If Clarissa is a neglected read, it might have brought some of that neglect upon itself. It’s 1500 pages long for a start and over the month I read it, I developed aches and pains from lugging the thing about. It’s in epistolary form, a mode of storytelling that resolutely declines to come back in fashion, even in an online age. Its morals are not our own. It’s about a rape, which arrives about a thousand pages in. You can see why people give it a miss. Still, you should read it. You just have to acclimatise.
Clarissa is a product of the Wild West era of the novel, when the form hadn’t quite been fixed yet. A novel could be a lawless hotchpotch of philosophical dialogues, melodrama, borrowed stories and crude farce. Clarissa played a part in domesticating the form, in erecting the dry stone walls of realism, but it still very much belongs to the rougher age. It turns, in its later pages, into something like a Christian chapbook on a vast scale.
Another cause of the book’s neglect might be that its author, Samuel Richardson, lacks glamour. He was, in every sense, bourgeois. He didn’t have the frenzied entrepreneurialism of Defoe, the worldly conviviality of Fielding or Sterne’s strenuous peculiarity. He was smug about his achievements, obsequious to his social betters and prone to tedious moralising. He wanted novels to be respectable. He seemed unaware of the streak of lechery that runs through all his work. He’d be easy to dismiss, if Clarissa wasn’t so good. Greatness doesn’t always fall where it’s expected.
His debut novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740) is the tale of a fifteen year old servant girl whose reward for resisting her employer’s sexual harassment is his hand in marriage and the riches and acclaim that go with it. Even at the time, there seemed something not right about this and the book’s denouement annoyed Henry Fielding so much he spent his first two novels taking the piss out of it, going so far as to name the first Shamela.
Richardsons’ follow up, Clarissa, came in 1748 and at first seems more of the same. Clarissa Harlowe is young, beautiful and a paragon of virtue, this virtue expressing itself in pious reflections, acts of charity and a strict system of daily organisation, which we are given in full (it’s that kind of novel). Robert Lovelace is also a looker, generous and charming, but abnormally dedicated to having it off and unscrupulous in furthering this cause. The book consists mostly of letters between Clarissa and her rather more likeable friend Anna, and Lovelace and Belford, a wavering fellow rake. Only, somehow, unlike Pamela, it slaps. The moralist in Richardson is restrained, at least for a while, and the artist in him takes over.
The eight volumes of an early German edition of Clarissa.
Dr Johnson is supposed to have said that anyone reading Clarissa for the plot would end up killing themselves, but there is a story of sorts. Clarissa’s family are keen on her marrying Solmes, an unappealing neighbour, and when she demurs, they take the very eighteenth-century step of holding her captive. Lovelace, meanwhile, has spotted her and has Designs. In a panic, Clarissa flees with him to London and is promptly held captive again. Perhaps Dr Johnson had a point. Yet I was completely gripped.
What matters isn’t the plot so much, but something else that happens as we go on. The mad abundance of letters to and fro, the characters all being compulsive jotters down of every thought, yanks us into the action. Richardson starts to use the letters like Shakespeare uses soliloquies. His characters argue with themselves, change their minds, waver in their intents, over a long series of erotic negotiations and, perhaps for the first time in the English novel, we feel we are seeing actual human beings and can look inside their thoughts. Clarissa and Lovelace might have been supposed to represent chastity and libertinage respectively, but there’s always the feeling of actual people behind these archaic beliefs, who won’t always live up to them.
So, Clarissa is exemplary, but also stubborn, priggish and far more attracted to Lovelace than she’d like to be. Lovelace, who could have been a moustache-twirling cardboard baddie, becomes something far more complex, split between his absurd and frightening commitment to the sexual chase and his growing regard for his victim. It’s an extraordinary act of ventriloquism, so that reading the Lovelace letters, it’s easy to forget we are reading Richardson at all. It’s as though the Puritan author poured all his buried flamboyance, libido and wit into the performance, along with a smidgeon of class resentment. Lovelace is fun to read. Richardson expressed some shock at how popular Lovelace proved, especially with female readers, but it’s easy to see why this was. He’s funny, he’s intelligent. He is also, we learn, a rapist and, even knowing it was coming, his drugging and rape of Clarissa still has the power to horrify.
The first time I read Clarissa, her ordeal struck me as implausible. My 20-year-old self didn’t believe we lived, anymore, in a world where wealthy individuals ferry teenage girls into brothels with the aid and assistance of their peers. Many years later, this disbelief has passed. Apparently likeable men do monstrous things unchallenged and Lovelace is an ancestor of every charming monster, from Humbert Humbert to James Franco. Clarissa’s preoccupation with bodily autonomy is put in religious terms, but, squinting past this, it’s impressive how much Richardson noticed the difficulties women face. And in Clarissa’s friendship with Anna Howe, who teases her and playfully toys with her own suitor, he created -to this male reader- a convincing friendship between two teenage girls. There’s something heartening in one of the founding English novels being about a young woman’s act of refusal.
An illustration from a 19th Century French edition of Clarissa.
After he rapes Clarissa, an alternately penitent and defiant Lovelace proposes marriage, a then standard way of saying sorry and restoring honour to all parties. Clarissa is having none of it. She forgives all who have wronged her, but is set upon leaving a world that has done its best to subject and degrade her. Here the book becomes much odder. Richardson seems to remember his business is offering life lessons and Clarissa embarks on a decline that is also an apotheosis, bidding farewell over a long 500 pages. At least half of this is great; long before they were considered diseases, Richardson seems to have understood PTSD and what looks like anorexia and the slow conversion to virtue of Lovelace’s friend Belford can still move, but some of it exasperates. My own tolerance was tested when, with a good few hundred pages left, our heroine buys a coffin. Having invented realism, Richardson swerves away into melodrama at whiplash speed and we are given a series of unlikely come-uppances and moments of repentance. Clarissa herself becomes a near saint rather than the sympathetic young woman of the opening stretch. She takes longer to die than Rasputin or Clive James. The moralising side of Richardson takes over and we are given many homilies on correct behaviour, including a demented passage where he tries to convince us that women of loose morals are ugly when not wearing make-up (this argument is not made, as you might expect, in praise of cosmetics).
Perhaps the problem comes from Richardson having no model of female excellence that wasn’t chiefly passive. All the characters line up to tell us, at dull length, how Clarissa is the most virtuous of women, but there isn’t any suggestion she could do more with her greatness than turn someone down and die. There’s a gulf between our way of looking at the world and his, and Clarissa’s death doesn’t quite cross it. You have to think yourself back into an England where refusing to marry your rapist could be an act of shocking radicalism. If you can do this, it sort of works.
If this proves too great a leap, if you can’t take Richardson’s forcing of characters who seemed to pulse with life into a sort of moral tableau, there’s still a hundred reasons to read this book. Read it for the weird moments of recognition, for the conversations we’re still sadly having, for Belford correcting Lovelace in his disbelief in female friendships, for Anna observing, after her friend is raped, that she now views seemingly good men as ones “who haven’t yet been found out.” Read it for the way erotic attraction and moral repulsion play against each other in Clarissa’s letters about Lovelace, read it for the stream of consciousness bricolage of the letters Clarissa writes when her mind is disordered, read it for the dash and swagger of Lovelace’s letters hiding an ethical abyss, read it for Anna and Clarissa’s friendship, for Richardson’s sudden moments of startling insight. You’ll roll your eyes at times but you might find yourself dabbing them as well.
Rob Palk is the author of Animal Lovers (2018, Sandstone Press) and has written for The Guardian, The Fence and the Erotic Review and broadcast on the BBC. He is currently seeking agent representation for his second novel, The Crowd Pleaser. He tweets at @robpalkwriter.
Headline from the Victoria (BC) Colonist’s reprint of Peter Vansittart’s New York Times obituary.
Poor Peter Vansittart. When he died after a career spanning seven decades and producing over 40 books, some newspapers reached back to the very beginning and dredged up a damning line written about his first novel I Am the World: “I can without hesitation say that this is the worst book ever published.” Just which critic wrote that, I’ve been unable to determine. But it’s the sort of absolute declaration that lends itself to endless repetition.
Advertisement for I Am the World in The Spectator.
Was the judgment deserved? That’s very hard to tell because I Am the World has since become exceedingly rare. There are just three copies listed for sale, all well over $100, and six library copies listed in WorldCat.org. From the reviews I’ve been able to locate, I Am the World is, like several of Vansittart’s later novels, set in an abstract location — in this case, a country referred to simply as “The Land.” It tells of the ascent to the throne of absolute dictatorship of a charismatic peasant named Goran, aided by a Jewish banker named Finkenstein.
Vansittart’s descriptions of Finkenstein are difficult to read now. He’s a man “big-nosed in expensive glory” whose “slim tentacles swarmed everywhere.” Vansittart calls the Jews of The Land “mysterious people borm from the knowledge of Babylon darkly, living in the two worlds of race and nation, hiding disease and strength behind the glitter of their eyes.” Another Jew is “a short red figure with a snake’s tongue and a brain fertile and oozing like a grey sponge pressed by a hand seeking its own advantage.”
But the magnetic Goran is a bad piece of work, too. He beats up a blind old woman: “Goran smashed his fist savagely and with all his strength into her face, and she dropped recumbent and bleeding to the ground. With a single curse he stepped over her dragging the sack up from behind the wordless body.” When he ultimately rejects worldly power and seeks refuge in the sanctuary of a cathedral, he makes it clear that there is no place for the likes of Finkenstein there.
Though the “worst book” review may be apochryphal, the reviews I’ve managed to locate are hardly the kind to show off to Mom:
• Kate O’Brien in The Spectator:
“I am the World is a wordy first novel which might be ignored were it not that its sentiments leave a bad taste in the mouth, and one is forced to wonder why on earth it was published just now. It is a tale of a little country called The Land, which has some kind of “salvation” forced upon it by a thoroughly objectionable young peasan-dictator, who climbs to his curious power-vision on the back of a criminal Jew. The author is devoted to such words as lust and hatred, and is very free with his own loose conception of the deity. It is difficult to see where Mr. Vansittart is going in this over-lush study of a bad, crude megalomania.”
• R. D. Charques in the Times Literary Supplement:
“First novels are almost always the better for a certain modesty of intention, but there may be no great harm in striking an ambitious gesture. The abmition of I Am the World, however, is surely excessive even for a first novel by a young writer in these perplexing and difficult times…. But for the copiousness and polist of Mr. Vansittart’s language, it might have been kinder to ignore this first effort of his. He has, however, an unusual flow of words and a feeling for outward graces of style, and when he is not trying to be irresistibly eloquent he is at any rate engaged in expressing, however wordily, a point of view. But far too much of this lesser eloquence is merely bookish, while there are reams of empty sonorifics in the manner of “that chance of hope which could not now miscarry but must down upon the night’s frown.” As for the sentiment of the tale, one cannot but regret the evidences of a familiar and distasteful hysteria.”
• J. D. Beresford in The Guardian:
“… a first and very ambitious novel” but said Vansittart “as yet lacks something of the knowedgeableness necessary to make such a story as this convincing.”
• Frank Swinnerton in The Observer:
“Amid this verbiage are buried idealism and a serious idea, with an attempt to picture the rise of an ignorance man to power over a nation (imaginary) and his discovery that God moves in a mysterious way. But unfortunately Mr. Vansittart has not mastered the art of writing, which begins with a distinct knowledge of what one wants to say.”
• Anonymous review in The Sydney Morning Herald:
“Mr. Vansittart’s pseudo-allegorical style is baffling, but …it is possible to discern a trace of purpose behind the masses of turgid prose and ineffectual imagery….. This type of novel may appeal to a few readers in search of ‘something different.’ It is scarcely likely to be one of the year’s outstanding literary successes.”
V.S. Pritchett, Vansittart’s editor at Chatto & Windus, did suggest numerous changes, including toning down the language, all of which the author declined to make. This set a pattern that Vansittart repeated throughout his career. In a fascinating survey of Vansittart’s career packaged in a review of his 1986 novel, The Aspect in the London Review of Books, Martin Seymour-Smith wrote that, “The problem for Vansittart has always been that he is excessive: he wants to achieve too much within the bounds of a single volume. Nor will he give this ambition up – but by now his persistence has become courageous and impressive.”
Seymour-Smith identified this problem as far back as I Am the World. The book, he wrote, “is excessive (promisingly so): about the rise and fall of a dictator clearly based on Hitler, it seems to want to say everything that can be said about dictatorship. It is relentlessly and ambitiously unpleasant – the brutal and dark side of Vansittart has not, surprisingly, attracted the attention of reviewers – and is written in a curiously over-rhetorical, almost gushing style which sits very awkwardly with its sombre theme.”
Somehow, Vansittart managed to be a prolific producer of books despite his consistent habit of writing as he chose. Reviewing Vansittart’s novel Landlord in 1971, Auberon Waugh called him “one of those heroic people who just go on writing novels in English.” Francis King, reviewing Lancelot, Vansittart’s 1978 retelling of the Arthur legend, described the author as a noble eccentric: “Though he does not usually appear in histories of the modern English novel, though he has won no literary prizes and though his name is probably unfamiliar to the majority of the general reading public, he is a writer whose singularity is matched by his strength.” He continued to have advocates for his particular exceptionalism. In 1983, reviewing Vansittart’s Roman novel Three-Six-Seven: Memoirs of a Very Important Man, wondered, “When will this writer of extraordinary talent receive his due?”
Peter Vansittart receiving his honors from the Queen in 2008.
He did get formal due, courtesy of the Queen, just before his death in 2008, being awarded the Order of the British Empire. Although the New York Times obit said that Vansittart’s work was “like caviar to the critics and a stranger to the best-seller list,” he did crack the UK best-seller lists with his 1995 survey In the Fifties. And, as D. J. Taylor noted in Vansittart’s Independent obituary, the writer “belonged to a practically exclusive literary category: the defiantly highbrow novelist who, sustained by a private income and supportive publishers, writes more or less to please himself. Such qualifications are usually a guarantee of direst obscurity. Certainly none of Vansittart’s 40-odd books sold more than a few thousand copies or even went into paperback.” Although Taylor called Vansittart was a marginal figure in English literature, he credited him with “the virtual reinvention of the post-war historical novel.”
I Am the World, by Peter Vansittart London: Chatt & Windus, 1942
Konstantin Paustovsky titled the fourth volume of his autobiography The Story of a LifeYears of Hope, but it could just have easily been Years of Odessa. At the end of Volume 3, In That Dawn, he had escaped from Kiev and the battles for that city between the Reds, the Whites, the Ukrainians, and the Germans for the relative safety of the port city of Odessa. And here he would be stuck for most of the next two years.
Indeed, there is little hope to be found in these pages. The Whites retreated from the city in February 1920, leaving it with hundreds of ruins buildings and almost no food. Armies would continue to blow through the town like windstorms and the food supply was never a thing to be taken for granted.
Despite the grim situation, Paustovsky finds himself enlisted in a do-it-yourself newspaper operation, occupying offices by fiat, scrounging for paper and ink, and brow-beating officials into accepting the rag as a state-sanctioned news outlet. And among his fellow writers he made the acquaintance of Odessa’s most illustrious son, Isaac Babel.
Paustovsky’s first impression of Babel, however, was less than awe-inspiring:
Never had I seen anyone look less like an author. Stooping, almost neckless because of his hereditary asthma, with a duck’s bill of a nose, a creased forehead and an oily glint in his little eyes, he was anything but fascinating. At first sight you would have taken him for a commercial traveller or a stockbroker.
He soon learns, though, that Babel spoke with an assurance and focus that tended to leave his fellow writers speechless. He had no patience for colorful descriptions or romantic prose: “A story should be as accurate as a military report or a bank cheque,” he declared.
Yet he envied his colleagues for their ability to invent. “You can wrap things up in the dew of your imagination,” he told them, “while I — I have no imagination.” That’s why he had to focus on details, on specifics, on the precise touch, sight, and smell of things. “I have to know everything, down to the last wrinkle, or I can’t even begin to write.” Authenticity was his motto, he said — “And I’m stuck with it!”
Living in Odessa gave Paustovsky a priceless opportunity to learn to observe and record, and Babel’s lessons make Years of Hope, like all the volumes before it, shine with a vibrancy that often belies the grim conditions Paustovsky recalls. There’s barely a page without an incident, a conversation, or a description that seems as if it were happening now. Like this, about Odessa’s central market during one of the city’s periods of plenty:
How convey the noise of swearing, howling, whining, shouting, curses and hysterics, all merging into one continuous roar and suddenly cut off by the piercing sound of a policeman’s whistle ? Or the stampede of the black marketeers, festooned with their belongings, over the wooden pavements shaking to their tread ? Or the trail of yellowing bust-bodices, soldiers’ cotton underpants, and cracked, liver-coloured, rubber hot water bottles left in their wake?
Since rhetoric is out, I will have to do with every-day words.
Babel also taught him the art of the deal in the marketplace. The first rule was to feign indifference. One must never “show interest in any of the goods, and preferably to look bored as you elbowed your way through the crowd.”
Knowing how to bargain and barter was an essential survival skill. Cut off at times as waves of the Russian Civil War break over them, Odessans grow accustomed to living on almost nothing. “Only the cats, unsteady with hunger, wandered about looking for scraps. But scraps in Odessa were a thing of the past.” Food grew so scarce at one point that Paustovsky walks five miles out of town to an old mill where he’s been told the miller will take clothing in trade for flour. The only thing he has to offer the man is the shirt off his back, and he walks back bare-chested.
One of the few times Paustovsky does get away from Odessa, he nearly dies. Assigned to report on a transport of naval mines to Sebastopol, he discovers on the first night out that the ship he’s on is better suited for salvage than sailing. “Judging by all the signs,” a sailor tells him, “the Dimitry is heading for a watery grave.” Battered by a gale force 11 storm, the ship flounders and the captain barely manages to steer it into a safe anchorage.
On his return to Odessa (on a seaworthier ship), Paustovsky takes advantage of a short stop at Yalta to sneak ashore one night and climb up into the hills in search of Chekhov’s house. His last visit there had been in 1906, when his family was intact and the young Kostik had no notion of the turmoil his country would see in the next sixteen years. To even reach the house, he had to risk being stopped by patrols of Red guards. Yet this contact with his past — and Russia’s past — breaks through the danger and dreariness of the moment:
And suddenly I felt the nearness and certainty of happiness. Why, I don’t know. Perhaps because of that pure snow-whiteness which looked like the distant radiance of a beautiful country, or because of my sense of sonship — long unexpressed and driven to the back of my mind – towards Russia, towards Chekhov. He had loved his country in many ways, and he had loved her as the shy bride about whom he wrote his last story. He had firmly believed that she was going unwaveringly towards justice, beauty and happiness.
