www.NeglectedBooks.com: Where forgotten books are remembered
In his preface to the Spring 2007 issue of the Antioch Review, editor Robert Fogarty issues this challenge:
The reader who sends the best and most persuasive list of “neglected” books will get a free one-year subscription to the Review. You must include a paragraph stating your reasons and it must arrive here by December 31, 2007.
Send your lists to:
Neglected Books Contest
c/o The Antioch Review
P.O. Box 148
Yellow Springs, OH 45387
Good luck!
In the Spring 2007 issue of the Antioch Review, noveliest and critic Alan Cheuse speculates on “what variety of fiction might have a chance to survive what Norman Mailer in a recent interview dubbed ‘the thirty-years-out rule,’ by which he means that the test of a contemporary writer’s work begins at about thirty years after his death when we can see whether his work is still in print.”
As evidence of the evanescence of contemporary fame, Cheuse cites Mrs. Fanny Trollope’s list of good American writers of the early 1830s in her Domestic Manners of the Americans. Among the best, in her opinion: Timothy Flint. “There is a vigor and freshness in his writing that is exactly in accordance with what one looks for, in the literature of a new country….”
Timothy [who?] Flint doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia entry, although you can find his Columbia Encyclopedia entry on Timothy Flint doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia entry, although you can find his Answers.com. It turns out that Flint was a clergyman whose biography of Daniel Boone, The First White Man of the West (subtitled Life and Exploits of Col. Dan’l. Boone, the First Settler of Kentucky; Interspersed with Incidents in the Early Annals of the Country) can be found online at Project Gutenberg.
Cheuse goes on to offer “a group of test cases” of the durability of contemporary fame:
In Cheuse’s view, these examples raise “the larger question of exactly what is, if we can determine anything in human studies with any exactitude, a classic? Classic. A classic writer is a writer of the first rank. A classic work is outstanding work of the first order. Classic works are those works that endure over time, over generations, over centuries.”
He offers a few books he considers “valuable, which few others seem to care enough about to read and reread”:
“But we can never be sure…. Reputations rise and fall, and rise again.”
He concludes with the example of the novelist Mary Lee Settle who died in Charlottesville, Virginia on September 28, 2005. “She did some work that will last,” George Garrett said.
“Yes,” agrees Cheuse. “That’s the best tribute one writer can give to another. But the thirty year clock is ticking — twenty-eight years to go — and despite all our best predictions chances are her work will, alas, end up like her ashes, cast on the Rivanna River, on a rainy early autumn afternoon, disappearing into the flow.”
“Or, again, maybe not. Perhaps her wonderful love story Charley Bland will come back to haunt the lives of deep-hearted Americans in, say, thirty or forty years. And her joyful novel of quandary and religious faith, Celebration, will find a home in the minds of future citizens trying to live with the large and awful questions of destiny and vocation.”
Cheuse also reprints the complete list of titles from David Madden and Peggy Bach’s Rediscoveries II, obviously cut-and-pasted from this site.
Lingua Franca, the now-defunct “Review of Academic Life”, has a regular feature called “Breakthrough Books”, where academic experts recommend the groundbreaking books in their various fields. Way back in June 1997, the field in question was neglected books. The magazine asked thirteen writers and academics to share their favorites. Here is a sample of their responses:
And I continue to be amazed by the (relative) neglect of Elizabeth Bowen — a novelist, in my view, far superior to Virginia Woolf. Her early novel The Hotel (1927), in which a young woman staying with friends in an Italian pensione falls painfully in love with a Madame Merle-like older woman, is at once heartrending, fierce, and almost achingly well written.
The Fountain Overflows is a book that nobody I know has read without my recommending it, yet it is one of the great turn-of-the-century novels. It is about sibling rivalry, musical families, genteel poverty, unreliable fathers, the death penalty, the newspaper business, the market for old master paintings-and it is also, despite all this plot, an invitingly autobiographical, intimate book.
No one thinks of reading Fyodor V. Gladkov’s Cement (1925), because we all suppose Soviet socialist novels are junk, but it’s among the shrewdest and most inspired treatments of the pathos of organizations and the sacrificial impulse of the makers of new worlds.
The complete article can be found online at http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/Special/books.9706.html
Bliss Perry was a minor figure in American literary history. A professor of English literature and language, he taught at Williams and Princeton for roughly ten years each at the end of the nineteenth century, edited the Atlantic Monthly for ten years, then taught at Harvard for twenty years. He wrote dozens of books, mostly collections, essays, and biographies of American writers such as Emerson and Whitman.
Perry’s memoir, And Gladly Teach, is a book of muted tones and little drama. As he admits in the book,
… I suppose that even at home I have had, more than most men, what would be considered a sheltered life. There has been no feverish anxiety about money, for there has always been a modest salary and no fear of losing the job; always a roof over our heads; always food and fire and libraries and friends, to say nothing of a household happiness so perfect that I cannot attempt to describe it here.
This is an excursion back to another world, to the orderly and reasoned life of an academic and scholar at a time when the entire faculty of a college could sit around one not very large conference table and when reading and thinking were considered priorities to which a professor was expected to devote much of his working day:
I choose for illustration four English authors on whom I happened to be lecturing at Williams in the eighteen-eighties, at Princeton in the eighteen-nineties, and at Harvard in the nineteen-twenties. It is clear that the lecturer, at the outset, should have read the entire work of each author. Then comes the task of thinking, for, as W. C. Brownell used to say: “To produce vital and useful criticism it is necessary to think, think, think and then, when tired of thinking, to think more.” The third stage is the selection and arrangement of such significant facts, conclusions, queries, as can be presented to a class in fifty minutes….
“All this,” Perry writes, “is preparatory to the actual delivery of the lecture.” The son of a Williams College professor, Perry grew up in Williamstown, Massachussetts, graduated from Williams, then stayed on to teach introductory classes in English. As a boy, he and his father often wandered in the hills and forests around the town, and when not studying, teaching, or writing, Perry was usually out somewhere in the New England countryside, walking or fishing. And Gladly Teach is, therefore, a quiet and pastoral book, and comes to a modern reader as an escape from the world of 24-hour interactivity.
It is also very much a book from the time when power and social status in America lay in the hands of a small number of white men, mostly from the Northeast. “My day’s work, for more than half a century, has been with gentlemen,” Perry writes, and by “gentlemen”, it is quite clear that he means men much like him. He is not, however, quite so narrow in his definition as his Harvard neighbor, who offers the following classic assessment of the world as seen from Cambridge in 1900:
The men, while taking their coffee, mentioned a then newly published book, Who’s Who in America I remarked that I was finding it useful in the Atlantic office, inasmuch as it gave biographical information about most of the men who had achieved national prominence. Whereupon our host asked, with entire seriousness, “Wouldn’t the Harvard Quinquennial Catalogue answer every purpose?”
The relative inertia of the social class structure of Perry’s world extended to the relations between faculty and students as well. Perry writes unashamedly that,
Likewise I was too ignorant of the personal history of the men whom I was trying to teach. One could place the graduate students roughly, for one knew the colleges from which they came and something about their records and plans. But I never knew even the names of the majority of students in the big undergraduate courses, nor their preparatory schools nor their Harvard groupings and social affiliations. I had to leave all that to my assistants who read the blue-books and conferred personally with the men.
On this point, though, I suspect that the only thing that’s changed between Perry and many of today’s university faculty members is the willingness to admit this.
And Gladly Teach is not a major work of autobiography. “I am aware that I have not portrayed a whole life, but only such aspects of a teacher’s career as may conceivably prove interesting,” Perry writes near the end. It is, though, a sterling example of a life devoted to, and illuminated by, a deep love of the humanities, and a thoroughly pleasant place in which to spend a few hours.
In “Their Back Pages”, from the 26 September 2005 issue of the Village Voice, Paul Collins amusingly discusses forgotten books by famous writers. Among those mentioned:
I am the author of this book. It has a few good scenes, but is essentially “roman a clef” nonsense that every writer has to get out of his system early on. Do yourself a favor and read ANYTHING else I’ve written (you’ll be doing me a favor, too).
Collins repeated the story on NPR’s Weekend Edition: you can hear the excerpt here.
Collins takes the punchline of his piece from Annie Proulx, writing on the task of examining used cider barrels in her early (but still in print) work, Cider: Making, Using & Enjoying Sweet & Hard Cider: “Don’t be shy. Put your nose right up to the bunghole.” Good advice for those willing to look beyond the best-seller lists for their reading material.
