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The Last Blue Sea, by David Forrest (1959)

Cover of first edition of David Forrest was the pen-name of Australian writer, academic and historian David Denholm (1924-1997). Among his numerous works of non-fiction, including an acclaimed history, The Colonial Australians about the early white settlement of the country, were a few novels. The Last Blue Sea, published in 1959, was his first. The book drew considerably praise and attention when released in Australia and the US. However, the novel went out of print by the early 1970s and was then largely forgotten. Penguin Books Australia published a reprint in
1985 but the book has remained off the shelves since.

Forrest, a veteran himself of WW2, fought with the 59th Battalion of the Australian Army in New Guinea in 1943. That unit, although it had fought as a regular formation in the First World War, had been down-graded to a part-time reservist (militia) unit during the inter-war years. When the Second World War began, the 59th was re-assembled as a militia force. During the war, such militia units, comprised of conscripts and a smaller number of part-time reservists, formed a large part of the Australian army after 1942.

During the war, there was considerable animosity between the militia units and the men of the AIF (Australian Imperial Force), the latter comprising the volunteers who enlisted in the early part of the war. With some justification, the AIF units regarded themselves as better-trained, more professional and more motivated than the Militia men, whom the former nick-named “Chockos” i.e., chocolate soldiers who always melted under fire. There was no doubt that some militia formations deserved their poor reputations, especially those that remained garrisoned in Australia and were rife with in-discipline, desertions and poor morale. Yet some militia units performed remarkably well in the New Guinea Campaign, most famously at Kokoda in 1942. One can say “remarkably” considering the often poor training, lack of equipment and indifferent leadership many militia units were burdened with (some men arrived in New Guinea literally never having fired a rifle before).

With this background in mind, Forrest’s novel depicts a Militia unit—the 83rd battalion—in the campaign in eastern New Guinea in 1943 as US and Australian forces advance northwards, slowly pushing back the Japanese. The story is told from the viewpoints of a number of characters, including the battalion’s senior officers. But the primary focus is on one platoon and, in particular, on one of its’ sections comprising a Corporal and eight privates.

If the novel has any main characters, they would be two privates, 19-year-old Ron Fisher, a Bren-gunner and 26-year-old Robert “the Admiral” Nelson, a former schoolteacher and now an Owen (Australian-made sub-machine-gun) gunner. Nelson, the oldest of the section, has the fatherly role of the group. Yet even he, with his worldly wisdom, appears in awe of Fisher, an enigmatic figure, mature far beyond his years and whose background is only hinted at but indicates that he survived a tough childhood and is now a man that understands life more than many men twice his age.

The platoon engages the Japanese in the steaming, thickly forested steep slopes of New Guinea. The enemy, under-supplied and starving, fight desperately and with suicidal courage. In this struggle, there is no quarter, the enemy is never examined close-up, he remains a distant, hated figure. The militia men have to endure the taunts and insults from their AIF cousins. As the platoon advances through a ruined town, watching them are some AIF commandoes who snort with contempt “any battle they start, we have to finish.” The army is on a race against time, not just against the enemy but against the jungle and its climate. The campaign must be won before too many men succumb to malaria and before their rotting uniforms literally fall from their bodies.

The potential weaknesses of the militia is personified in one soldier of the section, private “Nervous” Lincoln who deserts early in the campaign but is caught and returned to his unit. He nearly makes it through to the very end of the advance before succumbing to his fear. To modern eyes, this might redeem him but as far as his comrades are concerned, “they would remember all their lives that Lincoln was not with them.” A major theme of the novel is the meaning to human existence that can be discovered by the endurance of hardship and danger. The Pacific Ocean (the “last blue sea” of the title) becomes a symbol as it slowly, tantalisingly becomes nearer as the exhausted soldiers advance through the jungle against the surviving enemy. A symbol of promise, of peace, of a just reward for hardship, sacrifice and duty. As the novel progresses, it becomes apparent that faint-hearted types like Lincoln were the exception, not the rule. “Their uniforms were rotting and falling apart, but their weapons were spotlessly clean.”

The novel explores the inner musings of the characters. In this, it anticipates such a device employed in the 1998 war movie The Thin Red Line although Forrest’s novel is not as dreamily lyrical as that film. Like all war novels published prior to the 1970s, there is a curious lack of coarse language, a reflection of the need to satisfy censors of the day. One critic did suggest that the novel’s depiction of Australian soldiers lacked the cheeky humour that they were known for, saying the Aussies in this novel are “way too serious and philosophical” in their manner. That might be unfair, given that these half-trained soldiers had been sent to one of the harshest terrains of the war against one of the most fanatical enemies, so a sombre mood might be understandable. In one later scene, Nelson, now a walking wounded case, is sent back to the rear accompanied by a younger injured soldier. The two crippled men have to climb a forested mountain, through clinging mud and steaming rain, their wounds crawling with infection. Seeing that the younger man’s will and strength is failing, Nelson saves him by goading him, “Didn’t you have to fight for anything, Jonesy? Was life just dished out to you on a silver plate?”

In another scene during the long trek back, Nelson says to Jones, “You can make this mountain mean something. I climbed a mountain once. When I was your age. And then I wasted the next seven years. You see, I should have gone on and climbed the next mountain. Only when I was over the first one, I sat down. I had to come to New Guinea to wake up to myself ….”

The Last Blue Sea remains curiously little-known in Australia, despite the lavish attention bestowed on this nation’s military history. It is one Australian novel that deserves a fresh audience.

This is a guest post generously contributed by Peter Hill [email protected]

The Last Blue Sea, by David Forrest
Melbourne: Heinemann, 1959

A Walk in the Sun, by Harry Brown (1944)

A Walk in the Sun was a slim war novel first published in 1944 which generated considerable hype and attention upon its initial release, followed closely by a successful film version. Yet, despite the praise of many reviewers and the conviction that this was a major work of war fiction, the book was soon forgotten. Perhaps it was obscured by the euphoria surrounding the end of the Second World War or more likely, it was elbowed aside by the spate of more self-important ‘big’ war novels that emerged in the United States in the post-war era.

Harry Brown (1917-1986) was an American writer & poet who achieved a measure of success in the post-war era. Born in Maine and educated at Harvard, Brown had works of poetry published in 1941 after winning several poetry awards, including the Shelley Prize in 1939. Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbour, Brown enlisted in the military in July 1941, serving in the US Army Engineers Corps. After the United States joined the war, the army put Brown’s writing skills to use by assigning him to the staff of Yank Magazine in 1942, a job he held until the end of hostilities.

After the war, Brown turned to writing as a full-time profession. By the early 1960s, he had produced four novels, a play, several collections of verse and he had written several Hollywood screenplays and had collaborated on a number of others. His play A Sound of Hunting (1946) was later filmed in 1952 as Eight Iron Men while his 1960 novel The Stars in their Courses inspired the 1966 John Wayne Western El Dorado. Screenplays that Brown worked on included The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and Ocean’s 11 (1960) and he was co-recipient of an Oscar for best screenplay for A Place in the Sun (1951).

A Walk in the Sun was Brown’s first novel, a work he wrote during his spare time while working for Yank. Released in 1944, the novel was an instant success, receiving much praise and it was serialised in Liberty Magazine that same year, expanding its audience. A film version was released the following year, directed by Lewis Milestone (of All Quiet on the Western Front fame). Critics received the novel warmly upon its initial release, the New York Times calling it the “best novel of the war.” Yet the novel quickly slid into obscurity during the next few years, as did, albeit to a lesser extent, the accompanying film version.

In just a few short years, the United States had advanced from an isolationist country ravaged by the Great Depression into an industrial and military super-power. Among the intelligentsia of the US, the final vestiges of the cultural cringe (inferiority complex) towards Europe were being eradicated as American artists and writers now felt able and emboldened to take their place on the world stage. For the American literacy scene, an event as momentous as the Second World War demanded a great and important novel, a new War & Peace for the 20th century. When Brown’s novel appeared in 1944, for a brief moment critics thought that the great American war novel had already arrived. Yet the post-war years saw a steady succession of WW2 novels, all generating attention and impressive sales, all of them big and long (some might say bloated and over-long). The war-novel “boom,” that lasted a decade and a half after 1945, began with Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions which both appeared in 1948, followed by Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny and James Jones’ From Here to Eternity (both 1951). Bringing up the rear came other (as popular albeit less-regarded) novels such as Leon Uris’ Battle Cry (1953), Anton Myrer’s The Big War (1957) and David MacCuish’s now-forgotten Do Not Go Gentle (1960). Brown’s book was simply swamped by this crowd of “big” war novels.

Looking back after nearly three-quarters of a century, it appears that while Brown’s little novel was perhaps over-praised upon its release, it is also true that it had been unjustly neglected in the decades since. The novel begins at the sharp end, in the early dawn, a landing barge carrying a platoon of GIs is approaching the coast of Italy. The novel is intentionally vague on the details- there is no mention of a date, or the exact location, there is no backdrop to the story, nor any explanation of the wider campaign of which this little group is a part of. As the novel begins, the platoon CO Lieutenant Rand has just been wounded in the head by shrapnel from a nearby shell, a freak casualty from one of the few shots the enemy has fired. The senior Sergeant, Halverson, is now in charge. Shortly after landing on the beach, Halverson leaves his men to go find the Company Captain but never returns, a victim of an enemy machine-gun nest. Command now falls to Sergeant Porter, a job he does not want.

The rest of the novel follows the shrinking platoon as it advances inland. Most of the men are veterans, having seen action in North Africa and Sicily. Some are already war-weary and one man will be claimed by combat fatigue before the morning is out. The novel is a simple one, the time span it covers is only half a day from dawn to early afternoon. No locations are mentioned, as far as the reader knows, it is just somewhere on the Italian coast. No context is supplied, the dwindling platoon seems to be on their own, marching inland towards an enemy-held farmhouse. The ending is ambiguous, there is no neat conclusion. It is like the author has simply taken a neat slice from the progress of one day in the life of an infantry unit in a combat zone. Only the reader has the benefit of hindsight, knowing that this is merely the first morning of what will be a very long and bloody campaign of which few of the platoon, if such a rate of attrition continues, will see the end of.