I, too, believed in that happiness — that it would come to my country, to starved and frozen Crimea, and also to me. I felt this as a swift and joyful impulse, like a passionate look of love. It warmed my heart and dried my tears of loneliness and fatigue.
Perhaps this is why Paustovsky chose to call this volume Years of Hope.
I first wrote about Konstantin Paustovsky’s autobiography, The Story of a Life, back in 2007. At the time, I’d read the U.S. edition from 1964, which nowhere indicated that it represented just the first three of a total of six volumes. Four years after that edition’s publication, Pantheon published The Years of Hope with the subtitle, Continuing The Story of a Life. When The Story of a Life was reissued as a Pantheon Moden Classic in 1982, again it was half the complete work.
Thanks to Paustovsky’s U.K. publisher Harvill, however, British readers were able to enjoy all six volumes, as translated from the Russian by Manya Harari, Michael Duncan, Andrew Thomson, and Kyril FitzLyon. For the record, these are:
Volume I: Childhood and Schooldays
Volume II: Slow Approach of Thunder
Volume III: In that Dawn
Volume IV: Years of Hope
Volume V: Southern Adventure
Volume VI: The Restless Years
In other words, the U.S. editions of The Story of a Life contain just Volumes I-III. To get the full Story, you’ll have to buy the last three Harvill books, which have never been reissued. They’re worth looking for, however, not only for the wonderful writing but also for their beautiful dust jacket designs.
The Story of a Life, Volume 4: The Years of Hope, by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Manya Harari and Andrew Thomson London: Harvill, 1968
My feelings for The Steagle are a combination of awe and disappointment, sort of like what many felt about Evel Knievel’s attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon in 1974. I admire Irvin Faust’s courage and audacity in trying to write about madness in a way that no one ever had — yet acknowledge that his results failed to hit the target. Somewhere short of the far side of sanity, The Steagle’s drag chute ejects and the book crashes in a messy jumble of words.
If some sharp publisher were to reissue The Steagle today, the book’s cover grab line could be, “A MAD MAN GOES MAD.” For both Faust and his hero, Harold “Hesh” Weissburg, are button-down, sport coat and tie wearing, salarymen of the early 1960s. Five days a week, Faust goes to work as a New York City public school guidance counselor and Weissburg teaches 17th Century English literature to bright-faced undergraduates. They have wives, mortgages, insurance policies, and daily commutes.
Like Don Draper of Mad Men, they’ve been drafted, uniformed, shot at. They’ve also been indoctrinated in American mid-century culture: comic strips and comic books, radio shows and movies, 78 RPM discs and sock hops, sports pages and the streets of Brooklyn. As Jack Ludwig put it in his New York Times review, “Everything is here, as current as Mad Magazine: Billboard America, brand-name America, America the blur seen from the window of a speeding train or car, the plotted-and-pieced America airplane passengers know best.” It’s the same combustible mixture that fueled all of Faust’s work, and all it takes is a spark to set it off.
For Hesh Weissburg, the spark is the news that Russian nuclear missiles have been spotted in Cuba. It triggers a psychotic break that leads him to interrupt his lecture on the mystique of the hero in Elizabethan literature and begin raving about Willie Mays and baseball, descending rapidly from rant to bizarre Brooklyn kid code:
(which condenses in the more comprehensible “YOU AND ME HAVE BEEN CONNED, BILKED, SCREWED BYE THE GREAT SPORTSMEN THAT TOOK OUR CLOSEST FRIENDS FROM US, AND THEN REACHED THE SINISTER FINALITY WITH THE KIDNAPPING OF THE GREATEST OF THEM ALL WHO OF COURSE IS WILLIE MAYS….”). Leaving his students gaping in bewilderment, he walks out of his class and heads to the airport, grabbing a flight to Chicago (“FLY NOW, PAY LATER!”) that starts a week-long dash about the country in search of….
Well, just what Weissburg is looking for is clear to neither himself nor us. It could be security in a moment of existential anxiety, but it could just as well be something as simple as the certainty of his 14-year-old comics/sports/radio/movie-obsessed self.
Chatting to his seatmate on board the flight to Chicago, Weissburg pretends to be Hal Winter, successful Broadway producer, and in this guise he checks into the Blackhawk Hotel, orders the best steak dinner and French wine in the place, and seduces a beautiful woman before heading off to his next stop. He visits Notre Dame to indulge a fantasy of being the Fifth Horseman in the football team’s legendary 1924 backfield lineup, Milwaukee to relive a romance from his G.I. days.
As he hops from place to place, Weissburg shifts from one fantasy character to another: Bob Hardy, brother to Andy of the movie family; Rocco Salvato, former high-school bully and present gangster; George Guynemer, son of the French flying ace of World War I; Cave Carson, son of doomed spelunker Floyd Collins; and, finally, Humphrey Bogart.
Weissburg heads for ever more artificial versions of the American dream in his manic race to stay one step ahead of the news of possible global annihilation. To Vegas:
Ocean’s Eleven. Sinatra. Judy. Thirty thousand a week. Sun. Desert. Red neon. One-armed bandits. Action. Faites vos jeux. Les jeux sont faits. Nothing Monaco. Nothing Miami. Nothing Reno. Pools. Tanfastic. Bikinis. Action. Vegas.
Finally, when he reaches Hollywood, his mind jumbles together fragments from his cultural and personal memories into a climactic sequence in which he refights World War Two, single-handedly triumphing over all of America’s enemies. I can only convey the verbal cacophony that Faust creates by reproducing two sample pages below.
Like Weissburg’s “OBB” Latin, one can, with patience, decypher this linguistic jumble. Perhaps, in future, scholars will painstakingly extract and identify each of the shards of cultural reference scattered around this ruin. On the other hand, this may be a case where it’s better to take in the effect at a glance and move on.
For the trick in successfully portraying madness in fiction is that the novelist can never fully surrender control to the madmen. Otherwise, language risks becoming word soup. And there’s a lot of word soup in the last pages of The Steagle.
The book had its share of admirers back in the Sixties. Richard Kostelanetz called The Steagle “the most perceptive breakdown in all novelistic literature.” “Of the many new novels I have read in the past three years,” he wrote in TriQuarterly several years after the book’s first publication, it was “the only one that struck me as fusing the three virtues of originality, significance and realization at the highest levels of consistency.”
Jack Ludwig, the Times’s reviewer, felt that it was a mistake to characterize the book as comedy or satire: “It is funny and great in its take-offs. But it is at bottom compassionate, comic and sadly accepting. As long as reality is what it is, fantasy must serve man as refuge.” Time magazine, on the other hand, lost patience with Faust’s verbal fireworks: “This pop novel pops so violently that it cannot safely be perused without welding goggles.”
Lobby card for The Steagle (1971)
Faust’s failure didn’t dissuade Paul Sylbert from staging another attempt, however. Five years later, screenwriter and director Paul Sylbert adapted the book for AVCO Embassy Films. Richard Benjamin did his best to capture the mad panache and manic energy of Hesh Weissburg, but there was no way that Sylbert could have caged Faust’s beast into an 87-minute package. It didn’t help that the first-time director was working for legendary director-breaking producer Joseph E. Levine. Working at a time before director’s cuts were invented, Sylbert had to take his frustrations out on the printed page, publishing his account of the disaster, Final Cut: The Making and Breaking of a Film in 1974.
The Steagle, by the way, took its title from an amalgamation that echoes Faust’s zest for cultural integration. The Steagles were a short-lived creation that the National Football League devised during the manpower shortages of World War Two, combining the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers into a single team.
The Steagle, by Irvin Faust New York: Random House, 1966
In two volumes of nearly a thousand pages in total, The Melville Log may be the longest biography never written. Seventy years after its first publication, it’s still one of the most innovative takes on biography and a woefully under-recognized attempt to revitalize a form remarkably resistant to experimentation.
In the last ten years or so, there have been a number of celebrated alternative takes on biography. Alexander Master took us through a life in reverse in his Stuart: A Life Backwards, showing us how to see the dysfunctional adult Stuart Shorter through the lens of his childhood traumas. Craig Brown created a biography as kaleidoscope in Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret. Janet Malcolm revealed the inherent unreliability of all biographies in The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes — which hasn’t stopped at least a half dozen more Plath biographies appearing since its first publication. And in Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer wrote about D. H. Lawrence by writing about not writing about D. H. Lawrence.
Jay Leyda, 1951.
The Melville Log, however, remains — to my knowledge — the sole example of the DIY approach to biography. “In the making of this book,” Jay Leyda wrote in his introduction, “I have tried to hold to one main aim: to give each reader the opportunity to be his own biographer of Herman Melville, by providing him with the largest possible quantity of materials to build his own approach to this complex figure.” The only way he could do this, he continued,
… was to put together everything that could be known about this life, to bring the reader close to Melville’s progress through as many of his days as could be restored, so that the reader may watch him as he works, sees, reacts, worries — to make those seventy-two years, from 1819 to 1891, and a portion of the America they were lived in, in Henry James’s word, visitable. This approach forbade an emphasis on any part of his life to the exclusion of any other part, and forbade the neglect of material that seemed, in itself, of small importance. I trust the reader will find enjoyment in traveling alongside Melville — through good days and bad days, through great aims and trivial duties — as his body and mind grow and change — in a constant present, accumulating past experiences, but without knowing a future.
Without knowing a future. Leyda recognized the crucial flaw that limits the realism of any work of biography or history: unlike the subjects, the author suffers from knowing how things turned out. For us, Melville lived in the past. But as David McCullough has put it,
One might also say that history is not about the past. If you think about it, no one ever lived in the past. Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, and their contemporaries didn’t walk about saying, “Isn’t this fascinating living in the past! Aren’t we picturesque in our funny clothes!” They lived in the present. The difference is it was their present, not ours. They were caught up in the living moment exactly as we are, and with no more certainty of how things would turn out than we have.
Though Herman Melville was born on 1 August 1819, Leyda opens his log two weeks later. Though Melville was certainly present at his birth, he wasn’t present in a conscious sense. But his infant subconscious likely sensed that he was coming into a family teetering on the edge of disaster. Thus, Leyda opens with an ominous letter to Melville’s father from one of his business partners: “I am under the painfull necessity of informing you that on the 9th instant I was obliged to Stop payment….” In the next, Herman’s grandmother Catherine Gansevoort is replenishing the family’s larder with an order including four gallons each of rum and Holland gin. When Herman is just five weeks old, his mother takes the children to her parents’ house in Albany to avoid the “epidemic fever” hitting New York City. Herman’s father writes his own father hopefully, “the alarm of Fever has suspended the little Business doing, but I hope with the blessing of GOD, confidence will soon return & Business revive again….”
Day by day, fragment by fragment, Leyda builds Melville’s world, spreading wider to take in political, economic, and social events, digging deeper into Melville’s own thoughts as shown in his journals and letters, and as reflected in those of his family and friends. Of course, his choice of fragments is not without a certain design or direction. As this excerpt shows, even as Moby Dick was being typeset and registered for copyright, a report was reaching New York of an incident proving that the fate of the Pequod was no wild invention.
Extract from The Melville Log from October 1851.
Leyda quotes, notes, extracts, reproduces, and interpolates. He invites us to look over his shoulder as he sits in the archive, reading Allen Melville’s calculation of his brother’s profits up to the publication of Moby Dick — and his dim prospects of significant profits from his newest title.
Allan Melville’s reckoning of his brother’s profits, from early September 1851.
This acccumulation of detail does not, however, guarantee that Leyda’s account is substantially more realistic than any conventional biography:
I found that while some aspects of Melville’s life grew more clear in the process, other aspects — usually the most important and creative ones — grew more complex and less clear. Even now that the casually undertaken project has grown into a book, and an enormous amount of material has been examined, I could not say that I know Melville any more than I can say I know why certain artists with whom I’ve had long friendships are artists.
Considering the lengths to which Leyda had pursued information about Melville, this is an unexpectedly frank admission. But one reason he chose to present a log of Melville’s life rather than a narrative in the usual biographical form is that he recognizes the difficult of the task facing every biographer:
[T]his job has, at least, given me an understanding and sympathy for all biographers eternally forced to simplify the tangle of real life and time into comprehensible patterns. Finding great areas of his art unused by biographer and critic, and excited by the discovery that Melville’s life was as dramatic as his art, I decided to take this documentary voyage outside the conventional realm of biography, and see where it would lead. I called what I was doing a Log of Melville’s life, for my purpose was to record the essentials of that life’s latitude and longitude, of its weather, course, whales captured or whales merely seen.
Leyda knew that even The Melville Log was itself only a fragment. Letters to and from Melville and other pertinent documents would, and did, emerge after its publication. In the mid 1960s, he took on the task of updating the Log to incorporate material revealed in the subsequent nearly twenty years, aided by Herschel Parker, and a new edition was published in 1969 by the Gordian Press with a supplemental chapter.
Already suffering from the early stages of Parkinson’s disease, however, Leyda had barely scratched the surface with his supplement and decided to begin again. He hired an assistant and began by cutting the earlier edition of the Log into pieces and trying to insert new material in a crude cut-and-paste manner. As Parker discovered when he and his assistant Mark Niemeyer visited Leyda’s home in 1987 in hopes of helping to get a new edition finished, the consequences of Leyda’s chosen method were disastrous:
You can imagine what happened: whenever you cut up a thousand pages into several thousand pieces so you can splice in hundreds of new pieces of papers, new items are going to get put in the wrong places, and new and old slivers of paper are going to get lost, half a page here, a page there. Every horror you can imagine did happen, and worse. One small oversight had disastrous consequences. No one had anticipated what would happen when, say, a Pittsfield item was spliced into a New York sequence, but hundreds of locations were thrown off, and given the technology being used these places were all but uncorrectable, since to splice in a new location would often mean recutting the rest of the heading and moving the last few words down a line (and in a heading running several lines would mean that all the lines would have to be recut).
Parker and Niemeyer gave up hope of making quick work of a new edition. Instead, as he told a meeting of the Modern Language Association in 1990, it was a task that could only be undertaken through a massive collaborative initiative, one he confessed himself too old and tired to lead. Though the effort was daunting, Parker still thought it worthwhile, “even in this age when literary history vaunts itself as being the product of stylistic verve, not archival research.” Though long retired from teaching, Parker still reflects on Melville and other subjects on his blog Fragments from a Writing Desk.
The Melville Log is not, perhaps, a book to be read through in the same manner one would a traditional biography. If you can afford the cost — and the shelf space — to keep a copy in your collection, it may be better appreciated by dipping at random into Leyda’s selections from the 26,356 days of Melville’s life. These dips will provide a constant reminder of the immediacy and inherent uncertainty present at every moment in any human life.
The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891, by Jay Leda New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951 New York: The Gordian Press, 1969
Back in September 2020, I posted an interview with Kari Sund, a PhD student at Glasgow University, in which we discussed five neglected favorites she’d come across while working on her thesis about Hollywood novels. Reading the anonymous City Without a Heart recently, I was reminded of a baker’s dozen of other lesser-known Hollywood novels that I posted on Twitter around the same time and have collected here for safekeeping.
Cover of first US edition of Queer People
• Queer People, by Carroll and Garrett Graham (1930)
The brothers wrote this caustic satire out of frustration at not getting jobs with the studios. In it, a newspaper man gets drunk, wins studio contract, then spirals down through movieland’s denizens. Hollywood ate it up: the book went through 4 printings in three weeks. “As much like the average Hollywood yarn as a Wyoming cylone is akin to a school girl’s sigh” is how Variety’s reviewer put it. Earns a cameo appearance in City Without a Heart:
Together they entered Mr. Alexander’s outer office. A pretty girl, with eyes like sloes, looked up over a copy of ‘Queer People.’ ‘He’s busy right now,’ she said. ‘He’s in a con¬ ference right now.’ They retired.
Reissued in pulp paperback in 1950 with one of the all-time great titles: Fleshpots of Malibu, and reissued in the Lost American Fiction series in the 1970s.
Cover of Cinelandia, the Spanish version of Movieland by Ramon Gomez de la Serna.
• Movieland, by Ramon Gomez de la Serna (1930)
A somewhat legendary novel, extremely rare in English translation. Written by a Spanish author who’d never set foot in Hollywood, so he could make it whatever he wanted. “So distorted as to have little meaning for the average American,” NY Times wrote, but “as a baroque and flippant literary antic … the novel is thoroughly satisfactory.”
Much easier to find if you can read Spanish or French. In English, the one copy for sale goes for $399.
Cover of Good Old Jack by Eric Hatch.
• Good Old Jack, by Eric Hatch (1937)
A typical Eric Hatch wacky road show comedy. Director Jack splits Hollywood to avoid creditors and girls, lands in South American backwater, ends up producing a coup. Having acted like a dictator on the set in Hollywood, Jack finds himself well-prepared to be one — but is disappointed to find that much of the native scenery “less believable” than the fake sets he’d become accustomed to on the studio backlots.
Cover of If We Only Had Money by Lee Shippey.
• If We Only Had Money, by Lee Shippey (1939)
A writer of Westerns and his wife and kids are “poor but happy.” Then a studio contract comes and the money pours in. Still happy after that? This is a cautionary tale for the tiny number of writers who won big studio contracts, found themselves swimming in cash, then wondered why they weren’t happy. Shippey’s family wises up and opts to go back to “poor but happy.”
Sounds a bit lightweight, but lots of reviewers liked it: “a true American story written with the charm, sympathy and understanding of human nature.” I suspect Dorothy Parker’s Tonstant Weader might have fwowed up, though.
Cover of a Signet paperback edition of Dirty Eddie by Ludwig Bemelmans.
• Dirty Eddie, by Ludwig Bemelmans (1947)
A fable about a Hollywood star who’s a pig.
A real pig (Dirty Eddie–get it?)
Bemelmans pokes fun at a business where nobody seemed to know what he was doing … and got very well paid for it. “… one of the best pictures of the Hollywood rat race … indicates that the whole business is run by the people in it as if it were a scenario for a movie they constantly rewrite and recast every morning,” wrote Variety’s reviewer. “One sees the danger of magazine fragments made into a book,” warned another critic, “for there is little progression… Each page is a delight. The total of all pages makes almost no culminating effect.”