After Marianne left with her husband and baby, I prepared a light lunch which Vincent and I ate around Mother’s bed. Then he escaped, first to wash the dishes and then to so unrevealed diversion, and I sat by my mother’s bed, along with her for the first time since I had run away from home thirteen years earlier. Propped up against her pillows in a bedjacket one of her children had sent her, she seemed unusually lucid and oddly girlish. She whispered that she knew I would take care of her; I was the favorite of all her children and I wouldn’t let Marianne go on mistreating her. Her customary lethargy gave way to flirtatiousness and quick, energetic gestures. Grasping her hot hands in mine, I looked into eyes I had evaded for many years and told her than I would not, and could not, rescue her from Marianne. She stared at me in utter disbelief, nodding her head at everything I said, hearing nothing. I told her I was getting divorced (she had never seen my wife), and she nodded her head in approval. I told her I was going to marry again (she had never met Dorothy), and again she nodded approvingly. She forgot, I think, the promise she had tried to extract from me, and rested quietly for most of the afternoon. Once, turning to me, she asked with a childlike clarity of speech, “How old are you, Harding?” “Thirty,” I replied, and she fumbled for my hand. “You’re in the prime of life,” she comforted me, patting my hand as she had often done when I was a boy.
Lying back, she muttered something I couldn’t understand until her urgent movements made me realize she required the bedpan. I raised her flaccid body to perform that function, which embarrassed me far more than it did her. When I came back from emptying the pan in the bathroom, she was asleep, her face peaceful against the pillow, her breath coming in sharp little grunts. I watched her as I was to watch, in later years, our young children asleep in their cribs, merriment and tantrums wiped from their faces, leaving only blank slates upon which a father (a son?) can write what he pleases. She was still sleeping quietly when Marianne and Lou returned, and I made my way back to Manhattan.
Harding Lemay’s memoir, Inside, Looking Out, struck critics and readers alike as an exceptional novelty when it was first published in 1971. At the time, this soul-baring account of Lemay’s painful escape from the poverty, alcoholism, violence, and ignorance of his upbringing and his fitful attempts to establish himself in a career and as a family man stood out from the mass of autobiographies. Disreputable relations, bad habits, and errors of judgment were considered best left unmentioned. Now, after the success of Angela’s Ashes, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Running with Scissors, and other such tales of adolescents emerging from troubled situations, Inside, Looking Out probably seems a bit old hat.
Lemay is best known for his work in the 1970s on the soap opera, “Another World”. When he wrote Inside, Looking Out, however, he had little in the way of conventional accomplishments on which to base an autobiography. He had written a few plays, none of which had got past an off-off-Broadway weekend run. He had spent nearly ten years working for Alfred and Blanche Knopf in their publishing firm, rising to a fairly senior level, but he’d quit that to devote himself full-time to writing. Before the Knopfs, Lemay had worked as a largely unsuccessful actor. His only starring roles were with touring company that performed abridged versions of the classics for high school audiences. His first marriage had ended in divorce; in the Army, he’d deliberately flunked out of officer training; and before getting drafted, he’d lived in a home for wayward boys and shelved books at the New York Public Library. A memoir was hardly what anyone would have expected him to write.
It’s not the facts of Lemay’s life that make Inside, Looking Out worth reading. Instead, Lemay introduced a new dimension to American autobiography. This is a story of mistakes, embarrassments, bad judgments, problems ignored, and hard choices avoided. What makes this something of a novelity for its time is that Lemay portrays his own failures and foibles as honestly as he does of others.
But what makes is most remarkable about Inside, Looking Out is that Lemay does — gradually, haltingly — come to find the character within himself to make those hard choices. He comes to admit that his first marriage is a failure. As he leaves, he throws into a garbage bin all the bits of theatre memorabilia he has made his hobby and his escape. He later leaves a solid position and an excellent salary at Knopf when he comes to recognize its toll on himself and his family. And, as in the excerpt above, he comes to terms with his parents. Lemay never takes his own growth as an excuse for judging others:
For memory may be nothing more than another form of fantasy, in which we ceaselessly arrange and rearrange the incidents of our lives into a pattern we can accept. The honesty with which we present our motives to ourselves may be merely rationalizations for actions we not longer dare to confront, and those we’ve loved and hated, blur together into one haunting image.
Inside, Looking Out was nominated for the 1972 National Book Award for Biography. It lost to Joseph Lash’s Eleanor and Franklin. Dorchester Publishing reissued the book as a paperback in 1982, but it’s been out of print since then. For anyone who appreciated the like of Angela’s Ashes, it’s certainly worth looking for.
The New York Review of Books devotes a long article in the 31May 2007 issue to Tom Stoppard’s play trilogy, which just finished playing on Broadway.
One of key sources Stoppard acknowledges in his forward to the plays is Edward Hallett Carr’s The Romantic Exiles, which Francis Steegmuller recommended in Writer’s Choice. Serif Publishing just reissued the book, which pops back into print every 20 years or so.
If you’re interested in getting a taste of The Coast of Utopia but don’t have a theater company near you willing to undertake a nine-hour production, The Romantic Exiles is a good substitute. Like the plays, it tells the story of the life in exile, mostly in France and England, of a group of Russian political thinkers, artists, writers, lunatics, and their wives, children, maids, and mistresses. These were people who liked to “live loud and live large,” as a character in one of my kids’ first computer games said.
Carr does a wonderful job of blending first-person accounts from diaries, letters, and memoirs with the perspective of a professional historian and the dry wit of a decidedly un-romantic skeptic. Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin, Ivan Turgenev, and other characters carom off political theories, art, literature, financial problems, and romantic entanglements with passion and energy, committed to a “stubborn refusal to compromise with reality.”
Since 2005, Nextbook magazine, which focuses on Jewish literature, culture, and ideas, has published a regular feature on “Lost Books”, in which writers such as Meg Wolitzer and David Rakoff discuss the lives and works of neglected writers.
Among the fascinating pieces to be found in the “Lost Books” archive are:
[Don Napoli reviews another of Brinig’s novels, the 1939 Anne Minton’s Life on his Reading California Fiction site.]
I look forward to further installments in this excellent series and encourage neglected book fans to check out all the articles.
Don Napoli has created a wonderful site, Reading California Fiction, devoted to his admirable quest of reading his way through the archives of fiction set in California.
Don’s work so far has led him to books good, bad, and indifferent. Among the first are some long-forgotten but worthy titles as David Duncan’s The Serpent’s Egg, of which he writes,
A labor arbitration case? Am I going to tell you that someone could produce a great novel about a labor arbitration case? Yes, I certainly am. A skilled writer can present complicated characters and an interesting story against even the most unpromising of backgrounds. And David Duncan is a terrific writer. Here he cuts back a bit on the usual energy of his prose to tell his tale in all of its complexity. I like this book a whole lot. When I get around to compiling a list of favorite California novels, The Serpent’s Egg will be near the top.
Don’s also honest in admitting that his journey sometimes leads to a dead end. Of Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s Play the Game, he writes, “Sometimes the only nice thing you can say about a book is that you’ll never have to read it again.”
Reading California Fiction is well-conceived, attractively presented, well-organized, and full of books you’ve never heard of but may want to pursue, thanks to Don’s literary archaeology. It’s among the very small number of sites I’d care to browse through in entirety.
I neglected to note the death earlier this month of Thomas Rogers, whose first two novels, The Pursuit of Happiness and Confessions of a Child of the Century were both nominated for the National Book Award (in 1968 and 1972, respectively) … and have both been out of print since 1982.
In a review of Roger’s other two novels, At the Shores (1980) and Jerry Engels (2002), both of which dealt with the adolescence and sexual education of an Indiana boy in the 1940s, Cathleen Shine wrote,
One of Thomas Rogers’s many gifts as a novelist is his ability to imbue the less appealing realities of both love and landscape with a gentle, elegiac beauty. Rogers writes about adolescent boys and the industrial towns of eastern Indiana. Nothing, at first glance, could excite less admiration. Yet, in Rogers’s loving hands, drunken frat boys are revealed in all the sweetness of their humanity, and the fires of steel mills decorate the evening sky like sunsets.
The Other Press, which issued Jerry Engels and reissued At the Shores, has a small set of pages devoted to Rogers. But more touching is the obituary from the Centre Daily Times, in which neighbors recall his garden and the sound of his typing away on quiet summer days.