The style is straightforward and unpretentious. After the lengthy and self-important novels mentioned above, the simplicity of this little work seems refreshing. The characters in Brown’s novel only concern themselves with the present. There is no sentimentalising about memories of home, no musing on the deeper meaning of the conflict, no debates on the wider implications of what they do. As British regulars used to say in the Great War, these men are “‘ere coz they’re ‘ere.” There is certainly the influence of Hemingway but I would argue that Brown’s novel has more in common with the “Hard-Boiled” crime novels of the Thirties with its direct simplicity and its bluntness that nonetheless avoids explicit detail. A contemporary review in the Nation argued that Brown’s novel owed more to the short stories of James Thurber rather than Hemingway, as the novel does not have the righteous anger of the latter. That argument is valid, Brown’s characters may gripe and grumble but they do not rage against their fate. Like the characters in Thurber’s works, the members of the platoon are ordinary, decent men caught up in un-usual (or in this case, extreme) circumstances. Despite being a tiny fragment of a vast machine, they retain their identity as individuals. Despite the untidy confusion of war and the unjust randomness of who dies and who survives, these men remain compelled to keep going.

This is a guest post generously contributed by Peter Hill [email protected]

A Walk in the Sun, by Harry Brown
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944

Signed With Their Honour, by James Aldridge (1942)

Cover of Signed With Their HonourJames Aldridge (1918- 2015) was an Australian journalist and war correspondent who covered the Second World War in Greece, Crete and North Africa 1940-1941. Signed With Their Honour was his first novel.

Aldridge enjoyed a period of considerable success in the late-war to post-war period and his biggest-selling novel was The Diplomat published in 1949. In the early post-war era, Aldridge was one of Australia’s most successful novelists in international terms. Yet by the early 1960s, his prestige was on the decline with his novels receiving increasingly poor or indifferent reviews and afterwards Aldridge devoted most of his writing to producing work for children or young adults. By the time of his death in 2015, none of his works were still in print and Aldridge’s writing was virtually forgotten (when he died in London three years ago, none of the Australian media even bothered to notice).

Aldridge chose a variety of settings for his novels. Early works such as Signed With Their Honour and The Sea Eagle (1944) were set in the Second World War, The Diplomat was a political drama set in the Azerbaijan Revolution in Iran, The Hunter (1950) portrayed fur hunters in Canada’s north, The Last Exile (1962) was set in the Suez Crisis and A Captive in the Land (1962) was a Cold War drama. A common thread among his novels is the conflict between an individual’s desires, morals and conscience and his obligations, demands and duty to the state and its political structures.

Signed With Their Honour was one of Aldridge’s more durable works, remaining in print off and on until the 1980s unlike many of his other novels. Set in Greece and later in Crete, it depicts the British Royal Air-Force and its participation in the Italian invasion of Greece in 1940, followed by the German invasion in early 1941. Although the author was Australian, the novel’s central character, a young pilot named Quayle, is English. One of his fellow pilots is Australian but is only a minor character. Whether Aldridge chose this device to help improve potential sales in the UK is unclear.

The title of the novel is a line from a Stephen Spender poem ‘The Truly Great’, a work that celebrates the individual that seeks greatness, glory and achievement even if the price is a life cut short. Aldridge no doubt considered the line apt for a novel about fighter pilots in wartime. This novel depicts the pilots of a British fighter squadron equipped with out-dated Gloster Gladiator biplanes, isolated in the heat and dust of Greece with few supplies and facing a powerful enemy invasion. The novel is closely based on the exploits of a real-life unit, No 80 Squadron, which fought in Greece during that campaign and, despite possessing out-dated biplanes, inflicted heavy losses on their Italian and later, their German opponents.

For a wartime novel, there is a surprisingly bitter tone which possibly reflects the feelings of many towards Britain’s role in the Greek and Cretan campaigns which ended in defeat. Characters in the novel complain about the too-little supplies they have been given, the indifferent Allied leadership, the false promises and hopes given to the Greek people and the in-adequacy of their equipment, being allocated old biplanes while fleets of more modern fighter-planes sit on airfields back in England.

The central character Quayle develops a relationship with a Greek girl and his feelings towards her and the longings of his inner self, combined with his bitterness of the Allied bunglings of the war around him, leads him to consider desertion. But his conscience and sense of duty in the fight against Fascism compel him to remain in the air.

The novel received considerable attention when it was first published in the US and the UK, earning some positive reviews and it became a best seller in both countries. Not all reviews were positive, Time Magazine dismissed it as ‘clumsy fiction’ for example. But the novel received a lot of attention. Rank Studios in Britain purchased the film rights and in 1943 embarked on production of a film version. However the project was abandoned after three Gladiator biplanes were written off in accidental crashes and the funding dried up.

The novel owes a big debt to Ernst Hemingway and the master’s obvious influence was pointed out by the book’s more negative critics. But despite its’ flaws, I believe this novel deserves to be better known still today. It vividly portrays aerial combat and the sights and smells of the Greek campaign. And, unlike his later works, it moves along at a smart pace and doesn’t allow itself to become bogged down in the details. Aldridge’s later novels, although perhaps more ambitious, became bloated in their own self-importance. Even his 1944 follow-up to Signed With Their Honour, the novel The Sea Eagle, about Australian soldiers trapped behind enemy lines in German-occupied Crete, now looks rather dated and pretentious with its heavy-handed symbolism and references to Greek mythology. This novel is slimmer, easier to digest and deals with a subject that obviously fired the author’s imagination without stretching his writing abilities too thin.

This is a guest post generously contributed by Peter Hill [email protected]

Signed with Their Honour, by James Aldridge
London: Michael Joseph, 1942

Shade of Eden, by Kathleen Sully (1960)

Cover of Shade of Eden by Kathleen Sully

I wrote in my post on Kathleen Sully’s Canaille that she was an unstudied novelist — sometimes clumsy in her prose and style but also free of many of the conventions of more mainstream writers. In Shade of Eden, she amply demonstrates that one set of conventions she felt free to ignore was that of sexuality. Without using any of the terms, she introduces homosexuality, lesbianism, even polyamory into her story — and shows no concern with any of it. If any moral principle applies for Sully, it is simply that love is better expressed than frustrated.

To demonstrate, she plays out a set of variations on this theme. There are Bette and Eddie, married some years and with a young son, Sandy, who have reached the stage where each realizes the other is not the perfect match. There are the Patchetts, married longer and irrevocably entrenched in mutual contempt. There is Cliff, brought into the situation by Eddie in hopes of putting Bette’s fidelity to the test. There is Patsy, an old friend of Jean Patchett’s who proves to be carrying a torch for her. And there is Miss Hinks, one of Patsy’s co-workers at the local department store, for whom any opportunities for love have passed by.

These characters she weaves in and out as if performing a series of chemical experiments: how will she react with him (or her)? Some reactions are almost lethal. Others fizzle without effect. And some produce surprising results. Bette, Eddie, Cliff, and Sandy prove a better combination than any other set of twos or threes:

They existed in unity. Their blood — each felt its pulsing — seemed to flow round their circle, into and out of each, one stream through four hearts; their thoughts were all the same colour and texture; their spirit was one. Four souls had found a rent in the fabric around Eden and had crept in past the bearer of the flaming sword.

“Or had the bearer looked the other way?” This is the real world, after all, and specifically England in the 1950s. This delicate construction must collapse, of course, and not all the pieces will get picked up. Finding and expressing love does not guarantee lasting results. It’s just as likely to turn out like that stuff you squirt into a flat tire to get to the nearest gas station.

Shade of Eden proves once again that if Kathleen Sully has been forgotten by English literary history, it may well have been because she was something that English literature hadn’t seen for centuries: a naïf. Wikipedia states that “naïve art does not necessarily evince a distinct cultural context or tradition. Naïve art is recognized, and often imitated, for its childlike simplicity and frankness.” Although this was written about visual art, it may offer the best way of understanding Kathleen Sully’s remarkable oeuvre.

Shade of Eden, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1960

Canaille, by Kathleen Sully (1956)

Cover of Canaille by Kathleen SullyIn his Observer review of Canaille, Kathleen Sully’s second book, John Wain wrote, “one never knows what she will do from one page to the next, only that it will probably be something surprising.” After reading over a dozen of Sully’s novels, I can say that truer words have rarely been written.

Canaille (French for vulgar, roguish, blackguard) collects two novellas, “For What We Receive” and “The Weeping and The Laughter.” Neither is the least bit like the other, and while “For What We Receive” is a bit in the vein of Canal in Moonlight, Sully’s first novel, and Through the Wall, which followed a year later: life among the hardscrabble poor of industrial England, the bread-and-drippings set. Although she occasionally descends into “we were poor but honest” sentimentality, Sully never softens her edges. “For pity’s sake use your snot-rag, Nat” is the opening line, and personal hygiene is no one’s strong suit in this book.

Nat is Nathan Mellowe, a likeable but clumsy and slow lad working in a garage. The six Mellowes live in a shack at the edge of town, Mr Mellowes being a farm laborer whose primary skill is shoveling. Nat and the rest of the Mellowes come to the rescue of Beryl, the garage’s pretty typist, when she is left in the family way by a Yank lothario passing through town, and he and Beryl wind up married merely to provide her with a semblance of propriety when the baby arrives. A few more bumps along the road of their life and, with the help of family, co-workers, and neighbors, something more grows from their Platonic relationship. “For What We Receive” might well be subtitled, “It Take a Village to Make a Marriage.”

“The Weeping and The Laughter,” on the other hand, might be described as a nightmare within a dream about a nightmare, and even that isn’t close to being accurate. It opens in a hospital ward, where an elderly woman with her leg in a cast is furiously writing out an account of a dream. It it, she escapes in the night from a hellish boarding house, perhaps a brothel, and encounters an equally mysterious man as she stands on a bridge contemplating suicide. “I learnt to get out of myself: I used to flow through the top of my head, go to the window, jump off into space and fly about like and owl,” she tells him.

