The Neglected Books Page

Betty Swanwick, Artist and Subversive Novelist

26 December 2023

Portrait of Betty Swanwick by Clive Gardiner (c.1948).

If Betty Swanwick is remembered today, it’s usually for her painting The Dream, which was used on the cover of the Genesis album Selling England by the Pound. And it’s as a painter she would probably prefer to be remembered, since she resigned from her long professorship at Goldsmith’s College School of Art in 1970 to pursue her unique style, a blend of traditional realism and somewhat exaggerated modernism.

Cover of *Selling England by the Pound* by Genesis, cover painting by Betty Swanwick.

But it would be an injustice not to celebrate her brief but distinctive career as a novelist. Whether she decided to write novels as a vehicle for her illustrations or as an outlet for her literary inclinations, between 1945 and 1958, Betty Swanwick wrote and illustrated three slim novels that gleefully subvert many of the tropes and conventions of the 19th century novels and more than deserve recognition themselves.

Born in 1915, the daughter of a professional draughtsman, Swanwick entered Goldsmith’s College at the young age of 15 and studied under two masters, Edward Bawden and Clive Gardiner. She fell into a long-term relationship with Gardiner, who helped get her a teaching position with Goldsmith’s after her graduation. It was a job she held for over thirty years, though she ultimately saw it as an obstacle to her own creative development.

She supplemented her teaching income by taking on occasional illustration jobs for clients ranging from London Transport to Strand magazine and, less frequently, illustrating children’s books such as Marjorie Seymour’s Camille Cat, “the story of a cat who liked green figs far too well.” Perhaps she felt she could do just as good a job with the words as the illustrations, for in 1945, she published her first novel — or, more properly, novelette, as specified in its subtitle, since it’s just 64 pages long.

The Cross Purposes opens in the manner of any good Victorian novel, with the Reverend Robert Randall and his sister Esmeralda traveling to take a vacant curacy in the prosperous town of Frogs Copping. The beautiful and eligible Esmeralda catches the eye of Frederick, son of Sir Edward Chalmers, the town’s most prominent nobleman, and everyone assumes that the Reverend Robert will pair up with Chalmers’ ward, the lovely Hermione Beauchampers.

Nothing in a Swanwick novel ever turns out quite as planned, though. Hermione is beautiful, cruel, and conniving and more than happy to lure the Reverend into matrimony, but she is no match for her governess, Miss Whistle:

Miss Whistle, mark you, was a woman of shrewd perception and quick ideas, and, being of an uneasy age, seized the possibility of being a respectable married woman with both hands. What more could a plain, intelligent woman require than a plain, egotistical husband with settled means? It was a very good and manageable catch, thought Miss Whistle to herself whilst saying her prayers at night.

Soon, two engagements are announced, and Hermione departs to the Continent in search of wealthier fish. Sir Edward plans a betrothal ball that sets his “noseholes quivering with lively anticipation.” Swanwick knows how to draw her story to an end according to the formula: “There now only remains the winding up of this story to universal satisfaction and cosmic gratification.” This doesn’t, however, mean that everyone lives happily ever after.

Swanwick is too much a realist to risk going into details about what happens after the dual wedding. She sides with Sir Edward, who would be just as happy to see the vision of the two couples at the altar in the lavishly decorated church prolonged indefinitely, “until the whole of them, the bridal party and all, were slowly consumed by death, standing up in a breathless trance in the Floral Chapel.”

Paddy Rossmore’s catalogue raisonné, Betty Swanwick: Artist and Visionary, lists few works between The Cross Purposes and her next novel, Hoodwinked (1957). Rossmore notes that this is more likely due to the fact that she concentrated on teaching and commercial work and the latter, held by the Society of Illustrators and Artists, was discarded in the course of moves and reorganizations. In any case, when she turned to fiction again, it was to revisit the theme of matrimonial mismatches — but this time brought up to current day and with even more subversive twists.

Cora Fox and Madeleine Mudie are old friends with a common problem: uncooperative children. Cora’s older daughters, Laurel, Flora, and Philippa are mad about jazz and are only interested in improvising and jitterbugging. Her youngest, Gemma, is the loveliest and most conventional in her attitudes … aside from her penchant for lying and cheating. Madeleine’s son, Castor, is handsome, of age, and an ideal candidate to be matched and married off … aside from his disinterest in everything except designing womens’ wear. The solution in obvious to both women.

And its urgency increases when Gemma arrives home, having been expelled from her boarding school for egregious cheating. The shadow it casts upon the family name leads Mr. Fox to take his life in front of Gemma (Swanwick illustrates the scene in case we have trouble picturing it). Gemma sighs with relief at the sight of her dead father. “Phew! Well, that is that,” she says, “very coolly fanning the smoke fumes from her eyes.” Castor and Gem are hastily brought together in hopes of kindling sparks.

Unfortunately, Castor prefers older women. Cora, to be specific. While he goes through the motions to please his mother, he insinuates himself into Cora’s companionship, and finds her love-starved and not entirely unwilling. At the same time, an enormously wealthy and utterly socially inappropriate Indian Rajah buys the estate next door to the Foxes. Gemma may have cheated on a fair number of her subjects, but arithmetic was not one of them. You can see where Swanwick is going. All it takes is the sudden death of the distraught Madeleine to remove the remaining obstacle.

Cover of *Beauty and the Burglar* (1958).

A year later, Arthur Barker Ltd. published her third novel, Beauty and the Burglar, while kicked the Victorian matrimonial formula to the curb for good. Once again, an eligible pair — this time, the ward Palma Purre and the earnest reformer Bernard Follow — are brought together through the machinations of guardians and parents with the aim of achieving a quick and socially profitable match. Palma is not entirely unwilling, but Bernard’s feet are so rooted in the 19th century that it’s hard for her not to get a bit exasperated. “It is to be hoped that we shall see a good deal of each other in the future,” he tells her.

I would find it satisfying to develop you in other ways also: of course, it goes without saying that we refer to the higher ways. There will be much gratification from these services that I am more than willing to render you. Whenever I am free from tours and lectures, I shall endeavour to see you and train you for the proper purpose in life.

Luckily for Palma, one night a cat burglar named Rowland Swagger sneaks into her bedroom to steal her jewelry. Instead, he falls instantly for Palma — and she for him — and the two abscond to his hideout, which happens to be a school where he is teaching a new generation to carry on his dishonorable profession. Rowland proudly shows Palma around his Royal Academy of Crime, allowing her to observe classes ranging from safecracking to the art of proper coshing.

Rather than taking exception to Rowland’s criminal enterprise, Palma is inspired by its educational potential and proposes to deliver a lecture to the students on the “Art of the Golden Section,” aided by an attractive and scantily clad model. The lecture gets a tremendous response and before we know it, the R.A.C. begins transforming into the G.C.C. — the Golden College of Culture. All ends happily at the altar again, or rather the bridge, as Rowland and Palma and Bernard and the thoroughly inappropriate Melba find themselves before an old sea dog named Captain Blott.

John Betjeman found Swanwick’s novels “Strange, startling, funny, and with a weird beauty.” Other reviewers struggled to categorize her books, drawing on everyone from Jane Austen and Wilkie Collins to David Garnett and Damon Runyon in hopes of finding a familiar point of reference. Angela Milne probably described them best by writing that they were “small and funny in the way [Daisy Ashford’s juvenile comic novel] The Young Visiters was funny” — but “not unintentionally so.” In fact, she argued, everything Swanwick did “points roundly to its adulthood.” And it would be wrong to dismiss these three little novels as pastiches. If anything, I’d say they looked forward, not back, towards 1960s satires of long-standing British traditions such as Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War! and Lindsay Anderson’s If…. Swanwick was not just saying that those Victorian tropes were dead but standing in front of their grave and saying a derisive, “Good riddance.”

