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
Proximity is often what leads me to discover a neglected book. Whenever I look into reviews of something I’m planning to write about, I scan through the other titles discussed. This is most useful with reviews in British newspapers and magazines from the 1930s to the 1970s, when it was the habit of the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and other journals to have a reviewer — and sometimes, quite prominent writers such as L. P. Hartley, Angus Wilson, or Anita Brookner — to cover three to five new works of fiction in the space of an 800-word article.
In this case, it was Angela Milne’s review of Veronica Hull’s novel The Monkey Puzzle that led me to No Bedtime Story (1958), the last of a half-dozen novels that Mary Nicholson, née Crawford, published between 1932 and 1958. Milne described the book as “told by a small boy of a nameless oppressed country” in the days following a popular uprising against the ruling regime. In light of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and on the heels of reading a similar account of a revolution in a nameless European country and its refugees, Monica Stirling’s Sigh for a Strange Land, I was intrigued. While there were almost no used copies available, they were cheap, so I bought one.
Were No Bedtime Story to be published today, it would probably be categorized as a young adult novel. The story is narrated by a boy named Jacko, probably around nine or ten, living with his mother, father, and little sister Vicky in the capital of a country that might just as well be Hungary or any other landlocked European state. (All we know is that the sea lies somewhere across the border.) His father is an activist, a leader of the printer’s union, which seems to be organizing against some status quo, some combination of political and economic forces, and he often hosts meetings — sometimes attended by men with foreign accents — at their apartment.
But all we see and know is through Jacko’s eyes and thoughts. And for him, the story begins when the radio announcer says she is sorry: “Children’s Hour was cancelled. She said we weren’t to be cross about going to bed without our bedtime story.” The next morning, Jacko’s father leaves early. “It’s a day of great events,” he tell his family. His mother sends Jacko to school with Vicky, but the streets seem mostly deserted aside from a figure or two rushing along.
When Jacko and Vicky arrive at the school, there is talk of the “great events,” but no one quite knows what is going on. Everyone is sent home. From their apartment window, Jacko sees crowds rushing down the streets carrying flags and policemen chasing after them, knocking down and arresting a few. His mother puts on her green overcoat and leaves, telling Jacko that she’s going to do some shopping. She does not return.
The next morning, knowing no better, Jacko dresses and feeds Vicky and the two head to school again. Now, there is no one but Christina, a student teacher, and Banger, a neighborhood delinquent. Leaving Vicky in their care, he heads to the city’s main center to try and find his mother. He comes across some men loading bodies into a truck. A skirmish breaks out and he jumps into the truck with the men, who drive to the edge of town. There, he sees hundreds of bodies:
They were arranged tidily in rows, so I was able to walk down between them, when I had dodged out of sight of the lorry, looking for the green coat. I didn’t think it was any use looking at the faces, because some of them were not like faces. The clothes were torn, too, but not so much.
I found the green coat at last, and the face, which was not bloody at all. But it was white and glossy like a candle, and though it looked like my mother, it was also quite wrong. I might not have been certain it was her, except that she still had her string bag, helf-full of fading spinach, twisted round her wrist.
This passage captures what is best about No Bedtime Story, which is Crawford’s skill in capturing the mix of concrete details and incomplete comprehension with which a child might perceive a chaotic situation. We know that some kind of revolution is going on, that tanks are rolling down the streets, that people are either huddled together in their apartments or trying to escape to safety in another country. There are scenes we are all too familiar with: a tank knocking down the wall around a suburban garden, blowing a hole into a family’s home; people running away from gunfire; roads clogged with people fleeing and airplanes swooping down to spray them with bullets.
The disarray and confusion that occurs when a war crashes into a civilian population is amplified by Jacko’s youth and lack of a frame of reference. When he hears a great screaming noise, sees a great shadow pass over him, feels the blast of heat from an explosion, it takes him a moment to understand that a plane has been shot down. When he then comes across a man in a fly suit, a parachute strung out behind him, crawling feebly to drink from a pool of water, he doesn’t know if this whose side the airman is on: he simply acts on instincts and pushes the man into the water, drowning him.
I found the simple details and abstract setting of No Bedtime Story highly effective. It was hard not to project images from the war in the Ukraine onto some of its scenes. Several contemporary reviewers, however, had reservations about Crawford’s decision to use a child as her narrator. Anthony Cronin, writing in the TLS, acknowledged that “the story is told skillfully enough; there is no obvious insincerity.” “Yet,” he wrote with some suspicion, “we have the feeling that use is being made of a child’s eyes for an adult purpose.” He felt that Crawford was pushing an agenda, probably a liberal one: “We know of course that all political action leads to evil but there are ways and ways of telling us.”
Portrait of Mary Crawford by Elizabeth Henderson, from the flyleaf of No Bedtime Story.
Angus Wilson, on the other hand, considered the novel a “tour de force that completely comes off,” but had reservations about the consequences of Crawford’s choice: “Nevertheless, even the greatest novel seen through a child’s eyes can never, I believe, be more than a tour de force.” “The vision is too limited,” he argued. “What the author gains by the brilliance of imposing this limitation accurately, he loses in the intellectual and imaginative scope of what can be told.”
To me, this is the objection of a writer who simply could never see himself making the same choice. Every narrator — even supposedly omniscient ones — is, in effect, a lens that focuses or disperses light in a particular way. In this case, I think Crawford has chosen a lens that accurately captures the experience of finding oneself in the midst of chaos. People say of such an experience that everything happens in a blur. But that isn’t true. Many things seem to be in a blur, while a few things stand out in perfect focus. And that was very much the feeling Mary Crawford conveys in No Bedtime Story.
No Bedtime Story by Mary Crawford London: Putnam, 1958
Robert Harling? Steel Magnolias and The First Wives Club? American playwright, actor and film producer?
No – not that one.
This one: Robert Harling, British author of eighteen titles (fiction and non-fiction) and variously a bookseller, printer, Royal Navy Reserve officer, advertising executive, typographer, veteran magazine editor and cloak-and-dagger commando. And, just possibly, one of the many candidates whose qualities came together to form James Bond in the mind of Ian Fleming. (He certainly has a good claim to this, since he and Fleming were friends of long-standing.)
Harling’s name has fallen out of public recognition. He would have been — even at his peak — a mid-list author, although sufficiently strong-selling that one publisher stuck with him throughout his writing career (and he with them, of course): all of his novels were published originally by Chatto & Windus.
Among other things, Harling had been a writer and typographer and enthusiastic amateur sailor before joining the Royal Navy Reserve at the outbreak of the Second World War. After the war, between 1951 and 1979, he wrote seven very good novels mostly dealing with journalism or having backgrounds based in the newspaper world. They were not quite thrillers, not quite literary fiction but certainly not pulp. Grahame Greene would probably have called them ‘entertainments”.
He also wrote eleven other non-fiction works, including two published before the war, on subjects as diverse as: the typography of Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden (both books being regarded as authoritative still); typographic styles; London by-ways; and famous homes and gardens.
His ability to present information cogently, his friendship and not least his wartime exploits – first in charge of a whaler off the beaches of Dunkirk, then as navigating officer on corvettes assigned to convoy duties in the Western Approaches and the Mediterranean – culminated in him being recruited by Ian Fleming to join 30 Independent Assault Unit, which undertook all sorts of specialist tasks towards the end of the war, with minimal official sanction and maximum dash and daring. He and Fleming had met at a book launch party just before the war.
After the war, Harling became a design adviser to newspapers (including The Times where he held a long-standing consultancy) and then joined Homes and Garden magazine, where he stayed as editor for twenty–eight years, nurturing a band of young journalists into distinguished authorities on cooking, interior design and gardening.
He was also a fabulist.
It was only on his death in 2008 at the age of 98 that it became apparent that much of the story of his early life had been a fiction he’d invented.
Far from being an only child orphaned young and brought up by an aunt and uncle in Brighton (the story he had told even his children), he and his brother had been brought up in Islington. His father was a taxi driver and he had married (and divorced) early. Many of his family relationships he Harling concealed, for unknown, and unknowable, reasons.
It does appear that he ran a bookshop in Holborn briefly, but whether as proprietor or manager is unclear. He spent some time at the Daily Mail but then left to work as a printer in two specialist printing houses. By the beginning of the war, he had begun to develop a reputation as a minor authority on typefaces as editor of the journal Typography. He developed at least three new typefaces which have endured and on his death was described in the Times obituary as ‘the most innovative and distinguished typographer of the last century’. Some claim!
Aside from his typographical expertise, Harling is worth remembering for a number of his books. The Amateur Sailor and The Steep Atlantick Stream, the two he wrote about his time at sea, are the equal and possible superiors of The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat, one of the most famous books about the Royal Navy in the Second World War. The Cruel Sea is not presented as anything but fiction and drew heavily on Monsarrat’s conversations with fellow officers in addition to his own experiences as an officer in corvettes and frigates in the Battle of the North Atlantic. One of the turning points in the novel, for example, comes when the ship Compass Rose is torpedoed. None of Monsarrat’s ships was torpedoed, and this stunning feat of plot and descriptive writing is all derived from second-hand information, possibly from someone involved in the sinking of HMS Firedrake in 1942.
The Cruel Sea, both the 1951 book and the 1953 film, was responsible for weaving into British boyhoods the myths and legends of the Second World War. It is without doubt, a great piece of writing that conveys the terror, stress and exhaustion of fighting a long, dogged war with the both the sea and human foes as the perpetual enemy. Harling’s books do the same, if perhaps less showily. They are less obviously fiction — although given his propensity to invent it cannot be held that they are entirely autobiographical. They are probably heavily embellished fact. They also avoid the serious flaw of Monsarrat’s book — a sub-plot of love interest in the second half of the book which grates oddly with the intensity of the main story and, far from acting as counter-point, distracts from the overall impact of the book.
The other candidates for burnishing his neglected memory are his novels based in Fleet Street – the ‘old’ Fleet street of hot metal printing and larger than life reporters and editors, particularly The Paper Palace and The Hollow Sunday.
The Paper Palace, written in 1951, was Harling’s first ‘civilian’ novel and his first venture into obvious fiction. The story concerns a columnist tasked by his editor, much against his objections, to uncover the reasons behind an obituary about a Communist written by a very capitalist newspaper proprietor – in fact their newspaper proprietor. This bare plot is the means of erecting a very satisfactory scaffolding about a power struggle between the editor and the proprietor, with the columnist being the instrument by which the duel is (partially) resolved. It is an exemplary ‘Fleet Street’ novel with the relationships between the two antagonists superbly described through the experiences of the columnist.
His second novel, The Dark Saviour (1952) continues the Fleet Street theme with a New York correspondent (who may or may not be the same man) being told by his London office to investigate an evangelistic, mystical revolutionary whose emotional appeal to the population is threatening the stability of a Caribbean island — run mostly for an elite. There are multiple betrayals between the characters and, like the correspondent, the reader is never quite sure whom to trust.
The Enormous Shadow (1955) is more obviously towards the thriller end of the spectrum; the denouement is much more ‘actionist’ than the previous two novels he had written to that date. The main protagonist is again a newspaper columnist (this time a recalled Washington correspondent) who is asked to pursue the story of the disappearance of a conscience-stricken atomic scientist. The scandal of the defections of Burgess and Maclean in 1951 were still in the front of the public memory and the novel draws on a similar context. As with the previous novel, there is a love-interest element, well-handled, which is central to the story.
The background to The Endless Colonnade (1958) departs from the world of journalism, having as its protagonist a holidaying physician taking his first holiday after the death of his wife. Meeting an attractive Italian woman who flirts with him turns into an affair. She entrusts him with a secret that may endanger both of them; needless to say, the female character is a foundation for the entirety of the story. The format of the novel is also different from the previous three being much more like a journal written by the protagonist than a third person omniscient narrator. Without spoiling the story, the conclusion is melancholy and much like an ending of a Greene novel.
The Hollow Sunday (1967) returns very successfully to Fleet Street and is occasionally cited (by journalists) as being one of the best of the genre, up there with Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop and Michael Frayn’s Toward the End of the Morning. The plot concerns the introduction of new technology into the printing of newspapers and how that will up-end the economics of the business. It is another ‘power-struggle’ story with politics and adultery thrown in for good measure. The characters are both well-drawn and likeable/dislikeable as required.
The Athenian Widow (1974) continues the investigative reporter theme — not a door-stepping tabloid man but a more genteel and refined exponent of the subtly pointed question and thorough, but discreet, research. It deals with issues of truth and journalistic responsibility. Somewhat flatter than the other Fleet Street books he wrote, it is slower in both development and outcome but no less gripping on its own terms.
Finally, in 1979, came The Summer Portrait, his last novel. Harling departed radically from previous themes and chose as the main character a painter on the verge of fame who paints the portraits of two very different people as summer commissions. Through them he has love affairs, all the while caught on the dilemma of whether to commit himself to one lover, or not. It is a very satisfying read, although much slower perhaps in some ways than anything else he wrote but, again, the conclusion is almost Greene-like.
In all his books, Harling’s writing is fluid, well-paced and engaging. He is a craftsman: he does not write bad sentences; the conversations and dialogue are well-enough handled — even at the distance of thirty, forty or fifty years — to be realistic and not stilted; though, admittedly, some of the words used to describe characters might now be regarded as unusable and the concepts about the dynamics of relationships (particularly between men and women) are very much of their time.
Harling was a psychological writer rather than one who relied on twists in the plot to drive books forward. What marks out his books is the psychological depth to the descriptions of his characters — going deeper into motivations and thoughts than simply skating along on plot and action. But the analysis is not so deep or introverted to be a drag on the plot and always relevant to the decisions that the characters take. . They are not flat cut-outs responding to the plot but rather the plot is pushed on by the psychological foibles, strengths and weaknesses – even the moral dilemmas — of the characters.
Harling was able to write convincingly about the effects of the demons which drove others to do things that they were often not proud of or had to defend against their own consciences and others’ criticisms. He probably conveyed much of himself through his novels in writing about the way his characters behaved.
Engagingly, Harling writes very well about women (at least from a male reader’s perspective). Although they conform to a certain type throughout his novels they are substantial and rounded characters. Their contributions to the plot are never peripheral and most often are central. This might be seen as unusual given the time in which he is writing. Harling’s female characters might not be as forceful as those of some modern authors but they are far more than the decorative ciphers of say, his great friend Fleming or any of the other fifties/sixties thriller writers like Maclean or even Innes..
