“Hot off the oven of our own time” was the verdict on new novel The Big Firm, according to The New York Times of 20th February 1938, in a review which also found it “unusually significant” and “distinguished as a work of literary art”. The novelist was the forty-three-year-old British writer and left-wing activist Amabel Williams-Ellis, who, although fulfilling the description of “neglected” today, in her lifetime was used to commanding press attention.
I began investigating Amabel’s story after visiting Plas Brondanw, the Snowdonia ancestral home of her husband Clough Williams-Ellis, architect of the fantasy village Portmeirion, and seeing her name on a plaque commemorating their marriage in 1915. Though Amabel was described only as a daughter, sister, wife and mother in the guidebooks, I followed my hunch there might be more to her than that and began digging. I found that in a career spanning seven decades of the twentieth century Amabel had published over seventy books. Six of these were novels, mainly written between 1925 and 1939.
One sign of her present-day obscurity is the difficulty I have had in buying copies of these novels, and what follows relies on my memory and notes of reading the book in the British Library in pre-pandemic times, as well as my own research into her life.
Born in 1894, Amabel was the daughter of the influential editor-proprietor of The Spectator, John St Loe Strachey, and grew up in a family where celebrity was normal. Dinner with a prime minister, story time with Rudyard Kipling, chess with the governor of Egypt and tea with the explorer Mary Kingsley were normal experiences for a girl whose relatives included the biographer Lytton Strachey and the painter Simon Bussey.
From the French magazine Excelsior spread on the wedding of Amabel and Clough Williams-Ellis in 1915.
When journalists and photographers turned up at her wartime wedding in a rural chapel in Surrey at an hour of the morning intentionally chosen to evade them, chasing the bride and groom down the hill to their getaway car, they came for her not Clough. She was both a Jazz Age socialite and an activist with serious politics and a steely work ethic. Despite the war being over and Clough being offered alternative employment as an architect, the Army refused to discharge her husband at the end of the war until he had written a history of the Tank Corps, so Amabel sat down and wrote it for him, finishing it just in time for the birth of their second child, Charlotte, in 1919.
The Big Firm(1938) was Amabel’s fourth novel. It was written in an atmosphere of increasing international tensions and crisis – Hitler’s annexation of Austria took place within weeks of its publication. Completion of the novel had been complicated by the concussion Amabel suffered when she was struck by a car while visiting her mother and her friend and author Margaret Storm Jameson helped proofread the draft for publication. The Big Firm tells the story of Owen Wynne, a scientist who works in microbiology research and his love affairs with two women, Caro and Nicola. The big firm of the title is Consolidated Scientific Products, which employs Owen and prevents him from publishing his research. Owen’s political leanings are left-wing; the plot concerns his attempts to prevent arms and scientific products being sold to the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War. The action moves remorselessly and thrillingly to the climax in which Owen and Nicola race to intercept a shipment intended for a mysterious cargo ship moored off the coast of North wales.
Characters who wrestle with strong political principles when others seek to corrupt them are a feature of The Big Firm. When Nicola, the wife of a Labour MP and committed member of the Labour Party herself, hears her husband preparing to compromise to gain a government post, her respect is lost. “This isn’t the moment when responsible leaders ought to stress our fundamental socialist policy,” he tells her. “We’ve got to soft pedal, otherwise the Labour Movement will be destroyed.” Nicola decides she must leave him. To her, his pragmatism is “false and horrible.” Her decision to end the marriage over this difference of political views might seem extreme to us, but in the context of the 1930s politics compromise could mean appeasing dangerous forces.
Amabel recognised the threat posed by Hitler to world peace when he came to power and advocated action to prevent full scale war. To this end, in July 1934, she travelled to New York to give evidence to the American Inquiry Commission, which was collecting information about conditions in Germany in the hope of getting the US government to take notice. Amabel described her missions to Berlin that year, the death threats she had received, and the treatment of Jews and Communists. “There is not only no right or justice in Germany, there is no truth,” she told the commissioners.
For the rest of the 1930s, Amabel campaigned against Fascism. She was put under surveillance by the British secret service as a result. Her son Christopher was killed in 1944 in Italy at the age of twenty-one, and she often wondered whether she had done enough to prevent the war. Amabel always suffused her writing with the issues which most concerned her, and in this light The Big Firm is part of the history of the anti-Fascist movement in the 1930s.
To the New York Times’ reviewer Jane Spence Southson, it was the scientific background of The Big Firm that stood out. A wife of one of the directors of Consolidated Scientific Products declares in a speech that although many people think of themselves as contemporary, they don’t have the first clue what is going on in the world of science. Southson notes that this will not be true for readers of the novel, which she considers more masculine in tone than any she has ever read by a woman because it is so detailed and knowledgeable on its subject. Reviewing Amabel’s memoir in 1983, Michael Holroyd noted that her working method was always to write a book in order to learn about its subject, and she would have been very much following her inclinations in the case of The Big Firm.
The masculine tone Southson referred to may have been a reference to its descriptions of the inner workings of Owen’s employer, CSP, an environment rarely written about by women at that time. Amabel had a track record of writing about technical “male” subjects established when her first published book detailed the development of the tank as a weapon of war. When she wrote a careers guide aimed at boys and girls in 1933 called What Shall I Be? she visited work places personally and interviewed the people who worked there to gain insight into what their work actually entailed. At a chemical plant, she observed astringently, “for some unexplained reason women are hardly ever employed…. Probably this is just a custom of the trade, for their seems to be no other objection.”
Amabel Williams-Ellis in the 1930s. Photo by Howard Coster, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery
Amabel always said that if she had been a boy, she would have chosen to be a scientist. Given no formal education or encouragement to go to university by her parents, she became a writer instead, but ensured that her daughter Charlotte became a scientist after studying at Cambridge University. Charlotte’s daughter, Dr. Rachel Garden, also a scientist, told me that her grandmother had a well-hidden insecurity about her lack of formal education which she rectified by asking questions of experts. It is probable that this kind of research lay behind her convincing portrait of a research scientist facing moral dilemmas at work in commercial industry.
In her testimony before the American Inquiry Commission in 1934, Amabel made a point of saying that the Nazi regime was suppressing women’s rights, that Nazis held that women were to be wives and mothers in the home only, with the primary task being to raise “fine warriors.” In Britain at that time, opportunities for women were slowly improving but the belief that women had to choose between family and career was still dominant. As a writer, Amabel was always concerned with women’s feelings about their lives.
Both Caro and Nicola, the women in The Big Firm, are struggling with complicated emotions towards traditional female roles. When the novel opens, Owen is having an affair with Caro, a woman of whom her family say, “all girls want to elope with their schoolteacher or with the butcher, or eat hasheesh, or run away to sea. They all want to – but Caro does.” Caro is lost. She realises that clinging to Owen will not give her the purpose she craves. Married women confuse her: “Could she, did she even desire to become like them, so peaceful…so blank…annihilated?”
But what, she wonders, is her alternative?
“You remember I tried to be a Doctor once? It was too difficult . . . oh, well! Anyhow, I believe a lot of women don’t stick things because they find it hard to believe enough in themselves…to think the work that they do, is all that necessary.”
In the 1950s, Amabel would write bitterly about the way in which society’s “uncreating unbelief” in a girl’s “power to do anything worthwhile” held young women back from reaching their true potential. Perhaps this is what she was implying with the deeply unhappy Caro.
Meanwhile, Owen and Nicola have been working together as part of the Industrial League Against War. They acknowledge their love for each other on the journey to Wales to intercept the suspicious cargo ship. Nicola has realised she is pregnant with her husband’s child and looks at Owen with “the desperate eyes of a creature in a trap.” In the end, Nicola and Owen decide to be together and love the child nonetheless. It is not going to be an easy romance, but the reader feels it might be a successful one.
Both Caro and Nicola are wrestling with their roles in a society which is not built for their benefit. This was a theme Amabel would return to, most notably in her 1951 work of nascent feminism The Art of Being a Woman.
In the late 1930s, Amabel was a modern woman writing about issues which still resonate today. Why then, is she so unknown? One answer to this question could be the variety of genres Amabel wrote in. Her dozens of books include biography, politics, memoir, feminism, parenting, anthologies of fairy tales and science fiction, and non-fiction books for schools. By the time of her death in 1984 the novels, none of which were written later than 1951, were forgotten and (if her work was mentioned at all) she was considered “a writer for children.”
Another answer lies in the fact that she was a woman. A male reviewer of her autobiography (who complained that she failed to say enough about all the famous men she had known and talked too much about herself) decreed her a writer “fated to be known by her menfolk”. This was an unjust self-fulfilling prophecy, but the growing fame post World War Two of her architect husband Clough Williams-Ellis and Portmeirion overshadowed Amabel’s own achievements. Portmeirion is such a flamboyant and colourful vision it is hard for Amabel’s narrative to have space within it, and the Williams-Ellis name today is synonymous with both the village and the pottery begun by Amabel and Clough’s daughter Susan.
Amabel herself recognised that her legacy might have fared better if she had written with her birth name when she called her memoir All Stracheys are Cousins. In the majority of Amabel’s books I borrowed from The British Library, the same pencilled hand had struck out Williams-Ellis on the title page and annotated “Strachey”. In the eyes of The British Library she was a Strachey.
A recurring note in Amabel’s writing is her hope for the next generation of young women. In The Big Firm, a schoolgirl called Lou tells Nicola that she wants her own life to be different:
“I should want to be able to say I was a something – you know, a doctor or a writer or a vet or something. I’m certain that if I was doing politics like you, I should want to be a member of parliament or in the cabin … not just a person who makes speeches.”
Amabel Williams-Ellis cared deeply about her family, but she was also very resoundingly “something” in her own right and The Big Firm is convincing evidence of this.
This is a guest post by Jayne Sharratt. Jayne is working on a biography of the writer and activist Amabel Williams-Ellis. Follow her on Twitter: @jayne_sharratt.
The Big Firm, by Amabel Williams-Ellis London: Collins, 1938
“Before the all-out bombings of Berlin began in November 1943, there were six houses on the Hofmann’s street,” Joel Sayre writes. “Now, in July 1945, there were, by official reckoning, one and a half, of which the house that Lilo lived in was reckoned as one.” Though it looked like an intact house from the street, its roof had been destroyed by an RAF incendiary bomb in early 1944 and the attic floor served in place — except when it rained hard or long.
The House Without a Roof is a story of how ordinary people survive under desperate conditions. But unlike other books about the early years of Germany’s recovery from the war, such as James Stern’s The Hidden Damage (1947) and The Smoking Mountain (1951), this book is as much about survival under the Nazis as it is about survival after their downfall.
That the Hofmanns made it through the rise of the Nazis and the war with their home and selves relatively intact was due to a combination of luck and wit. Hedi, the wife, was the daughter of a Jewish soldier killed on the Western Front in World War One, which made her, under the Nuremberg Laws, a Mischling — half Jew, half Aryan, and thus prohibited from numerous rights. Neither Hedi nor Fritz supported Hitler’s policies, but they soon found it necessary to avoid being singled out for retribution.
In turn, Lilo, their daughter, learned to blend in. One day, Lilo came home, upset that the grace she’d become used to saying at lunch had changed. Instead of the traditional,
Come, Lord Jesus, Be our guest, Let these gifts To us be blessed.
The pupils were instructed to say,
Fold your hands And bow your head, To Adolph Hitler pray; For he gives our daily bread, And all our wants he doth allay.
Lilo asks to be moved to a different school, but Hedi knows that under the Nazi’s scheme for standardizing the Nazification of German institutions , the Gleichschaltung, every kindergartener would now be saying this prayer. So, Lilo simply has to accept and go along. “Remember that it’s very, very dangerous to say that you don’t like Hitler, so you mustn’t ever tell our secret to anybody, ever, ever.” Just keep reminding yourself, Hedi tells her daughter, “Das Wunder ist ein Schwindel” (This miracle is a fraud).
Luck often brings the Hofmanns under its umbrella. One of tenants in their apartment house is a sculptor whose heroic busts are favorites among the Nazi elite and the other residents enjoy the protection accorded him. One day, a nurse in a neighboring apartment takes Lilo to visit the hospital where she works, where she meets Frau Ley, wife of ReichsleiterRobert Ley, one of the highest ranking members of the Nazi party. The Reichsleiter arrives, clearly drunk, and becomes enraged when he spots a crucifix on the wall. He rips it down and begins smashing the fixtures. Lilo is quietly escorted out and told the matter is not to be spoken of.
Berlin in early 1946.
Their greatest ordeal, however, comes when Fritz Hofmann, a strong, tall, and Nordically handsome man with a university degree, is invited to become a member of the SS, the most elite — and most extreme — element of Nazi Party. The idea sickens Fritz, but he recognizes this is an offer he cannot refuse. After considering the limited options before him, Fritz and Hedi — with the help of a friendly doctor — contrive a solution: Fritz will go mad. He benefits from having seen how his own father behaved (and was treated) when he went insane years before.
In the longest section of the book, Sayre recounts the extraordinary lengths and intricate maneuvers involved in convincing the doctors and SS officers that Fritz is, indeed, insane while avoiding becoming a victim of the state’s mental health system. The key to Fritz’s performance is his taking a pro-Nazi position more extreme and passionate than even the most fervent follower. He takes to drawing his visions of the ultimate triumph of the cause:
His masterpiece was an SS Armageddon on top of a mountain in the Urals, under a lowering sky. The central figures were Himmler — winged, of course — and Jesus Christ shaking hands…. About the two central figures stood a hierarchy of Heydrich, Kaltenbrunner, Sepp Dietrich, the Waffen-SS general, the smiling Standartenführer who had offered Hofmann the commission, and many others. Here and there, a wounded SS angel heiled Himmler and Jesus from the ground.
One comes away in awe of Fritz Hofmann’s ingenuity and stamina.
The Hofmanns also survived the almost constant Allied bombing that Berlin endured from 1943 on. Lacking a robust and deeply-buried subway system like London and Moscow, Berlin had few good options for sheltering its residents. The choices were hunkering down in a trench or huddling in a crowded basement with neighbors. The government began providing free postcards for contacting friends and relatives:
We are living We have had deaths We have been [half]/[considerably]/[totally] bombed out
These statements were thought to be sufficient to cover all situations.
The House Without a Roof is a remarkably light and sane account of a dark and crazy time, which is a tribute to the character of both the Hofmanns and Joel Sayre. Though none of his work is in print today, Sayre was considered one of the very best of The New Yorker’s exceptional team of reporters. As editor William Shawn later wrote of Sayre, “he had a strong individual style, his writing had humor, warmth, deep feeling for people, and great vitality.” My copy of The House Without a Roof came from the collection of James and Tania Stern and bears the following inscription from Joel Sayre:
To Jimmy Stern and his delightful missus whose first name, heard in a moment of booze, unfortunately escapes me. In sincere admiration.
The House Without a Roof, by Joel Sayre New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948
Ad for and Cover of Benjamin DeCassere’s Forty Immortals (1926).
This is a guest article written by the critic and artist Richard Kostelanetz, based on a piece that originally appeared in Rain Taxi #88. His website is at richardkostelanetz.com
Ever since New Association of Sephardi/Mizrahi Artists & Writers International appointed me one of its honorary fellows more than a dozen years ago, I’ve become more curious about Sephardic writers in America, more than once pointing out their omission from the standard anthologies of American-Jewish writing (except, of course, for Emma Lazarus, whose rhymes grace the Statue of Liberty).
Certainly the most substantial of these needlessly forgotten writers has been Benjamin De Casseres. Biographical information about him was spotty when I last wrote about him in 2017. Born in Philadelphia 3 April 1873, he didn’t go to college, instead becoming as a teenager a regular patron at the local Apprentice’s Library, incidentally founded by another Benjamin (surnamed Franklin). Starting as an office boy at the Philadelphia Press, he became at seventeen an editorial writer and theater critic. One source of Jewish genealogy identifies him as a descendent of Baruch Spinoza via the philosopher’s sister Rebecca de Spinoza, who gave birth to an earlier Benjamin DC around 1660. Variously is his surname spelled: DeCasseres, De Casseres, and de Casseres. I prefer Casseres or BdC, alphabetized under C.
An appreciation by his friend the writer and cartoonist Carlo de Fornaro (1871-1949), also Sephardic perhaps (much like my friend Arthur Fornari), places Casseres on the staff of the Sunday edition of El Diario, the Spanish-language newspaper that still exists. He contributed to Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work, which was the most prominent avant-garde magazine in pre-WWI America, and then occasionally to The Smart Set from 1914 to 1922 at least.[1]
BdC published poems and essays in many other smaller literary periodicals. One poem favored by anthologists in his own time was “Moth-Terror,” which is a sterling example of his apocalyptic prosy poetry in the tradition of William Blake (well before Allen Ginsberg):
I have killed the moth flying around my night-light; wingless and dead it lies upon the floor. (O who will kill the great Time-Moth that eats holes in my soul and that burrows in and through my secretest veils!) My will against its will, and no more will it fly at my night-light or be hidden behind the curtains that swing in the winds. (But O who will shatter the Change-Moth that leaves me in rags—tattered old tapestries that swing in the winds that blow out of Chaos!) Night-Moth, Change-Moth, Time-Moth, eaters of dreams and of me!
Doing a Google search, I discovered him remembered for this aphorism: “Progress is nothing but the victory of laughter over dogma,” which is charming but, to my senses, uncharacteristic of a writer otherwise more heavy than light! Other websites have this odd aphorism: “A mouse …running in and out of every hole in the cosmos hunting for the Absolute Cheese.”
Even in his critical reviewing, Casseres had a penchant for hyperbole. “Eugene O’Neill was the first true dramatic genius that America produced. He spun all of his plays out of his own bowels, lifting them up into the light of eternal cosmic and human laws.” Of one O’Neill play, BdC writes: “Marco Millions is the roots of O’Neill become a gorgeous flower. The black in O’Neill’s soul has become gold. Social venom is transmuted into ironic laughter of the mournful gods. Impotent melancholy bursts into the flame of philosophic wisdom, ‘Caliban’ has become ‘Hamlet’; ‘Yank, the Hairy Ape,’ has become ‘Kublai Khan,’ epicurean pessimist.”
About O’Neill himself, Casseres waxes with an abundance of opening appositives:
Beachcomber, adventurer, water-front bum, a “down-and-outer” with sailors and stevedores, a man fired from a hundred jobs, a nervous smash-up that landed him in a sanitarium; a man of melancholic, tragic temperament, having been at Gethsemane and having walked the fiery, alcoholic hells (a more tremendous feat than water-walking), Eugene O’Neill came out of the sanitarium like Lazarus newly risen.
BDC seems to have made literary alliances, first with Stieglitz, who dropped him however, and then with the playwright Eugene O’Neill, who wrote an introduction to Casseres’s book, Anathema! Litanies Of Negation (1925, Gotham Book Mark). BdC also wrote a short polemic about H. L. Mencken and G.B. Shaw that demotes the latter as inferior to the former, who incidentally published BdC in the American Mercury.
Dennis Rickard, a biographer of the American painter Clark Ashton Smith writes that the Providence terror author H.P. Lovecraft in 1925 and 1926 “made several efforts to gain a wider and, perhaps, more sophisticated and appreciative audience for Smith’s paintings. In 1926, he arranged for a sampling of twenty paintings to be shown to the distinguished writer and critic Benjamin de Casseres, in New York, in the hope that he could ‘bring them to the attention of some art authority of adequate standing.’ Apparently, this came to naught, or nearly so. Smith again gained a fervent and lifelong admirer in de Casseres,” Another website credits BDC with coediting the German film Das indische Grabmal (1921) for American audiences as The Mysteries of India(1922).
As unfortunate in his personal life, he spent years winning his last love, who had initially married someone else and moved to California before returning to BdC.[2] He lived in a single room while working odd jobs. On BenjaminDeCasseres.com is miscellaneous information including addresses. From 1933 to his death 7 December 1945, he lived with his wife at 593 Riverside Drive in New York City, which is between 136th and 137th Streets.
Why was he forgotten? His most remarkable work was certainly eccentric, if not unclassifiable. Most of it came from smaller, less visible publishers. His final publisher, Gordon Press, barely distributed its books. As a Jewish writer descending from earlier Sephardic immigration he did not appeal to the later generation of Jewish-American literary publicists, most of whom descended from Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europeans.
Searching for his rather unusual name on the Internet, I suspect he was related to an earlier BdC, Jr. (!), who is identified in The Occident and American Jewish Advocate (June 1848) as trying to establish in Curaçao a Talmud Torah. “He is assisted by the Rev. David Cardozo, minister of the congregation. The plan has been accepted with enthusiasm by the people, and many of the younger members of the congregation have offered their services as teachers. Mr. De Casseres is a merchant, and our correspondent presumes that he must suffer a loss in his business by the time he spends in this benevolent object.”
I also found this passing comment about the later BdC in an inventory of Jack London’s papers at the Huntington Library: “Six letters from Jack to Benjamin De Casseres deal with literary matters, and one especially interesting letter from the just-widowed Charmian to the same addressee, dated November 29, 1916, firmly disputes De Casseres’ apparent assertion that Jack was now ‘star-roving’ after death.” Whazzat? His Wikipedia entry states that, “De Casseres described himself as an individualist anarchist, and as such he was both a strong advocate of capitalism and a frequent critic of socialism.”[3]
Once known as “the greatest unpublished author in America,” Casseres found a patron, described by Fornaro as “a Harvard scholar and efficient businessman Joseph Lawren” to issue his uncommercial unpublished manuscripts, sixteen in sum. Three volumes collecting his shorter works appeared in 1935, perhaps self-published. Reissued as pristine hardbacks by the Gordon Press in 1977, these I own and treasure, even though they lack any prefaces or annotations.
More recently, Kevin I. Slaughter, the proprietor of a Maryland small press wittily named Underground Amusements, has published several BdC volumes, sometimes reprinting earlier books, more often new compilations of fugitive pieces, in handsome perfect-bound editions that are readily available. Slaughter’s website BenjaminDeCasseres.com collects information about BdC as well as numerous pieces of his writing.
Editor’s Notes
Benjamin DeCasseres celebrates the end of Prohibition in 1933.
1 Like Smart Set’s editors H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, DeCasseres was a hard-drinking thinker (or vice versa). When Prohibition took effect in 1920, he tried to be “the last man in the United States to take a drink on the night the Volstead blight came upon the land. But along about 10:30PM, I got so busy tanking up that I forgot about my noble aspiratioin. I must have fainted. All I remember is that my elbow was stiff the next day.”
In 1925, in Mirrors of New York, he looked back fondly on his pre-Prohibition memories. James Traub quotes from this “thoroughly soused memoir” in his book The Devil’s Playground: a Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square: Times Square was “the central depot of a Grand Trunk Line of Booze” that stretched down Broadway, with the bar at the Knickerbocker Hotel as “the headquarters of the 42nd Street Country Club.” On the street outside, he said, “only one phrase could be heard: ‘Let’s have another!'”
DeCasseres vowed to be the first man in America to take a drink after Utah ratified the 18th Amendment, bringing an end to Prohibition. He arranged to have a telegraph terminal installed in a Manhattan bar so he could be informed the instant the ratification vote passed in Salt Lake City. “After it is all over, I shall return to my home and my literary work, ready to die when Satan calls. I shall have filled my immortal soul with ineffable joy.”