Betty Swanwick died in 1989 from complications due to cancer. None of her novels has ever been reissued, but several can be had for under $50 if you’re interested. They’re lovely little packages of subversive fun.

Three novels by Betty Swanwick:
The Cross Purposes (1945)
Published by Editions Poetry London
Hoodwinked (1957) and Beauty and the Burglar (1958)
Published by Arthur Barker Ltd.

Mock Autobiographies for April Fools

1 April 20231 April 2023

Long before Clifford Irving concocted his fake autobiography of recluse millionaire Howard Hughes, mock autobiographies have been a popular vehicle for satire — usually of the sort of people who wrote these books, less frequently (viz. Roy Lewis’s The Evolution Man), of the (real, not mock) author’s contemporaries. I’ve written about a number of these over the years, but I had no idea how broad this seemingly narrow sub-genre was until I started compiling this list, which is less comprehensive than I suspected a few days ago. And so, in no particular order, here is a baker’s dozen of autobiographies (and diaries) that are not — Surprise! — by the people they claim to be.

• My Royal Past (1940, revised 1961): By Baroness von Bülop, nee Princess Theodora Louise Alexina Ludmilla Sophie von Eckermann-Waldstein. Actually by Cecil Beaton.; Perhaps the ultimate proof of the fact that Cecil Beaton felt his position as preferred photographer to the Court of St. James secure was the fact that not once, but twice, he mocked both his subjects and his own staid style of photographing them in this illustrated memoir of a remote offshoot of the tangle of Saxe-Coburg-Hesse-Hohenzollern-Hapsburg-etc. bloodlines that ruled Europe for too bloody long. Beaton himself dressed up as the Baroness, accompanied by such friends as the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, all dressed up in gowns and bemedalled uniforms.; Beaton was so sure of himself, in fact, that he provided his own review blurbs before they were written: e.g., “Here, as Lord Beaconsfield said, is a book that no time should be wasted in reading.” Perhaps to capitalize on his renewed fame for his costume designs for the Broadway musical My Fair Lady, My Royal Past was revised and reissued in 1961, including this time a list of errata, such as . And as one accustomed to paying attention to details, Beaton was sure to include a detailed index with such entries as:
Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s entries in the index to My Royal Past.
• Quail in Aspic (1962): By Count Charles Korsetz. Actually by Cecil Beaton; Beaton had such fun with My Royal Past that he took another shot at the sub-genre the year after its reissue. Quail in Aspic was an “as told to” autobiography of a Hungarian count who had a knack for being on the side of European noble houses moments before their demise. He manages to remake himself as a proper English gentleman, however, complete with a fine country house and a matching set of prejudices.; This time around, Beaton recruited his long-time friend, the society hostess Elsa Maxwell, to portray the Count in the photographs (by Beaton, of course) that illustrate the book.
• Cyril Pure’s Diary (1981): By Cyril Pure. Actually by Michael Geare.; Cyril Pure is a man after every bookshop owner’s heart. Of malice, that is. Set up in Chipping Toad’s only bookshop, he dives headlong into the bookselling industry. Although it might be more accurate to say that the UK’s bookselling industry dives headlong upon him, rather like a pack of ravenous vultures. One publisher’s rep, having heard the shop has sold one of their books, leaves Cyril with 100 copies of a sure bestseller, Reminiscences of an Old Crocodile Shikari. The Chipping Toad Poetry Society names him its Vice President, in return for which he has the honor of hosting a reading by the famous Cement poet, Bert Stunge, and providing refreshments. Cyril puzzles over the inner meanings of Stunge’s work:; Geare teamed up with Michael Corby the following year to write another mock diary, this time of the famed Transylvanian count, who, as it turns out, spent quite a lot of time in Victorian England, attending Balliol and Oxford, exchanging ripostes with Oscar Wilde, meeting Sherlock Holmes, and implicating Van Helsing in the Jack the Ripper murders. It’s earnest fun but more earnest than fun, unfortunately.
• Lord Bellinger (1911): By Lord Bellinger. Actually by Harry Graham.; Although just one generation away from trade, Lord Bellinger has easily adapted to the life of the idle nobility, priding himself on being “naturally disinclined to anything approaching effort.” An early attempt at portraying the type of privileged dimwit parodied in Monty Python’s “Upper-Class Twit of the Year” competition and now occupying numerous junior minister positions in the current Conservative government, Harry Graham ultimately missing his mark by favoring kindness over brutality in his approach.; I wrote about Lord Bellinger back in 2013.
• Little Me: the intimate memoirs of that great star of stage, screen, and television, Belle Poitrine (1961): By Belle Poitrine (see above for the rest). Actually by Patrick Dennis.; Dennis, rocketed to fame and fortune with his novel Auntie Mame and its Broadway and film adaptations, may have had most fun with this account of the successes, failures, and romantic entanglements of a grand dame actress a la Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, etc. Dedicated to her four husbands, including the fourth and shortest-lived (literally), Letch Feeley, the former Pomona gas station attendant who had the misfortune to step onto a yacht with his mistress just moments before it quite unexpectedly exploded. Illustrated with photographs by Cris Alexander.; Like Beaton, Dennis enjoyed this form so much that he followed a few years later with First Lady (1964), the memoirs of Martha Dinwiddie Butterfield, whose husband, George Washington Butterfield, occupied the White House for 30 days in 1909 — most of that time drunk or cavorting with his mistress, Gladys Goldfoil, in one of the spare bedrooms.
• I Think I Remember (1927): By Sir Wickham Woolicomb (“ordinary English snob and gentleman”). Actually by Magdalen King Hall; A celebration of a life lived “when gentlemen were gentleman” and before “all this socialism, etc., made everything cheap and nasty.” As with Lord Bellinger, it’s easiest to simply poke fun at the pompous than to turn parody into an authentic comic creation. As The New York Times‘s reviewer put it, “In parodying the pompous tomes of reminiscences that great personages manage to foist on the publishers and public with little difficulty, Miss King-Hall has taken a step downstairs. It is as if James Joyce, after completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had gone ahead to fashion A Portrait of an Old Man with Senile Dementia.”; There must be something about these spoofs that inspires certain authors. Magdalen King-Hall wrote two others: The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765 (1926), which mocked the pretences and rituals of Georgian England and which she admitted she’d only written to escape the boredom of a summer at the English seaside; and Gay Crusaders (1934), the memoir of an English knight in the Third Crusade, an experience enlivened by liberal amounts of booty and made tiresome by the consistent habit of the French to arrival after all the fighting was done.
• Water on the Brain (1933): By Major Arthur Blenkinsop, formerly of the Boundary Commission in Mendacia. Actually by Compton Mackenzie; Mackenzie, who ran a British intelligence and special operations network in Greece during World War One and was involved in everything from the disastrous Gallipoli campaign to an attempted assassination of Prince Phillip’s father, then King of Greece. Somewhat resentful at his lack of recognition from his higher ups, Mackenzie wrote this account of one particularly inept and dull-witted agent recruited into the service of His Majesty’s Director of Extraordinary Intelligence, MQ99(E).
• The Way Up (1972): By Anaxagoras, Duc de Gramont. Actually by Sanche de Gramont (who later changed his name to Ted Morgan).; The Way Up may have been an attempt to cash in on the success of the first of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series, mock memoirs by Harry Flashman, the villain of Thomas Hughes’s earnest Victorian boy’s novel about Rugby, Tom Brown’s School Days. In De Gramont’s case, his villainous hero is a fringe member of the court of King Louis XV, adventurer, soldier of fortune, slave trader, and courtier. Ironically, however, it was Scotsman Fraser who demonstrated a greater talent for panache than his French wannabe competitor. De Gramont/Morgan stuffs almost 500 pages full of plot but failed to come close to the joyous sense of bastardry that makes the Flashman novels so much fun.
• The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace (1937): By Ethel Firebrace. Actually by Gay Taylor and Malachi Whitaker.; The Victorian novelist par excellence, Ethel Firebrace wears out four typewriters churning out over a hundred novels or over five million self-righteous words. By her own account, Ethel is not a prig. It simply happens to be the fact that everyone else is lazy, ill-mannered, and untrustworthy.; And non-garglers. Ethel attributes her success (“or very nearly all of it!”) to her habit of gargling after food. Writers who fail to gargle “spring up like toadstools, live as long, and disappear as ignominiously.” Needless to say, but “there are no garglers among modern poets.”; As I wrote back in 2019, The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace was a jeux d’esprit for lifelong friends Taylor and Whitaker, but on the whole probably more fun for them than us.
• The Autobiography of Augustus Carp: By Augustus Carp, Esq. Actually by Henry H. Bashford.; Most of these books are amusing. Some are laugh-out-loud funny. The Autobiography of Augustus Carp is a comic masterpiece. Bashford, a Harley Street physician and amateur writer, grasped something that many of his fellow mock autobiographers failed to: namely, that one cannot spoof half-heartedly. There are moments, for example, when the reader sees the props in a book like The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, sees the scene being staged for a joke at Ethel’s expense. Bashford, on the other hand, understood that Augustus Carp is not only blissfully unaware of his ridiculousness but absolutely convinced of his constant and superior moral rectitude. And so, for example, if he happens to get hammered by imbibing excessively of a drink he’s told is “Portugalade,” he is not just a drunken boor but completely ignorant of the fact that he’s drunk. There’s a certain giddy delight in observing how often Bashford is able to coax Augustus into behaving like an idiot without his gaining the slightest clue to what’s going on.
• My Hey-Day: The Crackup of the International Set (1940): By Princess Tulip Murphy. Actually by Virginia Faulkner.; Taken from a series of articles Faulkner wrote for Town and Country in the 1930s, My Hey-Day is a world tour in the company of Tulip Murphy, former good-time girl and widow of “Brick-a-Minute” Murphy, who claimed to be related to ancient Irish royalty in some unspecified way. Unspecified is all right with Tulip, who’se never seen a set she couldn’t force her way into. Whether she’s visiting Scandanavian, the Soviet Union, France, Tibet, or Hollywood, Princess Tulip manages to mock power, wealth, class, culture, sexuality, and, most of all, fashion. No matter how limited her purse, she finds some old thing to throw on:; Princess Tulip noted, with regret, that the onset of World War Two was curtailing the activities of the International Set: “Many of my oldest friends can now count their yachts on the fingers of a single hand.” However, Faulkner carried Tulip through at least a dozen more adventures after My Hey-Day was published, visiting New Orleans, Washington, Mexico, a Western dude ranch, and the wedding of Rita Hayworth and Aly Khan in 1949 and setting at least the American land speed record for gate crashing.