None of his books were made into films (although The Paper Palace and The Enormous Shadow were both adapted into tv plays, one with Denholm Elliott in the lead role) – which may explain to some extent their lack of longevity in the public’s interest. Given the psychological complexity of Harling’s male central characters, it is an interesting parlour game to speculate who might have played them if the films had been made: Cary Grant is an obvious candidate for the suave, worldly columnist of, say, The Paper Palace. But generally he is a little too smooth for anything else. James Mason is sufficiently hard-edged for at least three of the stories perhaps but doesn’t have the crucial self-doubt that Harling’s central characters often display. Connery might have pulled it off more often than not – especially in The Enormous Shadow and The Athenian Widow. The tough one to cast would have been The Hollow Sunday. All of the male central characters are self-doubters to some extent, analytical of their own motives and very much the dissectors of the behaviour of others, which is why the books are such good reads.
Harling was not universally popular as a colleague. Not particularly gregarious, he shunned his own (secretly-prepared) retirement party from The Times with a rude remark about such affairs being nauseating. He admitted that some of the sparkle went out of his life when Fleming died. But he also found fierce devotees in the staff of House and Garden, some of whom – the cookery writer Elizabeth David for example – became famous in their own right after being taken on by the magazine.
Perhaps his attempts to conceal his background – successful until after his death – fostered his reluctance to talk much about himself, lest he betray his story. The last book he wrote – Ian Fleming: A Personal Memoir — was completed by his daughter and published posthumously. The title was probably chosen to capitalise on the cult of Bond, since it is mostly about Harling rather than Fleming (although it does reveal something of Fleming’s sexual proclivities in passing).
The book is something of an essay at autobiography, dealing extensively with Harling’s exploits in 30 Assault Unit. But even in this he could not bring himself to tell the complete truth about his past. Perhaps, having spun the story that long (he died at the age of 98), it had become more real than the truth – so “print the legend”.
Keeping people at arms length is one way of concealing one’s own history. And private people often listen well and become the most acute evaluators of others foibles, since they are testing themselves against what they see in others and vice versa. Writing then becomes a way of explaining personalities.
But few people who do those things can write as well as Harling did.
Robert Harling 27 March 1910 – 1 July 2008
As an ex-journalist and writer of academic texts, Stephen Bloomfield is baffled why so many excellent books become neglected.
Photo of the cover of Laugh a Defiance courtesy of Sarra Manning.
I recently engaged in a brief and pointless debate on Twitter with an impassioned adherent of the school of Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” who argued that it was not only unnecessary to know anything about the person who wrote a book but limiting, the intellectual equivalent of showing up to compete in the Tour de France with a set of training wheels.
To read Laugh a Defiance, Mary Richardson’s memoir of her experiences in the Suffragette movement without some biographical context, however, would set you up to reach some seriously mistaken conclusions. On the surface, it’s terrific book — immediate yet self-reflective, moving but frequently quite funny. You would wonder why on Earth it’s been out of print since 1953.
Mary Richardson was a Canadian woman who settled in England and was working as a reporter for the Toronto Globe and other Canadian newspapers when, one day in early 1913, she encountered a young man distributing Suffragette pamphlets. This led to a meeting with Christabel Pankhurst, and she was soon set to work in the campaign aimed at raising public awareness through acts of property destruction. On her first mission, she threw rocks through windows of the Home Office before she was chased away by policemen. She was able to get away in part due to their being encumbered by heavy capes, which, she observed, “must surely have been designed before any idea of quick-footed, quick-firing felons like Suffragettes had disturbed the official mind.”
Richardson was an ideal foot soldier for the cause. “I was better able to undertake the more difficult tasks,” she wrote, “in that I had no family to worry about me and no one I needed to worry over. In the fullest sense I was free to do what was asked.” Soon after stoning Whitehall, she was sent to the Derby on the day that King Edward II and Queen Alexandra would be in attendance. There, as she stood holding a copy of The Suffragette in her hand, she watched in horror as one of her fellow militants, Emily Davison, calmly slipped under the rail, stepped into the racecourse in front of the oncoming horses and riders, and was knocked down and fatally injured. The hostility of the mob towards Davison, both at the track and at her funeral, only hardened Richardson’s resolve.
Richardson joined the Suffragettes when they had made a deliberate shift in tactics, one aimed at raising awareness of the movement through acts of disruption and, in particular, the destruction of property. This was considered an appropriate response to a prevailing order in which “values were stressed from the financial point of view and not the human.” She witnessed this attitude in its most glaring self-contradiction when she and several others tried to interrupt an Anglican church service to offer a prayer for Emmeline Pankhurst, then gravely ill in Holloway Prison. Their actions, she wrote, “had the effect of so changing the faces of Christians that they resembled gargoyles on their own medieval churches.”
Some of the incidents recalled in Laugh a Defiance make you want to cheer for their ingeuity. Marion Wallace-Dunlop, raised in a stern Scottish family and reluctant to become involved in violence, arranged for a male friend to sneak her into the House of Commons disguised as an older woman. Once there, she started marking up the walls of the lobby with an inked rubber stamp reading, “No taxation without representation.” When MPs finally noticed what she was doing, much of one wall was defaced and it took hours for cleaners to remove the graffiti. Wallace-Dunlop later introduced the hunger strike as a non-violent response to the abusive treatment the Suffragettes received in prison.
Few Suffragettes saw the inside of a prison as often as Mary Richardson. Between July 1913 and June 1914, she was arrested nine times, and she was one of the first to be subjected to forced feeding, the initial and barbaric response to the Suffragette’s hunger strikes. Heading off on one mission, she handed a bundle of her things to a housemate and told her, “If I’m not back for breakfast tomorrow morning, send this parcel to His Majesty’s prison at Holloway for me.” After the Cat and Mouse Act was passed, prisoners such as Richardson who staged hunger strikes were merely discharged when they fell ill and weak and then imprisoned again once they’d recovered, but that didn’t stop prisoner authorities from trying get the upper hand. On one visit to Holloway, the warders sent in a woman trained in ju jitsu to subdue her.
Article on Mary Richardson’s slashing of the Rokeby Venus, from The Daily Mail.
Richardson’s best known act of destruction was her slashing of Velasquez’s painting The Toilet of Venus, better known as the Rokeby Venus, in the National Gallery in March 1914. For Richardson, the Venus and its prominent display — then one of the most expensive works of art in the gallery — symbolized much that she despised in the British establishment, including its public display of the nude female form. So, acting alone, she decided to damage or destroy the painting as an act of protest.
She bought what she refers to as an axe — but in photos looks more like a cleaver — at an ironmongers in Theobalds Road, then walked to the National Gallery. She slipped the cleaver up her sleeve and entered. The Venus painting was being guarded by two police detectives and, at first, there was enough of a crowd that it was impractical for her to approach the painting. So, she wandered for a while, then returned and started to sketch in a drawing pad. When one of the detectives left the room, the other took out a newspaper and she saw her opportunity:
I dashed up the the painting. My first blow with the axe merely broke the protective glass. But, of course, it did more than that, for the detective rose with his newspaper still in his hand and walked round the red plush seat, staring up at the skylight which was being repaired.
Though the detective and the nearest attendant were caught off guard, two visitors were not:
Two Baedeker guide books, truly aimed by German tourists, came cracking against the back of my neck. By this time, too, the detective, having decided that the breaking glass had no connectio with the skylight, sprang on me and dragged the axe from my hand. As if out of the very walls angry people seemed to appear round me. I was dragged this way and that; but as on other occasions, the fury of the crowd helped me. In the ensuing commotion we were all mied together in a tight bunch. No one knew who should or should not be attacked. More than one innocent woman must have received a blow meant for me.
Amazingly, this was not her last blow for the Suffragettes. Once in prison, she again went on a hunger strike and she again was released after falling ill. While out, however, she took on another job that was almost as spectacular, if not as public. She and another young woman, a new recruit, were sent to torch a large but abandoned country house on an estate outside London. Finding the grounds surrounded by a dense hedge, the recruit balked. Richardson simply wrapped her scarf around her head and went crashing through it.
She made her way to the house, dowsed the walls and floor with kerosene, and climbed outside to set light to the fuse. As soon as the flame caught, she ran back to where she’d broken through the hedge. Expecting the police to show up at any moment, she began crawling on hands and knees across the field when, “Suddenly, I felt a moist gust of warm air in my face and froze with horror.” In the darkness, she had smacked into the side of a cow.
Though she was quickly apprehended and charged, this would be her last mission. After war was declared in early August 1914, Emmeline Pankhurst called the Suffragette’s campaign to a halt and urged the women to support the war effort.
In popular accounts, the actions of the Suffragettes have taken on a certain rosiness of hue. No doubt their acts of protest were heroic and dramatic and their punishment by police and jailers disproportionate to their crimes. But some historians question the efficacy of their tactics. Brian Harrison and Martin Pugh have suggested that non-militancy, rather than militancy, and particularly violent militancy, ultimately played a bigger role in winning the vote for women.
In a detailed survey of Suffragette acts of destruction, C. J. Bearman raises the question: Did the WSPU’s campaign of distruption actually work? Based on his analysis, “The only returnable answer is that it did not. The main reasons for the militancy’s failure were that it did little economic damage and that it visibly lacked mass support….” The acts of arson, in particular, made not even a marginal difference in the number of arsons that occurred in an ordinary year — in fact, fire damage in the greater London area decreased in 1913, the year when WPSU arsonists were most active.
And ironically, Richardson herself recounts a most un-violent incident that may have had a greater impact that all her other missions. Once, she camped out on the doorstep of the Bishop of London to persuade him not to deliver a speech against suffrage he was scheduled to deliver in the House of Lords. After being put off all day, she was finally invited by the bishop’s secretary to return the following morning at 11. Once seated with the Bishop, though, her mind went blank.
I must earlier had rehearesed a dozen speeches. But I could remember nothing of these. It was as if I were compelled by something outside me to speak as I did. I could not remember afterwards what I did say. When I was at the end of my arguments, I remember, I paused and waited for the Bishop’s reaction.
“Before we discuss this any further, you must take refreshment,” he told her. He pushed a button and a servant came in with coffee and pink-iced cakes. The Bishop produced the text of his speech and said, calmly, “In view of what you have told me, I shall not make the speech I have written…. I think you have persuaded me.” And that was that.
And, indeed, based on Richardson’s account, the Suffragettes ultimately succeeded through a similarly peaceful conservation. After hearing that the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Enfranchisement Bill, which greatly expanded suffrage among men, made no mention of “Votes for Women,” Emmeline Pankhurst called upon Prime Minister Lloyd George. She warned him that her followers would resume militant action if women’s suffrage was not also addressed. Lloyd George, who supported the cause, expressed dismay, and afer consulting with his Cbinet, ensured that language was added to give the vote to women over the age of thirty.
As a historian, Brian Harrison has little patience for Richardson, who he describes as coming “as near as anyone to the ideal” of the self-sacrificing follower he claims that the Pankhursts sought to inspire. Likewise, Bearman dismisses Laugh a Defiance as “the unreliable memoirs of a self-dramatizing woman.” On this point, at least, their views don’t differ greatly from those express by the editors of the Evening Standard, who wrote after the slashing of the Rokeby Venus that “her lack of a sense of proportion pass the frontier between eccentricity and mental unsoundness.”
But we must bear in mind that historians, unlike some literary critics, do take context into consideration. And if we do the same, Laugh a Defiance no longer seems simply an entertaining piece of writing. Diane Atkinson, a historian overall favorable to the Suffragette cause, notes that after her time with the cause, Richardson “published several books during the war, … owned properties and was a somewhat unsuccessful landlady.” She also became one of a wave of women who sought public office after suffrage was approved.
Mary Richardson speaking for the British Union of Fascists in 1934.
Atkinson also notes, however, that in the early 1930s, Richardson joined the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley and set up the Women’s Section for the party. Between 1932 and 1934, she spoke frequently in support of Fascist policies and candidates. Although she eventually grew disillusioned and rarely became involved in political causes after that, while she was as enthusiastic in her support of the Blackshirts as she had been of the Suffragettes. She illustrates a point made by Eric Hoffer in his classic study of extremist movements, The True Believer: “The danger of the fanatic … is that he cannot settle down…. The taste for strong feeling drives him on to search for mysteries yet to be revealed and secret doors yet to be opened. He keeps groping for extremes.”
I learned about Laugh a Defiance after Andy Miller mentioned it in a recent tweet. As Andy noted in speaking of the book on the Backlisted podcast, anyone thinking of reissuing it would need to ensure that appropriate historical and biographical context was provided. Without it, readers might fail to see the narrow but crucial line that divides Mary Richardson’s actions from ones with far more sinister conseqeuences.
The book is extremely rare — I was unable to find any copies available for sale — but there are over eighty copies available in libraries worldwide, so it wasn’t too hard to borrow one via Inter Library Loan. Here is the link to the WorldCat.org listing: Laugh a Defiance
Laugh a Defiance, by Mary Richardson London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953
“One of the most ardent pursuits of man is finding excuses to persecute other people.” This chilling observation by Laurie Lee forms the epigraph to A Significant Experience, Gwyn Griffin’s story of the persecution and torture of a naïve young man — really a boy — by the officers of a British Army training base in Egypt during World War Two. It was a setting Gwyn Griffin was familiar with, having been born and raised in Egypt as the son of a Colonial Service officer and having served during the war and after in a variety of Army and police units in the Middle East and Africa.
is an illustration of what happens when an inflexible system encounters a foreign and incompatible body. Van der Haar, the son of a Dutch merchant long settled in Syria and fluent in English, French, and Arabic, is befriended by a British military intelligence officer who wants to use him as an agent and interrogator. To bring him into the Army, however, requires the boy, not yet 18, to complete the short officer training course run at the base.