Cover of the Houghton Mifflin edition of Of Streets and Stars by Alan Marcus.
• Of Streets and Stars, by Alan Marcus (1961)
Dorothy Parker called it “A novel of dazzling originality, written with compassion, sometimes with a wild humor, always in the beauty of simplicity.” Truly forgotten. The foreword by Lion Feuchtwanger (“Who?”) didn’t help. First published by Manzanita Press in Yucca Valley; two years later, Houghton Mifflin took it mass market. “His style is spare, lean, staccato. Jagged cutting in and out of scenes, in the manner of a skillful director, gives the book a breathless momentum. It needs to be read carefully, but the effort will be handsomely repaid.” Alan Rich, New York Times.
Midge Decter, applying the belated but deadly thrust often typical of New York Review of Books, thought less of the book:
[It] participates in that almost-genre, the Hollywood novel, and in so doing touches down on just about every one of its almost-conventional themes. There is the Fan Mail Department of the great studio, into which harelips from Minnesota, lonely cowboys from Montana, crazy adolescent girls from Sweden and other far-off places pour their Dreams, dutifully answered with autographed photos of the stars deposited into the mails by lonely working-girls in Hollywood. There is the old executive, called by his initials (in this case, J.C.), who terrorizes, sentimentalizes, and worries for his ailing heart. There is the second-generation executive (clearly modeled on someone like Dore Schary) who works on the principle of hard efficiency and confronts in his sleep the empty anxiety at the center of his life. There is above all the young Eastern writer, a prize-winner, who comes to Hollywood to beat the movies and instead is thoroughly beaten by them. Through it all, behind it all, move the beautiful legendary creatures in costume dropping their masks just long enough to reveal themselves as mean tippers in the studio commissary or as having to go to the toilet in the middle of a take.
Cover of first US edition of Come On Out, Daddy by Bernard Wolfe.
• Come On Out, Daddy, by Bernard Wolfe (1963)
Bernard Wolfe’s sex/drugs/girls/jazz take on Hollywood, full of starlets, faded matinee idols, and producers on the rise and on the fall. Wolfe probably came closer to translating the spirit of a Lenny Bruce routine to fiction than any other novelist of his time. Overdue for reconsideration.
“… hilarious and grotesque, penetrating and compeling, and on occasion … thoroughly original. And there is something more–style. He writes as though the words were invented yesterday,” wrote Robert Kirsch in the Los Angeles Times. Over on the East Coast, however, Gerald Walker in the New York Times felt the book was “overwoven” and compared reading it to “wearing a 30-pould turtleneck sweater.”
Cover of ,em>The Symbol by Alvah Bessie.
• The Symbol, by Alvah Bessie (1966)
Wanda Emmaline Kelly, orphaned at two, foster homed, raped at nine, married at 16, pin-up queen by 18. Then Buck, the football player, lunky and loving and Calvin, the NY intellectual/painter.
Yeah … Marilyn.
Compared to Jacqueline Susann’s The Valley of the Dolls, wrote one reviewer, this is the Sistine Chapel.
Consider it a rough draft of Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde, a much better novel. However, I should say that Bessie earned the right to lambaste Hollywood after doing time as one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten.
Cover of The Manner Music by Charles Reznikoff.
• The Manner Music, by Charles Reznikoff (1977)
“Unlike any other Hollywood novel ever done,” wrote Maurice Zolotow. “It is like T S Eliot writing a novel about banks, Wallace Stevens writing one about insurance companies.” A young composer goes to work as factotum to a movie producer named Paul Pasha. Wall St crashes, the studio folds, he heads back to NY, ends up burning his compositions in Central Park. In a just world, we’d recognize this as a minor American masterpiece.
I wrote about The Manner Music back in May 2020: Link
Cover of Night Tennis by Annabell Davis-Goff.
• Night Tennis, by Annabel Davis-Goff (1978)
Davis-Goff was Mrs. Mike Nichols #3.
“Reads almost like a handbook on film-making” wrote one reviewer. “A Hollywood novel that has an authentic contemporary feel (without ramming it down your throat),” Kirkus concluded.
I love this from the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Edna Stumpf: “The bleakest book about fornicating and making movies I’ve ever read. It’s a real little sobersides of a fable about weighing the odds and taking the consequences and biting the bullet.” “Call me corrupt,” Edna continued, “but when I read a Hollywood novel I want to have fun, if only the fun of a cheap contempt for bratty stars and money-mad moguls and noontime sex with catered champagne in interior-decorated trailers”
Cover of Blue Pages by Eleanor Perry.
• Blue Pages, by Eleanor Perry (1979)
An autobiographical novel written after her divorce from Frank Perry: “I’ll be the first to say it’s a disguised version of my experiences, told from a middle-aged writer’s point of view.” “Novels by men which draw portraits of women as bitches or shrews seem to cause no particular comment. But let a woman write about men as master seducers, users, monsters and there are cries of ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,'” Perry remarked.
On the other hand, Perry reported that women saw “Blue Pages as a book about working women and above all, middle-aged women and their plight.” “The book makes a woman in her late 40s a viable, sexual being, not somebody ready for the ash heap.”
Cover of Hix Nix Stix Pix by David Llewellyn-Burdett.
• Hix Nix Stix Pix, by David Llewellyn Burdett (1984)
“Take Doctorow’s Ragtime and West’s Day of the Locust, chop them up, mix them together, and let the fragments fly,” was how NY Times’ reviewer summed up this debut novel. It’s a wild hodge-podge running from silents to talkies, with tons of cameos by Chaplin, Hitler, Salvador Dali, and many others. Most reviewers hated it, but the book has a small cult of die-hard fans.
Cover of Creative Differences by Buffy Shutt.
• Creative Differences, by Buffy Shutt (1990)
Hollywood seen through the eyes of a woman who rises through a series of scut jobs to become an executive VP for production, in charge of solving daily crises, mostly over male egos. This may resonate more than when it first came out. The narrator is nameless, for example, only because to all the male characters, she is either “Babe” or “Honey” or “Pet.” And, of course, the male egos are more fragile than the thinnest egg shell: “Several film-makers ask me where they’re sitting on the dais. By the way they ask, you’d think their entire self-worth is tied up in whether they are on the first tier or the second tier.”
Publishing a book anonymously is a risky bet. For every Primary Colors, which took a long-term lease on the bestseller lists and won a film adaptation, there are a hundred books like City Without a Heart. At best, there is an initial flurry of speculation about the author’s identity, but then the practical challenges settle in. Where does a bookseller shelve it: under the As? How does a would-be buyer refer to it? “It’s a book about Hollywood.” “Do you know the author’s name?” “No.”
Novels about Hollywood are a semi-popular topic for PhD dissertations, and I’ve found City Without a Heart mentioned in the bibliographies of several, but none of the doctoral candidates in question appears to have actually read the book. I only stumbled across it searching for something completely different on the Internet Archive. Having read it, I can allay your hopes (or fears): this is not the Great Lost Hollywood Novel.
But it is an interesting novel. Now, we all know that interesting is the “Get Out of Jail Free” card of adjectives. If you can’t say anything nice about someone, say they’re interesting. It’s what you tell your best friend after they drag you to a three-hour art house movie with a dozen lines of dialogue: “Yeah, that was interesting.”
In this case, interesting is not a cop-out but a way of saying that City Without a Heart is not a particularly well-written novel but it is a well-observed one, though distorted by the author’s prejudices. When the book was published, there was that initial rush of guesses about the authorship. Candidates included Noel Coward, Michael Arlen, Getrude Atherton, Douglas Fairbanks, Louis Bromfield, and even Greta Garbo. What’s clear is that the author was someone familiar with the workings of the studio system from the inside. Someone who’d penetrated to the inner sanctum of a studio chief’s office, for example:
Mr. Schloss’s office was protected from assault by three lines of defences. The first was held by an empty table and rather a formidable filing cabinet. The next boasted a standing guard of three young things with typewriters. The third and last was occupied by a young man with a mauve face, geranium-coloured hair, and the best set of dentures Mary had ever seen outside a showcase. He was supported by an individual with such a powerful resemblance to a gorilla that Mary was quite alarmed that there were no bars in front of him.
If the author was indeed a Hollywood insider, he was someone who’d grown to hate what he knew. “You know nothing about Hollywood,” says its first representative to encounter the photogenic Mary Fresnell and her aunt in their humble village in Cornwall. “It would be a crime to send a girl like Mary into that sort of atmosphere.” Anonymous drives home this point repeatedly and unsubtly, starting with his title. “Hollywood,” declares a screenwriter she meets there, “for all the ferocity of its labours and the wealth of its talent, is as empty a shell as ever existed in the history of the world.” Another denies the assertion that Tinsel Town is a godless place. There is a god, he argues: “the god of I.”
It’s not hard to pick up a few clues about the author’s identity beside his insider knowledge. The fact that he was a he and not a she, for example. Sprinkled throughout the book are a hints of a streak of misogyny, such as his dislike of chatty women:
Mrs. Knalder was Mary’s first experience of America’s endurance-test talking women. Later she discovered that they are numerous and are without mercy. Lack of subject-matter, the inattention or obvious boredom and infuriation of a listener has no influence upon the flow of their chatter. Like the brook it goes on forever.
His suggested cure for these women is brutal: “nothing short of amputation of the tongue is of any practical service whatsoever.”
Anonymous is also an anti-Semite. Hollywood’s studio heads all “rose from the tailor’s bench,” have waists that measure “anything up to sixty inches round” and faces that “bore the prominent characteristics of a toucan.” In Hollywood, the rightful order of classes has been turned on its head:
Hollywood is a Jewish stronghold. The entire picture industry is under their control. The power they possess is incalculable…. Enthroned they sit and jest of their humble origin to a Christian community which is never weary of trying to ex¬ hume, from totally non-existent sources, ancestors of most piquant aristocracy.
Ask a Jewish executive, in receipt of five hundred thousand dollars a year, whence he sprang, and you shall hear tales of a basement on the East Side of New York. Put the same question to a ten-dollar a day ‘extra’ and you shall be buffeted with half the names in the English peerage.
Contrast this with his descriptions of the people of Cadgwith, the little Cornish port from which Mary, the innocent pulled into Hollywood’s lair by the promise of filthy lucre. Its men “are simple folk who, when not riding the waves, sit upon an old stone wall and watch the sea from which their slender blessings flow. Its women “are busy at home, for where money is scarce work is plentiful.” You may recognize them as the future inhabitants of Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” And Mary, of course, is the stoutest of these stout-hearted folk: “She could sail a boat, bait a line, shoot a net, and scale a cliff with any fisher lad in the village.”
She can also, we come to see, learn her lessons. Brought all the way from Cornwall to California based on her stunning beauty and vitality as caught, unaware, on a few minutes of film, she quickly falls from promising starlet to has-been (or rather, never-was) through the betrayal of a competitor unburdened by scruples, and heads home, the sadder but wiser girl.
Almost.
There is a twist right at the end that leads me to wonder if Anonymous’s chief gripe with Hollywood boiled down to something as simple as resentment that he wasn’t better paid.
I closed City Without a Heart grateful not to know Anonymous’s true identity. Three hundred pages in his company was quite enough. The book is a revealing if stilted portrait of Hollwood in one of its moments of transition, when talkies had overturned the hierarchy of silents and studios had succeeded in eliminating all but the last few independents, and for that it undoubtedly has some historical value. As a novel, however, its neglect is justified.
City Without a Heart, by Anonymous Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933
Stray cattle in a harsh landscape rarely fare well, let alone survive. The same could be said of stray novels in an unwelcoming market. So it’s not surprising that No More Giants, Joaquina Ballard Howles’ story about a young woman growing up on an isolated ranch in Nevada in the late 1940s attracted little attention and has been utterly forgotten.
It came out in 1966 as part of Hutchinson’s New Authors Series, an admirable series of first novels brought out by the U.K. publisher Hutchinson’s between 1958 and 1970. I’ve never seen a full listing of the New Authors Series, but from what I’ve been able to uncover, there were at least three dozen novels — and a handful of memoirs — issued under this imprint. Hutchinson formed the imprint to help “the new author, who has something of genuine importance to say” (in the opinion of Hutchinson’s unnamed judges). Hutchinson also declared that the series would only publish first books by writers who are members of the British Commonwealth. “No established writer, no author who has any other book to his credit (with such exceptions as a school text book, etc.) will be eligible for consideration.”
Times Literary Supplement article announcing Hutchinson’s New Authors scheme in October 1957.
Authors were paid a rather modest royalty of ten percent up to the first 5,000 copies sold (and there don’t appear to have been any that broke this mark), with an advance of £150. Relatively few of the authors whose first books benefited from this scheme saw a second book reach print. Exceptions include Maureen Duffy, whose That’s How It Was was published in 1962 and J. G. Farrell, whose debut The Man From Elsewhere came out in 1963.
Even among the diverse array of novice authors in Hutchinson’s series, Joaquina Howles was an outcast. An American, she qualified as a Commonwealth writer by marriage: her husband Geoffrey Howles was an Oxford graduate and banker specializing in oil investments whose work took the couple to Alberta, Canada, New York, and London. Like Jenny, the young woman in her novel, she had grown up on a ranch north of Reno. Unlike the girl, however, who gets pregnant by her first lover, a Basque ranch hand, and is sent to a home for unwed mothers, Howles attended Mills College, then the West Coast’s elite women’s school, and won several scholarships.
Photograph of Joaquina Ballard Howles from the dust jacket of No More Giants.
As No More Giants makes clear, though, her time at Mills and as an expat executive’s wife didn’t erase her memories of the good and bad aspects of life on a ranch. The hard work, surprisingly, is at the heart of the good. Long rides to herd grazing cattle allow her views of vast landscapes in shifting colors through the day. Chores provide a routine to distract her from her troubles: “The simple things, the milking, feeding, carrying, which we did with our hands, helped us both. Doing was the major part of living, and once as we both lifted the same bale of hay, I knew that we were healing ourselves.”
The biggest source of her troubles are her parents, an unhappy mix of personalities:
To my father, life ran in straight lines, and though they might run deep, they remained parallel, crossing only in the chaos of some unrecognised infinity…. My mother’s lines crossed, tangled, lost themselves in limbo, without colour, precision, or design.
“I wish I could have identified with Mama,” Jenny laments. If her father is the tall, laconic, gentle giant in her world, her mother is the fearsome one, “powerful as the sky can be in times of terror.” Lila, the spinster aunt who lives with the family, offers no consolation: “Aunt Lila lived in the world of terrible possibilities.” One of the few lessons she has to teach Jenny and her brother Brian is how to act if they find themselves kidnapped: “If we couldn’t phone when we were taken away we were to remember our names, ages, and address, so that sooner or later — perhaps even years later — we could escape and return home.”
The harsh landscape of the high desert is mirrored in the harsh emotional climate of Jenny’s home. Her mother hates her father for dragging her to the remote ranch and saddling her with unrelenting work and her father, in return, hates his wife’s failure to be a compliant helpmate. Their hatred is as much an environmental given as the desert’s dryness — “so familiar I had never thought of naming it.”
But even deserts are susceptible to sudden, unpredictable deluges:
Continuing hatred is a level thing, a line of monotony like telephone poles going across a valley, dwindling away out of thought. But sooner or later there is a break, a turn, a mountain where the line goes up or down or is broken, and then one sees it again and remembers the many poles in the valley.
Like the deluges that wash out bridges and brush fires that wipe out a season’s harvest, emotional crises rise up swiftly and with devastating force in No More Giants. It’s very much a novel of its place, a sparsely populated, unforgiving part of the American West unfamiliar to most British readers. If it could be said to resemble any other work of its time, it would be Joan Didion’s first novel Run River, another account of an unhappy ranch family in the West. Never published in the U.S., No More Giants gained a few brief and unexceptional reviews. The usually sharp-eyed Marigold Johnson of the TLS even got the author’s name wrong, referring to her as “Mrs. Knowles.”
Whether it was lukewarm reviews, disappointing sales, or some other reason, Joaquina Ballard Howles followed the path of many of Hutchinson’s new authors and gave up writing after publishing No More Giants. Or at least, so it was for over fifty years. In October 2020, however, a new novel titled Brighter Later appeared on Amazon. Self-published, the book is described as a story of forgiveness about “a middle-class family living in one of London’s more affluent artistic communities, who encounter alcoholism and a horrifying secret along the way which rips their family apart.”
Update. After posting this, I was able to get in contact with Joaquina Ballard Howles through her son, Geoff, and in November 2023, we republished No More Giants as part of the Recovered Books series that I edit for Boiler House Press: https://www.boilerhouse.press/product-page/no-more-giants-by-by-joaquina-ballard-howles. Joaquina was able once again to hold a new copy of her remarkable novel.
Joaquina Ballard Howles holding a copy of the Boiler House Press reissue of No More Giants in November 2023.
No More Giants, by Joaquina Ballard Howles London: Hutchinson (New Authors), 1966
The truly awful cover of the US edition of The Halt During the Chase Rosemary Tonks wrote six novels, but in many ways they’re six versions of the same story. Married or not, her lead characters are women, young but not naïve, not sure of what they want but sure of what they don’t, sure that they want a man in their life but not sure which one or how. They’re poised like a driver at a red light in an unfamiliar neighborhood, knowing they’ve got to make a decision: Left? Right? Straight? The only thing that’s clear is that backing up is not an option.
In the case of Sophie in Tonks’s last novel, The Halt During the Chase, as the book opens, she’s left her job as an administrator at a language school in Kensington and is wondering whether she truly loves Philip, the rising star in Treasury. As the book opens, she’s also in the middle of a conversation about school knickers at her mother’s house in Hampstead.
In the book’s opening chapter, there in that Hampstead kitchen, Tonks perfectly captures the way the pendulum swings back and forth between affection and annoyance in an adult daughter’s conversation with her mother. The shared memories then painful, now comic: “The regulation dark blue knickers. And they were knickers too!” The mother’s desire to see the daughter settled, the daughter’s chafing at the spectre of entrapment. And the mother’s long-developed and now deadly skill in wielding the weapons of conversation. Such as that simple and deceptive question: “How’s it going?”
