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1960s

The Roundabout by Michael Allwright (1968)

Cover of the Macmillan (UK) hardback edition of The Roundabout.

This year, I have been running the Wafer-Thin Books reading group with James Morrison (Caustic Cover Critic) and promised myself that I would take this as an opportunity to be more succinct in my posts. But I quickly discovered that, to paraphrase Blaise Pascal, it’s often harder to write something short than something long. Nevertheless, I will attempt to keep this and subsequent posts about some of the neglected wafer-thin books (under 150 pages long) that I’ve been reading this year.

Cover of U.S. paperback edition of Neighbors.

I’ll start with one I just finished, a tattered and price-stickered paperback published by Modern Promotions (“A Division of UniSystems”) in 1969 under the title of Neighbors. Neighbors is the American title of The Roundabout, originally published in the UK by Macmillan in 1968. I doubt I would have picked it up were it not for the following blurb from Brigid Brophy:

I greatly admire Neighbors [I’m sure she wrote The Roundabout], which takes up the universal nightmare feeling, “Suppose I’ve got it all wrong” and spins it into a very elegant, economical and scarifying little trap for the imagination.

Brigid Brophy, in my opinion, was a writer whose critical judgments you can take to the bank, so I was happy to spend a buck on the book and add it to my growing pile of wafer-thinners in anticipation of this year.

This morning, I picked it up to get a dozen or so pages tucked in and ended up reading it straight through. This is a riveting little book that manages to squeeze three different narrators and at least four different perspectives into 138 pages. There aren’t a lot of books on the theme of “Suppose I’ve got it all wrong,” but boy, do they tend to be good ones: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier; Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. And you can add this one to the list.

Cover of U.K. paperback edition of The Roundabout.

Mathew, a naive and odd young man, takes a room at Mrs. Haines’ house. Within his first day there, he notices, through the curtains in the window of the house next door, just fifteen feet away, that someone is watching him. He learns that this is Mrs. Shawburn, a heavy-set middle-aged woman whose husband is blind and almost deaf. He speaks to her over the backyard hedge, has tea with her and Mr. Shawburn, who’s obsessed with horse-racing, and believes she tries to kiss him impulsively as she shows him out the door. He becomes convinced that Mrs. Shawburn has designs on him and then, when he notices that the couple isn’t taking their usual walk on Wednesday evenings, that she’s murdered her husband.

Some of this is true. Or partly true. Some of it is utterly, totally mistaken. The root problem is fundamental in our make-up as humans: what you see and what I see can differ dramatically. And as dramatic as the relevations are by the halfway point in The Roundabout, there are even bigger ones waiting in the second half. This is a delicious wafer-thin slice of nastiness, a superb evening’s read.

Michael Allwright, 1968.

Michael Allwright was a South African journalist who said that he came up with the idea for The Roundabout from playing a game of “What If?” with a friend. Though his dustjacket bio says he was working on a second novel, I can’t find any evidence that one was ever published.

The Roundabout is available on the Internet Archive: Link.

The Roundabout by Michael Allwright
London: Macmillan, 1968
London: Panther, 1969

Published in the U.S. as Neighbors
New York: Walker and Company, 1968
New York: Modern Promotions, 1969

A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding, by Sylvia Wright (1969)

Publishing is almost as notorious for its misleading packaging as the recording business. We may never know what Doubleday’s remit to the Paul Bacon design studio was for Sylvia Wright’s A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding, but the vaguely romantic cover that was supplied in response represents in not the slightest way the book’s contents. For one thing, this is not a novel but a collection of three novellas. And three novellas that in no way resemble the sort of narrative a fan of Georgette Heyer or Anya Seton might expect.

Sylvia Wright doesn’t even pretend to know how to write such a book: “How do you make fiction?” she asks in the opening line of “Fathers and Mothers,” her opening novella. After contemplating fiction’s components — information, characters, plot — she confesses within a page or so, “I cannot grasp this craft.” And in the subsequent 180-some pages of the book, she makes no attempt to.

Although one can detect the influence of Nouveau Roman at some points, Virginia Woolf at others, there is no deliberate imitation here. In fact, it would be easier to place A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding in the context of the wave of American experimental fiction just then making itself known in the work of Donald Barthelme, William Gass, Robert Coover, and others. Except even that suggestion is misleading, since Wright’s career as a fiction writer (well, even though she claimed not to grasp the craft, it’s the most convenient label we have at hand) was too brief to allow any sort of network of influences to form. None of the three pieces in A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding were published previously and this is her only work of fiction.

Sylvia Wright was not a naïf, though. Soon after graduating from Bryn Mawr, she learned about both novel-writing and publishing when she and her mother worked with Mark Saxton to turn the 2300-page manuscript left by her father, Austin Tappan Wright, into publishable form. Though its bulk (over 1,000 pages even after editing) put off many readers, Islandia (1942) became, and remains, a cult favorite, a blend of utopianism, fantasy, romance, and what today we’d call steampunk.

Sylvia Wright
Sylvia Wright, 1969.

She translated that experience into a job on the staff of Harpers Bazaar, eventually earning her own monthly column of humorous observations on life. A couple dozen of these were collected and published in 1955 as Get Away From Me With Those Christmas Gifts. Many have titles like, “My Kitchen Hates Me” and “How to Make Chicken Liver Pate Once.” But one piece has worked its way into our vocabulary: “The Death of Lady Mondegreen.”

In it, Wright recalls learning a Scottish ballad, “The Bonnie Earl O’ Moray,” as a child. In particular, she memorized the lines, “They have slain the Earl o’ Moray/And Lady Mondegreen.” Only, in the balland, that last phrase is actually “And layd him on the green.” “I saw it all clearly,” she wrote:

The Earl had yellow curly hair and a yellow beard and of course wore a kilt. He was lying in a forest clearing with an arrow in his heart. Lady Mondegreen lay at his side, her long, dark-brown curls spread out over the moss. She wore a dark-green dress embroidered with light-green leaves outlined in gold.

“It made me cry,” she writes. When she did finally learn the correct wording, she clung defiantly to her version. It was better. And this led her to champion her invention: the mondegreen. For Wright, mondegreens are not errors. They are portals into other worlds:

If you lay yourself open to mondegreens, you must be valiant. The world, blowing near, will assail you with a thousand bright and strange images. Nothing like them has ever been seen before, and who knows what lost and lovely things may not come streaming in with them? But there is always the possibility that they may engulf you and that you will go wandering down a horn into a mondegreen underworld from which you can never escape.

Wright got her mondegreens from poetry, newspapers, and advertisements. Popular music lyrics have been a rich source for them, even when many of us didn’t know they had a name. And Wright was right in viewing them as transformative. A mondegreen, for example, turns Jimi Hendrix’s ode to LSD, “‘Cuse Me While I Kiss the Sky,” into a celebration of homosexual love: “‘Cuse Me While I Kiss This Guy.”

And perhaps the notion of mondegreens is a clue to understand what Sylvia Wright is doing in A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding. In the first novella, “Fathers and Mothers,” the reader can reconstruct a straightforward story: a Greek mother and father are sharing an apartment in Boston with their son, his American wife — the narrator, but only sometimes — and their infant grandson. The father is suffering from lung cancer. They have come to America to get the best medical care. After months of treatment, the father dies. The family returns to Athens for his funeral.

But that’s what’s happening in the background. In the foreground, the thing that attracts Wright’s attention is how her in-laws (in real life she was married to a Greek man, so presumably this is somewhat autobiographical) deal with their new world. Part of that new world is cancer and sickness and too many hours in the hospital. Another part is America is another part. They are Greek. At home, they can glance out their apartment and see the Acropolis. Ancient Greece and modern Greece are intertwined.

So naturally, one would expect similar things in America. “Have there been preserved here some of the songs and stories of the old Indians, so that one can get a sense of their rhythms, their sonorities?” the mother-in-law asks. A natural question. Except that even today, most Americans would be stumped to indicate any aspect of the culture of our indigenous peoples that hasn’t been processed through Longfellow, the Boy Scouts, and Hollywood. All we know is the transformed version.

The mother-in-law, in particular, is the transformative agent in this family. When not at the hospital, the father-in-law spends most of his time lying limp on the couch. The mother-in-law is the one questioning norms, pushing for routines to be changed, not being satisfied by the status quo. “Now, if this were a story,” Wright observes, “a real story instead of whatever it is, then this could be interpreted and the story shaped to advance through the interpretation.” And those interpretations “would serve the delicious purpose of turning the mother into the villain.”

But which is the truth? The interpretations — the mondegreens — or “the information,” as Wright refers to one of her elements of fiction? The tension between the two alternatives runs like a motif through all three novellas. In the second, “Dans le Vrai” [In truth], the “story” is about the narrator’s visit to her sister and nephew in upstate New York. It’s the late 1950s or early 1960s: the great Federal interstate highway system is in the midst of being built. The characters go to see a section under construction nearby, a great excavated gash through the countryside.

Then, suddenly, the narrator announces, we’re in a new story, a story within a story called “The Thruway.” Or is the narrator the story?

I am the Thruway. I live in a new world in which I must stretch myself to touch, to contain immeasurably unexpected combinations. I will link discrepancies. No, I will be discrepancies, encompass contradiction, and out of that compute what meanings — what secrets — out of what snail-like and dreary settled pasts will now freshly dart what pleasures in rooms without shapes, corners, of dimensions I cannot now imagine. Ah, yes, I will be reconciled — No, not be reconciled, never be reconciled, that will be the strength — but action — one’s life will be —

Following Sylvia Wright through her fictions is like watching someone trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces have the same color but just ever-so-slightly different shapes. She takes a piece of “the information,” places it against reality, sees where it fits … but also where it doesn’t. And so she sets that piece down and tries another. Which way does the mondegreen work? Which represents truth? The piece or the rest of the puzzle?

If this makes A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding sound maddening … well, it is. But only in the sense that Sylvia Wright refuses to accept the simple solutions. She is every bit as perceptive into the gestures and mannerisms and pretences of individual characters as Virginia Woolf or George Eliot, and there are plenty of moments of just the sort of pleasure one gets from reading about the interactions of human beings in more conventional fiction.

But she also reminds me in some ways of one of the most challenging and frustrating writers that ever lived, Dorothy Richardson, who puts such extraordinary effort into trying to get her impressions right — and yet always adds, “Yes, but there’s still something more.” Despite its extraordinarily odd title, A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding may be the best work of fiction I’ve read this year.

Sylvia Wright died of cancer in 1981 at the age of 64. She published no other books after this, though she left an unfinished biography of her great aunt Melusina Fay Peirce, wife of the philopher and mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce.

Oh, and a shark-infested rice pudding is the punchline of a joke. You’ll have to read to book to get it.

A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding, by Sylvia Wright
Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1969

A Jingle-Jangle Song, by Mariana Villa-Gilbert (1968)

Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press ad for <em>A Jingle-Jangle Song</em> by Mariana Villa-Gilbert.
Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press ad for A Jingle-Jangle Song by Mariana Villa-Gilbert.

Mariana Villa-Gilbert, who died recently at the age of 86, spent most of her life as a largely forgotten writer. Her last novel, Manuela: A Modern Myth, came out in 1973 and, like the previous five and her one short story collection, The Sun in Horus (1986), quickly went out of print and have never been reissued.

Such is the fate of a writer whose work earns the half-hearted verdict of “interesting.” Her first novel, Mrs. Galbraith’s Air (1963), about — well, not so much an affair as an attraction — between bright schoolboy and an older, sophisticated married woman was nuanced and complex but perhaps at a level a bit beyond its author’s reach. When I read it last year with some anticipation, I found that what was meant as subtle too often came out as muddle. I gave up several chapters into Manuela when the comic satire seemed to lose all connection to reality, though I still plan to take it up again in hopes that the problem was less with the book than with my tired brain.

Villa-Gilbert probably took her title of A Jingle-Jangle Song from Bob Dylan’s early hit “Mr. Tambourine Man,” for it takes place in a brief moment, probably around late 1964, when there seemed a chance that the American folk revival from which Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, and other singers might wash ashore in England with similar success. Sarah Kumar, Villa-Gilbert’s heroine, is undoubtedly modeled on Joan Baez, with similar long black hair, olive skin, piercing dark eyes, and otherworldly voice.