That Van der Haar is out of his element is obvious:
As individuals, most of the staff would have wised to be kind to Van der Haar, but in their professional capacities they could not be so. He had to be shouted at on the parade ground as much as any other cadet; he had to be officially chased on the square, officially bullied by the N.C.O. instructors, officially harried by the authorities…. To the other cadets — ex-sergeant-majors, sergeants, and corporals, combat soldiers who had often been years in the army — this treatment meant nothing; they knew it for the bluff it was.
to Van der Haar, fresh out of a French-run lycee where he learned the fundamentals of rationalist thinking, the idea that abuse of cadets by the staff was simply a scheme to inculcate a predictable level of regimentation and obedience seems absurd: “when he was shouted at he thought the shouter was really angry, really hating him.”
Van der Haar can’t march straight, can’t handle his rifle properly, can’t respond as required to the stimuli of daily drill. While this perplexes most of the staff (was it really possible that someone “could know absolutely nothing at all about the British Army”?), it maddens Captain Lutwyche, who prides himself on running the best company in the school. Maddens him because Van der Haar’s innocence and beauty stirs the homosexual desires he prefers to satisfy outside the camp, with Arab boys, in alleyways with the safety of the night.
Grumbling about Van der Haar in the officers’ bar, Lutwyche is informed that, because he’s considered a “boy soldier” under Army regulations, he can be punished for his minor infractions by caning. Lutwyche wins the approval of the camp commandant for this course of action and arranges to have this “significant experience” delivered to Van der Haar that evening. He leaves it to Battalion Sergeant Major Ulick to explain the decision and the punishment to Van der Haar:
He paused, frowning, trying with all his might to do something he had never done before: to evaluate and analyze a social concept and to put the result into words. He knew the facts. He knew that the English upper-class, whom he thought of always in terms of “officers,” put a peculiar and irrational value upon corporal punishment; it was almost an obsession with them, and practically every officer he had ever known “believed in it.”
To Ulick, caning is just one of the mysterious tribal rituals of the officer class, and “as such must be jealously retained, guarded, and worshipped.” He neither agrees with nor condemns its application: beating is simply another absurd element in the whole charade of military discipline.
For Major Seligman, an officer with a wartime commission rather than a Sandhurst-trained Regular, however, decision to cane Van der Haar is the action of an institution only capable of existing within its own artificial reality. The Regulars who run the training camp (and the Army itself) were part of “the machine of organized English upper class brutality,” which aims to eliminate “all those feelings and emotions which made the whole difference between man and beasts and which the system so deplored….” His thoughts speak for the millions who took the first opportunity of the General Election in 1945 to put Clement Atlee in place of Winston Churchill.
And likely for Griffin himself. Though he attended a boarding school in England and served the Empire in several of its colonies, he considered it morally and intellectually corrupt. Where Graham Greene saw in colonial stations the signs of moral exhaustion, Griffin saw active and malevolent forces. He and his wife — the daughter of a colonial governor — tried living in various places in Africa and Australia, but it was only when they settled in rural Italy that they were able to distance themselves from these forces.
It’s unfortunate that within a few years of making a home there that he died suddenly, of a blood infection in 1967 at the age of 45. His last novel, An Operational Necessity, a fictional account of the shooting of the survivors of a torpedoed merchant ship, the S. S. Peleus by a German U-boat, had only just hit the bestseller lists and in the U.S. and U.K.. All set in real or fictional British colonies or at sea, his novels might be compared with those of Alistair Maclean or Hammond Innes were it not for the streak of indignation that simmers in all of them.
This book is slight, just under 100 pages, and the comparisons with Billy Budd are obvious, if incidental. I found it hard not to read A Significant Experience and not see parallels with the callous actions and hostility toward “foreigners” of the current government in the U.K.. It makes one wonder whether the “machine of organized English upper class brutality” was in any way seriously affected by the end of the Empire.
A Significant Experience, by Gwyn Griffin New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963
Sense and Sensuality is a novel caught somewhere between Queen Victoria and Dr. Kinsey. Richard and Laura, a young upper-middle class couple living in London in the late 1920s consider themselves sophisticates in taste and morality. Richard, a publisher, recognizes the growing appeal of modernism and Laura knows this means one should appreciate the work of Gertrude Stein, though she can’t find the patience to read it.
Had they existed in real life, Richard and Laura would undoubtedly have been a part of the Bright Young Things, and they will remind some readers a good deal of Tony and Brenda Last of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, though that novel came five years later. They are out almost every night at parties or clubs while a servant takes care of the tiresome details of raising their child. Laura in particular adores the company of the ever-changing cast of handsome young men. “When she was jolly and happy, she enjoyed kissing strange young men. And it never occurred to her to have a bad conscience about it.”
Laura enjoys playing the coquette, though at times she has a hard time knowing “how much was pretence and how much was true.” Richard, on the other hand, is a bit suspicious of many new ideas like psychoanalysis (“It’s too easy, somehow”). Yet they both feel themselves almost obliged by modern mores to experiment. One of Richard’s friends tells him that “One ought to have three women. One for a companion. One to feel romantic about. And one to make love to.” “It sounded silly,” he thinks, “but as a matter of fact it also contained a good deal of truth.”
In reality, what appeals to him is less a modern notion of an open marriage than the good old-fashioned double standard of chauvinism. So, when he begins an affair with April, a pretty younger woman a bit in awe of his worldliness, he considers it “a bit off” when Laura objects. And so she, in response, begins an affair with the shallow but funny Julian.
But neither is prepared to accept infidelity as just another part of modern life, like air travel or jazz. Julian is a better dancer, a better lover, than Richard, but somehow Laura longs for her husband’s solidity. Richard enjoys playing with April but would never for a moment think of ending his marriage to be with her. Laura struggles to make sense of the situation: “The Victorians thought they ought not to commit adultery, and did! We think we ought not to be jealous and are!” “Am I just being a suburban wife?” she wonders.
Critical acclaim for Sense and Sensuality.
To the give-and-take drama between Richard and Laura, Salt adds an updated version of the Greek chorus in the form of letters from Daisy, their maid, to her friend Nellie:
The drawing-room here has got pictures of naked women. I suppose it all depends on what one likes. I was never one to like that sort of thing. It’s not that I’m what you’d call narrow-minded, but I’ve got my feelings like anyone else and I never did like dirt. I believe Mrs. L. would run about the house without a stitch on. She’s not sensitive like I am.
Nellie isn’t terribly upset at Laura’s carrying on an affair (“with some women, one man is never enough”), but she doesn’t think much of her choice in lovers (“He’s got something sly in his face”).
How to resolve this situation? Around the time that Sense and Sensuality was published, Evelyn Waugh and his first wife dealt with it the “modern” way: they divorced. Salt, however, reached back to a tried-and-true denouement from the Victorian era: tuberculosis and tragic death. And for all its cleverness, Sense and Sensuality is ultimately undermined by Salt’s apparent preference for the mores of the previous century. The first time Laura coughs, you know where this story is headed.
Sarah Salt was the pseudonym that Coralie Von Werner Hobson adopted in the late 1920s for some reason. She’d already published several somewhat well-received novels under her own name, beginning with The Revolt of Youth in 1919. She’d previously used it as a stage name when she’d spent a season as part of a touring theatrical company — an experience she twice put to fictional use: once with Revolt and the second time with Joy is My Name (1929) (published as Sarah Salt). She published several more books as Salt, ending with Murder for Love in 1937. She died in 1946 at the age of 55.
Sense and Sensuality, by Sarah Salt (pseudonym of Coralie Hobson) London: Victor Gollancz, 1929 New York: Payson & Clarke, 1929
“In the dry places, men begin to dream. Where the rivers run sand, there is something in man that begins to flow.” Wright Morris’s The Works of Love opens “West of the 98th Meridian,” in the part of western Nebraska that was sparsely populated in the late 1800s and that remains so today. In the land “where it sometimes rains and it sometimes doesn’t….”
As I’ve written before, Wright Morris is one of the great American novelists of the 20th century, but he tends to get labeled and limited as a regionalist. And it’s due in part to sentences like those above. I have to admit, though I have loved and admired The Works of Love since I read it forty years ago, I mentally tagged it as a Midwestern novel myself. I recalled it as a story set mostly in lonely places, in railroad stations where the express trains from Omaha to Denver don’t stop, in towns where a single hotel serves as the one place where travelers can sleep, eat, and drink.
The train station in Kearney, Nebraska, around 1910.
And it’s true that this is where Will Brady is born and where The Works of Love, which traces the path of his life, starts out. Will’s father dies when he’s still a boy, likely a suicide worn down by failure and the emptiness of the land. You can’t really say that Will is raised here. His mother leaves him and Will makes his way on his own, starting out as a railroad station agent. He gradually works his way east, until he finds himself the owner of a large egg-producing operation outside Omaha.
He also finds himself a father and a husband, in that order. After falling into a sort-of relationship with one of the whores in his town’s brothel, he receives a basket a year or so later containing “a sausage-colored baby” and a note saying, “My name is Willy Brady.” He then weds the widow of the owner of the town’s hotel, not so much out of love as out of a sense that a wife is one of the things with which a man’s meant to furnish his life.
On their first night together after the wedding, Will finds his wife laying in bed, “wrapped from head to foot, as mummies are wrapped.”
It occurred to him that something like that takes a good deal of practice, just as it took practice to lie, wrapped up like a mummy, all night. It took practice, and it also took something else. It took fear. This woman he had married was scared to death.
The wife wrapped up and protected from her husband is an image that stays with anyone who reads The Works of Love. It symbolizes how Will Brady is cut off, shut out, isolated from the people he loves. Which is part of what makes the book one of the most powerfully sad stories in American literature.
But what I didn’t recognize when I first read this book as a young man was that The Works of Love is, fundamentally, a work of absurdist fiction. In an analysis of The Works of Love published in a 1968 issue of Western American Literature, Joseph Wydeven wrote that critics such as Granville Hicks dismissed the character of Will Brady as a cipher, “a person moved paradoxically by an absence of motivation.” They argued that he “seems to exist at times as little more than a receptor of sensual stimuli, unable to convert perception into perception.”
Men outside the train station in Omaha, Nebraska, in the early 1920s.
But so is Gregor Samsa of Kafka’s Metamorphosis or Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. To Will Brady, much of life is a baffling mystery. He knows how to perform the tasks that his work puts before him and he does them well, attaining a level of wealth and comfort that others envy and are attracted to. After his first wife leaves him, he manages to persuade a good-looking younger woman to marry him, but she leaves him for “a Hawayan” vaudeville performer while they are still honeymooning in California. He provides for his son’s care but lives apart, often thinking of writing him a letter but rarely managing to send one.
He sees himself as “a traveler, something of an explorer” — except that the foreign land through which he travels is the land of other people:
It was one thing to go to the moon, like this foreigner, a writer of books, but did this man know the man or woman across the street? Had he ever traveled into the neighbor’s house? Did he know the woman who was there by the lamp, or the man sitting there in the shadow, a hat on his head as if at any moment he might go out? Could he explain why there were grass stains on the man’s pants? That might be stranger, that might be harder to see, than the dark side of the moon.
Morris based his story somewhat on his own relationship with his father. A man who struggled with depression and went through a string of unsuccessful marriages and lonely railroad station jobs, he, too, left his son in the care of strangers and seemed to forget about him for years. Morris told of saving up to buy an old pocket watch from a pawn shop, a watch he then proceeded to wrap up and leave under the Christmas tree in the Omaha house where he was staying, so that he could open it on Christmas Day and pretend that it was from his father.
For Morris, bottled-up men like his father and Will Brady were representative men. As he once told the critic Wayne Booth:
When I say, What is there to say about a man with so much of his life left out? I mean the reader to understand there will be plenty, however strange…. Without knowing, and in a sense without really having adequate reason to feel so, I was absolutely confident … that in Brady’s emotionally muted relationships and his failure to relate to others there was the drama, however submerged, of much American life.
Will Brady ends up playing the part of the most benevolent and friendly father figure known to American children. He takes a job as Santa Claus at the Montgomery Ward store in downtown Chicago, and buys a sun lamp to give himself the appropriate rosy complexion. But the harder he chases after the image he thinks the children want, the more his actions become self-destructive, the further he distances himself from others. He no more succeeds in making a connection with other people than Gregor Samsa succeeds in breaking out of his cockroach shell.
Morris worked in concrete, specific images and sensations. His prose is taut, his scenes immediate. He didn’t indulge in flights of fantasy. And so, it’s easy to think of him as a realist.
But rereading The Works of Love, I saw that I had fallen into a trap of thinking of the book as a realistic novel. We don’t make this mistake with Kafka. Though he gives the reader convincing details that help us feel the plight of Gregor Samsa as he lies helpless, unable to shift his cockroach body, unable to make speechlike sounds, we understand throughout that we’re reading something fantastic. But the realism of Morris’s writing is meant to achieve the same effect: to make us believe there is a man as cut off and bottled-up as Will Brady. So, it would be easy to diagnose him, using today’s terminology, as operating somewhere along the autism spectrum.
Seen symbolically, however, seen in the context of Kafka rather than Theodore Dreiser, Will Brady doesn’t have to be diagnosed. Morris wasn’t really telling the story of a man we’re expected to believe in as a fictional counterpart to any real person — not even his father — any more than Kafka meant us to think of people we knew who’d become cockroaches overnight. Will Brady’s story is a lens through which Morris means to show us something about “the drama, however submerged, of much American life.” When Brady buys a sunlamp, he’s no different from the guy who buys a new truck or bigger TV: they’re both trying to buy some form of happiness. And where it leads him is where all such behavior leads: still standing apart, still wondering why he’s no happier.
The University of Nebraska Press began reissuing Wright Morris’s work in the early 1970s and has shown exceptional support by keeping these books in print for decades as part of their Bison Books paperback series. But though the Press made it possible for generations of readers to discover and come to love Morris’s writing, it also helped reinforce the perception of Morris as a regionalist. The Works of Love was originally published by Alfred A. Knopf. Had Knopf or a similar major New York City publisher reissued The Works of Love, I strongly suspect that we would now recognize it a novel that deserves to stand on the same shelf with Invisible Man, Herzog, and Something Happened.
This is a guest post by the novelist and childrens’ book author Eric Brown
‘The summer of nineteen-thirty-nine was a thoroughly rotten one.’ So opens Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting, a chapter of autobiography by the Hungarian writer Adam Martin de Hegedus, published in 1944.