I read The Pursuit of Happiness decades ago and remember it as surprisingly strong but written with a light touch. It’s the story of a privileged young WASP who, as I recall, leaves the country not because of the draft and the Vietnam War, which always lurk in the shadows of the story, but because of a stupid hit-and-run accident. I may go back and reread it now. Vale, Thomas Rogers.
In the Grande Place, the peaked fronts of the old Guild Halls, as rich as wedding cake with tier on tier of sculptured figures, seemed asleep. The rain had lifted. They descended from the motor, walking softly on the wet grey flagstones, as in a cloister. The buildings enclosed their period and atmosphere inviolate, locking the ranks against any modern intrusion. If one went, the rest would crumble, betrayed to the time spirit.
“This is where the Spaniards used to burn heretics,” Russ pointed to a small memorial set in the pavement. Marta averted her mind. If you let yourself contemplate the monstrous sum of deliberate cruelty in known history, the fact that it is a part of human nature, you wanted to creep into some hiding place and cease to be. She said, “Handy for postcards in those days. X marks the spot. Wish you were here. The Belgians have a lot of old scores. But I suppose they’ve washed out the Spaniards, after three hundred years, except for the formal record.”
Russ said, “They have not. They hate the Spaniards yet. It actually makes trouble when we have business with the Spanish branch, calls for considerable diplomacy in direct contacts.” Yes, if you’ve been hurt, she thought, the fear is in your blood. She could not bear uncertainty, because of that long bewilderment which left her permanently dismayed … She conceded: “The Duke of Alva would take considerable washing out.” She wondered if hell might be an inescapable knowledge of what others think of you, after you are dead. Not so good for most of us. Then a mass would help, a kind thought, with music and candles. But Alva wouldn’t be let go to his masses; they’d hold him here at the stake he built, by the strength of their hate. She was not a Catholic, had never been anything, nor wished to be; but the forms of religion engaged her intellect. Disbelief did not wash them out; the mysteries then became one mystery of the creative imagination: that all these gods and devils and visions of judgment should exist in the brain of man, if nowhere else. Like the idea of justic, of virtue, of mercy. Say it all began in the crude barbaric legend of a warrior chief or a wise matriarch, or in a child’s trust in the omnipotence of its elders; and that it was passed on and magnified by untraceable degrees until it grew into the splendid and shining images of poetic myth, Athena with her golden spear, Saint Michael with the sword of the spirit: the process of transmutation remained inexplicable and marvelous. If it were only the insubstantial shape of what men would be if they could, how come so pitiful a creature to desire so greatly? … She checked herself, feeling that she was boring Pauline and Russ by such ponderous and futile fancies, though unuttered. They were not in the mood for history, nor was she; they wished to make the most of their own hour, of one another. Holding hands, for comfort….
The extraodinary richness of Never Ask the End is certainly not to be found in the plot. It’s most definitely a book written in the wake of Ulysses, Virginia Woolf, and other early stream of consciousness novels. “… [T]he mind is a deep pool, froth and ripples and straws on the surface and God knows what down below, water weeds and drowned things,” Marta thinks to herself at one point, and Paterson freely switches between physical events and the thoughts of her characters throughout the novel. Even for an experienced current-day reader, accustomed to narrative techniques of considerable complexity, Never Ask the End can be a challenge at first. I have to confess that I stopped after about seventy-five pages and started over again, reading more slowly and carefully the second time, in order to catch and keep track of the references to past experiences Paterson seeds in the flow of her characters’ thoughts.
Fortunately, there is much to reward the careful reader. Paterson, who worked for many years as a book critic for the New York Herald Tribune, accumulated more than her share of cultural and historical background fodder in the course of over a decade of reading and reviewing several books each week. Her principle character, Marta — something of an alter ego — is a cartoonist rather than a critic, but she appears to have had a reading diet similar to Paterson’s. She moves through Europe picking up historical connections and references at every brush.
Bits of history and snatches of poetry constantly slip into Marta’s thoughts, but she is sophisticated enough to keep most of them to herself. Instead, her public face is that of a wisecracker. “My epitaph will be, ‘She was right, as usual’,” Marta tells Pauline at one point, and she slips in an occasional quip worthy of her contemporary, Dorothy Parker:
Later in the morning they pursued the cathedral spire through a maze of narrow crooked streets, loitering by shopwindows filled with cheap lace, imitation jewelry and rayon undergarments. “These must be the Belgian atrocities,” Marta conjectured.
Marta includes herself among the targets of her humor:
“The English and the French,” Marta heard herself saying profoundly, “are different.” Fortunately Pauline ignored this contribution to world thought.
Marta and Pauline know each other from time they spent together in the Midwest twenty-some years before. Both women had left their homes, found jobs as waitress or clerk, and begun establishing themselves as that novelty of the time, the independent woman. One of the most interesting aspects of Never Ask the End is the glimpse it offers into the transformation of the role of women that began around the turn of the last century:
But all of us … Marta knit her brows, tracing through the confusion of her experience a thread of pattern … An army of girls, without banners, in mutiny…. Going out of the home, each alone, but multitudes at once. We didn’t intend to go back, to be caught; we were leaving it behind forever. Child-bearing and drudgery and dependence…. Just as we grew up, the door was open. Our mothers hadn’t had the chance. But they told us to run for it. And we did…
While working as a waitress at a hotel, Marta fell in love with a married man, a traveling salesman who often stayed at the hotel. Around the same time, Pauline fell for Keith, a handsome local charmer (“He was no damn good. But attractive,” Pauline recalls). Marta’s love never got beyond a rare walk holding hands, and the man eventually left, even after coming to talk with Marta about getting married soon after his wife died. One afternoon, Keith came to visit Pauline, found Marta reading by herself instead, and invited Marta for a horse ride. In the space of a few days, Keith and Marta decided to marry. Pauline soon after married George, who later proved to be an alcoholic. After a few years of marriage, Marta and Keith came to realize there was no love between them, and separated. Marta moved to New York and remained a working woman. Pauline had two children, bore up with George’s drinking, and found herself a widow at forty.
Throughout this time, the two women remain friends, and their history — both at the personal level and at the level of the social changes they’ve experienced — forms a tapestry of connections that Paterson manages to bring into even the smallest of details:
“Have you got a pin?” Pauline whispered, though they were well out of hearing, out of sight.
“A pin — what for?” Marta made a sketchy useless motion of searching. “The elastic of my knickers is done bust,” Pauline muttered tragically. “Wouldn’t it —” Marta had no pin. There was a historic transformation; she had not even a button about her, everything she wore pulled on, wisps of silk tied with a bit of ribbon. Women used to be clamped with whalebone and triple brass, bristling with pins. Our moral support, Marta thought; if it hadn’t been for that…. It was a state of mind….
Paterson’s perspective on the relationships and situations of Marta and Pauline strikes a modern reader as remarkably feminist. Never Ask the End was written by a woman who understood deeply that any progress she and her contemporaries had achieved did not alter a fundamental reality:
Marta remembered Alma, with her deep clear melancholy, saying that a woman’s point of view differs from a man’s because women can be used….
Paterson develops this thought into a howl of rage against the thoughtless power of men over women:
Even the process of childbearing is a physical indignity which no sentimentalizing can alter. One might resign oneself to that; the flesh is an increasing humiliation to the spirit, until in the end it is cast off with relief as a worn-out rag. But one may learn the lesson too soon. At her age, Marta thought, women were supposed to be overcome by regret if they were childless. When she was depressed, reckoning her errors, she was glad that at least she had no children. Otherwise she did not think of it at all. The exhortations of priests, moralists, statesmen, aroused only her remote contempt. Fat comfortable men in robes of office … Their insistence that tired, overworked, unwilling women must “submit,” bear more and more children, the fruit of apathy, fear, or even disgust, seemed to Marta a mental rape, a refinement of lust. She would answer to neither man nor God for her refusal.
Still, the different choices each woman has made — Marta’s to leave her husband and define herself as a working woman, Pauline’s to stay with her husband and find herself defined as wife and mother — add up to gulf between them that even the strongest friendship cannot always bridge:
How difficult, how impossible communication is, Marta thought…. At the moment, she and Pauline were about four feet apart in space, with no material obstacle to confidences, and no external distraction. The difficulty lay in the fact that an emotional truth is clothed in circumstance, and derives from a series of untraceable causes dating back to creation. To make it understandable, and the action resulting from it, one would have to reconstitute the universe as it was at precisely that interval of time, with the auditor in the center of it, and gifted with omniscience.