Crotchets in the Air, or An (Un)Scientific Account of a Balloon Trip, by John Poole (1838)

20 January 2021

Ticket to the Ascent of the Nassau, Charles Green's Balloon, from Vauxhall Gardens — Ticket to the Ascent of the Nassau, Charles Green’s Balloon, from Vauxhall Gardens

In September 1838, Mr. Charles Green, already considered England’s greatest balloonist (or aeronaut, as he preferred to say), entertained London crowds by making several ascents in his newest balloon, the Nassau, from Vauxhall Gardens. On one of these, he was accompanied by John Poole, then one of London’s leading playwrights (and soon to be author of the comic classic, Little Pedlington and the Pedlingtonians. Together they flew across London from west to east, enjoying a bottle of sherry and watching dusk settle over the city, until they came to ground somewhere along the road to Chelmsford.

Crotchets in the Air, Poole’s account of the trip, is as light as the gas filling Green’s balloon and unashamedly unscientific. “Why did you go?” Poole asks himself in hindsight. “To get out of the city,” is his reply, the balloon merely offering a novel and altogether more pleasant alternative to going by land:

One gets tired of being suffocated in coaches, choaked with coaldust in steam-boats, rattled and rumbled on railroads. But, up yonder, the ineffable stillness, the progressing movement without the slightest sensation of motion! whether up, down, forward, back, you seem to be suspended motionless in the air, whilst everything above, below, and around, is complaisantly taking the trouble of moving out of your way.

And unlike these forms of locomotion, travel by balloon is … quiet.

And then, the noiselessness, the perfect quiet, which I have before alluded to! It is the sublime of stillness. They who have not heard it — do not add this expression to your collection of bulls — they who have not heard it (for the ear is affected by it) can form no idea of it. In the tillest night, on the quietest spot on earth, some sound is occasionally heard, how soft or slight soever it be — the ripple of water, the buzzing of an insect, the fall of a leaf. But up there, you might fancy yourself living in an age antecedent to the creation of sound. There might you indulge to the uttermost in the luxury of thought, reflection, meditation there revel in all the delights of imagination, with not the ruffling of a utterfly’s wing to put your fancies to flight.

Indeed, the experience is so novel and so much more graceful than any of the land-bound options that even the departure comes in an unexpected manner. “I do not despise you for talking about a balloon going up, for it is an error which you share in common with some millions of our fellow-creatures,” Poole writes his friend. Instead, when Mr. Green casts off his anchor ropes, the balloon sits still and the land falls away.

[D]own it went with everything on it; and your poor, paltry, little Dutch toy of a town, (your Great Metropolis, as you insolently call it,) having been placed on casters for the occasion — I am satisfied of that — was gently rolled away from under us.

And the sights to be seen from several angels up (as RAF pilots used to put it) surpass those of travel on land (“Trees, rivers, and fields; fields, trees, and rivers! with here and there a hill some certain number of feet higher or lower than another!”). “Sights, oh! such sights! Gulliver not fabulous. Men and women six inches tall; and in proportion as we rose, they diminished — to five, four, three inches.”

Height eliminates all distinctions of class or rank: “The proud, the humble, the dignified, the lowly, yet, to us, the greatest amongst them was undistinguishable from the rest!” Poole admits, though, “I am glad I am down again, for I was imbibing a very contemptuous opinion of my species.”

Poole traces their route in the landmarks below. Westminster Abbey, Covent Garden, Blackfriars, St. Paul’s. Seeing St. Paul’s from above gives him the frisson of discovering a whole new sense of awe: “like possibilifying of an impossibility.” Seeing Newgate Prison, on the other hand, evokes feelings of outrage.

With what stomach for your breakfast would you get out of your bed at eight in the morning to be strangled at nine, in the open face of day, and in the presence of thousands of persons collected together to glut their eyes with the sight of a human being throttled with a rope — for such is the fashionable phrase — you call it the cant — for describing the execution of a murderer: how, I say, would you like that?

And as they drift away from the city and the sun sets, Poole sees London as any airline passenger would know it — but as none of its residents has seen it before: “And now conceive yourself looking down on an enormous map of London, with its suburbs to the east, north, and south, as far as the eye could reach, DRAWN IN LINES OF FIRE!”

Not everything about air travel is better, however.

There are no inns in the whole of that country so that when what we had “got in that bottle,” which was some sherry, was exhausted in drinking to the health of our dear little Queen, we could not get our bottle replenished for love or money.

Crotchets in the Air can be found on the Internet Archive and will take less time to read than it took Green and Poole to travel across London. It’s a sublime little gem and a perfect escape for anyone suffering from the lockdown blues.

Crotchets In the Air; or, an (Un) Scientific Account of a Balloon-Trip, by John Poole
London: Henry Colburn, 1838

Angels in Ealing, by Eileen Winncroft (1939)

10 March 20208 March 2020

Title page of Angels in Ealing by Eileen Winncroft

After enjoying the headlong narrative sprint that is Eileen Winncroft’s first novel, Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! (1938), I took advantage of a recent visit to the British Library to scan the first few chapters of her second (and last), Angels in Ealing. I enjoyed reading them on the train home so much that I went ahead and purchased the one and only copy I could find for sale.