De Hegedus first came to England in 1927, staying five months to study reference books at the British Museum Library on International Law and to learn English in order to enter the Hungarian diplomatic service. At the end of that time, however, he decided to return to Hungary only to pass his final law examination: then, as he writes in Vanman, to abandon his plans to become a diplomat and ‘return to England and settle there for good and become an English writer.’ He continues: ‘It was England’s mental climate that had proved so all absorbing, so conquering, all powerful, compelling, that it made me feel at home at once…’
Throughout the Thirties he was based in London, working as the London correspondent for several Hungarian newspapers as well as placing articles with British periodicals as varied as Esquire, The Observer, Evening Standard and the London Mercury. 1937 saw the publication of his first book, Hungarian Background, and he completed his debut novel, Rehearsal Under the Moon, in 1940. Later that year, when Hungary allied itself with Germany, Britain broke off diplomatic relations with his homeland and de Hegedus was no longer able to send his daily cables to Budapest. He had lost his main source of income and decided ‘the best thing I could do was to volunteer for one of the Forces.’ In October 1941 he was sent to train as a gunner near Wakefield in West Yorkshire.
Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting is his record of the following year, his training in Yorkshire and Nottingham and his posting to Kent to await assignment overseas. In the memoir, de Hegedus portrays himself as an outsider, forever looking in. There were the obvious facts that he was a Hungarian in Britain – despite having taken British nationality in the Thirties – and a writer, about which he commented: ‘I am to some extent inhuman and cold. Looking for copy all the time […] And the writer is lonely. The job has its gratifications, but it has dreadful drawbacks. The writer, you see, is not allowed to live.’ But what de Hegedus could not confess in his otherwise starkly honest account was that he was even more of an outsider because he was homosexual.
In hindsight, knowing what we do about de Hegedus, it’s not difficult to read between the lines and decode the sometimes buried messages in the text. In the chapter entitled ‘The Girl From Newcastle’, he describes his meeting and subsequent one night stand with a woman in the WAF: she ‘had a workmanlike handsomeness’ and ‘a nice deep voice’ and ‘there was something brave, almost heroic and masculine in [her] spirit’. He’s at home in the all-male environs of barrack life and describes the camaraderie (and the physical attributes) of his fellow soldiers.
On one occasion he is more overt in his sympathies and attraction. In Nottingham he meets Bombardier Brown, a troubled young man who says of himself: ‘I know that I am different. I have known it ever since I was a kid and I made up my mind that I would fight against it even if it’s impossible.’ In a moving passage, de Hegedus recounts an intimate meeting with Brown in which the young man unburdens himself. ‘… I am putting up a terrific fight. I may be beaten in the end, but I’m trying not to give in.’
De Hegedus questions Brown about his ambitions and learns that the Bombardier was turned down by the RAF because of his eyesight.
‘I wanted so much to become a pilot and I would have made a good pilot too.’
‘Yes. And it would have made you happier,’ de Hegedus assures him. ‘All that preoccupation with danger and adventure. You wouldn’t have found time to think of your personal problems…’
‘And it would have been so easy to end my life. Just shot down and finished […] Sometimes I really wish I was dead.’
Weeks later, de Hegedus is stunned to learn of Brown’s death in a motorcycle accident outside Nottingham. He was speeding, ran into a lorry, and died instantly – the inference being that the young man took his own life.
De Hegedus’s grief is followed by remorse. ‘Oh, how bloody cold-blooded I sounded […] when I asked him question after question. And what a thrill I had when he answered, full, honest, clean-breasted. Well, of course, he was confessing…’
It’s tempting to wonder to what degree his grief was responsible for his subsequent nervous breakdown, compounded by what happened next.
During his time as a gunner, de Hegedus applied for a commission and was refused; later he requested a transfer to the Army Education Corps as a lecturer, a role for which he was eminently suited. He was a Doctor of Law, could speak four languages, and had experience lecturing – quite apart from the fact that he was phenomenally well-read and had a wide knowledge of the arts. After an interview with the Selection Board, however, his application was rejected for reasons he was unable to fathom.
Following a bout of insomnia and depression, de Hegedus suffered a nervous breakdown and was referred to a military hospital in Leeds. After a period of recuperation, he was discharged from the Army in 1942. His later attempts to find work to aid the war effort were stonewalled for the same reason he was refused a commission and turned down as an Army lecturer: as his parents were enemy nationals, de Hegedus was considered a security risk.
The autobiography closes with de Hegedus working as a van driver, delivering film posters to cinemas in London and the suburbs. It was menial work for a man of his ability, but it did have the advantage of allowing him time to write.
At one point in Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting, while awaiting his posting overseas, de Hegedus contemplates the possibility of being killed in action: ‘It was, of course, unpleasant that from the literary point of view I had not had my season. I wanted to write at least five books, the kind of books I always wanted to write, messages in a bottle dropped into the sea, waiting for someone, like me, to pick up and read.’
Cover of an English edition of The Heart in Exile by Rodney Garland (Adam de Hegedus).
Adam de Hegedus succeeded in his ambition to become ‘an English writer’. He wrote ten books: six works of non-fiction, two novels under his own name, and two1 under the pseudonym of Rodney Garland. The searingly honest and heartbreaking best-seller The Heart in Exile>2, 1953, as by Garland, was the very first work of fiction to tackle the theme of male homosexuality in 1950s Britain. De Hegedus died of poisoning, a suspected suicide, in October 1955.
Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting is not only a wonderfully well written and compelling account of the times – his evocation of army life is on par with anything by Julian MacLaren-Ross – but an insight into the complex personality of the man himself and a neglected memoir that deserves a wider audience.
Notes 1 Three later novels attributed to ‘Rodney Garland’, published after Adam de Hegedus’s death in 1955, were the work of fellow Hungarian novelist Peter de Polnay: World Without Dreams (1961); Hell and High Water (1962); and The Sorcerer’s Broth (1966).
Eric Brown has published over seventy books. His latest is Murder Most Vile, and forthcoming is the SF novel Wormhole, written with Keith Brooke. He lives near Dunbar in Scotland, and his website is at: ericbrown.co.uk
Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting by Adam de Hegedus London: Staples Press Ltd., 1946
“I got the idea from a detective novel. I read a lot of detective novels…”
The 1970s were full of the 1940s. In fashion, Halstead and Yves St Laurent brought out lines based on the 40s’ look. In music, Bette Midler and The Manhattan Transfer were reviving Glenn Miller and the Andrew Sisters, while in Britain, Roxy Music sang 2HB, an ode to Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. But it was in cinema that the 1940s – and noir in particular – came back with a vengeance, like a spurned lover with a gun in her hand: Play it Again Sam (1972), The Long Goodbye (1973), Chinatown (1974), all updated noir tropes to suit the times. Perhaps it was all the old movies being rerun on US TV, maybe the scepticism of the archetypal 40s PI suited the post-idealism of the 1970s, or perhaps people just liked the clothes, but there it was: the 70s were full of the 40s.
Eddie Ginley’s ad.
Ahead of the game were two British movies: 1972’s hard-bitten classic Get Carter (based on Ted Lewis’ novel Jack’s Return Home) and the much more low-key Gumshoe, from 1971. Written by Neville Smith and directed by Stephen Frears, Gumshoe is a fantastic movie, set in contemporary Liverpool, starring Albert Finney as Eddie Ginley, a dreamer and would-be stand-up comedian who puts a joke ad in the paper on his birthday (see above) and gets more than he bargained for. With superb performances from Finney, Billie Whitelaw, Frank Finlay and a host of local actors, including the great Bill Dean, Gumshoe is a perfect marriage of old and new, understated Liverpool wit and noir attitudes (and there’s an astonishingly good pastiche soundtrack by Andrew Lloyd Webber).
But it’s the script that makes it. Neville Smith was to become a popular actor in the 1970s – best known for playing the lead in Alan Bennett’s Me, I’m Afraid Of Virginia Woolf (Trevor, a surrogate for Bennett himself), as well as his work with Ken Loach and others. Smith also wrote The Golden Vision, a Loach-directed television play about a group of Everton supporters and Long Distance Information, another TV play about a Elvis fan coming to terms with changes in his life on the night the King dies.
Smith’s central character Eddie is an Elvis fan too, his nostalgia for the past all mixed up, but what he mostly resembles, of course, is a Raymond Chandler hero. But Gumshoe is more than a pastiche of noir thrillers: it contains all the elements – a dame, a fat man, a murder, a betrayal, and plenty of mean streets – but adds to them a sense of the now. Eddie Ginley is not Philip Marlowe. He’s a socialist, a Labour voter. He signs on (“Down at the dole things move slowly. Down at the dole things always move slowly.”) He lives in a world not of night clubs, cabarets and torch singers, but working men’s clubs where the bingo takes precedence over the acts. (And there are odd little Beatles references throughout: Ginley lives in Gambier Terrace, as John Lennon once did, and has a friend called Mal Evans, the same name as the Beatles’ roadie).
Stephen Frears met Neville Smith in 1968 and, recognising his talent, asked him to write a thriller. As a writer, Frears said, Smith had “the grace of Jackie Milburn* and the wit of SJ Perelman**” – but he also saw that in Gumshoe, “within the framework of a pastiche of a film noir there lurked a human story.” Frears wrote in the introduction to the 1998 reissued paperback, “I had thought he was writing a thriller. In fact, he was constructing a self-portrait; a record of what it was like to have been a teenager in the English provinces in the Fifties.” Frears is right. Eddie Ginley is no hard man, no Spillane anti-hero packing heat. He’s a boy, with the sense of right and wrong of a boy. He wears the costume of a cynic – the trenchcoat, the whisky, even the gun – but he’s an innocent and, like all innocents (like all great movie private eyes), he’s going to get hurt.
Lobby card for the film Gumshoe.
The movie was made, released and went on to become, quite rightly, an acknowledged classic of British cinema. And before it came out, Neville Smith was asked to write a novelisation. Experienced screenwriter or not, he never written a book before. “I dithered and ended up with a week to the deadline,” he recalled later, and – borrowing a room at Frears’ house – dictated the book, as he had done the film, this time to a typist from a firm called Graduate Girls.
Perhaps it’s these unusual circumstances – dictating a novel in a few days from a script – that give Gumshoe the novel its voice. Laconic, but fast-moving. Drily funny, but also desperately melancholic. World-weary but also innocent. It’s a perfect noir and a perfect book. Is it better than the movie? Impossible to say: but without Finney and Frears, there’s more of Smith’s voice, and that’s not a bad thing.
Gumshoe the movie wasn’t a hit. Its stars continued their brilliant careers. Its soundtrack composer reused the movie’s main theme for another piece rooted in nostalgia, his musical version of Sunset Boulevard. Stephen Frears went on to well-deserved international success as a director, and Neville Smith continued to write and act (now in his 80s, he politely declines invitations to events where his work is shown).
It’s only the novel of Gumshoe that rests in the cold cases files. Issued by Fontana in paperback in 1971, it was reissued by Slow Dancer Press in 1998 with an introduction by Stephen Frears and a pithy afterword by Neville Smith: since then, nothing, which is a pity. Both versions can be acquired cheaply. Acquire them.
David Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Night Train, was published in September 2020. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.
Gumshoe, by Neville Smith London: Fontana Books, 1971 New York: Ballantine Books, 1972 London: Slow Dancer Press, 1998
‘NOVELIST LECTURER VANISHES’ announced a headline in The Sheffield Telegraph on Wednesday, June 26, 1963. ‘What has happened to Kathleen Sully, the writer who should have arrived in Sheffield yesterday to lecture at the Sheffield Arts Festival?’ the reporter asked. Sully, then at the height of her career, had been invited to lecture on ‘The Modern Novel’ as a highlight of the festival held at the University of Sheffield.
She was looking forward to it. ‘They think a lot of me up there,’ she had written her friend, the director Lindsay Anderson, a few days earlier. ‘Know the Heads of Languages and they set my work for 3rd year students.’ Instead, she failed to show up. No explanation was ever given. Two members of the faculty appeared in her place and discussed Sully’s writing. It may have been the last time anyone discussed her work in a public form. For although she continued to publish for another seven years and lived nearly forty more, as far as English literary history is concerned, Kathleen Sully has vanished completely.
Her name means nothing to you. I can say this with confidence because it meant nothing to me and I have been studying English novels and novelists great and obscure for over forty years. I first saw Kathleen Sully’s name in a list of 100 or so English woman novelists of the 20th century, a list running from Margaret Atwood to Virginia Woolf. It was the only name I didn’t recognize and given my hobby of tracking down forgotten books and writers, that fact immediately set me searching for more information. I quickly determined that she had written over a dozen books, that none of them were in print and few used copies were still available for sale. I located an electronic copy of her 1958 novel Merrily to the Grave on the Internet Archive and began reading.
Merrily to the Grave opens as Harold and Melanie Thydes, an elderly couple with ‘three small suitcases full of odds and ends, and each other,’ are wandering along the promenade in Brighton, cold, tired and desperately looking for a cheap place to stay. A policeman befriends them and takes them to Hesta Blazey’s. Hesta’s rooming house is not a desirable address: ‘It smelt of kippers, dust, onions, hair-oil, soap, turpentine, bath cubes, floor polish (though nothing looked polished), human sweat and cat.’
But it is a refuge of sorts. Whether pensioner, two-bit performer, shop girl, prostitute or thief, one thing unites the residents: failure. Rejected long ago by a fiancée returning from the Great War, Hesta expresses her love through acceptance. ‘Not all of us can withstand the inequalities of life: its buffeting, its knocks,’ she maintains. Though her tenants have reached rock bottom in the eyes of society, some of them learn there are even lower depths to which a person can sink: ‘other kinds of poverty, other kinds of nakedness, other kinds of crime’—the depths where the quality of compassion is lost.
Kathleen Sully’s writing is almost addictively readable. Her prose is spare, unstudied, brisk. She relies heavily on dialogue—but not on deep conversations. Scenes move quickly. Emotions run close to the surface. Merrily to the Grave was fuelled by a raw energy, a brutal honesty I’d only seen in Orwell or Patrick Hamilton. I was eager to go further. I located cheap copies of more novels, gulped them down, posted my initial reactions and became obsessed with learning more.