But this divide exists between all people, Paterson continues:
Now, for instance, Pauline, in a chrysanthemum kimono, was propped against the pillows of the lower berth, frowning slightly at a handful of letters scattered over the coverlet. Marta lay flat on her stomach in the upper berth. A curtain swayed, a draught from an invisible source blew on her bare shoulders. The white-painted box of a stateroom in which they were confined slanted crazily on the Channel waves. And if later Marta were to endeavor to explain, say to Alma — though she wouldn’t, but say Alma, whose receptive sympathy was unfailing — how futile this attempt at explanation had been, she would be impelled to describe these externals, as if they were important. Their significance was purely associational, not valid outside the minds of the participants.
Marta takes no special pride in her decision to make her own way:
Marta exclaimed out of the middle of her thoughts, because the three of them at that moment were enclosed in a fragile sphere of sympathy, so exquisitely perfect that it didn’t matter whether they understood or not: “Words cannot express the sheer horror that overcomes me when I find myself in a good home. A happy family, and a radio, and a concrete garage….” But why? What was the matter with her? Her own life was toilsome, solitary, insecure. She had made a wilderness and called it peace.
Paterson is remarkably effective in sketching, with the briefest of strokes, the complex ties that can be established between people. Five years or more before their meeting in Europe, Marta and Russ had shared a cab back from a party in New York. During the ride, Russ had taken Marta in his arms and confessed a great passion for her. Unsure of his motivations — and her own — Marta chose not to pursue the opening, and the two remained friends only, keeping up a periodic correspondence.
Now, in Europe, Marta see that Pauline is attracted to Russ, and she sincerely attempts to give the two some time to development their feelings, even as she struggles to understand her own desires for him. But circumstances conspire to make the effort futile. Pauline returns to the States without her hoped-for day with Russ in London. Instead, it is Marta and Russ who take a ride together to see Windsor Castle, and later spend the night together.
Marta has no illusions about their affair, though. She comes to see what an effort of will it has taken Russ to create and maintain his business face, and Russ himself allows an occasional mention of the physical cost he had paid. “My arms are always tired,” he says at one point, and later, he confides in Marta that he had already suffered some heart problems. He talks of holding on long enough to earn his pension and retire to his farm, but neither he nor she takes that seriously:
They understood one another well enough. Their relation had no name because it had no conditions. Whatever was between them was like those legends of rings exchanged or a coin broken, to be sent as a summons only in some unforeseen circumstance of finality…. She told herself she was romantic, inventing justifications. No harm, anyhow. Not with Russ. That was what he wished he could add to the past — wear his rue with a difference. They would not hurt each other.
Never Ask the End is a meditation on relationships. Marta and Pauline are, briefly and only in the most tangential way, rivals for Russ’ affection, but at no time does this competition take precedence over their friendship:
Pauline is a little in love with Russ now. As she [Marta] was with Lucien … Friendship is personal. Love, passion, don’t seem to be. We recognize our friends, we fall in love with strangers; they remain strangers.
If it’s true, as Fitzgerald once wrote, that, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” then all three of Paterson’s main characters are geniuses. Marta knows, for example, that she wants the comfort of a sustained love affair with Russ and that she is temperamentally incapable of it. “… [T]he fault was in herself. She couldn’t walk straight along a pavement.” It’s just this intelligence that makes Never Ask the End such a rich and refreshingly adult book.
Paterson is best known now as, in the words of her biographer, Stephen Cox, the “earliest progenitor of libertarianism as we know it today.” Her 1943 book, The God of the Machine argues against the possibility of engineering economies and advocates freedom and personal energy as the driving forces of progress. Cox’s 2004 biography, The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America revived Paterson’s role as a key influence on — and perhaps, in the end, a more profound thinker than — Ayn Rand.
Now and there one can glimpse a bit of this aspect of Paterson’s thinking in Never Ask the End, but I would caution anyone against reading it in hopes of pulling out some juicy bits of libertarian insight — just as I would warn non-Randians against shying away from it because of what others have made of Paterson and her political views since her rediscovery. In Never Ask the End, three intelligent and world-wise middle-aged people share a few days and a few thoughts with each other (and with us). The result will probably not change anyone’s world: but you will certainly feel lucky to have had such a chance — and to have been asked so little in return.
Note: Never Ask the End is currently available in an expensive paperback edition from Kessinger Publishing, but I recommend purchasing one of the much less expensive copies of the original Literary Guild release from 1933 available from Amazon or AddAll.com. For one thing, the Kessinger edition is nothing more than a bound photocopy of the William Morrow first edition; for another, Kessinger specialises in such reissues of books on the fringe of copyright and I’m not entirely sure if theirs is an enterprise I care to support.
New! Never Ask the End is now available in PDF format from the Ludwig Mies Institute website: http://mises.org/books/never_ask_the_end_paterson.pdf.
Robert Nedelkoff forwards an article by Larry McMurtry from the 23 June 1975 issue of the Washington Post titled, “Two Novels: One a Find, One Better Lost.”
In it, McMurtry lambasts the Lost American Fiction series from the Southern Illinois University Press for floundering “into an area of dry holes, of which the present volume [Janet Flanner’s The Cubical City] is certainly one of the driest.”
“It is in view of the rich possibilities offered by the ’90s, the teens, the ’30s, the ’40s, the ’50s, etc., that it seems to me time that the series stop futzing around trying to breathe life into ’20s artifacts….”
McMurtry offers some candidates of his own for rediscovery:
McMurtry also cites Caroline Gordon, John Sanford, David Stacton [him again!], and Calder Willingham as examples of writers with “lost novels that deserve revival.”
Ironically, the other novel McMurtry reviewed in this article, Maurice Edelman’s Disraeli Rising — the second of an unfinished tritypch that started with Disraeli in Love, both of which he described as “highly readable, well-handled narratives, in which the great and near-great figures of Victorian England appear and disappear” — has also been pushed into a dark corner of neglect.
A post on the NYRB Classic blog led me to the 23 December 1996 issue of the National Review, which featured two articles, by Florence King and Terry Teachout, about favorite reads — forgotten ones, in particular.
- · The Valley of Decision, by Marcia Davenport
- This novel has everything: sex amid the Johnstown Flood, labor-union strife, an expatriate adventuress, a playboy turned monk, a society wife who goes mad, a Czech violinist fleeing the Nazis. And if all this weren’t enough, the author even keeps us glued to the page when she describes the operation of the open-hearth furnace, a tour de force of “writing like a man” that won her high praise from male reviewers in that benighted pre-feminist age.
- · The Cardinal, by Henry Morton Robinson
- The Cardinal opens in 1915 and traces Steve’s [Stephen Fermoyle] rise from Boston parish priest to prince of the church. My favorite parts are the behind-the scenes accounts of how the Vatican works, and the descriptions of the Roman contessa’s salon: a hierarchy of ecclesiastical guests, their rank denoted by the colors of their flowing capes and birettas (the book answers all the Protestant questions about vestments), soignee women kissing rings, learned Jesuits swapping bons mots, and Cardinal Merry del Val capping quotations from Horace while juggling oranges. That’s what I call a party.
- · Jubilee Trail, by Gwen Bristow
- Sisterhood eludes feminist novelists, but it fairly leaps off the pages of Gwen Bristow’s Jubilee Trail, a good girl/bad girl western in which the male characters are all satellites.
- · Maggie-Now, by Betty Smith
- Maggie Moore (her childhood reprimand, “Maggie, now,” becomes her nickname) is a simple Irish-Catholic girl who wants only to marry a good man and have children. But along comes Claude Basset, a Protestant-agnostic college graduate with an ironic wit that goes over her head and a wanderlust she doesn’t find out about until after she marries him. The O. Henry-like twist here is the blissful marriage of this mismatched pair. Under normal conditions they would grow to hate each other, but their strange modus vivendi inadvertently keeps the dew on the rose.
- · Kings Row, by Henry Bellamann
- Suffice to say that Kings Row is immensely satisfying to read during political campaigns when the Trad Vals pile up too high.
[The movie version of Kings Row gave Ronald Reagan the title of his 1965 autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me?; as King notes, the novel was a bloodfest of medical malpractice, insanity, and small-town vice. — ed.]