Arrived in London on a brief stop en route to appearances in France, Sarah is taken by a British DJ to an opening at a Pall Mall art gallery and subsequent after party. Jet-lagged and uncomfortable, she drinks far too much and finds herself hanging over the sink in the ladies’ room. Which is where Jane, an older woman and wife to the exhibiting sculptor, comes to her aid. Jane cleans Sarah up and escorts her to a quiet couch to sleep it off.

The next day, Jane and Sarah meet again in a Soho cafe. Jane is waiting to meet her husband for lunch; Sarah is trying to re-enter the world with the help of caffeine. They talk and agree to meet later. Jane is already aware of a vague attraction. Discussing Sarah with her husband after the party, she had found herself being wary of how she spoke of her:

“Twenty-two.” Carefully. And putting aside the earring now, placing it exactly — so. Afraid he might wonder at her interest, that she’d bothered to discover her age. (Oh but it was ridiculous, the way one hummed and hahed over these things. Why on earth should she be ashamed of her interest in a member of her own sex?)

Within 48 hours of their first meeting, the two are making love, both apparently for the first time with another woman. Jane’s background is one of mostly unfulfilled matrimony punctuated by a very occasional affair (her husband’s far more frequently). Sarah, however, is scarred. After losing her virginity to a professor for whom she was just one in a long string of undergraduate conquests, she fell into a five-year relationship with a messianic figure who abused her physically and emotionally. This ended when she was swept up as a rising star by her agent, who is only interested in Sarah as a property — abuse of another form.

Now caught in a torrent of recording sessions, television appearances, concerts, and revolving hotel rooms, Sarah arrives in London not just jetlagged but shell-shocked. Her attraction to Jane, is less physical than for the emotional safety she offers. For her part, Jane is drawn both by Sarah’s beauty and the intensity of her passion for living, chaotically as she currently expresses it.

A Jingle-Jangle Song falls into that narrow sub-genre of the layover romance, where some of the magic resides in the relentless approach of the departure. We all know these things can only end in one of two ways: with a wistful farewell and a heart-breaking return to normal life; or with the last-minute scene in which the two lovers decide to rescue their love at the cost of all the resulting disruption to their normal lives. Either romance or normalcy has to win. This is the logic of this particular cliche.

In the case of A Jingle-Jangle Song, however, we are left one step short of the fork in the denouement. Either Villa-Gilbert was reluctant to choose her ending or intentionally manipulating her readers’ expectations.

Mariana Villa-Gilbert, from the late 1950s.
Mariana Villa-Gilbert, from the late 1950s.

In his Guardian obituary of Mariana Villa-Gilbert, Christopher Adams wrote of the novel, “Attacked by reviewers for its lesbian content, it nevertheless gained a following in the lesbian press and stands as an important contribution to the genre.” Attacked is too harsh a word. Pigeon-holed might be more accurate. Mary Kenny, in the Evening Standard, dismissed A Jingle-Jangle Song as “yet another [unsuccessful] stab at the definitive lesbian novel, not without talent — but not wholly with conviction either” and exhorted the author: “Come, come, Miss Villa-Gilbert: we did better in the dorm at convent school.” Vernon Scannell, quite the proper Englishman in the New Statesman, admitted that “For non-lesbians like myself, the love scenes have a certain didactic interest,” unconsciously revealing just how limited was his understanding of the physical act of sex between two women took place. (And the sex in the novel is barely past the “brush of a fingertip” level.) The worst take by far was that of David Irvine in the Coventry Evening Telegraph, who concluded that the root of the problem was that Sarah Kumar “can never quite reconcile herself to the fact that she is a half-caste.”

The most insightful and enthusiastic review was that written by Gene Damon, editor and critic of the pioneering American lesbian magazine, The Ladder. Damon, whose job often involved reading the sleasiest and worst-written porn, wrote that, “For me, the reward for searching through endless hundreds of books each year is the occasional title tha tmakes all the boredom and all of the irritation engendered by many of them, worth it.” A Jingle-Jangle Song, she announced, “is one of the special books.” Damon felt that “the nature of love is discussed and examined without clinical detractions” and the sex was described in realistic yet tender terms.

A Jingle-Jangle Song was, Damon wrote, “the closest thing to a romantic novel one could expect in this time.” Still, she did note that Villa-Gilbert’s decision to switch back and forth between character’s perspectives was undermined by her use of aa third-person narrative, “which is awkward and unsatisfactory” — as indeed it is. In a book where so much of the time is spent in scenes with just the two women, it can at times prove challenging to keep track of which she is which.

Now that I read neglected books not just to write about them here but with an eye to whether they might be worth including in Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press, I can see that there is a middle ground between “justly neglected” and “reissue worthy.” It links to something I discussed back in 2020 with Álvaro Santana-Acuña, the author of Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic. “There are other works that are canonical but not classics,” he argued. “They have literary merit, but they cannot survive in the wild, so to speak. They need support from institutions—academics, publishers, national governments.” When we select a book for Recovered Books, a primary consideration is whether it’s likely to be of enough interest to current readers to make a profit, however modest. This is not, as Santana-Acuña puts it, a curatorial project.

Does A Jingle-Jangle Song deserve reissue? I agree with Christopher Adams that it has some place in the history of lesbian relationships in the English novel, and for that alone it merit inclusion in a series devoted to neglected fiction on this theme. At the same time, I think there are enough essential flaws in its execution that it is hard to argue it can stand on its own without that pigeon-holing label. As a straight white male, I am uncomfortable in making that statement. It may well be that A Jingle-Jangle Song changed some lives. It may be that its structural flaws are of secondary importance to its place in the development of lesbian themes in literature.

What should be clear, regardless of one’s view of where it best fits in our understanding of literature, however, is that it doesn’t deserve to be so obscure and inaccessible that there are no copies for sale and just around three dozen copies sitting in (mostly) university libraries around the world. This is one of the reasons why I hope the Internet Archive, the Hathi Trust, and similar initiative continue to scan and make such books available online. What we understand as literature only grows when we can find places for books like A Jingle-Jangle Song and the other works of Mariana Villa-Gilbert and many, many other writers like her.

A Jingle-Jangle Song, by Mariana Villa-Gilbert
London: Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1968

The Pole and Whistle, George Moor (1966)

“A frank novel of today’s most controversial subject.” The tag line on the cover of the New English Library edition of George Moor’s novel The Pole and Whistle is accompanied by a photo of two men having a chat in the pub over a pint and a fag. It may have been the publisher’s way of achieving some plausible deniability, given that the Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults, had yet to be passed. The subject could just as well be alcoholism, perhaps.

The contrast between the tentative tone of the book’s cover and the candor of George Moor’s writing, however, is striking. In fact, Moor’s ability to create a situation which is simultaneously utterly mundane and life-destroyingly risky is part of what makes The Pole and Whistle a fascinating work for its time.

John Anselm, in his mid-twenties, is working for his uncle in a chick hatchery in a large city in Lancashire (Moor was raised in Liverpool). His work is hard, tedious, and full of long days. One evening, dreading the long walk back to his apartment, he stops at the Pole and Whistle, a run-down pub just off the main square. There, as he quietly sips a pint, and then another and another, standing in the narrow “parlour,” he notices the young men in tight blue jeans going in and out through the door marked, “Singing Room.” The carefree spirit of the teenagers, the blare of the jukebox, and another pint or two releases John’s inhibitions. “Like a chameleon I changed my emotional colour with each succeeding song. I yearned for ‘Johnny’ and I flamed for ‘Norman.'”

Then, after a visit to the gents’, he encounters a sharp-dressed man in his late twenties who offers him a pint. “You were on ‘D’ landing in Stafford, weren’t you?” he asks. Frank Jeffers, just out of prison, is full of cock and confidence and not the least bit reserved about his interest in John. The two wander out and into a park, where Frank pushes John up against a tree and kisses him. “I’ll do you tomorrow night,” he tells John. “I’ll wait for you in the Pole and Whistle.”

“I had spent most of my twenty-five years as in a railway carriage where no one spoke and everyone kept his reserve,” John tells us. He has accustomed himself to loneliness as a way of avoiding the reality of his sexual orientation. “I could never be liberated from an inner watchfulness. To myself I disclosed only a slumbering awareness of what I was.” To be honest about his desire would ruin everything in his life: his job, the love of his parents, the acceptance of his community, the right to live freely outside prison.

But Frank wipes that all away with the openness of his physical and emotional attraction to John. Soon their nights all start in the Pole and Whistle and end in John’s bed, although this still requires some subterfuge to avoid the patroling bobby and suspicions of John’s landlady. Frank is even so comfortable with their relationship that he takes John home to meet his mum, almost to show off that he can make friends with someone of a better class.

For as genuine as Frank and John’s love for each other is, the fact that they are nightly committing an illegal act is not their only problem. Frank is a criminal, a petty burglar. He can never hold onto an honest job for more than a week or two and he is constantly trying to devise another easy theft. One night, Frank goes missing and stays missing for weeks. When he finally shows up at John’s flat, he confesses that he’d tried to pull a job in a nearby town, been caught, and spent some time in jail. Before long, he attempts another robbery, which also fails, and lands him in prison with a five year sentence.

If John is hoping for a discreet and (relatively) safe long-term relationship, Frank is the last man he should be involved with. Well, next to last, perhaps, after Beggy, one of Frank’s thuggish friends, who takes advantage of the absence of John’s protector to organize a session where John is gang-raped and tortured.

Feeling his world near collapse, John retains enough of a self-preservation instinct to grab a thin, implausible thread and save himself by taking a job in Japan. In a rare moment alone with his mother, he comes out to her. “I knew,” she tells him. “Only, you had so much control I thought it would be for ever.” “It is better to be dead than live without love,” he responds, adding, “The love of a man” to be clear. Their conversation ends in the most British way imaginable: “‘I accept you as you are,’ said my mother. ‘I’ll make some tea'” John replies.

Although The Pole and Whistle was a potentially controversial book when it was published (the New English Library lacked the visibility or marketing clout to attract any serious attention), it’s actually a quite ordinary and calmly-told story about inappropriate loves and learning to accept them. John loves Frank and knows they can never be together. John’s sister is involved with a married man and she and her parents accept this as a long-term relationship. John’s mother may regret the consequences of her son’s sexuality but accepts it as a fact. No one gets everything he wants and still life goes on.

The Pole and Whistle was only ever published as a paperback original and copies are extremely scarce today. But it is recognized as one of the few and one of the best English novels to deal openly with homosexual love published before the passage of the Sexual Offences Act. Dewey Wayne Gunn included it in his Gay Novels of Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth, 1881-1981.

It’s likely that the book had some autobiographical elements. After attending Cambridge, where he won several awards for his poetry, George Moor returned north, teaching in Lancashire and Wales before he moved to Japan in the early 1960s. There, he worked as an English teacher and translator. He later taught in Papua New Guinea and Iran, returning to England after the fall of the Shah. He won an award for his novella Fox Gold not long after that. This was collected with his stories “Nightingale Island” and “Bowl of Roses” and published by John Calder in 1978. He also had two novellas published in New Writing and Writers in the 1970s. Moor was a frequent entrant in New Statesman parody and satire competitions in the 1980s. He died in Burnley in 1992.

The Pole and Whistle, by George Moor
London: The New English Library, 1966

Cressida Lindsay, Bohemian

A year or so ago, I picked up this cute Ballantine paperback copy of No Wonderland from 1967, one of a half-dozen or so contemporary British novels published to exploit America’s fascination with the Beatles, Carnaby Street, and everything gear fab. “A young girl alone in London’s swinging night world,” with a picture of a mophead and his bird sipping from what appears to be a glass of water, and from all appearances very much in love. So one might expect this to be something of a mod rom-com.

Alice is just under 18, secretly loves Elvis (considered very old school by then), and is in London to experience life. She is intrigued by, then attracted to, then fully under the sway of Matthew, just over 19 and quite full of his own worldly-wiseness. Alice moves into his flat. Only it’s not entirely his flat. There is also David, a student, and Al, a somewhat older Jamaican man.

Matthew and Alice is a match made in Soho. Which means that Matthew sometimes has to work the streets as a rent boy while Alice sips endless espressos while wedging herself into crowded tablefuls of loud artists and drama students and people of ambiguous employment. This relationship swirls around with the current for chapter after chapter, with the only episode of real interest being when Al gets beaten up by a group of white fascists protesting against immigrants. At the end, Alice declares to Matthew, “I don’t want to marry anyone but you,” to which Matthew replies, “Don’t let’s get bored, Alice.”