Benjamin Casseres and his wife Bio, 1925. Photo by Arnold Genthe.
2 According a newspaper article from 1931, DeCasseres first saw Mary “Bio” Terrill in 1902 in the kitchen of the boarding house where was living. “From that November morning until she left in March 1903, I saw her only four times, each time only briefly. In that time, I never touched her hand. I — reputed to be a brilliant and dynamic talker — was a perfect idiot in her presence.” Mary married and moved with her husband to the West Coast. DeCasseres got her address, though, and for the next 15 years, the two corresponded almost daily. Finally, in 1919, she divorced her husband and married DeCasseres. “In our 11-year marriage,” he told the reporter, “the first 16 years were the hardest.”
3 To call DeCasseres an individualist is to put it mildly. He was extravagantly and irrepressibly individualist. “Every great individualist worthy of the name is a renegade,” he once wrote. In 1932, he announced that he was going to publish a magazine to be called DeCassere’s Magazine, which would be written entirely by him. It would, he declared, “be a magazine of aggressive individualism, because the individual is the unit of all values.” Yet, he promised, the magazine would “have the smack and tang of eternity.” Although Slaughter reprints the pamphlet DeCasseres published as a prelude, the magazine itself never saw the light of day. In his 1936 pamphlet, The Individual Against Moloch, DeCasseres wrote, in words that would have made Ayn Rand proud, “There is no common good except the development of the individual. The state has no other function than to protect its members against invasion and promote the will of the individual so long as that will does not force itself on the will of another individual”
Covers of the Eridanos Press and Marsilio Publishers editions of René’s Flesh by Virgilio Piñera.
“Whereas English distinguishes between ‘flesh’ and ‘meat,'” translator Mark Schafer writes in an introductory note to René’s Flesh, “Spanish fuses the two concepts in the single word carne, which is used in phrases like ‘flesh of my flesh’ and ‘flesh and blood’ as readily as in ‘meat pie.'” The two concepts of meat and flesh fuse in the Spanish title — La carne de René — as they fuse in its story. This book is a powerful reminder that the human body is a package of meat you will ever read.
I was introduced to the work of Virgilio Piñera when I read Cold Tales, his collection of absurdist, surrealist, yet viscerally realistic short stories. No one’s stories are quite like Piñera’s. If I tossed out names like Borges, Ionescu, or Kafka, you might get some sense of his work — and it’s certainly of the same caliber, worthy of being considered as among the great writers of the 20th century — but you would likely make the mistake of thinking you knew it because you’d read theirs, and Piñera absolutely deserves to be read on his own.
I’m not sure I’d recommend René’s Flesh as the book to start with, though. There’s always a certain disorienting effect to Piñera’s work. As one Goodreads reader put it, his stories take place “in noplace in notime.” Locations are unnamed and the era could be anywhere from the 1920s to today. There are enough details — clothing, furniture, shops, trappings of government and church — to make the settings seem familiar, but at the same time, nothing specific enough to say we’re in Cuba or Argentina, where Piñera lived at different times, or Spain or the United States.
And then there are his subjects, things like the train as big as the world or the climbers whose bodies are broken into smaller and smaller pieces as they tumble from a mountaintop. Piñera takes things we know and stretches them to the point where they seem grotesque or ridiculous or both.
René’s Flesh is a novel that takes one thing we know — that we humans are creatures of the flesh, which means in Spanish, at least, that we are also creatures of meat — and stretches it to lengths that are not just uncomfortable but deeply disturbing. The novel opens as René, a young man just turned twenty, joins a queue outside a butcher shop. The shop is overflowing with meat and the hungry people are clamoring to buy as much as they can.
René, however, is there for a different purpose. His father Ramón wants to teach his son to love flesh. “My dear child, tomorrow, the day you turn twenty, I will put you in possession of the secret of the flesh.” (Bear in mind Schafer’s use of the word “meat” in his translation when talking about the human body and “flesh” when dealing with food, which I’ve tried to follow in this piece. However, as Schafer also warns, “to, as it were, help flesh out Piñera’s vision … wherever the word ‘flesh’ appears, it may be understood as ‘meat,’ and vice versa.”)
Ramón is not a flesh lover: he’s a flesh worshipper. His taste for the flesh is “a preference so passionate as to constitute a veritable priesthood and even a dynasty, something that is passed on from father to son, that is jealously bequeathed to keep the enthusiasm alive.” Ramón is a mysterious figure who’s uprooted his family in midnight moves throughout René’s childhood: “Some people asserted he was a traveling businessman, others, an engineer, some, a smuggler, and there were even people who declared him an assassin.”
Covers of Italian, French, and Portuguese translations of René's Flesh
Unlike Ramón, René abhors the flesh. His father’s passion for flesh, his murky role in some international conspiracy related to its worship, is the reason his family has been on the run for as long as he can remember. The sight of great slabs of beef, severed pig’s heads, steaks, roasts, and sausages in the butcher shop sicken him. Worse yet, in Ramón’s eyes, his son has yet to accept that being a creature of meat comes hand in hand with the reality of having to endure pain.
Pain — from cuts and wounds and torture — is a given when René joins his father in the Cause. Ramón, like his father before him, is a leader in the Cause, a worldwide revolutionary movement: “I am chief of those who are pursued, who pursue those who pursue us.” That sentence embodies marvelously the isolation, the circular logic, that binds so many extremist groups. For those in the Cause, “The pursuit never ends, it is infinite; not even death would bring it to a close.” When Ramón dies, René will carry on, and so on and so on. There is no suggestion that the Cause will ultimately prevail.
And what is the Cause fighting for?
“Over a piece of chocolate.” Many years before, the ruling powers forbade the people to eat chocolate. Protests led to riots, which led to underground movements that converged into the Cause.
But, René objects, “I’m never seen you drink chocolate.”
“You think we’re so foolish as to be seen with a cup of chocolate in our hand?” Ramón replies, “What we’re defending is the cause of chocolate.”
San Sebastiano, by Maestro dagli Occhi Spalancati (c. 1470).
At this stage in the Cause’s history, what it’s defending has, in fact, become irrelevant. All that matters is that the Cause is a struggle for which its believers must be willing to experience pain as well as to inflict it. In fact, given the circular logic of its belief, the two acts can be fused into one. shows a painting of St. Sebastian, the early Christian martyr. But unlike traditional depictions of St. Sebastian, this martyr is his own punisher:
This St. Sebastian was drawing arrows from a quiver and sticking them into his body. The painter had shown him in the moment of sticking the last one into his forehead. His arm was still raised, his fingers now removed from the end of the arrow and seeming to fear that this arrow hadn’t sunk definitively into his flesh.
For this reason, René is sent off for training. His school has a specific purpose: “Knowledge must be beaten into a person,” its director informs him. The only textbook at the school is the human body — “everything a man needs to forge his way into the flesh of another man.” If the Cause is going to produce men prepared to torture their pursuers, it must also teach them to experience pain: “a body deprived of pain isn’t a body but a rock; that the greater the capacity for pain, the greater the vitality.”
As one of fifty freshmen, René is muzzled, strapped into a chair, and subjected to increasingly powerful electrical charges. Their skins burn and sweat drips off their noses and fingers. Then, the rest of the students are instructed to creep up, to sniff around their bodies, trying to detect the subtle differences in the amount of pain they are suffering.
When René fails to show an acceptable level of pain, he is singled out for special treatment. He is forced to listen to a record endlessly repeating the same insistent lecture:
Attention, René! René! Attention, René! René! René! … Why do you not want? Do you not want because wanting, you do not want or do you want because you want not to want? Do you want wanting or do you want not wanting? How do you want?
When this brainwashing treatment fails, Swyne, the school’s chief torturer, decides that René is too impervious to pain. He must be softened up through the most direct method. And so he sets to licking René from head to toe. Soon, squads of students are stripped to the skin and put to the task. The licking goes on for hours. Days. It’s essential they succeed, for it’s René’s destiny to be a leader. “Cannon fodder comes in two categories,” Swyne tells him: “leader meat and mass meat.” Leaders are those “who aren’t just tortured, but who torture themselves and in turn torture others, inventing new models of torture.”
René’s Flesh follows the conventional formula of a Bildungsroman, covering the formative years and education of (usually) a young man. But writing 200 years after Voltaire, Piñera’s Candide is hypercharged with the forces of mass production and totalitarianism. There is no garden at the end of René’s journey.
There is so much to unpack in this book I can only scratch the surface. I haven’t even touched on the use of doubles (René meets a man who’s paid to have himself surgically altered to look exactly like his father Ramón), or the collusion between church and state, or deformity (the millionaire known as Ball of Flesh) or dual significance of arrows (Cupid’s arrows vs. St. Sebastian’s arrows). This is not a book one likes, but it is a book one admires — although, as Raymond Souza put it, “Pinera’s writings inspire the kind of admiration that a surgeon’s scalpel produces.”
Photos of Virgilio Piñera by Ida Kar (1964). Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery
Piñera was a gay man who lived under the dual repression of the Catholic church and reactionary leaders like Juan Perón and Fulgencio Batista. What he would have experienced as the pleasures of the flesh were considered deadly sins and criminal acts. It’s not surprising that the Cause takes St. Sebastian as its ideal. As Richard A. Kaye has written, “gay men have seen in Sebastian at once a stunning advertisement for homosexual desire (indeed, a homoerotic ideal), and a prototypical portrait of tortured closet case.”
René’s Flesh is often grouped or compared with José Lezama Lima’s novel Paradiso. Both writers were Cuban and homosexual, both novels dealt with young men growing up as outsiders in their worlds. However, René’s Flesh is, in my opinion at least, a much more relevant and accessible book. Despite the strong role of Catholic symbolism, Piñera’s use abstraction and exaggeration make this a story that can be appreciated by just about any reader on the planet. I called Cold Tales the best discovery I made in 2017, a year I devoted exclusively to short story collections. Barely one month into this year, I’m not afraid to call René’s Flesh my discovery of 2021. If Rhinoceros and The Trial can be considered 20th century masterpieces, then so can René’s Flesh.
[Although René’s Flesh was published in Mark Schafer’s excellent translation as part of outstanding Eridanos Press Library series in 1990 and two years later by Marsilio, it’s been out of print for decades and the few used copies available go for prices starting at $140. Fortunately, the book is available in electronic format on the Internet Archive (Link), which is how I read it.]
René’s Flesh, by Virgilio Piñera, translated by Mark Schafer Hygiene, Colorado: Eridanos Press, 1990
The Miserable Child is a six-year-old English girl abandoned in a dismal boarding school in the south of England. Her mother is in a sanatorium, her father, as the title suggests, is in the desert — in this case, serving with Montgomery in Egypt. It’s the autumn of 1942. At the school, they have whalemeat stew for lunch: “There is a war on, you know.”
The little girl knows she’s been abandoned: “Daddy Daddy Daddy, you don’t think of me at all,” she complains. “You imagine that I am secure, but there is no security for me if you are about to die.” In the desert, Monty has a Plan. A great offensive against the Germans is in preparation. The girl, of course, knows nothing about this — at the time.
In telling the story of The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert, Dinah Brooke adopts both the perspective of a frightened and lonely little girl in 1942 and of her adult self, aware of history with a big H (the battle of El Alamein) and a little one (her father’s being evacuated with a case of jaundice before the attack). At school, “The Miserable Child is alone and panic-stricken.” At the same time, however, she also wanders around the front in Egypt, observing the progress of the battle: “The Miserable Child wanders up to Kidney Ridge, where the enemy are launching heavy armoured counterattacks…. She prowls around the battlefield like a jackal, a hyena, sniffing at bodies as the sun rises high and the heat and the flies and the stench rise with it….”
Brooke switches perspectives instantly, without offering us signal or clue. It makes reading a disconcerting experience but also adds to the impact of the narrative. Though things follow a roughly chronological order, we are never quite sure of where the narrator stands. Are we seeing things through the eyes of the Miserable Child in the moment or through the eyes of the woman whose memories of her miserable childhood and knowledge of other facts provide context not available to the girl?
We are one-third of our way into the book before it becomes clear that this is really the story of the father, not the child. The son of a steel-makng family in the North, Bob is a promising young man, ready to work his way up the ladder at the works, eager to push for improvements. His judgment is not always sound, however. He has a bit too much of a taste for drink and he marries a fragile, artistic woman suffering from TB. When the war comes, he is happy for the opportunity to escape into the Army, placing his daughter into a convenient school and enjoying a spree in London with his best friend’s wife before shipping out.
Though Bob proves unfit for service and returns to a post with the steel works, his promise has already faded. He knows neither how to accommodate the growing role of the trades unions nor how to keep the trust of the financiers or government ministers. So, he heads to Kenya to launch himself again, divorcing his first wife and picking up another along the way. The Miserable Child, of course, is left to make her way at the same miserable school.
The construction firm he joins in Kenya goes bust, and Bob takes to drink while his new wife’s popularity among the clubmen leads to mocking comments behind his back. He gives up Kenya and the wife and heads back to England. Within weeks, he’s lying in a locked ward for alcoholics, admitted through the collusion of his brother and the presiding physician.
From here, Bob’s story is one of steady decline, with most of his time spent in jail or asylums. Everyone agrees he’s a fine fellow. On the few occasions when he’s able to visit his daughter, in school or in London or on the maternity ward after the birth of his first grandchild, everyone comments on his manners and charm. It’s just that he can’t take care of himself, let alone anyone else. And so he leaves the Miserable Child there in the hospital facing the prospect of raising her child without the help of her own parents.
With only what we’re told in the book, we’re left wondering what Dinah Brooke was trying to do in The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert. We feel sympathy for both father and daughter, but what is the point of this account of their miseries?
Fortunately, Brooke gave us her answer in “An Obsession Revisited,” an essay she wrote for Fathers: Reflections by Daughters, a collection edited by Ursula Owen and published in 1983 by Virago. “I was obsessed with my Dad for twenty years,” she writes.
You could almost say I made a career out of him – or out of the lack of him. Do people whose fathers are more present in their lives become so obsessed? I never lived with him after I was three, hardly saw him between the ages of seven and twenty-five, yet the amount of energy I focused on him was phenomenal.
“It would be hard not to describe his life as a failure,” she acknowledges. Like Bob in the book, his father ran a steel factory — Lysachts Steel Works in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire. He married a painter with lung problems, hit a plateau in his rise in the firm, and shrugged off the fetters of that life by joining the Army and warehousing his daughter in a boarding school. After the war, he divorced, remarried, went to Kenya and failed to make a new start. And from there, as Brooke puts it, “He became an alcoholic, went mad, and spent most of the rest of his life in asylums of varying degrees of Dickensian horror.”
Joseph Brooke and his daughter Dinah in 1938. From Fathers: Reflections by Daughters.
In hindsight, she sees the novel as an act of reparation — a posthumous attempt to establish kind of relationship she never had — and of restoration (of her father’s reputation):
I mean look, a book, printed pages, hard covers, shiny pictures. Just look at you, see what a mess you made of your life? You’re much better like this. Neat, full of good things, fixed, appreciated. You really fucked it up didn’t you, you silly old man, but don’t worry, I’ll make it OK. I’ll rewrite your life for you, not improving things much — playing around with the facts a bit, yes; putting you into the army instead of the air force so I can have some nice games with Monty at El Alamein, but not papering over the cracks; not trying to make you appear better, more successful, a better father.
Joe, while I’m writing about you I feel as if I’m pushing something uphill. Making a tremendous effort, as if I have to act both parts at once, the parent and the child. I did so want you to be a father to me. I did so want someone to be a father to me. You did the best you could. It wasn’t a lot. The desire was there, but the execution was feeble.
It wasn’t enough, though. “I was really hooked on fathers,” Brooke admits. She wrote another novel (Death Games (1976)), in which “a suicidal daughter pursues her father through the horrors of war-torn Vietnam, and finally, in the heat of the afternoon, she makes love to him, and as he comes he has a heart attack and dies.” In an early fictional instance of self-harming, the daughter holds lit cigarettes to her skin just to feel something.
“Thank goodness I’ve finished with that little lot,” she concludes.
There’s another twist in the story, however. In “An Obsession Revisited,” Brooke mentions spending six years at the ashram of the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. After becoming interested in the Bhagwan’s teachings in London, she travelled to India and made several short stays, during the last of which the Bhagwan annointed her with a new name, Ma Prem Pankaja.
Brooke decided to bring her children along and to settle in India for the long term. As she later wrote,
So we went, and settled into a run-down ex-British Raj house next to the ashram, surrounded by mangoes and palm trees. The only trouble was the kids didn’t like it much. The schools were dreadful, and there weren’t any kids their own age, turning ten, around the ashram. My daughter was having quite a good time, but my son desperately wanted to go home, and I more and more wanted to stay.
So, Brooke took her children back to England, left them in the care of their father, the actor Francis Dux, and returned to India. Brooke’s close friend, the writer Sally Belfrage, joined her and remained at the ashram for the better part of a year. Belfrage later published an account of the experience, Flowers of Emptiness: Reflections on an Ashram (1981), that offers an independent, if not entirely objective, view of Brooke’s time as a sannyasin (convert).
Belfrage was outraged by Brooke’s decision to leave her children behind. She also wasn’t convinced by Brooke’s embrace of her new faith. “They make her wear only orange,” Belfrage wrote, but in Brooke’s case, “It’s not by any means the shaven-headed-saffron-Buddhists-of-Oxford-Street sort of thing — Dior or Chloe will do as long as it’s orange,” and she looked “as Vogue-y as ever.” To Belfrage, the Rajneeshis were nothing more than a cult: “If Bhagwan were Billy Graham, they’d be out crusading; if he were Charles Manson they’d be out killing….”
Brooke returned to England, having decided against following the Bhagwan to his new enclave in Oregon, around the time that Flowers of Emptiness: Reflections on an Ashram was published. Feeling attacked by her friend, Brooke wrote an article titled “The Myth of the Responsible Mother” that appeared in The Guardian in May 1982. “I’d like to say something about motherhood from the point of view of this character, which was me,” it began.
Headline from Dinah Brooke’s article in The Guardian, 31 May 1982.
“Leaving my children certainly did not happen easily or casually. Being an averagely neurotic, guilt-ridden middle-class Englishwoman I manage to make it as difficult as possible for myself and everyone else by endless agonies of indecision,” she admitted. In her response to those who criticized her decision, Brooke also pointed to experiences recounted in The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert:
Among the myths to which I have subscribed is the one which decrees that children can only be happy rolling around like puppies in large groups wearing the minimum of clothes and not being forced to learn anything — because of course I was an only child and went to boarding school and had to wear a uniform.
And her feelings during this separation were perhaps not that different from those of her father over those years in the boarding school. “Most of the time I didn’t miss them at all,” she confessed. “My mother wrote regularly, sending photos and telling me how they were.”
After two years at the ashram, Brooke returned to England to spend Christmas of 1977 with them. When she returned to India, however, “I couldn’t stop crying. I cried for six weeks, almost all day, every day.” “Somehow,” she recognized, “all the sorrow of my own childhood were condensed into this endless crying.”
Discussing her situation, the Bhagwan suggested that Brooke was making the mistake of trying to take responsibility for her children’s feelings. She came to accept this view. “My parents are not responsible for the way in which I experience my life,” she informed The Guardian’s readers, “and neither I nor their father are responsible for the way in which our children experience theirs.” She felt justified in her choice: “I spent six years with an Enlightened Master, and not gift that life has to offer can be greater than that.”
As one can imagine, not everyone agreed with Brooke’s conclusion. The Guardian printed a number of angry responses to what most seemed to consider a “self indulgent” article. “I’m sorry that Dinah Brooke got so little out of being a mother,” wrote one. “My stomach churned on reading about Dinah Brooke’s six-year stay in India sans children,” wrote another, who couldn’t imagine spending even six days away from her own.
Dinah Brooke effectively disappeared from the printed page after “An Obsession Revisited” was published. In the short biographical remarks that preceded the essay, she wrote, “Returned to London. Ran a market stall, met Derek, now Mahabodh. Work as temp. sec. and freelance journalist. Tomorrow?” From what I’ve been able to determine, although Brooke had worked for The Observer and others prior to taking up fiction, her work after the ashram wasn’t for any major papers or magazines. [2023 update: Perhaps more will be revealed with the republication of her novel Lord Jim at Home by Daunt/McNally Editions.]
The Miserable Child and her Father in the Desert, by Dinah Brooke London: New Fiction Society, 1974
If Maurice Sachs deserves to be remembered today, it’s almost entirely for his effusive memoir, Witches’ Sabbath, reissued last year by Spurl Editions. As I wrote at the time of its republication, Witches’ Sabbath is not only a classic autobiography but an essential reference for anyone interested in French art and literature between the world wars: “Sachs knew everyone who was anyone in the world of French literature between the two world wars. Knew everyone, slept with many, stole from a few.”
Sachs’ first book, The Decade of Illusion, published in the U.S. almost two decades before it appeared (posthumously) in France. Sachs wrote the book during his stay of roughly two years, probably to cash in on his brief celebrity as a traveling lecturer. He’d come to New York City in 1931 at the invitation of his friend Lucien Demotte, who hired Sachs to run a Manhattan art gallery filled with French art. Unfortunately, the art market had dried up as a result of the stock market crash and the two men soon parted ways.
Notice for a talk by Maurice Sachs on Proust on New York radio station WRNY.
Ever the opportunist, Sachs reinvented himself as an expert on French culture and soon began appearing as a lecturer at lady’s clubs and art societies and on radio. Despite being homosexual, he married a socialite and aspiring writer named Gwladys Matthews. Within months, Sachs had deserted Gwladys for a handsome young man, while the couple were together, Sachs wrote, and Gwladys translated, this breakneck run through the cast of players in French culture and society of the 1920s.
As one reviewer put it, Decade is a “kaleidoscopic parade, staged in the smart salons, attics, theatres, studios and by-ways of France (mostly Paris), which includes in its dramatis personae practically every well known painter, composer, musician, poet, politician, dressmaker, critic, author, book seller, art dealer, and publisher who has gravitated to Paris in the last ten years or so.” And as such, it’s probably still of some interest to scholars of the period. Sachs’ Who’s Who is a good starting point: in the space of barely 250 pages, he manages to squeeze in enough names to fill 11 double-spaced pages in the index, for a rough total of 700 people.
But this is cultural history People magazine style. It’s full of gossipy tidbits and asides: the young pianist Arthur Rubinstein, “So strong, so powerful, he was like a bull on hind legs: when he took a woman’s hand, one imagined the rape of Europa.” Henri Matisse, the movie fan: “He goes each evening, no matter what the film. What appears on the screen does not interest him; he closes his eyes and listens to the murmurs of the neighboring crowd.” André Derain “loves auto racing” and collects landscape paintings by Corot. Maurice Utrillo was a drunk.