Winncroft — Henrietta Pryke Franckeiss Macloughlin in real life or Martha Blount in the pages of The Daily Express — must have gained tremendous self-confidence from her first foray into fiction, for in Angels in Ealing her omniscience doesn’t even draw the line at wandering through the mind of God himself (or the Most Beautiful One or the Holy One as he (it?) is referred to here). What sets this plot in motion is the Holy One’s exasperation at one particular resident of Ealing, Mr. Plantagent Jones. “I have been watching him for nearly forty-five years. And during that time he has never really tried once to behave properly,” he complains. “It has got to stop.” So, he dispatches the Archangel Michael to attend to it.

Jones — Plaggy to his wife and friends — is speeding down the Great West Road with his “under-nourished, under-exercised but very optimistic” nineteen-year-old new secretary, Vera, sitting next to him, on their way back from an afternoon drive in Surrey. Working with little more than the Holy One’s typically vague commission, Michael, at a loss what to do, sends down a great bolt of light into their path. In the resulting crash, Vera’s head is sheared off but Plaggy survives. Vera finds herself floating above the damage but soon loses interest: “she found she could move herself up and down as though in flight, and so she moved off in search of amusement.” Plaggy, however, is pulled from the wreck and soon finds himself on trial for manslaughter. When he pleads that he was only reacting to “the mighty finger of God” reaching down from the heavens, he is ruled insane and sent off to an asylum.

Relying on an act of God to kick off a story is always risky. In the real world, acts of God — or force majeure to use the contractual term — are often followed up by a great deal of cleaning up and fixing up: not exactly the sort of thing that allows a story to arc toward a climax. In the case of Angels in Ealing, the problem is compounded by the fact that the leading characters, Plaggy and his faithful wife Nellie, are so utterly conventional. Plaggy, the author notes, supports his wife “because everyone did support their wives unless they were cads. And he deceived her because he had no one else to deceive except himself, and being English deceit of some kind was essential to keep up appearances.” Though he goes off his head with a divine vision and Nellie soon finds herself in demand in high society as a fortune-teller, unusual spices rarely make up for bland base ingredients. Even Plaggy’s escape from the asylum is possibly the least exciting in all of fiction: after helping to open the front gate one day, he simply walks out and keeps going.

To liven things up, Winncroft introduces a counterplot involving something she had firsthand experience with: a Fleet Street reporter. In this case, it’s a very good-looking young man with a very well-respected family name — Prosper Haines, only son of a milk millionaire. Unfortunately, Prosper fails to make up through enthusiasm what he lacks in basic intelligence. His chief assets, in the eyes of his editors, are “his name and his connections and very often his photograph.” Without resort to divine intervention, the author puts him in the wrong corner of a love triangle, torn between the good-hearted but middle-class Joy and the empty-hearted but ever-to-stylish Julia. Winncroft devotes several chapters to the machinations among this trio, but clever asides aside, she manages to make them even less interesting than Plaggy and Nellie.

Ironically, it’s the eternally nineteen-year-old Vera who ends up experiencing the only substantial character development in the book. She devotes years to floating through most the the great homes of England, finding the inhabitants full of themselves but the interiors rich in thoughts and dreams: “Thoughts that had sunk deep into walls and dreams so strong and tenacious that they hung like a mist in the corners.” Finally, she looks in on her own family and decides to intervene. Although she manages to rescue her sister from the “horror and greed” of her parents, Vera discovers limits to her heavenly powers. She manages to coax a few neighbors over to have tea with her mother and make sure “that her father fell on something fairly soft when he did fall on his way home from the pub,” she is at a loss with her brother Henry:

He was so frightened of everything that she just couldn’t get hold of him at all. He was frightened of living and frightened of dying. Frightened of holding a job and frightened of losing it. Frightened of drinking too much and frightened of drinking too little and being thought a fool by someone else. Frightened of knowing nothing and far more frightened of finding out something. Just an ordinary normal half well-, half ill-, and half-developed young man, but with all the cunning of his kind to avoid knowing it.

This passage suggests where Winncroft’s real growth as a writer lay between Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! and Angels in Ealing. Gone is the relentless string of “And…. And…. And…” sentences. Where she uses repetition, she uses it sparingly and with good effect. And there are more than a few surgically-precise cuts into the hearts, minds and pretensions of English society of the late 1930s.

Sadly, Angels in Ealing marks the end of Eileen Winncroft’s career in fiction. One can’t blame her for the unlucky timing of the novel’s publication. The war hadn’t gone on long enough in November 1939 for readers to have a healthy appetite for escape. Angels in Ealing did get a second printing, but soon disappeared from the shelves for good — and if WorldCat.org is accurate, there are fewer than a dozen copies of the book now to be found in libraries worldwide. A sad fate for a writer whose work is highly readable and certainly not lacking in satiric insights — or ambition.

Other Opinions

• Kate O’Brien, The Spectator, 5 January 1940: Angels in Ealing is another book which ought to entertain a good many people, if they can put up with, or skip, certain unlucky whimsicalities about God and the angels and their direction of suburban destinies. Leaving Heaven right out of it, Miss Winncroft had a good idea, and could have made it just as lightly entertaining, and kept in all her best jokes — some of which are better than you expect. But even as it stands this is an odd, lively little story of strange events in the lives of a middle-aged couple in Ealing.
• Frank Swinnerton, The Observer, 3 December 1939: Angels in Ealing is both more serious and more flippant. Those not offended by its arch glimpses of Heaven will find that in spite of poor invention and occasional descent into girlishness the tale has a sort of quicksilver charm…. Miss Winncroft has much talent, many scathing perceptions, and often a beautifully light touch. When she gives her mind to invention she will write a good novel.
• J.S. The Times, 24 November 1939: Angels in Ealing is a slighter and more fantastic work than Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent, and one is inclined to support that this was the earlier piece. Yet a straggling plot and artificial premises cannot conceal the original twists of this author’s mind…. Her comments on her people are often shrewd; her invention runs to a scene in which a Continental dictator has his fortune told; and her inconsequences have at least the merit of keeping the reader awake. What makes Miss Winncroft particularly engaging, however is the fact that she is never self-important.
• R. D. Charques, The Times Literary Supplement, 2 December 1939: A previous novel by Miss Winncroft was welcomed as a shrewdly entertaining piece of work. It is difficult to know what to say of this present venture save that it is a tangle of apparent inconsequence. Evidently humourous in intention, its occasional jocosities have a disarming flatness, while the element of fantasy signifies everything or nothing. Frankly this seems a rhymeless and reasonless essay in fiction.
• Time and Tide, December 1939: Miss Winncroft’s unusual novel can be read as an inconsequent gay review not pretending to rhyme or reason, or as an unorthodox morality play covering with a sparkling cloak of wit and satire a severe criticism of man’s selfishness and self-importance. In either case it makes an excellent entertainment of real originality.
• James Agate, Daily Express, 25 November 1939: This is as trenchant and witty as the first…. This is a brilliant novel which says more in half a page than most best-sellers say in 300.

Angels in Ealing, by Eileen Winncroft
London: Constable & Company Ltd., 1939

My Hey-Day: Or, the Crack-up of the International Set, by Princess Tulip Murphy as told to Virginia Faulkner (1940)

2 March 2020

Cover of My Hey-Day by Princess Tulip Murphy as told to Virginia Faulkner

In a just world, Princess Tulip Murphy would have a place in America’s honorary royalty alongside Emperor Norton, King Kong, and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. In the course of the fifteen years or so when her updates, as faithfully reported by Virginia Faulkner, appeared regularly in Town & Country magazine, Princess Murphy was America’s leading royal. She boasted genuine red-white-and-blue blood: her grandmother was “the first white woman to be called ‘Madam’ west of Rock Island, Illinois” and her husband, “Brick-a-minute” Murphy, reveals in the heat of a barroom brawl that he is descended from a long line of Irish kings. In true American do-it-yourself fashion, Princess Tulip assembles these ingredients into an invitation into the finest circles of international society.