While No Wonderland is not particularly interesting or successful as a novel, it’s scattered with moments of genuine observations. Like how awkward it is for a young man to pretend to enjoy dancing with a stranger while her boyfriend has disappeared, obstensibly in search of a drink, or how exhausting to sit and pretend to be interested in the conversation of people strenuously trying to win an ennui competition. In fact, what struck me most about No Wonderland was how most of this life that Alice seems so eager to experience is tedious and uninspiring.

And yet, there was something that made me want to give Lindsay another try. No John, No (1966), her third novel (No Wonderland was first published in England in 1962), is about another woman, just a bit older than Alice, and her search for love. “This is a novel about what it is like to be poor, rootless, intense, and lesbian, trapped in a desperate bohemian life on the wrong side of Notting Hill,” the book’s dust flap tells us. Well, at least we know not to expect a rom-com.

“At the moment,” Kate tells us, “I’m living with Terry who is a girl like me and I rather love Terry in a way.” Although Terry is in her 30s, Kate is pleased that she’s “not like most lesbians who get broad in the hips when they pass the age of twenty-nine.”

This is from the second paragraph on page one. Two paragraphs later, we read that “Kate as usual is doing nothing, she bites her fingernails and is waiting for me to do everything for her.” So, now this is Terry speaking. A page later, the author tells us that “Kate and Terry shared a flat near the Portobello Road market.” Then we’re back with Kate, then over to Terry, then back to the author, and so on for roughly half the book, until Kate meets Anne and now we get four perspectives.

Telling a story through multiple narrators is nothing new, of course. Changing them from paragraph to paragraph is somewhat more challenging, but it tends to be less so when what the author is trying to do is help the reader see the complexity of the story. Unfortunately, the story in No John, No is actually quite simple: Kate wants to be in love and, if possible, be loved in return, though that is of secondary importance. The switches of narrators is more distracting than revealing, particularly when the characters themselves seem preoccupied with figuring out their own identities.

The one person in the book who seems to see things clearly is Kate’s married friend, Helen. Helen finds Kate’s good-natured muddle-headedness infuriating, not endearing. “Do you want me to be like you, then? Are you worried that I’m different?” Kate asks her. “No, I don’t want you to be like me,” Helen replies, “but I don’t want you to do things without understanding why, and there is a reason, something to do with your past, a psychological reason Kate.”

Cressida Lindsay and her son Simon, 1963.

Helen may have been addressing her author as much as Kate. For Lindsay’s life was a journey full of abrupt changes of direction. Her granddaughter, Tanya Perdikou, reflected on its erratic course in a 2021 article for the Wellcome Collection:

She received little love from either of her parents and reacted by spurning obligation to others, spending many years erratically pursuing her own desires. Her rejection of the traditional role of ‘mother’ was extreme: she moved from home to home, lover to lover, descended into alcoholism, neglected her five children and ended up founding The Old Rectory, a commune in rural Norfolk.

At the time No John, No was published, Lindsay’s fourth child had just been born. Its father was Anthony Blond, who published Lindsay’s second novel, Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces. Blond was quite deliberately pulled by Lindsay into a complicated triangle with her and her lover, Mark Hyatt. Recalling the bohemianism of her grandfather Norman Lindsay, Blond writes that:

She was equally bohemian in outlook and had three children by three different men. When she met me she decided I was to serve as papa no.4. She stalked me with delicacy. Her current lover, papa no. 3, was a gypsy and a poet called Mark Hyatt. He was beautiful…. A sensuous poetic face, tender lips, eyes you could swim in and a faultless nose…. Of course I fell for him.

After sleeping with both Lindsay and Hyatt, Blond bought her the country house she longed for — The Old Rectory — and was dumped by Hyatt for a tall younger man named Atom. Some time later, when Blond was visiting Lindsay and the chidren there, Atom arrived to say that Hyatt had committed suicide after learning that he was about to be left for a woman.

The dramatically different covers of the UK and US editions of Lovers and Fathers.

She married Peter Hammerton in 1968 and had her fifth and last child by him. Her next novel, Lovers and Fathers (1970), is something of a fictional account of how she ended up with five children and at least as many lovers. Lindsay, the American publisher’s blurb tells us, “has always been completely open to love in whatever variety it presented itself, whether casual, Freudian, heterosexual, lesbian, forced, seductive, or literary.” Whether we’re quite sure of what all of those adjectives refer to, we certainly get a healthy sample of the frenetic and eclectic nature of Lindsay’s love life:

For six months I had lived with the children and a few lovers. For a week I had fallen in love with a journalist because his eyebrows hung over his eyes like a moustache, and his mouth was red and he had life so well organised…. Then for weeks I liked sleeping with me…. one evening I fell in love with a tall man who had green eyes….

And then there was Bill, off to Canada the next day, he talked of the forests and pines and he drank beer very quickly…. Also Robin. Sometimes he stayed and he was good to hold, and also to be held by. One day, he said, “I’m glad your Jason affair has burned itself out.”

Then we’re on to Thomas and Gloria and Robin and it becomes like trying to remember faces on the sidewalk from a seat in a fast-moving bus. Around the time of Lovers and Fathers , John Swinfield visited Lindsay at The Old Rectory and filmed a short piece for Anglia Television that is available for viewing (if you’re in the UK) on the BFI Player. It shows a vibrant if chaotic community of writers, artists, and musicians centered around the rough country house, with children wandering on and off camera and talk and music and laughter filling the air.

If Lindsay’s like was full of children and lovers and friends at the time, it was also full of alcohol. What she couldn’t silence with the noise and energy of the people around her she could try to numb with drink. Perhaps a clue to the demons she was struggling with can be found in her second and best novel, Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces (1963).

At least one reviewer joked that the book’s title tells us all we need to know about its plot. But plot is of secondary importance here. “This book makes shocking reading,” the paperback edition’s blurb tells us. Shocking is the wrong adjective, though. Shocks are sudden. They have lingering effects, but they are usually brief, like a bolt of lightning. Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces is like fifteen rounds of being bludgeoned by an exhausted but relentless prizefighter.

When the book opens, ten-year-old Rachel has found a purse with some cash on the street. She takes it home but know better than to tell her mother Lucy about it, for Lucy will just take the money down to the pub to get drunk and probably come home late that night with a man she’d picked up. Much of the world may still be a mystery to Rachel, but she knows that money buys food, which she never gets much of.

Rachel’s father has gone to war. We gather from a few things Lucy says that he was probably taken prisoner in the British Army’s retreat from the German blitzkrieg of May-June 1940, but it’s clear that Lucy has given up hope and Rachel is trapped in a limbo of deprivation and neglect. She has a few other children to play with and together they built a little shelter that becomes a refuge for Rachel, but it’s a rough sort of refuge. Stan, a thuggish boy just turning teen taunts Rachel as a “Lying Jew puss” and attempts to force himself on her.

Lucy’s drinking progesses to the point she staggers home one night in a fit of DTs and her ravings become so loud and violent that the police are called and take her away. Rachel is then sent to what she’s told is a girl’s school but is obviously a reformatory. The attendants, known as rats, feel free to insult, mock, and slap the inmates. “This is not a rest home for young ladies, you know,” one of the rats tells her.

Her situation improves a bit when she is moved to a Catholic convent, though the sisters inflict a form of religious abuse by hounding her with the need to memorize the catechism and prepare herself for conversion. Rachel spends almost four years here, but they pass in a few pages. Then one day, a balding man in a thick overcoat and a grubby shirt shows up to take her away. “Are you Daddy?” she asks. “I never expected such a grown-up daughter. And quite pretty,” he tells her. What follows are the worst three pages in the book.

Though Cressida Lindsay may not have experienced quite the level of abuse and poverty that her character Rachel does, she did have a childhood marked by extreme highs and lows. Her father, the novelist Philip Lindsay, was friends with many celebrities and a lively figure in London creative society, but he had trouble holding onto money and Cressida spent more time with the sisters at her convent school than with her parents. The title Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces may give some indication of the abandonment she may have experienced and explain why she so fervently sought the company of others, seeking a level of contact and commitment that not all of them were willing to give.

After over decade at The Old Rectory, Lindsay and her husband Philip moved into the city of Norwich. She became a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and cared for Philip when he began to suffer from dementia. After her death in 2010, her son Dylan Hyatt discovered the manuscript of a fifth novel, written around the time of her move to Norfolk, and arranged to have it published as an e-book. The Mole and the Mountain is available from Amazon.

Marie Beginning, by Alfred Grossman (1964)

Cover of first Us edition of Marie Beginning by Alfred Grossman

This is a guest post by the novelist Rob Palk.

Some books are neglected in their old age, others — a majority — are neglected from birth. Alfred Grossman, the author of Marie Beginning (1964), was both neglected and known for it, a painful combination. Newspapers profiled his neglect in pieces that failed to avert it. Anthony Burgess, recognising another flinty show-off, gave his endorsement. It made no difference. Grossman released four novels that received good reviews and were ignored by the reading public. His efforts after the fourth were ignored by publishers too.

From the Chicago Tribune, 2 June 1968.

Marie begins in the world of The Apartment, the American office in its imperial phase. Two frazzled male office wiseacres drink their coffees and swap dialogue. Our heroine, a gamine young woman from Brooklyn, arrives to ask for a secretarial job. Her interviewer, Lydia, has very large breasts. (It was 1964. If a male writer thought up some breasts he was going to tell you about them.) So far, so Mad Men. Only something odd is afoot; the two guys in the office are discussing puritanism and the Conquistadores, and Marie bombards her interviewer with vaguely blackmailing questions about the aforementioned breasts and is rewarded for this with a job. (Yes, breasts, yes, I know. Again, it was 1964 and Lydia’s breasts are pretty much a character in this book.)

Then there’s the style. We are barely allowed inside the character’s heads; instead their inner lives spume out of them in florid ejaculations. They don’t so much converse as perform dialogue at one another, in a sort of gnomic screwball-ese of Grossman’s own invention. Scenes blur into each other in the space of a sentence. Marie herself might seem a familiar figure, the plucky street urchin who rises to the top through street smarts. Except there’s something chilling, something eldritch, about her, possessed, as she is, of both amoral cunning and a mysterious innocence. She is the teenage girl as avenging angel, or Martian, and her ambitions are set on more than just a job.

One senses that Grossman fell a bit in love with his creation, in a sweetly Platonic way. (“You don’t want to screw me and you know it. You and me,” she tells an office confidante, “I was a grown-up daughter — you could have fun with just walking on the edge of sex, playing with it, making jokes.” That sort of Platonic.) Aside from an early incident where she goads a blameless colleague into a botched suicide attempt for no reason except curiosity, her Machiavellianism is usually aimed at deserving targets. As Grossman gets fonder of her, or perhaps more annoyed at how America treated its children, Marie aims beyond humbling a few workplace chauvinists and takes on the country itself, embarking on an epic Kulturkampf against just about everything her creator must have loathed about his nation.

By a chain of implausiblebut enjoyable occurrences, Marie maneuvers her way into wedlock with her boss, Alexander Forbes. As well as being a minor plutocrat, Forbes is a predatory sadist and pervert and very American sort of fascist. We never fear for Marie in his clutches, which perhaps reduces the tension, but we do get to see our youthful protagonist turn her wits against the whole of the US right, in both its bow tied pseudo-aesthete patrician and gun-toting thick-as-pigshit forms. The creepy milieu of American reaction, its paranoid and prurient obsessions with racial and sexual hygiene, are expertly evoked. (Biographical detail: before turning to novels, Grossman edited one of the many CIA funded journals of the era, something he evidently had mixed feelings about.)

I will spoil things for no one by revealing Marie triumphs over her grim spouse and survives to fight further battles in a follow-up [The Do-Gooders (1968)] I’m now keen to read. This sequel, though, was to be Grossman’s last novel. He had no readership and it’s hard to say why. Perhaps he was that bit too clear-sighted, lacking the streak of post-Beat sentimentality of his black-comedy confreres Heller and Southern. The rest of his life was spent ignored except for occasional magazine pieces questioning why this talented author had had so little success. Twelve years after Marie Beginning was published, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He spent his last days alone, unable to physically write, but still recording novels onto a tape recorder that he knew would never be played.