As anyone who’s watched an hour of any American newschannel knows, the chief qualification of any successful commentator is a ready supply of opinions, well-informed or not. Maurice Sachs would have been a superstar in this world, for he tosses off judgments as other writers use punctuation. “In all American universities,” he intones, “one worries first about the moral reasons of written works — which certainly would be the last consideration of a young Frenchman.” Good taste makes for bad paintings: “Nothing is more deplorable than a delicious arrangement.” French cinema lags far behind that of America because French film-makers lack “the American mind, less lively, more deliberate and analytical, like the German” — a statement I can’t imagine any film historian agreeing with.
Though several reviewers praised Sachs’ “amazingly superficial chit-chat style,” the fact is that he managed to write a book-length work by filling large gaps between his chit-chat with windy pontifications. But perhaps this was not entirely inappropriate for someone who at one point took vows and began to train as a priest (a gig he soon lost after a wealthy woman complained about the Sachs’ interest in her teenage son).
In some ways, more interesting that the book itself is what came along with the copy I purchased. As the bookplate shows, it came from the library of the heiress and art enthusiast Adeline Lobdell Pynchon. Sachs first met her soon after his arrival in New York City, when she was still married to Henry Atwater. By the time the book was published, she’d moved back to her hometown of Chicago and married Harold Pynchon, a wealthy businessman.
Included in the book was a letter Sachs wrote her in November 1931 — shortly before her marriage to Pynchon — asking whether “there would be any possibility” for him to deliver lectures in Chicago similar to those he was in the process of giving in New York. He needed the work: “The Art season has started rather badly and since you ask me, I confess that I have not so much hopes for sales this year.” “But nevertheless, who knows?” he concluded optimistically.
Letter from Maurice Sachs to Adeline Atwater, November 17, 1931.
His call for help was heeded … eventually. In March 1933, the Chicago Tribune reported on a “delightful lecture” that Sachs gave to the Arts Club on “The Decade of Illusion.” Sachs was hosted, according to the article, by “Mrs. Harold Pynchon” and accompanied by Henry Wibbels, “a young painter from California who is with him here at the Ambassador East.”
It was Wibbels for whom Sachs had left his wife, and the two men sailed for France a few weeks after their stop in Chicago. They remained together for nearly four years — some of the worst in Sachs’s life, when he fell prey to alcohol and drugs. In the end, they parted. As Sachs later wrote, “Life played tricks on us because we were trying to play one on it. We had to separate before we were entirely annihilated, Henry by dependence, I by drunkenness and lying.” Adeline Lobdell Atwater Pynchon, on the other hand, remained a fixture of Chicago society and an active patron of the arts until her death in 1975.
The Decade of Illusion: Paris 1918-1928, by Maurice Sachs New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933
For a place deep in the heart of Central Asia, Khiva got a lot of traffic from English visitors in the 19th Century. In 1875, Captain Frederick Burnaby braved crossing the lines of a Russo-Turcoman to journey to the city, returning in triumph to tell the story in his best-seller, A Ride to Khiva. In 1899, Robert L. Jefferson, author of Roughing It in Siberia, repeated the feat (“as a sportsman”) and wrote about it in his imaginatively titled A New Ride to Khiva.
Between them, however, came the most daring traveler of all, F. C. Burnand (later Sir Francis), then editor of Punch. As he explained in his definitively titled THE Ride to Khiva, unlike Burnaby, he proposed to travel both to and from Khiva. And to travel not with Burnaby’s spartan 85-pound backpack but with saddlebags loaded with provisions and cooking utensils, a semi-grand piano fitted up with a comfortable bedroom, a store of American beef, and a cellaret full of beer and champagne (Pommery and Greno très sec). And finally, to stay in constant contact with his editors back in London, his own private wire (which at various times in the book is a telegraph, a means of escape, and former soldier named Wire).
Of course, all this kit costs a fortune. Luckily, Burnand manages to assemble a list of subscribers from those interested in his going — those interested in his not coming back.
The list of subscribers to Burnand’s expedition to Khiva.
“A. S. S.” on the list is, no doubt, Burnand’s poke at one of his perennial antagonists, the novelist Albert Smith, author of The Adventures of Mr. Ledbury and his friend Jack Johnson (1866), of whom the playright Douglas Jerrold once said, “When he signs his initials he only tells two-thirds of the truth.”
Scaring off the wolves (in sheep’s clothing) with a portrait of Gladstone.
Traveling through the backlands of Russia brings its fair share of hazards. Burnand is chased by wolves, attacked by Tartars, thrown in jail more than once. He even spends a night in a pig stye — but comes away with a piglet who proves an invaluable ally. He teaches the Pig alphabet as well as to play numerous card games … perhaps too well:
This evening played two games of Double Dummy with the Pig. He won the last rubber. If he repeats this, I shall watch his play closely. The Sleigh-driver backed the Pig. I begin to suspect collusion.
Though the Pig goes on to rescue Burnand from several near-death experiences, the air of suspicion is never entirely lifted. “There is a twinkle in his eye that I don’t half like,” Burnand confides to his journal. Still, the Pig compares favorably to the mouse he befriends while on one of his stays in Russian jails: “An apt pupil, but possessing neither the solidity nor the gravity of the Pig.”
Despite bragging early on that he’d found a more direct route to Khiva than Burnaby followed, Burnand’s journal suggests otherwise. He reports crossing the river Oxus on page 26, but over the course of the following weeks, manages to cross it at least 20 times more. At least he thinks it’s the Oxus. “I suppose,” he confesses, “judging by the position of the stars, as I’ve lost my maps.” He accidentally wanders into Persia at one point, forcing him to backtrack for hundreds of miles.
Burnand’s map of his ride to Khiva.
As the map he provides in the book clearly shows, Burnand’s ride to Khiva ultimately involved more digress than progress. If, that is, he ever actually made the trip. The editors close the account with a suspicious note that Burnand reported that, “Khiva is a very charming place, and, from his description, not totally unlike Margate.” Burnand was a long-time resident of Ramsgate and perhaps Margate seemed journey enough for the busy editor.
THE Ride to Khiva originally appeared as a serial in Punch. There appear to be just three used copies available for sale, but fortunately you can find it in electronic formats for free on the Internet Archive.
The Ride to Khiva, by F. C. Burnand London: Bradbury, Agnew & Co., 1877
Ticket to the Ascent of the Nassau, Charles Green’s Balloon, from Vauxhall Gardens
In September 1838, Mr. Charles Green, already considered England’s greatest balloonist (or aeronaut, as he preferred to say), entertained London crowds by making several ascents in his newest balloon, the Nassau, from Vauxhall Gardens. On one of these, he was accompanied by John Poole, then one of London’s leading playwrights (and soon to be author of the comic classic, Little Pedlington and the Pedlingtonians. Together they flew across London from west to east, enjoying a bottle of sherry and watching dusk settle over the city, until they came to ground somewhere along the road to Chelmsford.
Crotchets in the Air, Poole’s account of the trip, is as light as the gas filling Green’s balloon and unashamedly unscientific. “Why did you go?” Poole asks himself in hindsight. “To get out of the city,” is his reply, the balloon merely offering a novel and altogether more pleasant alternative to going by land:
One gets tired of being suffocated in coaches, choaked with coaldust in steam-boats, rattled and rumbled on railroads. But, up yonder, the ineffable stillness, the progressing movement without the slightest sensation of motion! whether up, down, forward, back, you seem to be suspended motionless in the air, whilst everything above, below, and around, is complaisantly taking the trouble of moving out of your way.
And unlike these forms of locomotion, travel by balloon is … quiet.
And then, the noiselessness, the perfect quiet, which I have before alluded to! It is the sublime of stillness. They who have not heard it — do not add this expression to your collection of bulls — they who have not heard it (for the ear is affected by it) can form no idea of it. In the tillest night, on the quietest spot on earth, some sound is occasionally heard, how soft or slight soever it be — the ripple of water, the buzzing of an insect, the fall of a leaf. But up there, you might fancy yourself living in an age antecedent to the creation of sound. There might you indulge to the uttermost in the luxury of thought, reflection, meditation there revel in all the delights of imagination, with not the ruffling of a utterfly’s wing to put your fancies to flight.
Indeed, the experience is so novel and so much more graceful than any of the land-bound options that even the departure comes in an unexpected manner. “I do not despise you for talking about a balloon going up, for it is an error which you share in common with some millions of our fellow-creatures,” Poole writes his friend. Instead, when Mr. Green casts off his anchor ropes, the balloon sits still and the land falls away.
[D]own it went with everything on it; and your poor, paltry, little Dutch toy of a town, (your Great Metropolis, as you insolently call it,) having been placed on casters for the occasion — I am satisfied of that — was gently rolled away from under us.
And the sights to be seen from several angels up (as RAF pilots used to put it) surpass those of travel on land (“Trees, rivers, and fields; fields, trees, and rivers! with here and there a hill some certain number of feet higher or lower than another!”). “Sights, oh! such sights! Gulliver not fabulous. Men and women six inches tall; and in proportion as we rose, they diminished — to five, four, three inches.”
Height eliminates all distinctions of class or rank: “The proud, the humble, the dignified, the lowly, yet, to us, the greatest amongst them was undistinguishable from the rest!” Poole admits, though, “I am glad I am down again, for I was imbibing a very contemptuous opinion of my species.”
Ascent of the Nassau.
Poole traces their route in the landmarks below. Westminster Abbey, Covent Garden, Blackfriars, St. Paul’s. Seeing St. Paul’s from above gives him the frisson of discovering a whole new sense of awe: “like possibilifying of an impossibility.” Seeing Newgate Prison, on the other hand, evokes feelings of outrage.
With what stomach for your breakfast would you get out of your bed at eight in the morning to be strangled at nine, in the open face of day, and in the presence of thousands of persons collected together to glut their eyes with the sight of a human being throttled with a rope — for such is the fashionable phrase — you call it the cant — for describing the execution of a murderer: how, I say, would you like that?
And as they drift away from the city and the sun sets, Poole sees London as any airline passenger would know it — but as none of its residents has seen it before: “And now conceive yourself looking down on an enormous map of London, with its suburbs to the east, north, and south, as far as the eye could reach, DRAWN IN LINES OF FIRE!”
Not everything about air travel is better, however.
There are no inns in the whole of that country so that when what we had “got in that bottle,” which was some sherry, was exhausted in drinking to the health of our dear little Queen, we could not get our bottle replenished for love or money.
Crotchets in the Air can be found on the Internet Archive and will take less time to read than it took Green and Poole to travel across London. It’s a sublime little gem and a perfect escape for anyone suffering from the lockdown blues.
Crotchets In the Air; or, an (Un) Scientific Account of a Balloon-Trip, by John Poole London: Henry Colburn, 1838
Serendipity continues to be one of my best guides to neglected books. While access to libraries and bookstores is restricted due to the pandemic, I’ve been turning to strolls through the Internet Archive as an alternative. I’ll either use the text search feature to see what titles pop up in response to a phrase like “he hailed a cab” or “she sipped her cocktail” or do a search using one of the metadata fields. Catch a Brass Canary came up when I went looking to see what books were published by J. B. Lippincott between 1950 and 1980.
Something about the dustjacket illustration and its description of the story, set in an aging upper West Side branch of the New York Public Library, made me want to keep reading. Catch a Brass Canary was Donna Hill’s first novel and I soon saw that neither her prose style nor her characterizations were of particular note. But Hill, who’d earned a Masters in library science from Columbia and spent eight years working for the NYPL before moving to Hunter College, knew her subject, the day-to-day running of a library and the variety of personalities among its patrons and staff, and the story doesn’t lack for authenticity.
The branch in Catch a Brass Canary is aging and changing along with its neighborhood:
… when the neighborhood had been prosperous not long ago, the branch had served genteel readers of Thackeray, Browning and Scott. Now it was hard-working and practical. Along with Dante, Shakespeare, and the Greek philosophers, it offered books on child rearing, home economics and other skills to help with daily life and stacks of mysteries and Westerns for escape from it.
Having grown up as a regular denizen of the Seattle Public Library — both its fine Carnegie-era Greenlake branch and the Central library in the days when the chairs in the ground floor fiction section were usually filled by dozing homeless men — I felt some pangs of nostalgia to read of a card catalog, load slips, and newspapers on wooden rods.
Hill’s fictional formula is pretty simple: take an unstable mix of people and insert a catalyst. In this case, the catalyst is Miguel, a Puerto Rican teenager looking to earn some money and put himself on the right track after a taste of gang membership and an unhappy stay in juvenile detention. Some of the staff welcome Miguel as new blood, a fresh connection with the community. Some see him with the same narrowed eyes as the Jets saw the Sharks in West Side Story. Like old Mrs. Ethelbald: “Completely unreliable. I knew it the minute I laid eyes on him. He’s one of those hoodlums, horsehide jacket and all the rest of it….”
If this were all there was to Catch a Brass Canary, it would simply be a predictable novel on the borderline between young adult and adult fiction. What spices things up in the insertion of a second disruptor: a mad patron with a mission. Rupert, a disturbed young man, is surreptitiously trying to excise racism from the library shelves.
When he first surfaces, it’s in search of an old children’s book “Epaminondas?” he asks the Reference librarian. “Theban general,” the librarian snaps. “I mean the little Negro boy, you know, who steps in pies,” Rupert replies, referring to Epaminondas and His Auntie, by Sara Cone Bryant and Inez Hogan.
I was interested to follow Hill’s handling of Rupert and his quest. On the surface, he is the sole of liberal compassion. “How beautiful they are, the heterogeneous children of this neighborhood,” he says to the librarian:
“Dark and fair, Asiatic, Puerto Rican, Negro. Did you ever watch them in the children’s room? How well they’ve started out in life together; no racial malice, no envy, no fear. They’re charming, I allow, but they spread evil attitudes like a disease. Among the children it’s most insidious, you know. Especially in a neighborhood like this.”
Having grown up in the South, Rupert stings from the memory of his family being ostracized and driven from their town after his father invited a black man to have dinner at their home. Now, having dropped out of college, he is squatting in a basement and trolling the shelves of the public library to find, borrow, and cut out the offending pages from books he considers racist.
He sees himself as a modern-day knight and peoples his world with medieval characters: “… that sturdy little abbess who works by the window, that young squire who shelves books with such verve, always smiling.” They are all fine-featured, chivalrous, and pure as in a romance. His is a mission to cleanse the world. “I’m devoting my life to racial empathy, to justice for the racially oppressed,” he asserts.
Rupert defends his actions by quoting Milton (“he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself”) — implying, by corollary, that he is justified in destroying bad books. And he demonstrates commitment to his principles when he rescues Miguel from a savage beating by members of his former gang.
But Miguel himself responds to Rupert’s argument by referring something he’s learned from working at the library: “All points of view should be in libraries for people to learn about and choose. Nobody should decide for other people what to read and think.” (Miguel refers to Article II of the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights: “Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”)
In a way, Hill was anticipating later debates about how libraries should deal with materials that are clearly offensive to some or all patrons. In the article about Epaminondas and His Auntie linked to above, David Pilgrim, the curator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University, writes “In January 1971 the City Council of San Jose, California voted to remove Epaminondas and His Auntie from general circulation in the city’s libraries and to place the book on reserve.” A few months later, however, the Council reconsidered and removed restrictions on the book. Pilgrim argues that there is value in “having racially offensive objects in the public so the objects can be used as tools to facilitate healthy, sometimes painful, dialogue.”
If Hill’s narrative construction is somewhat obvious, her sincerity in trying to tell her story honestly and in fairness to all her characters is genuine and gives Catch a Brass Canary the kind of simple decency that readers find in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Donna Hill, from the dustjacket of Catch a Brass Canary
After Catch a Brass Canary Donna Hill set adult fiction aside for over 20 years. She wrote a manual on managing visual materials in libraries titled The Picture File that was updated in the 1970s, and then a doorstopper biography of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, in 1978. She retired from Hunter College in 1984, wrote several children’s books and young adult novels, then produced Murder Uptown (1992), a mystery set at a women’s college in Manhattan (roman-à-clef?).
Catch a Brass Canary, by Donna Hill Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1965
A tweet about T. J. Bass’s wildly ambitious and imaginative Nebula Award-winning novel The Godwhale (1974) triggered a short discussion of favorite novels from the 1970s. I was struck by how many of them were — well, if not science fiction, then at least strongly influenced by SF. I started buying books — almost always cheap used pocket paperbacks — for myself around 1973, and as I began to recall those purchases, I realized that my own favorites were novels that sat on the border between SF and literary fiction.
Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick pioneered this territory in the 1960s, writing books we now recognize as key works of 20th Century literature without any suggestion that they’re somehow lessened through their origin as Ace, Daw, Dell, and Panther paperbacks deliberately packaged to turn off non-SF readers. When Collier released its paperback edition of Italo Calvino’s SF fables Cosmicomics in 1970, the publisher just as deliberately Doris Lessing gave it imprimatur of legitimacy with her dystopian novel The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), then returned to give it a gargantuan world-building embrace with her five-volume Canopus in Argos starting with Shikasta in 1979. (I’m pretty sure I have all five volumes of the Knopf hardbacks somewhere in storage: they quickly became fixtures of remainder tables. Literary appetites were not quite ready to follow Lessing to such lengths.)
Writers who ventured into this territory faced considerable obstacles. SF writers struggled to be taken seriously by critics and readers of mainstream fiction. Straight fiction writers risked being marked forever with the stigmata of the space opera. When one of the toughest of straight fiction writers, Harry Crews, opened William Hjortsberg’s second novel, Gray Matters in 1971 and read the first sentence, he later recalled, “My heart sank. I thought, ‘My God, he’s committed science fiction.'” Crews was willing, at least to state his objections:
Without going into too much detail, I think honor demands that I admit my prejudice against and contempt for most of what is called science fiction. Here is the formula — and therefore much of the reason for my contempt — for successful SciFi: it must have an anonymous ruling force; dehumanized people; totalitarian one?world drive to power; violence of mindnumbing dimensions ( people who have no stomach for the violence of their own everyday lives seem to read the violence of the future as morally instructive); and nuclear warfare.
“Every one of these elements of the SciFi formula are in Hjortsberg’s novel,” Crews acknowledged, the result, in his opinion, was simply “an engrossing fiction informed by an imaginative use of science.”
Here is a survey of 25 novels from the 1970s that looked beyond the labels that booksellers and librarians crave and forced their readers to wonder if they’d stumbled in the wrong section. It’s not a comprehensive list by any means (omitting the significant arrival of feminism to SF that took place at the same time), but I hope it suggests that there are plenty of reasons not to write off the 1970s as just the decade of polyester shirts and leisure suits.
I’m stretching the envelope of “the 1970s” to include this gentle fable. Frayn makes his leap into the future with his usual elegance of phrase: “Once upon a time there will be a little girl called Uncumber,” the book begins. He depicts a world where almost everyone is controlled through drugs and isolation has become a prevailing mode of existence. Among other things, its spare prose and pared-back descriptions offer a marked contrast with the next four titles.
Perhaps the wildest, druggiest, and word-drunk-est of the orgy of SF novels written by Brits in the midst of the psychedelic era, in Barefoot in the Head Aldiss tosses LSD, James Joyce, fascism, and the Christ myth into the blender and comes up with a perfect cult classic concoction: unreadable to many, a nectar of the gods to a few. Reissued as a Faber Find.
Jimmy Miller was Jane Miller, known to everyone as Jimmy, and the widow of novelist Warren Miller. This first novel was published by Knopf, which was not known for its SF work at the time. Set in the future — i.e., 2004 — it depicts a world devastated by a combination of a Chinese virus (hmm …) and a nuclear war started by the French. New York City has become the refuge of the Richies, who play a human-hunting game with the Poories. The Big Win makes a Poory a Richy. The Big Lose, as you can imagine, is terminal. It’s a bit of a mess but a crazy sort of fun featuring, as Raymond Sokolov put it in his New York Times review, “plenty of unquotable and impressive lubricity.”
Along with Aldiss, Moorcock, and other veterans of New Worlds, Spinrad, an American, helped bring SF into the age of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. In this novel about a talk show host (Barron) stumbling into a massive conspiracy about the means of ensuring immortality, Spinrad also introduced techniques from experimental fiction, such as cut-up (viz. Burroughs, Gysin). Not everyone liked the results. Joanna Russ felt the author had taken on so much in terms of style and content that he ended up being smothered by it.
The first in Moorcock’s four novels starring his anarchic, transmutating, polymorphically gendered superman, Jerry Cornelius. Word of mouth at the time I became aware of them in the mid-1970s was that Cornelius was sort of a drug-taking hipster James Bond, but I now suspect that everyone who said that was going off the covers, not the contents. Some of the books’ sexism has not aged well, but Moorcock’s embrace of body transformations and gender fluidity may resonate better with today’s readers than it did with his largely male audience when the novels first came out.
Abe was ahead of trend: he actually wrote this as a serial back in 1958-59. However, it was only published in English in 1970, which is why I’m including it. I turned to it somewhere in late high school after giving up on A Woman in the Dunes as just too abstract for my taste at the time. Inter Ice Age 4 should be a highly relevant book for our time, as it’s set in a world soon to be inundated by the melting of the polar ice caps. But there’s also a murder mystery, conspiracies, malevolent government and business entities, and heavy doses of biology (Abe trained as a physician). I got through it only vaguely understanding what I was reading, but I suspect now that it can hold its own alongside some of the early works of Stanislaw Lem (another writer who trained as a doctor but chose not to practice).
Another vision of a dystopic America, this time told by parallel narrators: Lt Col Danny March, a war-weary veteran (“I’ll tell you something about making dead guys…. You do it often enough and you’ll get used to it.”) and Anne, a woman on the run who finds her way to a pacifist commune called Calabria, isolated deep in a National Forest. Reed referred to it as her Why Are We in Vietnam?: “We were Americans, ergo we must be brash, insensitive, militaristic types. Never mind that Apollo 11 was heading for the Moon, Teddy Kennedy had just walked away from a fatal wreck in Chappaquiddick, leaving behind a drowned girl; less than a month later the Sharon Tate murders would confirm what many would not say but secretly suspected: that Americans were a crude, savage lot.” Though Reed had published some more conventional SF stories, Armed Camps cries out to be seen as serious fiction and not somehow diminished as a work of genre.
There were plenty of novels written about young men running away — from the draft, from the farm, from the Establishment — in the early 1970s. But unlike most of them, Going Nowhere is far more timeless than of its time. Partly this is due to Greenberg’s approach to fiction, which always uses the most concrete details (one of his stories is about a man discovering just how far he can allow his foot to rot before it becomes inedible) to anchor the most abstract conceptions. In this case, it’s also due to the conception at the heart of the story: Unteleology, the philosophy of fundamental purposelessness that one of its characters develops. SF skeptic Harry Crews admitted in his New York Times review that Going Nowhere was the first novel with a spaceship in it he’d been able to finish since he was 10: “Any writer who will begin a novel of only 143 pages with a 400?word sentence, which sentence itself be gins with ‘Once upon a time,’ can’t be all bad. For one thing, you know he’s not playing it safe. He’s a man you can count on to take a chance.” “Alvin Greenberg,” Crews wrote, “is such a man.”