- · Katherine, by Anya Seton
- Another favorite Anya Seton novel is Katherine, about the love affair between John of Gaunt, the ambitious younger son of Edward III, and Lady Katherine Swynford, whose four bastard children became the progenitors of the York and Tudor lines in fulfillment of the ancient prophecy, “Thou shalt get kings though thou be none.” Richly descriptive of medieval life, the story dramatizes major events of late-fourteenth-century England — the Black Plague, the Lollard heresy, the storming of the Savoy palace in the Peasants’ Revolt — and presents a brilliant fictional portrait of Katherine’s brother-in-law, Geoffrey Chaucer.
- · The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy
- Anyone capable of marrying Kenneth Tynan must have had a sense of humor, and Elaine Dundy’s first book, originally published in 1958, proves the point. It’s the stock Wanderjahr plot, transposed into a female key: Sally Jay Gorce, young, fairly innocent, and full of beans, heads for Paris in search of romance and adventure, gets more of both than she bargained for, and in the process makes modest headway toward maturity.
[Teachout provided the introduction to the forthcoming NYRB Classics reissue of The Dud Avocado. You can also find more about Dundy at her website, www.elainedundy.com.— ed.]
- · Pictures from an Institution, by Randall Jarrell
- This savage satire of life at a progressive women’s college circa 1954 is so good, it made Whittaker Chambers laugh. Some characters are drawn from life (Mary McCarthy among them), but you don’t need a scorecard to get the point, for every liberal fallacy of our time is here made as flesh.
- · Father Malachy’s Miracle, by Bruce Marshall
- This lovely, all-but-forgotten book tells the story of what happens when an easily exasperated priest, vexed to the utmost limits of his endurance by the invincible ignorance of the heathen multitude, requests God to confound them all definitively and simultaneously by working a jumbo miracle in broad daylight — and God obliges, leaving the world agog.
- · The Locusts Have No King, by Dawn Powell
- Long a fixture on short lists of Most Underrated American Novelists, Dawn Powell finally got lucky last year when Steerforth published her diaries and started reissuing her wicked novels. This is the best of the lot, a caustic tale of frustrated love and inadvertent success in postwar New York.
- · Max Jamison, by Wilfrid Sheed
- Speaking of critics, here’s a minor miracle: a comic novel about a famously ferocious drama critic for a weekly news magazine who awakes one day to find himself athwart a five-alarm spiritual crisis.
At Fairbanks he learned that he was not to be allowed to deliver at Minneapolis, as he had planned, a public address on his trip. Security reasons, said the President, who had to bottle him some way, and perhaps in this instance was not altogether wrong, but was getting tired of the way in which, no matter how we had defeated, the man came bouncing back. Report to Washington first.
There was also an offer to speak over the radio on October 26th. Well, thought Tom, that would take care of the bottling operation, if he had his way.
Unfortunately, the world, like the mouse’s tale in Alice, has a tendency to dwindle away to nothing, when you got back to America, except that in this case it was no mouse, but a lion they had by the tail. Didn’t they realize that?
He glanced at the mountains, whose snows were gold with sunset. Who was it, somewhere during his travels, a wit, so perhaps it had been in Turkey, where Noumen Bey, the Foreign Minister, had seemed, like his mind, a little sad, a little cynical, very strong, and very subtle, had referred to life in America as “Life behind the Gold Curtain”?
He could not remember, but he remembered the remark.
There were forces abroad (the war had let them out, as ghosts come out in a thunderstorm), out there, across the seas, which would have to be reckoned with, and which, if they were ignored, would distrub the whole world.
The trip had taken forty-nine days. That was almost exactly the length of that other trip he had taken, during the election campaign. That had not occurred to him before, but now he saw that they were the same trip, or at any rate, one on one side of the mirror, and the other through it; the one through a world that preferred to dream, the other through a world that was the nightmare America feared. It is true: the dream of reason produces monsters. But in this case it was an irrational dream. In this case it was the monsters who had reason on their side.
America is fenced with mirrors. They are our spiritual defence against the truth. And since we refuse to shatter them, there was nothing to be done now, but wait until they had been shattered from the other side, which would happen soon enough; though what would the world fine on the inside, then, but broken glass? The creature was shrivelling away from sheer mirror vanity. It was too late.
It had no dignity. Therefore it was a comedy, but only because one forced one’s self to smile. For it was also a tragedy, which broke for good hearts of those who still loved the place, no matter how ashamed they might be of what their government had done. There are a good many of those, and always will be, for the land means everything, even when those who rule it mean little or nothing at all. So it is sometimes nobler to be Tom Fool. Nobler, and of better use.
David Stacton seems, from his Wikipedia biography, a fascinating case of the neglected writer. In the space of eight years, between 1957 and 1965, he published eleven historical novels, ranging in subjects from ancient Egypt (On a Balcony) and medieval Japan (Segaki) and India (Kaliyuga) to the Cannes film festival (Old Acquaintances). He also wrote a good share of pulp fiction under pseudonyms such as Bud Clifton, Carse Boyd, and David West. He died at the young age of 42, having lived a fairly itinerant life, and his work quickly vanished from public and critical sight.
Among Stacton’s works was what he referred to as his “American triptych”: A Signal Victory, a novel about the Spanish conquest of Mexico; The Judges of the Secret Court, about the assassination of Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth’s flight and death; and Tom Fool, about Wendell Wilkie, the unlikely Republican presidential nominee. Having a long-standing interest in FDR, I thought I would start my investigation of Stacton by trying out this novel about the man who gave him his toughest competition in all his four presidential campaigns.
Wilkie came into the 1940 Republican convention with virtually no organization and absolutely no delegates, but a combination of strong support from several influential newspaper publishers and a three-way gridlock among the official candidates — Robert Taft, Thomas E. Dewey, and Arthur Vandenberg — enabled him to emerge after six ballots as the nominee. The old guard Republican party, in Stacton’s words, “wanted something like the Bourbon Restoration in Naples. They wanted to be reactionary. They wanted to punish.” Instead, the convention led to, in the words of one newspaper writer, “the most revolutionary thing the Republican Party had done since the nomination of Lincoln.”
Stacton portrays Wilkie as something of a holy fool. His motive is pure and simple — protect the land and the people from the many dangers of “that man”. Unfortunately, he quickly finds that modern politics is less a crusade than a circus, and no different from the lions and elephants, he is at the mercy of his handlers:
He was beginning to learn how much the professionals hated him. That left him the people. Unfortunately, as his advisers told him, it was first necessary to get to the people. He had to turn to such of the professionals as he could gather in, after all.
And so he winds up with a bevy of professionals at a retreat in Colorado. “The term is religious,” writes Stacton, “but the event is not. The event had about as much spirituality as a locker-room conference twenty minutes before the big game. It also had the same jockstrap, hard soap, sheep dip, and sweaty-armpit smell.” From the retreat, the Wilkie circus then takes off on an epic train journey around the country. Unlike Truman’s legendary whistle-stop campaign, Wilkie’s was less a matter of plain speaking and more one of media manipulation. Professionals such as “Sideboard,” who ghost-writes articles and forces canned speeches on Wilkie, or the Pattersons, who “had traits, but no character.” “Indeed,” Stacton continues, “they were not people at all, only a bank account and that odd, vacant look in their eyes.”
Wilkie’s crusade is not just a simple “back to roots” plea for folk democracy. He might argue against Roosevelt’s third term, but he shares FDR’s abhorrence of isolationism:
He could only tell such people that theirs was not the only country in the world, and that it behoved them to act accordingly. But that is never a popular message. Xenophobia saw to that, xenophobia is an act of ignorant pride, and pride, after all, goeth before a whole man.”
Still, Wilkie manages to misread the people’s will almost as consistently as the professionals do. He finds himself booed in Michigan: “… the workers, though better paid than the office staffs above them, were sullen with class hatred. He had never seen class hatred before.” He tells his listeners, “… if we do not prevail this fall, this way of life will pass.” But “Half the people … didn’t care. All they wanted was their salaries and hand-outs.” This half was already lost, at least in Stacton’s eyes, and with Wilkie’s loss, the other half — the good people of the land — lose their last chance:
The great ranches are going. The farms are gone. The highways lead nowhere; and the suburbs are worse and worse built; they cost more and more; and everybody drives.
The second half of Tom Fool seems a bit deflated. Despite his defeat, Wilkie carries on. Roosevelt sends him around the world as a personal investigator, a series of journeys Wilkie described in his 1943 best-seller, One World. But as Stacton characterizes the trip, which in the novel mirrors Wilkie’s campaign tour as precisely as described in the excerpt above, it is a journey through lands as spiritually defeated as America. The Soviets are neither the great red enemy nor the great hope for mankind. The Chinese masses are pulled between two leaders — Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao — more concerned with ambition and ideology than their peoples’ needs. Fascism comes to seem only slightly the greater of two evils. Wilkie’s vision has no outlet, even if Stacton considers it “Nobler, and of better use.”