Rob Palk is the author of Animal Lovers (Sandstone Press). He tweets at @robpalkwriter.

Marie Beginning, by Alfred Grossman
New York: Doubleday, 1964

The Fly, by Richard Chopping (1965)

Cover to the first edition of The Fly by Richard Chopping

I often stumble across a particularly intriguing forgotten book while on the trail of a different one. Recently, I was looking for information about a novel by Henri-François Rey called The Mechanical Pianos when I came across this blurb from Arthur Calder-Marshall in a Secker & Warburg ad in the Guardian: “The most interesting failure I have read for years.”

From the Secker & Warburg ad in The Guardian, 29 January 1965.

For anyone who loves odd books, a phrase like “the most interesting failure” will set off alarms. I abandoned The Mechanical Pianos (pardon, Henri-François) and went in search of Mr. Chopping’s The Fly. The reviews I found made it clear that this was not just an interesting failure but a book with a uniquely off-putting power for many critics:

E. D. O’Brien, The Illustrated London News
“prurient, scatological, corrupt and sickening.”
B. S. Johnson, The Spectator
“much gratuitous nastiness conveyed by means of an overwritter, convoluted progression of cliches…. Quite revoltingly self-indulgent and pointless.”

Seymour Simckes, The New York Times
“progresses toward a total sullying of life, toward the harshest realities of grotesque death and grotesque madness.”
Adrian Mitchell, New Statesman
“This spleeny story of office life is dominated by snot, shit, semen, and pus. Why should anyone bother to write about the interesting, fairly virgin, subject of people who pick their noses and eat the pickings if all he can say about it is an implied ‘ugh’?”
Iain Hamilton, The Daily Telegraph
“His sardonic descriptions are informed by a disgust so acute that it might even be called exultant.”
Sunday Times
“Rarely have the filthy, petty particularities of loneliness — the Camembert among the hairbrushes, the menace of a tattered usherette — been give such a thorough going-over.”

“The Camembert among the hairbrushes”? Exultant disgust? This was clearly a book worth investigating.

The first few dozen pages of The Fly feature some of the most compelling writing I’ve come across in a long time. “The perpetual silent witness of the events in this unpleasant narrative,” Chopping informs us, is a fly. A common house fly. But a fly with “nacreous glistening body,” “vicious soft proboscis,” two “many faceted globes” to observe its world. And not a mere observer but a “servant of the Eumenides,” “the miniature personification of evil, neat, fast, deadly.”

US paperback edition of The Fly by Richard Chopping

Mr. Chopping may not know his flies like an entomologist, but he clearly does exult in his descriptions. But this is just the first page. Turn it, and we and the fly are transported outside, to a gutter wet with drizzle, in which, “breaking the surface, lies a used condom.”

At least one reviewer pulled the red cord at this point.

He may not, therefore, have witnessed what happens on the third page. A young girl reaches into the gutter with a twig and produces the condom for her brother’s inspection: “‘Ere, Leslie, look at this!”

To call Jennifer –the girl — and Leslie street urchins would be to sully the fine name of street urchins. These are two of the dirtiest, nastiest, most malignant children in fiction. But they are paragons compared, in Chopping’s eyes, to what’s in the push-chair Jennifer is dragging along with her other hand:

Half lying, half sitting it gazes fixedly out at the world through still eyes, squinting and protuberant. It has been so battered into obedience by Jennifer that it knows better than to utter a sound. Its bloated appearance and its immobility are further accentuated by the lower half of its body being encased in faded blue woollen rompers, bulbously overstuffed with nappies. Its arms stick out straight in front of it as if they were articulated together on a wire through the upper part of its doll’s body. The hands are swollen, mottled blue and scarlet from bad circulation. Its head is concealed in, and its face framed by, a soiled white pixie cap. From this push-chair there arises a soursweet odour of stale urine and old milk. This object is called Brenda — Leslie and Jennifer’s baby sister.

“This object” — clearly Chopping is not a man with the milk of human kindness running through his veins. But he does not single out children with his animus: he is an equal opportunity misanthrope.

Jennifer, Leslie, and Brenda play in the street outside the Office. Although Chopping doesn’t identify where his novel is set, but it could be any overcrowded, squalid grey industrial English city of its time. The purpose of the Office is never mentioned, and it doesn’t matter. It’s a place full of desks and telephones, typewriters and file cabinets, ashtrays and pale-faced mediocre clerks, secretaries, and managers, all of them grey, miserable, and frustrated.

Mr. Gender most of all: “In adolescence, he was already a grey man in embryo.” Poor Mr. Gender does get his share of abuse from his creator. His encroaching baldness is examined under the fly’s microscope: “It saw damp thinning strands of hair, carefully trained across a putty-coloured skull; oiled fronds of seaweed across a dead fish’s belly.” His grossest behaviors are put on display for our revulsion: “going back to a childhood habit, he was feeding himself with the pickings from his nose with the eager rapacity of a hungry fanatic.”

Chopping has turned the tables on the reader, in other words. It is his fly who is the noble creature, the diligent agent taking note, acting on behalf of the gods. It is his people who are held up for our repulsion. There is not a line in these pages that does not make the reader want to take a shower and give himself a vigorous scrub down.

And yet, and yet.

Within a few dozen more pages, we discover the truth in Arthur Calder-Marshall’s words. For those willing to follow Richard Chopping into this cesspool he has created, The Fly is a journey filmed in Technicolor and Cinemascope. But as a novel, it ultimately fails in design and structure.

Balzac understood something that Chopping doesn’t: if you’re going to write about nasty people, it’s the nastiest ones who have to be the stars. By far the nastiest piece of work in the Office is the cleaning (there’s an irony!) lady, Mrs. Macklin. Her superpower is spotting everyone else’s vulnerabilities, which she then probes with her rustiest, filthiest instruments. And she’s not above shoving a corpse into the building furnace to avoid awkward questions. While Chopping may have prided himself on his choice of the fly as his witness, this book would have been much more effective seen through Mrs. Macklin’s hatefilled eyes.

Structurally, The Fly is several chapters too long. We follow everyone in the Office for an annual outing to the zoo. Chopping takes us home with several of the Office’s employees, as if test-driving them as protagonists, ultimately choosing to build his climax around Mr. O’Flattery, an anxious clerk whose only distinguishable feature is his being Irish, who works himself into a breakdown not so much by Mrs. Macklin’s machinations as by the anticipation of them — and even this process is drawn out too long. Chopping’s exultant disgust loses its joyous intensity, turning into tedium and, finally, weariness.

The Fly was Richard Chopping’s first novel. Trained as an artist, Chopping was best known for his trompe-l’œil covers for the original UK hardback editions of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Several years later, Chopping published a second novel, The Ring, about a gay man who finds himself consumed in London’s rough trade world. This was a world Chopping knew intimately, so I am interested to see if the subject tapped into his design aesthetic better than did the grey workers in The Fly‘s Office.

The Fly, by Richard Chopping
London: Secker & Warburg, 1965

The Twelve Days of Christmas, by Venetia Murray (1968)

The Twelve Days of Christmas by Venetia Murray

Venetia Murray’s novel The Twelve Days of Christmas (1968) has a reputation for being a cult novel, though I suspect that’s largely due to a certain passage that’s been quoted several times in potpourri books by Jilly Cooper and others. It comes from a scene in which two lovers are laying in bed in a discreet Paris hotel after making love. “I need some new pants,” the woman tells the man, which leads him to do a quick bit of the kind of mental calculus that’s one price of carrying on an affair:

After all, having committed himself to all this expenditure, he might as well get the best of it. And pants cost less than some things. But he was not looking forward to the moment when they would walk together down the Faubourg St Honoré. A happy thought occurred to him. Tomorrow was Sunday and the shops in the Rue St Honoré would be closed both on Sunday and Monday. This Sarah had forgotten. He realized this meant that he would have to keep her in bed for most of today.

Sarah is Sarah Yeates, in line to become Lady Yeates whenever her grandfather the Earl dies. The man is Simon Burford, a married publisher who’s told him wife that he’s attending a French publishing conference in Lyons. Which is just the sort of thing that French publishers organize … five days before Christmas.

But amorous complexities and moral quandries are the warps and woofs of Venetia Murray’s fictional fabric in The Twelve Days of Christmas. Sarah is divorced from her third husband and has had so many affairs that during her Paris getaway she has to stay two steps ahead of herself to avoid leading her current lover into someplace she’s been with one of the others. For Paris and London are small towns when it comes to people of their class and amatory habits:

There had been a memorable occasion in some restaurant in the King’s Road, where too many people who had crossed currents in their lives too often, had all run into each other having dinner at separate tables. Henry’s ex-wife had been there; she had been with a man with whom Suzy had once had an affair. Catharine had been there with someone she should not have been there with, since she was supposed to be a respectable married woman even if her husband was once again away. Some irrelevant Italian girl was there.

With so many matchings and mismatchings going on, some irrelevant man or woman is bound to find themselves the leftover in such scenes. When Simon flies off to Paris — sorry, Lyons — Catharine, his wife (second marriage for each) heads off to a psychedelic party at the Ritz and winds up falling for Mark, a novelist and leftover man. The party is being thrown by Catharine’s ambiguously trans(Atlantic) friend Elizabeth, who’s wealthy enough to persuade the management of the Ritz to look past the stoned half-naked bodies that litter the floor of her suite at the end of the party.

The Twelve Days of Christmas is certainly an artifact of the Swinging Sixties, but the irony is that the lion’s share of the licentiousness is in the hands of the monied/salaried/mortgaged thirty-somethings. Perhaps this is because the book is very much a roman à clef. According to Murray’s obituary in the Guardian, it was “a thinly disguised and pungent portrait of young, spoilt marrieds playing around in London in the early 1960s.”

Venetia Murray in the mid-1960s.

At the time Murray wrote the book, she was between her second and third marriages and was part of a social set whose interconnections — marital, sexual, familial, and professional — were easily as intricate as any in the novel. The granddaughter of the renowned classicist and humanist Gilbert Murray and daughter of the journalist and politician Basil Murray (rumored to be the model of Evelyn Waugh’s character Basil Seal), Venetia Murray had been among the more privileged child evacuees of Blitz, spending most of the war living with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and his wife in Washington, D.C. and attending the exclusive Potomac School for girls.

When she was 18, she stayed with the novelist Nancy Mitford in Paris so she could attend a gala ball. Mitford wrote of Venetia to Waugh:

I’ve got a Beauty of 18 coming tomorrow which is a lovely treat, she came with her mother to buy a ball dress, which she has duly done, & I’ve persuaded the mother to leave her with me for a few days. She is called Venetia Murray, daughter of my dear old drunken cousin the late Basil M & she is an old fashioned Beauty, that is to say rather large & in a perpetual state of puppy like ecstasy which I find very attractive — like a puppy which wags itself rather than its tail.

Murray attributes to her character Sarah an incident that took place during her stay with Mitford:

Once upon a time when Sarah had been very young and in Paris she had been allowed, though only sixteen, to go to a ball with some young people. But she had been told to be back by twelve. She had been staying with her god-mother, a witty and well-known novelist but not a connoisseur of the behaviour of young girls. Sarah arriving back from the ball at five — in face she had only been having fun, not doing anything that in those days people like her god-mother would have called “wrong” — had run across the large courtyard in her ball gown, aware of how late she was. Her god-mother had been waiting up, worried that Sarah, in her charge, might have done something “wrong.” Her god-mother had said, “What is the use of running the last hundred yards when you are five hours late?”

I suspect that anyone familiar with the goings-on of London literati in the 1950s and 1960s could find many other examples of Murray’s appropriation of real-life characters and situations. Simon and Catherine rent a bedroom in their North London house to Suzy, an arrangement that sounds similar to the one Murray and Sally Newton, daughter of the actor Robert Newton, had in the house owned by poet and cricket writer Alan Ross. An annotated edition of The Twelve Days of Christmas would, in fact, likely be a valuable piece of social and literary history. As a work of fiction, however, it’s amusing but superficial — in its way as dated as a Regency romance (Murray later became a historian of the Regency) — and not a 1960s counterpart to Waugh’s early novels about the Bright Young Things of 1920s London.

