attracts is crucial to the timing of Mike and Rosie’s affair. It is a criticism later levelled at Weller that he could have “fitted him up” better by charging him with by going equipped for breaking and entering.
The affair develops into much more than Weller anticipates. The crook seeks revenge by putting stolen goods in the shed at the back of Weller’s house and then writing anonymously to the Station Sergeant at Weller’s police station. Through force of circumstances, the sergeant is forced to report the anonymous letter to the new senior officer in charge of the station who is out to make an impact. The officer, in turn, outwits his divisional chief in a trial of procedural strength and Weller is the victim of the struggle.
The Little White God is structured in two parts, the first being the development of the affair and the receipt of the letter, the second what happens afterwards. It is very definitely a book of two halves in terms of writing style, as well. While the second half is tight and falls very much into the category of a ‘police procedural’ the first half is, initially, slightly over-written:
Outside the Court, the sun was doing its best but making heavy weather of it. It would look out of the clouds for a minute or two and then the sky would shut up to give the wind a chance. Round the corner it blew as though it were coming straight from Siberia. It was the kind of wind that seemed to make your clothing feel transparent.
And later:
On top of the bus the wind came at them like a four-ale bar pug – all rush and no science – until they turned a corner and it retired out of breath.
“Transparent”? “Four-ale bar pug”? Apart from the confusing analogies, Brock is obviously in poet mode in starting the book.
But the narrative soon gathers its stride. The descriptions of South London suburbia and its residents becomes more fluent and less contrived, more based in the reality of Brock’s experience — and Mike Weller’s fate:
It was as if there were two police forces. One was the real one which caught criminals and the other was the one that existed in some high-up’s office at the Yard. The real force was there to catch criminals and you caught them the best way you could. You knew who they were and if you couldn’t get them down according to Judge’s Rules, you got them down in your own way. Mike could see nothing wrong with that. He was paid to catch thieves and he bloody-well caught them.
But it is this attitude that proves to be Mike’s undoing. His ambitious station commander has aspirations for a position at the Yard and has the mindset to go with it. In his eyes, Weller’s having an affair with a criminal’s wife is the greater crime and, thwarted at not being able to take Mike out ‘fairly’, he ensures that Weller pays for his indiscretion. Brock keeps the reader uncertain about Weller’s fate almost to the end of the book.
Weller is demoted from detective to beat policeman and subjected to all the petty and largely mindless administrative procedures that the lowest on the pecking order have to put up with. He loses his wife and his marriage, probably keeps the love of Rosie but certainly loses his livelihood in a grand gesture of resignation.
To the British reading public at the time, this unsentimental insider’s view of the police would have been a marked change from the prevailing conventions. At the time, the most famous fictitious British policemen was Dixon of Dock Green — an avuncular sergeant close to retirement age who had seen it all and who recounted police-station stories of the “it’s a fair cop, guv” type on television on Saturday evenings. The revolutionary and grittier Z Cars (which influenced many later British police series) was just about entering its stride but the cynical tone of Line of Duty and its Chief Inspector Hastings of AC12 (who would become a British cultural icon in his own right), with its unremitting focus on internal corruption, would have to wait a generation or more of profound social change.
Despite his upbringing and background, Brock is only hit-and-miss when it came to the novel’s dialogue. Conversations in the workplace and between policemen are clear, unstilted, direct but with the necessary amount of ellipsis of ordinary dialogue between people with shared conventions and background. Conversations between the male and female characters are less convincing. Aside from using the word “gel” (hard ‘g’) to stand for the South Londoner’s catch-all term for a woman, Brock offers few other stylistic clues to accent or educational background in the male-female exchanges. The 1950s lower classes in Peckham are suspiciously precise about grammar and syntax — especially Weller’s paramour Rosie.
But this is carping criticism. The novel is not dialogue-dependent for its momentum, being as much an examination of social ideas, cultural customs and a dissection of moral attitudes.
Cover of Invisibility is the Art of Survival.
What then of Brock after The Little White God? In his first collection published in the US, Invisibility is the Art of Survival, the jacket biographical sketch states:
Born in London in 1927, Brock says he has spent the subsequent years waiting for something to happen, occupying his time as a sailor, journalist, policeman, and adman, in that order. Yet none of this, he feels, has touched him, “except with a fine patina of invisibility.” Poetry, however, is for him an act of self-definition “which sometimes goes so deep that you become what you have defined. And this,” he adds, “is the nearest thing to an activity I have yet found.” Thus in addition to being poetry editor of Ambit, Brock has published several volumes of his own. His first, An Attempt at Exorcism, was brought out in 1959, and was followed over the next decade by A Family Affair, With Love from Judas, a large selection in Penguin Modern Poets 8, and A Cold Day at the Zoo. Confronted with his work, American readers will agree with the critic Alan Pryce-Jones that Brock has written “some of the most observant and compassionate poems of our time–poems, moreover, in which the poet keeps his feet on the ground as skilfully as his head in the air.”
(Alan Pryce-Jones was the editor of the TLS who first spotted Brock’s poetry.)
The reviews that the Little White God received may also have contributed to Brock not writing another novel. The Times reviewer praised the novel’s “blatantly unvarnished authenticity” but Simon Raven (another now-neglected novelist) in The Spectator damned it with faint praise by saying that the documentary account was “smartly done in its way”. An anonymous reviewer in the TLS said that “the documentary element is the most valuable … but does not go deep…” while having “… sufficient vitality to complement the other more important side of the novel”. But perhaps what might have sealed the fate of further novelistic adventures was Anthony Burgess’s (rather unkind) conclusion in The Observer that “Brock is capable of better than” a documentary.
Brock probably got something out of his system with The Little White God. It was written at the same time as James Barlow, Allan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, John Braine, John Osborne, and the loose grouping that became known as the ‘Angry Young Men’ were active. So it was in good radical company. But Brock maintained that it was poetry that helped him to define himself, so the success he began to have with that – he joined the editorial staff of the quarterly literary magazine Ambit in 1960 – probably meant he chose to concentrate on the strong suit of poetry rather than risk further half-hearted praise with novels.
Like most poets – and many prose authors – Brock could not make a living out of his writing alone, so for 30 years he stayed in advertising at Mather and Crowther, rising up the company, through its mergers, to end as a director and originating the famous “No FT. No comment.” slogan along the way. He edited the poetry section of Ambit for nearly four decades (1960-97), rubbing shoulders with the likes of J. G. Ballard, Eduardo Paolozzi and Carol Ann Duffy.
The Little White God was an early starter in the field of the British police procedural. The description of the investigation by the ‘rubber-heelers’ –Scotland Yard’s internal affairs men, who are the catalysts of Weller’s demise – is, as the publisher noted, documentary in style and as different from the aristocratic, amateur detective novels beloved of the Golden Age as chalk from cheese. Changing social attitudes from the war and then post-war austerity did away with that.
Those who only know Brock’s poetry will find it an interesting read since it fits well with his early poetical works and fills a gap, demonstrating the importance of experience in his writing. It is a deceptively angry book — angry at the frustration of advancement because of artificial barriers; impatient with rule-bound satraps who value mindless procedure above sensible outcome: hinting at the beginnings of rebellion.