Greenberg, who died in 2015, is one of America’s most neglected metafictionists. One of his early short stories, published in Best SF 1970 (edited by Aldiss and Harry Harrison), was titled “‘Franz Kafka’ by Jorge Luís Borges by Alvin Greenberg.” He would go on to write stories such as “The Beast in the Jungle vs. A Sense of the Comic,” “Not a Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer,” and “The Mind of Emile Zola.” His work — four novels, short story collections, and poetry — is consistently theoretical yet worldly, extreme yet specific, tragic while remaining comic, and always accompanied by a genial narrative voice. You don’t always know where you’ll be going with Greenberg, but you’ll be in good company.
This is the novel that had Harry Crews reaching for his gun when he suspected Hjortsberg of fomenting SF. And of course, it is SF if we accept that fiction set in the future that involves some extrapolation of existing scientific, cultural, and/or political developments (or degradations) as SF. I think we can all accept that SF does not always equal space opera, and in this case, there is neither space nor opera. Gray Matters is the great brains-in-jars novel. Humans exist as the merest essential vessel to keep a brain functioning. Everything else is accomplished through thought: communication, commerce, and even sex. Gray Matters also has the merit of brevity: no reader of Hjortsberg even set down one of his books because it was too long.
Subtitled The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World, Love in the Ruins, envisions an America where all differences in race, religion, class, etc. have grown to their extremes (kind of like today). A lapsed Catholic scientist develops a machine to detect early signs of mental and spiritual degradation in hopes of bringing people to heal themselves. Instead, it becomes an object of great interest to the government, and soon the inventor finds himself on the run through the crumbling remnants of the United States, accompanied by Moira and her beloved pocket edition of the poems of Rod McKuen, “a minor poet of the old Auto Age.”
Not really a novel but a collection of five novellas about the inhabitants of 334 East 11th Street, a housing project in Manhattan, during the second Roman Empire, which is just a few years after 1972. Samuel R. Delany was so impressed with one of the novella, “Angouleme,” that he wrote a book-length study of it titled The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction. In it, Delany argued, among other things, that 334 was SF not because of any explicit scientific content but by virtue of its imaginative breadth.
Set in a Britain cut off from the rest of the world (Brexit foreshadowing, anyone?) and controlled by alien spaceships that hover in the sky, A Sweet Sweet Summer is East Enders dialed up to 11 and projected into the future. The aliens encourage all the fringe factions — fascists, Communists, racists, and even Scientologists — to incite violence and create chaos. “Shooting, pimping, knifing, beating to death, whether of strangers, life-long buddies, close relations, evan cannibalism, these are merely the pattern of life,” as the TLS reviewer summarized it. All narrated by Pelham, whom one Amazon reader described as “possibly the most repellent protagonist I have ever read.”
Saw was one of a short-lived series of largely experimental novels published by Knopf around this time. They were all printed in a rare — for Knopf, at least — glossy hardcovers without dust jackets, and on the rare occasions you stumble across them these days, they’re in surprisingly good shape, suggesting that Knopf shold have stuck with it. Steve Katz was the experimental fictionist of his time who most embraced the spirit of Pop Art. Although there isn’t a giant can of Campbell’s Soup in Saw, you wouldn’t be startled if one showed up. There are, however, a woman named Eileen who mates with an orbiting sphere in Central Park, a spaceship named Leroy, and a hidden hippopotamus. As with a number of the books on this list, Saw embraced (or stole) numerous elements from SF but it was never accepted as SF by SF die-hards (or later academics writing about SF in the 1970s).
Motorman was the first of a series of four novels that Ohle would write over the course of forty years featuring a character named Moldenke. Moldenke is as a “bloodworker” in a gauze factory in Texaco City outside L.A. (hence the title, perhaps, but there is no Motorman in the book) but also lives in a world with multiple moons, occasional double suns, and cosmic-scale timeshifts. One reader has compared it to a mix of Italo Calvino (in his Cosmicomics stage) and Cormac McCarthy (in his The Road stage). Out of print for decades, Motorman is now available from the Calamari Press (and you have even download a PDF version of it for free). In his introduction to this edition, Ben Marcus adds to the list of comparisons, calling Ohle “the dogsbody that resulted from a glandular mishap between Flann O’Brien, Leonora Carrington, Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler, Borges, and Raymond Roussel.”
In his prolific career, Paul West wandered in and out of just about every genre you could think of, so it wasn’t surprising that his journey eventually led into SF. In Colonel Mint, he takes a top-ranked insider — the astronaut Colonel Mint — and turns into an outsider when he sees an angel through the window of his space capsule — and then makes the mistake of reporting it. Garth Lloyd Evans, writing in The Guardian, argued that West had simply “changed the conventional traditional context for his consciousness of being alive.” Changed it, that is, “from the parochial, the provincial, the national, the routine tick of the clock, into an awareness of eternity as our natural habitat.” Unlike much of the formulaic stuff that cluttered science fiction, however, Lloyd Evans felt that “this shift of vision does not involve a loss of heart or render one invulnerable to this world, now.”
Quake is a dystopia novel after every Los Angeles hater’s heart. Wurlitzer operated in the realm of Pynchon, Vonnegut, and Brautigan, taking American quirks and twisting them into intricate origami. Here, we have Los Angeles after that massive earthquake we all know is coming some day. But instead of a predictable catastrophe novel, this is the story told by a writer who, if you will, inhaled. Like Hjortsberg, Wurlitzer wrote books you don’t have to set aside long weekends for.
Klise, whose day job was running an educational filmstrip company, wrote this, his only novel, as much as a moral exercise as a fictive one. He takes an innocent — Willie, a truly hybrid American, Irish-Indian-Black-Chinese with “red hair, red-gold-black-brown skin, and blue almond-shaped eyes spangled with brown,” and injects him into a dystopian world full of complex variations on the themes of power and evil. First Willie becomes the greatest pitcher in baseball with his trademark “upcurve” ball. Then he somehow manages to become Pope and the object of nefarious plots by Vatican, government, and media. The Last Western has never been reprinted and goes for a ridiculous amount of money if you can find a copy. But you can also download it for free from the Internet Archive.
Depending on your perspective (or experience of reading it), Dhalgren is either a masterpiece, a gripping vision of America in its end state, or a convoluted and confusing mess. Launched with great noise as a Bantam paperback original when it came out, it may have suffered a fate similar to another thick book from around the same time, John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues. Both books struck many as too full of their own self-importance to get out of the way of their readers. Now, however, when those who read it come to Dhalgren rather than having it thrust upon them, it’s seen for what it is: a challenging, complex, and deeply considered work of modernism that also happens to be SF.
Jane White, whose work was first recommended to me by Brooks Peters back in 2008, wrote a number of odd, edgy psychological thrillers starting with Quarry in 1967. Her last book before her death in 1977, Comet was a dystopian novel with an extreme version of life on Earth after a great holocaust — a disaster so great and so long ago that no one knows quite what it was. Life is hardly above the level of the Stone Age now, with the added twist that procreation is essentially impossible. Into one of the tribes scattered over this world come a man and a pregnant woman. Does this all lead to a Second Coming? To be honest, I can’t say, having never read this myself. But it awaits on my shelves.
Dr. Martin Bax’s only novel, The Hospital Ship is the story of the Hopeful, an atomic-powered and largely self-contained hospital that sails around a world rapidly breaking down through a mix of disease, autism, and widespread psychosis. The hospital’s director decides that the solution is — you guessed it — breeding. Bax’s subject matter is heavily influenced by J. G. Ballard, so it’s not surprising that Ballard contributed a generous blurb: “the most exciting, stimulating and brilliantly conceived book I have read since Burroughs’ novels.” A number of readers have rated Bax’s technique better than his results, as he employs a variety of documentation, from letters to logs to patient records, to illuminate the story. Michael Orthofer at the Complete Review took the opposite view, however, and I recommend his review for anyone interest in learning more.
I wrote about Plus back in 2013, when I called it my most neglected book for the simple reason that it took me 36 years to get around to reading my copy. McElroy’s writing is notoriously challenging, but even by that standard, Plus is, at least in the estimation of one Amazon reviewer, not the place to start: “If you haven’t read McElroy, don’t jump into this unless you consider yourself the boldest and bravest of readers.”
Much of the reason stems from McElroy’s subject, which is a disembodied brain floating in orbit around the Earth as the control system of a satellite. Imp Plus — the brain — has limited understanding of language and even more limited grasp of vocabulary, so McElroy has to tell his story as if manipulating by remote control. As Imp Plus becomes more sentient, his language grows and we see that McElroy is leading us through the brain’s struggle to establish an identity independent of ground control — the other being known to Imp as the Acrid Voice. It’s a bold experiment that ultimately succeeds, but it’s a bit like scaling El Capitan with your bare hands. You will work hard, but if you make it to the top, you may find it one of your most intense reading experiences.
DeLillo wrote SF? He sure ’nuff did. In Ratner’s Star, Little Billy Twillig, a child prodigy, is enlisted by a mysterious military/scientific research institution to help them decode an enigmatic signal from space. “We feel certain it’s a mathematical code of some kind,” the director tells him:
Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one language we might conceivably have in common with other forms of intelligent life in the universe. As I understand it, there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality.
To which Billy replies, “Did you just fart?” Among DeLillo scholars, Ratner’s Star is considered a work from his formative stage, before the era of his prize-winning/bestselling books. Which means it’s both less effective as a coherent work and full of greater experimentation and risk-taking. DeLillo takes codes, the encapsulation of information in condensed packages, as an overarching metaphor for the obstacles facing all forms of communication, and so plays around with text and dives down rabbit holes like the significance of symbol-based languages like Chinese. But if you’re looking for another fat DeLillo novel to follow up Underworld, this is the natural choice.
In this broad satire of the American military-industrial complex, an aging billionaire named Skylor Blue, has himself reconstituted by attaching his head to a mechanical spider run by a computer. The narrator, a failed poet and lowly copywriter in one of Blue’s aerospace companies, travels into the bowels of the Byzantine security mechanisms set up to protect Blue’s new being and comes to face the reality of life as a Six Million Dollar Man:
And my body knew what it was looking at too:It recognized immediately what the head in the mechanical spider meant to it: The body, the mortal coil, the source of despair, the thing that gets sick, manufactures aneurysms, tumors, cataracts, piles, stones in the bladder, limestone in the arteries, the shakes, the drops, the shits, the tears; the thing that hurts you so terribly, the thing that finally betrays the clever, efficient brain by withering like a leaf, is superfluous. (“The body’s only purpose is to carry the brain,” said Edison, and he should have known.)
Perhaps not surprisingly for a book written by an American male in the 1970s, along with robotic life comes new extremes of sexual experience. Comparisons with J. P. Donleavy are not out of order.
Despite the title, I may be stretching things to say there’s a real SF element in this novel. Set in Fork River, a nearly-deserted Kansas town near the geographic center of the U.S., The Fork River Space Project is about a collection of oddballs who come together to work on what they hope will be a landing site for UFOs. Even if the guy who came up with the idea isn’t fully convinced that aliens even exist, he sees it as a way to “restore awe.” In the meantime, it’s where folks gather on Sunday, listen to music, and “go into orbit.” This is certainly one of Morris’s lesser books, but in a way it’s significant as perhaps the first mainstream novel to recognize that ever since the first Moon landing in 1969, we’ve been living on a small planet in a very big cosmos.
With this novel — which I can well remember buying in hardback for its beautiful cover and opening with anticipation — we see serious fiction approaching the obstacle of the leap into imaginative fiction … and balking. Set in a largely depopulated United States after some unspecified catastrophe, this novel proved that a story about an epic journey (in this case from East to West) is bound to fail without a destination. I recall there was a lot of wandering through the overgrown ruins of cities. Nothing else stuck with me. Thomas M. Disch justly savaged the book in his New York Times review and summed up the challenge of venturing into the No Man’s Land between straight fiction and SF:
A Secret History of Time to Come fails equally at the general task of fiction and at the specific task of science fiction. The special merit of the best SF is not its capacity to predict the future but to analyze and analogize the present. It offers writers an opportunity to make scale models of moral problems that cannot be dealt with — not, at least, with the same clarity and directness — using the conventional devices of the realistic novel. At this essential science fictional task, A Secret History of Time to Come has the moral and intellectual finesse of a World War I poster exposing Hun atrocities.
Have the boundaries between serious literary fiction and SF evaporated since the 1970s? A visit to most libraries and bookstores today would suggest not. But luckily, plenty of writers don’t let that dissuade them.
Reviews of Selina Hasting’s new biography of Sybille Bedford, who was born Sybille Aleid Elsa von Schoenebeck in Charlottenburg, Germany and forced to live as an exile starting in the late 1930s due to her support of anti-Nazi causes reminded me of a number of other neglected writers who found themselves exiled not only from their own lands but also from their own languages.
The story of German intellectuals who sought refuge in the United States, particularly those who gathered in Santa Monica around the towering figure of Thomas Mann, is well known. But less remembered today are those who headed to England instead, a number of whom not only chose to settle for good outside their own countries but who adopted English as the language in which they wrote from then on. In an article in the Times Literary Supplement that appeared in 1962, Norman Shrapnel wrote of such writers: “Some have used the language as a honeymoon hotel, some as a gymnasium, some as a concert platform for virtuoso performances, some as an ideas factory. It has accommodated them nearly all, and their tendency has been to amplify, rather than alter, what might by now, if left to itself, have turned into something as stylized as a Pall Mall club or an Indian dance.”
Arthur Koestler, of course, is still recognized and his Darkness at Noon has a solid place in the canon. Here, however, are five others who chose to follow in Joseph Conrad’s footsteps.
• Robert Neumann
Robert Neumann was, like the better-known Stefan Zweig, a Viennese Jew who decided to leave Austria well ahead of the Anschluss. He settled in a village in Kent that he then took as the setting for his novel written in English, Scene in Passing (1942). The novelist J. D. Bereford considered it more successful as prose than fiction: “Dr. Neumann seems more at home with the English language than with the manner of life in an English village.” Neumann went on to write ten more books in English before he moved to Switzerland in 1958.
The Inquest (1944), an inquiry into the last years of a woman of the international set before the war, was his most commercially successful book. Though he never returned to live in Vienna, the city was close to his heart, and his first postwar novel, Children of Vienna (1946) decried the living conditions, particularly of the large number of orphan children, in the ruins left after the initial Soviet takeover of the city, “There are indignation, pity, savage humour, obscenity, irony on irony in this ferocious novel,” wrote one reviewer.
Neumann helped establish Hutchinson International Authors, an imprint of the major publisher, for which he contracted translations of numerous German and Austrian writers in exile, including Arnold Zweig (no relation to Stefan) and Heinrich Mann (Thomas’s older brother). His last work in English, The Plague House Papers (1959), was an unusual and light-hearted autobiography. “He has seemed to have decided to make the book worth his while as a novelist, and has arranged a nice patter of interacting themes,” Muriel Spark wrote in her review for the Spectator.
Born in Hungary, the son of a leader of the Jewish community in Budapest, de Polnay spent most of his life distancing himself from his home and his family. According to the version of the story he tells in The Crack of Dawn: A Childhood Fantasy (1958) and My Road: An Autobiography (1978), his mother was ill, his father an absent and abusive brute, and his primary caregivers were the servants who looked after him and his brother and sisters as they grew up in Switzerland, Italy, and England.
After spending time in Argentina and an unsuccessful attempt at establishing himself as a gambler on the Riviera, de Polnay found himself broke and in Paris and turned to writing to make cash. Though fluent in at least three languages, he opted for English based on its larger market share, and began pumping out novels at the rate of at least one a year beginning in the late 1930s.
In May 1940, however, the German invasion disrupted his comfortable life. Along with the government and many of the upper bourgeosie of Paris, he fled to Bordeaux, but soon returned. It was easier to survive on the cheap in Paris. He lasted for about a year, until he was able to make his way to England via Spain and Gibraltar.
He quickly took himself an English wife and enlisted in the Royal Pioneer Corps. After the war, he took a lease on Boulge Hall, the former home of poet and Rubaiyat translator Edward Fitzgerald. Though he aspired to the life of a country gentleman, he soon found the cost beyond his means, and after his wife died, he spent years as an itinerant, living in France, Spain, and Portugal while tapping out novel after novel that fell somewhere between Balzac’s Comedie Humaine and Simenon’s romans dur.
He remarried, this time to a Spanish woman, and converted to Catholicism. The couple lived for a number of years in seaside towns in Kent but decided they preferred the food and sun of France. By the time he died in 1984, he had written nearly 90 books in English.
• Edith de Born
Edith de Born took perhaps the oddest route to writing in English. Born Edith Ausch, like de Polnay, she came from a Jewish family ennobled in the Austro-Hungarian court. When her father lost his title and most of his fortune after the end of World War One, she married Jacques Bisch, a French financier who’d come to Vienna to liquidate what remained of her family’s estate, and moved to Paris.
Having been taught French and English as a child, she quickly became fluent after stays in Paris and London before the war. Trapped in Paris by the German invasion, the couple became involved in the Resistance. She later said that the work of translating cables to and from London trained her to write in English with nuance and subtlety. When Jacques Bisch became president of the Société Générale Bank in Brussels, they took a palatial apartment on the rue Royale and hosted such English writers as Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford.
Though de Born wrote in English, English characters were exceptionally rare in her books. Instead, she wrote of people she knew: Belgians, Dutch, French, and, in her trilogy of Schloss Felding (1959), The House in Vienna (1959), and The Flat in Paris (1961), Austrians and Austrian expats like herself. Many reviewers praised her elegant, pseudo-Jamesian prose, but novelist Francis King wrote somewhat more precisely that it was “in English that all her seventeen novels have been composed”:
I use the word ‘composed’, rather than ‘written’, advisedly, since, as with Conrad and Nabokov, one receives an impression of infinitely meticulous care in the shaping of every paragraph and even of every sentence. As with them too, one senses a ‘foreigness’, though it is impossible to point to any one passage and declare: ‘No one English could have written that.’ This foreigness is not a matter of vocabulary or syntax — each of these writers has a far more varied vocabulary and far firmer command of syntax than many a native-born novelist — but of rhythm. In the case of Edith de Born, this rhythm seems to be one, not of her native German, but of the French which (so I am told) she speaks with such precision and fluency.
King was dissembling in writing this. As he later disclosed in his autobiography, de Born sent all her manuscripts to the wife of an Anglican vicar in Norfolk, who returned them with meticulous line-by-line copy edits, before she submitted the corrected versions to her English publishers.
• Jerzy Peterkiewicz
When Jerzy Peterkiewicz arrived in England from France in 1940, he knew no English. Yet he enrolled in the University of St Andrews and went on to earn a doctorate in English literature at King’s College London. Soon after, he married Christine Brooke-Rose. Though they later divorced, both explored abstract and experimental themes and styles in their fiction. Peterkiewicz, however, grew somewhat more conventional in the course of his career, with one of his later books, The Third Adam, being a largely nonfictional account of the Mariavites, a Catholic cult based in the Polish town of P?ock whose leader considered himself to be the third Adam — the first two being the original man of Genesis and Jesus.
His first few novels, written in the 1950s, were full of Joycean wordsplices and almost embarrassing onomatopeia. He liked writing, as he wrote of one of his characters, “at his cosmopolitan best, daring every vocabulary to twist his eloquent tongue.” The Quick and the Dead (1961) might better have been titled The Dead and the Slow as it’s the story of a man who only figures out he’s dead halfway through the book. Its subject and style left the Telegraph’s reviewer unsure of what he was dealing with:
If only one knew what Jerzy Peterkiewicz was up to. Or, alternatively, if only one could be sure that what he was up to was elaborately pretentious nonsense. But if it is hard to find the viewpoint that would enable one to read some meaning into his oblique and arbitrary fancies, it is equally hard to belieave that a writer, more a writer working in an adopted language (like another Polish novelist, Mr. Peterkiewicz knew no English until he was grown up), who clothes those fancies in such precise and fastidious words means nothing at all.”
Anthony Burgess, on the other hand, loved it: “Mr. Peterkiewcz is on of our most intelligent and original novelists. There are some excellent things in The Quick and the Dead. Whatever you’re going to call this uncategorisable book, it’s an altogether brilliant performance.”
Stefan Themerson and his wife Franciszka — both artists and experimental film makers — were happy and productive members of the Left Bank avant garde, having settled in Paris after traveling there to meet the Hungarian artist and photographer László Moholy-Nagy. “I just knew I had to be in Paris,” he later said. When the war broke out, he joined a regiment of Poles that fell apart soon after the Blitzkrieg began, and he ended up spending two years in a Red Cross hostel in Vichy France. There, he began writing his first novel Professor Mmaa’s Lecture, an elaborate pastiche of a scientific lecture on the subject of the superiority of insects to human beings. After being smuggled out of France and reunited with his wife in England, Themerson decided to rewrite the book in English.
To say that Stefan Themerson wrote in English, however, is to accept that any one language could contain the energy of his imagination. Here, for example, is just an excerpt of the entry for Chapter Six in the Table of Contents of Professor Mmaa’s Lecture:
Wherein Professor Mmaa’s Lecture May Be Likened to a “Chariot Sailng over a Volcano ”
BATSMAN HITS A GOOSE & LADIES AND GENTLEMENT! IMAGINING THE IMAGINATION PROFESSOR MMAA’Ss ATTEMPT TO ADAPT A VERTICAL POSITION HOW WILL MY OLD MAMMA COME TO BELIEVE IN THE SHALLOWEST BEING, & HOW WILL PROFESSOR SOUL COME TO BELIEVE IN CORPUSCLES? LES MORTELS SONT EGAUX, AND THE TOLERANCE OF FANATICISM LES MORTELS SONT DIFFERANTS, AND THE FANATICISM OF TOLERANCE HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN STOPS LAYING EGGS NONOBODY ON SCIENCE, LANGUAGE, AND POLITICS PANCAKERS & FARCEMEATERS
After the war, the Themersons became cornerstones of the English avant garde — which might be a bit of an non-sequitur, as they never looked for imitators or others to imitate. In 1948, they formed the Gaberbocchus Press, under whose imprint a fair share of their books were published over the course of the next 30 years. Franciszka worked steadily as an illustrator of children’s book, including such collaborations with Stefan as Peddy Bottom (1950), Mr. Rouse Builds His House (1951), and The Table that Ran Away Into the Woods (1963). Franciszka also provided the illustrations for Barbara Wright’s remarkable English translation of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises de Style
Queneau’s fiction is perhaps the closest equivalent to Themerson’s. Both men drafted genres and put them to work for slyly anarchic purposes. In one of Themerson’s last works, The Mystery of the Sardine (1986), he took the international conspiracy thriller a la The Da Vinci Code and turned it into a playful epistemological fantasy. Not everyone appreciated the results. Kirkus Reviews “a stringy mass” of heavy-handed social comedy and compared it to “sour-tasting fudge.” Neville Shack, reviewing it for the TLS, recognized that Themerson was more of a puppetmaster than a master of characterization:
Many of them, weird and wacky, seem to have a flair for bemusement in action and speech. They are figures in a constantly shifting scenario, neither nautralistic nor typical ofmuch beyond themselves. These people who come and go, often in search of clues, serve only the fickle ends of the narrative. They are mannequins, walking constructs in the mode of Peter Greenaway’s cinematic inventions; the tableaux are highly synthetic, despite real settings and occasionally believable situations.