The problem with Tom Fool, though, is that it claims to be a novel and yet comes across as a tract. Stacton may write that the Pattersons have no character, but Wilkie himself is more spirit than substance. The figures in this book have attitudes and positions, not features and habits.
In a review of another Stacton novel, Naomi Bliven wrote in the New Yorker, “Although Mr. Stacton is a good writer, his work is extremely disheartening, because he will indulge his talent for twisting perspectives so as to make human life appear to be nothing more than a grotesque and malignant practical joke.” This tone certainly pervades Tom Fool, and by the end of Wilkie’s journeys, the reader grows weary of Stacton’s relentlessly acerbic commentary. One biographer noted that Stacton’s characters
… are often two-dimensional figures, selected to illustrate a thesis, and drawn without much sympathy or understanding. By way of compensation there is his baroque and waspish style, studded with epigram, apothegm, and aphorism, ‘one of the most massively complex and convoluted styles of our time.’
In Tom Fool, however, this style bludgeons narrative, protagonist, and reader, leaving all with various scratches and bruises. Imagine one of Gore Vidal’s wonderful historical fictions, such as Lincoln, with all the intelligence and insight but almost none of the grace and wit. Or a cocktail party hosted by a brilliant but overbearing host — who drives his guests to the bar for another martini to tune out their host’s insufferable banter.
I plan to give Stacton a try again sometime. But if you care to give Tom Fool a try … well, then, you’re no wiser than Wilkie was.
Tom Fool is fairly rare. Neither Amazon.com nor Amazon.co.uk lists any copies for sale, so if you’re desparate to read this book, you’ll need to search for it at a major university library or consider plunking down $75 for one of the few copies listed on AddAll.com.
Robert Nedelkoff forwards a link to “The Sustaining Stream”, a Time magazine article from February, 1963 that provides “a recommended reading list of American novelists whose first work has appeared within the last few years.” As with any “best of” list from decades past, the names discussed are a mix — those whose works are now accepted into the canon of university curricula, academic studies, and regular reissues, and those whose works merit the dubious distinction of requiring rediscovery and mention on this site.
Among the well-known and established names are Walker Percy, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and John Updike. But the article also mentions several novelists worth noting here:
David Stacton, 37, is a Nevadan who wears cowboy boots, is fond of both Zen and bourbon, and is as nearly unknown as it is possible for a writer to be who has written, and received critical praise for, 13 novels (all have been published in England, five in the US.). His books, most of which have historical themes, are masses of epigrams marinated in a stinging mixture of metaphysics and blood. Mostly they resemble themselves, but something similar might have been the result if the Duc de la Rochefoucauld had written novels with plots suggested by Jack London.
Stacton’s story is as interesting as any of his books. He managed to produce 28 books in roughly the same number of years, including 22 novels. Most of these were historical novels, but Stacton shared the same kind of arch omniscience that makes Gore Vidal’s historical novels so entertaining. In addition to these, however, he also produced a number of pulp fiction titles such as Muscle Boy aimed at gay readers, using the pseudonym Bud Clifton, and westerns such asNavarro as Carse Boyd. Stacton rated Sir William, an account of the affair between Lord Nelson and Lady Emma Hamilton, as his best book. Back in 1992, Thomas Disch picked it as his book of the year in a roundup in The Nation magazine, saying he’d intended to read Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover, but read Stacton’s account instead when he found a copy in his shelves. Disch said of the book,
It’s wonderful, paced and cut like an MTV video, so epigrammatic I could extract an enticing quote from almost any page, and, as Sontag’s readers already know, one of the great Believe-It-Or-Not sex scandals of all time. For those who relish Boito’s “Mefistofele” all the more for having enjoyed Gounod’s “Faust”, Stacton should be the perfect complement to Sontag, not an alternative. Seek him out, or if you’re in the book business, republrsh hrm. He’s too good to be gathering dust.
I bought a copy of Stacton’s Tom Fool, a 1962 novel about Wendell Wilkie, and read it recently, but I have to confess that it’s in the queue for a post under the justly neglected tag. Stacton was just a bit too clever to be tolerable and Wilkie seemed more a bit of flotsam carried off on the tide of history than an effective protagonist.
In unfolding this grim tale, Novelist Bankowsky is thoroughly convincing as he enters successively the minds of a tormented religious fanatic, a furtive, greedy storekeeper, a mentally retarded girl. In each character’s rambling recall, his own weaknesses are laid bare and another’s motivation is made clearer.
On the other hand, Norman Podhoretz, writing in the New York Times, called it “an embarassingly naked imitation of The Sound and the Fury.” In more recent years, however, Thomas Gladsky called A Glass Rose “perhaps the best novel about Slavic immigration in all of American literature.” Bankowsky has put a number of excerpts from his work on the web under his Cal State Sacramento page, including the first dozen or so pages of A Glass Rose.
The article also mentions several names neither too famous nor too obscure: Richard Condon, who will never fade completely away as long as people watch “Prizzi’s Honor,” “The Manchurian Candidate,” and my favorite, “Winter Kills”; John Knowles, whose A Separate Peace rates its own Cliff Notes; and William Gaddis, who may still have a tough time finding casual readers, but who’ll continue to provide raw material for PhD dissertations for many years to come.
from John Berryman’s afterword to the Signet Classics edition of Theodore Dreiser’s The Titan:
Thank the Lord for second-class novels, or what would we read after the age of twenty-one, and how insufferable would be a criticism that devoted itself solely to first-class novels (the fifty-two or eight-six there are).
and from Zadie Smith’s wonderful essay, “Fail Better,” which appeared in the Guardian on 13 January 2007, but is no longer available online:
If it’s true that first-rate novels are rare, it’s also true that what we call the literary canon is really the history of the second-rate, the legacy of honourable failures. Any writer should be proud to join that list just as any reader should count themselves lucky to read them. The literature we love amounts to the fractured shards of an attempt, not the monument of fulfilment. The art is in the attempt….
Few of the books featured on this site qualify as first-rate or first-class, by Smith’s or Berryman’s standards, so it’s good to know that there are such eloquent justifications for reading them.
The barber at Stadelheim prison is called Adam, and most people don’t know if it his given name or his surname. He is not an independent businessman, but a state employee with the title of Surgical Assistant and a certificate attesting to his competence. He lives in the prison. Until 1935 he lived in the same capacity in the surgical clinic, and shaved the hairy parts of bodies before they were submitted to the surgeon’s knife. He is a master of his trade, but his trade has nothing in common with the gay, loquacious beautification work of a Figaro. For he does not shave faces. Adam is grave and taciturn and emaciated like a fakir. His office, his appearance and the late hour of the night at which he usually goes into action, spread terror, deadly terror. He is used to it and pays no attention to it. Sometimes it happens that his clients must be tied to their cots face down and cut hair in any position and has never yet nicked anyone. That is his pride.
“Adam, work!” the prison’s executive secretary speaks over the house wire.
“Cell number,” Adam requests.
“There are six.”
“Six,” says Adam. It is not an exclamation of astonishment, but only a repetition of the number. He hangs up, and dons his work coat. Every barber in the world wears a white jacket, Adam wears a black one. He is no worldly barber.
Six of Them is a remarkable feat of imagination. An exile from Germany, writer Alfred Neumann wrote the book, a fictionalized account of the 1943 White Rose protest against Hitler and Nazism, and the subsequent arrest, trial, and execution of the six organizers, with little more than hearsay accounts published in Time magazine and circulated among the emigre community. Yet he managed to convey with considerable accuracy both the particulars and the atmosphere of the event.
The book opens with the six in jail, awaiting their questioning by a Nazi Peoples’ Court. Although the narrative thread runs a short course from here to their conviction and execution, Neumann provides for each of the accused a flashback that shows how he or she came to the decision to publically oppose Hitler, with all the obvious risks that involved. Hans and Sophie Moeller (brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl in the real protest), university professor Karl von Hennings and his wife Dora (Karl Huber and his wife), and their comrades, Christopher Sauer and Alexander Welte, each arrived at his or her choice through different experiences and motivations. Sophie had watched as her best friend, a Jewish girl, was hounded out of school, then hemmed in by increasingly restrictive measures, and finally shipped off to a concentration camp. Karl von Hennings’ objection was an ethical one; Christopher Sauer’s a religious one. Dora went along out of love for Karl; Alexander out of loyalty to Hans, whom he befriended on the Eastern Front.