Those who are fresh to Brock may well find that the novel is an enticing stepping stone to a poet of considerable talent in encapsulating the significance to the individual of common hurts. It was only as he got older that he got mellower. His initial works were partly autobiographical, coloured by the unhappiness of his first marriage. Later they became broader and less personal – more infused, paradoxically, like The Little White God –with the experience of ordinary people of the hurts inflicted by the world. Two of his poems– “Five Ways to Kill a Man” and “Song of the Battery Hen” — were particularly popular with compilers of anthologies.
As an ex-journalist and writer of academic texts, Stephen Bloomfield is baffled why so many excellent books become neglected.
The Little White God, by Edwin Brock London: Hutchinson, 1962
If the term had existed in 1962, critics would have labelled Personal File a “mid-life crisis” novel. It is certainly a novel of middles. George Park is middle-class, midway through life’s journey, midway through his career, midway in the ranks of the civil service.
As the book opens, he is about to face an Establishment Panel, which is a euphemism for a promotion panel. He realizes that this could be, effectively, his last such panel:
Everyone knows that this is the promotion which matters. If you stop here beyond … say, about forty-two, you probably stop here indefinitely. If you make it, then in ten or twenty years you might even take home a medal. If I don’t get it this time I probably won’t get another Panel for about three years. Then I’ll be forty-two. The odds against will be longer then.
George does not do well. To forget his failure, he leaves work early and goes to the movies. There, he becomes infatuated with one of the ice cream girls and, rashly, decides to ask her out, in what has to be one of the worst sales jobs in the history of romance:
It’s not that I am interested in you. You represent everything I have not got: youth, love, warmth, happiness. Of course, I have no excuse for not having them. I have children — nice ones — and a wife. But my life is empty, dry. I might be a vegetable, or an electronic computer.
“I like to hear you talk,” the girl replies, and she agrees to meet him for a drink.
Looking at this description, George’s affair with Lily, the ice cream girl, seems completely unbelievable, but in the book it comes across as only somewhat unbelievable. George is fascinated by her beauty, her casualness, her working-class life; Lily is amused by his awkwardness, touched by his tenderness, and glad of something to lift her out of her boredom. Never for a moment do we or they think of this as anything permanent.
Jones contrasts George’s situation with those of his colleague Peter — recognized by all as the more competitive — and of the Junior Minister they both work for, a rising star from their own year at Oxford. All three men are at crucial points in their careers. The poses of their college days are “now hardened into attitudes; it was no longer a game.” The Junior Minister’s success is tempered by the miserableness of his marriage. And Peter is obsessed with fears that he is just one mistake from seeing his promise transformed into disgrace.
George’s pessimism deepens when he considers the example of his own father, whose “life had not been as he had expected”:
He had won none even of the modest prizes which had seemed within his reach, had inspired no special affection among his colleagues. Even his family had comforted him only moderately…. He now slept a good deal during the day, did nothing by which one day could be distnguished from another, had no plans for the future.
In the hands of a writer willing to inflict real pain upon his characters — someone like Richard Yates, who never hesitated to peel away that last layer of self-respect — Personal File could have been a truly powerful novel. But there’s a certain reluctance to deal with serious levels of discomfort that dulls the book’s impact.
When you learn a bit about G. O. Jones, you get the impression that he was neither invested enough in the book nor sufficiently misanthropic to sacrifice his characters. Gwyn Owain Jones was something of a Renaissance man. A pioneer of low temperature physics, head of his department at Queen Mary College, who left science at the age of 50 to become director of the National Museum of Wales. He was an admirable administrator, a manager who brought out the best in his people, a leader who sought to improve the institutions he ran. An amateur musician, he also managed to write Personal File and several other novels in the course of his very busy life.
Anyone who’s worked a large bureaucracy, and particularly civil service, will recognize the world and characters of Personal File, even though sixty years have passed since its publication. This does not, however, mean that it’s anything but a respectably well-crafted piece of middlebrow male fiction. For me, it was far more interesting than something of similar caliber involving espionage or adventure, but no more than a satisfying evening’s read.
Personal File, by G. O. Jones London: Faber and Faber, 1962
Raymond Souster was born in Toronto and, aside from four years he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War Two, lived there for over ninety years. And almost every day of his adult life, even when he worked full time in the Bank of Commerce, he wrote poetry about the city, its people, its nature, and its history. The fifty-some collections of poems that he published represent a unique record of one city’s life, almost an impressionistic diary of Toronto in the 20th Century.
Souster’s life was almost exceptionally unexceptional. After finishing high school in 1939, he went to work for the Imperial Bank on the word of his father — who, as a good banker, didn’t think it proper for his son to join the Standard Bank where he worked. He enlisted in the RCAF in 1941, trained as a mechanic, served in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick before spending six months in England as a ground crew member in a Lancaster squadron. After mustering out in 1945, he returned to the bank, married in 1947, and stuck to a predictable routine until he retired in 1984. He and his wife lived in the same house on Baby Point Road most of their married life, and other than the death of his parents, the biggest event in his life may have been the arrival of major league baseball in 1969.
His routine allowed Souster to channel tremendous energy into poetry. His as-yet not fully collected oeuvre amounts to thousands of poems, and his pace of production didn’t slow down until his very last days. He sometimes referred to his writing time as his graveyard shift. As he wrote in a poem of this title,
Five o’clock and still sleepless, with eyelids half-shuttered, I am still commanded to remain here at my desk,
awaiting the late arrival of the last two lines of what’s turning out to be a reluctant, foot-dragging little bitch of a poem.
He and his wife Rosalia had no children. In a poem he dedicated to her after twenty-some years of marriage, he proposed,
Let us call these poems if you like the children we never had,
a thousand-voiced family, some born hard, some born easily,
all bearing, I hope, some marks of our love, our sweat and our care.
He did not, however, overestimate the significance of his work. As he wrote self-mockingly in “Epitaph for a Poet” from the early 1990s,
I wrote too much, said too little.
Perhaps being silent now my greatest accomplishment.
And as much as he devoted his time and energy to his own poetry, Souster contributed as much or more to supporting his fellow Canadian poets. With Louis Dudek and Irving Layton, he founded the Contact Press and Contact magazine in the early 1950s and was responsible for publishing the work of dozens of young poets, including George Bowering, Frank Davey, and Margaret Atwood. He helped organized countless readings in Toronto and arranged for visits by much better-known American poets such as Charles Olson and Robert Creeley.
Coming across the work of William Carlos Williams probably had the most profound influence on his own poetry. “The Six Quart Basket” from Crepehanger’s Carnival (1958) is perhaps Souster’s most obvious imitation of Williams’ minimalist style:
The six-quart basket, one side gone, half the handle torn off,
sits in the centre of the lawn and slowly fills up with the white fruits of the snow.
In some ways, however, it was Williams’ life, rather than his poetry, that may have had the greatest significance for Souster. Williams’ ability to fit the duties of busy doctor and the hours required to remain an active writer and poet into the space of a single day inspired him to find the time and energy for those many graveyard shifts at his typewriter.