There’s a certain satisfying irony in the fact that more of Themerson’s work is in print now in Polish than in English. Several of his books, including Professor Mmaa’s Lecture, are available on the Internet Archive.
Ramón J. Sender’s 1949 novel The King and the Queen (El rey y la reina) demonstrates great big subjects are sometimes best dealt with through very small situations. In this case, Sender condenses the Spanish Civil War into a battle of wills between the Duchess of Arlanza and Rómulo, her gardener.
One day in 1936, shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, Rómulo is enlisted, in the butler’s momentary absence, to take a message to the Duchess. A woman whose very being is imbued with entitlement, the Duchess is in the daily habit of swimming nude in her palace’s indoor pool. The Duchess’s maid stops him outside the entrance to the pool, then goes inside to warn her. Dismissively, the Duchess tells her to bring him in.
“My Lady, it’s a man,” the maid cautions.
“Rómulo a man?” the Duchess replies. She listens to the message while slowing swimming on her back in front of him. A peasant from Andalusia, Rómulo has been subservient all his life. Working in the garden of a large palace in Madrid has only introduced certain nuances to that attitude.
But this brief incident plays on his mind in the days afterward. He comes to understand the Duchess’s response as more than just the treatment of an subordinate by a superior. “Rómulo a man?” questions his very existence as anything but a mindless, soulless beast of burden.
Soon, however, the Duke is called away to lead his troops in support of Franco and the Nationalists. He is captured by the Republicans, who also commandeer the palace as a barracks and training center. The Duchess is assumed to have escaped, but Rómulo discovers her hiding in a remote part of the palace accessible through a passageway known by few of the servants.
Seeing his duty as that of protecting the Duchess, Rómulo gradually recognizes that the balance of power has shifted. With just a word to one of the Republican officers quartered in the palace, he could send her to prison, perhaps even the firing squad. But the Duchess’s sense of superiority is too strong to give in to what might only be a temporary inconvenience. Thus, Sender plays out the bloody conflict between the Nationalists and the Republicans in the cat-and-mouse game between the noble captive and her humble — but increasingly cunning — servant.
The King and the Queen is short — just over 200 pages — tight, and strong as a sinew. Written while Sender was living in the United States after the fall of the Republic in 1939, it reduces the atmosphere and complexities of the Spanish Civil War to their essences, resulting in a story that could well be read as a fable or surrealist tale, something along the lines of Julien Gracq’s The Opposing Shore or Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe.
Sender began writing in this vein with The Sphere (1947) (La esfera), which starts as the tale of a refugee from the Spanish Civil War — not unlike Sender’s — and evolves into an Animal Farm-like story of fascism played on the small set of a passenger ship on its way to an unspecified destination. This abstraction actually makes The King and the Queen less an artifact of the Civil War and more a lasting story about the tensions between the weak and the powerful — the same topic that Elizabeth Janeway dealt with so well in her Powers of the Weak.
The King and the Queen, by Ramón J. Sender (English translation not attributed) London: Grey Walls Press, 1949
“After all, he’s not a young man,” Dorothy Rutherford’s mother advises her. Dorothy, in her early thirties, working as a bank clerk and living with her parents, has the limited options available to many lower-middle-class women one hundred years ago. She can continue at the bank, after which, as her mother tells her, “You’ll have to live out your old age in one room on a tiny pension.”
Or she can marry. Unfortunately, at her age, handsome or even passable eligible suitors are no longer looking her way. Her one offer comes from Frank Chappie, a red-faced, twice-widowed retired furniture store owner. His merits, as Mrs. Rutherford assess them, come down to two: “He must be seventy, if he’s a day — you’ve only got to look at his neck. Well — mind you, one would never wish anything to happen to anybody — but it’s obvious he can’t last very long.” And once he’s gone, “You’ll be rich — and free.”
And so, Dorothy agrees. And soon learns that “can’t last very long” is, in fact, insufferably long. Mr. Chappie (never Frank) is demanding. “Girlie!” he calls to his wife whenever she’s out of sight for more than a minute. He is tight-fisted. And he is ardent. Turpin captures the horror of the old man’s kiss:
“My darling,” he murmured, folding her soft form in his bony arms and pressing his hard, thin lips against her full, naïve ones. He kissed insatiably as if he were trying to drain the fountain of youth and beauty. Then from between his lips she sensed the stealthy advance of a little serpent that was trying to insinuate itself into the privacy of her mouth.
Like any prisoner confined against her will, Dorothy seeks relief in fantasy. In desperation, she latches onto Tommy, a driving instructor and cheap version of Ronald Colman. Lessons with Tommy provide Dorothy’s one furlough from Mr. Chappie’s funerary passion. Working on commission, Tommy is happy to encourage Dorothy’s demand for more and more frequent sessions behind the wheel, even if at the price of an older woman’s unwonted advances. He has “a predator’s streak of cruelty. He liked to keep his victims, conquests, until, as he expressed it, they almost cut their throats themselves.” Among other things, “This saved recriminations.”
With Dorothy’s ever more frantic longings for Tommy, Tommy’s ever mor cautious manouevering to thwart them without losing a client, and Mr. Chappie’s increasing suspicions and unrelenting desire for proof of her affection, the situation spirals upwards. In a French or Italian opera, this would all culminate in a great coloratura aria. In this tight-laced English novel, nary an antimacassar is disturbed. Instead, all the dramatic tension resolves quietly, efficiently, and without the slightest risk of embarrassment in the eyes of the neighbors.
Though Behind the Net Curtains is set in the 1930s, it could just as well — and often seems to be — set during the Edwardian era, or even — aside from the crucial role automobile driving lessons play in the plot — in the late 19th century. As seen in The Laughing Cavalier, Allan Turpin wrote in the 1960s and 1970s novels set in the 1920s and 1930s that rang with the features and attitudes of the decade before his birth — demonstrating, perhaps, the truth of V. S. Pritchett’s observation of “how long the shadow of Victorianism was, how long it takes for a century to die.”
Turpin might well be considered a male counterpart of Ivy Compton-Burnett (if somewhat less prolific), writing over and over tight-knit family dramas that — no matter when written — always seem to take place in some ambiguous period between the 1880s and the death of King Edward VII. And like Compton-Burnett, the pleasure of Turpin’s small dioramas is his cold-blooded and sharp eye for hypocrisy in all its subtle manifestations. You don’t care to know any of his characters, but you enjoy watching them set to their paces.
Behind the Net Curtains, by Allan Turpin London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976
Advertisement for Enter a Child by Dormer Creston.
Excerpt
There must, I suppose, have been wet days during the summer holidays at Hilldrop but actually, I cannot remember a single one. It may have been on these supposititious wet days that Uncle Reggie had out his toy engine; not for us to play with; it was far too expensive, also far too dangerous for that: Uncle Reggie’s engine was a grown-up toy, an engine of importance. All the male members of the family were pressed into the service of laying down the rails — which were heavy. In this Adam house the billiard-room, drawing-rooms, hall, library, and dining-room all opened out of each other: when all the double mahogany doors were thrown back there was revealed a charming landscape of room beyond room, the whole length suffused with streams of light from the windows at one side. But when the rails were all down, crossing every room, running through every doorway, it gave a most desolate look.
But still that was not the point; the point was to make the engine go, and for such an extremely grand and impressive toy I must say I never saw anything that demanded so much inducement, that necessitated so many people to attend to it, before it could be persuaded to perform. It appeared to require not only the encouraging presence of the entire family but that too of Randall, the carpenter (who was always sent for on engine-days as a matter of course), before it could be persuaded so much as to stir. The amount of discussions, tapping, screw-turning, adjustment, and readjustment that polished brass and green enamelled object required! Matches were lit … blown out … further matches lit … the smell of methylated spirits impregnated the air. The attendant family got tired of waiting … it seemed as if nothing would ever happen … as if there would never be any other show to look’ at than that of the two bending, arguing figures of my uncle and the carpenter hiding the engine from our view.
And then suddenly there would be a cry. “She’s off!” There would be a fizzing and a puffing, and actually, yes, actually, there was the little creature moving along the rails of its own accord … beginning to go quite quickly … quicker … now really fast; and my uncle, flushed with success, and brandishing a walking stick (which he used for poking into the engine’s tender when he wanted it to stop) would run along by its side, occasionally, for some strategic purpose, vaulting over the rails. The whole family, headed by Aunt Flora crying out, “Splendid, dear Reggie, splendid!” would try to rush after him. I say try because, (being so many, there was generally a jam at the doorways.
Uncle Reggie, meanwhile, by his leaps over the rails, invariably got left behind by the engine which, now at the height of its form, would rush from room to room, a terrifying demon that no one of us dared interfere with for fear — as was constantly impressed on us — that it would either explode, burn one’s fingers, or set the house on fire. For us it was this very diabolic quality that was the engine’s charm; the delicious feeling at the back of our mind that anything might happen at any moment. “Oh, Uncle Reggie — what’s that funny noise it’s making? Is it going to explode?”
“Get off the rails, dear child! Get off the rails!” And then, seeing the engine was nearing a side line on to which she was to be shunted, “Quick, Harry, she’s coming — quick, quick — the points!” To see all the grown-ups so excited seemed very odd. It made one wonder whether at bottom they were really so very different from oneself as one had imagined.
It’s been a long time since I opened a book and was instantly taken by the freshness of the writing. I stumbled across Enter a Child when it came up among the results when I went to the Internet Archive in search of a Patricia Traxler poem. It was about a woman’s memory of an abusive relationship and the only words I could remember were “kidnappers, burglars.”
Amazingly, Traxler’s 1994 collection, Forbidden Words was the first title returned, but what caught my eye was the one at the end of the first line of results: Enter a Child, by Dormer Creston.1 It came from the Public Library of India, which includes a wonderful assortment of books that appear to have been left behind in the officer’s libraries of various army outposts when the British cleared out after Partition in 1947. The phrase appears in the following sentence, which was by itself enough to make me want to keep reading:
My mind, stretching out all round me to get to know the kind of world I had entered, discovered through stories read to me, gossip, and teasing that, apart from the few home figures, it was peopled by a most sinister company: kidnappers, burglars, ghosts of many kinds, a witch who lived in the nursery bathroom, and a “little man” who, if I did not behave myself, would leap like an acrobat out of the chimney.
That “little man” made me remember with some shame a story we used to tell our children about the fearsome Turtle Lady. The Turtle Lady hid in the bushes around the front door of houses and jumped out and grabbed little kids who made the mistake of wandering alone outside after dark. She would snatch them with her great clawed hands and stuff them inside the empty turtle shell she carried on her back. I’m sure the Turtle Lady held a prominent place in the “most sinister company” that peopled the world of our children’s nightmares.
Enter a Child is structured in five sketches, but in reality, it’s just two parts, one dark and one light. The book opens in the dark, in the memories of the fears that filled the author’s early years as Dolly, the youngest daughter of an upper-class English family in the late 19th century. “As regards fear I was an expert,” she writes of those days.
Her one safeguard was her beloved nurse, Mary, in whose company she spent most of her days. Yet even Mary brought fears into the child’s life. Decades before, when Mary have been her mother’s nurse, she incurred the wrath of no less than Queen Victoria herself. While walking together in Hyde Park, the mother — then just seven — had broken away to run alongside the Queen’s carriage as she was out for a ride. Seeing the child, the Queen called for the driver to stop, then instructed a policeman to escort her back to her guardian. The man asked for Mary’s name and address, and ever after Mary remained convinced that at any moment, there might come an angry knock at the family’s front door.
The thought of Mary being taken away in irons became one of Dolly’s nightmares. Imagine, then, the girl’s anxiety when she was sent away from a few days in the charge of another maid. Why wasn’t Mary taking her? she wondered. And then to discover, upon their return, that Mary had vanished.
“Please, please tell me about Mary,” she begged her mother. “When will she be here? To-night? To-morrow?” Her mother gave evasive answers and tried to distract the child with a game of “Happy Families.” But her mother’s avoidance only increased Dolly’s panic. So, she sought out another maid, Ellen, Mary’s best friend among the servants. “Why, don’t you know, Miss Dolly?” Ellen answered, matter-of-factly. “She’s never coming back! She’s gone for good, she has!”
Dolly’s parents were classic Victorian in their attitude towards children. Many days, they neither saw nor spoke to their children aside from saying good morning or good night. Her relationship with her father, in particular, had only two modes: great periods of completely ignoring her, alternating with short bursts of fearsome discipline. “My father was one of the major problems of my life,” she recalls. “A problem in the sense that I was always making little bids to enter into friendly relations with him, which little bids were invariably repulsed.”
One of these bids, heart-breaking for most parents of today to read, was when Dolly heard that her father’s birthday was approaching. She felt compelled to offer him a present but having no money and no means to shop for him, decided to create one. She cut out several pictures of bowls from a newspaper advertisement and decorated them with the brightest colors in her paintbox:
My system of painting was first to ram the paint brush with all my force down on top of the paint, and then to twist the brush this way and that. I then pressed the brush with equal force on top of the drawing, splurged it round, and would note with satisfaction a spatter of paint arrive, more or less, on the object I wished to colour.
Then, when the happy day arrived, Dolly carefully laid out her offerings in front of her father as he read his newspaper at the breakfast table. He briefly glanced over at them then resumed reading. That was the end of it.
I could not believe that nothing more than this was going to happen. I stood there waiting. The clock ticked, the breakfast things lay glistening in the strong morning light, my father continued to read. It was driven in on me that the Great Moment had come, had passed. No more notice was going to be taken of my present: my father had not accepted it and was not going to: he did not think it even worth a thank-you.
“If Miss Creston’s parents had possessed as much common-sense as the ordinary farm labourer’s wife,” one of the book’s reviewers wrote, “she would have been a far happier child, but might never have grown into so acute a writer.” “Their cruelty was the more intolerable,” he continued, “because it was unintended, and their daughter could not console herself with hating them.”
Instead, the author sees her parents’ cool uninterest as their peculiar eccentricity, just one of the many forms of it she observed among her relations. Fortunately, charm rather than aloofness characterized the majority of her family’s eccentricities, and these — related through Dormer Creston’s vivid prose — brighten the sketches that comprise the latter two-thirds of the book. As Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy later wrote in his book The Unnatural History of the Nanny, “She manages to create, out of what must have been numerically a tiny proportion of her childhood months, the illusion that she had a perfect, radiant, sunny Edwardian girlhood.”
A bit of Dorothy Julia Baynes’ pedigree.
Gathorne-Hardy was mistaken, however, in placing the book in King Edward II’s reign. Its author had, in fact, come of age by the time Edward came to the throne. Dormer Creston was the chosen pseudonym of Dorothy Julia Baynes — Dolly in the book — born in 1880 and the beneficiary of not one but two baronetages. Her father Sir Christopher William Baynes was the 4th Baronet Baynes of Harefield Place, Middlesex; on her mother’s side, her uncle Charles was Charles Edward Hungerford Atholl Colston, 1st Baron Roundway and heir to Roundway Park, a large estate in Wiltshire. When she was in her mid-sixties, she applied by Deed Poll to change her name to Colston-Baynes to emphasize her pedigree.
Roundway Park — referred to in the book as Hilldrop — is the setting for four of the five sections of Enter a Child, and a stark contrast to the grim atmosphere of the stern Victorian London home where the book opens. Every summer, Dolly and her parents would travel there to relax with a dozen or more uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandmothers. The grownups would relax in the cool interior while Dolly would explore and play outside in the baking August sun. “All this warmth, this glow, is within me as well as without,” and that warmth pervades these pages.
The house at Roundway Park around 1900.
Part of that spirit was due to her Aunt Flora, a spinster who’d sacrificed her life in “self-immolation” to Dolly’s grandmother, but who nonetheless served as a prime specimen of the art of living: “let life offer her a handful of dust and her exuberance would so irradiate it that it was dust no more.” At times, though — particularly sunset — Aunt Flora’s enthusiasm could grow tedious:
“Yes, beautiful. Aunt Flora,” I would say because I had been taught to be polite, taught, when a grown-up said anything was beautiful, to acquiesce, but in my heart hating this flaming wreckage of the day’s reassuring blue sky.
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic, dear,” Aunt Flora would murmur, disappointed in her proselyte, then, catching sight of my mother coming down the stairs, “Here, dear!” she would cry, “such a lovely sunset … you must come and look at it … did you ever see such colours!” And then, realizing I was about to slip away, “No, dear, don’t go yet, it’s changing every minute — you really oughtn’t to miss it!…Oh! Look at that long streak of yellow by the green!” And in her excitement she would drub on the glass with her fingers as if, could she only reach the sunset, she would like to pat it in approbation.
Eccentrics like Aunt Flora fill these pages with their well-meaning ridiculousness. As The Observer’s anonymous reviewer put it, they are all “strait-jacketed from the cradle in conventionality, and carefully trained to feel, as well as to be, useless.” Yet collected together and put to such activities as loading into carriages for a picnic or organizing themselves for a photograph or giving Uncle Reggie’s trainset a go, they become completely charming. “There is a lucent airiness in the writing that is often a delight,” wrote Marjorie Grant Cook in her review for the TLS.
“The essential merit of Miss Creston’s book,” Anthony Powell wrote in The Spectator “is that, although it may be … an account of a child who suffered from misunderstanding and loneliness, it is entirely free from any sense of obsession or feeling that the words have been written for the author’s gratification rather than the reader’s; a failing from which even a great writer like Proust is not entirely free.”
One reason no shadow of lingering resentment hovers over Enter a Child is that Dolly — or Doreen, as her friends came to call her as an adult — was not fundamentally out of sympathy with her parents and their values. When she was in her sixties, she would write a testy letter to the editor of The Spectator complaining about a William Plomer article proclaiming the merits of Surrealism. “As the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of culture is ‘the training and refinement of mind, tastes and manners,’ she wrote, “it can scarcely be used to describe Surrealism. Its whole motive is exactly the opposite of this definition.”
Dorothy Julia Colston-Baynes, from a family photo.
Dorothy/Dolly/Doreen never married. She took up the penname of Dormer Creston out of discretion: like Hilldrop, few things or people in Enter a Child appear under their real names. After publishing a small volume of poetry in 1919, she took up biography and earned a solid reputation as a dedicated researcher and colorful writer.
Books about royals bookended her career: The Regent and His Daughter (1932), about Queen Charlotte and her domination by her father, King George IV, and The Youthful Queen Victoria (1952). Other titles included Andromeda in Wimpole Street: The Romance of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Fountains of Youth (1936), about the artist and diarist Marie Bashkirtseff. Her best-received work, In Search of Two Characters (1946), about Napoleon and his short-lived son François, won a Heinemann Foundation Award Royal Society of Literature award. Elizabeth Bowen wrote of this book, “A sort of lyricism and freshness comes from so much of the material having been drawn from young minds. This is in the best sense — and how good that can be! — a feminine book.”
She lived most of her life in London, sharing a house on Lowndes Square with her sister Christabel. She was great friends of the writer and preservationist James Lees-Milne, who would often drop in her for tea and a bit of gossip. Doreen found a happy statis in her life. “She writes in bed every day till 1 o’clock, lunches alone, then walks at breakneck speed, she says often running; returns for tea to receive some friend or other; reads at dinner alone and retires to bed immediately” Lees-Milne wrote in his diary. “She says happiness consists in finding the right rut and never leaving it.” She suffered, however, each time her books were published. She told Lees-Milne that she went through “such agonies over reviews of her books that she often retires to bed for a week, with blinds drawn, silently weeping.”
Her sister Christabel, who died not long after Enter a Child was published, was even less fond of publicity. Lees-Milne recalled a guest at one of Doreen’s lunch parties going to the lavatory in her house and finding Christabel sitting on the toilet, a Pekinese on her lap, reading a novel. “I attributed this to the sister’s intense shyness and reluctance to meet Doreen’s friends,” he wrote.
Enter a Child proved Alfred A. Knopf’s adage that many a book dies on the day it’s published. It came out in October 1939, earned good reviews, and vanished. There are no used copies available online and only a dozen library copies listed in WorldCat.org. Fortunately, it is available on the Internet Archive in electronic formats.
1 Among the other titles containing the phrase is a fascinating 1935 study titled Children’s Fears by Arthur T. Jersild and Frances B. Holmes which catalogued and analyzed an impressive and unsettling list of fears that included “queer, ancient, wrinkled, deformed persons,” “being shut in a small space,” “going up or down in an elevator,” “being abandoned by parents,” and “darkness plus imaginary characters other than animals.”
Enter a Child, by Dormer Creston (pseudonym of Dorothy Julia Colston-Baynes) London: Macmillan, 1939
Gerald Wilkinson and his parents, Bombay, India, 1914.
I first came across Peter Greave in a battered Penguin paperback copy of his 1977 memoir, The Seventh Gate, that I’d found at the Montana Valley Book Store, a marvelous storehouse of books in the little town of Alberton, Montana. The Seventh Gate has the grim fascination of a car crash. Born in Bombay in 1910, Greave spent his first years in the comfort of a villa surrounded by a lush garden and cared for by Indian servants. That haven was soon destroyed, however, by his father’s predilections. It wasn’t just that his father (who is unnamed in the book) was a swindler, he was also a chronic exhibitionist. He would ask his wife to play something on the piano to keep her occupied while he strolled out to their porch and exposed himself.
Greave’s childhood was punctuated by abrupt moves as his father fled the police and creditors or pursued ever-riskier ventures. In late 1918, the family sailed from India to New York City on a ship called The City of Lahore to make a fresh start. The voyage was not smooth: the ship was quarantined at Cape Town when influenza broke out among the crew; then the Hindu and Chinese seamen began fighting and one man was thrown overboard. Twice German submarines tried to torpedo her. Then, hours after the family disembarked in New York, the ship caught fire and sank at pierside.
Advertisement for the 1921 Dixie Flyer.
Greave’s father tried to set up an import/export business. It failed. Then he took off for South Africa hoping to sell Afrikaners a new American automobile called the Dixie Flyer. Greave’s mother and the three children were left freezing in a tenement flat in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, the car had a tendency to stop running, usually far from a garage. The father returned and took the family back to India again. This time he started a sporting newspaper; it too proved a failure. Then he set up a lottery scheme that proved another scam. He was convicted of fraud and sent to jail.
Greave’s mother fell ill of cancer. As he writes in The Seventh Gate, the family fell apart “like an old trunk eaten by white ants” — his sister sent to a convent in Calcutta, Greave and his brother to a derelict school in Darjeeling. Desperate for a home, Greave ran away from the school in the spring of 1923. Alone and almost penniless, he traveled eight hundred miles — walking, train-hopping, stowing away on a boat — to a remote town in East Bengal. There he persuaded a kindly woman he barely knew to take him in.
Cover of the Penguin edition of The Seventh Gate.
By the time Greave was a young man, he’d become accustomed to life on the fringes of Anglo-Indian society. With his sketchy education and lack of connections, he took whatever work he could get. He sold gramophones; he sold refrigerators; he sold coloured enlargements of family photos for a firm that rarely delivered them. He spent most of his time reading, going to movies and getting drunk: “I lived like a nomad, moving from one city to another, existing in seedy hotels or in shoddy rooms.” His father reappeared. The two often shared the same rooms and pooled their meagre resources. Then one day in 1938 while shaving, Greave noticed a reddish bump on his forehead. Others appeared on his legs and buttocks. A doctor diagnosed food poisoning: “You’ve been eating some muck from the bazaar.” New symptoms joined the skin lesions — numbness in his right hand, pain and cloudiness in his eyes.