Neumann contrasts these six with the judges on the Peoples’ Court. They, too, have reached their destination through different paths.One is an dilettante nobleman who disdains his Nazi colleagues but lacks the personal strength to find any faith of his own to follow. Another is a fat, smug butcher who gloats at the rise in his fortune and standing resulting from his decision to join the Nazi Party early in its existence. Where the six accused took risks to voice and defend their beliefs, Neumann shows the judges as compromised, corrupt, or opportunistic.The political power may be theirs, but the moral strength of the six protesters is greater.
The book suffers somewhat from Neumann’s awkward style and his tendency to rely too much on conveying his characters’ thoughts rather than their actions, but it remains a strong story. He often shows a cinematic flair for scene-setting: at the time he wrote Six of Them, he had just finished the screenplay for None Shall Escape, another tale of Nazism for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. Neumann may not have intended to turn Six of Them into a screenplay, but it wouldn’t have taken much effort.
The real story has itself been filmed several times, most recently in the 2005 film, Sophie Scholl, and the facts have also been well-documented in numerous books. Neumann wrote his novel to show Americans that a simple stereotype would not suffice to understand tthe German people, but perhaps there is little remaining reason for anyone to pick up Six of Them and read it. That does not mean, however, that the genuine merits of this book deserve to be forgotten.
Just added to the Sources lists on this site: “Reputations revisited”, which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement’s 75th anniversary issue.
The TLS asked a number of writers and academics to name the writers and books from the past seventy-five years they considered most overrated and underrated. This feature is remembered now for two reasons: first, the revival of the reputation and works of the English novelist Barbara Pym; second, for Vladimir Nabokov’s odd choice of H. G. Wells’ lesser novel, The Passionate Friends, which one Wells biographer described as, “by anybody’s standards … a solemn and boring book.â€
But the old routine had to be followed again, almost as monotonously as in Saint Pierre Wood and in the camp of Arcachon — drudgery of all sorts, fetching water, carrying soup, wine, grenades, work with pick and shovel to extend the branching ways. The coupe-coupe and gun were useless here too and the only difference the Blacks could see in the trenches was that they could find death there at any moment, but they had no better chance of dealing it.
Certainly life in these holes in the ground did not seem like the war they had imagined. War as their parents had always spoken of it was war in the open, the stealthy surroundings of a village, the ambuscade behind the trees, then all at once warriors dashing forward with wild cries, palisades overthrown, streets taken, the combat around the huts, the gun that once fired cannot be reloaded, sabre strokes on naked flesh, screams of women who flee into the forest, necklaces and bracelets snatched, old men gutted like useless beasts, young men borne into slavery — these were the memories of ancient warfare. Then at night the return, driving before them droves of cattle and captives, women bending before the conquerors, dances, tambours, songs of the witch doctors, all celebrating the exploits of the glorious day….
A couple of years ago, I came across a French compilation of novels about World War One. Most of the titles were familiar — Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel, Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire, and Arnold Zweig’s Education Before Verdun. But La randonne de Samba Diouf caught me short. Who’d ever heard of a World War One novel with a title about “Samba Diouf”?
Intrigued, I did a little searching and located an English translation: The Long Walk of Samba Diouf. It appears to have been out of print in English since its first printing back in 1924, but it didn’t cost too much to obtain a copy in good condition. It was written by Jerome and Jean Tharaud, French brothers and writers who collaborated on dozens of books, won the Goncourt Prize in 1906, and were separately inducted into l’Academie Française (in 1938 and 1946).
The Long Walk of Samba Diouf tells the story of a young Senegalese fisherman who sets out to claim some animals that were left to him by a relative. His journey takes him through lands belonging to other tribes, and along the way, he learns of the war that has broken out in the homeland of the Toubabs — the local term for the French colonials. Like most other natives, he ignores the news, concerned more with his fantasies of coming home a wealthy man, ready to marry the daughter of one of the strong men in his village.
Unfortunately for Samba, he wanders into an strange town just as the French authorities announce a draft of able-bodied young Africans. For every 100 villagers, one man has to be offered up for service in to the Toubab cause. A few local men befriend him, ply him with palm wine, and turn him in as their contribution. When Samba comes to, he’s on his way to a boat destined for France.
Although the Tharauds (at least as translated) adopt a rather stilted tone to convey it, the mix of tribes, languages, customs, and religions in Samba’s group of inductees is the most memorable aspect of his story. The Toubabs see the men as a faceless band of “les noirs”, but they are a wild hodgepodge — Muslims and animists; sophisticated traders and primitive bushmen. Each has some story to tell around the campfire or barracks stove each night, and each has his own interpretation of this odd endeavor of the French to turn them into a uniformed batch of able, if loosely disciplined, utility troops.
After months of training, the Africans are hauled up to the front. Expecting to put their skills as warriors to the test, they spend their days merely filling in shell craters and laying down new duckboard lanes through the mud. Finally, the NCO in charge of the group convinces his commander that the men deserve a chance in combat. In a brief, furious scene in which the sensations of an attack across No Man’s Land is mixed with learned impressions of war as told by their elders, the men attack a German line, and Samba is wounded.
From this point, the journey rolls back in a fast rewind. Samba recovers in a field hospital, wondering for a moment if the tenderness of a beautiful French nurse could lead to romance. It’s all in his head, of course, and soon enough he’s boarding another ship, headed back to Africa. He eventually gets back to his home. In true war story cliche, his girlfriend has married another, and he’s never managed to collect the livestock that was to make his fortune. He returns to fishing. What significance the whole experience has had for him is unclear as the book ends.
It would be hard for any book written almost eighty years ago by white men about the world as experienced by African men not to seem a bit dated now. To the credit of the Tharauds, who specialized in accounts of peoples very different from the advantaged, intellectual world they inhabited — Africans, Jews, Gypsies — they make considerable efforts to take the perspective of the Africans at face value. Although they adopt primitive dictions to convey the talk and thoughts of the men, there is relatively little implication that these conversations and perceptions are not sublte and sophisticated in their own way. The Tharauds’ Samba is a considerable development from James Fennimore Cooper’s American Indians, and The Long Walk of Samba Diouf probably ranks among the more balanced and sympathetic Western attempts to depict a Third World culture.
Jerome and Jean Tharaud are largely forgotten now, even in France. I suspect this is due mostly to the fact that the gap between the French and the people of their former colonies has shrunk considerably — physically, at least, if not in other ways. However, they deserve recognition for creating some of the earliest works in which these peoples were treated from an anthropological rather than imperialistic perspective.
Novelist Julian Barnes brought another novel of les freres Tharaud, Dingley , l’illustre écrivain (Dingley, the famous writer), to public attention in this 2005 article in the Guardian. Of this loose fictionalisation based on the life of Rudyard Kipling, he wrote,
The novel is thus both a critique of British imperialism – of its coarsening effects, its brutalities and self-deceptions – and a warning against literary populism. But it is also a proper novel about human failure, about the price paid (and the public benefits reaped) when part of the human heart is suppressed. It seems impossible that Kipling could not have heard of Dingley; also highly unlikely he would have read it (not least because of Archie’s death-scene). I can’t find Kipling making any written or reported comment on the novel; fictionalising him, I would imagine silent contempt as his reaction to this piece of Gallic impertinence.
Unfortunately, Dingley stands even less chance than The Long Walk of Samba Diouf of being rediscovered, at least by English readers — it’s never been translated.
Off the phone, Dulac returns to his list. Yes, of course, he thinks, the APB should be all New England, and they should put reminders out to the customs people at the border. He’ll have DeMarcus take care of that. The photograph, he thinks. Did he mention the need for a photo to the state police commander? He cannot remember if he did or not and reminds himself to mention it in the rendezvous in the liquor store parking lot, before they go ahead and move on the house.
The last item of his list is the phrase and the question mark: Status of boy?
Was he being kept in the car? Dulac asks himself. Why would Vernon return to the cottage by himself? Was the boy in the car? Tied? Was he harbored elsewhere? How could this Vernon character leave him and be on campus that morning? Did he have access to some other shelter? A barn? A garage? As he was buying him food at McDonald’s, did that not imply an intent to care for the boy. Certainly it does, Dulac says to himself. And given all the signs this suspect has left in his wake, does that not imply that he is not a calculating or hardened criminal? Certainly, Dulac thinks. No question there. Is he therefore less dangerous? What is his frame of mind? Does he really know they have a make on him?