At first, she does resort to a little blackmail ease her way in. A month or two working as a chambermaid in an exclusive Riviera hotel and some spying into the diaries and doings of the various millionaires and noblemen and -women staying there, a few suggestions about the potential damage of a tip or two to the gossip sheets, and soon she has a string of invitations to the finest watering holes in Europe. “Before the afternoon was over, they understood that my friendship was indispensable and my social position was assured.”

From here, we travel along through My Hey-Day on Princess Tulip’s seemingly neverending round-the-world tour: from Scandanavia to India via Russia; from Egypt to Hollywood; from the 1939 World’s Fair to the supposed site of the Garden of Eden in Iraq. All along the way, we meet a hodge-podge of personalities:

… an unfrocked monk from Athos; a Rumanian gun-runner; a stranded Anazc ventriloquist; a Macedonian pimp; a honey-bee salesman from Hymettis; Raymond Duncan; a two-headed brown-and-white goat; and twenty-seven Levantine streetwalkers — to say nothing of a wandering band of Russian wolf-boys….

We also meet such nobility as Lady Crystal Scum, the Bedad of Nawab, Lord Beastie of Kelp, Grand Duke Slavko (the Nero of the Neva and author of What to Do Till the Dictator Comes), and the ex-King of Jugo-ourway.

Princess Tulip Murphy, shown signing her contract for *My Hey-Day*

If the changing scenery and cast are not enough, we can also enjoy Princess Tulip’s ever-evolving wardrobe:

I was wearing a taffeta middy bloud with a halter of passementerie; an accordion-pleated backless sarong; stout, hand-twisted fondant-colored ski shoes (ideal for dry weather); and a jaunty parka made of the skins of dozens and dozens of elves from the Irish Free State.

In circles where quick-wittedness was considered a prime virtue, Virginia Faulkner had one of the fastest tongues in the business. Gossip columnists like Walter Winchell and Sidney Skolsky often reported one of her sarcastic quips. On an over-exposed actress: “She had established herself in the public eye, ear and hair.” On a particularly ghastly Hollywood actress’s palace: “The decoration was not so much period as exclamation point.” She delighted in the public’s appetite for dished dirt and was not averse to inventing some of her own to keep things lively. Of a scandal involving an actress on Broadway, she remarked: “There have been conflicting stories — all mine.”

Faulkner was often in demand to supply rapid-fire comic dialogue for Broadway shows, radio, and the movies, but at times her tastes went beyond the conventional limits. It’s unlikely that Winchell or anyone else would have quoted Princess Tulip’s report from Russia:

I want to go on record that no matter what you hear about Russia their beauty parlors are most economical. You can get a shampoo, wave, massage, facial, manicure, and abortion all for about seven rubles ha’penny.

In his 1962 book, The Image, the historian Daniel Boorstin defined a celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.” In My Hey-Day, however, Faulkner/Tulip portray a world in which everyone sought to make their knownness ever more splendid in its isolation. “If you don’t already know who someone is, why on earth would you want to meet him?” Princess Tulip asks. “I have never been introduced to most of my intimate friends.” She admires the standards of Baroness Burper, who never consented to set foot in an establishment which did not boast at least one heated moat.

Even Princess Tulip could not be unaware of the great events unfolding outside the heated moats of high society. She acknowledges at several points what she refers to as “the unpleasantness” which was making travel in Europe ever more difficult. In keeping with the American pioneer spirit, however, she devised ways to accommodate the new circumstances — wearing, for example, a specially-designed frock which, “with a little manipulation can be converted into an air-raid shelt, with room for one other, or a good book and three square meals, if you are the cool, practical type.” War and the rumors of war were driving the International Set to taken extreme measures: “Many of my oldest friends can now count their yachts on the fingers of one hand.” Others are closing their apartments as … gasp! … “moving into their homes!”

My Hey-Day was published in 1940 and you might think the fall of France would have brought Princess Tulip’s adventures to an end. There remain, however, uncollected and out of print, a further half-dozen or so of the princess’s stories that Faulkner published in Town & Country over the course of the war and after. This material is crying out to be assembled with My Hey-Day into the complete memoirs of Princess Tulip. It would be a work that deserves a place on the shelf next to Augustus Carp, Esq., The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, and Lord Bellinger: An Autobiography.

My Hey-Day: Or, the Crack-up of the International Set, by Princess Tulip Murphy as told to Virginia Faulkner
New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1940

The Barbarians, by Virginia Faulkner (1935)

16 August 202323 February 2020

Cover of The Barbarians by Virginia Faulkner

If we were to trust Virginia Faulkner, the “Lost Generation” had no desire to be found. In The Barbarians (1935), her account of the Bohemian life of expats and war veterans set in Paris and on the Riviera in 1922, to be “disoriented, wandering, directionless” was more fun than having to be tied down to any particular plan. The Barbarians — a loose cluster of creative types — painters, a sculptor, a writer, a pianist, and a gigolo — value independence over all:

Because their work was concerned with the forms of things, they had little time to bother with problems of behavior when in the presence of substance. They possessed great singleness of purpose, and because they found simplicity in all that they most admired they tried to regulate their lives as simply as possible. What they disliked they avoided or ignored, or pretended was non-existent. Life all students of reality, they were experts at make-believe. Like all people who must live intensively, they were sometimes cruel and impatient. Like all specialists, they had a good many blind spots.

This sounds remarkably insightful coming from a writer who was all of 22 when The Barbarians, but bear in mind that Faulkner was nine years old in 1922 and had spent less than a year in Europe, mostly attending a tony girls’ finishing school in Rome. So, there’s far more in this book one has to attribute to precocious powers — of either observation or imagination or probably both. “Tauchnitz had taken the place of experience,” Faulkner writes of one particularly naïve young woman, but it might have truer for the author herself than she might like to admit.

Faulkner later wrote scripts for Fred Allen’s radio show and dialogue for Hollywood comedies, and her talent for rapid-fire conversation in an absurdist vein takes center stage in much of The Barbarians.

“There are so many things to think about. For instance, did it ever occur to you that there are an equal number of hands and feet in the world — at least to start with?”
“And the thumb is the strongest of the fingers?” said Phip helpfully.
“And monkeys have knuckles,” contributed Beppo. “At least, I think they do. Funny how you never associate a monkey with a knuckle.”
“And if we didn’t have fingernails, what would we scratch with?” said Marie.
“Do you suppose if we weren’t subject to itching we’d have fingernails?” inquired Andreas.
“Pulling off the fingernails was a medieval form of torture,” said Sarkesso.
“The Chinese take great pride in long fingernails,” said Lise valiantly.
“And short feet.”
“And many a foot is not twelve inches long.”
“And there is a kind of worm called the inch-worm.”
“And it is very hard to tell one end of worm from the other.”
“Can worms back up?”
This provoked quite a long discussion which ended by Lise and Beppo going out to get some worms….

Faulkner also tries her hand at romantic farce involving mistaken identities and hiding under beds à la Feydeau and proves herself a quick study. The Barbarians collectively foil Baroness Von Schanzburg’s attempt to arrange a marriage between her daughter and a passing American millionaire (“An income for herself from the son-in-law was not essential but would be acceptable,” she muses) and spirit her off to their Left Bank suite of garrets.