“How’s it going?” So childish, so shrewish, that I had to answer on the same level: “How’s what going?” She would then draw her face into an expression of nauseating complicity, just like a mime who only has one second to portray some human failing and so has to do it with decisive vulgarity. Heaven knows what underworld theatre she got the expression from, but it was invaluable.
Sophie’s mother is also a bottomless well of advice and life lessons, on everything from religion to noses:
A woman’s nose has to be small and neat. But a man is quite different. If a man hasn’t got a good nose, he should sit down and grow himself one, because he’s going to need it!
Backing up is most definitely not an option for Sophie.
The nearly as bad cover of the UK edition of The Halt During the Chase
In fact, after two hours in that kitchen, she feels suffocated. Desperate just to get out the front door and to the freedom that lies outside, even on the sidewalks of Hampstead.
More air! I couldn’t get enough of it — I wanted a cold, flowing river of it past my cheeks. Drink it down, white stuff, and get rid of all the vinegar inside you that makes you trembling and irresolute, afraid that you ‘re not rich enough for your lover, whom you love too much on one level and doubt on another.
Moving foward is the only choice, but how is still in doubt. The obvious answer seems to be marriage with Philip. Brilliant, fit, handsome, and obviously destined for a future KCB, Philip is also the safe choice: “the sort of man with whose life nothing could possibly go wrong; decisions were permanent, and ended at death.” Philip is a precursor of the Tony Blair Labourite: socialist, but not in a sweaty way. His socialism, Sophie thinks, is “so snobbish, so exclusive, so bogus.”
How snobbish, she suddenly realizes, when, lying together in a hotel bed after making love, Philip tells her, “I was going to ask you to come and live with me. But I can’t promise you there won’t be an emotional bust-up in five years’ time. And then you’ll be less well off financially than you are now.”
To Philip, this is both pragmatic and empathetic. What better demonstrates how much he cares for Sophie than his consideration for how hard it will be when he dumps her? To Sophie, this is soul crushing. Trapped beside Philip in that perfectly equipped, airtight hotel room, she feels herself being swallowed whole. Again, she finds herself suffocating. She claws through the heavy curtains, manages to crack up the window, and drinks in the air. “I have never tasted anything like it. Through that gap in the plating of the hotel, I began to carry on my life once again.”
In his perfect dispassionate way, Philip has pushed Sophie out into that intersection, forcing her to make a choice.
Here, however, we find the one thing that distinguishes Sophie from Tonks’s other heroines. She’s begun to realize she’s got a soul. She’s started attend lectures by Mr. Ruback, Hampstead’s resident mystic. She may not fully understand how she will develop her spiritual self, but she knows that it will not be Philip’s way — having all the right opinions, furnishing one’s life with all the right accessories. “Isn’t buying new lampshades a form of slow death?” she wonders.
The Halt During the Chase is not only Rosemary Tonks’ funniest book but it’s also her deepest. Or rather, it’s a book that hovers on the edge of depth. By the time the book was published, Tonks had entered a period of soul-searching that had been triggered by her mother’s death in 1968. As Neil Astley wrote in his Guardian obituary, “Rosemary turned her back on Christianity, and for the next eight years attended spiritualist meetings, consulted mediums and healers, and took instruction from Sufi ‘seekers’ before turning to a Chinese spiritual teacher and an American yoga guru. All these she repudiated in turn.”
One opens the book thinking the chase of the title is the hunt of one sex for another. Sophie does turn from Philip to take some interest in his half-brother Guy, but the real quest is a spiritual one. “They taught you that it was your job to develop yourself, as the primary purpose of life,” she says of Ruback’s lectures: “the chase is inward [Emphasis added].” It clear that this is Sophie’s most likely direction when she exits her intersection.
Though Tonks ultimately returned to Christianity years later, she dismissed her own writing as something as pointless as buying new lampshades. She burned an unpublished novel and if she’d had her way, would have seen to it that every copy of her published books saw the same fate.
If one knows nothing about Rosemary Tonks, The Halt During the Chase is a remarkable work, studded like a bejeweled belt with shrewd and funny observations and perceptive about the quandaries of women looking for ways to make a life not centered on a man and family. But once you know her story, it’s hard to read Halt without sensing the spiritual direction in which she was about to turn, without knowing that she would soon want to destroy the very words we are reading.
The Halt During the Chase, by Rosemary Tonks London: The Bodley Head, 1972
I’d never heard of Emlyn Williams before my sister gave me the paperback of his autobiography when I was about thirteen. The cover showed a sepia photograph of a boy of my own age with badly-cut hair and a tentative expression that was almost a smile.
After I read (and re-read) the book, I kept a lookout for his older incarnations: he still popped up in the odd pre-war film on Sunday afternoons, swarthily overacting; his creaky plays – once huge West End hits – were occasionally performed, largely in amateur theatre; his novel Headlong (which, bizarrely, was the basis of the John Goodman film, King Ralph) and a requisitely chilling book about the Moors Murderers, Beyond Belief, were both still in print.
But I’m sure that George, his early autobiography, will outlast the lot. From the opening it has precision, style and wit, as well as a dash and sparkle that is all its own, and it doesn’t matter if future readers know nothing about his relatively fleeting fame, because this book’s not about a famous person – it’s about someone who wants to be famous.
He writes with brilliance about his childhood egotism, of how, after seeing a schoolmate, Kate, lying in an open coffin, dead of pneumonia, he imagines – in heart-wringing detail – his own deathbed, funeral and eulogy: ‘Never another like him…’. The chapter ends: ‘Ten minutes later I was changed into ganssi and courduroys and in the field playing rounders as if I had not died at all. Or Kate either.’
Born in 1905, he grew up, Welsh-speaking, in Flintshire, the oldest son of an (intermittently) drunken publican and his long-suffering wife, but this is emphatically not a misery memoir – the parents’ marriage survived into loving old age, Williams senior pulled himself together and took a steady job in the steelworks, and both parents adored George, their gifted eldest son, who went from village junior school to the local grammar:
‘He has got to pass first’ said Mam, as he lit his pipe, ‘and there’s the trip, five miles, how would he get there every day if he did pass?’
‘In a tank’ said Dad, without a flicker. ‘I shall have one sent over from the works.’
From the grammar school, George won an Oxford scholarship and went on to a career in theatre and film. When (under his stage name Emlyn Williams) he starred in the smash-hit thriller, The Case of the Frightened Lady, the steelworks block-booked the cinema in Connah’s Quay, and Dic Williams had the prime seat at the centre of the balcony.
Penguin paperback editions of George and Emlyn by Emlyn Williams.
The narrative trajectory that takes his son to university is fabulous, but then a sort of drift and lassitude take over the story – the last quarter of the book is perhaps less satisfying, but it’s nevertheless intriguing. Williams falls for another undergraduate, loses the ability to study, drops out and follows the siren call of theatre to his first tiny role on stage. (Emlyn, his second autobiography – also enjoyable – takes up the story at exactly this point.)
But my favourite part of George has always been his days at the grammar-school, where he was nurtured by a superb language teacher, Sarah Cooke (later immortalised in his hit play The Corn is Green) and where he started to unleash his extravagant imagination in print. Asked to invent 3 sentences to include ‘inordinate’, ‘vehemence’ and ‘parsimonious’, George, who had just read an article on the Romanovs in The News of the World, went to town: ‘Rasputin, eerie werewolf of all the Russias, staggered up to the Czarina, his filthy locks inordinately matted as he flung a mere kopek to the subservient servant, for he was a parsimonious monster.’
This boy was never, ever going to settle for a job in the steelworks….
George: An Early Autobiography, by Emlyn Williams London: Hamish Hamilton, 1961
Lissa Evans is a former television producer and the author of V for Victory and other novels. You can learn more about her work at LissaEvans.com.
These include Sanora Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown, shelved in 1939 by Bennett Cerf at Random House for being too similar to The Grapes of Wrath — which wasn’t surprising, since Steinbeck had used Babb’s own Farm Security Administration notes as a source. Babb’s novel only saw the light of day in 2004 thanks to the University of Oklahoma Press. Another was Margaret Brown Kilik’s novel The Duchess of Angus, about the lives of women in San Antonio, Texas during World War Two. Discovered by Kilik’s step-grandmother, Columbia professor Jenny Davidson, in 2017, it only came to print in 2020 with the help of Trinity University Press.
Ad for Tough Little Trollop by Helen Adams.
Perhaps the most intriguing on the lot is Helen Adam’s 1935 novel Tough Little Trollop, which is about as obscure as a book can be without ceasing to exist. I didn’t bother linking the title to anything because there are no copies for sale and only two (!) library copies listed in WorldCat. Issued from the short-lived Hartney Press, which specialized in pulp Westerns, mysteries, and romances, the book was at least widely reviewed, though opinions were mixed. The Chattanooga News said it was “just tawdry.” The Minneapolis Star-Tribune called it “the best of its type” since Viña Delmar’s bestseller Bad Girl (which is supposed to be forthcoming from the British Library’s Women Writers series).
Variety’s reviewer thought it was “one of those over-sexed yarns concocted for library [meaning commercial lending libraries — decent public libraries didn’t shelve much pulp product in those days] readers,” but acknowledged, grudgingly, that “Trollop is more than that, though it is a story of sex rampant. Not classic literature, but decidedly a work of promise.” (Bear in mind that in the same issue of Variety, Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart was called “crude and amateurish” and both Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao were deemed “Not screen material,” though went on to be filmed in the 1960s.)
Ad for Hagar: A Story of To-Day from the New York Dispatch.
Phillips focuses on Alice Cary’s 1852 novel Hagar: A Story of To-Day. Published just two years after The Scarlet Letter, it offers a mirror to Hawthorne’s classic tale of adultery. Cary’s heroine, Elsie, is seduced by a clergyman and then abandoned. Elsie’s child dies at birth and she eventually takes on a new name, Hagar, and becomes a housemaid. She ultimately has the satisfaction of seeing the Reverend being carried off to the madhouse in a cage. The book was not well-received — one feminist paper, The Una, found the book “had no aim or purpose but to give utterance to sickly, morbid fancies” — and was largely forgotten until Nina Baym and other scholars began digging into the backlists of 19th century American women novelists.
In her 2000 book, Dreaming Black/Writing White: The Hagar Myth in American Cultural History, Janet Gabler-Hover shows that there were at least thirteen Hagar novels –all by women — published between 1850 and 1913. In fact, the number of Hagar novels is enough that some scholars (including the usually meticulous Baym) became confused and credited Cary’s novel to Harriet Marion Stephens. Stephens’ novel, however, was titled Hagar the Martyr (1855). All drew upon the Biblical story of Hagar, the Egyptian (and therefore, Gabler-Hover argues, black) servant that Sarah tells to sleep with her husband Abraham and who bears the child Ishmael. These novelists, she writes, “probably selected Hagar because they wished to write novels exceeding the boundaries of the woman’s domestic novel in mid-century America.”
I’m intrigued by Stephens’ Hagar the Martyr. Its full title was Hagar, the Martyr; or, Passion and Reality, A Tale of the North and South. According to Gabler-Hover, Stephens, an actress of mediocre reputation, wrote the novel “pseudoauto-biographically, using the revenge aspect of the heroine to target theatre socialites who she imagined (probably rightly) had shunned her. The story starts in the antebellum South, where the girl Hagar is alleged to be the illegitimate child of a quadroon slave and her father, Alva Martin. Laird, a Southern gentleman of ungentlemanly ways, threatens to take her as a mistress and, after Hagar makes her way to the North and makes a name for herself in Boston society, re-emerges to assert his right to seize her as a slave.
Ad for Hagar the Martyr from the New York Times.
In words that seem a 19th Century version of Tough Little Trollop’s reviews, a proper journal such as The Living Age wrote indignantly of the novel,
The name of a woman on the title-page of a book is generally considered fair security for its freedom from gross faults of principle, if not of style. With this impression, we took up the story of Hagar, and — found ourselves mistaken. It were charity to suppose the author subject to occasional fits of mental aberration while guiding her pen. No reader of refined taste will proceed far in a book whose violations of probability and sins against good style are only exceeded by its recklessness of propriety.
Harper’s reviewer, more charitably, found Hagar the Martyr “a story belonging to the school of melodramatic intensity, written in a bold, dashing style, and seeking the materials for popular effect in scenes of strange and high-wrought passion.”
In 1955, not long after Dave Brubeck became the first postwar jazz musician to make the cover of TIME magazine, Whitney Balliett, The New Yorker’s veteran jazz critic, commented that novels about jazz had become “as indestructible as watercress sandwiches.” The irony of this, he noted, was that jazz, “with its overheated, bleary terminology and ghettoish aspects, is perhaps the hardest of all artforms to penetrate persuasively.”
It didn’t stop a couple generations of novelists from trying. After someone on Twitter asked for recommendations of novels about music and musicians recently, I began to jot down a list of just the ones about jazz and jazz musicians I could think of and was surprised how the list kept growing. Perhaps the best-known of these are one of the earliest, Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn (1938), which has been reissued as an NYRB Classic, and the best selling, Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1949). Algren’s book was more about drug addiction than jazz, and many of those who followed in his footsteps found it as hard not to mix up the two as did an unfortunate number of jazz musicians themselves.
Having played in an amateur big band for years, I’ve long taken an interest in books about jazz, but I won’t deny that the nonfictional ones — particularly coming from the pen of a master like Balliett, Gene Lees, Ted Gioia, or Stanley Crouch — tend, on average, to be far superior to their fictional counterparts. There’s just something about fiction and jazz than often comes out like mustard on chocolate: as great as the two may be on their own, put together they do neither a favor.
Approached as genre novels — which means, I guess, that you can set your critical brow down to middle or lower — however, they can have the same appeal as a whodunnit or western. Those same qualities of atmosphere, clichéd characters, and predictable plots that kill a book’s chance of critical praise can provide such the kind of reliable formula that makes for good escapism. Or, as another reviewer put it, one can become a willing “victim of a sort of déjà vu or déjà lu effect.” Here, then, are a dozen-plus jazz novels to enjoy.
I’d call this a half-way jazz novel. It’s about what happens when an amusement park piano player gets it into his head to start composing music. At first, everyone thinks it’s a joke, but when he meets a violinist with some training in orchestration, he ends up producing an opera titled The Giant Swing, which is set in … an amusement park. It’s halfway jazz because Burnett’s description of his hero’s music is clearly taken from George Gershwin’s “serious” compositions such as “Rhapsody in Blue” and Porgy and Bess — i.e., jazz-inspired but without the improvisational element. The story was later filmed as Dance Band (1941).
This, one of the earliest novels about a jazz musician, might just be the best when it comes to capturing both the business and the art of performing jazz. The story follows Frank and Pete Davis, brothers playing trombone and tenor sax (ala Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey), from the first time they pick up their horns in band class to their commercial and artistic success leading a swing band. The book is full of practical details about working as a musician that suggests that Steig spent a good deal of time listening to veterans of the road.
It’s also probably the first to address what made playing jazz so different from playing any other type of music before it. “Did you ever hear of Joe Venuti?” Frank asks a violinist interested in joining his band.
Well, he’s about the best of the jazz violinists. And by jazz violinist I mean something very different from the fiddlers who play in most dance orchestras. I mean a man who can play hot improvisations, a man who can play inventions extemporaneously in jazz idiom. There aren’t more than six or eight in the whole country who can do it well — probably the whole world. If I wanted a violinist I would try to find such a man. A Joe Venuti.
“But I don’t want a violin!” Frank continues. “The way I’ve worked things out there’s absolutely no place for it” — meaning that Steig also understood something that was beginning to be a major factor in the shift from hot jazz to swing: the importance of orchestration and arrangements.
Send Me Down is likely the most unjustly neglected novel on this list. Despite its — for the time — unusual subject, it was good enough to convince a hard-nosed reviewer like the novelist Kate O’Brien to declare, “There are not at this time of day many novels that can be called original, but Send Me Down is unmistakably one of them.”
The last book in the forgotten magnum opus of this genre, a trilogy called “Three Musicians’ loosely based on the careers of Bix Beiderbecke, Frankie Trumbauer, Eddie Duchin, and other white musicians who got their start in the 1920s’ hot jazz era. The first novel, Tangleweed (1943), followed a musician who got caught in the trap of booze and drugs. The second, The Wild Faun (1945), took the other direction and told about a talented soloist who sold out and became a big star playing non-threatening “sweet” music. Lou Carey, the protagonist of Little Boy Blues sticks with his passion, staying true to jazz, but also proves a first-class heel who cheats on the woman who loves him.
Willis, who was a musician himself, knew the lot of a touring player living out of a suitcase and riding the band bus from one town to another, and the kind of places where they performed:
You can walk tonight into the Union and find that nothing real has ever changed there. You can walk up to the bandstand with its tiny, scarred rail behind which the musicians sit secure, and after you have put your dime in the kitty, you can ask those boys to play a tune for you. They will understand. And one of them will stand up to the microphone while the pianist accompanies him, and in the dim light and the smoke the young man will ask if anyone in the house loves him, for you who had a dime but could not sing it, and everyone will understand. For a moment in the night, everyone will be silent, and each at his table, or in his booth, or with his instep hooked on the railing at the bar, will be asking, too, in his heart and in his own peculiar way, if anyone there loves him—the song said they did and somebody must.
He’s also the only writer on this list who would refer to “a Shangri-la, a never-never land, or more closely a kind of White House … the quarters of the fabulous Local 802 of the union to which they all belonged, the American Federation of Musicians.”
The only title on this list written by a woman. Ewing was a journalist who specialized in profiles of swing band leaders and innovative musicians such as Raymond Scott. This novel, similar to Willis’s followed the career of a trumpet player who gets tangled up in a messy marriage. From the book’s reviews, I regret that Ewing’s publishers didn’t encourage her to write a collection of profiles — ala Balliett and Lees — instead of a novel. This, from The Philadelphia Inquirer, for example:
When the author talks music, she talks first-hand, directly and without self-consciousness. Unhappily, she felt obliged to make a Book out of it, with a well-trammeled grade B plot containing a lady gangster and a lost week-end. The plot thickens but doesn’t jell; the dialogue is delivered on cue; and the music fades far, far away.
Dupree Blues is almost a novelization — except in this case, of a blues song rather than a movie:
Betty told Dupree She wanted a diamond ring And Dupree told Betty, “I’ll give you most anything.”