These were not like anything I’d read before. There were hints of Joyce’s rawness, of Lawrence’s bluntness and, in Sully’s use of dialogue, of Ivy Compton-Burnett, but only hints. Her first novel, Canal in Moonlight, opens: ‘Bikka’s rats are large, fierce and tenacious. They find rich pickings in the garbage of the extravagant Bikka poor which nourishes bodies and whet appetites for yet more.’
Canal centres on the Hoppes, a family with sixteen children living in a filthy house with a broken toilet and a pregnant goat in the kitchen. Horace Hoppe is soft-headed and idle, his wife Belle a fat sloppy former prostitute. Their children run wild. They steal. A little boy comes home with a ball smeared with the blood of a murdered young woman. Even the Dyppes, the ‘proper’ family next door, is dysfunctional: Mrs. Dyppe torments her spinster daughter about maintaining an upright reputation, all the while concealing the fact that Mr. Dyppe had committed suicide after learning he’d caught a venereal disease from his wife. This was beyond kitchen sink realism: this was toilet bowl realism.
Kathleen Sully’s 1960 novel, Skrine, set in the aftermath of some unspecified global apocalypse, opens with a woman murdered for a pack of cigarettes. A Man Talking to Seagulls opens—and closes—with a body lying dead on a beach. In Through the Wall, little Celia Wick shivers outside while her parents fight, throwing plates and punches. ‘The Wicks were the scum of Mastowe: drunkards, loafers, petty thieves, and worse,’ Sully writes. And yet through this grim world flows a current of magic and spirituality. At night, Celia rises up from her miserable bedroom and flies above her street, up into the moon, ‘a million years away to where tigers ate apricots, and birds, honey-coloured and smelling of wall-flowers, flew in and out of her heart.’
The nameless madwoman in ‘The Weeping and the Laughter,’ one of the short novels in Canaille, tells how she used to ‘flow through the top of my head, go to the window, jump off into space and fly about like an owl.’ In A Man on the Roof, a dead husband comes back to his wife as a ghost and the two carry on as if nothing had happened. One of Sully’s later novels, A Breeze on a Lonely Road, is about a solicitor searching for the people and places he dreams about each night. As a man stands over a dead body at the end of A Man Talking to Seagulls, he suddenly realizes ‘that he beheld a husk—that the man was elsewhere—no matter where—but somewhere—and that life was life and could not be denied or extinguished—ever.’ The only equivalent I knew to this combination of realism and the fantastic was the magical realism of Latin American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez—but Sully began publishing a decade before these works were known in England.
Seeing how little had been written about Kathleen Sully’s work, I decided to carry through to the finish. I tracked down the rest of her books, locating the rarest—Not Tonight (1966)—at the British Library, one of just a dozen libraries worldwide still holding a copy. It was clear that Sully followed in no one’s footsteps. This uniqueness unsettled reviewers when her books first came out; now, it was what intrigued me. Even relative to my own extensive knowledge of neglected writers, the extent to which Sully’s work had vanished seemed astonishing.
So, I began looking into Kathleen Sully’s life and critical reputation, trying to understand why she had gone from being such a prolific and original writer to being utterly forgotten. Aside from contemporary reviews when her books were first published, critical assessments of her work are virtually non-existent. Walter Allen, part of the bedrock of the English literary establishment of his time, considered her work worth mention alongside that Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and future Nobel Prize winners William Golding and Doris Lessing in his 1960 survey, The Novel To-day. Ironically, Allen’s short paragraph on Sully is still the only critical consideration of her work to appear in print in the last nearly-sixty years. Her name appears in no encyclopaedia, in no dictionary of biography, in no other survey of the English novel.
One reason for her critical neglect is that she didn’t fit in—a reflection of the institutional prejudices of the English literary world. She was a woman writing when writing was a man’s game—not just a man’s game, but a public school/university-educated man’s game. She was the wrong age: too young for the generation of Greene, Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen, too old for the likes of Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch and the Angry Young Men. Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson, then rising stars in a new wave of gritty, ‘kitchen sink realism’ theatre, were so impressed with her early novels they chose her first play to initiate a bold new series of Sunday night ‘productions without décor’ at the Royal Court Theatre in London—but remembered her years later as a ‘middle-aged woman standing in the wings.’
She didn’t write the sort of domestic dramas and comedies that were considered standard middlebrow fare. There is not a lot of tea being served in china cups and saucers in her books. Sully’s characters ate bread and drippings huddled around the kitchen table. They didn’t fit the mould of other fiction of her time. ‘Her people constantly say the untoward thing, move strangely against conventional furniture,’ as one reviewer put it. But they weren’t rebels, either. Sully’s novels are utterly a-political and virtually a-historical: while they’re mostly set in mid-20th century Britain, they provide few references to events that might allow one to pin the story to a specific time.
And her work itself didn’t fit in. ‘Every now and then a novel comes along which appears to possess outstanding merit, and yet to fit into no known category,’ read the fly-leaf blurb, and for once the publisher’s statement wasn’t hyperbole. ‘Bizarre? A nightmare prose-poem, a lyric nightmare? How shall one describe Canal in Moonlight?’ asked Elizabeth Bowen in The Tatler. ‘I have never read anything like it,’ John Betjeman wrote in the Daily Telegraph. John Davenport, in The Observer, was equally baffled: ‘I don’t, quite honestly, know what to make of it.’
As further books followed, reviewers seemed to reach consensus on two points. First, that Sully was a powerful storyteller: ‘It is impossible to stop reading Miss Sully, who takes a vice-like Ancient Mariner’s grip on your nerves and feelings,’ wrote Siriol Hugh-Jones of her fifth novel, Burden of the Seed. And second, that no one knew how to take her. ‘Kathleen Sully beats me,’ Karl Miller confessed in reviewing Shades of Eden for The Observer. Even after she’d published nine books, they remained stumped. ‘Kathleen Sully is another mystery, which on the evidence of her new novel [The Undesired, 1961] I can’t solve,’ confessed Ronald Bryden.
In his survey, Walter Allen precisely assessed the cost of her uniqueness: ‘Kathleen Sully is a novelist very much on her own, which may account for her comparative lack of critical recognition.’ By her eleventh novel, The Fractured Smile, The Times Literary Supplement—‘that British bastion of highbrow book culture,’ as Publisher’s Weekly once called it—seemed to have found a way to deal with her: ‘Miss Sully has established a reputation as something of an eccentric among novelists.’ By her 14th novel, the TLS simply stopped reviewing her work entirely.
A selection of Kathleen Sully’s novels.
Sully did little to ensure her own legacy. She donated no papers or manuscripts to any archive for eventual research. If she had any friendships with other writers of her time, none of them considered her worth mentioning in their own letters or memoirs. I looked through biographies of the literary figures of her time, from Kingsley Amis to Angus Wilson, and found not one mention of her. And from the story about the Sheffield Arts Festival we know that she didn’t show up on the one occasion when her work was publicly recognized by academics. Whether she was flouting the school, taken ill, caught up in some personal crisis or simply the victim of an automobile breakdown doesn’t matter now—she never got another opportunity.
Kathleen Sully lived for over thirty years after her last novel, Look at the Tadpoles, was published in 1970, and yet at that point, as far as the literary world was concerned, she vanished forever. Even her own literary agency lost track of her. In 1986, the Curtis Brown agency published a notice in the Times trying to locate her in connection with the renewal of American publication rights.
None of the journals that reviewed her novels noted her death at the age of 91 in September 2001. When I began to investigate Kathleen Sully’s life for a biographical entry on Wikipedia, I soon found that the fifteen years she spent as published novelist were an anomaly: aside from her books and their reviews, there seemed to be nothing. If I wanted to find any record of her life beyond the books, I would have to look in other places: genealogical databases, census records, civil registers and telephone directories. I would also have to locate surviving members of her family, if there were any.
By picking through public records, one can sketch the bare facts of Kathleen Sully’s first thirty-two years. The second of seven children, she was born Kathleen Maude Coussell in a poor neighbourhood on the south side of London in 1910. Her father Albert was a skilled mechanic, credited in a 1910 issue of The Engineer with the design of an automotive device, but that didn’t appear to have improved his family’s economic status. Between 1911 and the 1929, the family moved at least six times—mostly back and forth between poorer parts of London (Peckham, Lambeth, Camberwell) and market towns in Cambridgeshire (Wisbech) and Norfolk (Downham Market).
If Sully’s fiction contains any traces of her childhood, it suggests the Coussell household was poor, overcrowded, and chaotic. Canal in Moonlight centres on a family with sixteen children living in squalor with dogs, cats, rats, goats and even a broken-down horse. Overcrowding and families with odd assortments of generations and relations are constant themes in her early books. These were, in fact, among the first aspects of her work to draw the attention of reviewers. ‘[T]he house in it stinks of goats, blood seeps under the garage door for a child to bounce his ball in, and the warehouse rats are as big as cats,’ Isabel Quigley wrote in her Spectator review of Canal in Moonlight.
Children in her books are often left to fend for themselves. In Through the Wall, Celia Wick sleeps on a filthy sack of straw, has one pair of dirty, ripped underpants, and is handed over to another woman to raise when her mother remarries. Stephanas in Burden of the Seed steals from a pair of senile aunts to buy food for himself. Sully may have taken liberties in her fiction, but families living in poverty on the fringe of society are such a constant in her work it seems reasonable to assume that she experienced something of the same in her own childhood.
At twelve, Sully was sent to the Barrett Street Trade School, where she studied dressmaking. She left the school at fifteen and worked in a garment factory in East London. She was still living at home when she married Charles Sully, a skilled mechanic like her father, in 1932. Within a year, she gave birth to a daughter, Victoria, and a second daughter, Shirley, followed in 1934. Charles and Kathleen carried on with the itinerant lifestyle she’d grow up with. Victoria (Vicki) was born in Paddington, Shirley in Billericay in Essex. In the 1939 register, they are listed in Weston-Super-Mare on coast of Somerset. Then a civil register records the birth in 1942 of a son, Fraser, listing Charles as the father, in Southend-on-Sea—back in Essex.
From here, the facts are hard to find and harder to verify. Many of the official records that could provide dates and addresses to trace her life over the next sixty years have not yet been released. Much of the rest of the available information came from Sully herself. In a short ‘About the Author’ sketch printed on the dust jacket of Canal in Moonlight she reported that ‘At 38 years of age’—around 1948—she attended Art College for two years and then ‘went on to a Teacher’s Training College to take a teaching post (Art and English).’ A biographical sketch taken from Sully’s response to a questionnaire included in Contemporary Authors (1966) further specified ‘Art College’ as Taunton Art College and St. Alban’s Art College and ‘Teacher’s Training College’ as Gaddesden. This last fact helps narrow the timeline somewhat, given that Gaddesden Training College operated just from 1946 to 1951.
This list of dates and places would not have been particularly illuminating had it not been supplemented by an email I received from Paul Hunt, Vicki’s son, in March 2019. He had seen my posts about his grandmother’s novels and confirmed that the information in her Wikipedia entry was correct to his knowledge. ‘I think I can help in explaining why she faded,’ he wrote. According to Paul, Kathleen and Charles Sully’s marriage was ‘rancorous’ and marked by separations. Sometime before the start of World War Two, Kathleen took the girls to a cottage in Paignton, Devon, where she tried to run a dress shop. She then reunited with Charles and they lived in Weston-Super-Mare as recorded in the 1939 register.
Not long after, the couple had ‘a furious row’ and Kathleen took the girls to Denbigh in Wales. Charles pressed to be allowed to visit his daughters and Kathleen relented. She would regret this decision. As Paul wrote:
My mother remembers the event clearly. They were living in a small cottage in a village close to Denbigh. Her father came to visit and when her mother left for work, he threw the children’s clothes into a suitcase and then rushed them to the station. She believes they left by train. He had nowhere to live and so his mother came and cared for the children. They all lived for some time in a room in a house in Hereford.
‘Much as I loved my grandfather, I knew him as an uncompromising person and I could imagine him doing this,’ Paul added. This account also seems credible considering a few other facts: Vicki married in Newbury, Berkshire in 1957; Charles died there in 1997; and Shirley died there in 2008. So, Charles stayed in Newbury for decades, while Kathleen moved from place to place, almost always near the sea, always miles from Newbury. In Kathleen Sully’s entry in Contemporary Authors, it states, ‘children: three.’ There is no mention of her marriage.
If the story of Charles abducting the girls is true, it does raise questions about Fraser Sully. If Charles was father, as stated in the birth register, why didn’t he take Fraser as well? Or did the incident take place before Fraser was born? Was Fraser illegitimate, as Paul speculates, conceived in an affair that took place afterward? Regardless of the boy’s paternity, however, picturing Kathleen Sully as a single mother raising a son—possibly without any financial support—provides a context that helps make sense of the few available facts about her life after 1942. Financial considerations and the need to care for her son, for example, would likely have been her foremost concerns after 1942.
With no family money, no university degree, and a young son to look after, Kathleen Sully would have few options. ‘Almost every mother of fatherless children has to find work to help in their support,’ Leonora Eyles wrote in her1947 book Unmarried but Happy. ‘On the whole, it is better if a single woman with children can earn money in the home,’ she continued, recommending child-minding, typing, keeping a small shop, dressmaking, graphic arts and writing as possible ways to earn money working in the home.
In her ‘About the Author’ sketch, Sully devoted the most space to listing the many jobs in her ‘varied career’: ‘domestic, lift attendant, dress model, dress cutter, dress designer, dress-shop owner, professional swimmer and diver, canvasser, bus conductress, cinema usherette, free-lance artist and writer, tracer in the Admiralty, dressmaker.’ She later repeated this list in her Contemporary Authors questionnaire, adding ‘owner of antique shop and now full-time novelist’—which correlates with a remark in her June 1963 letter to Lindsay Anderson: ‘I have finished with shops and all else other than setting down the human agony and joy.’
Looking at this list alongside Eyles’ Unmarried but Happy, I wondered if Sully had her own copy of the book. My suspicions only increased after reading the following: ‘There is only one art that is blithely taken up without training, without discipline and without the appreciation of difficulty with which one approaches even the learning of knitting, and that is the art of writing.’ We know that writing was one of Sully’s first ventures as a working single mother because her first book wasn’t published in 1955 but in 1946, when Edmund Ward, a children’s book publisher, released Small Creatures and Stony Stream, listing Kathleen M. Sully as the author. Small Creatures contains two stories, about a dormouse and a dragonfly; Stony Stream is about fish. Neither the stories nor the style is noteworthy, but the books did get reprinted at least four times each. They appear to be her only attempts at juvenile fiction.