Like Williams, Souster had a keen eye for the signs of natural life that could be found even in the midst of a major city like Toronto. Indeed, one of the wonderful things about reading one of Souster’s books is how often poems about weather and street people and city buses and jazz, he seems to grab us by the elbow and whisper, “Stop. Look over there.” Of “Queen Anne Lace,” he writes,
It’s a kind of flower that if you didn’t know it you’d pass by the rest of your life.
But once it’s been pointed out you’ll look for it always, even in places where you know it can’t possibly be.
Souster notices the ants in his driveway, the butterfly on a bus, the periodic return of cicadas (he certainly heard plenty of them), a raccoon patrolling at night, the stench that tells him a skunk has marked his cellar door. If anything, he seems apologetic for not paying close enough attention to nature:
Looking up to see the birds I notice first shy traces of buds, the tiny green fronds on all the willows,
and feel as I go down this street almost ashamed of my sorrow.
Souster saw not only that nature came before man but that it intended to stick around long after man has gone. In “Seven Days of Looking at a Rubber Plant,” in which he records the changes in a sorry rubber plant in a downtown hotel window, he imagines the plant planning its escape:
The rubber plant in the plain front window of the Peacock Hotel has become two legs,
one trying to escape through the back door, the other hoping somehow to make it out the front.
Alongside the natural life in Toronto, Souster’s poems are full of the homeless, the poor, the druggies and drunks, the mad, the sad, and the lonely. He was fully aware that he shared the streets with people who couldn’t enjoy the comforts of his routines. As he once told an interviewer,
This isn’t an easy city or an easy time. And I suppose I write so many poems about poor people because frankly they’re the most interesting, the only ones who seem to have really come up against life; their scars are almost like medals from the engagement.
And so, as with the signs of nature, Souster is constantly reminding us to look at these people, not to avoid them. “You can’t keep walking around/the same block day after day,” he write in “Bad Luck,”
just because you don’t want to meet the heavy woman with the limp, the woman with the crazy look, old winter hat pulled over her face.
If anything, it’s the tendency of advertisers, city planners, and boosters to gloss over or pretend that there are uglier sides to human life that angers him most:
today’s smart drinkers are shown as handsome, well dressed, always surrounded by many young and beautiful women glasses held just so:
the bastards never show them crowded into drunk-tanks hardly able to breathe, still retching a little, or clawing at the walls in an effort to escape the oncoming slimy crawling, multiplying beetles.
It’s not enough just to notice, however. Souster wants to know how to share their pain and suffering as literally as possible. “The Problem,” as he poses it:
How to share the aching feet of the already limping deliverer of handbills.
In “County Courtroom,” he wonders if his responses — his empathy and his poetry — are both futile:
either because I don’t believe this evil can be changed, this system I’ve helped create, help perpetuate, and so I don’t ever let it really get to me,
or it may be I don’t mind too much the way it works the way it fiendishly destroys….
Besides, I still hope to buy off my conscience by writing a page or two of angry verse.
At times, the simplicity of Souster’s style threatens to verge into the territory of Edgar Guest, into the superficiality and pat satisfaction of newspaper poetry of the mid-20th Century. As Bruce Whiteman wrote in Raymond Souster and His Work (1985), one of the few dedicated studies, Souster wrote no reviews or criticism, abstained from postulating or advocating any theories. Instead,
His poetics is correspondingly practical. Though there is certainly a good deal to be said about the influences upon his work, the poems as a whole do not emerge from a poetics any more complicated than that of a man talking about his experiences in words recognizably his own, but not directed by any elaborate theory of poetic voice or procedure.
Whiteman also points out that Souster produced no single great work comparable to The Waste Land or Paterson. Souster himself admitted this. In “Confession” he wrote,
I’m not sure I’m ready for epics — there are far too many little songs the rest have left unsung.
I’m not sure I entirely agree, though. The issue is not that Souster has no single great work: it’s that he published his epics in bits and pieces over the course of decades.
In the nearly thirty years between Whiteman’s book and Souster’s death, for example, he wrote several dozen poems sharing the title “Pictures from a Long-Lost World” which were 6-10 page-long accounts of historical events such as the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Taken together, these represent a substantial work. It is not, however, a very good one. As much as I hope the bulk of Souster’s work will be long-remembered, these poems, I think, are best quickly forgotten. Historical poetry is even harder to write well than historical fiction, and whenever Souster ventured beyond the territory of first-hand knowledge, the immediacy and simplicity of his writing suffered.
There are others, and good ones, however. In Riding the Long Black Horse (1993) and Close to Home (1996), he published a series of poems about his father and mother’s last days and deaths. Souster’s mother and father, also Toronto natives, lived to the age of 96 and 98, respectively. He was in his seventies when each failed, suddenly and seriously, and entered into downward spirals of ambulances, hospitalization, and care homes. Souster recorded their last weeks in poems that read like journal entries: never too philosophical, never too sentimental, simply noticing. In “A Matter of Dentures,” he describes how his father, with weak and shaking hands and nearly blind, attempts to fit his dentures into place. After many attempts, near exhaustion with the effort and frustration, he asks a nurse for help.
… she smiled, took the dentures from me, said “Open wide” to my father, then deftly pushed them in with an expert’s sure touch, finishing with a “Try that for size,” and Dad closed his mouth, and I knew right away his old grinders were back in place again.
We were still both thanking that nurse when she left to answer a buzzer, then, in the sudden silence of your room, both of us must have known, almost at the very same moment, that you’d just finished suffering another in a string of defeats you’d never bounce back from. And from that day on, never once did you put your teeth back in on your own.
Taken with other poems he wrote around this same time, recollections of moments with his mother and father over their many years together — “All the Long Way Home,” for example, about how Souster and his father walked for miles from a downtown Toronto bar on Christmas Eve 1940, supposedly because his father wanted to “take the air” but really because he needed to sober up before facing his wife — these points constitute a single and remarkable work, perhaps the longest extant record of the relationship between a child and his parents.
And then, there are Souster’s many poems about Toronto. Some were published in Queen City (1984) and Of Time and Toronto (2000), but most are scattered across dozens of books. Were these to be collected and curated, the resulting work would represent a unique portrait of a major city over the course of seven decades. Souster’s history with Toronto allowed him to mark the passage of time and the city’s evolution. He knew, for example, that where the H & R Block office stand on the corner of Jane Street and Harshaw Avenue, “the sign CAIRD’S CONFECTIONERY/Candies, Soda Fountain, Light Lunches/no longer swings with the breeze.”
There is relatively little nostalgia in Souster’s early Toronto poems. “When I look across today at this,/the first school I ever attended,” he writes in the early 1950s, “I think of how little/of anything really useful/it gave me to take/to the big world outside.” By the late 1960s, however, looking around his old neighborhood, “it’s only ghosts I see around these houses.” He was willing to admit that he was “well hooked on the past,/and a sucker for memories.”