Now he didn’t want Betty To know he didn’t have a thing. He killed that jewelry man, Gave Betty that diamond ring.
Or as the Hartford Courant’s reviewer summed up this book, “When a man is addicted to liquor and hot music, he will not necessarily get into trouble. But add a beautiful blonde — and he is doomed.” Bonus points for featuring a trombone player, though.
Gilbert specialized in writing middle-brow, mid-best-seller-list novels that focused on particular settings: an architectural firm in Native Stone, Detroit automotives in American Chrome, a fancy Fifth Avenue apartment house in The Beautiful Life. The Hot and the Cool focused on a sextet of jazz musicians and their struggle to break through (perhaps hoping for something along the lines of the Brubeck Quartet’s splash). Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Balliett gave Gilbert credit for accuracy in his descriptions of the practical details of a musician’s life, but when it came to writing about music, he said Gilbert’s prose “reminded me of a man trying to carry on a rapid monologue underwater.”
Think of this as the Atlas Shrugged of jazz novels. Its hero, Virgil Jones, is sort of a cross between Art Tatum and Lennie Tristano — in other words, a piano god but, you know, intellectual? And at the core of his philosophy is … himself. He hands out cards reading “I AM THE LAST INDIVIDUAL IN THE WORLD” (though without an address, but I suppose the last individual in the world wouldn’t need one). This was Whitmore’s one and only novel. He soon found more profitable work as the lead writer for James Garner’s TV western Maverick.
When I wrote about this book back in 2009, I acknowledged that I’d have put it in the Justly Neglected if not for the fact that its lead character is a trombonist. As a wannabe sliphorn wrangler myself, I had to give it some bonus stars. Trombone players need love, too. However, the fact is that any book that takes almost 450 pages to cover two weeks in the life of a big band playing a gig at a Santa Monica amusement park had better justify that demand on its reader’s time by being awesome. And Sideman is not.
What I did appreciate — and what is rare among jazz novels — was Duke’s solid grasp of the difference between musical proficiency and the capacity to improvise. Duke’s hero Bennie Bell packs up his horn in the end because he comes to realize that he might be sharp enough to play the book and write innovative compositions, but he simply doesn’t have the chops to play a half-decent solo. And that — far more often than drugs — is what usually brings a would-be jazz musician’s career to an end.
Twenty-four years after The Great Swing, W. R. Burnett returned to take jazz head-on, though under a pseudonym for contractual reasons. In this case, he tells about the rise and break-up of a jazz trio — guitar, piano, and bass. He skirts around the challenge of trying to describe jazz by having a character intone, “Music is a hard thing to write about. Almost impossible, in fact: it’s just something you listen to — so I won’t bend your ears with too much talk about it.”
The trio’s bass player, Royal Mauch, sounds as if Burnett might have encountered the young Charle Mingus, then just making his name in L.A.:
This Royal — he broke everything up into pieces. The word ‘fracture’ was invented for him. I don’t know anything about Art — with a capital B, standing for Bushwa, to be polite about it, but if Royal had ever decided to paint, he would have painted those cockeyed looking things where the woman has two eyes on one side and looks like she was cut out of a marshmallow with a cleaver.
Baird was a former drummer who led a band called the Jesters of Rhythm that played around Pittsburgh in the 1930s and 1940s. After marrying and quickly fathering five children, however, he took a steadier job as a liquor store clerk and began writing pulp novels at night. This one is set in Pittsburgh and features the tragic romance between a white trumpet player and a Black singer. The result was not only unusual in its interracial theme but admirably concise. As Virginia Dale wrote in the New York Times, “You might think that jazz and love and double crossing, gambling and murder would be enough to crowd hundreds of pages, but here it’s all skimmed over in under 150.”
The only fictional outing of a one-time Broadway producer (the musical “Barnum”), this is easily the most obscure and hard-to-find title on this list. I couldn’t find a single review, aside from a brief synopsis in David Rife’s Jazz Fiction: A History and Comprehensive Reader’s Guide (2007). The New York Times’ only mention was in their “Books Published Today” item for 12 June 1956: “Novel about a musician.” So there you go.
An early offering by Ed McBain under his favorite pseudonym, Second Ending follows the example of The Man with the Golden Arm and focuses on the drugs more than the music. Though the main character is a trumpet man, the horn itself proves to be more important as something to hock than something to play. “A dossier on the disintegration phenomenon of addiction and the clawing torment of those who have been hooked,” according to Kirkus Reviews.
Most people familiar with the 1961 movie Paris Blues probably don’t realize it’s based on a book — or that Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s characters were invented to appeal to white audiences. In the novel, it’s the Sidney Poitier character, sax man Eddie Cook, who’s the protagonist. A long-time expat, Cook finds his reluctance to return to the racism he remembers at home tested when he falls in love with a black American woman visiting France on her summer holiday. Flender himself was a New York-based writer who usually worked on comic material with the likes of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner before the sale of his novel to producer Sam Shaw allowed him to pursue more serious subjects, such as his 1963 account of the evacuation of Danish Jews, Rescue in Denmark.
This first novel won the Avery Hopwood Prize for major fiction in 1957. A clarinet player returns from the Korean War and trades his licorice stick for a bari sax and his adolescent fixation with Dixieland for a fascination with cool jazz. Lea captured the contrast between the jazzman’s passion for music and their passive acceptance of the limbo to which drugs and uncertain income condemns them.
This was screenwriter Kanin’s first novel, and it shows. Switching back and forth between present and flashbacks, it follows three musicians from their start as a Dixieland combo through changing styles and ensembles, to their ultimate fortunes and misfortunes. Although Kanin went on to write a number of bestsellers, the best parts of this book are those about the music itself, infused with Kanin’s thirty years of listening as an avid fan.
Russell made his mark in jazz history as the owner of Hollywood’s Tempo Music Shop, one of the best places to find jazz recordings in L.A. after the war and as the founder of Dial Records, for which Charlie Parker recorded a hugely influential set of tracks after being released from the Camarillo State Mental Hospital. Red Travers, the trumpet player in The Sound, is largely based on Parker. Those familiar with Parker’s life can identify the real-life counterparts to most of the book’s characters and Ross later reused much of the material in his Parker biography Bird Lives!.
Simmons won a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for his first novel, Corner Boy, in 1957, but he struggled to get his second book written and then published. Unlike most of the books on this list, it not only features a black protagonist but burns with the anger of a Black writer poised at the birth of the Civil Rights movement. For Simmons, jazz is more than just music: “Jazz is the story of the Black men being messed around so bad by the white man that if he could he’d lay down and die from the blues but his soul won’t let him do it.”
Man Walking on Eggshells and Corner Boy were forgotten for over thirty years until Norton brought them back in the late 1990s as part of a short-lived series of “Old School Books” by neglected Black writers. Although Amazon says it still has copies on stock, it’s probably time for Norton (or someone else) to consider another revival.
Asher, the house piano player at San Francisco’s famous Hungry i nightclub, based this comic novel about a New England Conservatory-trained pianist who moves to the Bay Area and takes a job playing at a strip club very loosely on his own experiences. Asher followed this up with The Electric Cotillion (1970), which took a similar character in a similar situation forward a few years, with the initial excitement and novelty of the San Francisco scene having been replaced with the drag of endless nights playing “Happy Birthday” and “Hava Nagila” at union minimum rates, until an 18-year-old high school dropout arrives to shake things up. Light on the jazz content, both novels are mainly of interest today as snapshots of SF’s swinging Sixties culture. Asher did, however, earn a permanent place in anyone’s jazz library b co-writing Hampton Hawes’ autobiography Raise Up Off of Me.
I wrote about this, Lees’ first novel, back in 2010. The book focuses on Jack Royal, a kid from Chicago who evolves from student of classical piano to jazz musician to jazz singer to pop star to star of baguette Westerns and adventure movies. My assessment: “Lees himself later told an interviewer that he hated the book. Perhaps the kindest thing one can says about it is that it provides convincing evidence that Lees made the right decision when he abandoned fiction and concentrated instead on writing about what he knew and loved best: jazz, pop, and the remarkable musicians who play it.”
Gig is about a gig. One night’s work for Roy Ambrose, a lounge pianist at the Seacliff, a fashionable joint in San Francisco known for its scenic views and society clientele. Of all the books on this list, it’s probably the most accurate in its depiction of the life of a working musician as seen through his own eyes. Roy has to deal with drunks, snobs, boors, groupies, clumsy waiters, and a rude owner, but takes it all with the perspective of someone who’ll deal with all of it all over again the next weekend:
I do not program people’s lives. I’m only a piano player. I long ago decided public arguments are silly, and I don’t participate. They solve nothing. No one’s opinions are changed. People argue because they’re good at it. I’ve learned I’m a flop at it. So I keep out of them and keep my distance from those who indulge in argument.
Roy is a true cool blue kind of cat:
Why continue this conspiracy of performers to keep the audience in its place? It’s the very thing that drives musicians to drink, to drugs, to insanity, this egomaniac reluctance to let someone else’s noises mix with their own. Why not let everybody into the act?
“As long,” he hastens to add, “as I continue to be in charge.”
I should mention that several fine novels in this genre from the 1960s have been reissued and are now available in print or eBook editions, including John Clellon Holmes’s The Horn, John Williams’s Night Song and Clifford’s Blues, and Mary Weik’s The Jazz Man, a children’s book.
It’s not hard to think of fiction set in Cambridge, from E.M. Forster’s Maurice (written in 1913-14, published posthumously in 1971) to Dusty Answer (1927) by Rosamund Lehmann and, more recently, Laura Barnett’s The Versions of Us (2015). But I’m convinced that well-written nonfiction can bring an authentic story to light in a way that no novel can. My research is on Cambridge’s first women students, university wives and college tutors (link) and there’s nothing like hearing their own voices, in the form of memoirs and biographies based on their letters and diaries. Here I focus more closely on two of these books.
Mary Paley Marshall’s memoir What I Remember was published by Cambridge University Press, 1947. It’s a slim volume, only 50 pages long, with a jaunty introduction by the historian G.M. Trevelyan who writes:
If people who knew not the Victorians will absent themselves from the felicity of generalising about them for a while, and read this short book, they can then return to the game refreshed and instructed.
What I Remember begins, as many good stories do, with a happy childhood. Mary’s was spent in a rose-covered country rectory, where her father Reverend Thomas Paley encouraged his daughters’ education: ‘We had a father who took part in work and play and who was interested in electricity and photography’, she recalls. She moved to Cambridge in 1871 as one of the University’s earliest women students and one of the ‘first five’ at Newnham College; Girton College had begun two years previously. The idea that unmarried women could live apart from their parents and attend lectures was, as Paley Marshall said herself, ‘an outrageous proceeding’ at the time.
Soon after she arrived in Cambridge, she became fascinated by Political Economy because of Alfred Marshall’s lectures. He was ‘a great preacher,’ she observes, who spoke passionately about the need for women’s equality in education and quoted from George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss. With his encouragement, Mary was one of the first two women to sit for the University’s final year exams in 1874 and she became Newnham’s first residential lecturer.
By the mid-1870s the Pre-Raphaelite era of colour in dress and house decoration had dawned all over England. As Florence Ada Keynes later wrote: ‘Newnham caught the fever. We trailed about in clinging robes of peacock blue, terra-cotta red, sage green or orange, feeling very brave and thoroughly enjoying the sensation it caused’ (By-ways of Cambridge History (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1956, first published 1947)). The college room that Mary studied and slept in was, like those of her students, papered in William Morris designs and hung with Burne-Jones prints. At the age of twenty-five she was that rare thing in Victorian times, an unmarried woman who lived independently from her parents and earned a good income doing a job she loved.
Then she and Alfred Marshall married and accepted posts at the newly founded University College, Bristol, where they taught and together published a textbook on The Economics of Industry (1879). Their working marriage seemed the ideal of an intellectual partnership that Mary had dreamed of, and What I Remember describes the happy years the Marshalls spent in Sicily and in Oxford before returning in 1885 to Cambridge. Alfred was made a Professor and published The Principles of Economics (1890) and Mary returned to her post at Newnham, where her inspiring teaching would have a great influence on one student: Winnie Seebohm.
‘This is the true story of a young woman who lived in the later part of Queen Victoria’s reign,’ Victoria Glendinning writes at the beginning of A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter, her biography of Seebohm.
But do not be misled into thinking that because it is history it has nothing to do with you. 1885 is yesterday. It is probably tomorrow too. — From A Suppressed Cry
The prize-winning biographer of Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell and Leonard Woolf, among others, Glendinning took as her first subject her Victorian great-aunt Winnie Seebohm, but the book is no less powerful for Seebohm’s obscurity. A Suppressed Cry was not much noticed when it was published in 1969 and it disappeared from view until it was reissued by Virago in 1995 with a new introduction by the author.
The issue at the heart of A Suppressed Cry is how a young woman from a close-knit Hertfordshire family rebelled against their loving claims on her and achieved her ambition to study at Cambridge. The Seebohms were linked to other Quaker clans in what Glendinning describes as ‘a tight genealogical spiral’ with banking and scholarly connections. Winnie’s father was the economic historian Frederic Seebohm, and she grew up with her siblings and invalid mother in an idyllic house called the Hermitage in rural Hitchin. Despite her obvious intelligence, Winnie was expected to be a ‘good daughter’, contented with flower-arranging and visiting her Quaker relations until a suitable husband was found for her. But she decided that ‘no woman (it is not my business to consider a man’s life) has any excuse for living a life that is not worth living’.
So, in 1885, at the age of 22, she took the gruelling Cambridge entrance exams and won a place at Newnham. A Suppressed Cry reproduces some of the touching letters and diary entries she wrote there. Winnie was thrilled with her college room, her new friends and the freedom to spend her days reading books and writing essays. She adored her tutors, particularly Mary Paley Marshall, who taught Political Economy ‘from a philanthropic woman’s point of view’. ‘She is a Princess Ida,’ Winnie told her sister, thinking of the heroine of Tennyson’s poem The Princess who founded a university for women.
She wears a flowing dark green cloth robe with dark brown fur round the bottom (not on the very edge) – she has dark brown hair which goes back in a great wave and is very loosely pinned up behind –very deep-set large eyes, a straight nose – a face that one likes to watch. Then she is enthusiastic and simple. She speaks fluently and earnestly with her head thrown back a little and her hands generally clasped or resting on her desk. She looks oftenest at the ceiling but every now and then straight at you.
Winnie wanted to become a teacher just like the marvellous Mrs Marshall, but her time as a student was heartbreakingly brief. After just six weeks at Cambridge, she fell ill and was brought back to the Hermitage to be nursed by her family. ‘How queer it looks to see everybody so leisurely here!’ Winnie wrote to her classmate Lina Bronner, confessing how she longed to return to Cambridge. ‘I imagine you lingering on dear Clare Bridge, and King’s spires will be looking grey and sharp against the sky.’
Her kindly tutor Mary Paley Marshall also wrote to her. She was the only woman Winnie knew who seemed to have it all, combining fulfilling academic work with her role as a wife. ‘If she is the woman of the future, I am sure the world will do very well,’ Winnie wrote in her diary. It was one of the last things she wrote. She died after a severe asthma attack – though she may also have had undiagnosed anorexia – just a few weeks later. Expected from childhood to suppress her ambitions and put others’ needs first, Seebohm was, in Glendinning’s memorable description, ‘left stranded on the shores of the nineteenth century’.
Mary Paley Marshall’s married life was far from the ideal that Winnie perceived. In the early 1880s Alfred turned against the idea of women at Cambridge: ‘it is not likely that men will go on marrying, if they are to have competitors as wives’ he told LSE founder Beatrice Webb. He insisted that The Economics of Industry, the book he and Mary wrote together, should be pulped and in 1897 he voted against women being awarded Cambridge degrees. But unlike Winnie, Mary was a survivor and she had the final word. After Alfred’s death in 1924 she co-founded Cambridge University’s Marshall Library of Economics. She worked there for nearly twenty years and her portrait now hangs above the library staircase opposite his.
What was left out of (or ‘forgotten’) in Mary Paley Marshall’s memoir What I Remember is at least as interesting as what was put in; and the cheering counterbalance to Winnie Seebohm’s sad story is the continuing success of Newnham, which celebrates 150 years as a women’s college this year.
Dr Ann Kennedy Smith is a freelance writer and researcher based in Cambridge. Her book reviews and essays have been published in the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Slightly Foxed and the Journal of Victorian Culture among others. You can follow her blog and other activities at AKennedySmith.com.
Isabel Bolton floats through the letters and memoirs of other writers like a ghost. “Isabel Bolton was there,” the poet Louise Bogan wrote May Sarton about a cocktail party in 1954: “A strange and rather pathetic figure, who is resigning herself to gradual blindness.” Edward Field recalls seeing her at the Yaddo writers’ colony around the same time, a tall elderly woman in a white dress and an outsized sun bonnet. At the time, Field was in his early thirties; she was in her seventies.
The other writers at Yaddo must have felt they had little in common with this aloof woman born in another century. Those who recognized her name knew it from the critical success of her three novels: Do I Wake or Sleep? (1946); The Christmas Tree (1949); and Many Mansions (1952), which had been nominated for the National Book Award. Far fewer knew that it was a pseudonym.
By the time she published her first novel as Isabel Bolton, Mary Britton Miller had become accustomed to being an outsider. But she’d started at the center of American society, born at the Madison Avenue mansion of her father Charles Miller, a prominent New York lawyer, and his wife Grace (née Rumrill). Charles, considered a rising star on Wall Street, was largely a self-made man, having overcome the scandal of his father’s suicide in 1847.
From the New York Daily Herald, 16 March 1847.
It was through Grace Rumrill that the Millers gained most of their status. Her father was a prosperous manufacturer in Springfield, Massachusetts and her brother James was a vice president of the Boston and Albany Railroad, having married the daughter of its founder, Chester Chapin. James and his father-in-law also founded and were on the board of the Chapin National Bank in Springfield. With a large summer house on the shore of Long Island Sound in New London, Connecticut and a mansion in Springfield, James Rumrill and his wife Anna Chapin Rumrill were among the wealthiest and most influential members of New England society.
Mary Miller and her identical twin sister Grace joined two older brothers and one sister in a bustling household full of servants that followed the common routine of autumns, winters, and springs in the city and long summers at the Rumrill-Chapin estates in New London. It was there, while playing tennis at his brother-in-law’s house that Charles Miller fell ill in August 1887, just two weeks after Mary and little Grace’s fourth birthday. Pneumonia quickly set in. Tending to her husband, Grace also became ill, and the two died within hours of each other a few days later.