How did Sully get from ‘It was a warm day in Spring, and the East Wind blew gently through the grasses growing in the meadow’—the opening line of Stony Stream—to the fierce and tenacious rats that greet the reader of Canal in Moonlight? Perhaps she found, in her arguments with Charles, in their separations, in having her daughters stolen from her and in her effort to support herself and Fraser, that she had to be fierce and tenacious herself. In her June 1963 letter to Anderson, she reassures him, ‘You will find me much changed: not so arrogant and childish,’ and closes by saying, ‘it is so good to hear from one who was my first friend.’ Did she really spend those years before the success of her first novels friendless? Or did she attack would-be friends like one of Bikka’s rats?
Kathleen Sully, from the dust jacket of Merrily to the Grave.
A clue to Kathleen Sully’s temperament—and stunning evidence of the anger and pain wrapped up in her separation from Charles—can be found in a poem that Vicki shared with me. Written in the late 1980s after she attempted to visit her mother, who was by then living in Camborne in Cornwall, it was part of Vicki’s extraordinary effort to restart her life after her traumatic childhood and an unhappy early marriage. I reprint the poem here in full (and with Vicki’s permission) because it reveals so much that lies beneath the sparse facts.
Lost Person
The first time I lost her I was six in a whitewashed cottage in Wales my father came to visit he said but he threw my sister’s and my things into a suitcase and rushed us to the station
the second time came after twenty years I found her on the back of a book a middle-aged woman and the name was right I wrote her letter said why see me now I am successful and not before
the third time my son tracked her down and she said I could meet her too with her dark eyes and beauty she resembled my sister not me my mentally ill sister both with long white hands not like my gardening ones
she told me of her struggles, her travels in Spain and her achievements she didn’t ask about mine she said my hair and clothes were wrong she gave advice on diet and lifestyle I must put castor oil on my eyes to prevent cataract I was drowning in words when my letters went unanswered I knew I had lost her again years later I found her new address and phoned she said I could visit rain was forecast and the air was heavy with sour scent of cow parsley as I drove the pre-motorway tangle of roads to her terraced house in Camborne weeds straggled over her doorstep when I knocked, a ragged curtain jerked at the grimy window the front door inched open
hunched over a frame her eyes glittered up at me and with a voice reverting to the cockney of her youth she said I have two things ter say ter yer one is Go Away and the other is Piss Orf the door slammed shut cold rain began to fall and I left
In this poem, ‘the first time’ is clearly Charles’ abduction of Vicki and Shirley; ‘when I was six’ fixes the time as late 1939 or early 1940. The ‘second time’ would have been around 1959 or 1960, after seeing Kathleen’s photograph on the back cover of Merrily to the Grave—the only book on which it appeared. If Sully did write ‘why see me now I am successful,’ one can hardly imagine a more ‘arrogant and childish’ response by a mother to her long-separated daughter.
Paul Hunt incorporated the ‘third time’ into Mahogany Rose, the novel loosely based on his family that he published as ‘Paul Sully.’ I say loosely because Paul merges the stories of his grandmother and mother into his character Suzy. Much of Suzy’s story—living in Ghana at the time it attained independence, working in a defence laboratory, participating in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – comes from Vicki. But there is also the visit to Kathleen at the house in Cornwall and elements of the bitter relationship between Kathleen and Charles.
Vicki’s poem offers some further clues into Kathleen Sully’s life and the family’s emotional traumas. Vicki refers to ‘my mentally ill sister’—Shirley. Looking for more information on Shirley Sully, I located a letter she wrote in 1986 to an imaginary lover named Frederique, which the artist Lisa Marie Gibbs posted on her blog in 2016 in tribute to ‘My mentor, my friend, my inspiration.’ Gibbs confirmed that Shirley lived with her father and struggled with mental illness as an adult. Shirley’s letter quotes Stevie Smith’s poem ‘The Frog Prince’—‘I have been a frog now/for a hundred years’—and adds, ‘As I have not had a family to look after, I have tried to make as many things as possible–my clothes, sculptures, paintings.’
Vicki shared with me a set of poems that she wrote after Shirley died. Through these, we can trace not only Shirley’s troubles but the parallels between her and Kathleen. In her ‘prologue’ Vicki writes,
we sisters shared a map shared the haemorrhage of streaks and runs and patched-up places
After taking the girls from Kathleen in Wales, Charles – who was working as a contractor for the Royal Air Force and moving from airfield to airfield – left the girls in the care of a Mrs. Crane, ‘the lonely woman/who cared for us/a bit/when she was sober.’ Vicki married, mostly as a means of escape, she says, and Shirley was left to deal with Charles, who was, according to Vicki, an angry, controlling, and violent man. She displayed a talent for art and was able to get work in London, where she soon fell in with a group of friends as full of vices as they were of promises.
She also began suffering from a combination of alcoholism and mental illness and was forced, on more than one occasion, to beg Charles to return to live with him. During these years when Shirley’s life was punctuated by various crises, she made contact with Kathleen and even went to stay with her in Cornwall briefly. This must have been in the late 1960s, for the sole dedication in all of Kathleen’s 17 novels appears in 1969’s A Breeze on a Lonely Road. It reads ‘For Shirley—My Daughter.’
Kathleen Sully letter to Lindsay Anderson from June 1963, courtesy of the University of Stirling archives.
It’s not clear if Kathleen Sully ever shared the loss of her daughters with people who knew her as a writer. There is no hint in her few letters in Lindsay Anderson’s archives that she had any children but Fraser. In her June 1963 letter, she writes that Fraser is finishing his first year at the University of Manchester, which meant ‘I am free to go where I like and do what I like.’ Fraser’s attendance at university might also explain why she could be ‘finished with shops and all else,’ and why there was a break of nearly four years between the publication of The Undesired in 1961 and The Fractured Smile in 1965.
Did the furious rate at which she first published—ten books in the space of less than six years—have something to do with Fraser’s situation? Was Sully paying for school fees? In my copy of Canal in Moonlight, I found a short letter she wrote from Brighton in early 1957 and was able to confirm that the address had been a rooming house at the time—possibly the inspiration for Merrily to the Grave—suggesting she might have been living alone while Fraser was at boarding school. Her June 1963 letter to Anderson, on the other hand, was sent from a house in The Lizard, a hamlet at the southernmost tip of Cornwall, which she had recently purchased as ‘a permanent home (retreat).’
This period between books may also have been when she took ‘her travels in Spain’ mentioned in Vicki’s poem. Two of her subsequent books—Horizontal Image and Island in Moonlight—largely take place in Mediterranean settings. Within a year or so of failing to show up for the Sheffield Festival, however, Sully resumed writing at an even more fevered pace, publishing another seven novels in just five years.
There is a noticeable difference in these books from her first ten—a difference in tone and in intensity. The Fractured Smile is an infidelity farce, Dear Wolf a limp comedy about a small-town Lothario. Not Tonight was described as a ‘whimsy, flimsy piece of sugary shockingness’ by one reviewer. Christopher Wordsworth, in The Guardian, found that The Fractured Smile ‘meanders artlessly’ and Dear Wolf displayed ‘a rather simpleton humour.’ Mary Holland was scathing in her assessment of Not Tonight: ‘At best it is the novel one might expect from an aunt who had been told once too often: “You write such droll letters, you should put it all down in a book.”’ By 1968, when Horizontal Image was published, The New Statesman’s reviewer complained, ‘She is prolific and seems to have created a standard expectation in her readers—the deadliest way of paralysing critical faculty.’ Both Sully and her critics were, it seems, becoming exhausted. Where her early books were reviewed in major periodicals by top-flight reviewers, her last few barely received notice.
Why does the list of books end in 1970? Did she lose her readership? Did her publisher lose interest? She didn’t stop writing. On New Year’s Day in 1992, she informed Anderson ‘Am still writing—but you know how things are in the publishing business—and my work has become more controversial.’ In the same letter, she mentions that Fraser ‘is very well—works full time and held on as a member of staff’ and implies he is living with her. This letter is addressed from Camborne, very likely the same terraced house mentioned in Vicki’s poem. Paul Hunt believes that the reason Kathleen stopped publishing was that her energies became consumed in dealing with Fraser’s schizophrenia. Mahogany Rose includes a conversation in which Matt (Charles Sully) tells Paul’s fictional counterpart that Fraser (whose name, interestingly, is not changed) hung himself in his bedroom in the Camborne house. Paul did later acknowledge to me that ‘I never met him [Fraser] so I could not be sure of this fact.’
Paul’s disclaimer raised my suspicions because, at the time, I’d been unable to find any record of Fraser Sully’s death. When I ordered a copy of Kathleen’s death certificate from the General Register Office, I decided to search for Fraser’s as well, and soon obtained information that both disproved and proved what Paul had written. Fraser Sully did not commit suicide. He died of heart failure at the age of 76 in May 2019, just two months after Paul’s email. However, according to his death certificate Fraser died at Woodtown House at Bideford in Devon, a care home that, according to its website, ‘provides nursing care and rehabilitative support for 28 adults experiencing complex mental health needs.’ Although the staff at Woodtown House could not discuss Fraser’s condition, they did acknowledge that he’d been living in the home for nearly twenty years—probably from the time that Kathleen entered the care home in Camborne where she died. It’s safe to assume that Fraser’s care would have consumed much of his mother’s time and energies in the years before she had to seek full-time care for herself.
So perhaps Paul was right, after all. Perhaps the reason Kathleen Sully vanished from the literary world had less to do with institutional prejudices and more to do with the simple fact of a mother struggling, with few resources and little support, to cope with her son’s mental illness. ‘Not all of us can withstand the inequalities of life: its buffeting, its knocks,’ Hesta Blazey says in Merrily to the Grave. Kathleen Sully had been isolated from her family for decades. She had few connections to the literary world to start with. Her few letters to Lindsay Anderson may, indeed, represent the only ones to have survived the buffeting and knocks that would have been the daily life of an aging woman caring for an adult son with schizophrenia. Orwell said that history is written by the winners. It’s easier to win when you’re not isolated, out on the margins, old and out of print. Perhaps, in the end, there is no mystery why Kathleen Sully vanished.
I thank Vicki Sully and Paul Hunt for their generous cooperation in my research on this article.
Advertisement for The Journey in Publisher’s Weekly.
Of all the muses you might expect a young woman novelist to be channeling in 1933, Henry Fielding is among the last. Yet the closest parallel one can find to Rose Caylor’s second novel, The Journey, is The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling. In both books, a young innocent, a tabula rasa personality, travels to a great city where that blank slate is scribbled over by various forms of iniquity and sent home sadder and wiser.
But plot isn’t the primary point similarity between Tom Jones and The Journey. It’s the authorial voice. Tom Jones would be about a third as long and not one-tenth as enjoyable were its fairly thin story enriched by Fielding’s gentle, amused, and worldly-wise commentary. By the time Rose Caylor sat down to write The Journey, she’d been a newspaper reporter, PR agent for the American Medical Association, business report publisher, and actress in the Leo Dietrichstein’s traveling company, for which she had jumped into stage volcanoes, got shipwrecked on a desert island, and flounced around in crinoline and hoop skirts as “the Spirit of the Old South.” In his memoir Gaily, Gaily, Hecht compared Caylor to “a combination of Laurette Taylor, Sarah Bernhardt, and Geronimo.” Not quite the same as Fielding’s years as a magistrate and founder of the Bow Street Runners, but close in terms of street savvy, I suspect.
The actual story in The Journey could easily be squeezed onto about five pages without much abridgement. A Chicago reporter names Jimmy Dyrenforth sweet-talks Caryl Fancher, a typist in his father’s office and the two get married on a whim. Coming out of City Hall, Jimmy panics and rushes to a pay phone, where he talks the friendly editor of a New Orleans newspaper into giving him a job. Jimmy bolts for the first train to New Orleans, leaving the virginal Caryl to her own devices, hoping she will give up on the marriage before it’s even started.
Instead, she assembles a trousseau and heads off to New Orleans in pursuit. Though Jimmy meets her at the station, his welcome is mostly intended to persuade Caryl to leave as quickly as possible. Whether obstinate or just obtuse, she persists as he variously ignores and insults her, and eventually the two hop in bed and Caryl ends up pregnant. Though Caylor wrote her share of happy endings as a playwright and Hollywood screenwriter, there’s none to be found here. Caryl gives up eventually and heads to New York for an abortion after brow-beating Jimmy into borrowing $200 from his father.
So much for the narrative arc. What you can’t get from this synopsis, however, is any sense of why this book is 483 pages long. Perhaps an excerpt from Caylor’s introduction of the reader to Jimmy will help:
We take it that the reader will be glad at length to meet one of our characters who is not a fool. However, the reader may well turn and ask “What is her?” In attempting a valuation of our favourite masculine character, we must first state some of our concepts and premises, to which he must measure up. Thus:
To have convictions –! that is the true, the high, human importance. To feel that one’s beliefs matter, to attain them through moral force, to give them up with a struggle when one has become convinced they are false, that is living a worthy, possibly even noble, life. We truly believe that convictions, hard won and hard relinquished, are the only possessions that lend a passing importance to man, and dignity, etc., to his transitory estate. Our hero, however, hadn’t any hard-won convictions or any he wouldn’t give up at the drop of a hat. Opinions blew through his head like drafts. He no more bothered to knew where he got them than were he got a cold in the head, and he no more knew the reason why he gave them up than he could give the reason for a sneeze.
This is followed by nine pages of further reflection on Jimmy’s character, its development, and the nature of modern man, while Jimmy and Caryl wait side-by-side in a cab for the plot to move along. The Journey may take place in a time of trains, planes (well, a few), and automobiles, but its pace is solidly grounded in the 18th century. Thirty pages later, the couple is just sitting down to their first meal together. The consumation of their marriage is still at least three hundred pages off.
And this, in a nutshell, is the dilemma faced by a reader who decides to take Caylor’s journey. One reviewer called the book “irritating and entertaining,” and that’s precisely the mixed bag it offers. This is not a book you read for the story or even much for the characters, so if you don’t fall in love with Caylor as tour guide, I can’t imagine you’re likely to hang in past Chapter Two.