With no apparent talent aside from looking beautiful, she’s soon convinced by a ne’er-do-well to join him selling fake native artworks to tourists in the middle of the Sahara. Faulkner may have taken a page from Evelyn Waugh’s just-published A Handful of Dust in that the girl finds herself held prisoner by an especially sadistic local trader. Unlike Waugh’s Tony Last, however, several Barbarians come to the rescue, and the comic crew rides laughing into the sunset.

Virginia Faulkner 1935

When it came time for The Barbarians to be published, however, it was Faulkner herself who was the butt of jokes. As the story came out in May 1935 when the New York Supreme Court granted her an annulment, one night two months before Faulkner had been entertaining friends, including Tallulah Bankhead, at her hotel. As more drinks were poured, the party flowed out of the hotel and into one or more nightclubs, until at 3 A.M. the next morning, she was standing up in front of the Justice of the Peace of Harrison, New York pledging to love, honor, and obey one Everett Weil, whom reports identified as a “cotton converter,” whatever that is/was. Hours later, Faulkner awoke, finally sober, to find Weil bringing her breakfast in bed. Faulkner, who was likely gay and in any case in no mood to get hitched, fled the scene and began a frantic search for the fastest route to an annulment. A few papers picked up the story in March, but when the court ruling came out on 15 May 1935, The New York Daily News gleefully put its best headliner writer to work:

NY Daily News headline - Highball Elopement Scotched by Bride — Headline from *The New York Daily News* story on Virginia Faulkner’s short-lived marriage

“Fifteen Scotch highballs preceding a dawn elopement mystified Virginia Faulkner so thoroughly that she didn’t know what was happening until the blissfully happy bridegroom, Everett V. Weil, revived her with a platter of scrambled eggs of his own making in his apartment at 42 W. 74th St. Then she fled,” the article opened. You can hear the copy writer chuckling as he went to town on this story. “He Scrambles, She Scrams,” quipped a subheading. It ended with testimony from her application: “All she remembers of the honeymoon’s final chapter, she deposed, was that the bridgegroom gave her his card and phone number as she was leaving his apartment, and said: ‘Call me up some time.'” Not even Faulkner ever managed to come up with a story quite as wild as that.

The Barbarians, by Virginia Faulkner
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935

A Cavalcade of Joan Butler Covers

2 February 202314 February 2020

From a letter to the Editor, *Manchester Guardian*, 19 November 1998

For over three decades, P. G. Wodehouse had stiff competition for the shillings of English readers looking for a good comic novel: Joan Butler. At the rate of roughly one a year, Stanley Paul published over thirty of Butler’s novels. Few of them were considered worthy of review by most of the major magazines and newspapers, but that didn’t stop readers from buying them in the thousands and sometimes tens of thousands. They are now — every last one of them — out of print.

Given the zeal with which the work of English women novelists from the interwar period has been rediscovered and celebrated in recent years, you might wonder how it is that the work of Joan Butler has been so utterly neglected. The answer is simple: she was a he. As the Daily Mail announced in early 1960, Joan Butler was the pseudonym of the writer Robert William Alexander, who was born near Dublin in 1905 and who died in British Columbia in 1979. Although Alexander published a handful of novels, some with science fiction themes, under his own name, he primarily worked as Joan Butler.

From *Daily Mail*, 31 October 1961, page 2

I’m still waiting for the cheap copy of one of Butler’s novels I bought recently to arrive, but in the meantime, I thought it worth splurging on a cavalcade of the covers from about two-thirds of Mr. Alexander’s total Butler production. So, over the lips, past the gums, look out stomach here it comes:

Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent!, by Eileen Winncroft (1938)

30 July 202110 February 2020

When I spotted the yellow¹ spine with the title Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! and the name of Eileen Winncroft below it while browsing through the shelves here at UEA, I knew I had spotted a live one: rare, audacious, and somehow overlooked in the sometimes cultish fervor for novels by British women from the 1930s. That title alone is a bundle of potential psycho-sexual-social interpretations, and I knew I would have to read the book to see just which direction Eileen Winncroft took it.

Now, some readers might stop at the second sentence: “‘Breakfast, poops,’ he murmured in a homosexual Oxford accent.” We’re obviously in comic territory, but not everyone would find the joke funny today. Winncroft might have considered herself a sophisticate — and her narrator Forest is quite open-minded when it comes to heterosexual love — but when it comes to gay men and women, her humour sinks to the level of Benny Hill:

“Do stop stroking each other; you look like a couple of pansies.”
But she only made them worse and they picked dog daisies and stuck them behind each other’s ears and smacked each other’s bottom and called each other darling and behaved in a manner in which young men do in that pretty pub so near the Green Park.

Sean is a poet and would-be writer, while Forest is a mother and bread-winning writer. It’s Forest who worries about being able to buy her daughter new Wellies while Sean spends hours sunning himself in a deck chair, épuisé et fatigué. Be a Gent is, at least at the start, a comedy of role reversals. “Never in her wildest dreams did she think of Sean as a husband… She felt too much of a gent to need a husband then.” The problem at the root of their marriage, in fact, is that Forest sees Sean as an object: “… much as he despised his long, slender body it had at least got him a wife, whereas his inspired brain had not even got him enough to eat.”

That doesn’t stop Forest from turning out newspapers articles for pregenant women on “how much your husband could help in these last few tiring months.” For Forest is in her last few tiring months as the novel opens. And when the household is increased with a healthy baby boy (Robin), the population is quickly rebalanced by a sickly adult man as Sean — at his mother’s expense — is sent away to a sanitorium in Switzerland. Leaving Forest alone to manage affairs.

I use the word affairs with tongue firmly in cheek. Not only does Forest have to pop up to London and make the rounds of Fleet Street in search of freelance writing gigs, she also has to sort out childcare, lodging, food, finances, and transportation. To this extent, Be a Gent is utterly up-to-date. It may, in fact, be the best account of life as a freelancer written before the phrase “gig economy” lit up some sadistic capitalist’s brain. More than a few writers will recognize the editors Forest has to deal with:

“I adore the article you had in the so-and-so yesterday. Now, that is exactly the kind of thing I want. Why don’t you give me that kind of thing instead of this kind of thing.” Picking up her last article for them and curling up their lips at it.

Outside the practical realm, Be a Gent is about a game of musical chairs, with Forest the player and a series of men the chairs — once she’s got rid of Sean through a divorce pulled off like a rabbit from a hat. There is Charles, the unfailingly charming and reliably caddish man about town. Martin, the magnificent doctor who proves to have a different girl for … well, several days of the week. An enormously wealthy Frenchman smitten with Forest — but she with him? Not so much. It all ends like these games do: the music stops and the player plops down on the chair that happens to be within reach. It doesn’t really matter which man Forest ends up with.

Winncroft admits that none of her characters, including Forest, are particularly admirable. “The next story I write will be about quite different people. Really nice normal people.” But since she only knows one at the moment, she invites her readers to send “names and addresses of any others you know so that I can have a few minutes’ talk with them and get a complete picture of them for the story.”

Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! is a little needle of a tale about surviving as an independent woman wrapped up in so many layers of fluff I suspect almost no one felt the barb when it came out. Neither Forest nor Winncroft took herself seriously enough to brood over anything. And the prose speeds the reader along in endless strings of conjunctions:

And then Susan got affected…. And that, of course, opened the heavens…. And while all this fun was going on…. And, of course, Forest accepted…. And the pretty girl he loved…. And Forest returned home…. And every week she tried not to see Martin….

It’s not all like this, but I counted strings of sentences starting with “And …” running on for as much as two pages. Winncroft set a high standard for breathlessness in her prose.