From the Fall River Daily Evening News, 22 August 1887.
Their deaths not only left their children orphans but paupers. Having rushed back from vacation in France upon receiving the news, James Rumrill was appointed executor and soon discovered that Charles Miller’s practice was based largely on goodwill and promissory notes. He settled matters with his brother-in-law’s creditors and took the children to Springfield to live with his mother. Rebecca Rumrill tried her best, but she was in her late seventies and in poor health and died a little over two years after the five Millers’ arrival.
Writing as Isabel Bolton eighty years later in her memoir Under Gemini, Mary recreated the impression her death left on the twins:
Everything was at sixes and sevens. Grandma had gone. We could no longer find her in the library sitting beside the fire swinging her slipper on the end of her great toe. We could not find her in her room or in the dining room. There was a feeling among us all that we were not so safe and sheltered as before.
With Grandmother Rumrill gone, the children became the wards of James Rumrill and his wife Anna. James, who Mary remembered as “the most remarkable miniature gentleman anyone could imagine,” dapper and full of good humor, left the real decision making to Anna. She, in contrast, loomed over them like the judge in the supreme court of their lives. “Whatever charm and geniality she might have had,” Mary recalled, “was compressed, laced in, buttoned up, suppressed.”
Anna saw the Miller children as a problem to be solved. She had no desire to bring them into her fine house on the hill above Springfield, so Anna hired a former teacher to move in as their custodian. She was Desire Aurelia Rogers. As Mary later wrote,
Desire — who could have thought up a better name for her? What hopes, what dreams she must have had before she came to live with us. What lovely pictures must have floated and dissolved and built themselves again in that sad and hungry heart.
Unfortunately, Desire Rogers was outnumbered and outgunned. The five Miller children buzzed with more energy than she could match. The boys mocked her, the older sister Rebecca ignored her, and the twins alternated between tormenting and adoring her. She learned to trust their uncle’s characterization of them as “sprigs of Satan.” Life at the house on Maple Street became more and more anarchic. And Miss Rogers had no hope of support from Anna Rumrill, whose only interest was in keeping the orphans at arm’s length.
When Philip, the oldest of the orphans, was ready to go to college, Aunt Anna saw her opportunity to push the Millers even farther to the margins of her life. James arranged for Philip to attend his alma mater, Harvard (which continues to offer a James A. Rumrill scholarship) and Anna convinced her brother to take James, the younger Miller son, to Europe for a year’s study at a preparatory school in Geneva. Rebecca was to be sent to live and study with a music teacher in New York. The twins learned of these decisions when they returned home from school one day and found a sign reading, “THIS PROPERTY TO BE SOLD” planted on their front lawn.
They were to be packed off even further from Springfield than Geneva: Long Island. Mary and Grace, then just short of 14, were sent to live with a family in Quogue, on the south shore of Long Island. Though sad at being parted from Miss Rogers, they enjoyed their summer freedom, going off together around the countryside or swimming in the large lagoon.
Just ten days after their 14th birthday, while swimming at the mouth of the lagoon, they were caught in the current of the outgoing tide and were pulled away from their rowboat. They both struggled to swim back to the boat, but as Mary recalled in Under Gemini,
… this we saw was hopeless, a futile thing to do — to waste strength necessary to swim ashore. We were lost and terrified — Grace’s strength already spent. Was she clinging to me? No, she was not, she was still beside me in the water, swimming still. What was it she was saying? Clearly, I heard her voice; as though I myself were speaking the words, she said, “My darling Mary, how I love you….”
From the Brooklyn Standard Union, 14 August 1897.
News of Grace’s drowning made headlines in New York papers the next day. It left a permanent scar on Mary’s being. She had spent fourteen years with more than a constant companion. As she wrote in Under Gemini, as identical twins, Mary and Grace saw themselves as a single collective being:
Attuned to the same vibrations, with nerves that responded to the same dissonances and harmonies, we were one in body and in soul. What happened to one of us happened at the same instant to the other and both of us recognized exactly how each experience had registered in the other’s heart and mind. It was never I but always we. It was never you or I but both of us. Never mine or yours but always ours.
The death of her parents and the death of her sister Grace were the tragedies that bookended Mary Miller’s childhood. Together they had an impact so profound that she wrote the story of these events and the years between twice.
Her first account, published as Mary Britton Miller, was In the Days of Thy Youth (1943). Reviewers lumped the book in with Life with Father and Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, both much more nostalgic and comical accounts of life in the 1890s. The Chicago Tribune’s critic called the book “Charming, incredibly egotistical, beautifully remote,” but also “as antidiluvian as the dinosaur.” In a review titled “Gilt Gingerbread”, the New York Times recommended it mostly “For those who want to escape the headlines of today.”
Mary Britton Miller, around 1948, and the cover of Do I Wake or Sleep.
Unhappy that the book “made no ripples in the pond,” Bolton took a friend’s suggestion and adopted the pseudonym of Isabel Bolton for her next novel. It proved a lucky choice. Do I Wake or Sleep was praised as one of the best novels of its decade. Edmund Wilson reportedly fell for his fantasy of the young, pretty, and talented Isabel Bolton and was nonplussed when the stately older woman, walking with the aid of a cane, approached the bench where they’d arranged to meet in Central Park and introduced herself.
Her subsequent novels, The Christmas Tree and Many Mansions, were equally praised. Though some critics such as Stanley Edgar Hyman dismissed the acclaim for Bolton’s work as an aberration, most agreed with Diana Trilling that she was one of, if not the best, “woman writer of fiction in this country today.” Rose Field, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, ranked her alongside Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Ann Porter, and Kay Boyle. “Miss Bolton’s talent is clear,” she wrote.
None of the people applauding the arrival of Isabel Bolton, from what I can determine, bothered to learn anything about Mary Miller. There was no mention of the several volumes of poetry, mainly sentimental in nature, she had published earlier nor did anyone give In the Days of Thy Youth a second look. They certainly didn’t know that the tragedies that framed that story came from her own life or that her sister’s drowning in 1897 did not mark the end of her woes.
Alone after Grace’s death, Mary attended a New England girls’ boarding school and then was shipped off to Europe to stay with her cousin Marguerite Chapin, who was studying music in Paris. It’s not clear if her aunt Anna Chapin Rumrill had any more intent than to get her out of the way. Mary may have returned to Europe a few years later, spending time in Italy where Marguerite, having married Price Roffrello Caetani, was now, officially, Princess of Bassiano and Duchess of Sermoneta.
Edward Field claims there were rumors that Mary had become pregnant while in Italy and given birth to an illegitimate child that she gave up for adoption. I’ve found nothing to substantiate this. Laurie Dennett barely mentions Mary in her 2016 book An American Princess, The Remarkable Life of Marguerite Chapin Caetani, even though the two cousins remained in touch through the decades and Marguerite was to publish one of Mary’s stories in an early volume of her literary journal Botteghe Oscure.
Somewhere in her mid-twenties, Mary decided to settle in New York City, taking an apartment in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood that would be her home for the rest of her life. She became active in social reform and led a study for the Consumer’s League of the conditions of children working in homes in New York slums. In her report, she wrote that “It is no exaggeration to say that there are thousands of young children in New York who ought to be in school who are hidden away in East Side tenements by their parents and often locked in so that they may be forced to do the awful home work outside factories, which the present laws do not forbid.” The situation, she argued, was effectively a sanctioned form of slavery.
From the Daily People, 30 December 1912.
After their grandmother’s house in Springfield was sold and the Miller children sent their separate ways, the siblings never found another home. Philip, the eldest, took a law degree and moved to Illinois, though he eventually returned to New York to join the prestigious Sullivan, Cromwell law firm. Rebecca married a Canadian doctor, Edward Farrell, and lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia for years.
From the Hartford, Connecticut Courant, 11 May 1916.
James, the younger of the two boys, had been taken under the Chapin wing and brought up through the ranks of the family bank in Springfield after graduating from Harvard. In 1915, he became president of the bank and was beginning to exert some influence in Massachusetts state politics. Within a year, however, he suffered a breakdown and was hospitalized at Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. He eventually recovered enough that he was allowed to go for walks on his own. Early on the afternoon of 11 May 1916, a gardener at the Swan Point Cemetery next door found his body with a revolver laying nearby. Like his grandfather Ezra Miller, he’d taken his life with a shot to the head.
Though the three remaining children were reunited in the early 1920s when Rebecca returned to New York City and her husband took a position on the faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, tragedy continued to haunt their lives. Edward Farrell was struck by an attack of peritonitis and died before he could be operated on. Rebecca suffered from a crippling form of depression and died a few years later at the Home for Incurables in the Bronx.
When she was in her forties, Mary became writing poetry. Most of her poems were simple and transparent, written for children. Her first book, Menagerie (1928), was a collection about animals illustrated with woodcuts by Helen Sewell. Her poem “Cat” (“The black cat yawns/Opens her jaws,/Stretches her legs,/And shows her claws.”) has been reprinted numerous times in anthologies of cat poems. Even after her success as Isabel Bolton, she continued to publish collections of children’s poems, the last, Listen — the Birds appearing in 1961.
The remainder of her poetry was ethereal and religious, often invoking Jesus or the spirit. If there is a common theme through these poems, it is loss. In one of her “Stanzas to Spring” in Intrepid Bird (1934), for example, she cannot greet the season without some dread:
My eyes are worn with watching, and my heart is filled With unavailing knowledge. Underneath your bough Too much extortionate trust has been expelled For aught but apprehension to invade me now
Her reservations about looking back are clearest in “On Remembering One’s Childhood”:
If to these fonts and springs That joyed my soul When I was young I could return To be made whole again, I would discover Mint and fern And cresses green And flowers fresh and fair — But should I dip my hand Into the candid stream What flower or leaf or fern Would I recover there?
Reading this in light of her own experiences, one has to wonder if Mary Britton Miller ever fully recovered from the losses of her childhood.
She was forty when she took up poetry, sixty when she took up fiction. But perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she took up prose. For In the Days of Thy Youth is fact with the names changed and the occasional assistance of an omniscient narrator. Dedicated to “G. R. M.” (Grace Rumrill Miller, her drowned sister), the book opens with the death of their parents as perceived by the four-year-old twins. At first, there is only the commotion, the appearance of unknown relatives, the murmurs in the parlour. The adults try to explain the situation:
From their faces and the tones in which they spoke the twins got a sense that the world was coming to a sudden end, that a calamity so dire was about to overtake them that everything to which they were accustomed, light, air, food, shelter, the very business of living with these good things — was about to be whisked away from them. So when they finally realized that what they were being told was that their parents — their mother, their father were dead, “tot,” it did not seem so very terrible.
In the Days of Thy Youth is the story of the orphaned Millers (here called Marshalls) vs. the powerful Chapins (and their Rumrill followers), a contest doomed from the start. Although the little girls are relieved to be welcomed by their familiar grandmother, they can sense that the odds are against them. “Five orphan children, a bereaved old lady. You couldn’t set this outfit up against these Arnolds [the Chapins] who always managed to marry the right people and who felt in each other’s society such boundless assurance, energy and joviality.”
Their security grows more fragile with their grandmother dies. The twins find only a morbid pride to hold up in the face of their comfortable, better-off cousins:
“You have never had a funeral in your house.” No,” said Julia regretfully, she had not, and she continued to stare. “We’ve had three,” said the twins, lording it over Julia.
To the Chapins, on the other hand, the orphans are a cross they are only happy to bear when it allows them the leverage of superior self-righteousness over their neighbors. Otherwise, they are sure to make it “as obvious as a brass band” to the children “that they were a chronic source of trouble and responsibility.”
The fact that reviewers compared In the Days of Thy Youth to light-hearted memoirs of the “Gay Nineties” shows how little they understood it. Mary may have described wonderful summer days playing on the wide lawns of the Chapin/Rumrill estates on the shore of Long Island Sound, but she never forgot that the Millers were poor relations hosted with reluctance and some suspicion. The children might be invited to elaborate Christmas feasts at the Chapin mansion in Springfield, but then find themselves standing in the entrance hall afterward, abandoned. “I’ve never seen such a thing,” exclaims one relative. “Why didn’t you go home?” “We didn’t go home because nobody sent for us,” Philip replies.
Mary was able to see the potential for psychological devastation in the Chapins’ treatment of the Miller children and their concerns through their Aunt Anna’s effect on their guardian, Miss Rogers [the one name unchanged in this book]. When the twins are told that their grandmother’s house is being sold and their siblings farmed out to the care of others, they see in an instant the consequence for her:
They knew that from the moment she passed over the threshold of life with them at Maple Street Aunty Dee would cease to exist as a substantial human being. She would be Miss Nobody, Miss Nowhere, Miss Nothing-at-all. She’d be a ghost, calling on other ghosts to see, to hear, to speak to her. Nothing she said or did or even thought would be real, and nobody in any way connected with the bitter, defeated creature locked up inside this phantom lady could communicate with her. They might put out their hands to touch her, but to no avail. Miss Rogers would be ghost — wholly ghost.
By the time she was writing this, Mary was becoming something of a phantom in the eyes of others herself. Not long after In the Days of Thy Youth was published, Philip, her last remaining sibling, died of a heart attack while sitting at his desk on Wall Street. A year later, she would burst upon the literary world as Isabel Bolton, but she’d already lost most of her family and friends.
Those who looked closer, however, would see a woman still vitally connected to her world. Though her eyes were failing, she kept up with current literature by hiring readers. She fired one for balking when he came to the word “fuck” in James Joyce’s Ulysses. She published five books of children’s poetry between 1957 and 1961, each with a different theme and illustrator. Jungle Journey (1959) was illustrated by one of her closest friends, Tobias Schneebaum and drew, in part, on his experiences living with indigenous people in Peru and Mexico (later retold in Keep the River on Your Right (1969)).
Mary dedicated her next book as Isabel Bolton, Under Gemini, to Schneebaum. In it, she returned to the story told in In the Days of Thy Youth, but with a much tighter focus. This time, instead of hovering over her cast in the third person, she wrote in the first person, giving her world a fixed center: the being formed by her bond with her identical twin.
It was never I but always we. It was never you or I but both of us. Never mine or yours but always ours. We were seldom referred to by those we lived among as Mary or as Grace but as the twins — I was Mary, she was Grace. This may be so.
“There is a legend,” she wrote, “that once the ribbons we wore upon our wrists to establish our identity were misplaced while we were being bathed.” Their nurse grew flustered. She called for their mother, who declared that one was Mary, the other Grace. Thus, Mary’s words eighty years later: “This may be so.”
“Human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love,” Plato wrote in The Symposium. Grace Miller’s last words to her sister before drowning were, “My darling Mary, how I love you.” To Mary, so many years later, these words were a confirmation that they had found that whole in each other:
That business in which we are all perpetually engaged — the making of an individual soul — is an enterprise of memory. In our case it was a joint and not a single venture.
“I am an old woman now and full of many memories,” Mary wrote “but those which I have here evoked have for me still the strange and wonderful completeness of having lived another’s life that was at the same time my own.” If the people who saw Isabel Bolton sitting in a corner at a cocktail party or floating through the rooms at Yaddo saw her as something of a ghost, perhaps they could sense that she was walking through the world with the shadow of her sister at her side.
Mary Britton Miller was born in the horse and buggy era and wrote her memoir of her life as a twin in a time of ballistic missiles and Mutually Assured Destruction. But she had become familiar with destruction and loss early on in her life, and her awareness of life’s fragility pervades every page of her work as Isabel Bolton. As she wrote in Many Mansions,
… [T]here was something not to be passed over lightly in the startling fact that the splitting of the atom and the splitting of the soul, the long, long range of human memory, had been contemporaneous, all in the open world together, no shelter for us, no place to hide.
When David and Blanche, the two old friends in Mary’s last novel as Isabel Bolton, The Whirligig of Time, sit together, meeting in their eighties after a separation of decades, they feel themselves moving “toward some immense, annihilating, and unimaginable catastrophe.” Perhaps Mary Miller wrote this because she knew just how close we always are to unimaginable catastrophe.
L to R: Pete Morgan; Philip Callow; Harold Massingham; Anne Cluysenaar; Agneta Falk.
This is a guest post by Ian McMillan
Let’s face it, most poets are neglected (or they think they are) and, oddly, even when poets published by small independent presses are out of print, they’re still somehow in print because the publisher has got loads of copies of unsold books under the bed and in the wardrobe in the spare room.
Here, though, are five poets who seem to be out of print; two of them are so out of print that I almost lost their books. I found them under the bed, of course.
In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Secker and Warburg had a fantastic poetry list, including poets like James Fenton, Jon Hollander and writers known in other fields like Erica Jong. For me, Pete Morgan was one of the best; his poetry is lyrical, beautifully constructed and written for performance. Pete was one of the poets I took as a model for the freelance life when I was a young poet starting to make my way in the literary world: he did workshops and gigs and school visits and wrote copy for advertising firms; anything to keep the wolf from the door. The Grey Mare Being the Better Steed was his first collection and it brims with work that begs to be performed, like ‘My Enemies Have Sweet Voices,’ which Al Stewart later turned into a song. His other Secker books A Winter Visitor and The Spring Collection are well worth hunting out.
Philip Callow was a marvellous novelist as well as a poet; his novels like The Hosanna Man and The Story of my Desire are well worth reading. The wonderful Bradford-based Rivelin Press, run by another neglected poet, David Tipton, published a number of Callow’s collections, including this one, full of beautifully observed poems of love and the natural world: ‘After you hear the rustle in a denim shirt/of a pocketful of apple leaves/Gathered by your pocket under eyes of apples.’
Massingham always suffered from being a couple of years below Ted Hughes at Mexborough Grammar School, so his work seems to be endlessly in Hughes’s long shadow. I’ve always enjoyed Massingham’s imagistic, Anglo-Saxon influenced, word-drunk work. In later life he made a living as a crossword complier under the name Mass, and that makes sense to me because his poems can often feel like crossword clues, as in the poem ‘Cow’: ‘Tub-sided galleon-/But O, her walk, stalwart, a wonder of hundredweights/Borne by sure bone.’ Marvellous!