Finally, he went to an Indian hospital in Calcutta, where he was diagnosed with leprosy in August 1939. Hearing this news, Greave “realised instinctively that I had crossed a frontier from which I could never return.” He spent the next seven years in squalid Calcutta flats, living off handouts, an occasional cheque from his father and the kindness of a few Indian friends. With India being torn apart in the conflicts over Partition, his existence grew more and more tenuous until he received a letter from a doctor with the British Empire Leprosy Relief Association. The doctor offered him free treatment at St Giles, England’s last operating leprosy clinic, outside Chelmsford. Greave managed to obtain a berth on the Franconia, a ship carrying British Army troops and their families away from the embattled former colony. The Seventh Gate ends in August 1947 as Greave stands on the deck, his last view of India slipping over the horizon.
The story that followed was told in Greave’s first book, The Second Miracle, published in 1955. His first miracle was making it to St Giles, where through slow and painful drug therapy, his leprosy was cured. The second miracle referred to in the title was his spiritual recovery. Greave wrote in the brutally honest tradition of Rousseau and Stendhal that considered hypocrisy as the greatest of all sins. While he hid away from the world in his room in Calcutta, Greave had come to see his disease as a mark of “the guilt of a thousand generations of twisted minds, and of bodies thirsting for decay.”
The Homes of St. Giles, the last clinic in England for the treatment of leprosy.
The Second Miracle takes the reader not only through the physical ordeal of Greave’s treatment for leprosy but also his realisation that he — not his doctors and not God — was responsible for what he made of his situation. In the end, he went from slinking through his days “sunk in lethargy” to an attitude of joyful penitence — of saying in his prayers, “Thank you — give me more.” This attitude would be crucial to Greave’s acceptance that, despite being cured, his leprosy had left him with such severe damage to his eyes, nerves and muscles that he would remain at St Giles, dependent on its care, for the rest of his life. It fills the two otherwise grim books with vitality, wonder and hope.
Years after I posted pieces about The Seventh Gate and The Second Miracle, I was contacted by Josephine, a woman living in Herefordshire. Josephine had been given Peter Greave’s journals by a friend. Greave had left them to the secretary at St Giles and through various hands they made their way to her. Having been born and raised in India, both Josephine and her husband had a keen interest in materials related to Anglo-Indian society. She also informed me that Peter Greave’s real name was Gerald Carberry, though she had no idea why he’d chosen the pseudonym.
In June 2019, I arranged to visit Josephine and look through the journals. When I arrived, she showed me into her dining room. There on the table sat an old fruit crate filled with what looked like two dozen or more well-used school notebooks. Josephine had marked the dates covered by each — the earliest starting in January 1937, the last in late 1969.
The first entry in Gerald Carberry’s diary, dated 11 January 1937.
Not knowing what I would find, I hadn’t planned how to use the few hours I had. At first, I skipped through entries almost randomly, photographing pages with my phone. In the earliest entry — 11 January 1937 — he was miserable. “Nothing to read, nothing to do, and no money. And a god-damned toothache.” He was rooming with his father — “H,” for Herbert Carberry — who is also broke but working on some suspicious deal: “I’m sick of his strong silent man act.” And he was frustrated with a woman he referred to as “C”: “It’s like her to start her stuff when I’m in a worse corner than usual.” I jumped forward to the 1950s, where he reported his progress in writing The Second Miracle, worried about publishers and critics, exulted when BBC Radio invited him to appear. In the journals from the 1960s, the handwriting grows larger, looser and more difficult to decipher. Fears about losing his sight came to dominate the entries.
Pages from Gerald Carberry’s diary.
I soon began to focus on references to “V.” The initial first appears in the entry of 5 June 1948, the first since his arrival in England nine months earlier. V appeared to a nurse at St Giles. “V was anxious this morning, and behaved with less than her usual sense,” Gerald wrote.
By August, she had left the clinic and he went to see her in London. They saw Oklahoma at the Drury Lane Theatre, sat together in a bar full of visitors to the Olympics and, near midnight, went to V’s room. They “experimented with passion,” but he confessed, “I felt little real desire.” “She sensed it almost immediately and was, I fear, hurt and disappointed.” And yet she begged him, “Can’t we be married?” He quickly gave in. On 9 September 1948, he wrote, “I’ve done it! What the blazes it will lead to I don’t know.” Just a few lines later, he wondered if the marriage can be annulled but feared the resulting publicity “would immediately finish me.” He hadn’t told anyone at St Giles aside from “M,” a fellow patient and confidant.
Armed with the date of the marriage, Josephine and I searched on a genealogical website and confirmed that Gerald Carberry and Violet Wood married in London in September 1948. This fact — indeed Violet’s very existence — was never mentioned in The Second Miracle. It seemed from the diary that Gerald and Violet rarely lived together — there are notes about sharing holiday cottages, but also entries where he fretted about not receiving letters from her.
Then, in an entry dated 26 September 1964, he wrote, “10 months since Vi died.” In the following pages he wrote multiple versions of the days leading up to her death: “And so, when I returned to your room it was all over …”; “It must have been around eleven on the night of 25 October 1963 that I learnt she was going to die”; “She died on the morning of the 5th of December.” It was as if he hoped to appease grief by achieving the most precise record of her death. Yet the sense of loss remained. In one of the last notebooks, from December 1966, one line appears on the inside cover: “My dear Vi, I miss you so very, very much.”
A note from 3 December 1966: “My dear Vi, I miss you so very, very much.”
As I later read through the hundreds of pages I’d photographed, it became clear that Violet was not the only secret Gerald Carberry had kept from the readers of Peter Greave’s books. In trying to reconstruct Gerald’s story through further research, I discovered that Carberry was also a pseudonym. Gerald Carberry had been born Gerald Wilkinson and christened at St Teresa’s Church in Kolkata on the 11th of November 1910. His parents were listed as Herbert Reginald Wilkinson and Katherine Margaret Wilkinson, nee Tighe.
His father had been born in Manchester and enlisted in the 1st (Kings) Dragoon Guards at the age of 16 in 1899. After service in the Boer War and Aden, he made his way to India. When he married Katherine Tighe, whose father had been a police commissioner in Bombay, in 1909, Herbert Wilkinson’s profession was listed as “merchant’s assistant.” The job must have involved some travel, because a few months before Gerald’s birth, Herbert was arrested and fined in Adelaide, Australia for indecent exposure.
Herbert Wilkinson’s arrest for indecent exposure, Adelaide, Australia, 29 June 1910.
Sometime after the family’s return to India in 1922, Herbert Wilkinson changed his name, because the Times of India article about his conviction for “cheating and abetment” identifies him as “Herbert Carberry, alias Wilkinson.” The rest of his family went along and Gerald began Gerald Carberry, the name by which he was known outside of his books.
Greave had also taken liberties with some of his characters. In The Seventh Gate Greave wrote of his sexual relationship with a woman he called Sharon. Sharon was clearly the “C” of Gerald’s diary: “C and I spent hours together yesterday;” “With C all afternoon.” He was deeply affected by her: “Another of C’s moods worked off on me;” “Struck cold by something C said.” According to the book, Sharon married, left India in 1946 and was killed in a traffic accident soon after arriving in England.
In the diary, however, C remained alive and part of Gerald’s life into the early 1960s—despite his marriage to Violet. He wrote of meeting her. In 1951, he quoted from one of her letters: “For God’s sake, come to me Gerald; come to me before I lose my sanity.” From some of the clues in the diary, I was able to identify “C” as Catherine Rowland-Jones. Born in Bombay in 1914, she married Owain Rowland-Jones, a ship’s captain, and left India for England not long before Gerald’s own departure. Living in Kensington after coming to England, it would have been easy for her to meet with Gerald, who appears to have come to the city often by train from Chelmsford.
An excerpt from the diary entry for the meeting with “Mac”, November 1966
After Vi’s death, yet another woman appears in the diary: Mac. In a long entry from November 1966, he wrote of meeting her at the Liverpool Street station in London, after which they spent a long afternoon in the bar of the Great Eastern Hotel. “For the first hour her behaviour was relatively subdued, but as one double vodka after another disappeared her voice and her spirits rose disquietingly.” She plied Gerald with drinks, insisted he kiss her, implored, “Will you marry me?” She may have been another nurse from St Giles, as she speaks of her impending departure for “that big hospital in Barnsley” (Yorkshire). He referred to her apprehensively as “Mac the Knife.”
By this point, however, sight was his biggest concern. From the early 1940s, the effect of leprosy on his sight had been a constant worry. “I just don’t know what to do with these bloody eyes”; “Eyes killing me again”; “I feel blindness hovering over me.” At times, he couldn’t focus or bear bright lights. In the 1960s, there were repeated visits to the Royal Free Hospital for operations. Each time he wondered whether he would wake up from the anesthesia and find himself blind. In the next entry after his meeting with Mac, he writes, “The world becomes increasingly foggy and indistinct. All I see is seen darkly even at noon when the sun shines brightly.”
The last entry in Gerald Carberry’s handwriting, 30 December 1966
His ability to see became intertwined with his will to live. “Long ago I made up my mind that when it came to this, I’d say, OK, enough,” he wrote in late November 1966. “But already I may have lost the power to act, to conclude the final chapter.” The last entry in his hand is dated 30 December 1966: “Almost certainly my last entry. No sight left — can’t read, can’t write. At last I’m ready to say — I don’t want to live anymore.”
After this, the remaining pages are blank. The next journal opens in early 1967. The handwriting is new, a precise secretarial copperplate: Gerald’s dictation, taken down by the secretary at St Giles. Occasional passages are written in Pittman shorthand: other secrets to be revealed, perhaps.
I wonder how many people under the age of 40 understand the point of this question. If you’re under 40, by the time you learned to read, Rod McKuen had already begun to fade from the scene. He was no longer a regular on television variety shows — in part because television variety shows had themselves faded from the scene by the end of the Seventies. He was still performing live, but much of his audience were people who’d been going to his shows for years. After pumping out a steady stream of books of poetry and lyrics for over two decades, his output — having made him the biggest selling poet in the world for much of that time — fizzled out. After Intervals and Valentines in 1986, there would only be two more books, published in the early 2000s.
But there was a time — from 1967 to around the mid-1970s — when you couldn’t walk into a bookstore or record store or turn on a TV or radio without bumping into Rod McKuen. If he wasn’t as big as the Beatles, he was as big as Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass or Jacqueline Susann and certainly more prolific.
That was when, as a profile that appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle in 2002 put it, “every enlightened suburban split-level home had its share of Rod McKuen.” “His mellow poetry was on the end table (Listen to the Warm), his lovestruck music and spoken-word recordings were on the hi-fi and his kindly face was on the set, on The Tonight Show and Dinah Shore’s variety hour.” (In our house, it was The Sea, one of his collaborations with Anita Kerr.) In Frank Sinatra’s long career, Rod McKuen was the only songwriter he ever devoted an entire album to. Guys bought his books to show their girlfriends how sensitive they were and women bought them for their boyfriends to show them what sensitive was. “The cult of Rod McKuen grows by leaps and bounds,” proclaimed a 1967 profile in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
The same year, The Chicago Tribune’s entertainment editor gushed, “Rod McKuen is great, great, absolutely great! His is a poet, and he sings and reads practically nothing but his own songs and poems. Doesn’t sound like a night club act? Well, he doesn’t just read and sing them — he lives them and makes you breathe and feel them. He drags you through the gamut of emotions, putting a lump in your throat one minute and making you chortle the next.”1
Bear in mind: this was a guy who wrote poetry and then read it in a quiet, gravelly voice (he used to joke that “It sounds like I gargle with Dutch Cleanser” and rock critic Greil Marcus once said it had “the force of a squirrel’s”) over a soft musical accompaniment. That was it. He didn’t dance and you couldn’t dance to him. He didn’t act, or at least hadn’t acted since his last B-movie in early 1960s. He didn’t tell jokes, or at least not many and not well enough. He wasn’t a sex symbol: although there were plenty of women (and undoubtedly some men) who fell in love with him, he made it clear he was a loner. And yet, he’s the only poet with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And yet, as late as 1974, he was being billed as “the greatest entertainer in the world!”2
Ad for Rod McKuen’s 1974 appearance at the Troubadour in Santa Monica
He did, however, infuriate many people who took poetry seriously. The English poet David Harsent described McKuen’s poetry variously as “scraps of maudlin meditation masquerading as emotion deeply felt,” “ersatz anguish, carefully sifted to pablum for easy consumption,” and “lumpish impressions of places and people, flashes of cheap surrealism and clumsy gropings at the numinous.” “No one has done more to degrade language and human sensibility,” D. Keith Mano wrote at the end of a full-page skewering in the National Review.
Josh Greenfeld, writing in Mademoiselle, lumped McKuen with Kahlil Gibran and the now-forgotten Walter Benton as “the Marshmallow Poets.” “The main thing I have against McKuen is his oversimplification of everything,” Greenfeld says. “I mean, if your pussy cat comes home, your life problems aren’t solved. And the words, the phrases McKuen uses! They all lack that precise particularization that is poetry.” Professor Robert W. Hill of Clemson University argued that McKuen “touched the anti-intellectual, the escapist, the superficial, the blindly sentimental capacities of the American public.” McKuen’s books, he wrote, belonged in “the lachrymose quagmire of the KMart poetry section.”
This was similar to the view expressed by Margot Hentoff in The New York Review of Books in its one and only review of his poetry: “McKuen is so devitalized a singer, so bad a poet, so without wit or tune—as well as so out of touch with the contemporary pop sensibility—that one can only consider his monumental nationwide popularity as a kind of counter-counter-cultural phenomenon.” Karl Shapiro said it was irrelevant to speak of McKuen as a poet. Shapiro conflated McKuen with Bob Dylan into a creation he called Dylan MacGoon. Asked about his creative regime, Shapiro wrote, “MacGoon tried to answer as best he could (language is not his strong point).” One reviewer refused to do anything more than include the title of McKuen’s latest in a round-up of recent poetry books. Reviewing McKuen, he complained, was “a bit like using a jack-hammer to clear cobwebs.”
This attitude was a dramatic contrast to the gushing admiration with which Margaret MacDonald, a reporter for the Oakland Times reviewed McKuen’s first book of poetry And Autumn Came in 1954. She praised the book’s “powerful impact of sincere emotions, expressed in clear language with original figures of speech and a sensitive approach.” “Like all true poetry,” she felt, it could “stand the test of re-reading” and was “one which all who really love poetry will keep in an easily accessible place for frequent perusal.”
There was a long gap between that review and the next. As Barry Alfonso writes in his fine biography of McKuen, A Voice of the Warm, McKuen self-published his next collection, Stanyan Street & Other Sorrow, and sold it at his concerts and other appearances while his long-time partner, Edward Habib, drove up and down California, placing it with bookstores. “I’d go through the telephone book and get addresses of bookstores,” Habib told Alfonso. “I’d go to the stores and say, ‘Can you handle five books? If they don’t sell by next week I’ll come and pick them up.’” In a matter of a year or so, this approach stacked up over sales of over 50,000 copies.
It was McKuen’s lyrics that sold the books — lyrics he wrote first for Glenn Yarbrough, one of the most successful of the school of well-scrubbed folksingers so popular in the early 1960s, and later for himself after signing with RCA. McKuen was a prolific lyricist, heavily influenced by Jacques Brel, whom he came to know during a spell in France and with whom he collaborated, performing some of Brel’s songs and writing others than Brel performed in translation. Indeed, the label chansonnier was perhaps more appropriate for McKuen than poet. And his performances drew inspiration from Brel, as McKuen usually sat on a stool on a bare stage, dressed in turtleneck sweater, jeans, and sneakers, and sang/spoke his songs.
In 1966, RCA released a Yarbrough album titled The Lonely Things: The Love Songs of Rod McKuen. The next year, having signed with RCA as well, McKuen recorded Listen to the Warm, which was also the title of his third book. Having heard about the grassroots success of Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows, Bennett Cerf of Random House had approached him to join its list and the two men agreed to an initial release of 30,000 copies of Listen to the Warm.
Gene Shalit broke the news in the Los Angeles Times, commenting, “Insiders versed [funny, Gene] in publishing history can’t remember another volume of poems by a national unknown which got such a send-off.” McKuen cagily negotiated a partnership arrangement that allowed him to continue publishing the books with his own Stanyan Press imprint, which gave him the advantage of Random House’s nationwide marketing while preserving the independence to put out other titles (which ultimately included God’s Greatest Hits, a collection of Bible quotes illustrated by the folk artist Sister Gertrude Morgan).
Listen to the Warm was as much a phenomenon of 1967 as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonelyhearts Club Band. The book sold over one million copies in hardback within a year of its publication. Although the record’s success was less spectacular, it became the first of nine albums McKuen placed in Billboard’s Top 200 charts over the next four years.
Both the book and the record opened with a poem that became a favorite for many McKuen fans. “A Cat Named Sloopy” remembered a cat McKuen had owned when he was living in New York City in the early 1960s.
For a while the only earth that Sloopy knew was in her sandbox. Two rooms on Fifty-fifth Street were her domain.
In the poem, Sloopy wait while the poet goes off in search of love, or at least one-night stands, until one day when he runs away.
Looking back perhaps she’s been the only human thing that ever gave back love to me. prologue
Some of its fame could be attributed to association (or confusion) with a popular tune from two years before, “Hang On, Sloopy” by the McCoys. But it was a heartstring-tugger sure-fired to bring out the hankies. I suspect more than a few of his fans wanted to take Rod home like a stray kitten.
After years of hanging around the margins, McKuen quickly found himself in the warm embrace of the book, record, television, and stage business. He did hundreds of live shows each year, dozens of television appearances, and continued to release new books of poetry and new records at a steady rate. Ads for his books and LPs ran in mainstream magazines like the Saturday Review of Literature, Playboy, Life, and Time. In a 1980 book titled Shrinklits: Seventy of the World’s Towering Classics Cut Down to Size, Maurice Sagoff parodied Listen to the Warm:
Are you sentimental? Dote on plastic charm? Rod’s massage is gentle, Does no lasting harm:
No deep thoughts to rile you, Blandness to beguile you, Pare your toenails while you Listen to the smarm.
McKuen’s only record to break into Billboard’s Top 100, however, came years before Listen to the Warm. It was a novelty tune titled “Oliver Twist” that mocked the rage launched by Chubby Checker’s hit, “Let’s Do the Twist.” He later blamed his scratchy voice on too many nights of trying to sing the tune at bowling alley lounges.
An ad for a 1961 McKuen appearance performing his hit, “Oliver Twist”
“Oliver Twist” was only one of the many milestones along McKuen’s career path to bestselling poet (or chansonnier). After dropping out of high school, he started working as a disc jockey for an Oakland, California radio station. Within a year, he had attracted the attention of Bay Area entertainment columnist Dwight Newton, who included him among his “1952 Prospects”: “A young man with much promise. Writes interesting, colorful scripts for his disc jockey show. Good individual voice.” After a spell in the Army, he returned to the Bay Area, took an apartment on Stanyan Street in San Francisco, and began appearing as a singer in nightclubs such as the Purple Onion.
He also dipped his toe in the water of Hollywood, picking up a few parts but eventually earning lobby card billing, if only as a supporting player, on such movies as Rock, Pretty Baby. One of McKuen’s friends later joked that, “If Rod weren’t a poet, he’d make a tremendous marketing analyst,” and the proof can be found early on. In 1956, the United Press syndicate ran a feature titled, “Rod McKuen Has Too Many Talents.” “McKuen is a young man in a very pleasant quandary,” wrote the anonymous author — most likely a press agent paid by McKuen. “He does so many things well that he has trouble sometimes deciding which talent to emphasize.”
The article also reported that McKuen had “appeared in five Japanese films” while serving with the Army. This was just one of many accomplishments that McKuen would claim over the years. Others included singing with Lionel Hampton’s band, writing a column for the San Francisco Examiner, and performing for a state dinner at the Kennedy White House. He told one interviewer, “I write novels under other names. I wrote a medical book. I’ve had a couple of books of history that have done very well. I’m in the middle of doing a history now that will be about 12 or 13 volumes by the time it’s finished.” He also claimed that every day he ate one meal, read two books, wrote ten poems, and worked 16 hours straight.
Three and a half years of research has led me to believe that Rod told many white lies and some real whoppers about his life and career. A constant need to legitimize himself and prove his worth drove him to exaggerate his actual accomplishments, which were truly formidable. His deceptions were mostly benign; he probably came to believe many of them were true. In the end, they invoke more sympathy than outrage. No amount of recognition could still the nagging inner voice that he just wasn’t quite good enough.
Even after achieving commercial success as America’s chansonnier, culminating in his first appearance at Carnegie Hall in 1969 (which was recorded and released as an album), McKuen continued to pad his resume. Perhaps his most dubious claim was of having taught himself musical composition. As early as the late 1950s, when he recorded several albums that would today be labeled “beatnik jazz,” he was taking credit for not only the lyrics but the music to his chansons. In 1960, he collaborated with veteran studio arranger Dick Jacobs on an instrumental album titled Written in the Stars, also known as The Zodiac Suite, with each track based on a different astrological sign. McKuen was listed as composer, but this needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
There was a lot of musical ghosting going on in the 1950s and 1960s. As is almost common knowledge today, most of the music heard on recordings by the Beach Boys, the Monkees, and other LA-based pop groups was actually played by a handful of ace session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew. TV comedian Jackie Gleason claimed arranger credits on several dozen easy listening albums that were the work of trumpeter Bobby Hackett working at union scale.
McKuen acknowledged some of his collaborators, such as Stan Freeman, another veteran faceless studio musician, but in reality Freeman probably did most of the work. As Michael Feinstein told Barry Alfonso, Freeman recalled that McKuen would say something like, “I want to write a concerto for oboe and this and that instrument” and then hum a couple of melodies that Freeman would then work into a completed piece. And Freeman was certainly not McKuen’s only “collaborator”: others included John Scott Trotter, Vince Guaraldi, and Arthur Greenslade.
McKuen’s musical credits began to pile up quickly in the late 1960s. He was credited with a number of soundtracks, most notably for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Song in 1969 and which became a #1 pop hit for the English singer Oliver. His “classical” compositions began to compete with, and eventually overtake, his chanson albums. He took to listing them along with the titles of his books on the frontispiece.