She then relates how she married a Scottish fisherman and lived with him and his mother in a rough stone cottage by the sea. Winter sets in, the mother dies, and she is sitting there by the fireside, knitting the man’s socks “and hating it with all the hate I had.” Then she is the woman of the house in a fine city residence, surrounded by convivial friends, when she floats away again:

Sitting, sitting, sitting, and eventually thinking nothing, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, feeling nothing but a sense of smug possession.

The bell must have clanged on, noting each hour of each day, week, month and year. The community must have gone about its business of waking, working, eating and sleeping. There must have been merry-making, and mourning, too; and there must have been accidents, blood must have flowed and music must have set young feet dancing and gay hearts beating, yet I was aware of nothing until some time, I have no notion of when, the bell stopped.

Then she is a slum mother of nine thin, hungry children, worried about lice and scabs and where the next meal will come from. Then she is in a train station, watching other people in a mirror. “One face interested me more than the others, although it was a caricature of a face.” She discovers the face is hers. She takes a train to a remote seaside village where she rents a caravan near the beach and wanders about, trying to unravel her dreams. A neighbor, a beachcomber living in a shack (shades of A Man Talking to Seagulls) recites Ernest Dowson’s poem, “They Are Not Long”:

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate;
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses,
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

“It isn’t true,” she tells him. “Every desire, every smile, every hateful thought, all leave their mark and are carried by us to where next we go.”

Where next we go is into a Somerset town, where Mr. Upforde, a draper, lives with his wife and their three daughters, Vera, Grace, and Lennie. Vera is lovely, Grace homely and awkward, Lennie rather peculiar, not quite all there. Mr Upforde dotes on Vera, ignores Lennie, and shuns Grace to the point where she cuts herself just to get some attention. We follow the girls through several decades and several alternate narratives, winding up in a seaside cottage where the three women, all spinsters now, sit in a fetid bath of bitterness and recrimination.

Somehow Sully manages to tie all these odd, diverse, and loose threads together in the end. It is all as convincing and unreal as a nightmare. Reviewing the book for the Guardian, Norman Shrapnel summed it up well:

A woman’s day-dreaming has, as it were, its bluff called and is transposed into real life. Where does the one end and the other begin? The writer seems to be suggesting that the boundary is subtly confusing and yet vital to disentangle, which is rather like scrambling all the eggs and then telling us to count our chickens. But again she has the power, and it is an unanswerable one, of being able to carry us with her into her fantasies.

The TLS reviewer of Canaille described Sully as “a Sunday writer,” adapting the phrase, “Sunday painter.” I think this is a fair assessment of Sully’s talent. On the one hand, she was unschooled, unstylish, sometimes incorrect in her usage (e.g., disinterested to mean uninterested). But that lack of schooling also allowed her tremendous imaginative and narrative freedom, to a degree comparable only with that of Doris Lessing and J. G. Ballard in her generation of English novelists.

(As an aside, one possible reason Sully was largely neglected even when her books were in print is the erratic quality of her dust jacket designs. When I first received Canaille, between the French title and the coarse yet artistically affected figures on the cover, I thought it would turn out to be a story set on the waterfront in Marseilles. Even Gollancz’s simple but garish canary yellow covers are better than this.)

Canaille, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1956

Canaille

Luxury Cruise, by Joseph Bennett (1962)

Cover of Luxury Cruise by Joseph BennettReading Luxury Cruise is a bit like thumbing through issues of Holiday magazine, the glossy travel magazine of the 1950s. The look, the ads, the content — they all spell “M,000,000,000Ney.” The passengers aboard the Olympic have paid at least $14,000 each for their berths on this round-the-world cruise. That’s over $120,000 in today’s dollars, so this is a ship of very rich fools.

Some of them are spending new and plentiful Texas oil money. Some of them are more carefully doling out the remains of very old money. Others seem to be riding along on a supply of cash seemingly capable of endless replenishment. These are the boys “perpetually arrested at the sportcoat stage”: “They were genial, restless children, careful never to get too drunk, and their toys were sailing yachts and expensive motorcars and airplanes, and stocks and bonds and oil wells and gold mines, and whole ocean-going liners.”

Of the new money men, some are desperately trying to make their way into the old money circles the only way they know how: with cash. So the Seth Carsons of Dallas open up the pipelines and let the champagne and caviar flow. The Aldriches, Van Gouverneurs, and Ashcrofts drink and eat it all up and, as you can predict, leave tipsy, full, and disdainful of the Carson’s lack of subtlety.

Emlen Boyne and his wife — also of Dallas — are along for the ride simply because it seems like the sort of thing you do when you’re rich. So Em drinks a little too much on the first night out, talks a little too loud, enjoys himself more than he should. And earns the same sort of dismissal as Seth Carson — or so it seems. Coarse and boorish, the old money murmurs to each other. “They were generous, impulsive, simple people — peasants grown rich in the vast lottery of America, and they must be tolerated.” But behind the comments there is a lingering sense of having encountered something that had been bred out of them generations back: “a directness, a vigor, a cunning and yet an understanding and sincerity which was rare enough in their circles — Porcellian, for instance, at Harvard, or Brooks in New York.”

Joseph Bennett, the author, scion of the Pittsburgh steel Bennetts, Princeton ’43, Lieutenant (j.g.) (US Navy) in World War Two, partner of Wellington and Co., was familiar with both sides in this drama: the old money he grew up among and the new money he invested their remaining cash in. But he was also familiar with both sides of his own creation. He could undoubtedly have afforded a cabin on the Olympic, and he aspired to be the playwright, too. His senior thesis on Baudelaire was published by the Princeton University Press the year after his graduation and his seed money had helped establish the Hudson Review after the war.

Though Bennett knew his characters well, however, he apparently didn’t know what to do with them. There is much drinking, much talking, much commenting by some on the faults of others, many details noted that one can only assume are both accurate and precisely placed. There is a drunk stumbling by accident into a woman’s cabin and possibly committing a rape (but almost certainly not). There is the loss of a million-dollar necklace that could possibly be a theft (and most certainly is). There is an Italian count who plasters himself in make up and old Ike Shawley of Osage, Oklahoma, one of the original oil barons, spending his final days withering away on the sun deck. There are brassy broads who relish their booze and their boys and Main Line heiresses who would be happy if sex stayed next to sewing machine the way it does in the dictionary.

What there isn’t is, well, a point. Why bring these people together and why roll out their antics for us to observe? The plot lines of the probably-wasn’t rape and the definitely-was theft play themselves out three-fourths of the way through the book. What follows is a bit like watching the actors shuffle around on stage, still in character, for another twenty minutes after the play is over. Faultless scenery, costumes, and mannerisms can never compensate for the lack of any compelling drama or comedy. Bennett most certainly knew his material. He just didn’t know what to do with it.

Bennett died of leukemia at the age of 50 in 1973. From the records of his papers, held in the Princeton University Library, he appears to have written, or at least started, a half dozen other novels besides Luxury Cruise. With titles such as “Sons of Rich Men” and “Trevor and Townshend Fortunes,” they suggest Bennett might have produced something quite striking on the subject of American wealth if he’d lived longer.

Luxury Cruise is available in electronic format from the Open Library (link).

Luxury Cruise, by Joseph Bennett
New York: George Braziller, 1962

Appius and Virginia, by G. E. Trevelyan (1933)

Cover of Appius and VirginiaI’ll admit that I bought G. E. Trevelyan’s novel, Appius and Virginia, on the briefest of descriptions: “A story of a spinster who raises an ape in isolation in hopes of turning him into a man.” It seemed to promise another His Monkey Wife, John Collier’s sublime account of … well, as the title says. And, indeed, one of the consistent criticisms made of Appius and Virginia is that it’s not another His Monkey Wife.

Once I began reading, however, several things became clear. First, this is a riveting story. Taking in a few pages before turning over for the night, I ended up staying up for fifty pages and finished the book the next day. As Leonora Eyles wrote when she reviewed the book for the TLS on its first publication, “There are times when it is painful to go on reading, but impossible to shirk it….” Second, if there is anything comedic about Appius and Virginia, it’s only in the sense that Balzac used the term “comedy.”

There is nothing farcical here. Instead, this is the tragedy of two souls utterly incapable of understanding each other. Virginia Hutton, a single woman deep into spinsterhood, decides to undertake an experiment. She purchases an infant orangutan she christens Appius and raises him in complete isolation, treating him in every way as if he was a human child: “If it succeeded she would indeed have achieved something. She would have created a human being out of purely animal material, have forced evolution to cover in a few years stages which unaided it would have taken aeons to pass….”

The price of failure, however, is absolute: “… if this experiment failed her existence would no longer be justified in her own sight.” The alternative to throwing herself completely into the experiment is continuing to living in her single woman’s club in Earl’s Court, “Each year a little older, a little stouter or a little thinner, a little less quickly off the bus”: “an existence subdued and rounded and worn smooth by the little comforts and habits of her warm nonentity.”

And so as the book opens, we find Virginia sitting in the nursery of the cottage to which she has taken Appius, watching him sleep in the crib. Each time he attempts to burrow into his blanket, she commands, “Head out!” Night after night, through relentless repetition, she will teach Appius to sleep like a human. This is the sum of her technique. Caring for Appius, keeping the house, tending to the yard and garden, avoiding in every way possible not only any contact between Appius and any other ape but also any disclosure of the experiment to any other human being.

Gradually — very gradually — her efforts produce some effects. She gets Appius to say her name: “Ma-ma.” She manages to train him to feed himself with a spoon. Through years of daily training, she teaches him to read.

Or so she assumes. In fact, Appius merely learns to recognize the pictures in the lesson book and to produce the sounds he has come to know that “Ma-ma” will make as Virginia reads and repeats the text to him. Nearly none it reflects the cognition she thinks is going on. Instead, Trevelyan shows how very different is Appius’s understanding of his world compared to Virginia’s. One night, he watches a thunderstorm from his nursery window:

Blackness. Big moving things. Big still things. Big black things. Stillness, whiteness, dazzle.