The Twelve Days of Christmas, by Venetia Murray
London: Collins, 1968

Victoria Kelrich Morhaim, Conflicted Feminist

Cover of The Girl in the Gold Leather Dress by Victoria Kelrich Morhaim

When it comes to books, good things often come in misleading packages. This is particularly true when it comes to pulp paperbacks from the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these were sold at newsstands and drug store check-out lines, where the key to a sale was more about catching the eye than conveying truthful information about content. And the demand for new titles to push into those display racks meant that publishers tended to be undiscriminating about content.

Sometimes, this means the content is pure formula, nothing more than a rush-job assemblage of one-dimensional characters, hackneyed plots, and ineptly written prose. Sometimes — not too often, but sometimes — this means the content is pure gold. A masterpiece in disguise. And sometimes, this means the book is just, well, interesting.

Interesting. Yes, that’s the word our mothers taught us to use when we couldn’t think of anything nice to say. But to me, interesting hasn’t lost all its meaning. Interesting here means that the book is perhaps not fully successful yet still worth reading, often because it leaves me wondering about what might have been.

The minute I saw The Girl in the Gold Leather Dress (1961), I knew it would at least be interesting. “Ginsburg – Kerouac – MORHAIM” announces the banner at the top of the back cover. Morhaim? you ask. So did I. But this was a somewhat rare (for Signet Books) original novel, not a reissue of something from a major publisher, so it looked promising.

And promising it certainly is. The girl of the title is Rena, an undergraduate at UCLA (or something like it) who’s unhappy with the choices that life is presenting her. Which is understandable, given that we first see her heading off to a frat party with a superficial honor student too dumb to realize what an unusual woman he’s with.

For one thing, while he’s wearing the same sportscoat/tie/loafers combination as every other male in sight, Rena is wearing a hand-tailored dress made out of glove leather the color of wheat. She’s a knock-out in it and she knows it. So she’s not surprised when Tom, a football player and one of the alpha dogs of the fraternity, tries to steer her into his bed. The scene is the same pathetic melodrama played out every Friday night by undergraduate men all over the world:

“Oh, honey, help me, help me,” he said. His voice was as spoiled as a child’s begging candy.
“Help you what?”
“You know.”
“Say it.”
He struggled for a moment, not wanting to verbalize his desire.
Then he said, “I’m so excited.”
“You want to …” began Rena, pausing for him to finish the sentence.
“… make love,” he said.
“That’s a lie,” said Rena, her face showing scorn. “You don’t want to make love, you want to screw.”

Rena rejects him, pointing out that football is “merely a society-approved sublimation of homosexual impulses.” This happens in the book’s first ten pages. I knew I wanted to see where Victoria Morhaim would take Rena.

Rena is at an experimental stage in her life. She’s willing to sleep with a man when she feels the attraction (as with the maker of the gold leather dress) and just as willing to turn them down. She will drink or smoke pot if she’s in the mood or toss someone from her apartment for offering either when she’s not. That apartment reflects the unsettled state of her life: “At times Rena would suddenly see the tangle of things and feel a desperate need to straighten them out, but that desire never lasted long and the apartment remained untouched.”

Her parents are ready for the experiment to end. Actually, her mother is more than ready. After calling Rena a slut, her mother ejects her from their house, telling her to “Take the stench of your way of life and your mind with you. Don’t ever come back here again.”

As many young people discover, knowing what you don’t want doesn’t necessarily get you any closer to knowing what you do, and this is both Rena’s dilemma and the source of Morhaim’s difficulties in turning The Girl in the Gold Leather Dress into a coherent work of fiction. If one had to predict what will happen after the first few chapters, it would be natural to guess that Rena will go through a series of relationships that will ultimately lead to either happiness (with some form of Prince Charming) or wisdom (with some form of acceptance that Prince Charming doesn’t hold the key to happiness).

And while that’s essentially what does happen, the problem lies in the execution. At several points in the book, Morhaim switches from Rena’s point of view to that of one of the men she’s involved with. These transitions are neither well-executed (the men are names without character) nor useful for advancing the narrative.

Part of the problem, I think, is that Morhaim doesn’t trust her own creation. Rena lacks no confidence when it comes to her opinions. When Dr. Altman, an older “more sophisticated” history professor, invites her to his home, he proudly displays his collection of books on early American history, expecting her to be in awe. Instead, she’s in shock:

“Look at this, this collection of prints.” Rena lifted the leather cover. “It’s pornographic. Look at those pictures: scalpings, burnings, murder, mutilations.” She flipped the pages of the book. “Look, look here.” She pointed at one particularly gory print. An Indian was in the process of decapitating a pioneer woman. “This is the most perverse thing I’ve ever seen.”

Yet within another twenty-some pages, we see Dr. Altman coming to Rena’s rescue, calling her “Rena girl” as she begs, “Help me, Leonard. Please. Help me.”

Cover of The Girl Who Had Everything by Victoria Kelrich Morhaim

A similar problem exists with Morhaim’s second novel (also a Signet original), The Girl Who Had Everything. Here, she offers us a portrait of a woman a few years older than Rena but none the wiser. Samara — Sammy to everyone — is a former homecoming queen from the San Fernando Valley now working for an electronics firm in San Francisco. Though she’s “just” a secretary, she is, in fact, the administrative glue that holds the marketing department together, and not long into the book is offered the job of running it.

Unfortunately, Sammy has completely bought into the idea that a wedding ring is the key to happiness. Worse, she also accepts wholeheartedly the myth that men have all the brains in business.

Around the same time that the door to career advancement opens, Sammy meets the perfect man. Charles runs his own company, owns a fabulous home with a bay view, knows the maître-ds at all the best restaurants in town, and — very much a stereotype of the “sophisticated man” in those days — confidently knows what to order for Sammy without asking her. She’s as giddy as a baby on a swing when he asks her out for the first time.

“Yippeeeeeeee,” she screamed.
“My God, what was that?” Maxine appeared suddenly in the doorway.
“That, Maxine,” said Sammy, “was a man. Man, man, man!”

To which we can only respond, “Oy, oy, oy!”

Things too good to be true usually are. Beneath Charles’ man of the world mask is a petty, violent, jealous boy. So it’s no surprise when, suspecting Sammy of having another lover — her gay interior decorator, of course, because jealousy rarely improves discernment — Charles shows her that he must be the only one to control her in a predictably adolescent way: he rapes her.

Once again, Morhaim makes her heroine weak and unstable. Sammy has been seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Rolfe, on a regular basis for over five years. “He helps me live through the week. I don’t think I could make it without him,” she tells a friend. In truth, Dr. Rolfe is a model of the kind of shrink who turned a generation or more of women into therapeutic co-dependents. When Sammy tells him about meeting Charles, he dismisses her enthusiasm:

“No, my dear girl, that is not the answer. You don’t need another man right now. You need something to get rid of all that hostility that is in you…. I have told you many times that it does no good to be angry at me. I am only the voice of your conscience.”

Dr. Rolfe’s answer to Sammy’s problems: “Why don’t you join a dramatic group?” And with that, he sends her on her way, reminding Sammy, “Don’t forget the check next time.”

Instead of encouraging Sammy’s development into emotional independence (she has, after all, already achieved financial and social independence), Dr. Rolfe’s guidance ultimately sends her into a literal regression. She returns to her parents’ house and, digging through her high school and college souvenirs, reverts to Homecoming Princess and “Queen Samara, SDM Fraternity,” imagining herself in a white ballgown, descending the staircase to awaiting admirers: “All the best, the blond and the dark and the young.”

cover of Casebook: Nymphomania by Victoria Morhaim

Morhaim’s trilogy of conflicted feminism concludes with the most misleadingly packaged of her books, Casebook: Nymphomania — “Based on Actual Case Histories,” the front cover declares: “A Book that Probes Beneath the Skin of Four Women Ruled by Sexual Compulsion.” The book includes an introduction by Dr. Albert Ellis, then a prominent psychotherapist and prolific author on sexual topics, to encourage the reader to think this is some sort of clinical text.

It would be more accurate to describe Casebook: Nymphomania as a collection of four linked short stories, four sketches of women for whom sex is a major source of unhappiness. Unhappiness because each, in her own way, seeks fulfilment or advancement through sex, only to find the resulting relationships shallow, unsatisfying, or downright harmful.

Whether what any of them exhibits is a form of nymphomania is beyond my ability to answer, but if any reader was expecting to be titillated or shocked by Casebook: Nymphomania, they were certain to be disappointed. The book is about as sexy as a manual on venereal diseases. These not four vixens. These are four miserable women.

“Angelique Adams,” for example, the first story in the book, tells about an ambitious and calculating beauty who sleeps her way into Hollywood stardom, starting by allowing a powerful agent to rape her at the age of fifteen on his proverbial casting couch. Angelique considers herself an opportunist, choosing her partners and the occasions based on the advantages she expects to realize as a result. Unfortunately, she has no exit strategy, and at the ripe age of 38, finds herself more and more isolated: like “she was living in an elevator — going up and down endlessly, but never getting off at any floor, never exploring the world beyond the confines of the elevator.”

“Lois Love,” Morhaim’s second subject, grows up in a family that has apparently arrived at emotional exhaustion without ever venturing to any other destination. Morhaim’s description of a Love family dinner is grim:

Mrs. Love sighed deeply as she reached for the bowl of stew. It was not that she had worked hard to prepare dinner and was now sighing over the quick disappearance of so much labor … no, she had opened several packages of frozen stew, and heated the contents a quarter-hour before the meal; rather, she was sighing over the rapidity of the entire operation. She prepared, the family ate, and then each disappeared to his own corner. But she, herself, was incapable of bringing any warmth to the ritual of dinner and so she submitted, with that sigh, to the machine-like process of feeding her family.

With no model to ground it in, Lois’s initial attempts to find love are unsuccessful, if not self-destructive. Where Rena pretty ruthlessly rejected the football star, Lois goes along with a good-looking boy at a frat party and ends up being gang-raped. She bounces through several other short affairs until she ends up in an awkward arrangement with a wealthy bisexual man named (creepily) Dad. In the end, the most satisfying relationship she experiences is with a cross-dressing lesbian she initially mistakes for a man.

The writing in Casebook: Nymphomania is often strong. Carefully chosen words, striking images, little muddling around in making a point. We cannot help but feel sympathy for these four women. But I found it unsettling how consistently Morhaim treats her women as victims. To her credit, she does not suggest that there is a single or common reason they become victims. To paraphrase Tolstoy, she believes that every victim is victimized in her own way. Taken together, these three books offer a comprehensive catalogue of the factors oppressing the lives of women in the early 1960s. But in none of them do we see women moving beyond victimhood or exploring other ways of staking out an identity for themselves. And so, I would argue, Victoria Morhaim’s fiction from the early 1960s is of greater sociological than literary interest.

Morhaim went on to publish further under a variety of names. As Victoria Kelrich, she wrote two pulp paperbacks, Charades (1978) and High Fashion (1981). As Victoria Reiter — taking the name of her second husband — she published another thick soap opera-ish novel, Big Hawaii in 1977, and then translated several of the novels that Daniel Odier published under his pseudonym of Delacorta, including Luna (1984) and Vida (1986).

The Girl in the Gold Leather Dress
New York: Signet Books, 1961
The Girl Who Had Everything
New York: Signet Books, 1962
Casebook: Nymphomania
New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1964
All by Victoria Morhaim

The Little White God, by Edwin Brock (1962)

Cover of The Little White God by Edwin Brock

This is a guest post by Stephen Bloomfield

Edwin Brock only wrote one novel.

In 1962, after eight years as a Police Constable 258 of the Metropolitan Police between 1951 and 1959, he published The Little White God, an early example of what later came to be called a ‘police procedural’ novel.

Why then, if he only published one novel, is he of any interest?

First, because Brock went on to publish some very good poetry – quite a lot of it – and two of his poems are among the most anthologized of the twentieth century. So, the novel is an interesting waystation on the path of his development.

Second, because the novel is worth something in its own right. After a shaky few opening paragraphs, it develops strongly and gives an intriguing view of an unusual episode in an ordinary copper’s life in a suburban division of ‘the Met’ during the post-war years. It describes the perpetual battle between an efficient police force and a justice system striving for fairness; it lays bare, very vividly, the universal battle between the ‘doers’ and the paper-shufflers in any organisation; and it analyses, softly and subtly as it goes along, some deep moral issues about right and wrong.