Rod McKuen’s credits, from Intervals (1980)
As Alfonso writes, McKuen’s compositions “sound like an amalgam of Aaron Copland–like Western elements, stage musical melodies, and film soundtrack excerpts” — in other words, the sort of pleasant but somehow generic stuff often sold as library music. He gave Newsday reporter Leslie Hanscom a recording of his opera The Black Eagle when she interviewed him in 1979. “On later sampling,” she wrote, it turned out to be a work of truly masterful monotony with a plot and theme that might have made Jonathan Livingston Eagle a more appropriate title.” Hanscom found that McKuen “projects a sense of self that could dwarf Wagner.” That might have been an understatement: in 1983, he told Bill Thomas of the Baltimore Sun that he’d rewritten Wagner’s entire Ring cycle and reduced it down to 5½ minutes. Though McKuen often award-dropped the fact that one of his pieces was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music for 1974,3 for his composition The City: A Suite for Narrator & Orchestra, the other fact that composers such as Patric Standford openly admitted to ghostwriting for him tends to diminish just how impressive that accomplishment sounds.
The more one looks into the details of McKuen’s life and work, the more McKuen comes off as a Jack of all trades and master of none. His poetry and lyrics, in particular, were written at a furious rate. He published nearly 30 collections of poems, the vast majority new, in the space of 20 years. By the end of 1968, three of the alone had sold over one million copies. By 1972, it was 12 books and over 4 million copies; by 1974, 15 and 9 million; by 1979, 24 and 16 million. McKuen’s modesty about the success of his poetry tended to ring false. “I’ve sold five million books of poetry since 1967,” he told one interviewer, “but who’s counting?” Or, on another occasion, “I didn’t even know I was a millionaire until I read about it in the newspapers.”4
The enormous popularity of McKuen’s poetry could be one of the reasons so many critics attacked it. As critic Gary Morris has written, “There aren’t many art forms where commercial success is relentlessly equated with aesthetic worth.” The National Lampoon made an obvious joke of it in their McKuen parody: “The lone$ome choo choo of my mind/i$ warm like drippy treacle/on the wind$wept beach.” Even the New York Times felt free to publish their own parody: “I met your press kit first/Box of mimeographed attributes and achievements.”
A few tried to look beyond the sales figures. Robert Kirsch, the LA Times book editor, declared in late 1968, “I don’t believe that Rod McKuen can be ignored as a poet simply because he is the best-selling troubadour in America today.” But even Kirsch found it hard to be unqualified in his praise. Although he found that McKuen “more than occasionally … is capable of rendering awareness into perceptions of small but haunting truths,” he also acknowledged that “He is less effective on the printed page than on his records, where, assisted by music and the nuance of the spoken voice, he evokes recognition and fantasy.” Too many of McKuen’s poems — such as “Manhattan Beach,” from Lonesome Cities — read less like poetry and more like, well, notes:
I’ve taken a house at Manhattan Beach working the summer into a book.
Eddie came last weekend and brought two girls and some books. The girls were pretty but the books stayed longer and now they menace me stacked up on the floor staring back in unread smugness.
Otherwise I’ve had no visitors.
In a survey of American poetry of the 1960s written a few years later, Louis Simpson quoted from Listen to the Warm:
But yesterday you touched me and we drove to the toll beach and ran in the sand. Sorry no one could see how beautifully happy we were.
“Well, what’s wrong with it?” Simpson asked. “It’s simple, it makes lots of people happy. Only an effete intellectual snob would find fault with it…. The world is like a sand-pile with lots of nice gooey wet blobs to play with. It’s a soda pop, a weenie-roast, a sticky, marshmallow kiss.” McKuen’s world, he wrote, “is the province of Youth.” But Simpson warned that, “Youth sooner or later will want to have poetry. Not this slop.”
McKuen claimed he started writing poetry because he couldn’t find ones he liked. “I wanted to say something different or write about what everyone else was saying but say it in a different way.” But in truth, what tends to distinguish McKuen’s language from that of other poets is its lack of individuality. His poetry, like his music, is not so much different as generic.
“Forever is not far enough/to throw a smile/that never was” McKuen writes in one of his later collections, The Sound of Solitude. Which seems at first glance like a koan, something a guru or Yoda might say. Except … look closer, read it over a few times, and you realize it’s nothing. We know what each word means, but put together it’s nonsense. Everywhere is close enough/to lose a memory/you never had. Would you buy a book filled of 80 pages with that?
Saturday Night Live used to run a cartoon feature about two superheroes known as the Ambiguously Gay Duo. McKuen might be crowned the Ambiguously Poetic Poet. “I’m not a poet, I’m a stringer of words,” he sometimes demurred. Yet when the Los Angeles Times invited McKuen to submit a short reflection “On What Poets Are … and Aren’t,” he wrote with patent self-importance, “A poet is a keeper of the language.” The job of the poet was to “shed light on the darkness.” A poet “must repair but never rape the words that form his native tongue,” adding rather disingenuously, “nor should he be an advertisement for himself.” The LA Times piece sparked some sharp reactions. One reader wrote in to say that “Having McKuen comment on the nature of poetry is somewhat akin to having a kindergarten fingerpainter comment on the art of Picasso.”
McKuen often resorted to a rhetorical trick when asked to defend his poetry:
Actually, I really don’t think it’s fair to criticize poetry. A novel, sure. But not poetry. See a poet is his poem. He lives his poem. So if you just give a poem a quick reading and call it something like sappy, then you’re really calling the poet sappy. It just isn’t fair. Not really.
Attack my poems and you attack me, McKuen was saying — a cheap way of warding off any interviewer with good manners. “I lived that poem,” he liked to declare. “I defy you to catch me and say that I wrote about the experience badly. How do you know what the experience was? You didn’t live it!” Some who profiled McKuen pointed out, however, his penchant for assuming a martyr-like pose. Like the old joke, he seemed to say, “I’ve suffered for my art. Now, you can suffer, too!”
Rod McKuen signing books at a Phoenix mall, 1977.
Another tactic was to compare his fame to that of his critics. “Name one critic who’s downed me,” he challenged Bill Thomas, “and ask five total strangers if they know who he is. I bet none do. Then ask them if they’ve heard of me. They may have a good opinion or a bad opinion — but they sure as hell know who I am.”
On other occasions, McKuen would defend his poetry by trotting out its achievements. “I mean — if I wasn’t a damn good poet,” he told Rick Soll from The Chicago Tribune in 1975, “why would I be in the Oxford Book of Verse, why would I be in all the famous quotation books, why would my poems be used in hundreds of college courses?”
The trouble is: none of that was true. There is no Oxford Book of Verse. There are Oxford books of English Verse and American Verse and Comic Verse, and McKuen is in none of them. I also checked more than a dozen different quotation books published between 1968 and 1978, and the only one I found McKuen’s name in was What They Said in 1971: the Yearbook of Spoken Opinion. McKuen’s quote is worth repeating in the context of this discussion, however:
Critics attack my poetry because it’s understandable. I always think everything should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. A while ago it was announced that I would come out with a paperback of new poetry. I got bad reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Book World and a rave from Coronet, and I still have not written one word of the book.
Which, of course, was also untrue.
As for his poetry being used in hundreds of college courses, this was also improbable. A few, such as Brian Curtis in a 1972 article in The English Journal, the journal of the National Council of Teachers of English titled, “The Necessity of the ‘Rod McKuens'”, argued for McKuen as, if you will, a gateway drug for serious poetry. However, this argument tended to produce the response reported by Ross Talarico in his book Spreading the Word: Poetry and the Survival of Community in America: “As a matter of fact, I brought sneers to the faces of poets and critics when, during a couple of panel discussions over the past few years, I’ve made the observation that if poetry survives at all in America, perhaps more credit will go to Rod McKuen than to any of a few high-powered poetry critics.”
And both Curtis and Talarico were careful to point out that while McKuen’s poetry had utility, it lacked quality:
Do I say these things because I am a fan of Rod McKuen’s? No, not really. I’d be the first to say his poetry is filled with overused, often trite phrases, sentimentalism, predictability, and a naive, terribly romantic view of the world. [Talarico]
I do not suggest that “trash” compose the curriculum, although it fits the nation’s bias and fills drugstore shelves. We all leave our McKuens behind, and, if lucky, we suffer “growth.” [Curtis]
Part of the problem was McKuen’s own understanding of poetry. “The problem is that a lot of people who write poetry think the more obscure they can be, the more intelligent their poetry is,” he once told an interviewer. “To me, intelligence and obscurity never went together.” He sometimes compared his poetry to that of Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams, but mostly in self-defense: “Their poetry was very uncomplicated, very straightforward.” “I write in the language of my day and try to make it effortless for the reader,” he said on another occasion, which only supports Dick Cavett’s quip that McKuen was “the most understood poet in America.”
Now, there’s nothing at all wrong with poems written in simple, uncomplicated language that reads effortlessly. Millions of American schoolchildren have had their first exposure to modernist poetry through Williams’s red wheelbarrow:
so much depends upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens
But I think it’s illuminating to compare McKuen’s simplicity with that of another poet known for creating poetry from simple, clear words: Mary Oliver. For the same of illustration, let’s look at how they each treat the subject of dogs. Here are two selections from McKuen:
From Caught in the Quiet (1970): My dog likes oranges but he’ll eat apples too. Like me, he goes where the smiles go and I’d as soon lie down with sleeping bears as track the does by moonlight
Don’t trouble me with your conventions, mine would bore you too.
Straight lines are sometimes difficult to walk and good for little more than proving we’re sober on the highway.
I’ve never heard the singing of the loon but I’m told he sings as pretty as the nightingale.
My dog likes oranges but he’ll eat apples too.
And from Listen to the Warm: See the dog he doesn’t move—a voyeur. Never mind. What we’ve done is beautiful. For gods and animals to see, for us to stand aside in awe and look ourselves up and down.
And Mary Oliver:
From Devotions Now through the white orchard my little dog romps, breaking the new snow with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited, hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins until the white snow is written upon in large, exuberant letters, a long sentence, expressing the pleasures of the body in this world.
Oh, I could not have said it better myself.
Neither poet tells us much about the dog they’re writing about. In both McKuen poems, however, the dog is merely an object. It, like the “gods and animals,” is there merely to be a silent witness. In Oliver’s poem, on the other hand, the dog’s the star. We’re sure that McKuen has seen dogs; but we know that Oliver has owned dogs and has watched them delight in hopping about in drifts of new snow. And while McKuen’s dogs are there to gaze upon his sensitive pensiveness in wonder, Oliver is the one observing and taking joy from her dog’s exuberance.
In his later years, McKuen was candid about his less-than-ideal childhood. He was born in a Salvation Army hospital, his father having vanished soon after sleeping with his mother, who was working as a taxi dancer. He was sexually abused by an aunt and uncle, physically abused by his stepfather, and probably both as a teenager at the Nevada School of Industry. He dropped out of school and went on the road at a young age and spent time as an in-house male prostitute at logging camps in the Pacific Northwest. A background of this sort of abuse is now known to be associated with an “impaired capacity to develop proper definitions of the self,” as the psychologists Bessel van der Kolk and Rita Fisler have written.
One suspects, therefore, that part of what was missing from McKuen’s poetry was himself. For all the supposed confessional honesty of his poetry, McKuen concealed and distorted much about himself, including his sexuality. Ambiguity was not a trick he used to avoid being pinned down: it was at the heart of his being. He was careful, for example, not to openly declare himself as gay. Though he lived with Edward Habib for decades, he always referred to Habib as “my brother.” After the success of Listen to the Warm, McKuen would refer to having a son and daughter he’d fathered during a stay in France in the early 1960s, but as Alfonso writes:
There is no information that confirms Rod McKuen ever had children. To the author’s knowledge, no one else has ever mentioned meeting or communicating with them. At least four of his closest friends either doubt or flat-out deny that Jean-Marc and Marie-France ever existed. After Rod’s death, no son or daughter came forward to claim anything from his estate.
Yet clues slip out here and there in his poetry, if only unconsciously. In “A Cat Named Sloopy,” for example, he writes:
I never told her but in my mind I was a midnight cowboy even then. Riding my imaginary horse down Forty-second Street, going off with strangers to live an hour-long cowboy’s life, but always coming home to Sloopy, who loved me best…
While “midnight cowboy” might have been an obscure reference when Listen to the Warm was published, it became impossible to miss after the release of the Oscar-winning film two years later. And some of the lines in the title poem are positively creepy: “Follow women after dark/they can only yell for help or whisper yes”; “I’m grateful then for your upbringing/it led you like an arrow here uncomplicated and mine.”
Though many of McKuen’s poems are about love, they are almost never a celebration of love or the loved. Instead, McKuen most often looks at love in the rearview mirror. Even when he’s in a relationship, he’s thinking about its end, as in the lyric of one of his most popular songs, “If you go away”: “If you go away/as I know you will….” One woman who posted about Listen to the Warm on Goodreads wrote tellingly, “My husband gave me [McKuen’s] three small poetry books, early in our marriage. I think I probably related some of his feelings in poems. Now I just see a man having affairs with various women, and then breaking up with them.” In fact, the one constant in McKuen’s views on love is himself: “If I’m still alone by now it’s by design/I only own myself, but all of me is mine.”
His political views were as ambiguous as his sexuality. Though hundreds of thousands of young people bought his books, he was never comfortable being associated with hippies, Flower Power, or other aspects of the youth movement. “Flower power is fine but what they really need is shower power,” he used to joke, and he had little patience for hippies: “I got my success on my own terms, worked for it, suffered for it. Hippies are fine, but I like to be clean myself,” he told the New York Times in 1969. In one of McKuen’s earliest profiles, Joyce Haber of the Los Angeles Times wrote that his careful choice of material and his own presentation made him “a hip square or a square hip, depending on which way you look at it.” Flower children may have bought his books, but they didn’t go to his concerts. One account of a McKuen performance described his audience as “white, female, middle class, scrubbed and respectable.” “I’m an entertainer,” he would say, “and that’s what I want to be. People don’t want to keep getting hit in the head with social commentary all the time.”
When the Saturday Review invited McKuen to review a collection of Mao Tse-tung’s poems, he made sure to stipulate that “Being neither far right, left, nor extreme middle (though having antagonized in my brief span each faction in turn), I am more concerned with poetry than with politics.” Even McKuen’s religious views were elusive. He told one interviewer that he’d been “a Roman Catholic, an Episcopalian, a Methodist, a Mormon, and a Quaker” and that he was planning to give Judaism and Greek Orthodoxy a try.
In some ways, it was as if McKuen was trying to be both the most famous poet in the world and invisible. When his book The Power Bright and Shining: Images of My Country was published in 1976 to coincide with the Bicentennial, he claimed that he had started out wanting to write “a kind of Studs Terkel book” featuring the words of working men and women.5 “Unfortunately — or fortunately, I suppose — it’s not easy for me to be invisible….”
It’s the ambiguity of McKuen’s identity that ultimately undermines his poetry. One reviewer on Goodreads wrote, “These poems are like the antithesis of Bukowski.” Well, exactly. Like him or not, Charles Bukowski was unapologetically himself. Rod McKuen, on the other hand, seems never to have been entirely satisfied with whatever self he devised.
And that lack of a strong sense of self may have been the secret to both his commercial success and his artistic failure. There was just enough content in McKuen’s poems to give his readers the sensation of reading poetry without any of the individuality or obscurity that make good poems both challenging and memorable. McKuen dedicated Come to Me in Silence by saying, “This book is for nobody/everybody.” “I think he should make up his mind,” quipped the Daily Mail’s book editor, Peter Lewis.
“If there’s a message in my work,” McKuen would often tell interviewers, “it’s about man’s inability to communicate.” Which cannot but remind one of Tom Lehrer’s joke: “If a person feels he can’t communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it.” Even McKuen occasionally allowed readers to see the emptiness at the center of his poetry. As he wrote in “October 3,” from In Someone’s Shadow:
If you had listened hard enough you might have heard what I meant to say. Nothing.
I was going to end this piece here, dagger neatly inserted into the poet’s corpse. But I realized this would leave an incomplete picture of McKuen’s work. One of my favorite adages is that if a pile of horseshit is big enough, there might be a pony in there. I went through more than a dozen of McKuen’s books across his career as part of my research. And yes, there are a LOT of poems about beaches and sunsets and loneliness, but there are also oddities.
Fans of pop music have long known that some of the most interesting tunes in an artist’s repertoire are the stray tracks thrown in to pad out one side of an LP, songs where the constraints of what should or shouldn’t go into a hit were tossed aside and caution shelved in favor of unfiltered creation. Sometimes, the result is awful; and sometimes the result is — well, if not genius, at least intriguing.
And the same is true of McKuen’s oeuvre. It may be that McKuen sheltered a big hole of hurt at the center of his being. And while a big hole of hurt may be a handicap as a poet, it can often be a source of great energy for a satirist. Listen to the Warm, for example, which is easy to dismiss entirely from its drippy dedication alone — “For E.: If you cry when we leave Paris/I’ll buy you a teddy bear all soft and gold” — includes a poem with the title “First and Last Visit to an Annex in Burbank.” “Time was you couldn’t see the Forest Lawn for the trees.” Forest Lawn, just to fill in possible gaps in cultural history, is a huge cemetery in Glendale, California where hundreds of celebrities from L. Frank Baum to Elizabeth Taylor are buried. It’s also one of the inspirations for Whispering Glades in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One And because it’s the cemetery that set the standard for the grandiose American style, it’s also largely swathes of headstone-dotted grass.
The fact that I had to explain McKuen’s joke drained what meager comic value it may retain, but it serves to illustrate the vein of ironic observation that runs quietly underneath much of the teddy bear dreck of his poetry. One of the best examples is his 1959 album Beatsville. It was marketed to tap into the Beatnik craze, the fascination with beret-wearing, goatee-bearded, finger-poppin’, jazz-loving coffee house-haunting poets and musicians who ranged from serious (Allen Ginsburg) to silly (Maynard G. Krebs). Its cover shows an angst-ridden McKuen brooding over a glass of cheap wine as he sits next to a wild abstract painting with a mysterious and beautiful woman and would lead the buyer to believe this is a sincere sample of Beat art.
Instead, it’s a pastiche. Though he’d spent plenty of nights strumming his guitar and singing folk songs and published his own book of poetry, McKuen wasn’t buying the shtick. On Beatsville, he mocked the beats as poseurs — such as “Raffia the poet, who is not only an angry young man but a dirty old man as well” — and riffed on their lingo (“I was mixed up with this Gemini cat who, well, she didn’t like to be liked, like”). As Alfonso puts it, McKuen “came across more as an observer (or infiltrator)” than a card-carrying Beat. He went on to demonstrate his disdain for the Beats even more obviously in the single “The Beat Generation” he released with Bob McFadden soon after: “Some people say I’m lazy/They say that I’m a wreck/But that stuff doesn’t faze me/I get unemployment checks.”
He went through years, or volumes, rather, without indulging his appetite for caustic commentary, but sometimes it came out despite himself. One of the tracks on his first album with Anita Kerr, The Sea, included a short number titled “Body Surfing with the Jet Set” that was full of parodies of surfer talk along the lines of Beatsville: “Madame Marie Ouspenskaya went through her whole life never learning to surf/But she sure had some bitchin’ garlic leis.” Years later, in his collection Beyond the Boardwalk, he reused that title for something whose humor is almost too black to bear:
My father’s uncle’s brother married his cousin. Twice he beat her up and twice the police came and twice they carried her away. Does that make her his cousin twice removed? Surf’s up.
I keep a loaded pistol just beneath my bed, it’s nice to have a gun that works in case I lose my head. Hang ten.
Edward Habib and Rod McKuen at McKuen’s Hollywood mansion.
In his later books, the sunshine fades and more often gives way to unvarnished sarcasm. The Beautiful Strangers (1980) includes a multi-part poem titled “A Field Guide to Cruising” that is nothing less than a summation of decades of cruising experience — by both McKuen and his “brother” Edward:
Do not dress up or down but as you would for an occasion. With some luck and some premeditation it will be one.
Avoid church socials or the Bake-off. Those who gather at such gatherings have paired off long ago. They are in the middle of what they perceive as the act of living life, who are we to interrupt them?
In its way, this is every bit as uncomfortable as anything in Bukowski. If nothing else, McKuen here ventures into territory few other American poets (well, perhaps aside from William Dickey in The Rainbow Grocery). In the same book, “Designer Genes” veers into Ogden Nash territory with its perhaps too-ephemeral satire on a 1980s fad:
With laissez-faire each derriere with nom or nom de plume is held in place with little space to wiggle or sha-boom.
In one of his last books, Intervals (1986), McKuen not only displays a more good-natured sort of humor but also includes his most extensive use of social observation in a long poem titled, “Is There Life After Tower Records?” The poem, dedicated to Tower Records founder Russ Solomon, will tug at the nostalgia strings of anyone who spent a long night browsing through the aisles of this legendary West Coast record store.6 (And for those under 40, I won’t try to explain what a record store was except to say that it was the social and cultural heart of many towns in America.)
See them move between the aisles, pathways so narrow that passing past another is bold adventure, thrilling drawing-in of breath and stomach. And in between the aisles, the islands back to back that hide the million dreams inside bright jackets, well-turned sleeves plastic fused so fast it must be cut apart to reach the shiny metal hopes, the deep dark vinyl of delight whose inner grooves can only be decoded by the diamond needle, narrow beam of laser light.
This is just the kind of ecstasy you would experience flipping through the shrink-wrapped albums that filled Tower Records’ trays.
Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard in L.A.
Occasionally, just occasionally, McKuen shared moments too candid to be faked. Nothing like the trinkets about sun and sand and cats that cluttered many of his pages, with details that quickly burrow themselves uncomfortably into the reader’s mind:
One day coming home I saw a farmer pissing by the road. His balls hung down below his hand and looked so heavy that I began to run for no apparent reason. I didn’t stop until I reached the safety of my room.
Home again, I pulled the shade and got down from the bureau my Sunday School coloring book. Having chewed my brown Crayola just the day before, I had no choice but to color Jesus Christ’s hair yellow.
Ten pages before this in And to Each Season …, McKuen tells a ridiculous and unbelievable story about a friendship he made with a mountain lion he spotted in the woods behind his family’s house when they lived in rural Washington state. A few pages on, we’re back in the land of sun and lovers left behind.
Had McKuen held himself to the same standard of intimacy displayed in poems like this, he might truly have earned a place in one of the Oxford books of verse. And his poems might still be taught today.
But perhaps poet is not really the right label for Rod McKuen. Remember what he often said: “I’m an entertainer,” he would say, “and that’s what I want to be.” Perhaps we should heed Maya Angelou’s advice and believe him.
Reviewing that 1974 performance at the Troubadour in Santa Monica, Dennis Hunt of the L.A. Times wrote, “His performance was awash with flagrant melodrama. He used a lot of old, obvious tricks to put his songs across. On his closing number, ‘Seasons in the Sun,’ he was even gesticulating in the flamboyant manner of Al Jolson.”
There was a time when Al Jolson was considered the greatest entertainer in America. Today, it’s hard for anyone to see Jolson’s blackfaced rendition of “Mammy” in the original The Jazz Singer and cringe. As it might be hard for anyone to listen to one of Rod McKuen’s albums or read one of his books now and wonder how they managed to sell in astronomical numbers. Perhaps entertainment is not quite so timeless as poetry.
My thanks to Barry Alfonso for suggesting I take a look at Rod McKuen’s increasingly — if somewhat justly — neglected poetry.
1 The Tribune article also mentioned that the same bill featured a ventriloquist, Aaron Williams, “and his dusky friend, Freddy.”