White lights shooting: bright blades cleaving the black branches. Big silent things swaying and shiverying. Big moving things rotating: bending, sinking, swaying, crouching under the light.

Dazzle, giddiness. Blackness, brightness. Round and round, down and down.

In the first few years, Virginia seems impervious to the effects of her constant physical and mental toil: “The constant excitement, the unrelaxed tension, the unwavering hope, intermittently fed by minute signs, that before long he would communicate with and understand her, these not only sustained her through each day; she flourished upon them.” Appius, on the other hand, does not understand the pictures, does not understand the meaning of the sounds he has learned to make, does not understand the sounds that “Ma-ma” makes. “What was she saying now? He’d better repeat it, or she’d shake him, and then he’d be jerked right up into the nursery so suddenly that he wouldn’t be able to get back again for a long time.”

Appius’ progress slows, of course, and the years of constant work wear Virginia down. The kitchen grows black with filth, dust accumulates everywhere, the garden goes to weed. Virginia spends hours reading to Appius and the ape is happy to sit, comfortable and half asleep, in her arms, one hand on hers. “They had discovered the perfect relationship,” Virginia thinks. “Darling child, you can’t know how lonely mama was before she had you.” But of course, Appius truly can’t know how lonely mama was. Neither can Virginia understand that Appius has learned nothing more than to reproduce desired actions and sounds.

One could read Appius and Virginia as an allegory for marriage or the relationships between men and women in general. Indeed, one could argue that Trevelyan demonstrates that understanding may be secondary or even completely dispensable in a relationship. In reality, the only thing Appius and Virginia share is coexistence. In Virginia’s case, though, this is preferable to the invisible nonexistence of an aging single woman in the city. Which is why Appius and Virginia may be one of the most powerful stories about loneliness ever written.

Appius and Virginia, by G. E. Trevelyan
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1933

Passage from the Red Sea, by Zofia Romanowicz (1962)

Zofia and Kazimierz Romanowicz in front of the Galerie Lambert in 1962, from the Archiwum Emigracji, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka, Toru?, Poland
Zofia and Kazimierz Romanowicz in front of the Galerie Lambert in 1962

This post belongs in an as-yet uncreated category called “Scarcer than Hens’ Teeth.”

According to AddAll.com, there are exactly two copies of Passage Through the Red Sea available for sale, the cheapest starting at over $700. If you can read French, you can find more copies, including one autographed by the author, for $15-25. For those with access to a university library, WorldCat.org reports several dozen copies available in the U.S. and elsewhere, including one at the high school library in Chinook, Montana, in case you’re passing through there.

So I will not claim to have read this book, but I think it’s worthwhile on occasion to bring a little attention to truly, madly, deeply neglected books while there’s still a chance.

Zofia Romanowiczowa, to use her proper Polish surname, the author of Passage Through the Red Sea, was seventeen when the Germans invaded her country. Arrested by the Gestapo in early 1941 for aiding the resistance movement, she spent most of the rest of the war in a series of prisons and concentration camps, ending in the Flossenbürg subcamp of Neu-Rohlau in Bohemia. She and a friend escaped during an evacuation march and she was eventually able to make contact with the Red Cross and be taken into the American Zone.

She settled in Paris, where she met and married Kazimierz Romanowicz, owner of a bookstore and publishing company, Libella, serving the expatriate audience. The two became leaders in the Polish cultural community, founding the Galerie Lambert, an exhibition and performance space. She continued to write, eventually publishing a dozen novels, of which Passage Through the Red Sea is the only one to have been translated into English.

The English translation, by Virgilia Peterson (whose bilious memoir, A Matter of Life and Death, I discussed here back in 2007), was published as a Kurt and Helen Wolff book by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1962. It recently relatively few reviews (the New York Times passed it up) and soon disappeared. But here are a couple of the reviews that did appear:

• Kirkus Reviews:

It would be quite just to call this odd, repellent little book a strangely powerful novel. The narrator (we are not told her name or anything else which is not absolutely necessary) spent her adolescence in a concentration camp. While there she was kept alive, and also permanently crippled emotionally, by her love for and dependence upon an older girl named Lucile, who was married to Paul, who died in another camp. The narrator loved and still loves Paul, too, in much the same tortured, adolescent way. After their liberation, after Lucile has abandoned her, the narrator takes a rather crass (her opinion of him) lover named Philippe. When the book opens, years later, Lucile is coming halfway around the world in answer to the narrator’s desperate letters. Lucile, the narrator’s “”salvation””, is quickly attracted by Philippe, her “”doom””. When the narrator murders them both it is “”so that she (Lucile) would cease not being Lucile.”” It is a very sick and often moving portrait of a warped soul whose only reality lies in the dead dreams of a childhood ruined by war. The main fault to find is technical: the book is all self-analysis and private symbolism, repetitious to the point of fetishism: the tense drama of the actual events is present by implication only. But after all, that is precisely the narrator’s tragic condition.

• The New Yorker:

A strange, sorrowing short novel that deals with the reunion of two women — the nameless narrator and Lucile, who is somewhat older — some years after their release from a Nazi concentration camp. The narrator discovers that Lucile, whose help she needs and has always needed, has become an empty, posturing copy of her former self, and for a horrifying reason: in prison, the narrator, through her own dependence and frailty, has permanently drained Lucile, leaving only a husk. This nightmarish plot is accentuated by an oblique, dreamlike narrative (there is almost no dialogue), written in a chanting, doubling-back-on-itself prose, which may or may not be the author’s style but which is nevertheless just right.

• Elizabeth Cade in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

This beautifully written memoir of a Polish girl’s imprisonment in a Nazi slave labor camp, her intense bond with another woman, and their respective adjustments to freedom takes a unique place in contemporary writing. It touches, in a new and two-sided approach, the questions which have concerned the existentialist school of thought: personal integrity and the usage of freedom.

The narrator is still a young and idealistic girl when she is deported. In the camp she meets an old school pal, Lucile, who becomes her friend, protector, and above all, the guardian of her self-respect. “Let go” is Lucile’s motto, whenever her younger friend is about to give up wht last vestige of human dignity and sink to an animal level in the despair brought on by hunder and physical suffering. It is Lucile’s belief that survival must not be bought at any cost.

Freedom seemed to justify such moral strength. They “cherished the image of freedom as a higher and more just form of existence … a paradise of perfection where the lion and the lamb would lie down together, where everything would be given back to everyone.” When confronted with the realities of the world, in which compromise seems to be the accepted modus vivendi, both women take different paths in utilizing their hardwon survival.

The novel switches with flashbacks to the camp days to its locale in post-war Paris, winding up in a dramatic climax. Brilliantly translated by Virgilia Peterson, this is a fascinating exploration of human relationships and values.

• Polly Saunders in The Newport News Daily News:

For those of us who never spent time in a concentration camp this intense novel might seem to be an exaggerated account of morbid emotions. If we sharpen our imaginations, however, we can appreciate it as a small masterpiece written by a survivor of just such an inferno.

… Lucile was the elder of the two. She had been the younger girl’s only reason for being. “Lucile had known more about me than I knew about myself and sometimes, thanks to her, there came to life in me whole worlds the existence of which, until now, I had not suspected.”

This attachment is so powerful that it carries over into her present life in Paris. She still needs Lucile’s support and nostalgically recalls their camp days (despite their horrors) when she basked in her warm protection and love. The anticipated reunion finally takes place and there is utterly crushing disillusionment when she finds a changed Lucile. Lucile’s strength now lies in her ability to forget the past. She is interested only in wrenching from her present life whatever pleasures present themselves. References to their former life are taboo. Meantime, her worshipper practically dissolves in her disappointment.

The writing is intense. Sentences are long and repetitious and, for this reason, often monotonous. The story is depressing, but it is powerful in its turbulent outpouring from a young girl’s heart.

The best source on Zofia Romanowicz is a 2016 article by Alice-Catherine Carls from World Literature Today blog titled “The Renaissance of Zofia Romanowicz,” which includes a link to four poems newly translated into English.

The Man Next Door, by Emanuel Litvinoff (1968)

Cover of the first U.S. edition of The Man Next Door

With English anti-Semitism a matter of headline news, the time is perfect for some quick-witted publisher to reissue Emanuel Litvinoff’s second novel, The Man Next Door, which is a case study of how hate can turn a proper Englishman into a seething cauldron of antagonism and violence. Litvinoff does operate on the level of a prankster in the high school chemistry lab in a way, as he deliberately sets a catalyst — a Jewish couple with a Holocaust refugee mother-in-law — next to a highly combustible substance.

Even before David and Sylvia Winston (originally Weinstein) move into the empty house next door, Harold Bollam is an unstable compound. A mid-level manager in International Utilities, back in London after a long stretch in West Africa, Harold is having trouble adapting. “Forty-five was too old to change,” he thinks at one point. Younger men are beginning to rise above him. His wife Edna has failed him by getting older, too. And everything is slipping away from him:

The country had gone mad for gimmicks. Young smart alecks were getting in everywhere. Long-haired pop-singers bought up the stately homes, public opinion media were in the hands of queers and sensation-mongers who made England look cheap in the eyes of the world. Cheap, indeed, when black college boys became prime ministers of ridiculous “independent” states, dined with the Queen and lectured the British on the what’s-what of democracy.

Harold looks back wistfully to living in a country “where blacks were regarded as getting above themselves if they put a pair of boots on their naked feet.”

Like most objects of hatred, the Winstons don’t actually have to do anything to arouse Harold’s anger. They simply have to be. To be younger and better looking, have a pretty daughter, have a better car, have newer, nicer furniture. And in any case, it isn’t Harold who harbors a grudge: it’s them, even if they haven’t the guts to admit it. “Only the Jews hoarded their grievances, maintaining a cold, exclusive conspiracy against the world.”