To her credit, she was writing something of an ironic self-portrait. Eileen Winncroft was, in fact, a pseudonym of a pseudonym. To the millions of readers of the Daily Express, she was Martha Blount, one of a trio of women’s page columnists — along with Anne Edwards and Eve Perrick — masterminded by Lord Beaverbrook and all taking their names from friends of the poet Alexander Pope. A few years before Be a Gent came out, Martha Blount provided regular updates during and after her pregnancy. In real life, Martha Blount was Mrs. Neil Macloughlin (her second husband) and their son — known to the Daily Express as Simon Blount — Shaun Macloughlin went on to become a writer of radio dramas for the BBC and, more recently, to found the English Through Drama program. And Mrs. Macloughlin was the former Mrs. Franckeiss and, in the beginning, Henrietta Pryke from Sussex. It took a good hour digging through genealogical databases to unravel that thread.

As Eileen Winncroft, she went on to write a second novel, Angels in Ealing (1939), with a very different tone entirely — a story involving a real angel and a real divine power. Then, over a decade later, she collaborated with a German woman, Else Wendel, in writing Hausfrau at War (1957), a memoir of life in Germany during the Second World War.

Ad for I am Going to Have a Baby by Martha Blount — Hutchinson catalogue listing for *I Am Going to Have a Baby*

As Martha Blount, she appears to have had a deal with Hutchinson in 1937 to write a book based on her Daily Express columns to be titled “I am Going to Have a Baby.” The book was announced in Hutchinson’s catalogue with the promise that it would contain “advice on matters which, if overlooked, may be disastrous.” Unfortunately, the book appears never to have been published: not even the British Library has it. Now we know the reason for World War Two. Much later, in the 1960s, Martha Blount finally offered her advice to mothers in a little paperback titled, A Time for Joy (1968). Tandem Paperbacks gave it far less hoopla than “I am Going to Have a Baby,” despite the fact that the former appears to have been largely based on the latter.

¹The UEA Library has the second printing, which had a simpler, all-yellow binding. For those of you keeping track.

Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent, by Eileen Winncroft (pseudonym of Henrietta Macloughlin)
London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1938

Financial Times, by Ronald Fraser (1942)

19 January 2020

Financial Times has the best two opening sentences I’ve read in a long time:

William Longfellow Wollacombe, the Royal Academician, an upright figure with whiskers and the face of a statesman, a man of great truth and purpose you would have said, endowed this world somewhat bountifully with children. Indeed, he was a shade careless about it, not sufficiently distinguishing between his own field and his neighbour’s with the result that the stern visage which has now gone out of fashion stamped itself rather freely on the new age, though with diminishing incisiveness.

The wonderfully vague sense that adultery and bastardry are rather like atmospheric phenomena that take place beyond one’s control conveyed here sets the tone perfectly for the comic clash at this book’s core. If the painter Wollacombe floats through his world blithely unaware of his impact on it, he is positively razor-sharp compared to his poetess wife, Ella, sometimes referred to as “Love-in-the-Mist.” On her brief and infrequent passes through the family’s home in Kensington, she is apt to stumble into one of the many children rambling unsupervised around the place, say “I seem to know you,” and then call out indefinitely, “Give him a penny!” before passing out again.

There are, in fact, thirteen Wollacombe children, bearing artistic names such as Leonardo, Perugino, Rubens, Ingres, Veronese, Gentile, and Lippi and even more artistic manners: “They wrote, painted, made sculpture or played instruments from birth.” They gather like birds when they need to eat, descend upon unwitting grocers, taking away whatever foods strike their fancy, and signing off on hugely marked-up bills against their father’s account. Fortunately, Wollacombe is among the great artistic successes of the Victorian age: “He painted Cows. No gallery in England was complete without a number of Wollacombe Cows; no private house without one or two reproductions.”

One Wollacombe, however, is the odd number in this baker’s dozen: Titian. When his mother asks, “And what are you going to be when you grow up? Painter? Poet? Sculptor? Musician?” he snaps back, “None of that nonsense for me. I’m going into business!” Financial Times, in other words, is a fable about an ant in a world filled with grasshoppers. Unlike his siblings, Titian’s soul aches for order, and he insists on being sent away to boarding school. Fraser passes over this period with an observation some might find applicable to the current Conservative government:

We do not want to follow Titian through his schooldays: nothing could be duller. He used, later, to say that his schooldays were the happiest of his life. Men do say that. It shows they ceased to develop a short time after they left.

Titian takes all the pennies given by his mother and deposits them fastidiously in a Post Office account. And when, after leaving school, he rises quickly through the ranks of a commercial firm (his specialty is collecting outstanding debts), and is recruited by Kettering, the era’s grand financier, his father bids him a bitter farewell: “I can’t say I’m sorry you’re going. I never thought any one of mine would have sunk so low.”

Financial Times perfectly illustrates the principle that tragedy is the flipside of comedy (and vice versa). We laugh at the continual discord between upright Titian and the rest of the Wollacombe tribe. They accept him with a breadth of mind, a tolerance for all types, even a sort of affection — “rather like the affection of a scientist for some example of Neanderthal Man.” To him, though, their tolerance merely proved them utterly lacking in principle. To Leonardo et al., Titian is sad but comic figure. To the author, however, he is ultimately a tragic figure — for it’s clear from the start whose side Fraser’s on.

Despite the fact that Fraser was an accomplished and knighted administrator and civil servant, his greatest passion was for spiritual matters, especially the possibility of transcendence, of passing from this world to another realm of immortality and beauty. He saw art as one of the means by which we can build bridges between the two worlds, and so he has no choice but to take Titian through to a final judgment in the court of immortality. In Fraser’s hands, of course, it’s a kangaroo court, and it’s painful thing to witness. Painful and sadly, from an artistic standpoint, unsuccessful. Good comedy is its own reward. In Financial Times Fraser manages to earn a fortune and fritter it away trying to make a philosophical point. “There is little left to record,” he writes on page 200 — which is where he should have stopped writing. And if you take up Financial Times — which I highly recommend — I would advise you to make the editorial choice Fraser failed to. You won’t miss what you miss.

Other Reviews

• Viola Garvin, The Evening Standard

It sparkles with laughter and mischief; heaves hugely with a deeper mirth at the eternal comedy; gravely considers the temporal world and its mad affairs; pities both the sad and sick, both sinful and sorry, though with an aloof, measured tenderness in proportion to the larger issues. Above all, being afraid neither of beauty nor ugliness, but taking experience for the enriching thing it is, not afraid either of life or death.

• Kate O’Brien, The Spectator

Because Mr. Fraser writes at speed, keeps up his design of excess, overstatement and satire, sustains in all directions, pro and con his hero, a sense of non-reality, and presents a crowd of amusingly mythical figures, formal, grotesque, decorative and theatrically-lighted—his inverted theme, which might have been merely a statement, untenable, as an effect of fireworks, develops into a sustained amusement, imperfect and uneven, but well worth reading, and containing much that is colourful and out of the common. Hit or miss anyway, it is non-pedestrian, and aims at being an entertainment.

Financial Times, by Ronald Fraser
London: Jonathan Cape, 1942

Reader Recommendation: Mr. and Mrs. Cugat, by Isabel Scott Rorick (1940)

17 December 20238 November 2019

Peter Laurence writes to recommend Isabel Scott Rorick’s Mr. and Mrs. Cugat (1940), a collection of comic sketches about Mr. and Mrs. George Cugat, a happily if comically married couple that was a huge best-seller in its time. For a book about a couple with no children it managed to spawn an impressive number of offspring: Hollywood filmed it as Are Husbands Necessary? starring Ray Milland and Betty Fields in 1942; CBS broadcast it on radio as My Favorite Husband with Lucille Ball and Richard Denning from 1948 to 1951; CBS then put it on television as the landmark sitcom I Love Lucy from 1951 to 1957; and finally, CBS milked the cow one more time, running My Favorite Husband for two-and-a-half seasons on television with Barry Nelson and Joan Caulfield.