I think we have to accept that Caylor miscalculated how far she could stretch her story’s thin fabric over its complex scaffolding of commentary. I stuck with her to the very end because reading books like this is part of the price of my obsession. Given how rare this book is in the first place (perhaps a dozen copies in libraries worldwide and zero copies available for sale), I suspect few who even bother to read this far are likely to track down The Journey for themselves.
Yet, I must remind you that irritating was only one of the adjective used to describe this book. The other was entertaining. For, in the midst of many pages of reflections and discursions that often made me grumble, “Oh, just get on with it!”, there are also wonderful set-pieces. Like the literary discussion where a roomful of New Orleans belles dames debate whether Gulliver’s Travels is “fornographic” and gush over their latest reads, the titles and authors of which none of them can quite bring to mind. Or this description of the earnest authoress Rose Entwhistle and one of her attempts at research:
Today, Miss Entwhistle is very tired, and for a most perlexing reason. Having heard a salesgirl remark the other day, in answer to her own statement that a department store was very fascinating, that it was “a good place to learn human nature,” she had immediately (quite secretly of course and incognito) obtained a job in this same store and for that very purpose. Today, having worked a week there, having been rather disappointed in human nature, and having quit the day before, she suffered greatly in her feet, but especially there was a strange disquiet in her memory. Famous for her many stories dealing with department store life, she was beginning to wonder whether it was not she herself who was the author of that statement about department stores being “a good place to learn human nature,” and could it be that she had been taken in by a quotation from herself?
And, on occasion, Caylor can be refreshingly telegraphic in her approach. Take, for example, Chapter 32, which reads, in entirety, “We have no room in this book for the savageries of Caryl’s sister-in-law, Hazel.”
The Nation’s reviewer, Florence Codman, loved The Journey in all its digressive beauty, dismissing her own brief description of the book as “an offering of nickels where millions are to be enjoyed.” Well, perhaps not millions, but something in the mid-hundreds at least. Do these make The Journey worth the investment of a couple of weeks to read it? I guess that’s why I get paid the big bucks to help with these decisions.
The Journey, by Rose Caylor New York: Covici, Friede (1933)
Back in the 1990s, I was browsing my way through an independent bookstore in Saskatoon (now, sadly, defunct) and came across a title I hadn’t heard of, by an author whose name was unfamiliar to me.
I’ve always been drawn to war novels (I’m something of a history buff) and this one had, as its backdrop, the grim, bloody trenches of the First World War. I read a few paragraphs and decided to purchase The Poppy Factory, a leap of faith that paid big dividends as the book remains a favorite to this day.
It impressed me to such an extent that, some years afterward, when I was guest at a science fiction convention in Vancouver, I brought up The Poppy Factory during a panel of on “Neglected Books” that also included my Canadian colleague Spider Robinson.
No one in the audience recognized the book, so I stoutly defended its literary qualities, at one point cracking open The Poppy Factory, reading an excerpt from about thirty-five pages into the novel. The protagonist, Captain Adrian Garrard, is lying in “no man’s land” after an abortive attack. Wounded, semi-delirious, at first he can scarcely credit his senses:
I shall never find peace in the moonlight again, only fear, because it was then I saw the first of them.
It appeared over the lip of the crater, crouching on all fours, its black head twitching rapidly from side to side, sensing danger, scenting prey. It began to crawl through the mud toward me…
… I heard the sickening, sucking sound as its legs drove it closer and closer through the clinging mud and could not look. And then I heard laughter. Harsh, grating, wild, only just recognizable, but laughter.
I forced my eyes open.
The creature had risen onto its rear legs and, still bent forward, was clutching my revolver between its forepaws. Only they weren’t paws, they were earth-blackened hands, and the creature was not an animal but a man, his head shrouded in a cowl of filthy sacking, his clothes blackened rags…
…I lay still, feigning death. The claw-like hands ripped at my clothes. Perhaps this was death….
The reaction to that reading was most gratifying. I could see people writing the title down for future reference.
William Fairchild, with Simone Simon (L) and George Baker (R) on the set of The Extra Day in 1955.
My investigations over the years uncovered some biographical details about The Poppy Factory’s author, William Fairchild. He served in British Naval Intelligence during World War II, and subsequently enjoyed a fairly lengthy and successful tenure in the British film industry, scripting and directing a number of movies. His best-known efforts were Malta Story, featuring Jack Hawkins, and Star!, with Julie Andrews.
So, it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s a strong cinematic feel to The Poppy Factory; visually it’s quite evocative and compelling. As part of his research, Fairchild personally toured the Ypres battlefield in Belgium, spurred by a rumor (I’ve never been able to confirm its veracity) that at one point in the conflict two hundred men from both armies lived underground between enemy lines.
William Fairchild died in 2000 at the ripe, old age of eighty-two.
Sadly, he never lived to see his novel translated to the big screen.
But it’s never too late to rectify that oversight….
Cliff Burns has been a professional author since 1985, with 15 books and scores of published short stories, essays, reviews and poems to his credit. He lives in western Canada with his wife, artist and educator Sherron Burns. He also writes the Beautiful Desolation blog.
The Poppy Factory, by William Fairchild London and Toronto: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1987 Also published as No Man’s Land in the U.S. by Bantam Books, 1988
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece titled “The Mystery of Jessamy Morrison” that surveyed four of the six novels published between 1963 and 1972 by a writer of that name. Aside from the fact that the British Library’s catalogue listed “Jessamy Morrison” as a pseudonym, I hadn’t been able to determine anything more about Morrison’s true identity. Indeed, although the pioneering lesbian critic and publisher Barbara Grier considered two of Morrison’s early books, The No Road (1963) and The Girl from Paris (1965) among the best books on gay themes in their respective years, certain aspects of the books made me wonder whether Jessamy was, in fact, male.
Soon after I posted the piece, the British novelist and editor Eric Brown emailed me. “Now this is a long shot,” he wrote, “and I suspect it might come to nothing — but I wonder if there is a possibility that Jessamy Morrison was a pseudonym used by Peter de Polnay?” Eric felt the descriptions of Morrison’s novels seemed “like synopses of works by Peter de Polnay: upper middle-class characters, continental settings, unpleasant female characters, and sex.”
I’ve been fascinated by Peter de Polnay for some time and wrote de Polnay’s Wikipedia biography several years ago. Born into a Jewish-Hungarian noble family, he and his sisters were raised mostly by governesses and caretakers in Switzerland and England. After a series of misadventures in Austria, Argentina, and the French Riviera, de Polnay settled in Paris and began writing novels in English. His first book, Angry Man’s Tale (1939), was described by one critic as “a curious and effective blend of James M. Cain and Noel Coward.” De Polnay tried to blend into the woodwork when the Germans occupied Paris in 1940 but eventually chose to flee, making his way south through Spain to Gibraltar, from where he was evacuated to England — an experience he recounted in his 1941 book Death and Tomorrow.
De Polnay tried to assume the life of an English country gentleman, renting Boulge Hall, formerly the home of the poet and translator Edward FitzGerald (responsible for the hugely popular English translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam). He soon found this lifestyle unaffordable and after his first wife died in 1950, he spent most of the rest of his life circulating through Spain, France, and southern England. And all the while, he wrote like a demon, amassing something like 80 books under his own name before his death in 1984.
Peter de Polnay.
I’ve written about several of de Polnay’s books. All that I’ve read are short, spare, speedy, and utterly cynical, leading me to refer to him as “a poor man’s Georges Simenon.” Poor because de Polnay is not quite the master that Simenon can be at his best. As a novelist, de Polnay lacks something of Simenon’s ruthless efficiency. None of the de Polnays I’ve read so far is without an extraneous character or two, or a narrative detour down what proves to be a dead end. And unlike Simenon, de Polnay was not working in his native language (which he’d probably say was French rather than Hungarian, in any case). Now, that alone is not necessarily a handicap (viz. Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov to name just two who put many native English writers to shame), but combined with the speed with which de Polnay wrote (averaging 3-4 books a year), it led so some stylistic tendencies that Eric Brown felt might offer further hints to Jessamy Morrison’s identity.
The moment I read Eric’s first email, I knew he had to be correct. “It seems obvious now that I think about it. Many similarities. Many,” I replied. However, I was also checking with other sources to see what I could find. The Humanities staff of the British Library diligently looked through their records but found no further clue to why their catalogue listed Jessamy Morrison as a pseudonym. The Society of Authors drew a blank as well, and so did several agencies I contacted.
I sent Eric a selection of chapters from Morrison’s novels to aid in his comparison with Peter de Polnay’s prose. “I’m convinced it’s Peter de Polnay,” he wrote back a few days later:
Even if we were to disregard the many stylistic similarities, it ‘feels’ like de Polnay: the narrative is leisurely and slapdash, interspersed with often irrelevant asides concerning the narrator’s relatives or acquaintances (a typical de Polnay trait.) The milieu is pure PdP. At the start of The No-Road he mentions shooting (he was a keen shooter) and the specialist phrase ‘walk up partridges’ – which has echoes with a character in his 1970 novel Spring Snow and Algy. He’s casually disparaging about stout women, and garrulous swearing women, who often crop up in his books.
Eric’s comparison of de Polnay’s prose with Morrison’s added to his conviction:
The stylistic similarities are telling. The prose is littered with ugly sentence splices; there’s an under-use of commas; minor characters are described coming and going to no real effect; he employs ‘whereby I mean’ and ‘As a matter of fact’ and ‘In short’ which crop up again and again in DpD’s novels; he combines in the same paragraph dialogue attributed to different characters which other novelists would lay out on separate lines; there are one or two instances of the absence of a comma between verb and gerund, a DpD trait; in dialogue, characters are oddly off-hand with each other.
Like de Polnay, Morrison had a predilection for splicing sentences:
We had a couple of hours to kill, Clarissa went off with the children, I called in on my club, and then we all met at the air terminus.
Like de Polnay, Morrison composes with a slapdash brush, introducing, as Eric put it, “willy-nilly, background detail into a section of dialogue, thus wrong-footing the reader when returning to the dialogue”:
My father had been a shipbroker in Leadenhall Street and my brother John and I inherited the business. In furtherance of our business I went abroad from time to time to places like Antwerp and Rotterdam and Hamburg. “That doesn’t come into it,” I added. Clarissa remembered she had something or other to do, so left the room, and if I come to think of it she never thanked me properly for agreeing to the holiday in Majorca.
And, like de Polnay, Morrison’s stage directions can be haphazard:
I said I intended to settle in the town. Before he could make some appropriate remark an ill-dressed old woman, in a not too clean apron, waddled in and asked for ten Woodbines. Meanwhile the man in the green hat had left. The landlord served the woman, the door closed on her and we were alone.
“He likes having minor characters wander off set for no reason!” Eric observed.
By this point, I was convinced as well. So, I wrote to Peter de Polnay’s son Greg, a retired actor now living in France. I’d interviewed Greg for the Wikipedia article on his father. “Yes, indeed Jessamy Morrison was a pseudonym of my father’s,” he replied. “But I had no idea he had written so many novels.” Greg de Polnay’s relationship with his father had been difficult at the best of times — as evidenced by the fact that Peter de Polnay never mentioned his son in any of his autobiographies.
Chances are that Peter de Polnay adopted the pseudonym of Jessamy Morrison for two reasons. First, to avoid saturating the market. But more importantly, to avoid incurring the wrath of the Catholic Church, which still maintained its index of forbidden books. De Polnay had converted after marrying his third wife, Maria del Carmen Rubio y Caparo, daughter of a Spanish theater director and a devout Catholic.
And, by 1963, he had become accustomed to using a pseudonym. As Greg confirmed, his father published a number of novels for W. H. Allen under the name of Rodney Garland. Rodney Garland was itself a pseudonym, adopted by a fellow Hungarian emigre named Adam Martin de Hegedus. De Hegedus was a journalist and commentator who’d published several works of nonfiction between the late 1930s and early 1950s. He took the pseudonym when W. H. Allen published his 1953 novel The Heart in Exile (recently reissued by Valancourt Books). Now considered a landmark book for its candid and positive portrayal of the relationship between two gay men, The Heart in Exile risked condemnation, if not censorship, given the fact that homosexuality was still illegal under English laws.
De Hegedus died in October 1955, though the circumstances of his death are still in doubt. Soon after his death, W. H. Allen published a second Rodney Garland novel, The Troubled Midnight, which was undoubtedly by de Hegedus. Over the course of the next ten years, however, W. H. Allen published three more novels by “Rodney Garland”: World Without Dreams (1961); Hell and High Water (1962); and Sorcerer’s Broth (1966). Greg de Polnay has confirmed that the last two were written by his father. I’m waiting on a copy of World Without Dreams to see if it passes the subject/style test.
So, there we have it: Jessamy Morrison was Peter de Polnay. I shall have to amend his Wikipedia page now.
Prayer: “Let us throw back our heads and laugh at reality.” Response: “Which is an illusion caused by mescaline deficiency.”
N. F. Simpson wrote those words in his play A Resounding Tinkle, and they are as true today as they were then, which is to say as true as anything else. Simpson, born Norman Frederick but known to everyone as “Wally” – a play on the name of Edward VIII’s lover, of course – was a great writer, an influence on Cambridge comic writers like Peter Cook and John Cleese, and a popular and critically-acclaimed playwright from the 1950s onwards, admired both by Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. Wally wrote mostly for the stage, but also for television and cinema and, on one exceptional occasion, as a novelist. He was able to outdo Lewis Carroll by thinking of a million impossible things for breakfast but, unlike his contemporaries who could make their work only absurd, he could also be as funny as a writer he admired greatly, P. G. Wodehouse. More philosophical than absurdist, Simpson nevertheless created surreal worlds whose logic was as rigorous as that of Aristotle, only much more hilarious.
N. F. Simpson, around 1976.
In his long career – his work was first performed at the Royal Court in London in 1957, and his last new work for the stage, If So Then Yes, debuted in 2009 – N. F. Simpson produced many extraordinary works, from A Resounding Tinkle and One Way Pendulum (the latter filmed by Peter Yates in 1964) to television work as diverse as episodes of the ITV serial Crown Court (which vehicle Simpson subverted to near-breaking point) and Elementary My Dear Watson, a 1973 TV play in which John Cleese played Sherlock Holmes.