But the best of the Toronto poems put you into the middle of the city’s life. If Souster had a favorite place in the city, it was undoubtedly on the sidewalk at rush hour: “Where Yonge Street meets Queen/the flood of human faces quickens,/seethes in its quicksand run”; “People out in droves,/spilling out over the sidewalks.” In “St. Catherine Street East,” he imagines the cityscape as a palimpsest on which all the lives ever lived there are written:
Every face in every window of these buildings watching as we go down the steaming pavement, on and out of this jungle where the dead are never buried by the living, but crowd onto buses, sit late at bar-stools, or wait in the darkness of always-airless rooms.
For Souster, the city had a life of its own, a power greater than that of any (or all) of its inhabitants. He knows that even he will ultimately be defeated by it:
Strange city, cold, hateful city, that I still celebrate and love while out there somewhere you are carefully working at my death…
Souster died in 2012. Between 1980 and 2000, Oberon Press published ten volumes of Souster’s collected poems, covering the bulk of his published poetry between 1940 and 2000. Unfortunately, these are now out of print and a few of the volumes almost impossible to find. Volumes 1 through 5 and Volume 8 are available, along with at least two dozen of Souster’s books, on the Internet Archive. You can also hear him read a selection of his poems there, from a Folkways record titled Six Toronto Poets.
Life could not keep up with Souster, however, so it’s understandable that Contact Press, the successor to his home-run publication venture of the 1950s and 1960s, came out with Come Rain, Come Shine: The Last Poems of Raymond Souster two years after his death. Probably the best place to start discovering Souster’s work is with his 1964 collection The Colour of the Times, which won the Governor General’s Award for poetry that year.
“The first 36 pages of The Monkey Puzzle excited me more than any first novel I have read for years,” wrote the Daily Telegraph’s reviewer, Peter Green. “Here, I thought, is a real winner.”
So did I when I first started the book. It opens in a philosophy tutorial in Professor Marble’s rooms. It’s one of the hottest tickets at this London university, with students squeezed into various forms of seating, increasing in discomfort as they decrease in seniority. Marble has disposed of individuation and problem of identity and is launching into negation. “What is ‘failing to find?’ my cigarette-case?” he asks. “Is it finding my paper the books the ashtray plus the rider that these are all the things on the table? How do we verify ‘my cigarette-case is not on the table’?”
Professor Marble is, as several biographers have pointed out, a fictionalized version of the philosopher A. J. Ayer, under whom Veronica Hull (then Veronica Benton) studied at University College London in the mid-1950s. Though it was later claimed that The Monkey Puzzle satirized Ayer’s affairs with numerous female students, I suspect the people who say this never read the book. When, on several occasions, Hull’s protagonist Catherine says she’s in love with Professor Marble, it’s obvious this is intended with a healthy dose of self-mockery.
Catherine, sitting in one of the more uncomfortable chairs at the opening tutorial, is struggling with the problem of ‘failing to find.’ “She had failed to find anything.” In fact, she is struggling with pretty much everything in her life. She’s taken to attending Mass every morning “in order to give God a last chance to reveal himself.” He has not. Her hairdresser hacks her curls into an Iris Murdoch-like pageboy cut. Her step-mother disapproves of her decision to study philosophy, expects Catherine to transform herself into a completely conventional housewife, and offers no practical or emotional support.
When she fails a critical exam, she becomes so distraught she finds herself admitted to a mental asylum. She awakens to a ward full of unhappy faces that stare back at her “munching and uncomprehending like cows.” They and the nurses are drowning in a slough of despond and Catherine’s greatest concern, even more than how to get out, is how to avoid being strapped down for a dose of E.C.T..
She gradually realizes that there is, in fact, a code of conduct among the inmates,
… the most honourable one she had yet encountered…. United against a common double oppressor, their madness and the hospital authorities, they rose above trivialities and did everything they could to help each other when the nurses weren’t looking. Catherine noticed many instances — a hot-water bottle passed on among four patients, a surreptitious puff of a Woodbine in the lavatory, such possessions as they were allowed to share, and always encouragement which if eccentric was well meant.
Though she frustrates her psychiatrist by preferring to talk about metaphysics than masturbation, Catherine manages to get herself released before experiencing the worst horrors of the asylum, but it soon proves only the first loop of a scarifying rollercoaster ride.
She spends a few weeks at a dismal, unheated boarding school in the North. Friends get her a job as a live-in teacher for the children of a couple of hyper-sensitive intellectuals in Essex: “She had expected them to be dirty but friendly; she found them dirty but extremely unfriendly.” She spends a few weeks homeless in London, going from cafe to cafe, and bar to bar in Soho, “where poets, painters, intellectuals and bums gather in the community of drink.” Her diet of cadged drinks leaves her wound up tighter than a violin string and she falls ill and spends time in a hospital (not mental this time).
All she really wants is “time to look at people and understand.” Everyone around her takes this as a lack of sufficient career-mindedness. What she’s trying to do is to learn to “live with my dirty brain,” to avoid becoming one of “the people I was brought up with” — the people who “hid trouble under a bank balance.” In the U.S., Catherine would have been considered a member of the Beat generation. In the U.K., perhaps one of the Angry Young Men — if she’d been a man. As a woman, however, she’s a bit too early for 1960s’ feminism and too independent to conform to the stereotype of a housewife and mother. (She does end up as both wife and mother, but only according to her own model.)
Catherine provides Veronica Hull with a wonderful vehicle for sharp and satirical observations and The Monkey Puzzle is one of the funnier novels I’ve read in quite a while. Unfortunately, Hull undermines her own work by failing to give the book sufficient backbone. Peter Green of the Telegraph thought the book lost steam after the first chapter. I think it holds up for a good four-and-a-half. but then, instead of keeping a tight focus on Catherine, she wastes her time and ours on characters none of us cares about. Like John, the “interesting” working-class philosopher, who never seems to open his mouth without going on for at least 2-3 pages. Like Adrian, her husband, who might be gay or might be a petty criminal but is probably just the ambiguous blob he seems. In the end, Catherine is not sadder but wiser than she started, just duller.
Not everyone agreed with Peter Green (and me) about The Monkey Puzzle’s diminishing returns. Angela Milne felt that Hull wrote “with an excellent colloquial simplicity, telling dialogue and a biting wit. This novel (her first) may not seem to have much shape, but it reaches its final comment decisively.” Angus Wilson remarked that “I have seldom read scenes at once so comic and so terrifying….” The book met V.S. Naipaul’s demanding standards: “The book is full of good things,” he wrote, though he added that “the early chapters are the most impressive.”
The Monkey Puzzle was Hull’s only published foray into fiction. She wrote several works of history and worked as a translator of French and German. The novelist Robin Cook, who lived with her for several years in the early 1960s, said she “had a brain like a bandsaw” and described himself as “one of her few survivors.” One wonders what might have come from Hull’s having a more supportive editor or a less sexist philosophy tutor.
The Monkey Puzzle, by Veronica Hull London: Barrie, 1958
I first learned of Louise W. King’s queer comedies from Barbara Grier’s capsule book reviews (written as Gene Damon) in the 1960s lesbian magazine The Ladder. “If ever a novel could rightly be termed Gay, this is it,” she wrote of King’s first book, The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies (1964), describing the book as “High camp in full flight.”