Brock was born in 1927 to a working-class family in the middle-class suburb of Dulwich in South London. Books were apparently few in the Brock household and the atmosphere was occasionally ‘turbulent’. Brock won a scholarship to the local grammar school but left after completing his school certificate, the family lacking the funds or ambition to push his education any further.

Too young to be ‘called up’ in the war years, he completed his National Service in the Royal Navy and ended up in Hong Kong waiting to be “demobbed’ in 1947. Listless and bored, Brock began to read anything he could get his hands on at the NAAFI (the British servicemen’s welfare organisation) library and, finally, was reduced to borrowing a book of poetry.

This proved to be the opening of a door. After reading the paperback poems, Brock knew he wanted to write. As his fellow poet, obituarist and friend, Anthony Thwaite, would put it later, Brock thought that most activity is a means of defining oneself; and for Brock, poetry was the best means, of doing that.

After leaving the Royal Navy, Brock secured a job as a trade journalist and used the free time it afforded to write poetry, most unpublished, as a way of developing his proficiency and style. He gradually accumulated publication credits in small, literary poetry magazines of the time. He married in 1949 and, with a young family needing the regularity and the prospect of increasing income, two years later he joined the Met. He continued to write poetry.

His break came when the editor of the Times Literary Supplement published a few of his poems, accepted on their merits, without any knowledge of who or what the author was. The TLS is famously intellectual, so publication caused quite a stir in literary circles, when his identity as a working policeman with no more than a grammar school education became known.

This led to a brief flash of celebrity. when a journalist from the Daily Express interviewed him and the paper’s editor gave the resulting piece a full-page splash. Far from the reprimand expected for giving an unauthorised interview,– which appeared in the Daily Express as ‘PC258 CONFESSES I’M A POET –THE THINGS HE THINKS UP AS HE POUNDS THE BEAT’ – Brock’s revelation was received tolerantly.

In 1959, he left the police and joined the advertising firm of Mather and Crowther as a copywriter. It was here that he mined his experiences “pounding the beat”, as the Express had it, and produced The Little White God. The novel was published by the prestigious firm of Hutchinson (no, unfortunately not Constable). The Little White God was never published in the USA, despite the American readerships’ appetite for police novels (although British readers were happy to lap up American crime fiction in all its forms) possibly because of some of the unfamiliarity of the context and the commercial risk associated with a first novel.

The Little White God describes the downfall of Detective Constable Mike Weller, a (generally) good and conscientious policemen, who, like most of his colleagues, is tuned in to the rhythms of the streets he patrols. He is an alpha male without being macho; aware that only a thin line of fate separates him as a policeman from many of the criminals he brushes up against, coming as they did from the same background. They drink at the same pubs, live in the same areas, marry women from the same background– and accept the rules that police, crooks, the courts and prison dance to in the game of justice in post-war Britain. But the men who join the police become “Little White Gods” and their downfall, if it comes, is even harder.

‘Like most of his colleagues’ does not mean all of them, though. Weller has the misfortune to report to a superior officer who does not have the tolerance Brock himself experienced as a PC. Although happily married, Weller cannot resist having an affair with the wife of a small-time criminal he has arrested for ‘sus” — suspicion of attempting to break into a locked shop. The relative triviality of this offence and the three-month sentence it attracts is crucial to the timing of Mike and Rosie’s affair. It is a criticism later levelled at Weller that he could have “fitted him up” better by charging him with by going equipped for breaking and entering.

The affair develops into much more than Weller anticipates. The crook seeks revenge by putting stolen goods in the shed at the back of Weller’s house and then writing anonymously to the Station Sergeant at Weller’s police station. Through force of circumstances, the sergeant is forced to report the anonymous letter to the new senior officer in charge of the station who is out to make an impact. The officer, in turn, outwits his divisional chief in a trial of procedural strength and Weller is the victim of the struggle.

The Little White God is structured in two parts, the first being the development of the affair and the receipt of the letter, the second what happens afterwards. It is very definitely a book of two halves in terms of writing style, as well. While the second half is tight and falls very much into the category of a ‘police procedural’ the first half is, initially, slightly over-written:

Outside the Court, the sun was doing its best but making heavy weather of it. It would look out of the clouds for a minute or two and then the sky would shut up to give the wind a chance. Round the corner it blew as though it were coming straight from Siberia. It was the kind of wind that seemed to make your clothing feel transparent.

And later:

On top of the bus the wind came at them like a four-ale bar pug – all rush and no science – until they turned a corner and it retired out of breath.

“Transparent”? “Four-ale bar pug”? Apart from the confusing analogies, Brock is obviously in poet mode in starting the book.

But the narrative soon gathers its stride. The descriptions of South London suburbia and its residents becomes more fluent and less contrived, more based in the reality of Brock’s experience — and Mike Weller’s fate:

It was as if there were two police forces. One was the real one which caught criminals and the other was the one that existed in some high-up’s office at the Yard. The real force was there to catch criminals and you caught them the best way you could. You knew who they were and if you couldn’t get them down according to Judge’s Rules, you got them down in your own way. Mike could see nothing wrong with that. He was paid to catch thieves and he bloody-well caught them.

But it is this attitude that proves to be Mike’s undoing. His ambitious station commander has aspirations for a position at the Yard and has the mindset to go with it. In his eyes, Weller’s having an affair with a criminal’s wife is the greater crime and, thwarted at not being able to take Mike out ‘fairly’, he ensures that Weller pays for his indiscretion. Brock keeps the reader uncertain about Weller’s fate almost to the end of the book.

Weller is demoted from detective to beat policeman and subjected to all the petty and largely mindless administrative procedures that the lowest on the pecking order have to put up with. He loses his wife and his marriage, probably keeps the love of Rosie but certainly loses his livelihood in a grand gesture of resignation.

To the British reading public at the time, this unsentimental insider’s view of the police would have been a marked change from the prevailing conventions. At the time, the most famous fictitious British policemen was Dixon of Dock Green — an avuncular sergeant close to retirement age who had seen it all and who recounted police-station stories of the “it’s a fair cop, guv” type on television on Saturday evenings. The revolutionary and grittier Z Cars (which influenced many later British police series) was just about entering its stride but the cynical tone of Line of Duty and its Chief Inspector Hastings of AC12 (who would become a British cultural icon in his own right), with its unremitting focus on internal corruption, would have to wait a generation or more of profound social change.

Despite his upbringing and background, Brock is only hit-and-miss when it came to the novel’s dialogue. Conversations in the workplace and between policemen are clear, unstilted, direct but with the necessary amount of ellipsis of ordinary dialogue between people with shared conventions and background. Conversations between the male and female characters are less convincing. Aside from using the word “gel” (hard ‘g’) to stand for the South Londoner’s catch-all term for a woman, Brock offers few other stylistic clues to accent or educational background in the male-female exchanges. The 1950s lower classes in Peckham are suspiciously precise about grammar and syntax — especially Weller’s paramour Rosie.

But this is carping criticism. The novel is not dialogue-dependent for its momentum, being as much an examination of social ideas, cultural customs and a dissection of moral attitudes.

Cover of Invisibility is the Art of Survival
Cover of Invisibility is the Art of Survival.

What then of Brock after The Little White God? In his first collection published in the US, Invisibility is the Art of Survival, the jacket biographical sketch states:

Born in London in 1927, Brock says he has spent the subsequent years waiting for something to happen, occupying his time as a sailor, journalist, policeman, and adman, in that order. Yet none of this, he feels, has touched him, “except with a fine patina of invisibility.” Poetry, however, is for him an act of self-definition “which sometimes goes so deep that you become what you have defined. And this,” he adds, “is the nearest thing to an activity I have yet found.” Thus in addition to being poetry editor of Ambit, Brock has published several volumes of his own. His first, An Attempt at Exorcism, was brought out in 1959, and was followed over the next decade by A Family Affair, With Love from Judas, a large selection in Penguin Modern Poets 8, and A Cold Day at the Zoo. Confronted with his work, American readers will agree with the critic Alan Pryce-Jones that Brock has written “some of the most observant and compassionate poems of our time–poems, moreover, in which the poet keeps his feet on the ground as skilfully as his head in the air.”

(Alan Pryce-Jones was the editor of the TLS who first spotted Brock’s poetry.)

The reviews that the Little White God received may also have contributed to Brock not writing another novel. The Times reviewer praised the novel’s “blatantly unvarnished authenticity” but Simon Raven (another now-neglected novelist) in The Spectator damned it with faint praise by saying that the documentary account was “smartly done in its way”. An anonymous reviewer in the TLS said that “the documentary element is the most valuable … but does not go deep…” while having “… sufficient vitality to complement the other more important side of the novel”. But perhaps what might have sealed the fate of further novelistic adventures was Anthony Burgess’s (rather unkind) conclusion in The Observer that “Brock is capable of better than” a documentary.

Brock probably got something out of his system with The Little White God. It was written at the same time as James Barlow, Allan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, John Braine, John Osborne, and the loose grouping that became known as the ‘Angry Young Men’ were active. So it was in good radical company. But Brock maintained that it was poetry that helped him to define himself, so the success he began to have with that – he joined the editorial staff of the quarterly literary magazine Ambit in 1960 – probably meant he chose to concentrate on the strong suit of poetry rather than risk further half-hearted praise with novels.

Like most poets – and many prose authors – Brock could not make a living out of his writing alone, so for 30 years he stayed in advertising at Mather and Crowther, rising up the company, through its mergers, to end as a director and originating the famous “No FT. No comment.” slogan along the way. He edited the poetry section of Ambit for nearly four decades (1960-97), rubbing shoulders with the likes of J. G. Ballard, Eduardo Paolozzi and Carol Ann Duffy.

The Little White God was an early starter in the field of the British police procedural. The description of the investigation by the ‘rubber-heelers’ –Scotland Yard’s internal affairs men, who are the catalysts of Weller’s demise – is, as the publisher noted, documentary in style and as different from the aristocratic, amateur detective novels beloved of the Golden Age as chalk from cheese. Changing social attitudes from the war and then post-war austerity did away with that.

Those who only know Brock’s poetry will find it an interesting read since it fits well with his early poetical works and fills a gap, demonstrating the importance of experience in his writing. It is a deceptively angry book — angry at the frustration of advancement because of artificial barriers; impatient with rule-bound satraps who value mindless procedure above sensible outcome: hinting at the beginnings of rebellion.

Those who are fresh to Brock may well find that the novel is an enticing stepping stone to a poet of considerable talent in encapsulating the significance to the individual of common hurts. It was only as he got older that he got mellower. His initial works were partly autobiographical, coloured by the unhappiness of his first marriage. Later they became broader and less personal – more infused, paradoxically, like The Little White God –with the experience of ordinary people of the hurts inflicted by the world. Two of his poems– “Five Ways to Kill a Man” and “Song of the Battery Hen” — were particularly popular with compilers of anthologies.

As an ex-journalist and writer of academic texts, Stephen Bloomfield is baffled why so many excellent books become neglected.

The Little White God, by Edwin Brock
London: Hutchinson, 1962

Personal File, by G. O. Jones (1962)

Cover of the first edition of Personal File

If the term had existed in 1962, critics would have labelled Personal File a “mid-life crisis” novel. It is certainly a novel of middles. George Park is middle-class, midway through life’s journey, midway through his career, midway in the ranks of the civil service.

As the book opens, he is about to face an Establishment Panel, which is a euphemism for a promotion panel. He realizes that this could be, effectively, his last such panel:

Everyone knows that this is the promotion which matters. If you stop here beyond … say, about forty-two, you probably stop here indefinitely. If you make it, then in ten or twenty years you might even take home a medal. If I don’t get it this time I probably won’t get another Panel for about three years. Then I’ll be forty-two. The odds against will be longer then.

George does not do well. To forget his failure, he leaves work early and goes to the movies. There, he becomes infatuated with one of the ice cream girls and, rashly, decides to ask her out, in what has to be one of the worst sales jobs in the history of romance:

It’s not that I am interested in you. You represent everything I have not got: youth, love, warmth, happiness. Of course, I have no excuse for not having them. I have children — nice ones — and a wife. But my life is empty, dry. I might be a vegetable, or an electronic computer.