As the story progresses, Harold’s ability to bottle up his resentments behind the exterior of a dignified, bowler-hatted gentleman erodes. He gets drunk, begins ranting in a pub about women, minorities, Jews, the bosses, goes to a prostitute, insults Edna. When he runs into Sylvia Winston on Regent Street, he offers her a ride home, then corners her into having dinner with him, then attempts to force himself upon her.

Yet Litvinoff somehow manages to keep the reader from utterly despising Harold. His pain, his fear, his loss of self is too palpable, too raw to see him as simply a demon. Alone in his living room, “He had a queer notion that if he went over and looked in the mirror now it would offer no image but that of an empty room.” And as his hatred consumes him and leads him to even more violence, Harold is still left with a tiny core of decency that cannot be erased.

“The British answer to Portnoy’s Complaint” Martin Levin wrote in his New York Times review — possibly one of the most inaccurate comparisons ever made by a critic. There is little funny and nothing sexy about The Man Next Door. More than anything, this is a book about how resentment builds to a boiling point when a person feels that youth, power, success, and even just self-esteem is being taken away and there is nothing to do but get angrier and angrier. And a book about how fear is the base emotion for an oppressor. It’s a book that’s relevant in the U.K, in the U.S., and in any other country where a once-secure majority feels itself losing control.

The Man Next Door is available in electronic formats on the Open Library (Link).

The Man Next Door, by Emanuel Litvinoff
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1968

The Undesired, by Kathleen Sully (1961)

Cover of The Undesired by Kathleen Sully

Having now read a full dozen of Kathleen Sully’s 17 books, I’m beginning to see the outlines of her moral universe. Though it’s rich in comic circumstances and peopled more by the good than the evil, there is never more than a razor’s edge separating life from death, never more than a chance accident separating life’s winners from its losers. The Undesired is an object lesson in how to survive in her world — and how not to.

Stanley Chubb is one of the losers. A meek little man, he is so little noticed when retiring after thirty years in the same government office that a co-worker mumbles “See you Monday, Chub” as he leaves. He is as alone in the world as one can be: “… he was an old man without close friends or relatives — a lone man at the end of his life and usefulness, traveling in a train to a small flat in a nondescript street. He had done nothing worth recounting; he had see nothing worth remembering. He was nothing — a speck in the universe, less than a speck — merely a point in space.” Faced with a future in which he will simply “moulder away as if he had never been born,” he decides he must “blast this world wide open.”

He heads into the West Country and picks a little resort village on the coast to settle in, taking a decrepit cottage without electricity or running water and pledging to engage with the people there instead of receding into the background as he’s done all his life. Soon after, another retiree, the erect and tweedy Agnes Strathers — universally called “Horse” behind her back — shows up and demands to know if the cottage is for sale. She, too, is one of the undesired: “unlucky enough to feel alone in the world, unwanted, unlovely, unloved.”

Sully weaves Stanley, Agnes, and the growing circle of people they become involved with through an intricate choreography of encounters, misunderstandings, and accidents, but the real story here is far simpler than that. The Undesired is about nothing more than learning to survive by reaching out to the people around us — for help and to help.

But Sully will not let her readers be lulled by the soft glow of a happy ending. Just as the book closes, she draws our attention to another solitary visitor, a plain, grey nameless woman like Agnes, and leaves us with a grim reminder that we are never more than a step or two from death’s grasp. I recommend reading The Undesired in a warm place: a cold and bitter draft runs through this book.

The Undesired, by Kathleen Sully

London: Peter Davies, 1961

Horizontal Image, by Kathleen Sully (1968)

Cover of Horizontal Image by Kathleen Sully

Kathleen Sully was 58 when Horizontal Image was published. Liddy Creemer, her protagonist, is perhaps ten years younger. Her husband Tim is a good man: faithful, a good provider. Her daughter Olive is married to the also faithful Jeff. Together, they are visiting the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey when Liddy looks into a mirror set horizontal to the ground and sees “a visage of eighty years old.” It shocks her so much she reels, thinking, “My life has gone: I’m old — nearly dead.”

I’m not sure the phrase “mid-life crisis” was being used in 1968, but I’m pretty confident it wasn’t being applied to women. Reading Horizontal Image, I was often struck by how Kathleen Sully’s perspectives on the situation of women was far ahead of its time. Here, for example, is a short discussion between Liddy and her daughter:

“It’s my opinion that a woman can’t be a good mother and a career girl at the same time.”

“That’s right, Olive: you are beginning to see the problem. Husbands ought to share in the beginning and –”

“If any father ever took his responsibilities seriously, it’s Tim. He still does.”

“He takes the pleasure of his children — I’m talking about dirty diapers, feeding, cooking, cleaning, nursing and minding in those first years. A father should share the work and so allow the mother to continue to earn so that she may always be independent financially. And so that she can enjoy the children, too.”

“He takes the pleasure of his children” — that’s a fine (meaning, well-put) distinction. As a stereotypical housewife of her time, Liddy recognizes the steep economic uphill climb she faces if she wants to be independent: no skills worthy of easy employment; housekeeping and cooking skills sufficient to please a husband but not to work in either capacity professionally; no access to money without her husband’s permission. When she does decide to leave home and trying living on her own, Liddy has no other option but to pawn her jewelry, none of which is of any great worth.

Once on her own, when Liddy decides to explore the possibility of relationships with men other than Tim, she soon realizes that they all come with drawbacks of some type. One seeks sex but really wants a housekeeper; another is a fine companion in the day but an utter loss at night. Considering that Horizontal Image hinges on a woman’s negative self-image, it’s men who are seen in the worst light. Sully often offers up corrective asides to set the reader straight: John Downe was boyish in the manner meant when grown men are called boyish. Real boys are not at all like boyish men: they tend to be mischievous with a cruel streak, their energy is directed nowhere or anywhere, their innocence is a surface quality masking a furtive probing towards adult feelings.”

Liddy ends up in Sicily, where she manages to scrape out a way of surviving, but not before putting out a call for cash to avoid being put out on the street. She sends it in parallel to the three men — including her husband Tim — she thinks may still be prepared to help. The response is surprising and leads to a hectic and comic ending. But the reality of being female in a world run by men is never far, as an encounter on the steps of a Sicilian church reminds her:

She sat there, grey and old, dressed in dusty black — black cotton dress, black shoes and stockings, black shawl — all as old as herself and as worn. Her grey hair was drawn harshly back from her wrinkled brow and her nobbled, veined hands hung loosely over her skinny knees.

Liddy had been preparing to enter the church. The woman’s eyes caught hers and held them: not so much because they begged but by the surprise, amazement and envy in them. Liddy wore a simple pale cream dress, sleeveless, with a cream cardigan slung loosely over her shoulders.

The woman summed it all up in one simple gesture: with her left hand she indicated her own wretched attire — her own self — then moved the hand towards Liddy’s immaculate outfit and well-fed person. They looked into each other’s eyes — Liddy’s cool English ones and her near-black anguished ones. They were sisters: it was neither fair nor equal.

Horizontal Image is no Golden Notebook, but it certainly is proof that feminism was, by the late 1960s, penetrating deeply into the sensibility of English women — including that of a 58 year-old housewife and mother of three well into her second decade as a novelist.

Horizontal Image, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1968

Horizontal Image

There’s No Story There, by Inez Holden (1944)

Women workers training at a Royal Ordnance Factory, 1943
Women workers training at a Royal Ordnance Factory, 1943

I keep lists of books to find, to buy, to read, and three titles that have been on all of them for years are Inez Holden’s wartime memoirs/novels: Night Shift (1941); There’s No Story There (1944); and It Was Different At The Time (1945). When my friend Kate Macdonald recently announced that her Handheld Press would be issuing Night Shift and It Was Different At The Time in a single volume, Blitz Writing, edited by Kristin Bluemel in 2019, I was thrilled. Seeing my reaction, Kate very generously offered to send me a PDF copy of There’s No Story There that Kristin has been using for courses for years.

In her own post on There’s No Story There, Kate writes that this is “both a story and not a story” because it is essentially nothing more than a slice of time in the life of a secret munitions factory in Yorkshire and the lives of its workers, without a definitely beginning or end, which is certainly true. But anyone who’s worked in a high security situation knows, one of the easiest ways to spot one is by its deliberate efforts to maintain a low profile. “There’s no story there … move along” is the kind of thing a security guard might say as he quietly suggests you’d best move along. “Security is the foundation of the whole thing,” the chief of security tells the plant manager.

There’s No Story There is set in what was undoubtedly a Royal Ordnance Factory or its private equivalent run by ICI Nobel, one of the massive facilities, usually located well away from population centers and favored bombing targets, at which artillery shells and aerial bombs were manufactured. These facilities were literally powder kegs, where extraordinary precautions were taken to prevent sparks or anything else that might trigger an explosion that would very likely set off others and result in the whole facility being blown out of existence. No wonder such an accident is never far from workers’ minds: “Now supposing there was a ‘blow’ here … Another part of my consciousness would be taken clean away from me…. Maybe I wouldn’t even remember leaving the hostel this morning…. There would be a parting in my memory as if a zip fastener had been ripped back and then got stuck suddenly….”

Holden may have taken some inspiration from Henry Green’s superb factory novel, Living (1929), because she uses a similar approach, scanning through the minds of a variety of the men and women working at the munitions plant. Julian, the Dunkirk survivor who transports shells from one shed to another; Mrs. Karslake, the hyper-officious functionary whose chief task is arranging for film showings to keep workers’ minds from the fact that they are never more than a second from obliteration; Ysabette Jones, the schizophrenic who boasts of her Group Captain boyfriend who “knows German, Italian, Spanish and all those already.” Holden’s proxy is probably the observer, Geoffrey Dutton, who lurks on the edge of the scene, obsessively recording conversations in his notebook. Only Geoffrey notices that the male and female workers “shared the same table, the same food, and the same fatigue — yet the conversation of the women and the men was completely isolated, on from the other.”