I suspect that Grier was the only reviewer who “got” the book. The TLS missed the fact that it’s a work of comic fiction, noting instead that it admirably avoided “the twin temptations of revelatory pornography and sociological exposition.” Hear, hear! Punch’s reviewer, the young Malcolm Bradbury, on the other hand, bristled at the publisher’s description of the book as “camped up Jane Austenese,” writing that “my indignation still hasn’t cooled.” He found it more “camped-down Truman Capotese” and dismissed it as a complete failure as a work of fiction: “Nothing at all in the way of real relationships or convincing dialogue pulls them around in the direction of reality; so that the bright sparkle of the wit seems to have nothing to engage with, and Jane Austen wouldn’t like it at all.”
But then, even its publishers didn’t understand The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies. The U.K. publisher, Michael Joseph, was responsible for the completely off-target Jane Austen comparison. And the U.S. publisher, Doubleday, was even more obtuse. At the time, Doubleday ran a regular ad in The Saturday Review of Literature and similar journals in the form of a “Letter from the Editor” written by one L. L. Day. Their ad for the week of November 14, 1964 called the book “the best novel I ever read about an interior decorator living more or less happily in sin with the cast-off girlfried of a lady truck driver,” which suggests that the copywriter either didn’t read the book or was one of the dumbest straight men on Madison Avenue.
Both The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies and its sequel The Velocipede Handicap (1965) are about the misadventures of an queer threesome living in Greenwich Village. Miss Moppet is a beautiful blonde agent of chaos who carries on like an airhead while maintaining an impressive TBR stack in her bed (“In her bed? You mean by her bed?” “No, in her bed”) with everything from Naked Lunch to the complete works of Shakespeare. Everywhere she goes, she insists on bringing along her pet turtle Emma Hamlet Woodhouse, named for her three favorite works of literature [Woodhouse = Wodehouse. Ed.].
Miss Moppet is alternately loved and loathed by Lillian Richardson, a lady truck driver who hits the road whenever she finds her patience with Moppet’s antics running thin. Rounding out the trio, narrating their tales, and usually cleaning up afterwards, is Maurice Calhoun, an interior decorator and delicate Southern beau. Whenever Lillian heads out of New York City, she leaves Moppet in his charge. Maurice denies any such responsibility:
I might take this opportunity to explain about Miss Moppet and how she doesn’t belong to me at all. And just in case any damnyakee Federalist is making ready to pop up and give me that Union jazz about no one human being owning another since the days of the unspeakable treachery of General Butler and his ilk, I know it sufficiently good and well…. Miss Moppet is more than usually unrewarding as far as I am concerned because not only can you not hitch her to a little basket cart and drive to distant places … but she doesn’t care for men and won’t do the littlest morsel of housework.
In fact, the book opens with Maurice complaining that Moppet has just slipped into the bathroom with a copy of McTeague to avoid washing the dishes.
The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies is no novel, but rather a collection of four stories, and though The Velocipede Handicap is one coherent story, taken together the book more closely resemble The Pickwick Papers or Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour than anything we’d consider a novel today. One story is about a trip to Coney Island where Emma Hamlet Woodhouse (the turtle) gets lost (temporarily). In another, Maurice comes home to find that Miss Moppet has smuggled a racehorse into the laundry room. A racehouse features again in The Velocipede Handicap, but this time outside the apartment and in the clutches of a bunch of mafiosi.
But just as with P. G. Wodehouse, it’s a mistake to read the Moppet/Lillian/Maurice stories for plot. Good comedy is always about the journey, not the destination. And though King’s characters are gay, there’s nothing more titillating in her books than there is in Wodehouse’s. She does, however, slip in more than a few sly observations from the queer side of life.
On one of her road trips, Lillian sends Miss Moppet a postcard of a redhead stripper from Reno. “It’s true what they say about the West, love L.” reads the inscription. Moppet begs Maurice to explain: what did they say about the West? “They always do say the West is wide open.”
When, at Coney Island, Miss Moppet tells Maurice somewhat haughtily that she doesn’t swim, she wades, he informs her,
Moppet, honey, you can wade elegantly near the shore. It’s out deeper all the evil dykes swim, to show how terribly manly they are. You’d be fifty million times happier just messing around in the shallows with the queens…. You don’t want to go wading in deep water where some butch is likely to drown you without ever knowing it.
So much for the TLS reviewer’s claim that King avoids “sociological exposition.”
Louise W. King, from the dust jacket of The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies.
I have to admit that I found The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies and The Velocipede Handicap somewhat tedious when I first read them straight through (no pun intended) some months ago, and I kept putting off writing this post. But that tends to be true of a lot of comic writing. I thoroughly enjoy S. J. Perelman, for example, whenever I sit down and read one of his pieces. One — not two, and never three. And I’d put the same warning label on these two books: “To Be Consumed in Small Portions.”
Taken in small bites, there is something to enjoy on almost every page. Here, for example, is a moment in a diner, from “The Love Goddess of the Middle West,” about the attempt by Miss Moppet’s third cousin twice removed to make it in the Big Apple as “an editor, or an actress, or a poetress, or all three”:
The Love Goddess said loudly that she’d like a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of sarsparilla to drink, without bothering to say please or thank you. The waitress mopped off the marble top of the table, and carefully wrote down what the Love Goddess wanted on a little pad of paper. No sooner had the waitress turned herself around and got halfway to the safety of the kitchen, than the Love Goddess changed her mind about the sarsparilla. By saying “hey” very insistently several times, the Love Goddess managed to call the girl back. After an unconscionable amount of erasing and a few false starts for the kitchen on the part of the waitress, the Love Goddess settled on a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of sarsparilla.
One of the few critics to mention King’s work after its initial publication called her books “amusing but mindless and stereotyped trash.” While I think that’s quite unfair, I wouldn’t take the Wodehouse comparison too far. One of the reasons we can still read and enjoy Wodehouse is that there is always a certain deftness in his touch. Restraint is crucial for comic writing to survive, and strain is the disease that usually kills it off. King wrote these books in the space of just a couple of years (her first story appeared in The Transatlantic Review in 1962), and there are times when her effort to be funny shows.
Louise W. King only attempted one other work of adult fiction, an apparently un-ironic Gothic thriller titled The Rochemer Hag (1967). She moved to Connecticut, where she took up ceramics and was active in animal rights causes. She self-published a children’s book about two Pekingese puppies, Geronimo and Geranium, in 1979. She died in Washington, Connecticut in 2016.
The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies (1964) The Velocipede Handicap (1965) New York: Doubleday & Company; reissued in 1971 by Curtis Books
Charlotte Salomon’s “autobiographical play” Life or Theater? is often described as a work of Holocaust art. It’s true that Salomon created it while living as a Jewish German refugee in the south of France and that she was arrested, shipped to Auschwitz, and murdered there on 10 October 1943. And the repression of the Jews by the Nazis is a backdrop whose shadows grow longer as the story reaches its climax.