I recognized Mr. and Mrs. Cugat when Peter recommended it, but had assumed that it was about Latin bandleader Xavier Cugat and one of his five wives. Instead, George Cugat is Fourth Vice President of the Tri-State Bank in some nameless Ohio city and Mary Elizabeth (Liz) is his superficially addle-brained (but ultimately smarter) wife. Rorick structures the book around phrases from the traditional wedding vows (“… to have and to hold …”, “… for richer or poorer …”), but this is still just a collection of anecdotes. Unlike in I Love Lucy, however, George is the comic goat just as often as Liz. This synopsis of one of the episodes gives a taste of that:

The year that the big annual social function, the Bal Masque of the Coronet, turned to an African version, Mrs. Cugat wasn’t a bit astonished that Mr. Cugat put off getting his costume to the last minute. But she was certainly surprised when he turned up in a complete suit of armor, completely cock-eyed, and managed to steal the show — and also to set himself on fire inside his iron suit.

Mr. and Mrs. Cugat is out of print, except from print-on-demand publishers, but you can read it for free from the Open Library (Link), along with its 1945 sequel, Outside Eden

The Well-Meaning Young Man, by Luise and Magdalen King-Hall (1930)

23 April 2019

I decided to read The Well Meaning Young Man after stumbling across this passage:

Horatio Swann, the famous portrait painter, was at his wit’s end. Harry Ames, the well-known scene designer, was at his wit’s end. The Russian chauffeur, Boris, was lying upstairs under a neat check bedspread, in a bedroom of the inn, suffering from an overdose of cocaine. The only person who was enjoying himself was Gene Tunney the panther who, attached to the kitchen table by a stout chain, was guzzling his luncheon out of a wash-hand-basin. In the entrance hall of the inn, the Princess Vanda Fiorivanti stormed to and fro. Her tall, snake-like figure clad in a pair of seagreen pyjamas and a fur coat, quivered with rage. Her enormous, distraught yellow eyes, ringed with black lashes, appeared to swamp her emaciated white face. Her hair was like a crazy scarlet chrysanthemum and matched her scarlet mouth. Her general appearance at the moment closely resembled that of a vampire who had been carelessly buried without a stake in her heart, dug up again after some centuries, and was now giving vent to her feelings.

I am a sucker for over-the-top farces about the goings-on of silly rich people (viz. Five Days, The Ritz Carltons, Heart in a Hurricane, et al.), so this was enough to get me started.

The hero of The Well Meaning Young Man is not himself rich but he comes from a comfortable family. The younger son of Anglo-Irish gentry, Dan Cavanagh is already a failure. His father and mother (“a fine stand-up lump of a woman”) have shipped him off to join a family business in Sicily, thinking he had “a way with him” that “might be invaluable in charming intractable foreigners.” At the time he stumbles across the Princess and her entourage, however, he is trying to make his way there by foot, having squandered most of his travel budget with an old school chum in London. Dan is not the sharpest knife in the drawer: “He had not yet learnt to read except in the literal sense of the word,” and the authors esteem his handwriting “about one degree of culture superior to that of his valiant twelfth century ancestors, who came over to Ireland with Strongbow, and when occasion demanded, signed their names with an X.”

With her chauffeur incapacitated, the Princess hires Dan as a replacement, and he soon finds himself behind the wheel of a massive Pannonia-Svitza estate car, racing through the Black Forest towards Schloss Erlenburg, where American producer-tycoon Rex Guggenheim awaits the star of his new spectacle, “The Legend of St. Dorothea and the Heavenly Roses.” Unfortunately, by enlisting Dan, she also manages to hijack the narrative for the remainder of the book. What starts as a good-natured Bildungsroman with above-average comic writing swerves onto a side road and becomes mired in a seemingly endless opera buffa with all the fun and spontaneity as a Soviet rhythmic gymnastics demonstration. By the time poor Dan is spit out on the far side of the Alps, the comic spirit has been beaten out of us.

While The Well Meaning Young Man got waylaid with a narrative flat tire, I’m willing to give Magdalen King-Hall’s earlier solo attempt, with the intriguing title I Think I Remember, Being the Random Recollections of Sir Wickham Woolicomb, An Ordinary English Snob and Gentleman. I’m also a sucker for comic autobiographies of English snobs (viz. Lord Bellinger and the classic Augustus Carp, Esq.).

The Well Meaning Young Man is available on the Internet Archive (link).

The Well-Meaning Young Man, by Luise [Louise] and Magdalen King-Hall
New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1930

The Ritz Carltons, by Fillmore Hyde (1927)

15 December 2018

Remember when it was still possible to make fun of rich people? Like Thurston Howell III and his wife, Lovey, on Gilligan’s Island? Or the silly, spoiled heiresses in High Society and My Man Godfrey? Well, if you’re nostalgic for a time when the idle rich were valid objects of ridicule instead of reality TV stars, The Ritz Carltons was written for you.

For Fillmore Hyde, the more money a family has, the more it must struggle with the slightest of problems. Which limousine to take? Will the first chauffeur be available to drive us to Long Island (because really the second one wouldn’t do)? Or what to do on your summer vacation:

The problem of where to go for the summer is a grave one to people of wealth and social prominence. The majority of mankind may take it lightly, but the rich cannot; from somewhere they must find strength to solve the perplexing question; and they do — noblesse oblige.
The Ritz Carltons, of course, faced it squarely.

Labelled as a novel, The Ritz Carltons is nothing more than a series of sketches. Actually, it could have worked well as the basis of a sitcom, especially back in the early days of TV when they had fifteen-minute shows — because there isn’t more than fifteen minutes of material in any of the chapters. And its humor has just that reliable formulaic ring you could count on from sitcoms.

In this case, the formula depends on a catalyst and predictable reagent. The reagent is Mrs. Ritz Carlton, whose response to the slightest hint of stress is complete physical collapse. As in the episode in which their daughter, Ritza announces her engagement to Parker House, just graduating from Harvard. The happy parents rush to Cambridge to witness their son-in-law-to-be’s commencement.

“Why isn’t he dressed like the rest?” asked Ritz, noticing that the ornament of Parker’s gown was of a different color from that of the others.
Ritza didn’t know.
The Fates were soon to make it plain. A speech was made, and the new graduates were asked to come forward to receive their diplomas. Parker House was the first in line — and the fateful words, Summa cum Laude, came down the wind from the dais.
“Good God!” exclaimed Ritz as the truth swept over him. “The fellow’s a grind!”
On his left, Mrs. Carlton collapsed silently into the arms of the secretary.

And each episode ends with the doctor rushing in from stage left to aid the prostrate woman.

Come to think of it, The Ritz Carltons has a pretty strong misogynistic streak in it, too.

Well, you don’t look to a formulaic sitcom for subtlety — just a few cheap laughs. To help forget the fact that the rich today are not sources of comic relief but soulless blood-sucking vampires.

Three novels by Betty Swanwick: The Cross Purposes (1945) Published by Editions Poetry LondonHoodwinked (1957) and Beauty and the Burglar (1958) Published by Arthur Barker Ltd.

Crotchets In the Air; or, an (Un) Scientific Account of a Balloon-Trip, by John Poole London: Henry Colburn, 1838

Other Opinions

Angels in Ealing, by Eileen Winncroft London: Constable & Company Ltd., 1939

My Hey-Day: Or, the Crack-up of the International Set, by Princess Tulip Murphy as told to Virginia Faulkner New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1940

The Barbarians, by Virginia Faulkner New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935

Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent, by Eileen Winncroft (pseudonym of Henrietta Macloughlin) London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1938

Other Reviews

Financial Times, by Ronald Fraser London: Jonathan Cape, 1942

The Well-Meaning Young Man, by Luise [Louise] and Magdalen King-Hall New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1930

The Ritz Carltons, by Fillmore Hyde with illustrations by Rea Irvin New York: Macy-Masius, 1927