“I like to hear you talk,” the girl replies, and she agrees to meet him for a drink.

Looking at this description, George’s affair with Lily, the ice cream girl, seems completely unbelievable, but in the book it comes across as only somewhat unbelievable. George is fascinated by her beauty, her casualness, her working-class life; Lily is amused by his awkwardness, touched by his tenderness, and glad of something to lift her out of her boredom. Never for a moment do we or they think of this as anything permanent.

Jones contrasts George’s situation with those of his colleague Peter — recognized by all as the more competitive — and of the Junior Minister they both work for, a rising star from their own year at Oxford. All three men are at crucial points in their careers. The poses of their college days are “now hardened into attitudes; it was no longer a game.” The Junior Minister’s success is tempered by the miserableness of his marriage. And Peter is obsessed with fears that he is just one mistake from seeing his promise transformed into disgrace.

George’s pessimism deepens when he considers the example of his own father, whose “life had not been as he had expected”:

He had won none even of the modest prizes which had seemed within his reach, had inspired no special affection among his colleagues. Even his family had comforted him only moderately…. He now slept a good deal during the day, did nothing by which one day could be distnguished from another, had no plans for the future.

In the hands of a writer willing to inflict real pain upon his characters — someone like Richard Yates, who never hesitated to peel away that last layer of self-respect — Personal File could have been a truly powerful novel. But there’s a certain reluctance to deal with serious levels of discomfort that dulls the book’s impact.

When you learn a bit about G. O. Jones, you get the impression that he was neither invested enough in the book nor sufficiently misanthropic to sacrifice his characters. Gwyn Owain Jones was something of a Renaissance man. A pioneer of low temperature physics, head of his department at Queen Mary College, who left science at the age of 50 to become director of the National Museum of Wales. He was an admirable administrator, a manager who brought out the best in his people, a leader who sought to improve the institutions he ran. An amateur musician, he also managed to write Personal File and several other novels in the course of his very busy life.

Anyone who’s worked a large bureaucracy, and particularly civil service, will recognize the world and characters of Personal File, even though sixty years have passed since its publication. This does not, however, mean that it’s anything but a respectably well-crafted piece of middlebrow male fiction. For me, it was far more interesting than something of similar caliber involving espionage or adventure, but no more than a satisfying evening’s read.

Personal File, by G. O. Jones
London: Faber and Faber, 1962

The Steagle, by Irvin Faust (1966)

Cover of the first edition of The Steagle by Irvin Faust

My feelings for The Steagle are a combination of awe and disappointment, sort of like what many felt about Evel Knievel’s attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon in 1974. I admire Irvin Faust’s courage and audacity in trying to write about madness in a way that no one ever had — yet acknowledge that his results failed to hit the target. Somewhere short of the far side of sanity, The Steagle’s drag chute ejects and the book crashes in a messy jumble of words.

If some sharp publisher were to reissue The Steagle today, the book’s cover grab line could be, “A MAD MAN GOES MAD.” For both Faust and his hero, Harold “Hesh” Weissburg, are button-down, sport coat and tie wearing, salarymen of the early 1960s. Five days a week, Faust goes to work as a New York City public school guidance counselor and Weissburg teaches 17th Century English literature to bright-faced undergraduates. They have wives, mortgages, insurance policies, and daily commutes.

Like Don Draper of Mad Men, they’ve been drafted, uniformed, shot at. They’ve also been indoctrinated in American mid-century culture: comic strips and comic books, radio shows and movies, 78 RPM discs and sock hops, sports pages and the streets of Brooklyn. As Jack Ludwig put it in his New York Times review, “Everything is here, as current as Mad Magazine: Billboard America, brand-name America, America the blur seen from the window of a speeding train or car, the plotted-and-pieced America airplane passengers know best.” It’s the same combustible mixture that fueled all of Faust’s work, and all it takes is a spark to set it off.

For Hesh Weissburg, the spark is the news that Russian nuclear missiles have been spotted in Cuba. It triggers a psychotic break that leads him to interrupt his lecture on the mystique of the hero in Elizabethan literature and begin raving about Willie Mays and baseball, descending rapidly from rant to bizarre Brooklyn kid code:

“YOBBOU OBBAND MOBBEE HOBBAVE BOBBEEN COBBONNED, BOBBILKED, SCROBBEWED BOBBYE THOBBEE GROBBEAT SPOBBORTSMOBBEN THOBBAT TOBBOOK OBBOUR CLOBBOSEOBBEST FROBBIENDS FROBBOM OBBUS, OBBAND THOBBEN ROBBEACHED THOBBEE SOBBINOBBISTOBBER FOBBINOBBALOBBITOBBY WOBBITH THOBBEE KOBBIDNOBBAPPOBBING OBBOF THOBBEE GROBBEATOBBEST OBBOF THOBBEM OBBALL HOBBOO OBBOF COBBOURSE OBBIS WOBBILLOBBIE MOBBAYS….”

(which condenses in the more comprehensible “YOU AND ME HAVE BEEN CONNED, BILKED, SCREWED BYE THE GREAT SPORTSMEN THAT TOOK OUR CLOSEST FRIENDS FROM US, AND THEN REACHED THE SINISTER FINALITY WITH THE KIDNAPPING OF THE GREATEST OF THEM ALL WHO OF COURSE IS WILLIE MAYS….”). Leaving his students gaping in bewilderment, he walks out of his class and heads to the airport, grabbing a flight to Chicago (“FLY NOW, PAY LATER!”) that starts a week-long dash about the country in search of….

Well, just what Weissburg is looking for is clear to neither himself nor us. It could be security in a moment of existential anxiety, but it could just as well be something as simple as the certainty of his 14-year-old comics/sports/radio/movie-obsessed self.

Chatting to his seatmate on board the flight to Chicago, Weissburg pretends to be Hal Winter, successful Broadway producer, and in this guise he checks into the Blackhawk Hotel, orders the best steak dinner and French wine in the place, and seduces a beautiful woman before heading off to his next stop. He visits Notre Dame to indulge a fantasy of being the Fifth Horseman in the football team’s legendary 1924 backfield lineup, Milwaukee to relive a romance from his G.I. days.

As he hops from place to place, Weissburg shifts from one fantasy character to another: Bob Hardy, brother to Andy of the movie family; Rocco Salvato, former high-school bully and present gangster; George Guynemer, son of the French flying ace of World War I; Cave Carson, son of doomed spelunker Floyd Collins; and, finally, Humphrey Bogart.

Weissburg heads for ever more artificial versions of the American dream in his manic race to stay one step ahead of the news of possible global annihilation. To Vegas:

Ocean’s Eleven. Sinatra. Judy. Thirty thousand a week. Sun. Desert. Red neon. One-armed bandits. Action. Faites vos jeux. Les jeux sont faits. Nothing Monaco. Nothing Miami. Nothing Reno. Pools. Tanfastic. Bikinis. Action. Vegas.

Finally, when he reaches Hollywood, his mind jumbles together fragments from his cultural and personal memories into a climactic sequence in which he refights World War Two, single-handedly triumphing over all of America’s enemies. I can only convey the verbal cacophony that Faust creates by reproducing two sample pages below.

Like Weissburg’s “OBB” Latin, one can, with patience, decypher this linguistic jumble. Perhaps, in future, scholars will painstakingly extract and identify each of the shards of cultural reference scattered around this ruin. On the other hand, this may be a case where it’s better to take in the effect at a glance and move on.

For the trick in successfully portraying madness in fiction is that the novelist can never fully surrender control to the madmen. Otherwise, language risks becoming word soup. And there’s a lot of word soup in the last pages of The Steagle.

The book had its share of admirers back in the Sixties. Richard Kostelanetz called The Steagle “the most perceptive breakdown in all novelistic literature.” “Of the many new novels I have read in the past three years,” he wrote in TriQuarterly several years after the book’s first publication, it was “the only one that struck me as fusing the three virtues of originality, significance and realization at the highest levels of consistency.”

Jack Ludwig, the Times’s reviewer, felt that it was a mistake to characterize the book as comedy or satire: “It is funny and great in its take-offs. But it is at bottom compassionate, comic and sadly accepting. As long as reality is what it is, fantasy must serve man as refuge.” Time magazine, on the other hand, lost patience with Faust’s verbal fireworks: “This pop novel pops so violently that it cannot safely be perused without welding goggles.”

Lobby card for <em>The Steagle,/em> (1971)
Lobby card for The Steagle (1971)

Faust’s failure didn’t dissuade Paul Sylbert from staging another attempt, however. Five years later, screenwriter and director Paul Sylbert adapted the book for AVCO Embassy Films. Richard Benjamin did his best to capture the mad panache and manic energy of Hesh Weissburg, but there was no way that Sylbert could have caged Faust’s beast into an 87-minute package. It didn’t help that the first-time director was working for legendary director-breaking producer Joseph E. Levine. Working at a time before director’s cuts were invented, Sylbert had to take his frustrations out on the printed page, publishing his account of the disaster, Final Cut: The Making and Breaking of a Film in 1974.

The Steagle, by the way, took its title from an amalgamation that echoes Faust’s zest for cultural integration. The Steagles were a short-lived creation that the National Football League devised during the manpower shortages of World War Two, combining the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers into a single team.

The Steagle, by Irvin Faust
New York: Random House, 1966

Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday, by Mary Lee Settle (1964)

Cover of US edition of Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday

This is a story about two novels. When Mary Lee Settle published Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday in 1964, she wasn’t happy with the reviews or how her publisher handled the book. Settle saw the book as part — the conclusion, in fact — of a larger series she’d begun with O Beulah Land (1956) and Know Nothing (1960), which ultimately became known as the “Beulah Land Quintet.”

Her plan was to trace the story of a family not unlike her own and those she grew up with: landed white people in West Virginia who could trace their lines from religious and political dissidents who left England for America in the 1600s, through the pioneers who drove their wagons into the hills of Appalachia and what would become West Virginia, who fought (on both sides) in the Civil War, who started the coal mines and fought in the battles between the miners and the owners (again, on both sides) in the early 20th century, and who saw the introduction of strip mining.

In 1964, an outside might have thought that this was a story that ended on a high note, at least for the owners and their descendents. Strip mining was pulling coal from the earth faster than any lot of troublesome miners could and the money that came in could be spent at exclusive country clubs, resorts like The Greenbrier, and shopping trips to New York and Europe.

Mary Lee Settle, circa 1960.
Mary Lee Settle, circa 1960.

But Mary Lee Settle was no outsider, and she must have had the sense that there was going to be a price to pay for raping this land. She picked up on clues that are sprinkled throughout Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday. And so, almost twenty years later, after writing the beginning of the story (Prisons (1973)) and the penultimate chapter (The Scapegoat (1980), about the violence between the miners and the owners around 1912), she returned to update her ending with The Killing Ground (1982).

Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday appears relatively intact as the middle section (“Before the Revolution, 1960”) of The Killing Ground, which begins in 1978 and ends two years later. So, it can be read as a work in progress or a fragment. Personally, I think neither of those interpretations is correct. Fight Night and The Killing Ground tell fundamentally different stories. The Killing Ground is truly the culmination of the Beulah Land quintet, which is a larger story, a story about people and generations and their land. Fight Night, on the other hand, is a snapshot in time, a story about individuals, set over the course of little more than a weekend. And as a result, I think, a better and tighter book.

The book opens with a late night drunken phone call from Johnny McKarkle, the wealthy but aimless son of a family with coal money, to his sister Hannah in New York City. Johnny is in a phone booth in Canona, their home town in West Virginia. It’s Saturday night, “the night for a man to fight free to the surface of his life, not caring how he did it or how much hate he dragged up and let fly.” Johnny wants to confide in Hannah about his problems — marriage, meaningless job, unlistening parents — and to coax Hannah down to cut loose with him. The next call Hannah gets, a few hours later, brings the news that Johnny is dying, his head having been bashed in while he was sobering up in the town’s drunk tank.

Johnny is clearly painted as a tragic figure and Hannah isn’t much better off. But at least she’s had the sense to leave town, and when she gets off her flight from New York the next morning, her senses are alert for the signs of getting pulled back. Friends stop by her parents’ place — “set sentinel on the hill above Canona” — to express concern on their way home from church, but she knows they’re just looking for fuel for the gossip mill:

They would take whatever words I stammered out, piece an “inside” story together, their unkissed mouths breathing the smell of cigarettes and coffee into their telephones, making little secretive sounds to each other. I remembered how small termite mandibles were, and how, if you lean close and pinpoint attention, you can hear them, how their combined tenacity can crush a building. These women were moving close to trouble, chewing at it because they had, that week, none of their own to feed the others with.