But Life or Theater? is first and foremost a story of private tragedies, tragedies whose full details have only gradually come to light over the course of decades.
Beween July 1940 and February 1943, Salomon, daughter of a wealthy Berlin surgeon, Dr. Albert Salomon, told a story in nearly 1,300 paintings on 10×13-inch sheets of paper with a narrative of 32,000 words of dialogue and description inscribed on their backs. From these, she selected 769, which she entrusted to her French doctor in Villefranche, with instructions for him to pass them on to Ottilie Moore, the German-American millionaire in whose villa Salomon and her grandparents were living. A few months later, she and her husband were arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where she was executed, probably on the day of their arrival.
Charlotte Salomon and her grandparents in France 1939 or 1940.
By the time of her arrest, Salomon’s grandfather was dead. She had killed him, preparing an omelette laced with the poison veronal. As Toni Bentley wrote in her 2017 New Yorker article, “Salomon’s crime that morning was not a mercy killing to save the old man from the Nazis; this was entirely personal.”
Life or Theater? itself is entirely personal, despite its historical context. Every character is someone from Salomon’s life. Its dramas are family dramas, its emotions individual and specific to her. And it is a work of self exploration, though the explorer admits her expedition is incomplete. As she wrote in a preface to what she described as “Ein Singespiel” — a libretto, if you will:
Since I myself needed a year to discover the significance of this strange work, many of the texts and tunes, particularly in the first paintings, elude my memory and must — like the creation as a whole, so it seems to me — remain shrouded in darkness.
The suicide of Charlotte Knare.
The story opens in darkness. The first painting shows a Berlin street at night, what appears to be a bridge, and a sequence of figures — a woman at first but growing less distinct — leading to the darkness at the lower lefthand corner. “One November day, Charlotte Knarre left her parents’ home and threw herself into the water,” the text tells us. Knarre is the name she gives her mother’s family, the Grünwalds; Charlotte Knarre is the aunt for whom she is named, the aunt whose suicide four years before Salomon’s birth proved only the first in a series of deaths that shaped her life.
In the next scene, Dr. Albert Kann, a young military doctor, courts and marries Franziska Knarre. Charlotte is born in 1917, but her mother suffers from depression and, within six panels afterwards, is shown taking an overdose of opium. Though she is found before it can take effect, she then jumps to her death while recouperating at her parents’ apartment. In reality, nine years passed between Charlotte’s birth and her mother’s suicide.
Charlotte waits for her mother to come at night.
Charlotte struggles to understand her mother’s death. She leaves a letter on her mother’s gravestone: “Dear Mommy, please write to me.” She sits up nights expecting her mother to visit, like an angel.
Her life improves somewhat with the arrival of a governess, but then, in 1930, Dr. Kann meets and marries Paulinka (Paulina Lindberg in real life), an aspiring singer. For much of the next few years and several hundred pages, the focus shifts from Charlotte to Paulinka — her increasing popularity as a singer, the obsession of an older man, a theater director, for her and then Paulinka’s own obsession with a poet and mystic named Amadeus Daberlohn (“penniless Mozart”).
For Charlotte, Paulinka is a figure of fascination for her beauty, talent, and glamorous lifestyle — and a source of intense jealousy, first as a competitor for her father’s affection and then as Charlotte herself becomes obsessed with Daberlohn. At the same time, Charlotte learns from her grandmother that she has experienced even more tragedies that the suicide of their two daughters. Her brother and sister also took their lives; her husband has had affairs, stays with her only for the sake of appearances.
Der Sturmer announcement of the boycott of Jews.
History begins to intrude upon this private story at the start of Act Two: “The swastika — a symbol of bright hope!” reads the text over a picture of brownshirts marching down a street, featuring the date “30.I.1933.” By the next panel, however, Der Sturmer announces the boycott of Jewish businesses. Dr. Kann is dismissed from his university post.
Two panels of Daberlohn’s monologues.
But the greater shadow that descends over Charlotte’s world is that of Amadeus Daberlohn. Page after page after page appears with a series of his head and lines of dialogue –or rather, monologue. At one point, there are fifteen straight pages of his head and his talk; at another, nearly a dozen of Daberlohn shown reclining, the images and words growing more rushed and indistinct. One has to wonder whose madness is being depicted: Daberlohn’s or Charlotte’s?
Charlotte and Daberlohn in a park.
Charlotte and Daberlohn meet away from the Kann’s home. He encourages her affection: “You are so beautiful. When you smile, your hands smile too.” The two are shown kissing. Embracing on a park bench. Arm-in-arm on the street.
And the focus shifts again, from Charlotte and Daberlohn to Daberlohn himself. To his attempt to create a masterpiece, an adaptation of the story of Adam and Eve into a contemporary setting. He superimposes this story onto his own relationship with Charlotte. Then he turns his back on her and his “masterpiece” becomes a version of the Resurrection blended with that of Orpheus and Eurydice. “My hopes, therefore, life with the future souls of young girls who are willing to tread the path of Christ, the Orpheus path,” he writes. Daberlohn’s “masterpiece” seems more than a little creepy as portrayed by Charlotte, still clearly infatuated with the man at a distance of some years.
Suddenly, it is 1938, and the public and private tragedies converge and accelerate. The assassination of a Nazi diplomat in Paris by the Jewish exile Herschel Grynszpan incites the destruction of Jewish shops and properties in Kristallnacht. Dr. Kann is sent to prison at Sachsenhausen. Paulinka manages to get him released and they leave Germany for the Netherlands.
After Grandmother Knarre’s suicide attempt.
Charlotte joins her grandparents in France. There, her grandmother attempts to hang herself. In the aftermath, her grandfather reveals more dark family secrets. The grandmother makes another attempt, throwing herself out a window like her daughter had. And succeeding like her daughter had.
Charlotte talks with her grandfather.
Yet, somehow, Charlotte manages to find hope. She draws energy from the warmth and beauty of southern France. “You know, Grandpa,” she says, “I have a feeling the whole world has to be put together again.” To which he replies, “Oh, go ahead and kill yourself and put an end to all this babble!”
“She had to vanish for a while from the human plane and make every sacrifice in order to create her world anew out of the depths,” Charlotte writes of her work over the year following her grandmother’s suicide. “And from that came: Life or Theater?”
This ending omits the poisoned omelette. And none of the words in Salomon’s text touch on the question that naturally arises when one learns of it: what was Salomon’s real motivation for killing her grandfather? It is hard not to look for answers in the pictures, however. Is there another untold story, a story about abuse, lurking in the many dark pages of Life or Theater?, written beneath the pages and pages of talking heads and feverish monologues, in the frenzied speed that seems to have driven Salomon’s brush throughout so much of this project?
The last panel of Life or Theater?
The last image shows Charlotte in a bathing suit, kneeling on the beach, looking out over the blue Mediterranean as she paints or sketches. On her back are painted the words Leben Oder Theater. When I first read the book, I assumed the question was being posed as a choice between Life (as in real life) and Theater (as in Art). But now I wonder if Salomon intended it to be read differently: as a choice between Life (her own desire to draw inspiration from the beauty around her, to put the world together again) and Theater, as in the Greek tragedy, the family drama that the women in her family seemed to feel condemned to sacrifice themselves to.