Standing, the questions left hanging, Dulac knows without looking at his watch that it is time to leave. Checking his hardware, double-checking the presence in his deep shirt pocket of the warrant and a USGS map on which the cottage has been marked in flourescent yellow, he takes up not his regular jacket but a flak vest he has checked out, and adds over this a light and roomy, dark blue jacket with POLICE on the back in reflective white letters. And he remarks to himself, this is why you’re here, this is the time to do what you’re here to do, as he moves across the hall and into the squad room, where the others are waiting in their blue jackets, with tear gas canisters, shotguns, rifle with scope, waiting for his word.
Theodore Weesner’s The Car Thief is mentioned on several lists on this site, and remembering the power of that novel, I went rooting around the net one day in search of information about his other novels. Of these, The True Detective had the most intriguing title. I was curious to see what Weesner did with a detective novel, and searched the New York Times book review archive to see what critics thought of it. The first hit to come up was not a review, though, but the following letter to the editor:
May 17, 1987
To the Editor:
I’m sure you receive many letters of dismay and complaint over book reviews, and of course nothing is perfect — still, how can I tell you how deeply you have hurt me by publishing Jonathan Coleman’s review (April 26) of my new novel, The True Detective? The degree of unfairness is what is so extreme or, believe me, I would not be sitting here feeling as if I have witnessed the very authorities commit a terrible crime.
The book in question is one I worked on for more than five years, and it came alive, and it does work — it is relevant and it is compelling — and the responses I’ve received from others and in earlier reviews have been genuine, extravagant, even passionate. Yet you chose to give it a short review, inconspicuously placed, and — and I just cannot deal with this — your reviewer did not even understand what he read.
I repeat: your reviewer did not even understand what he read.
And you printed it. You break my heart. You owe me much more than an apology.
Theodore Weesner
This is more than just the grumbling of an unhappy author. This is the cry of a wounded soul. I clicked the next link and read Coleman’s review, which was lukewarm but not harshly critical. What was there in this book that could provoke such a raw expression of pain to what seemed just a mild review? I knew I had to find out, and immediately ordered a copy — a first edition in great condition for $1.50.
The Car Thief is a grim book, and from its opening pages, The True Detective promised to top it in bleakness. Weesner sets his story in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a fading port in mid-winter, already on the margins of progress — literally: a great new bridge now carries the Maine-to-Boston freeway traffic high and away past the town. Claire Wells, a divorced waitress barely making ends meet, worries about the grim prospects of her sons Matt, 15, and Eric, 11. Vernon Fischer, a miserably unhappy college student, comes to recognize that his overtures toward another male student have been rejected. And Lt. Gil Dulac, the true detective of the title, 52, fat, aging, in a lifeless and childless marriage, wonders where his town is heading.
Murder stopping at a small town may have the effect of a nail dropped into the mechanism of town life. In large cities, by contrast, any number of murders may be processed and left behind daily, and only a glut creates a stir. A town or small city, even as it has no choice but to continue on its way, is likely to pause. It will look within, may gaze even harder and longer if the crime seems to have stepped down from a bus coming in from Boston or New York, L.A. or Atlanta. Questions will be asked. Why here? Did we do something? Is this the start of something new?
And it goes downhill from there. Over the course of five days in February 1981, these lives intersect in an increasingly gruesome disaster. Overwhelmed with despair and sexual confusion, Vernon goes to a gay bar, hooks up with and then flees an older man’s embrace, watches a child porn film, then finds himself cruising the streets of Portsmouth. Vernon’s fantasy is to find a young boy, care for him, and love him — a tender but desparate and senseless love. Turning a corner, he passes Eric, walking home from the bar where Claire works.
He has driven past something that has alerted his mind and shifted his eyes to his rearview mirror. As if in a movie, in its odds reflection, there is a young boy walking on the sidewalk through the early evening air. Already there is a new beating in his heart, as he returns his eyes to the street before him and lets his car roll along.
Approaching an intersection, slowing to a near stop, he has no idea where he is going or what he might do. He turns right and rolls slowly along the side street. Where there is a space along the curb, he pulls over and stops.
The boy may not come this way, Vernon thinks. He may have already passed back there on the larger street. He doesn’t look back; he decides not to let himself do so, so he turns off the motor. Life is chance, he thinks.
Vernon gets out and pretends to work on the car’s engine. Eric passes. Vernon coaxes Eric into getting behind the wheel and helping out. The car starts, and he offers to give Eric a ride home.
Instead, he drives out of town, and after Eric resists his approaches and tries to run, Vernon strikes him, binds him, and brutally rapes him. Weesner spares us the details of the rape until the autopsy near the end of the book, but he is completely unsparing in his portrayal of the intense and chaotic thoughts and emotions that grip Vernon as, over the next few days, he tries everything from bathing Eric to trying to flee with him to Canada to leaving Eric’s lifeless body in his trunk as he attempts to return to his college classes. Weesner manages to keep an astonishingly sympathetic view of Vernon’s inner demons even as he takes us through every desparate action.
Meanwhile, Claire returns home and after a sleepless night waiting for Eric, reports him missing. Gil Dulac, the town’s chief of detectives, senses something more than a routine runaway, and quickly raises his department’s level of attention to the case. Dulac may be somewhat confused and unhappy himself, but as Weesner repeatedly shows in dozens of small touches of police procedure, he is an excellent detective. He immerses himself in the case, digging deep into the world of porno stores, gay bars, and man-boy love networks that lies unnoticed around his town.
Step by step, a combination of good police work and lucky breaks leads Dulac to find Eric — dead from the accumulated effects of a blow to his head, the rape, exposure, and dehydration — and then Vernon. In a cinematic (but overdone) climax, Dulac chases him to the freeway bridge and then watches as he accidentally falls to his death.
Weesner is most effective when he drills inside the heads of the main characters, achieving a remarkable balance of empathy and stark realism. Weesner told one interviewer, ” The True Detective helped me as a writer. I learned a lot about looking outside myself and trying to capture other characters.” No one in The True Detective gets what he or she wants, and that fatalism, along with the wrenching realisation that Vernon cannot pull himself out of a spiral that will crush Eric and himself, too, makes for some tough reading. But it’s also a riveting narrative.
Weesner first began working on the book as a piece of nonfiction, an account of the abduction and murder of several young boys around Detroit, where he was living in the early 1980s. The book grew bigger and bigger, ending up as a 1300-page manuscript. After numerous blue-pencil rounds, his editor at Simon and Schuster persuaded him to turn it into a novel instead. What he learned in the course of his original research served him well in adding to the credibility of the details of Dulac’s investigation.
The Vietnam War spreads a subtle shadow across the whole of The True Detective. Vernon’s unhappy childhood and hateful relationship with his mother are the result of his father’s death in the war. And to Dulac, the war has left the world in an “endless hangover”: “Everything they did as policemen had changed in his time and he had never been comfortable — he had always been upset — with the implication that a policeman was not a good or humane person.” Porn, too, he sees as part of the aftermath of the war: “Of porn, all he can say — he sees in this moment — is that it makes the air around it different. It creates an air in which life has a different value. Less value.” The story on the surface of The True Detective is about a kidnapping and murder. But beneath the surface, Weesner suggests that the larger story is that of a wounded nation dealing with a world “in which life has a different value. Less value.”
Recognizing the deeper thread in The True Detective, one might sympathize a little more with Weesner’s anguished letter to the New York Times. Novelist Stewart O’Nan (below) calls The True Detective a great novel. Whether one fully shares his opinion or not, The True Detective is certainly a powerful and engrossing story that deserves to be taken down from the shelves and experienced.
These are the ingredients of a cop-and-robber thriller, except that Weesner’s sense of complexity undercuts the melodrama. His portrait of the young man, Vernon, is amazingly empathetic without once excusing him for what he’s doing, just as his look into Lieutenant Gil Dulac is generous yet never simply admiring. The two men are singled out, isolated in their hopes and fears, their hard-earned views of the world.
The True Detective is tough-minded, but subtly done. The language, the details, the progress of the POV sections — everything serves Weesner’s total effect brilliantly. And while it deals with a sensational, even loaded subject, ultimately I’d say the novel is that rare achievement, a wise book, and maybe the saddest book I’ve read. That it’s also a page-turner is a marvel.
And yet, The True Detective is out of print, and when people think of great American novelists, few think of Theodore Weesner. I won’t waste time speculating on why this is.