It would explain both the exceptional accuracy of the book and its essential shapelessness. The plant, its workers hostel, its operations and the interactions of the people are all artificial, temporary, full of privileges unknown elsewhere in England (Ham! Fruit!), and always on edge, one ear cocked for the possibility of an explosion. “There’s no story there, one can’t know it all. How can one? — with thirty thousand workers, some brave, some sad, some stupid, some clever, and others just kind of comical,” one young woman writes home. Although her letter would most certainly have been censored by someone in the Security office. These places would, after all, have run much more smoothly if they didn’t have to use people. And that tension between the desire to dehumanize the process and the unsuppressible insistence of people to be human provides the energy that makes There’s No Story There such a fascinating read.

Kate is considering issuing There’s No Story There if the reprint of Blitz Writing does well. So keep an eye peeled for when Blitz Writing comes out next summer!

There’s No Story There, by Inez Holden
London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1944

Through the Wall, by Kathleen Sully (1957)

Cover of Mastowe is a miserable industrial town on the English coast. Life there, writes Kathleen Sully, “seemed to know no moderation”: in the summer, “everything became dehydrated”; “in the winter everything was wet and cold”; and even when frozen “Mastowe managed to be uncomfortably wet — wet walls, wet bedrooms, wet cellars, wet feet, wet overcoats, and spirits, damp perhaps elsewhere, were sogged and water-logged at Mastowe.”

And the most miserable being in Mastowe is little Celia Wick. With lice in her hair, a rip in her bloomers, locked out of her house for hours on a cold and rainy day, going to bed hungry because her mother is too busy arguing with her father for coming home drunk, trying to fall sleep on a filthy straw mattress. She escapes by flying out her bedroom window, floating down the streets, transporting herself to the sea to watch a magical show: “the shells gave out tiny musics and the pebbles captured the light of distant starts, and the waves, separate and personal for an instant, each broke upon the living sands, then merged into the mother sea again with contented sighs.”

Through the Wall is Kathleen Sully’s grimmest story. Celia’s father dies of tuberculosis; when her mother remarries, the new husband refuses to accept the child and she is given to a friend. Any happiness that might come her way is soon replaced by a new tragedy. At fifteen she hitch-hikes to London. We last see her being taken into a lay-by by a trucker.

Suddenly, the story jumps forward twenty years. The step-father who disowned her is tormented with guilt. He convinces himself that a woman in London who’s been sentenced to hang for murder is Celia and sends his nephew off to find her and seek her forgiveness. Reluctant at first, eventually the nephew leaves on a long and largely fruitless search that leads him through a series of London neighborhoods as hard and poor as Mastowe.

Through the Wall contains some of Sully’s strongest writing. As her first book, Canal in Moonlight suggests, she had more than a brushing acquaintance with the smells, the sounds, the sensations, and the desperation of poverty. The row houses with broken windows, a jake in the back, and underfed and dirty children playing in the street. The crowded pub full of people looking for an escape:

… the mixture of other sounds, the warmth of alcohol within, and the close-pressing bodies without, all added to the feeling of unreality and confusion.

A pair of feet tapped out the rhythm of the piano’s tune; two or three voices sang the words; glasses clinked; a man shouted, “Two beers”; a woman laughed with a full, unrestrained voice.

… A woman caught his eye, but her stare was vacant, unseeing; she raised a glass of gin to her mouth, drank, continued to stare, but her thoughts seemed far away.

A man rolled up his shirt-sleeve, and carefully explained something about a scar to a disinterested group of people who drew seriously on their cigarettes.

An old woman, black-hatted, stockinged, coated-and-scarfed, nodded her shriveled head as if counting the throng, and smiled secretly into a glass of stout every time she took a sip.

The power of Sully’s spare but evocative prose cannot disguise the awkward seam that joins the two parts of her story. Gradually, however, the real link between Celia and Rodney, the nephew searching for her, becomes apparent, and it has little to do with their practical circumstances. Through the Wall is ultimately a book about the possibility of spiritual survival in a relentlessly harsh world. I’m not sure I say that Sully fully realized what she attempted, but once again, she demonstrates a voice and vision that was unlike anyone else’s. My respect for her achievement grows with each book.

Through the Wall, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1957

A Breeze on a Lonely Road, by Kathleen Sully (1969)

Cover of A Breeze on a Lonely Road by Kathleen Sully

A Breeze on a Lonely Road may be the most level-headed account of madness every written. Not that Trevor Greyson, Sully’s lonely bachelor solicitor is raving and frothing at the mouth mad. Trev has a very moderate, very English form of madness: for over thirty years, he steps into an alternate reality out on the moor: “On the moor he had many friends — all who came there. On the moor, he was not a greying and balding man of fifty: he was a supple youth whose voice rang with enthusiasm.”

On the moor, exciting things happened. On the moor, people were friendly: genuinely interested in him, genuinely please with his company. Unfortunately, “He had been escaping to the moor for many years and now it had become a greater reality than his waking live. It was his reality — so much that his work and daytime activities had become less and less important.”

The matter comes to a head during one of his mental trips to the moor when he comes across a group of badgers who have been killed. Dozens of their bodies lie scattered about. Trev finds this deeply perplexing: if this is his fantasy, as he understands it to be, then why would such a violent, evil act have taken place?

The experience leads him to reflect deeply on what it means for the moor to be part of his reality. He neglects his work to prepare a detailed map of the moor as he has experienced it. He compares it with real moors around England and finds no match, not even close. One night, as he is out with his friends on the moor, he asks them for their names, addresses, other details about their lives.

These are pointless questions, one of them, Edward, responds:

Telling you would mean nothing, and there is no name — no name that one could name though, if there were, how to get there? No map or chart could show the way but there is no map and, if there were, you would not be able to travel in that direction. Dear boy, do be content.

When Trev wakes, however, he writes down everything he can recall. He shuts his office and heads off to follow these clues.

None of them leads to anything definitive. It’s the wrong address, or no one by that name has ever lived there, or other details are off. Not just a bit off — wholly wrong in most cases. But still there are … resonances. He neither finds clear answers nor convincing disproof.

Concerned, his few acquaintances arrange for two psychiatrists to speak with Trev. And in a remarkably moderated depiction of psychiatrists at work, they bring Trev’s attention to possible connections between his moor experiences and his real life and leave it at that. No locking him away, no drugs, and no miracle cures.

In fact, they confirm what Edward had told him on the moor: “What you find out, prove or disprove will alter nothing except your attitude.” In Trev’s case, the most significant change is indeed one of attitude: from quietly and covertly sneaking away from his own day-to-day reality to a fantasy that makes him happy to deliberately making happiness part of his day-to-day reality. In the end, he’s still fifty, balding, and single and still responsible for what makes him happy: it’s a moderate sort of transformation, and all the more convincing as a result. In its own calm, softly comic way, A Breeze on a Lonely Road is one of the healthiest books I’ve read in a long time.

A Breeze on a Lonely Road, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1969

Burden of the Seed, by Kathleen Sully (1958)

Cover of Burden of the Seed by Kathleen Sully

“It is impossible to stop reading Kathleen Sully, who takes a vice-like Ancient Mariner’s grip on your nerves and feelings,” wrote one reviewer of Burden of the Seed. I completely agree: but having finished the book, I feel like this Ancient Mariner took me on a wild goose chase.

Once again, Sully offers a story completely unlike anything before it. The book falls into three sections. In the first, we are introduced to Stephanas, a orphan boy living in the care of two elderly aunts quite unfit for the job. One day, Stephanas sneaks out the back gate of their garden, wanders into a poor neighborhood, is accosted by some local bullies, then latches onto Marge, a girl who rescues him by threatening the boys with a brick. Stephanas slides right into Marge’s family, sitting down to bread and drippings for tea. Soon, he becomes a daily visitor, helping with the washing up and bringing items from the large collection of antique china his aunts have inherited as offerings.

In this section, Stephanas seems a rather resilient kid, growing increasingly independent from his aunts as they grow less and less capable of taking care of him, let alone themselves. Their petty interferences drive away their one servant, who leaves them with a piece of her mind: “… they were completely mad. They ought to be shut away where they could do harm to none except themselves. And as for them having the charge of a poor innocent child! Words failed her.” Aunt Rose’s hearing begins to fail; Aunt Clara grows blinder each day. Merely fixing two meals a day becomes an ordeal, and Stephanas steals change from their purses to buy enough food to keep himself from starving. When Rose finds Clara dead, it takes Rose four days to comprehend the fact. It takes Stephanas five days to notice Clara’s absence.

Leap forward some years. Stephanas returns from college to open the aunt’s house and get it ready for sale. He seduces Marge, decides he’s not interested in her, fantasizes about Marge’s mother, then heads off into the world. He proceeds almost at random through a few unsuitable relationships, then sets his mind on marrying Edna, a headstrong farm girl he encounters in Somerset. Yet after he sleeps with her, he claims to be married already and unable to obtain a divorce. They settle into a cottage together, Edna has his child, and spend some happy years. One day Stephanas informs Edna that he had lied about being married. She takes their son and returns to her father’s farm. There is some tedious back-and-forth squabbling and negotiation, and they reach a truce.

Then the war (the Second World War, never mentioned in specific) breaks out. If Stephanas seemed to have an approach to relationships as odd as his name, his attitude towards military service is even harder to fathom. He considers going into hiding. He enlists. Then he decides to escape to Ireland and desert. Running into Marge on the way, he drags her along. Then he changes his mind. Then he returns to his unit and is shipped overseas. After years, he comes back to Somerset and there is more back-and-forth with Edna. He thinks he wants her back. She thinks she wants to marry a farmer. Oh, by the way, we learn that their child had somehow been killed in the war. Stephanas goes off on a walkabout to lose himself. Then he changes his mind. By which point it’s momentum alone that will keep a reader from giving up.

And by which point it becomes clear that Kathleen Sully somehow lost her way in the course of writing Burden of the Seed. What started as an emotionally compelling story, sort of Great Expectations brought forward sixty years, became a meander in search of a protagonist. Young Stephanas has spunk. Adult Stephanas is emotionally damaged and incapable of knowing his own mind for much more than a day or two at a time. Edna is the one level-headed character in the book, but you have to wonder why she doesn’t show Stephanas the door, which would have brought the book to a close around page 100. There is some good writing her, but Kathleen Sully’s assembly is too jury-rigged to stand the test of time. I have to give Burden of the Seed a solid “Justly Neglected” rating, I’m afraid.