2 The ad for McKuen’s appearance at the Troubadour credits the “greatest entertainer in the world” quote to The Times, London. I searched through the archives of The Times and failed to find any such statement. Indeed, the only time The Times saw fit to give McKuen more than advertising space, it was a brief entry in the “Times Diary” for 20 February 1969 about an appearance he made at the Odeon cinema on Leicester Square reading the lyrics to his title song for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Perhaps this, like many other things, was just something he made up.
3 One of McKuen’s favorite claims was that of having been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music in 1974. This intrigued me so much that I contacted both the Pulitzer committee and the Pulitzer archives at Columbia to confirm it. What they both stated was that prior to 1980, when the Pulitzer Prize adopted its current nomenclature of winners, finalists, and entrants, the submission process for the Music prize was essentially open. All entrants were considered “nominees” and all nominees (there were 40 in 1974) received a certificate. It is quite possible that McKuen or someone working for him submitted the nomination. That didn’t keep him from frequently mentioning the nomination for years thereafter.
4 After reading dozens of McKuen’s newspaper interviews, I strongly suspect the piece he was referring to was … an interview with Rod McKuen.
5 McKuen said he’d spent months traveling around the country as research. “I took a lot of odd jobs” taxi driver, hot dog seller, ice cream seller, mine worker, garbage man. “I was found out in Florida and it got on the front page of the Miami Herald that I was a Miami garbage collector for a week.” In fact, no such story appeared. Instead, on December 18, 1974, a story appeared on page 2 of the Herald that reported that “Millionaire poet Rod McKuen worked in Miami as a garbageman sometime in the last three months as research for a new book.” He said it was the toughest job he’d ever done. “I was aching everywhere. I don’t know what they put in those cans. It must be cement bricks.” The story also added bartender and soda jerk to the list of his odd jobs. The source for the story? Rod McKuen.
6 I’m told that people shopped at Tower Records during daylight hours, but I have no personal experience of this and have to discount it as myth.
The Glasgow-based independent publisher the Common Breath recently reissued the Great Depression classic of homelessness, Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing, and the initial response of readers has been quite enthusiastic. I think a lot of today’s readers may not have been aware before now that there was a wealth of good writers beyond John Steinbeck who dealt with the impact of an economic and social catastrophe that reached as far back as the mid-1920s. So, I wanted to take this opportunity to mention some of the other remarkable books written in the 1920s and 1930s that focused specifically on life “on the bum”: the experience of the homeless, unemployed, and often desperate men and women who drifted about America in search of something to hope for.
The grandfather of all American hobo books is probably Ralph Keeler’s Vagabond Adventures (1870), which I wrote about in one of my earliest posts back in 2006. Keeler got around by steamboat instead of railroad, but his life of wandering and casual labor set the pattern that thousands would follow. Vagabond Adventures is so old that it predates the word hobo, which seems to have sprung up in the 1890s and which, according to etymologist Anatoly Liberman, has an uncertain origin. By the 1893 edition of the Funk & Wagnall dictionary, however, the establishment had already passed its judgment on the hobo: “An idle, shiftless wandering workman, ranking scarcely above the tramp.” Tramp, in fact, was the label preferred by poetic types, starting with W. H. Davies’sThe Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) and continuing through Harry Kemp’sTramping on Life: An Autobiographical Narrative (1922). Kemp’s book, however, also marked the end of the romantic notions about life on the bum.
Jim Tully was probably the first to celebrate the hobo-cum-hobo life, though by the time he published this autobiography, he’d been off the road for over a decade. Still, he worked hard to cultivate his image as a bruiser and built upon it through a series of novels about boxing, carnies and circus performers, thiefs, and prostitutes. A lot of the tough-guy literature of the 1930s drew its inspiration from Tully.
Jack Black spent most of his life on the wrong side of the law. The novelist and historian R. L. Duffus claims that Black was credited with over half the robberies that took place in the first year after San Francisco was hit by the 1906 earthquake. In between stick-up jobs and break-ins, however, Black preferred to travel like other hobos, at the railroad’s expense. Though he doesn’t actually use the word hobo in the book, there are plenty of stories about swinging into empty freight cars and run-ins with railroad bulls. It’s likely that Black decided to write his autobiography after seeing the success of Jim Tully’s, but Black has inspired his own followers, including William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, and Black is sometimes described as “the original beatnik” (a word that’s probably just as archaic as hobo by now).
There are several different reissues of You Can’t Win available now, including a Kindle edition and an audiobook.
Bottom Dogs, Dahlberg’s first novel and largely autobiographical novel was written in Brussels but centers on the year or so that he spent bumming around the West after he was discharged from the Army. Dahlberg’s alter ego, Lorry, is what country songwriters call a ramblin’ man: “He didn’t care if he never saw any grub, he wanted his freedom, he wanted to knock about, hit the road whenever he felt like it, bum around the country.” And he arrives in a new town in typical hobo fashion:
… [H]e looked down; the train was rattling away at forty anyway; he wasn’t sure; but he knew he couldn’t jump. He’d have to wait till they got outside the yards of Ogden, Utah. He’d have to lay low, too, when he got in; he might get picked up in the streets. He wasn’t quite sure what he would do yet. Pulling into the yards outside of Ogden, Lorry jumped, hitting the coal cinders. He went down solid, bleeding at the hands and knees, and limped out of the railroad yards, stumbling toward the Lincoln Highway. He trudged along, half-heartedly hailing passing autos; he was too dirty; his shoes half off him; cinders in his ears; soot through his hair; no one would stop for him; they might think he was a stick-up.
Dahlberg was the first to test the appetite of critics and readers for a fictional equivalent of Tully and Black’s memoirs. Despite a foreword by D. H. Lwawrence, Bottom Dogs got a less than stellar reception. For Saturday Review, it seemed “to represent the vanishing point, the reductio ad absurdum of the naturalistic ‘low life’ novel,” that it amounted to ‘sub-animal reaction reported by sub-animal itself.’ “We doubt if the book helps one to understand any considerable or significant part of anything,” its reviewer sniffed.
Bottom Dogs is out of print now, but copies of the collection of Dahlberg’s first three novels that was published by Crowell back in 1976 can be picked up cheaply on Amazon and elsewhere.
More cultural artifact than story, The Hobo’s Hornbook reprints dozens of hobo rhymes and songs, including classics such as “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.” George Milburn, then a budding young folklorist, collected them from a variety of sources, including interviews with hobos in towns around the Midwest. “The idea that hoboes, as a class, were imbued with the spirit of the medieval troubadours first occurred to me in 1926 when I was living on the outskirts of Chicago’s hobohemia,” Milburn wrote in the introduction. “A short distance away was Washington Square, known to staid Southsiders and suburbanites as ‘Nut Square’ and to hoboes the nation over as ‘Bughouse Square.’ In that oasis speech is free and the hoboes make the most of it. There it was that I found my first hobo elocutionists….”
In You Can’t Sleep Here, Newhouse’s first novel, the hobo life is not a matter of personal choice but economic necessity. In the novel, a newspaper reporter loses his job and quickly drops through what little social support net existing in those early Depression days — getting evicted from his apartment, sleeping in flophouses and park benches, standing in soup kitchen lines, and finally sharing a crate in a Hooverville. The novel reflects the energetic radicalism with which Newhouse and many others responded to the economic devastation that followed the Stock Market crash. As one reviewer wrote, “Starvation has a remarkable effect on the intellect; the latter becomes susceptible to ideas to which, in the pride of its security, it had been stubbornly closed.”
Despite its somewhat childish title and a certain simple-worded prose style, this is a serious anthropo-/socio-logical study of the tens of thousands of young people made homeless, destitute, and itinerant by the Depression. Minehan spent several summers riding the rails and collecting observations and interviews in places like Chicago’s Bughouse Square. The New York Times’ reviewer was grateful for Minehan’s factual approach: “Congratulations are due to Thomas Minehan that he did not attempt to make literature out of the material he has put into this book. The stark, brutal, vivid, uncompromising realities of life he has set down in it are more important for his purposes, and for any use that could be made of them, than any literary product into which they could have been transformed.”
Algren’s first novel, it drew upon his experiences in Texas, where he lived for a year or so after graduating from college. While there, he became so destitute that he stole a typewriter and landed in jail for a spell. The book sold poorly when first published and Algren preferred to draw attention to A Walk on the Wild Side, the 1956 novel into which he worked a number of elements from the earlier work. Of Someboy, Algren later wrote, “This is an uneven novel written by an uneven man in the most uneven of American times.
Still, it’s full of details that demonstrate that Algren was no dilettante when it came to his time on the bum. He records verses like those found in Milburn’s collection:
The roundhouse in Cheyenne is filled every night With loafers and bummers of most every plight ; On their backs is no clothes, in their pockets no bills. Each day they keep comingfrom the dreary black hills.
He also recounts the tales that hobos tell each other about railroad bulls and sheriffs to avoid — like Seth Healey in Greenville, Mississippi:
He’ll be walking the tops and be dressed like a ’bo, so you’ll never know by his looks he’s a bull. But he’ll have a gun on his hip and a hoselength in his hand, and two deputies coming down both the sides ; your best bet then is to stay right still. You can’t get away and he’ll pot you if you try. So give him what you got and God help you if you’re broke. When he lifts up that hose-line just cover up your eyes and don’t try any backfightin’ when it comes down — sww-ish. God help you if you run and God help you if you fight; God help you if you’re broke and God help you if you’re black.
In this, Anderson’s first novel, an unemployed musician travels around America as a hobo until he stops in Chicago and forms a band with other homeless musicians. They get arrested after a fight breaks out when they refuse to play the Communist anthem, the “International.” Anderson was skeptical of the likelihood that the Depression would lead to revolution: “”Every idle man becomes economic-minded. He starts wanting to know why this man has a chauffeured Packard and he can’t get his three dollar shoes half-soled? But the American isn’t going to turn socialist or communist. At least not in this generation.”
This may accounted, in part, for Tom Kromer’s disdain when he reviewed Hungry Men for The New Masses. Kromer found it paled beside his own novel: “You will see no Jesus Christ looks in the eyes of Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men, no soup-lines that stretch for a block and never start moving, no derelicts dying of malnutrition on top of lice-filled three-decker bunks while the mission sign outside flashes ‘Jesus Saves’ on and off in the dark. In a word, you find no Hungry Men.”
The University of Oklahoma Press reissued Hungry Men in the early 1990s, but it’s out of print now. A Kindle version, however, is available from Amazon. Anderson’s second novel Thieves Like Us, which was filmed by Robert Altman in the 1970s, has been included in the Library of America’s volume Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s.
This is a picaresque novel by the long-forgotten novelist Louis Paul. Though the story centers on the travels of two ex-doughboys after World War One, Paul incorporated elements from the life of his better-known friend, John Steinbeck. It’s perhaps less of a hobo book than a book of many unsuccessful attempts to be hobos. The lead, one Resin Scaeterbun, accompanied by his Army buddy Copril Ootz, wind back and forth across the States in search of idleness.
As Paul told an interviewer, “They want to become bums, to give their whole souls to the art of bumming. But they find themselves circumvented and defeated on every hand.” But, he complained, “In a competitive economy, it is very hard to avoid work.” Instead, Resin finds himself at various times a bootlegger, fight promoter, poet, reporter, pornographer, and screenwriter, ending up in the thoroughly disgraced profession of bookseller. One reviewer wrote that Paul “writes as Rube Goldberg draws cartoons, with a delicious sense of the ridiculous.”
The Hiding Place opens with Hans Frick putting on his Nazi party uniform, preparing his breakfast, and taking a tray with meals down to the two RAF airmen imprisoned in his cellar. While they eat, he tells them a story about a British bomber shot down outside Karlsruhe. The crew, having been rescued after parachuting into the Rhine, were summarily shot by the local Gauleiter. He then heads upstairs, changes out of his uniform and into a suit, and bicycles in to work.
“The date was June the twelfth, nineteen fifty-two.”
Well into the 1950s, the Soviet Union was returning its last surviving German prisoners from World War Two. For several decades after 1945, stories would appear from time to time of Japanese soldiers who emerged from the jungles of Pacific islands after hiding out for years, unaware the war had ended. But in The Hiding Place, Robert Shaw imagines the plight of two British airmen held in isolation, ignorant of the outside world aside from the stories of victories on the Russian front, amazing new German weapons, and the continuing futile attempts by Allied bombers to attack Germany.
This is not, however, an alternate history like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Instead, it’s a tightly-focused study of the psychology of prisoners and their jailer that anticipates by over a decade the phenomenon known as Stockholm syndrome. Connolly and Wilson, having bailed out when their Lancaster bomber was hit on a raid over Bonn, are taken prisoner by Frick, a civil defense auxiliary. To keep them from being lynched by an angry mob, he ushers them to his nearby house and locks them in the bomb shelter that’s been built in his basement. Thanks to his late mother’s fears about being buried alive, the shelter is extremely strong and completely soundproofed.
As the first hours pass, however, he realizes the quandary he’s in: he cannot take the men to the Gestapo without questions about the delay; neither can he set them free. He soon decides the only solution is to keep them prisoner in his house. And so he enters upon a fiction that, once started, he can’t figure out how to end.
Shaw manages with remarkable success in convincing the reader that Frick could continue to convince his prisoners that his fiction is their reality. In part he does this by careful attention to the necessary practical details, but more is the result of his understanding of how prolonged captivity, particularly in relative comfort compared to what the typical Allied POW in Germany could expect, erodes the will to resist.
The monotony of their existence also saps their initiative. After an argument over Connolly’s latest idea for overtaking Frick and escaping, the two men stop suddenly:
After a moment, Connolly and Wilson felt the whole of the previous conversation had been incomprehensible: neither of them could remember what had been said; surely they had said it before; it seemed to bear no relation to anything whatsoever; and in what order had the sentences fallen? They didn’t know if it was exactly similar to hundreds of other conversations, or significant in some tiny detail, some fresh twist. Connolly swayed again. He felt so weak this morning. Wilson felt as if he had been improvising the same tune at a piano for years, and now, asked to play the original, had forgotten what it was. What had they been talking about?
Wilson endures their confinement better than Connolly. A lawyer in civilian life, he early on convinced Frick to supply pencil and paper so he could practice translating remembered English texts into German. When his memory ran out, his imagination took over. Gradually, Connolly becomes “aware how much Wilson was changing — how much he was beginning to enjoy writing — how much there seemed for him to do.”
Eventually — and quite by accident — Wilson and Connolly do escape, and in some ways what happens next forms the most interesting part of the book. Interesting because the reader wonders where Shaw will take the story. After all, the men think the war is still going on, that they are in the midst of enemy territory. So, even after getting away from Frick, Frick’s fiction remains with them: they are, indeed, actively resisting being set straight.
Frick also struggles to adapt to his new reality after the escape, for he has become as emotionally dependent upon them as they have been physically dependent upon him. Despite the inhumanity of Frick’s actions, Shaw makes him seem sympathetic in the end. The Hiding Place manages to be both thrilling and tender and — despite the very specific conditions upon which the story is premised — also somewhat timeless. It could almost as easily have been set during the American Civil War or on another planet as science fiction.
The Hiding Place was twiced staged as a television play: once in the U.K. with Shaw himself, along with Sean Connery, as the airmen, and once in the U.S. with James Mason as Frick and Richard Basehart and Trevor Howard as Wilson and Connolly. Unfortunately, neither one of the productions received positive reviews. Then in 1965, Gottfried Reinhardt, son of the legendary theater director Max Reinhardt, decided to turn it into a comedy, Situation Hopeless … but Not Serious with Alec Guinness as the jailer and Mike Connors and Robert Redford as the airmen, now Americans. One IMDB reviewer wrote that the movie “was sheer torture to watch”; another, that it was “the strangest Alec Guinness film out there.”
The Hiding Place was Robert Shaw’s first novel. And though he’s now primarily remembered as an actor, he wrote a total of five novels between 1958 and 1969. His second, The Sun Doctor (1961), won the Hawthornden Prize and is becoming rather rare and expensive. The Flag, is something of a realistic parable, perhaps along the lines of William Golding’s The Spire. The Man in the Glass Booth (1967), inspired by the Adolf Eichmann trial, was adapted with considerably more critical successful both for the stage and film. A Card from Morocco (1969), about two British expats on the prowl in Spain, bears traces of Anthony Burgess in its corrupted sense of humor. All, sadly, are long out of print.
The Hiding Place, by Robert Shaw London: Chatto & Windus, 1959
To someone who grew up in California, a place like Wisconsin seems both drab and exotic, the sort of bland nowhere you would never want to visit deliberately. This may be the prevailing view, but that’s not how I thought of the Badger State when I lived in San Diego. I remember discovering Michael Lesy’s classic book Wisconsin Death Trip in the early ‘70s. Its grim prose and even grimmer photos from the 1890s captured a world as darkly fascinating as H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham for me. The Wisconsin countryside seemed like a vast empty plain where human affairs — quiet tragedies punctuated with loud explosions of insanity — could play out. Living in a supposed paradise at the far end of the continent, Californians tend to think of the Midwest as irredeemably dull, filled with the sort of stunted people who don’t have the gumption to move West. To me, though, books like Lesy’s made the case that places like Wisconsin were filled with mystery, shadowy secrets, old houses harboring old people possessed by twisted dreams.
A lingering association of the Badger State with things stark and spooky led me to pick up a paperback copy of Good-Bye Wisconsin (Signet edition, 1964) at a San Diego used books store in the 1990s. The author of this short story collection was Glenway Wescott, a writer completely unknown to me. Reading it, I was struck by his lyrical prose and the empathetic treatment he gave to his damaged and morally confused characters. Years later, I ran across Wescott’s novel The Grandmothers at a library sale in the Pittsburgh area. This 1927 novel — apparently a best-seller that went through at least 24 printings — was a much deeper dive into the moody Midwestern landscapes and tormented characters that Good-Bye Wisconsin dealt with. I recently re-read it and found it an even richer experience the second time around.
Glenway Wescott, 1933.
On the surface, The Grandmothers treads the same ground covered by Sherwood Anderson: commonplace scenes rendered with a poetic touch, filled with repressed, thwarted men and women who turn into grotesque exaggerations of themselves when their hurts and grievances remain buried too long. Anderson generally dealt with Midwestern small town life rather than more isolated rural folk, but the same sense of rigid Protestant proprieties draped over chronic regret and moldering obligation is present in Wescott’s novel as well. Both Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and The Grandmothers feature an adolescent boy with artistic inclinations who strongly resembles the author at a similar age. That said, Wescott seems to accept and embrace the failings and cruelties of the society he grew up in with a greater sense of forgiveness than Anderson does. And while Westcott is more literal and less parable-like in his accounts of his characters’ lives, his poetic language is even more mystically evocative than Anderson’s. The Grandmothers doesn’t mythologize its gruff, semi-articulate men and wounded yet indominable women so much as surround them with a visionary glow. Its prose heightens the normal world and makes you see it with renewed color and vibrancy:
“They went down the Mississippi on a river boat. There were whisperings of the water and a sound of kisses around the prow as it advanced through regular ripples that were like a wedding veil…”
“The east was covered with tiny clouds like the torn bits of paper which a newcomer finds in a dismantled house; the sun entered the sky like such a newcomer.”
“As a flying seed will debauch a whole meadow with flowers, one kiss, one caress not even wished for, had spoiled her peace of mind, even her good health.”
The arc of The Grandmothers is simple and reminiscent of similar narratives. A group of families move to frontier Wisconsin before the Civil War and intermarry, establishing lines of descendants who prosper or succumb to ill fortune (mostly the latter) as the world enters the 20th Century. Wescott treats nearly everyone with respect and at least a modicum of sympathy — there are no real villains in the book. He doesn’t shy away from bringing out the more unpleasant and downright bizarre qualities of his characters, though. One of the grandmothers of Alwyn (the stand-in for a young Glenway Wescott) suffers from excessive prudery and takes to hiding small household objects to torment her husband. The couple’s poisoned but enduring marriage is summed up in a bitter vision: “During their last years it was as if they lay on one deathbed — the dying hands interlaced by habit, by hatred of each other and love of God, the dying mouths murmuring truths without pity and complaining still.” (I read this and thought of certain photographs in Wisconsin Death Trip and shuddered a little.)
At times, the slow-seeping toxicity within these family relationships gets a tad claustrophobic. Those who wander away from the ancestral homesteads generally come to no good, though their travels do add some excitement. Black sheep Evan Tower runs off to fight in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, deserts the army and hops a freighter for London, marries an Italian woman and ends up living with his wife and children under an assumed name in New Mexico. These adventures provide contrast to the severe monotony of rural Wisconsin life, throwing its grinding routines and unyielding moral codes into starker relief.
Wescott parses the subtle shadings within old-fashioned Protestantism without displaying disdain or boredom. (Unlike Sherwood Anderson, he doesn’t flaunt his pagan instincts.) The lives of the most publicly religious are portrayed in the least flattering terms — the “stringless harp wrapped up like a mummy in the music room” found in a minister’s home suggests his overall stuffiness. It is the women in the book — most of them thwarted or broken by love — who seem to possess the most life-affirming faith. Believe in a forgiving God and the promise of heaven makes the sorrows of the everyday world easier to accept. Yet that isn’t the whole story – as the book nears its conclusion, Wescott makes clear that hard-shell Methodism, habitual labor and flattened expectations still allow for nobility and satisfaction if not joy. The “dignity of citizenship” and “the perfect and tender monotony of an uneventful married life” deserve celebration, something Anderson (let alone fellow Midwestern chronicler Sinclair Lewis) might not concede.
The final chapters of the novel lay the older generation to rest as Alwyn’s growing awareness of his family heritage comes into focus. Wescott notes that Alwyn spied upon his family, “studied to convict them,” even as he watched his grandmothers slowly die. He compares his desire to write to the art of taxidermy, an attempt to simulate life out of selected pieces of the dead past. As she wastes away, his maternal grandmother mistakes Alwyn for her son and tells him, “You know, you are my only sweetheart.” Whether this parting benediction is given to the wrong person is irrelevant. Wescott finds an all-embracing love in the resolute endurance and collective heartbreak of his ancestors.
In its sometimes bleak, sometimes tender depiction of a vanished world, The Grandmothers anticipates Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels. There’s a quietly compelling drama to the stories that both writers tell about the Midwest, as well as an attempt to describe ordinary men and women with as much perceptiveness and nuance as possible. They share a deep empathy for the overlooked and undervalued. I haven’t seen Wescott’s name invoked in reviews of Robinson’s fiction. Those who admire her work would find The Grandmothers worthy of discovery.
I have visited Wisconsin many times over the past two decades. I’ve seen the sorts of places Wescott described in The Grandmothers and maybe even met the descendants of the people he wrote about. The mysteries of the Badger State still haven’t been dispelled for me. I hope they never are. If I need to revisit them, I will return to The Grandmothers one more time.
The Grandmothers, by Glenway Wescott New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1927
by Patrick Bennett (1988), however, Anderson spent two years “in the twilight world of vagabonds, riding the side-door Pullmans across the nation — San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, Boston. Now and then he turned to riding his thumb along the highways, although he felt that hitchhiking was ‘like sticking your tail out and every time somebody passes they kick it.'”