An illustration from Harry Bleachbaker.
Harry Bleachbaker, published 1976, is not his only prose work, but it is his only novel and, being an N. F. Simpson novel, is very little like anything else in fiction. Based, at times so closely as to be verbatim, on his 1972 play Was He Anyone, Harry Bleachbaker has very little in the way of plot and an enormous amount in the way of diversion, rumination and side-tracking. Its plot, which unfolds over a hundred or so pages with the speed of a Galapagos tortoise making its mind up, is extremely simple: a man named Albert Whitbrace has fallen into the Mediterranean and plans are put into motion for his rescue. Or rather, plans to make plans to rescue him are put into motion, or if not put into motion, then discussed. The whole thing reads – probably intentionally – at times like the minutes of a very tortuous civil service meeting. Practicalities are weighed up, pros and cons are debated, issues are raised, and all the time Albert Whitbrace remains floating in the Med. There are footnotes, there are illustrations, there are sections rendered in dialogue but the thrust of the story is never out of focus: Albert Whitbrace is in the sea and he must be got out. And eventually, a decision is made.
At times Harry Bleachbaker (the titular character remains obscure) reads like Flann O’Brien, at others like Samuel Beckett, and at still others like an extended Monty Python sketch, but always it is pure N. F. Simpson: a world gone mad which is nevertheless ordered by the strictest rules of logic. Simpson, who laughed at reality, nevertheless went to great pains to replicate it faithfully at the same time as he was mocking it. And from the very first page of Harry Bleachbaker, nothing is safe. The Author’s Note at the beginning warns the reader:
This is an uneven book, parts of it having been deliberately made more boring than was in itself strictly necessary in order to highlight those parts which are less so.
Even the blurb cautions, “This is not, it goes without saying, a book to be read through from cover to cover at one sitting, or even at several sittings. It is not, indeed, a book to be read from cover to cover at all….” Simpson’s own biography lacks the usual elements of self-promotion and enthusiasm: “He was born in 1919, though without having first gone into the thing properly to see what it was likely to entail. Had he done so he would not be here now.”
The whole thing sounds quite daunting, and the lack of a conventional storyline doesn’t help the casual reader. Simpson’s lack of interest in narrative, he explained in the radio documentary Reality Is An Illusion Caused By Lack of NF Simpson, was caused by stems from the death of his mother when he was a child: ever since then, he seemed to imply, nothing had made sense. But the book, whether dipped in from time to time or read from cover to cover in a manic burst of brain-frying, is fantastic. Simpson’s ear for dialogue is incredible. His ability to capture the details of human selfishness (for this is not a book about Good Samaritans) and the tangled mess of bureaucracy (this is also a satire on the modern age of red tape) creates a world where the reader, who should feel like ALBERT WHITBRACE that they are drowning in a sea of madness, is buoyed up by laughter and a sheer helplessness at the force of Simpson’s imagination.
As an introduction to Wally’s work, Harry Bleachbaker is accessibly hilarious as well as being fairly easy to find online. As a stand-alone novel, there is very little like it, however you choose to read it. Be careful, though: it will lure the reader into the world of N. F. Simpson, from which, thank God, there is no escape.
David Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Night Train, was published in September 2020. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.
Harry Bleachbaker, by NF Simpson London: Harrap, 1976
Back in August 2021, when I interviewed Michael Walmer about his independent press MichaelWalmer.com, which has reissued dozens of fine neglected books, he asked if I knew anything about the 1960s British author Jessamy Morrison: “I’m wondering whether or not you’ve looked into her,” he wrote — “Who she actually was — if indeed it was only one person. My searching so far has revealed nothing.”
The name was completely new to me, and that in itself is an increasingly uncommon thing.
Well, having since tracked down, purchased, and read four of Jessamy Morrison’s novels and awaiting a fifth to make its way from South Africa, I can answer Michael’s inquiry. I’ve looked into her, who she actually was.
And my searching so far has revealed nothing.
According to the British Library’s catalogue, Jessamy Morrison is a pseudonym. Having checked with the Society of Authors, Penguin Random House (which now owns the backlist of Morrison’s original publisher, W. H. Allen), and several major literary agencies, I’ve been unable to find any record outside library catalogues and a handful of bookseller listings.
What’s worse, I’m no longer even sure that Jessamy Morrison was, in reality, a she or a he. Or both.
Three of Morrison’s books have male narrators, which in itself offers no clue. Plenty of women have written novels with male leads and male narrators.
Of the very, very little that was written about Morrison’s books even when they first came out, the one thing consistently mentioned in reviews was the “unusual” nature of their subjects. Given that these books came out when England was just learning how to swing, that was undoubtedly code for homosexuality. W. H. Allen dropped a big, unsubtle hint on the cover of Morrison’s first novel The No-Road (1963) by announcing it as “A brilliant new novel in the tradition of The Well of Loneliness” — Radclyffe Hall’s one-scandalous novel of lesbian love. And that’s confirmed through the rave reviews that Barbara Grier, a pioneering lesbian writer and publisher, wrote for The Ladder, a 1960s lesbian journal, in her identity as Gene Damon.
Grier delighted in the ways in which Morrison puts the reader into the minds of men who consider themselves urbane and intelligent and then demonstrating beyond all doubt that they’re as thick as bricks when it comes to understanding women.
Gerald Milton, for example, acknowledges at the very start of The No-Road that he failed to see what was going on with his wife Clarissa: “One needs detachment in order to know. Detachment is easy when one isn’t involved.” He admits that he was “involved up to the neck,” yet still prides himself in thinking that “I retained my detachment to the last.”
Gerald and Clarissa are a fairly conventional upper-middle-class English couple. He is a shipbroker whose business to various European ports and Clarissa’s primary passion is for horses. They enjoyed a very British sex life, “neither of us attaching too much or too little importance to sex.” Gerald does share with the reader that he takes the occasional opportunities that arise on business trips through “a drink too many but never by planning or premeditation.”
On a holiday to Majorca, the Miltons encounter a boisterous group at a restaurant that Clarissa suggests are probably gay men and women but that Gerald dismisses as simply loud and unpleasant. One of the group, a self-confident woman named Diana Upton, however, befriends Clarissa on the beach and soon the two are inseparably. After their time on the island, though, the Miltons return to London on schedule.
Within a few weeks, however, Diana Upton arrives in London and begins making frequent calls on the Milton house. The two women go out riding together. Gradually, even Gerald starts to realize they’re having an affair. Though he puts all the blame of Diana as the devious seductress, he condemns Clarissa as a deviant:
I know, I said to myself, there are women homosexuals the same way as male homosexuals, but I know too that society has to defend itself against them. In my own nest was an enemy of society and to my misfortune the enemy happened to be my wife. And what she had down was in my eyes, and according to my sense and rules or morals, almost as illegal as murder. There are no extenuating circumstances for sexual depravity.
Clarissa agrees to end the affair and Gerald agrees to bring in Jill, a rather plain and dumpy woman in her thirties, to help with the children and household matters in consideration. And all is forgotten, bygones easily becoming bygones.
And so, this particular story might end, were it not for Gerald’s indominable obtuseness. For him, Clarissa’s affair was a disgraceful but forgivable dalliance. For her, it was a transformative experience. As John Lee Hooker’s mother observes in “Boogie Chillen,” once the boogie-woogie’s in someone, “it’s got to come out.” Or, to put it another way, three into two won’t go. And it’s not Gerald the Upright who fails to live happily ever after.
Herbert Brownlow, the narrator of Morrison’s next book, The Wind Has Two Edges (1964), is equally obtuse but perhaps a bit less hypocritical in his propriety. Herbert has retired from civil service to a flat in a Channel-side town neither too touristy for comfortable nor too dull to be deadly, where he intends to write the definitive history of administration.
His sole acquaintance is Stephen, a fellow civil servant who seems, upon their meeting again, to have become somewhat too louche and fond of drink for Herbert’s taste. Stephen has also made friends with two young, noisy, and brutish brothers named Alan and Michael. They spill drinks, jostle tables, make lewd comments about girls, and generally unsettle Herbert when he tries to have a quiet drink in the pub with his old friend.
Herbert becomes particularly offended by the brothers when they begin toying with the affections of Beryl, the beautiful and apparently strait-laced granddaughter of his landlady. In hopes of putting affairs back into good order, Herbert ends up thoroughly entangled in lives his entire worldview makes him ill-prepared to deal with. He attempts to play matchmaker, then peacemaker, and finally, the knight in shining armor to resolve matters in what, to him, seems a straightforward and rational manner.
Unlike Gerald Milton, however, when the facts of the situation — which include the efforts of several gay men and women to love as they choose without running afoul of the law or their community — are make clear to him, it is Herbert who adapts his values and put friendship ahead of such labels as “deviant” or “enemy of society”: “If you want to give it a label, Beryl had said on that unfortunate morning, then call me a lesbian. I could not. For I remembered only two nice and happy girls who in their harmonious way had given me a delightful meal.”
His error in trying to make sense of affairs deliberately convoluted to disguise the actual sexual orientation of its participants, as he admits in the end, was failing to consider “the human element.” The Wind Has Two Edges reminded me very much of Kathleen Sully’s novel Merrily to the Grave, similarly set in a house in a Channel-side town and similarly about how a collection of society’s outcasts and misfits can find community and acceptance together.
If The Wind Has Two Edges ends in a sort of sadder-and-wiser sunset glow, Morrison’s third novel The Girl from Paris (1965) opens with a scene certain to offend conventional British proprieties of its time. Duncan Diplock (which sounds like a name out of Catch-22) is trolling the streets of Montparnasse after midnight in search of a prostitute. Not just any prostitute, however, and not, as you might expect, for sex. Duncan is on a recruiting trip. He’s looking for a suitably attractive and refined prostitute to bring back to London and install in his mate Martin’s call-girl service. Duncan and his wife will host her as, ostensibly, an au pair to fool the immigration authorities, while she earns a small fortune for Martin by bringing in a better class of client.
Duncan selects Josette, a stunningly beautiful widow on the stroll to pay for her daughter’s care in a safe and respectable country home. After her initial surprise when Duncan starts talking business instead of hopping into bed, the wheels in her head begin turning and she negotiates a tough bargain: she will take the job for just one year and at a higher than planned rate.
Once settled London, though, Josette proves an agent of chaos — sexually, emotionally, financially, and practically. Martin the pimp falls in love with her, Duncan’s wife Wendy is seduced by her, a wealthy and shallow young lord contemplates marrying her, and Duncan simply struggles to keep it all from attracting the attention of the police. Josette, as he slowly realizes, is calculating and acting at a level of self-interest that makes the rest of the cast look like hapless amateurs. While their lives fall to pieces, Josette is able to return to Paris with a tidy sum to open a dressmaking business with — her intent all along.
The Girl from Paris is not a particularly profound book, but Morrison is quite effective in making Josette’s highly unconventional position seem more balanced than that of any of the lovestruck or simply bewildered English men and women around her. And as with all of the Morrison novels I’ve read so far, it flies like the wind. You keep turning the pages in each out of fascination, wondering just where this is all going.
I haven’t located a copy of Morrison’s rarest novel, Rusty (1967), which seems to be about the affair between a wild ingenue and a prominent author, and I’m still waiting to get my copy of The Office Party (1967), which was the only one to be widely reviewed. But the sixth and last novel, The Widow (1972), offers a few hints that clarify, if not solve, the mystery of Jessamy Morrison.
The Widow has, again, a male narrator. Nigel Hood is a successful art dealer dealing with an exclusive network of artists and clients. While in Durban to arrange a sale, he runs into an old Oxford friend, a South African poet named Roy Banting. After great initial fame and critical success, Banting has become something of a has-been, spending much of his time building an elaborate garden on a country estate and looked after by his adoring wife Charlotte Ann.
When Roy dies suddenly of a heart attack, Nigel finds himself enlisted into the roles of executor, counselor, and problem solver. The root of the problem is that Roy and Charlotte Ann’s marriage was a fake. He’d married a sexy but troubled undergraduate while teaching in the U.S. and never managed to secure a proper divorce. And now Charlotte Ann is pregnant with Roy’s child. So, will the child be a bastard or will Roy be revealed as a bigamist? This leads Nigel to devise an elaborate charade with all the complexities of a Feydeau farce and none of the humor.
Morrison spins out the tale with the usual flair for convolutions, but this time around it’s a little like listening to a very long-winded explanation of a situation you weren’t much interested in to start with. “Yes, yes,” I found myself saying, “get on with it.” If the real author behind Jessamy Morrison gave up publishing after The Widow, it may simply have been that he or she ran out of ideas.
I say he or she because I found it difficult to convince myself that The Widow was written by anyone but a man. Not only is there not the slightest hint of anything but good old-fashioned heterosexuality going on, but the book is riddled with one of the most notorious tells of male writers: a fixation about breast size. Nigel makes sure the reader knows that Charlotte Ann is well-endowed while Nancy, his long-time girlfriend, is not. He even makes sure we are forced to witness a scene in which Charlotte Ann lactates for his edification.
Perhaps this alone is not enough to prove that Jessamy Morrison was, in fact, a male author, but it certainly raises questions. Why would a man take a woman’s name and then publish novels written from a man’s perspective? The Wind Has Two Edges aside, is the lesbian element in two of the other three novels a serious attempt to stimulate a conversation about the complexities of gender and sexual preferences, or is it simply a literate version of the very old story of a guy trying to talk his wife or girlfriend into a threesome with one of her friends?
I still hope to unravel the mystery of Jessamy Morrison, but at this point it’s more out of curiosity than any interest in trying to bring a lost-lost talent back to light. Three of the four novels discussed here may have some value as artifacts of a time when sexual mores in England were beginning to change, but only The Wind Has Two Edges has more than average merit.
I welcome any assistance any reader of this piece might be able to lend in solving this mystery. It would still be nice to know what was going on with these books. If nothing else, they are certainly atypical for their time.
The No-Road, The Wind Has Two Edges, The Girl from Paris, and The Widow were all published by W. H. Allen in 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.
David Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Night Train, was published in September 2020. You can find out more at 