Burden of the Seed, Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1958

The Fractured Smile, by Kathleen Sully (1965)

Cover of The Fractured Smile by Kathleen Sully

The Fractured Smile is a Feydeau comedy of infidelity, coincidences and missed connections transported to sixties England and a universe where Brownian motion has replaced Newtonian mechanics. Jess wakes to a phone call saying that her husband, George, has been spotting boarding a train to the seaside with his very attractive secretary. Jess throws on a dress, digs George’s revolver out of the attic, and dashes out of the house still wearing her bright red fuzzy slippers, with son David in tow, to give chase.

From this point on, the chain reactions take off, carried along by their own momentum. Except that Sully’s chain reactions have a unique characteristic. While each propels the story along, it also causes her characters — and the reader — to adapt to a shift in perspective. Piling into the first train compartment with any space, full of adrenaline and jealous rage, Jess gradually realizes that her compartment mates are not aloof and anonymous but a group of little people, elderly, alert, and considerate: “She looked around at their faces — they were pocket-sized angels in moth-balled reach-me-downs.”

Once at the coast, Jess quickly discovers how difficult it is to track down an unfaithful husband in a resort town full of hotels when his name really is Mr. Smith. Jess becomes separated from David and the gun. David meets up with a fearless local seven year-old named Rodge and the two of them meet up with a tenacious little dog they name Stray. Both Jess and George’s parents learn of her homicidally-minded flight to the coast and decide to team up and head off in pursuit.

Characters rush in and out of places with the manic energy of a farce on fast-forward. The two sets of in-laws, at distant ends of the financial and cultural spectrum, find they have far more in common than suspected. George eventually shifts from skulking husband to ally in the hunt for the lost boys. But in Sully’s physics, nothing that’s been upended can’t be upended again. Another accident, an angry word, and soon the in-laws are at battle again: “She could hear their querulous voices, her mother’s dominating all, as they quarrelled, heavily and bitterly, bringing up old wounds from the past, personal slights, imagined insults, broken promises — anything, anything at all so long as it could be hurled spitefully at the other.”

And as seems to be a rule in Sully’s universe, death is never too far off stage. Emotions tumble one after another like the balls in a bingo spinner, so love and loyalty and giddy delight can be followed a page or two later by fear, bitterness, and dread. As one might expect in a universe ruled by a healthy dose of randomness, some reactions shoot characters off into quite unexpected directions and some simply ricochet them right back where they came from. One thing’s for sure, though: when you start The Fractured Smile, you won’t be able to predict how things will turn out.

The Fractured Smile, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1965

The Way Out of Berkeley Square, by Rosemary Tonks (1970)

Cover of "The Way Out of Berkeley Square"

Rosemary Tonks is now known as the poet who disappeared, thanks to a 2009 BBC program (“The Poet Who Vanished”) and features in the Guardian, TLS, the London Review of Books, the Poetry Foundation and others following her death in May 2014 and the reissue that fall of Bedouin of the London Evening, a collection of her poems and selected prose. In truth, she didn’t disappear as much as take a deliberate decision to step away from the life of London and literature she’d led since the mid-1950s. She had health problems, became a devout Christian, and spent her last thirty years in Bournemouth having little or no contact with the large circle of writers, artists, and friends she had known. Sometime in late 1981, she retrieved most of her souvenirs and papers from storage in London and burned them in her garden incinerator. In the years before her death, she read only from the Bible.

The reissue of Bedouin of the London Evening has done much to restore Rosemary Tonks’ standing as an innovative and challenging poet of the sixties. Though praised when her two collections of poems were first published, her poetry is aggressive, edgy, unsettled. “Her poems matched the forceful personality, being rhetorically explosive, with more exclamation marks than anyone else used,” one of her contemporaries recalled. She was neither feminist nor conservative: more than anything, she was an individualist. Several observers have remarked that she most admired the spirit of the flâneur — “equal parts curiosity and laziness” — as embodied in the work of Balzac and Baudelaire:

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define.

She was a creature of the city. As she writes in “Diary of a Rebel,”

For my fierce hot-blooded sulkiness
I need the café – where old mats
Of paper lace catch upon coatsleeves
That are brilliant with the nap of idleness
…And the cant of the meat-fly is eternal!

Cover of Bedouin of the London Evening by Rosemary TonksShe told a Guardian interviewer in 1968 that she used to drive straight into the centre of London each morning, and then to a cafe south of Putney Bridge, where she had scrambled eggs. And the photo on the cover of Bedouin of the London Evening shows her at work at a sidewalk table, a large café-au-lait sitting beside a stack of books and papers. Bloodaxe Books is to be commended for taking advantage of ebook technology and included recordings of Tonks reading a dozen of her poems, along with an interview with Peter Orr, in the EPUB and Kindle versions.

Tonks’ work as a novelist, however, has yet to be rediscovered, for the simple reason that it’s almost impossible to get hold of one of her six novels. The cheapest copy goes for over $70, the dearest for over $400. And forget about finding Emir (1963) outside a couple handfuls of libraries worldwide (she disowned it, anyway). Thanks to the Public Library of India, however, you can find her first novel, Opium Fogs (1963), online in electronic formats.

With the help of my daughter and the University of Washington Library, I was able recently to read Tonks’ 1970 novel, A Way Out of Berkeley Square. At the time it came out, the book probably seemed too odd, too marginal to merit much consideration. “I’m thirty, and I’m stuck,” Tonks’ protagonist, Arabella, complains. Living with her father, romantically involved with a married man, and barely employed with the job of decorating some flats her father is renovating, she was neither the Victorian model of a spinster nor the Seventies’ vision of a woman taking charge of her own life. One reviewer dismissed Arabella as “30 on her driver’s license and 13 in her emotional development.”

This is pretty close to her father’s estimation. He would have her be both the Victorian spinster, serving up a hot dinner and keeping a tidy home for him, and a go-getter, diving into the business of interior decoration with a profit-minded zeal. The one thing he can’t accept is what she is:

My father can’t bear ordinary life; a woman in a dirty cardigan with two pockets on the stomach misshapen by handkerchiefs makes him bristle up, the sight of a coarsely-patterned formica table with brown tea-cup rings on it and large yellow crumbs will cause him a temporary loss of personality, his ego buries itself in one of his shoes and leaves the rest of his body to look after itself, grey, inert.

“I’m out of the habit of taking action,” she thinks. “I don’t have a proper stake in life, in the world.” She definitely doesn’t care for a future of caring for her father for decades until he dies — and then having nothing to show for it. But she’s also skeptical that there is any pot of gold waiting at the end of the rainbow of marriage and/or career:

Inside the showroom I catch the eyes of various men and women, torpid and haggard as drug-addicts, as they turn over the endless fabrics. I have never actually seen a face with an expression on it in this showroom; blanks, and more blanks with dead eyes. The suffering is awful, and it goes on and on, like writing out “I must not say bloody” a hundred times at school, until you’re free to rejoin the mainstream of life.

Yet she wonders, “Shall I take this bit of life, because if I don’t I may not have any life at all?”

Her one lifeline is her brother, who has escaped from London to Karachi, where he is trying to find the distance and energy to make a start as a poet. They write each other nearly every day — he consoling her over their father’s domination, she cheering on his efforts to embrace his new surroundings and work on his writing. When his correspondence suddenly stops, she worries — then panics when she learns after a gap of weeks that he has contracted polio and is barely surviving with the help of his cook. (This parallels Tonks’ own experience of contracting typhoid and then polio while living in India early in the 1950s.)

The crisis kicks her out of her doldrums. Though still very much dependent upon him to arrange for her brother’s care and return to England, it’s Arabella who prods her complacent father and forces the action. In so doing, she discovers a capacity in herself she had not suspected: “I’ve found out that strength is silent; it doesn’t have to be talked about, proved, or borrowed from others. It isn’t even called strength, but action.”

It’s likely that The Way Out of Berkeley Square would have a more favorable reception today. A fair number of women (and men) are stuck living with their parents into their thirties with the decline in earning power and finding the experience demoralizing and emotionally stultifying. And Tonks’ prose is studded with little gems of description. Of her father’s car: “His new Bentley is fully automatic, has doors as heavy as safe doors from the Bank of England, and a steel body as wide as a ping-pong table. Inside you serve from one corner of it, while burning hot air and noisy stereophonic music try to draw off your attention, subdue, drown and kill you.” Of her married lover’s best talent: “Now there are some men who are so good at getting women across traffic that it’s a form of love-making, in which the woman is touched, protected, and lifted forward, until she reaches the opposite pavement in a state of mild delirium.” Kirkus’s reviewer called Tonks’ prose “A decorative style but it’s all parsley.” Well, if that’s parsley, I say bring it on.

The Way Out of Berkeley Square, by Rosemary Tonks
London: The Bodley Head, 1970
Boston: Gambit, Incorporated, 1970

A Man on the Roof, by Kathleen Sully (1961)

Cover of "A Man on the Roof" by Kathleen Sully

I don’t think it qualifies as a spoiler to say that the man on the roof in A Man on the Roof is a ghost. Specifically, he’s Wilfred Clough, late husband of Peony. Obsessed with stamp collecting while living, he returns to haunt — or rather, berate — his wife after she sells his collection.

Left with little after Wilfred’s death, Peony has moved in with Ada Frisby, a spinster and oldest friend. Though the two women find happiness in each other’s company, people make fun of their situation — their relationship, their age, their poverty. Even their landlady whispers behind their backs: “Ada-Boy” and “fat as a pig.”