• Anne Cluysenaar: Double Helix, Carcanet Press (1982)
Anne Cluysenaar was born in Belgium in 1936 and I knew her when I was writer-in-residence at Sheffield Poly in the mid-1980’s; she taught English and Creative Writing and had an evangelical zeal for the power of poetry to change lives. Double Helix was published by Carcanet Press in 1982; it’s a remarkable example of hybrid writing, being a combination of Cluysenaar’s poem and her mother’s prose memoirs and letters; the writing bridges the generations and invites us to examine our own pasts. Tragically, Anne was killed by her son in 2014.
Agneta Falk is a Swedish poet who was born in 1946. She lived in the endlessly creative enclave of Hebden Bridge for many years until she moved in the late 1990’s to the equally creative enclave of San Francisco, where she’s still very active on the literary scene. Here By Choice is her first pamphlet and I’ve always enjoyed her striking and unsettling lines like ‘A car goes by/rocking the floor boards/the wood creaks/like petals of red roses/hitting the tarmac.’ Or, from her poem ‘Hanna’: ‘She knew nothing of fear or hope/laying her bare bones in the/arms of soft lichen.’
Loneliest Girl in the World was the first novel in history about losing something in your computer. Which was a neat trick given that personal computers wouldn’t even have a name, let alone be commonplace, for another thirty-some years.
The computer in this case isn’t really a computer. Rather, it’s a large audio recording, transcription, and storage device using stainless steel wire as its medium, combined with some kind of indexed reference system controlled by a dial. It’s intended to store everything from business meetings, musical performances, and radio shows to novelties called “audiobooks.” He envisions it as part of a continental network,
… offering instantaneous information to anyone, on any subject, but also a general repository for all the data a businessman might need in the daily conduct of his affairs. His correspondence, his estimates, inventories, invoices, receipts, bills paid and due, all memoranda, everything he now committed to paper and placed in his cumbersome and bulky individual files, not recoverable a good part of the time, could go on deposit with us, on tape or wire, quickly available at all times.
Its inventor, Adrian Vaughn, keeps his most advanced model in his Manhattan penthouse apartment, having recently devised a voice-activated mechanism and some kind of processor that allows recordings to be requested and played on demand. Known as “Mikki,” this system becomes the focus of intrigue after Vaughn and his son Oliver fall to their deaths through an accident involving keys and an open penthouse window.
“The Loneliest Girl in the World” is the name the tabloids give Vaughn’s daughter Ellen when she inherits the penthouse apartment. Despite her apparent wealth, her situation is closer to that of Prometheus, staked to a mountain peak so birds of prey can attack and eat his liver. When she returns after the funeral, in fact, she finds two men in Mikki’s room. “We think there’s a recording of an oral agreement your father made between Vaughn Electronics and another company about an exchange of rights for mass production and sale,” they tell her.
What they don’t say is that other things are hidden there, too, such as the disposition of most of Adrian Vaughn’s fortune. To avoid going bankrupt and being tossed onto the street, Ellen must find answers: “There is a secret here somewhere in this storehouse of living sound, this pool of memory.” The problem is that the system contains over 463,000 hours of recordings or enough to take 50 years to work through. And, as she quickly figures out, with her father, brother, and others using Mikki, the chances of something being misfiled increase dramatically: “Between the lot of us, everyone using the collection for a different purpose, anything not in the right place can be written off as lost forever.”
Anyone who shares a home computer is familiar with this.
Fearing was neither Luddite nor doomster when it came to technology. He’s not particularly interested in the implications of a system like Mikki. As he once admitted, movie scenes “depicting a hell of a lot of fantastic machinery as built and operated by the science of the future, laboratory thunderbolts leaping from a positive steel electrode to a negative Wassermann have always found me a ready sucker.” He’s impressed by Mikki’s inherent superiority to the fallible humans it serves:
I never forget. Unlike you, I have no limit of life, my memory is total and accurate, this thread of thought never wanders with the weakness of age, and I am always able to receive the new and strange, nor am I intrusive, stubborn. I do not evade issues, or lie. I do not know how to lie.
But if Loneliest Girl in the World isn’t science fiction, neither is it much in the way of suspense. In Fearing’s previous novel and the one for which he’s remembered, The Big Clock, the tension increases with each page as time and space run out for its hero, a man falsely accused of murder. Here, however, as Ralph Partridge aptly put it in his New Statesman review, Fearing “duly keeps the reader gasping for the first half of the book … and then — after halfway, the excitement fizzles out, the forceful characters go dim, the machine obligingly croaks out the most boring possible answers to the questions, and the book drops from listless fingers.” “A crushing disappointment,” Partridge concluded, adding, “You have been warned.”
The Sound of Murder, Mercury Mystery No. 173 (1953).
Even John Brooks, The New York Times’ reviewer, was pressed to have many good things to say about Loneliest Girl after warming up his enthusiasm for its predecessor. Brooks praised the book’s “readability, humor, sound characterization and firm but understated dramatic significance,” whatever that last phrase means. The book was reissued in magazine form as The Sound of Murder in the Mercury Mystery series two years later, but it’s been forgotten ever since. And, aside from its value as footnote material, it probably deserves this fate.
Loneliest Girl in the World, by Kenneth Fearing New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951
Cover of first UK edition of You Were There (1948).
This is a guest post by David Quantick
And so they sat and talked and drank and even sang a little. And the Puppa came beaming up with fresh supplies, and the Mumma sat at the desk and scolded the Puppa roundly because he hadn’t done anything wrong.
And at a table in the corner a pair of palooka writers looked on fascinated and invented fantastic names for them, and imagined their life stories. The palooka man had a shock of black hair like a Japanese doll without a fringe, a moon-shaped, moon-coloured face that looked like a moon that needed shaving, and ash all over him. His name was S.J. Simon.
The girl palooka looked like a Semitic sparrow. She was Caryl Brahms.
And they didn’t know what the future was to hold for them either.
But you could bet your monomark there’d be a lot of laughter in it.
From You Were There.
I didn’t know what a monomark was when I first read this (an ancestor of the postcode, apparently) but the rest made complete sense to me. It is the final paragraph of the last novel written by Brahms and Simon, completed by Caryl Brahms after S. J. Simon’s death in 1948 and, entirely appropriately, it is the story of their first meeting. Even now I find it moving, because for me it is one of the best farewells of all time. It’s a tribute to a novel-writing partnership that lasted only eleven years but in that time produced eleven books, several short stories and a host of films, stage plays, radio broadcasts and television adaptations. They were called “lunatics of genius” by the press; they invented at least one genre between them, and while only one of their joint novels is currently in print, they remain my favourite writers of all time.
Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon, from Too Dirty for the Windmill, by Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin (1986).
Caryl Brahms was born Doris Abrahams in Surrey in 1901. S.J. Simon – real name Simon Jacobovitch Skidelsky – was born in Ekaterinoslav in 1906, the son of Russian Jews who emigrated to France after the revolution. The two first met when they were fellow lodgers at a house on Finchley Road, and they first worked together on contributing subjects for the Evening Standard cartoonist David Low; forming an instant rapport, they soon decided to collaborate on a novel. They had known success in other areas – Brahms had written a very A.A. Milne-esque slim volume of verse called The Moon On My Left, while Simon (as noted elsewhere on this site) was one of the best bridge players of all time – but the decision to become a novel-writing duo was a brilliant one.
Cover of first UK edition of A Bullet in the Ballet (1937).
The first Brahms and Simon novel, A Bullet In The Ballet, was an instant hit. The first of several comic murder mysteries set in the world of dance, A Bullet In The Ballet combined expert knowledge (Brahms was a balletomane and brilliant theatre critic), superb character writing (the member of the Ballet Stroganoff company are fantastical creatures, rendered just the right side of caricature), and a new way of writing crime fiction, that of introducing a long-suffering detective (Inspector Adam Quill) into a closed world of people whose self-obsession, egotism and devotion to their craft would make, frankly, anyone want to murder them.
Cover of first UK edition of Six Curtains for Stroganova (1945).
But mostly it was the humour that made A Bullet In The Ballet so good. Characters as disparate as modernist choreographer Nicholas Nevajno, always trying to cash a bad cheque, and the prima donna Stroganova, always hoping for six curtain calls, were depicted in a prose style that combined, unexpectedly, the floriate excess of the ballet world with a new kind of bone-dry wit. One of the great joys of reading Brahms and Simon is their unique way of turning a sentence, the way they can convey changing moods in a sentence, one minute mocking the foolishness of human beings and the next bringing out unexpected sympathies. For lunatics of genius who could write at the same pace as their beloved Marx Brothers, Brahms and Simon were also full of heart and love for their creations. Almost, to use one of their favourite turns of phrase, they might be sentimental writers.
Cover of first UK edition of No Bed for Bacon (1941).
A Bullet In The Ballet was the first in a long series of Stroganoff novels, but Brahms and Simon were unable to restrict themselves to ballet mysteries: their other great achievement – many would say greater – was to, essentially, invent the historical comedy. Most people would say that the best Brahms and Simon novel is 1941’s No Bed For Bacon, and it would be insane to argue against this notion (although I will try soon). No Bed For Bacon, written during the London Blitz when both writers were air defense wardens, is not just a magnificent imagining of the London of Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, it is possibly the greatest comic novel of all time. Part romance – it tells the story of Shakespeare’s affair with the lady-in-waiting-turned-boy-actress Viola, it’s also part history lesson (a scene where old seadogs recall the victory over the Armada, written at the last minute to up the word count, is poignant and moving) and it is entirely, outrageously funny. Only a stone carving or a genuinely bad person could not love it.
Shakespeare sprang to his feet. ‘Master Bacon,’ he demanded passionately, ‘do I write my plays or do you?’ Bacon looked at him. He shrugged. From No Bed for Bacon
Cover of first UK edition of Don’t, Mr. Disraeli (1940).
And great though No Bed For Bacon is, it is possibly not as great as the duo’s other notable historical novel, the epically glorious Don’t Mr. Disraeli, which is nothing more and nothing less than a comic tribute to the entire 19th century (its authors said that it was “not a novel set in the Victorian age but a novel set in its literature”). Based around a Victorian reworking of the Romeo and Juliet story, with Capulets and Montagues replaced by Clutterwicks and Shuttleforths, Don’t, Mr. Disraeli is also infected with the spirit, marvelously, of J. W. Dunne’s long-neglected but at the time hugely-influential An Experiment With Time, which proposed that time was not linear at all but rather simultaneously occurring everywhere, a viewpoint adopted by J. B. Priestley in An Inspector Calls and other plays. Brahms and Simon use Dunne’s notion to present a Victorian era where anyone can appear in the book so long as they lived or died in the 19th century: thus the Marx Brothers and the Duke of Wellington exist side by side, while Victoria herself appears many times at every stage of her life, from dowager widow to young bride. Stuffed with vignettes, running gags (even the title of the book is a catchphrase) and moments of great power (a montage concerning the poor of London is worthy of its roots in Henry Mayhew), Don’t, Mr. Disraeli may sometimes lack the lightness of No Bed For Bacon, but it is an extraordinary achievement.
Cover of first UK edition of Trottie True (1946).
Brahms and Simon have always been immensely popular with other writers: Don’t, Mr. Disraeli was admired by Evelyn Waugh, who namechecked it in his Sword Of Honour trilogy, while No Bed For Bacon is one of Neil Gaiman’s favourite books. Their work has been adapted for stage, radio, television and cinema: particularly worth watching are the film versions of Trottie True and No Nightingales. They wrote superb short stories for Lilliput magazine, some of which were collected in To Hell with Hedda. And when Simon died suddenly in 1948, Caryl Brahms found a new collaborator in Ned Sherrin, with whom she worked until her death in 1982. Not enough of their work is currently in print, aside from No Bed For Bacon, which enjoyed a brief flurry of new recognition when people flagged up its accidental and coincidental similarity to the Tom Stoppard-scripted movie Shakespeare In Love. Now it is the 21st century and it has been three quarters of a century since the “Semitic sparrow” and the man with the moon-shaped face wrote together, but they will always be my favourite writers, and those of many other people. Much of their work is out of print, but copies of their books are easy to find online, and other readers will be drawn to them as I was.
And if I had one, I’d bet my monomark on it.
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.
If you’re a theater lover like me, All Star Cast is the next best thing to the thrill of seeing a live performance. That’s because it’s about a live theater performance as experienced by both actors and audience.
Its premise is simple: a young theater critic, David Winters, arrives at the Empress Theatre in a taxi with a fellow critic, O’Hara. They’re there to attend the premier of a new play, The Ace of Wands, by the veteran playwright William Renishaw. And over the course of the next 270-some pages, Naomi Royde-Smith takes us through that experience.
We watch the audience dribble in, take their seats, converse with each other, anticipating the curtain’s rise. We follow the action on stage through three acts, hear the dialogue, watch the actors come and go, observe the sets and the use of props, feel the tension grow as it comes to seem as if the wrong person is going to be sent up for murder, sense the tragic relief as the right person arrives at the decision to admit guilt. And then, after the cast takes their bows, we join the slow stream climbing the stairs to the lobby, sharing reflections on the performance.
Fin.
When All Star Cast was first published, more than a few reviewers expressed surprise that no one had ever come up with the idea before. It’s not the same thing as reading a script. Royde-Smith includes all, or virtually all, the dialogue, but instead of stage instructions to the director and cast, she describes the action as seen by the audience — in particularly, by David Winters, who, though new to the job of critic, is an experienced and keen-eyed theater-goer.
An action, for example, as simple as a character picking up a small table lamp and placing it near another character is more than it seems:
“Queer bit of business with the lamp,” whispered the little man, as Rawlinson left the stage, “I wonder what it has been done for.”
“I wonder,” murmured David, not attempting to express his own recognition of the change in lighting effected by this simple and obvious gesture. The pillar of white light between the still unclosed doors in the centre of the background now showed faint and grey like the plinth of some vague funereal monument. The light from the shaded lamp on the ground made a round pool on the rug by the chesterfield, and threw a diffused circular glow upwards, changing the shadows of the room.
Is this something in the script or something the director has added? Something incidental or intentional?
Well of course, in a good performance, as this one seems to be, nothing is incidental, and a few pages later, we see that the lamp allows the murderer — and the audience — to see a crucial prop: a tarot card, the Ace of Wands. The Ace of Wands shows a hand holding a staff emerging from a cloud. Right-side up, it signals promise, a new opportunity; reversed, it warns of misfortune to come. Which way the card is read, and when and to whom the card appears, becomes instrumental to the plot twists that follow the murder in Act One.
We, like the audience, are surprised that the victim is the difficult Russian wife, played by Vera Paley, “famous for wearing to-day what every fashionable woman would be trying to wear next week.” It is she who enjoys the play’s star entrance:
Critics had been known to complain that, whether she played Rosalind or the Second Mrs. Tanqueray, she was never anyone but Vera Paley; but the salvo of applause with which she was greeted from the stalls as well as from the more discriminating parts of the house showed that she held a wide public under some kind of spell. She paused, holding the door open with her left hand, outstretched at full arm’s length behind her, so that the player with whom she was talking as she entered was hidden from the audience. Without bowing or losing her pose, she smiled as the applause increased in volume. She let the play cease while she, as Vera Paley, took her reception.
Within the next twenty minutes, she will be lying dead on stage, an antique Indian dagger through her heart.
“But darling,” David overhears a woman saying as the audience files toward the bar at the interval,
“Vera Paley can’t be killed in the first scene of Act I. She’s the leading lady.”
“Oh! So you think she’ll recover — or come back as a ghost and haunt them all?”
“Recover — ofcourse. Vera’d never do any highbrow spookery stuff. She’ll be ill in the most marvellous négligé — and then there’ll be a perfectly terrific love scene…”
Instead, as David learns from another critic at the next interval, Vera Paley is paying a favor to the producer and will be gone by the end of the first week to start rehearsals for a showpiece of her own.
This is just what makes All Star Cast so fun. You get to experience not just the play but all the trappings and all the threads that come together to weave a unique evening at the theater.
Ernest Milton and Naomi Royde-Smith.
Naomi Royde-Smith knew her subject from all angles. She’d been a theater critic herself through much of the 1920s and had written several plays that were produced in London’s West End. Her husband, Ernest Milton, was an actor, a stalwart of the Old Vic’s company for over twenty years. And, as she conveys so effectively in her account of The Ace of Wands’s opening night, she understood just how complex were the sensations and interactions of a night at the theater:
It was difficult enough to form an opinion on a play, seen for the first time, that would not cry to be revised or restated when once you saw your own words in print. You could go back, re-read, check, verify when reviewing a book: but a play acted itself without repeating any passage, noteworthy or obscure, and while it told its tale, demanded attention on three counts. Its appeal was too complicated. You were bound to miss some point, while under the impression made by another, in a scene which you had to see, to watch and to hear in one and the same unrelenting minute. You had to pass judgment on playwright, players, scenic artist and producer at one sitting, while their combined work was set in movement before your eyes and made its continuous appeal to your ears as well.
“How flat and stale these journalistic phrases were in comparison with the state of mind in which the play had actually left him!” David Winters despairs. And it’s a tribute to Naomi Royde-Smith’s skill that All Star Cast succeeds so well in putting us into that state of mind — and longing for the chance to return to a theater ourselves.
All Star Cast is fairly rare, but luckily it’s available online from the Internet Archive: Link.
All Star Cast, by Naomi Royde-Smith London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1936
Covers of the 1933 edition of The Flutter of an Eyelid (L) and the Tough Poets Press reissue (R).
This is a guest post by Barry Alfonso
“God has always smiled on Southern California,” wrote Carey McWilliams in 1946. An abundance of blessings filled the landscape from the shoreline to the mountains – there was no excuse to feel empty or sad. Yet there has always been a brooding undercurrent to the region, with plenty of sinister shadow lurking amidst the sunshine. Huge clouds of guilt hang over the wide blue skies, brought westward by seekers hungry for self-reinvention who never quite escaped the sins and failures they left behind. There’s a sense of doom on the balmy breezes, as if the Lord might turn on His ungrateful children at any moment.
Southern California has long done strange things to writers. Poets, novelists and journalists have found fear and loathing among the drowsy Spanish Colonial bungalows and palm tree-shrouded grottos of the region. From the working-class ansgt of John Fante to the exalted consciousness of Aldous Huxley, writers have been unsettled, and sometimes driven mad by the sheer beguiling pleasantness of the place. Its promise of freedom has seemed like a curse to even adventuresome artists. Even a brief exposure to Southern California’s insinuating vibes can rewire the brain of the most workaday scribe.