Life or Theater? has appeared several times in English, each time with more material as new papers and paintings are discovered. The best and most comprehensive was the 2017 edition from the Overlook Press. Unfortunately, this edition is already out of print and hard to find. Taschen’s edition from the same year is still available, though it’s slightly abridged. Previous versions appeared in 1963, with a foreword by the theologian Paul Tillich, and in 1981 following the exhibition of 250 paintings at the Jewish History Museum in Amsterdam.
In all cases, the book is presented as an art book — large and very heavy with its hundreds of pages of full-color images. But I think this does the book as a book some disservice. For it can also be seen as a graphic novel. Indeed, many of its images will seem familiar to today’s readers, much more accustomed to the presentation of graphic novels.
Take this image from early in the book, showing Charlotte’s mother and father at the hotel when they spend their wedding night. Three wordless panels as they progress up the staircase, into the room, and into the bed.
The wedding night of Charlotte’s parents.
In 1943, this would have seemed novel, more like three shots from a film than any painting. But we can easily picture similar images from a book by Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown or Jimmy Corrigan. And I do hope that one day some editor will have the courage to package the book in this way. Not only because it seems truer to the spirit of the book, but also because its readership will remain limited as long as reading it means holding a great ten-pound lump in the lap for hours at a time.
Life or Theater? is one of the most intense and moving works of autofiction I’ve ever read, and I highly encourage others to discover it, even in ten-pound lump form.
Life or Theater? by Charlotte Salomon New York: Overlook Press, 2017
Most Americans couldn’t explain what the Department of the Interior does, so one could ask why anyone would want to read over 2,000 pages of the diary of the man who ran the department over eighty years ago. I suspect it’s easily the least likely candidate for the #1954 Club, the latest in Simon Thomas and Karen Langley’s twice-yearly call for readers to write about books published in a particular year. Most of the books people offer during these events are novels, and most of these by British women. When I looked through various lists of notable books from 1954, though, I had to pause when I came to The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, Volume III: the Lowering Clouds, 1939-1941. Back in another century when I was obsessed by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, I’d read Volume I: The First Thousand Days, 1933-1936 and started Volume II: The Inside Struggle, 1936-1939 before running out of steam. This seemed a fit occasion to tackle it again.
FDR’s first Cabinet, March 1933. Harold Ickes is second from left, back row.
It’s not unusual to be worn out by Harold Ickes. A lot of people were. Indeed, one of the tributes to FDR’s strength of character was his ability to put up with having Ickes in his Cabinet for the entire length of his Presidency, a record of Secretarial tenure exceeded by only one other person in America history. Ickes was often referred to in the popular press as a curmudgeon and in private conversations as many other things best left unrepeated. Walter Lippmann once called him “the greatest living master of the art of quarrelling.” As one of his biographers, Graham White, has written, “Ickes seemed to lack insight into his own motives, to be sometimes obtuse in understanding others, to become obsessed with certain goals to a degree that approached the irrational.” One Washington commentator described him as “a man of bad temper and good will,” and anyone who reads his diary will agree that those descriptors are in the right order.
Ickes was a classic American liberal. He started as a progressive Republican, followed Teddy Roosevelt to the Bull Moose Party, then became a Democrat to support candidates he saw as advancing the causes he believed in most: breaking up big corporate trusts, obtaining safe and fair conditions for working people, expanding the availability of public schools and housing, fulfilling the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 14th Amendment. He headed the Chicago chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1920s, arranged for the black contralto Marian Anderson to perform at the Lincoln Memorial after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her sing in their auditorium in Washington, D.C. in 1939, opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor. As Secretary of the Interior, he played a crucial role in the New Deal by running the Public Works Administration and helped greatly expand the number and size of National and state parks with the help of the Civilian Conservation Corps. When he finally stepped down from the Cabinet, it was in protest against what he saw as President Truman’s sanctioning of corruption and cronyism in the Federal Government.
Harold Ickes in 1937.
But he was also handicapped by the dangerous combination of a big ego and a thin skin. FDR brought Ickes into the Cabinet to keep the support of the left wing of the Democratic Party, but he deliberately put him in charge of a department recognized by everyone as being in the second rank of the Executive Branch. A generation after Ickes, the reporter Stewart Alsop would write that, “Interior only becomes clearly visible on the horizon of Political Washington when there is a row about the redwoods, or the Indiana dunes, or shale oil,” and though the topics may have been different in the 1930s, nothing had changed in terms of visibility or importance in the intervening years.
The two great issues that tend to consume the attention and energy of American presidents are the domestic economy and national security. This is starkly illustrated by FDR’s time in office, which can be divided neatly into the period when he was primarily concerned with bringing the Great Depression to an end and the years when he was consumed with America’s involvement in the Second World War. Nothing got under Harold Ickes’s skin as much as the fact that he could only play a supporting role in these dramas.
It was a critical role at times, particularly in the first years of FDR’s administration, when Ickes organized and ran the Public Works Administration, which employed millions of workers on infrastructure projects such as the Grand Coulee Dam, the Lincoln Tunnel, and the chain of bridges connecting Key West to the Florida mainland. But Ickes could not be satisfied with merely being a good public administrator, as much as he more than anyone else at the time believed in the value of such figures.
Importance in a political context correlates to power, and political power take two forms: formal authority and influence. Of the two, influence tends to be the more highly sought after. No power is so contested in Washington as that of being able to get the President to listen to what you have to say. Harold Ickes was tenacious in getting on FDR’s agenda at least once every week or so, preferably one-on-one or in small groups, and Ickes’s diary continues to be a primary source for historians studying Roosevelt. “I lunched with the President”, “I told the President”, and similar statements appear hundreds of times in these pages.
Ickes felt comfortable offering FDR advice on topics well outside his portfolio. One of the statements most often quoted from the diary comes from an entry in February 1938 at which Ickes argued that the U.S. should lift its embargo on selling arms to the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. FDR told him that he’d discussed the matter with the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader in the Senate, and both felt that supporting the Republicans would lose Democrats the support of many Catholic voters. “This was the cat that was actually in the bag,” Ickes wrote afterwards in fury, “and it is the mangiest, scabbiest cat ever.” To Ickes, it proved that there was a conspiracy of conservative Catholics in the U.S. and Great Britain to make it easier for Franco to win.
Harold Ickes with FDR (L) and his arch-rival, Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace (R).
Unfortunately for Ickes, he was working for the cagiest President ever to occupy the White House. FDR once tellingly said, “You know, I’m a juggler, and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does.” He often gave members of his administration conflicting instructions simply to elicit which of them would prove more adept in coming out on top of the resulting squabbles. If FDR had on occasion to smooth Ickes’s ruffled feathers or flatter Ickes’s ego by appearing to take his advice, he would do it to serve his purposes. Ickes seems to have believed that, on the whole, FDR esteemed his advice highly. His diary, however, suggests otherwise. It’s clear that while FDR listened to Ickes selectively, Ickes pored over every communication with the President like a reader of tea leaves.