These are the three best-written sentences I’ve come across in a long time. Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday is full of them. There are dry pages and a few ill-crafted passages in this book, but it’s worth reading just for sentences that cut to the bone like a switchblade in the hands of a killer with a swift and sure mastery of her weapon. Hannah on her father, a man who’s spent his adult life in the shadow of a domineering wife: “How could I ‘go easy’ with my father — a man whom I had never seen separately, as you see, in a split second of love or even horror, in all my life? Christ, I knew a two-day lover better than I knew my father.” On her mother, putting herself together after the shock of learning of Johnny’s death: “She began to take her own shape, hiding the woman again behind the lady.” Or Johnny’s relationship with Hannah: “Usually he loved me as you live in spite of.” Or the atmosphere of the Greenbrier (called Egeria Springs in the book): “Egeria’s smell, from the gate on into the rooms, a smell compounded of expensive secluded mountain air, hand-ironed linen, polish, huge, glossy, well-fed plants, and thick notepaper, I recognized later wherever I smelled it, and it brought me back to Egeria Springs. It was the clean, crisp new smell of protected American money.”

At times, Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday made me wonder if Balzac had been reincarnated as a woman from Charleston, West Virginia, for Settle deals with the relationship between families and money in a way few American writers — and even fewer of Settle’s generation — equalled. What she knew better than any of her characters was that families and money are always moving together in one of two directions, up or down. There is no stasis.

Johnny’s head is bashed in by one of his distant cousins, a hard scrabble farmer still trying to hold on to a poor patch of hill farm. Jake Catlett is from the unlucky line that got stuck with the rocky hillsides when the McKarkles got the rich bottom land along the river. A few decades of coal-mining wages wasn’t even to prevent the Catletts’ slow slide into deeper and deeper poverty.

But neither are the McKarkles secure in their grand house above Canona. Coal mining is starting its decline. Owners who failed to make the switch to strip-mining have already seen their fortunes evaporate:

Money disaster had a phrase: You ran through with every last thing. I could see people fleeing down River Street, running through it, shoveling money, until they threw the last thing, the last dollar, and having at last committed the unpardonable sin, they were stripped as if they had shed their clothes, left naked, turned away from, cut from the minds, except in moral stories or in late-night memories.

In the case of the McKarkles, this disaster is lurking somewhere in the future. Having lost his illusions during the war, Johnny — the heir to the McKarkle fortune, such as it is — has done nothing to avert this: “Without land to till or people to care for, Johnny had been caught in a parody where the land had shrunk to a genteel suburban house he wasn’t even needed to work for.” And with his death, that fate becomes certain.

The coming money disaster is paralleled by the disaster becoming evident in the toll that coal has taken on the landscape. That awareness is just setting in: “The river was too dirty with chemical and coal waste for many fish to survive in it. But they kept on trying.” As Settle sees it, however, in a perspective that at the time was just beginning to be expressed, the land was going to be the ultimate victim:

We had cut down its trees, and the water had poured down its naked gulleys and swept itself clean. We had stabbed too hard, and in those places it had shrunk back baring its rock teeth. Arrogance and lack of care toward its riches had grown into arrogance and lack of care for each other. The crash of the grabber at the coal face had exploited, grabbed, as we had grabbed. We had left a residue of carelessness, and the hatred that grew in it had made a fist.

Cover of The Killing Ground by Mary Lee Settle

When Settle returned to Canona and fit the small story of Johnny McKarkle into the fabric of the “Beulah Land” series when she incorporated Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday into The Killing Ground, the consequences of coal mining on both land and people had become clear. The two books, however, take very different views on their subject. In The Killing Ground, we see the decline of Canona and the McKarkles as if through a telescope, in the larger context of history. In Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday, we see in small dimensions: one weekend, one family, one death. The larger context of history is only the background to Hannah McKarkle’s close observation. And when the writer is a cold-blooded and skilled knife fighter like Settle, used to feeling her victim’s breath as the blade goes in, the larger context of history doesn’t stand a chance.

Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday, by Mary Lee Settle
New York: The Viking Press, 1964

Sam’s Song, by Shirley Schoonover (1969)

Feature on Shirley Schoonover from the <em>Democrat and Chronicle</em>, Rochester, New York, 1 August 1971.
Feature on Shirley Schoonover from the Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, New York, 1 August 1971.

“Are you a lesbian?” a man asks the narrator of Shirley Schoonover’s novel Sam’s Song.

“No,” she replies. “But I’ve been called a unicorn. A zebra. I have a cousin who is an onion.”

Whatever Sam is, the only thing that’s certain is that’s she’s not happy with it. “I don’t quite know who I am,” she thinks. “Even after thirty years of living with me, I don’t feel familiar with myself.”

Everything about Sam’s Song is wildly out of place. Sam, the thirty-something mother of three who’s separated and in the final stage of divorcing her husband, in her own skin. “I find myself to be a bitch. But in a world of bitches, I don’t want to hand on to my children the ugliness that is in me.” She’s out of place in her community. Having chosen — unfathomably in the eyes of most of the people she knows — to leave her children in her husband’s custody, she’s the woman that other women talk about at cocktail parties.

Yet she’s unwilling to let her soon-to-be ex’s new girlfriend get ideas: “I’ll kill you, you bitch, before you’ll mother my children.” Restless and horny, she picks up men in bars knowing they have no interest in staying with her: “I can make love. Fuck, if you will. But, my God, I have the secret knowledge that I have been fucked with shit.” When they ask her name, she answers, “I am no-name.” She even dresses up as a man and goes to bars where gay men hang out. “I smell cocks and peacocks, cut booze, and brothers lusting for their brother’s cocks.” She drinks — hard. “You use up Scotch like other people use water,” observes Martha, Sam’s last remaining friend.

They fucked her up, her mum and dad. She’s Sam, not Samantha, because they wanted a boy, not a girl. “Girls are no good on a farm,” her father said. She admires men for their ability to take what they want, material or sexual. That same selfishness is one of the few things she’s sure of about herself. “Yes, I am selfish,” she admits to her son one afternoon as they swim together. “Fuck you,” he replies.

That stops me. I tread water again, looking at him. He stays out of my reach; I read his eyes. He knows I can feel his anger. At this moment he feels hate. He hates me because I left them with their father. No, just because I left them.

Which reminded me of something Nora Ephron once wrote: “You give kids a choice — your mother in the next room on the verge of suicide versus your mother in Hawaii in ecstasy, they’d choose suicide in the next room.” Yet as confused and unhappy as Sam may be, she’s clear-sighted when it comes to the potentially toxic effect she could have on her kids if left responsible for their day-to-day care.

Not that Sam is in ecstasy, let alone in Hawaii. Nor does she expect her life to be turned around by the freedom of the single life. “Living alone, unloving, I will shrivel and dry into an ancient sterile turd,” she thinks.

Cover of Sam's Song by Shirley Schoonover

As these quotes suggest, Sam’s Song is a long way from the safe, nice housewives of 1960s sitcoms. When she wrote the book, Shirley Schoonover was herself the mother of three, living in Lincoln, Nebraska and in the process of divorcing her husband. That didn’t mean that the book was autobiographical, though. “I didn’t go to bed with any sailors, I didn’t pick men up off the street, I didn’t have a homosexual lover,” she later said. “But the anger was real,” she warned. And so was her frankness. “We Finns are very blunt,” she told an interviewer. “We come out and say, no tact whatsoever, what we have to say. I guess a lot of people don’t understand that.”

Schoonover and her husband met in Iowa, where she had studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first novel Mountain of Winter (1965), about a young Finnish-American girl growing up rural Minnesota, was closer to autobiography. Born Iliana Waisanen, she was given the name Shirley by her mother, who loved Shirley Temple and who wanted her daughter to seem “more American.” Schoonover hated the name.

Mountain of Winter was generally well-received. Bernard Bergonzi wrote that “its humanity, its breadth of feeling, and range and exactness of observation of men and nature, place it well above the ordinary run of first novels (or second or third novels, come to that).” The book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and folks in Lincoln were so proud of her accomplishment that the manager of her local IGA grocery store even cleared space on an endcap for a display and hosted an autograph party.

She joked that a few of the customers, as they picked up a copy along with five or six cans of Campbell’s soup, that the book might be “dirty.” “Well, it was very frank,” she later said, “but not nearly as potent as Sam’s Song .”

Headline from the <em>Lincoln Journal Star</em> review of <em>Sam's Song</em>, 2 March 1969.
Headline from the Lincoln Journal Star review of Sam’s Song, 2 March 1969.

When Sam’s Song came out, however, it was another story. “Sam’s Four-Letter-Word Symphony” proclaimed the headline of the Lincoln Journal Star review. “If it had not been assigned to me for review, I would not have read past the first 15 pages.” The reviewer — a man — judged that Sam “is as abnormal as any woman could be” and that her language “is worse than any attributed to the wharves of Liverpool.” He did, however, admit that the book might be useful for students of vocabulary: “If there is a four-letter word used to describe sex in its most perverted form, it can be found in this book.”

Coward-McCann’s dust jacket blurb didn’t help. It promised that the book featured “sexy sex, sick sex, homosexual sex, racial sex, even religious sex.” The Journal Star’s reviewer wrote that Sam’s Song “ranks with the stuff that is sold under the counter in shops which deal with pornographic works.” Most Lincoln bookshops preferred not to stock the book at all, on or under the counter.

Martin Levin, then one of the New York Times’ lead reviewers, argued that those who wrote off Sam’s Song as pornography were missing the point: “When is a dirty book not a dirty book? When it is a cri de coeur, in which whatever detritus there is exists as part of the structure of personality.” Contrary to the Lincoln Journal Star’s reviewer, he considered Sam “a thoroughly homogenized mixture of ambiguous urges, detoured maternal feelings, sharply bitter humor, and ethnic (Finnish) traces.” It seems that the bigger the city, the better the chances of Sam’s Song getting a favorable review. When the novel came out in paperback in early 1970s, the Chicago Tribune’s book editor observed cynically, “It is one of the most revealing books ever written about a woman. Which is probably why the hardcover edition vanished without a trace.”

If anyone picked up Sam’s Song in search of a thrill, they were bound to be disappointed. Sam is certainly profane, but it’s not pornographic. Sam does not “discover” herself through her sexual liberation. Sex is more like booze, a source of temporary relief from pain. Sam’s Song is more a four-letter-word rap than symphony: Sam’s profanity is visceral, a sign of the pain, anger, and unrest always simmering, always on the brink of boiling over. It may be the rawest book written by a woman in the 1960s.

By the time the book was published, Schoonover was ready to leave Lincoln. “I literally felt like a zebra in a herd of horses,” she later said. When her divorce from her first husband, Leroi Schoonover, was finalized, she headed to New York, where she joined the faculty at the University of Rochester. She took revenge on Lincoln with a “Letter from Nebraska” that was published in the New York Times after she’d moved to Rochester. “If you don’t love Willa Cather’s work you are not included in the literary life of the university.” Sam’s Song is nothing like My Antonia: it’s closer to Last Exit to Brooklyn.

When it came to Nebraska as a whole, Schoonover concluded that, “As far as I can tell, there is no literary life in Nebraska.” “You ask if writers talk to each other,” she wrote her imaginary correspondent. Since Karl Shapiro, who’d been the editor of the university’s long-running literary quarterly Prairie Schooner had left Lincoln in the mid-1960s, she replied, “I’ve been talking to myself; and you know that can become agonizingly lonely. That’s Nebraska. Beautiful but killingly lonely for the writer.”

After a few years at Rochester, Schoonover moved to Missouri, where she taught at Webster University in St. Louis. While there, she published her last novel, Winter Dream (1979) a folk tale set in Finland in the 15th century. “I wrote it for the child in me,” she told a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. “I wanted to write something people could enjoy and whose characters they could love.” Schoonover moved to Teaneck, New Jersey in her later years to live near her son Noel. She died in 2004.

Sam’s Song, by Shirley Schoonover
New York: Coward-McCann, 1969