Kathleen Sully's inscription in my copy of "A Man on the Roof"
Kathleen Sully’s inscription in my copy of “A Man on the Roof”
But these old girls still have some spunk. Indeed, they constantly manage to bolster each other’s confidence. When Wilfred suddenly appears in their flat demanding that Peony retrieve his stamps: “I shall not go until you fetch them back.” “You must do as you please,” she replies. “It won’t affect us in the least.” And though Wilfred is further infuriated when he learns his coveted collection has gone for little more than three hundred pounds, Peony and Ada consider it more than enough to start a new chapter in their lives.

A Man on the Roof could have been made into a great little Ealing comedy had it been published a few years earlier. The ladies buy a junky old van, have it fitted with a couple of beds and a gas ring, and set out for a life on the road. Though hoping to leave Wilfred behind in the flat, he manages to latch onto them like a limpet. They have their share of misadventures, all accompanied with Wilfred’s grumpy commentary, and have a gay time.

And their dogged independence and bedrock optimism alters how they’re perceived. Instead of mocked for being too old, too fat, too poor, too ineffectual, people begin to see their better qualities:

But he did not see the wrinkles around her bird-like eyes, nor did he notice the grey amongst the soft brown hair which was cut in a modern cap of loose waves and curls. His did not see the strings showing her neck; he admired her hands because of the signs of toil.

He saw a small woman — remarkably fit and spry, sun-burnt and clean — no messy make-up or varnish, a gently smiling mouth — as sweet and modest as a young girl’s, slim, pretty legs –decidely pretty legs. And pretty knees — decidedly pretty knees. He saw a fine woman — a charming woman — and a woman who couldn’t be bribed or intimidated.

Even Wilfred starts to look at Peony differently. Her refusal to listen to his criticism or let his constant presence (he’s visible but immaterial, if that makes any sense) eventually wins his respect:

“I’m beginning to think that I wasted my life living all those years in that hole of a town. Why didn’t we come to live in the country?”

“I always wanted to live in the country,” said Peony.

“You should have forced my hand.”

“Easier said than done.”

“And to think of all the time and money I wasted on those stamps and what good did they do me or you?”

Farcical comedies are bit like wind-up toys: no matter how fast they run along at first, at a certain point it’s hard for them to keep going. The trick is wrap things up while there’s still some energy left. It should be easier to do with a ghost story: after all, ghosts can live happily ever after. In the case of A Man on the Roof, however, Kathleen Sully resorts to some cumbersome narrative machinery that takes most of the glow from what should be a sunny ending. (Tip to writers: if you find yourself introducing new characters in the last chapter — don’t.) Otherwise, A Man on the Roof is a bit of fun with no more substance than a champagne bubble.

A Man on the Roof, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1961

McCabe, by Edmund Naughton (1959)

Covers of various editions of McCabe by Edmund Naughton

Edmund Naughton’s 1959 western, McCabe, is mainly mentioned as a footnote to Robert Altman’s first masterpiece, his 1971 film McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Reissued as a tie-in to the film when it came out, it’s been out of print for over three decades now and fetches some fairly steep prices. (My tip: the cheapest copies seem to be of the 1961 Oldham Press edition — the “Man’s Books” version, which bundles McCabe with two other macho titles in what appears to have been attempt to create a testosterone-rich alternative to Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.)

This is a real shame because it diminishes how much of Altman’s “revisionism” in his approach to the western movie derives from Naughton’s work. Superficially, McCabe follows a classic western formula: stranger comes town, a reputation as a gunslinger trailing behind him; he settles in and the town settles to him; then he is forced to decide whether to run and save his skin or stand his ground and take his chances. There’s a showdown scene as dangerous and gripping as the climax of High Noon.

Yet, writing just seven years after High Noon, Naughton is far less looking back at the traditions of the western than anticipating much of what came in the next 10-15 years, in films and, to a lesser extent, in novels. Naughton’s protagonist, John McCabe, is closer to an anti-hero like Catch-22’s Yossarian than Marshal Will Kane. Though a dead-eye shot who’s adapted his Colt to fire without a trigger, he has only killed one man and him mostly by accident. He lives mostly as a traveling gambler but reminds himself that he was chased off a riverboat as a greenhorn amateur. He tries to be fair to the Chinese and Indians in the little mining town of Presbyterian Church where he decides to set up a saloon and, later, a whorehouse.

And he is far ahead of his time in his attitude towards women — or at least towards Mrs. Miller, who arrives and takes over the job of running McCabe’s whorehouse. Though the two are partners in business and, fairly regularly, in bed, McCabe understands that he cannot take their relationship for granted:

McCabe was sensitive about being noticed in her room. He took care, thought, to be discreet, to attend to business, and there were nights when he didn’t want to go over there.

Those were the nights when he knew she would like there smoking naked on the bed with the wicks down in the kerosene lamps; and, if he came, she would look at him with eyes like violet stones in cold water — as if he were to blame for the man she had sold herself to that evening.

McCabe also exhibits a degree of emotion intelligence that’s still pretty rare in most male characters. He struggles with Mrs. Miller’s dispassionate approach to their nights together. Though frustrated that she quickly sees that he is close to illiterate and far less trustworthy with figures, he wishes they could share more than just a physical intimacy: “All my like I been walking around with a block of ice inside me, Constance, and I don’t hardly get the sawdust brushed off before you got me back in the icehouse.”

Covers of German, French and Italian translations of McCabe

Naughton’s view of good and evil is a far cry from High Noon, too. McCabe is a gambler, a schemer, a coward and, when pressed, a killer. Rev. Elliott, who has erected the church that gives Presbyterian Church its name, is bitter, bigoted, and anti-social: he would prefer that the rest of the town disappeared. When gunmen arrive to face off with McCabe, they are there as stooges of a distant corporation, carrying out a business transaction:

Snake River Mining Company can’t afford you: can’t afford a man it can’t buy out. Know that? Never tolerate that. Can afford Sheehan, damned fop they sent to you last week: margin of corruption it allows for in its budget. Company calculated the cost of Presbyterian Church; who collects doesn’t matter. More corrupt people are, easier they can be controlled; company can always send them to jail when they get to be a nuisance.

… At any rate, McCabe, they can’t afford you around. Bad example. Pile all these mountains on you, if they have to; so people thereabouts will believe it, if they deny you ever existed.

Naughton may have been the only writer of westerns to have learned more from George Orwell than Zane Grey — although one English reviewer cited a different influence, dismissing the book as the “Latest example of the neo-Freudian intellectual death-wishful Westerns.” Suffice it to say that McCabe merits more than just footnote status in reference to a much better known movie. It’s original, innovative, and as gripping as any thriller. And, as one reviewer put it, “You don’t have to like westerns to like this one.”

McCabe, by Edmund Naughton
New York: Macmillan, 1959

A Man Talking to Seagulls, by Kathleen Sully (1959)

Cover of 'A Man Talking to Seagulls'

Kathleen Sully uses death as punctuation in A Man Talking to Seagulls, a tale of one day in the life of Dundeston, a resort somewhere on the east coast of England. She opens the day with the body of a young woman washed up on the beach. Scratcher, a vagrant living in a shack on the beach, “a man of little account to anybody — even himself,” is the first to find her and, it seems, the only one to take any note of her death. “Where is she?” he asks the seagulls as he feeds them.

She must be somewhere; she can’t be nowhere. A person is a person the same as a gull’s a gull. And a soul’s a soul: indestructible, quite — quite indestructible, everlasting, for ever and ever. The good Lord said it was so — is so. The body holds the soul — holds us.

The police come quickly and take the body away and Dundeston carries on with its day. The man who rents the beach chairs begins setting them up. The man with the donkeys brings them out to await a new batch of riders. The cockle seller lights up his stove and raises the awning on his stand. The day-trippers start flowing in from the bus stand and train station. The people staying in holiday bungalows awake and breakfast.

In one of the bungalows, two young people away for a secret weekend begin arguing. He loses his temper and throws a vase at her head. She collapses. He tries to rouse her. Finding no sign of life, he decides he must dispose of the body. “Val won’t be missed — yet,” he thinks. “When she was missed — and who would miss her apart from her landlady and a few casual friends — would she be traced?” He stashes the body in a shed and heads into town for breakfast.

This disregard for the value of a life threads throughout A Man Talking to Seagulls like a motif in a minor chord: never too long, never too loud, but persistent and unsettling. To the young and healthy, it’s an irrelevance. To the middle aged trying to get through another day, it’s an annoyance. And to an old woman quietly nipping from the bottle of gin in the family picnic basket, it’s a disturbing inevitability:

Her youth was long past, yet she found it difficult to accept the fact that she was old — really old. But her weak and trembly legs insisted upon it; her gnarled and blue-roped hands proclaimed it; only the oldest of human flesh was as crepe-like and yellowed as her own.

And a little while after having these thoughts, as she sleeps in her beach chair, death makes its second appearance of the day. “What can we do with her out here — how will we get her home?” is her daughter’s first reaction. She is still at the annoyance stage.

Sully manages to squeeze a cast of dozens into the space of barely 160 pages. They weave in and out, crossing paths or missing each other entirely. Val, the girl with the cracked skull, comes to, finds herself wrapped up in a canvas cloth in the shed, susses the situation, manages to slip out, and heads for the first train out of town. Her would-be murderer wanders the town trying to decide between finding a shovel and a discreet bush to bury her behind and attempting to toss her body into the sea that night. He meets a creepy old man in a isolated mansion at the edge of the town and is left with the distinct impression that the old man may have buried a body or two himself.

But he never meets with any sense of regret until death makes its last visit of the day. Wandering along the beach, he comes across another body:

For an instant he knew that he beheld a husk — that the man was elsewhere — and that life was life and could not be denied or extinguished — ever. The body was merely a shack.

The instant passed and all knowledge of it: all he knew afterwards was that he had felt something to stupendous to comprehend.

After reading six of Kathleen Sully’s seventeen novels, I think I can see two themes emerging in her work: life is chaotic and rarely comprehensible; and death is inevitable and never more than a breath away. A Man Talking to Seagulls is an apt example of how she managed to weave both themes into a single composition almost Simenon-ian in its grim efficiency.

A Man Talking to Seagulls, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1959