One reason FDR probably discounted Ickes’s counsel was that Ickes could never understand that influence tends to trumps formal authority. The only thing Ickes pursued more zealously than face time with the President was the preservation and expansion of the scope of his department. It’s very rare for substantive new functions to be established within any bureaucracy. Instead, battles over formal authority are almost always territorial disputes. For Ickes to increase the power of the Interior Department, it could only be by taking some away from another department. Throughout his time as Secretary, no territory so obsessed him as the U. S. Forest Service.
For reasons that few taxpayers could explain, the U. S. Forest Service was established under the Department of Agriculture, while the National Parks Service falls under the Department of the Interior. Ickes had a legitimate argument that the government could better ensure the conservation of forest land by transferring the Forest Service to Interior, but the cause was, in fact, driven as much by personal ambition as civic vision. When Ickes first brought up the idea with FDR in early 1934, the President was blithely supportive, telling Ickes that if he “could bring it about, it would be quite all right so far as he was concerned.”
That wording is classic FDR. He was, in effect, placing all the responsibility on Ickes’s shoulder. As Ickes himself recognized, although the Department of Agriculture had a smaller budget and staff than Interior, it also had, in a House and Senate still imbalanced in favor of rural voters, exceptionally strong support for maintaining its status quo. FDR was sending Ickes out to land Moby Dick with a rowboat and a butter knife. Seven years later, Ickes was still pressing FDR on the case for moving the Forest Service to Interior. And FDR was still nodding in mild encouragement. To this day, the Forest Service remains under Agriculture.
Ickes also protected his own territory like a junkyard dog. It helped that he had an ultra-sensitive conspiracy detector. Just two weeks after joining the Cabinet, Ickes told the President that, “in my judgment, a well-conceived conspiracy was in process of being carried out to make my position in the Cabinet untenable.” When, in 1939, FDR decided it would be necessary to adapt the Public Works Administration, moving it out from Interior and shifting its focus to war preparations, Ickes came close to resigning in anger. FDR invited him up to Hyde Park for a placating chat, but sent him home with a letter that was less gentle in tone: “My dear Harold, will you ever grow up? [FDR was eight years younger than Ickes.] Don’t you realize that I am thinking in terms of the Government of the United States not only during this Administration but during many Administrations to come?” FDR closed the letter, however, by assuring Ickes that, “For the hundredth time, I am not forgetting Forestry.”
One reviewer described Ickes the diarist as “Pepys with a chip on his shoulder.” In these pages, Walter Trohan of The Chicago Tribune wrote, “Ickes dies a thousand deaths in welters of self-pity, indignation, injured feelings, frustration, and tears.” Bankers, oil companies, Senators, Congressmen, White House staffers, journalists, lobbyists, and even life-long friends show up as hostile blips on Ickes’s ego-defense radar. In small doses, it’s amusing. At the length of these three volumes, it’s exhausting.
What’s also exhausting, but recounted in perhaps unparalleled detail, is the endless give-and-take involved in working in and around the highest levels of a national government. An enormous amount of Ickes’s time is consumed in meetings with members of Congress, staff from the White House, staff from his own department, to develop, test, refine, lobby for, defend, salvage, and, occasionally, resurrect proposals for new programs or changes in priorities and policies. Despite the considerable erosion of bi-partisan cooperation in Washington, this back-and-forth, give-and-take is the reality of how politics work at the Federal level. One needn’t read three volumes of Ickes’s diary to understand this, but it’s still a useful illustration of much the success of the good ideas that get through depends on the willingness of a few key people to push for them almost to the point of insanity.
Ickes’s diary also shows how politics is always enmeshed with personal issues, and none more than personal ambition. Almost every entry includes one or more conversations about what jobs are up for grabs, who are the likely candidates, who are backing them, what are their relative advantages and drawbacks. In Ickes’s day, there were many fewer so-called “Plum Jobs” (“Federal civil service leadership and support positions in the legislative and executive branches of the Federal Government that may be subject to noncompetitive appointment,” to quote GovInfo.gov), but the wheeling and dealing over appointments was a constant subject of discussion. Here, for example, is part of the entry for 24 January 1937:
Vice President Garner discussed the personnel of the joint committee that is to be appointed to consider the President’s reorganization plan. He brought up the name of Senator Byrd [Harry Flood Byrd, long-time senator from Virginia] in this connection, but the President objected to the inclusion of Byrd because he has been fighting his plan in favor of one of his own. I leaned over to Jim Farley and whispered to him that for my part I would rather take care of a man on the inside than on the outside and that I thought it would be good policy to appoint Byrd. Jim agreed and quoted what I had said but the President seemed to be set against Byrd. The Vice President also agreed with me, and finally the President said he would leave the matter to him. I rather suspect that the Vice President will appoint Byrd as a member of this committee and I hope that he will.
I quote this at length not to highlight Ickes’s prose style, which is unexceptional, but just to show how tiresome these discussions must have been. And this business with Byrd comes up two more times in the diary before a final decision is taken.
The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes is not particularly good literature. When it was first published, excerpts from the first two volumes were serialized in newspapers across the country. But back then, the memory of FDR and the personalities of his administration were still fresh in people’s minds. Today, the diary is illuminating not because we remember or care who Tommy Corcoran or David Lilienthal were but because it remains the most candid account of the grinding day-in, day-out work of governing.
As Graham White has put it, “It allows us to observe, from Ickes’ highly distinctive perspective, the messy processes of official decision-making; the rancorous controversies that disturbed the affairs of state; the personal charm and manipulative skills of a president who deftly kept his unruly team together; and, through all these things, the subtle and shifting relationship between idealism and ambition, principle and power.” Along with all the bargaining and sore feelings and backstairs deals that Ickes records, we also have a record of some of the boldest programs in American history, set down by a man who may have had a giant chip on his shoulder — but who also had the personal integrity not to hide this from the reader.
Ickes kept a diary the entire time he was in office. He was known for scribbling notes in most meetings, notes he would then use to dictate the first drafts of his diary entries. Considering the hectic schedule of a Cabinet secretary, even in the days before constant connectivity and social media, his commitment to keeping a record of his activities demonstrates — depending on your perspective — admirable discipline or a relentless compulsion.
The complete work amounts to an estimated six million words. His widow, Jane, helped edit these volumes, which appeared after Ickes’s death in 1952, but the publication of the remaining period (Volume III ends with FDR’s speech on December 8 calling for a declaration of war on Japan) was stopped when her relationship with the publisher, Simon and Schuster, broke down. At this point, it’s unlikely that further volumes will ever appear.
The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, Volume I-III New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953-1954
Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.
The complete work amounts to an estimated six million words. His widow, Jane, helped edit these volumes, which appeared after Ickes’s death in 1952, but the publication of the remaining period (Volume III ends with FDR’s speech on December 8 calling for a declaration of war on Japan) was stopped when her relationship with the publisher, Simon and Schuster, broke down. At this point, it’s unlikely that further volumes will ever appear.