From what I’ve read, Myron Brinig’s time in the region was relatively brief. Like so many others, the Minnesota-born, Montana-raised author headed West in the late 1920s seeking work in Hollywood. His first novel Singermann (1929) earned critical praise for its vivid depiction of the hardscrabble lives of Butte, Montana’s Jewish community. Brinig apparently wasn’t successful in getting on the screenwriting gravy train that rewarded Ben Hecht and other novelists of the era. He did find companionship for a time as part of a bohemian group centered around poet/bookseller Jacob Zeitlin in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighborhood. This circle of creative types, athletes and assorted freethinkers spent time congregating at a beachside swimming club in nearby Palos Verdes. Brinig was made to feel welcome – he seemed to be another footloose dreamer looking for companionship and inspiration. The group thought Brinig was one of them – “he had a way of winning your confidence,” Zeitlin recalled in an interview many years later.
As it turned out, Brinig was repulsed by his new friends and the hedonistic lifestyle they embraced. Like a sponge soaking up toxic fluids, he absorbed as much sun-ripened decadence as he could stand, then squeezed it out through his spleen into a sprawling, surreal novel titled The Flutter of an Eyelid. Published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1933, the book had a difficult birth thanks to threatened litigation, received mixed reviews and quickly disappeared from view. Over time, it took on legendary status as a vividly vicious satire of L.A. eccentricity and excess. By the 2000s, rare copies sold in the $600-$700 range. L.A. historians like Mike Davis ranked the book with Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust (published six years later) in its scathing depiction of pre-World War II L.A. The Flutter of an Eyelid became a lost touchstone from a vanished era of Angelino history.
Now back in print after nearly 90 years thanks to Tough Poets Press, Brinig’s book still has the power to surprise, confuse, irritate and fascinate. Readers looking for a taut, reporterly exposé of Golden State flakiness and corruption won’t find it here. Though not a personal confession in any normal sense, The Flutter of an Eyelid is a brazenly subjective take on what Brinig saw, heard and felt during his L.A. sojourn, a wildly uneven farrago of hallucinogenic vision, potboiler dialogue and droll caricature. At its best, its prose embodies the psychic breakdown that its convoluted storyline attempts to tell.
Two illustrations by Lynd Ward from The Flutter of an Eyelid.
Brinig sets the stage for the disorienting scenes to follow at the start of the book. Novelist Caslon Roanoke boards a ship headed for California in hopes of escaping the grey, tradition-encrusted confines of his native New England. As he sails into Los Angeles Harbor, he feels “possessed by the sun, as if climbing a steep ladder of golden rings to the sky’s zenith.” Very quickly, he gets to know an assortment of oddball pleasure-seekers who enjoy insinuating conversation, morbid home decoration ideas and crème-de-menthe baths. Everyone seems pretentiously unaffected. “The people are so natural they’re grotesque,” he says of the locals. “Here, all life is a series of breathless tangents shooting off from the center of the reasonable.” Hanging over everything is the power of the brilliant California sunshine, giving the novelist the sensation of its light running through his veins.
At this point, Brinig could have concentrated on sketching believable portraits of the quirky men and women who frequented the watering holes of late Jazz Age L.A. That’s not his goal here – whether through careful calculation or sheer self-indulgence, he draws the reader into the diffusive, sensually overloaded minds of his characters by blurring the distinctions between dream and reality. Nothing is fixed for the denizens of Alta Vista (the beachside town based upon Palos Verdes). The glittering, shifting waves of the ocean mirror the churning emotions and unhinged morals of Caslon’s new friends. The very idea of a “fact” is challenged early in the novel. A host of New Age self-empowerment philosophies and paranoic conspiracy beliefs that have become La-La Land cliches are anticipated in the unmoored fancies explored here.
Like a sideshow psychic shuffling through a tarot deck, Brinig contrasts and pairs up the novel’s supporting characters. Sensitive young “pagan” hunks Antonio and Dache revel in homoerotic fantasies that lead to delirium and death. Frustrated composer Jack – a “mannish” young woman portrayed with sympathy – longs for signs of affection from Sylvia, an artist’s muse who is also Caslon’s object of desire. A striking blonde who longs for her absent husband, Sylvia’s fluttering eyelids – symbolic of her veiled desires and fickle attentions – are frequently referenced throughout the novel. She is the topic of the book’s most memorable exchange:
“And you?” [Caslon] dared to address her at last. “What do you do?” “I give and receive pain,” she said. “Ah, that’s interesting,” said Caslon, already in pain.
There are more sinister figures as well. Mrs. Forgate is a creepy older woman who has spent time in Europe, where she poisoned several husbands. She savors rare liqueurs, wears black satin shoes that are “startlingly like miniature coffins” and speaks pleasantries that seem “to peer, green-eyed, from behind cerements and tombs.” Her presence allows Brinig to add decadent J.K. Huysmans/Aubrey Beardsley dark colors to his otherwise sunny landscape. Why the rest of the Alta Vista crowd tolerates Mrs. Forgate’s malevolent presence is not clear. She does provide Brinig with a fulcrum for deadly subplots, however.
Sister Amiee Semple McPherson.
There’s at least one famous person depicted in exaggerated form here: Sister Angela Flower, a thinly-disguised caricature of Aimee Semple McPherson, L.A. superstar evangelist of the 1920s-‘30s. A flamboyant master of publicity who blended fundamentalist Christianity with a flair for show biz and raw sex appeal, McPherson had been controversial for some time before Brinig arrived in town. Her famed Angelus Temple church was in Echo Park; Brinig may well have seen her leading services. Whether the author saw Sister Aimee in action or not, he infused his portrait of Angela Flower with both loathing and a certain appalled respect for her innate charisma: she “lives, breathes, and shouts sex, without ever quite knowing it … (and) preached Christ with the eyes of a predatory animal and the lascivious mouth of Salome.”
Sister Angela informs a handsome, “brainless” young sailor named Milton that he is the reincarnation of Jesus and convinces him to attempt walking across the waves off Santa Monica Beach. This event occurs at the exact middle of the book and ties together (loosely) several of its occurring motifs. Milton/Jesus begins his stride upon the water, then falters when Sylvia flutters those pain-inducing eyelids of hers. He sinks out of sight, touching off a riot among Angela’s followers watching on the shore. In a scene that anticipates the mob violence at the climax of The Day of the Locust, the crowd reacts to Milton’s drowning by “stampeding like a herd of senseless wild animals…drowning along with the others who thought that they heard Jesus calling to them from the drear, dim depths of the melancholy ocean.”
By this point, it has been established that Caslon is creating these events by writing about them – the boundaries between the subjective and objective have been erased with the stroke of a key. Caslon is “unable to know when he was still at the typewriter or away from it. Was it a nightmare he was having, a hallucination more real than reality?” He attributes this omniscient psychosis to his environment: “Ever since I arrived in California, I seem to have become possessed of clairvoyant powers…sometimes, I write things before they happen.” His characters have independent thoughts and realize they are trapped in the world he is creating. “The thing to do was capture Roanoke and amputate both his hands so that he could no longer write a single word down on paper,” Antonio says. His friend Carlos adds, “We are prisoners of a page, and yet we continue to live like desperate flies whose legs are entangled in the glue of a poisonous sheet.”
Is Brinig anticipating postmodernism with this brain-teasing twist? There are echoes of Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author here, as well as anticipations of existentialism and the experimental fiction of Alain Robbe-Grillet. The literary conceit Brinig indulges in captures the essential unreality of the Southern California mindset remarkably well. The egomaniacal dream of self-recreation that brought so many to the Golden State is taken to its logical (if insane) conclusion. While this works well as satire, it does little to make the reader care about Flutter’s characters. Caslon – the world-creating hero of the story as well as its victim – is not exactly a sympathetic figure. He pines for Sylvia and tries to save Jack from the mass destruction he knows is coming (he’s writing it, after all), but mostly he feels like “a visitor to Dante’s Hell” who is forced to endure the “germs of genius and the worms of wantonness” who populate the place. Such descriptions don’t encourage you to invest a lot in what happens to these sun-soaked wretches.
Brinig’s satiric edge slips from caustic into cruel in his portrayal of Sol Mosier, a feckless artist manque apparently based upon Jacob Zeitlin. Like the author’s real-life friend, Sol is a small-time Jewish businessman who longs for authentic experience and Walt Whitman-like poetic epiphanies. After failing spectacularly as a workman, he drags his wife into a quest for decadent pleasures that spirals out of control and finally takes her life. Along the way, Brinig comments about Jews in general, mocking them collectively for their self-obsession and clannishness. Being Jewish himself, Brinig seems to be working out some personal issues in writing about the hapless, doomed Sol. Whatever the motivation behind the character, Sol was close enough to Zeitlin in particulars to raise legal issues before Flutter was published. A threatened lawsuit caused Farrar & Rinehart to tone down Sol’s more objectionable aspects in print. Still, as California historian Kevin Starr noted, “Even by the most forgiving standards Brinig’s caricature of Zeitlin edges into anti-Semitism.” (Though unsuccessful as a poet, Zeitlin continued on as a bookseller and secured his status as a beloved figure in the L.A. literary community.)
Advertisement for The Flutter of an Eyelid.
Gratuitous personal attacks are all part of the boiling bouillabaisse that is The Flutter of an Eyelid. The mechanics of the book are often creaky and turgid: a gothic subplot involving a decayed Spanish family and a murder-suicide bogs down the narrative towards the end. More could have been made of Angela Flower and her hold on the Midwestern retirees who comprise her besotted flock. In describing the petty obsessions of his characters, Brinig tries the patience of the reader with logorrheic laundry-lists of words and objects. He is at his best when he soars into psychedelic flights of language that skirt the ridiculous to achieve something nearly sublime. There’s an acid trip intensity to some of its passages, such as when Antonio and Dache share a cozy folie a deux before the latter drops dead from poisoning:
He knew the graceful, instantaneous leapings of deer as though shot forth from some great cosmic sling; the slow, curling indolences of snails, and the plodding, prowling intricacies of lobster and crab. He knew what it was to be a man and a woman, a wild deer and a cat prowling stealthily over leaves in search of a bird or a mouse. And he knew the tumbling cascades of moon-touched music that pour from the abandoned throats of nightingales… sometimes he was a snake, long and dazzling, and knew each separate, scintillant particle of earth.
The Flutter of an Eyelid ends with a gleeful depiction of California sliding into the ocean, sending the good, bad, and indifferent alike to a watery mass grave. (The powerful Long Beach earthquake struck Southern California around the time Brinig was completing or delivering the novel.) Listening to reports of the catastrophe over radio while safely back in New England, Caslon knows that he is responsible. He discovers that the manuscript of his book has been transformed into a damp piece of coral, leaving no trace of the fantasy he made reality.
In the real world, Brinig’s novel soon vanished as well. In an unsigned review published May 14, 1933, the New York Times pronounced Flutter a failure: “The fantastic elements are not sufficiently integrated with the realistic ones; the wit and satire are neither subtle or piercing…. The book is, in short, insufficiently amusing.” Brinig quickly returned to the more sober, realistic fiction he was known for, eventually scoring a notable success with The Sisters (1947), which was adapted into a film starring Errol Flynn and Bette Davis. Less popular novels continued to appear into the following decade. Long before his death in 1991, Brinig had slipped into obscurity.
For all its uneven prose, improbable plot convolutions and nasty caricatures, The Flutter of an Eyelid compels interest and even admiration. There’s nothing I’ve read that’s quite like this lush hothouse garden of a novel. Clearly, this was a story that Brinig needed to get out of his system: once he purged the noxious sunshine from his bloodstream, he never wrote in this vein again. Flutter may be an ephemeral expression preserved in literary amber, but its flipped-out bitterness in the face of seeming beauty still speaks to the Golden State experience. God could smile on Southern California, but Myron Brinig could only laugh, grimace and feel a little sick.
Barry Alfonso is an author, journalist and songwriter. He is a founding member of the San Diego Comic Convention and a 2005 Grammy Award nominee. His most recent book is A Voice of the Warm: The Life of Rod McKuen (2019). More information can be found at barryalfonso.net.
The Flutter of an Eyelid, by Myron Brinig New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1933 Arlington, MA: Tough Poets Press, 2020
This is a guest post by the writer David Quantick.
“You didn’t have time to think about the dangers of a raid in the cipher room of the secret service sabotage organisation. You were too bloody annoyed.”
There are many mysteries about this book: they start before the book has even begun, in the authorial blurb, and they continue even after the book has ended.
In the endpapers of the dust jacket, an anonymous writer says of S-s-s-sh that “readers of her Contract for a Corpse should find this, her latest book, even more satisfying”. There is, in actual fact, no evidence of that a book called Contract for a Corpse ever existed, while the only other novel published under Kathleen Mary Carmel’s name – Secret Service – turns out to be a French translation of S-s-s-sh. “Kathleen Mary Carmel” is itself a pen name, made out of the author’s real names, and S-s-s-sh, while a small classic of genre fiction, is not what the writer is most famous for.
Kathleen Withers and S. J. Simon, courtesy of their family.
Kathleen Mary Carmel was best known as Carmel Withers. Nicknamed, inevitably, Caramel, she was a brilliant and highly respected bridge player, and it was through that game she met her future husband S. J. “Skid” Simon. They both represented their country at bridge and even appeared on TV television programmes playing bridge before World War Two.
Skid was a household name, a brilliant analyst and a formidable player who was not only the author of the influential Why You Lose At Bridge (a book that is immensely readable even if you know nothing about bridge) but also, with Caryl Brahms, one of the most popular writers of the 1930s and 40s. (I shan’t write about Brahms and Simon here, except to say it was as a lifelong fan of their work that I came to Kathleen Mary Carmel and S-s-s-sh: despite their own reduction in fame, Brahms and Simon’s work, which ranged from historical comedies to ballet-related detective novels, has had many fans, from the late Ned Sherrin, who wrote with Caryl Brahms and completed her autobiography, Too Dirty For The Windmill, and Neil Gaiman, who ranks Brahms and Simon’s No Bed For Bacon very highly indeed.)
When I came across mention of Kathleen Withers in Too Dirty For The Windmill, I wanted to find out more about her, but there was very little information out there. I managed to acquire a copy of S-s-s-sh (as well as its French translation) and spent a while trying to find the elusive Contract for a Corpse without any luck. All I knew was that she had a file in the National Archives related to her real-life work in ciphers during the Second World War, that she was a champion bridge player, and that she had been married to SJ Simon, who predeceased her by only a year.
S-s-s-sh is an excellent book. From its dedication – FOR THE CIPHER ROOM MICHAEL HOUSE – via its unsentimental tone, appropriate for a murder mystery set during the carnage of a world war, to its satisfactory conclusion, this is a novel that’s entirely convincing in its milieu and entirely chilling in the way it follows its murders and the reason for those murders. Along the way, we are engrossed in the minutiae of life in a wartime cipher department – the flirtations between male officers and female staff, the triumph at cadging an extra piece of toast and marmalade, the sheer exhaustion of working in near-impossible conditions to save the lives of countless men and women – and we are caught up in a bigger picture: this killer’s agenda is, unsurprisingly, entirely connected to the greater drama of worldwide conflict.
It is also a funny book, a suspenseful book and at times a chilling book. The scene where the narrator reports that she has found a woman’s body stuffed into a cupboard plays out with humour at her superior’s bureaucratic bluster but also with casual horror – “I was tired, the smell was sickening and now into the bargain I was getting bored”. And, as befits a story set in the small, cramped world of a cipher unit, where everything is a secret and everyone lives in each other’s pocket, throughout there is a sense of claustrophobia and paranoia quite at odds with the increasingly cosy way that current WW2 novels portray Britain at war, all country lanes and boffins cycling off to Bletchley. S-s-s-sh is a book that’s full of the mundanity of war and all that it implies.
By the sound of it, this dry, half-humorous, half-serious tone was entirely typical of the author, whose death in 1948 (it was reported as suicide) was deeply mourned by her fellow bridge players. “It is at this moment at once a pride and a tragedy of remembrance that the writer of this brief memorial recalls that he was for long her partner and her friend,” wrote one of her obituarists, Guy Ramsey. Friends and fellow players recalled her wit and intelligence, and it is clear that she was more than a match for her anarchic, chaotic and popular husband (who died of a heart attack after a television appearance).
Kathleen Mary Carmel Skidelsky, née Withers, deserves to be remembered for more than one excellent novel (I am hopeful that one day S-s-s-sh will be reprinted), and it looks likely that she will be: while researching this piece, I came across the work of Shireen Mohandes, a writer and expert on bridge history. Ms Mohandes has been researching Kathleen’s life in some detail, and brought several important facts to my attention: you can read her work at www.mrbridge.co.uk/library (she was also kind enough to source the accompanying photograph and to ask permission from Kathleen’s family to reproduce it).
For now, however, it’s enough to read S-s-s-sh for its lucid, convincing depiction of a novel world of terror, and to remember Kathleen Mary Carmel as both a writer and a person of distinction.
[Editor’s note: When S. J. Simon died in July 1948, just hours after appearing on television with Terence Reese, it was front-page news on most British papers, even though the Times incorrectly identified Caryl Brahms as his wife. His death devastated his wife, who suffered from severe depression thereafter and took her own life with an overdose of barbiturates just days short of its first anniversary. S-s-s-sh is so rare that the only copy listed in Worldcat.org is at the British Library.]
Stories on Kathleen Withers’ death from the Daily Mail and The Times.
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.
Rob Palk is the author of Animal Lovers (2018, Sandstone Press) and has written for The Guardian, The Fence and the Erotic Review and broadcast on the BBC. He is currently seeking agent representation for his second novel, The Crowd Pleaser. He tweets at @robpalkwriter.
Lissa Evans is a former television producer and the author of 
Dr Ann Kennedy Smith is a freelance writer and researcher based in Cambridge. Her book reviews and essays have been published in the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Slightly Foxed and the Journal of Victorian Culture among others. You can follow her blog and other activities at 
David Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, 
Barry Alfonso is an author, journalist and songwriter. He is a founding member of the San Diego Comic Convention and a 2005 Grammy Award nominee. His most recent book is A Voice of the Warm: The Life of Rod McKuen (2019). More information can be found at 
