As a long-time student of early twentieth century novels, I must confess to at first being utterly confounded when I started reading Madam. I couldn’t make head or tale of the prose and the cast of characters that spun in dizzying speed before my eyes in the early sections was so bewildering that I had to draw a diagram of their relationships just to keep up.
Ethel Sidgwick makes great demands of her readers. Her meaning is like a will o’ the wisp, darting in the darkness of her elliptical prose. She is always several paces ahead of the reader, who feels as if they are dully plodding behind, in danger of losing their way completely. Even a contemporary Observer reviewer wrote that Sidgwick was “more elusive than Henry James” and that “she seems to overrate our powers of intellectual sympathy”, unaware that while she is racing ahead, her readers are stuck somewhere far behind her. But like a will o’ the wisp, one feels that if one might only grasp it, and bathe one’s mind in its light, it might illuminate a greater truth.
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Sidgwick was once regarded as a brilliant writer, “drawing the picture in firm, fine lines: never losing our attention, or ceasing to charm…it is supreme art,” wrote Reginald Brimley Johnson in Some Contemporary Novelists (Women) (1920). Madam is one of several novels Ethel Sidgwick produced between 1910 and 1926, earning praise for their literariness, wit and truths to be discovered under the sparkling wit of her prose. These novels, many with single-word titles such as Promise (1910), Succession (1913) and Restoration (1923) offered sharp and often humorous criticism of the manners of the British upper classes. Sidgwick enjoyed a few years of fame and popularity: regularly compared with Henry James, in 1919-20 she was offered that most glittering of accolades for an English author: a lecture tour of the United States, during which time she kept a journal that is now with her other papers held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Afterwards she dedicated the US edition of Madam, “To America. If she will accept so poor a thing in memory and in gratitude”. Her later novels, however, received less critical acclaim, being more popular and romantic. Despite having made considerable impact on both British and US reading publics, after long before her death in 1970, Sidgwick quickly had disappeared, virtually without trace. If she is remembered at all, it is only for her 1938 biography of her aunt who was an early principal of Newnham College Cambridge: Mrs Henry Sidgwick: a memoir by her Niece.
Published in Spring 1921, Madam follows the lives of a large cast of characters, from stable lads to landed gentry, in a narrative beginning just before the First World War, “the golden days, before the world lost its innocence”, and ending in the months following the Armistice. In the second half of the novel the traumatic effects of the War haunt the men who returned from the trenches, and those who were too young to fight. They are dogged not only by physical injuries but suffer an almost obsessive need to seek “fellowship with the dead”, their survivors’ guilt destroying any honest or meaningful relationship with the living. Like out-of-control pinballs, they careen wildly through London and county society, causing varying degrees of damage, from wrecking motor cars to breaking young girls’ hearts. A haunting study of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) decades before the term was even coined, Madam is, as the contemporary Guardian reviewer urged, worth sticking with until the second half fully reveals itself.
The novel’s main characters are the jovial country squire Henry Wicken, who has lost a hand in the fighting and who gently subsides into what today would be called a nervous breakdown, and his former stable boy Mott Lane, who was too young to join up but who lost all five of his older brothers in the fighting. The effects of the war on Mott are more atrocious than on Henry: he suffers from a split personality, ruins everything he goes near: bicycles, motor cars, horses and young ladies. That is, until he meets Caroline, ‘Lina’ Astley, the ‘Madam’ of the title. She recognises Mott is damaged and through her patience and courage saves him from his demons and his desire only to be with the dead. Far from the dreary cliché of the angelic feminine, Lina helps Mott in a shockingly physical and criminal way. She confronts Mott’s at once cruel and pious mother (who used to interrupt her beating of him to read out verses from the Bible), slapping her hard on the face and stealing from her a memento of Mott’s beloved brother Christopher.
In meting out criminal and physical harm, fighting fire with fire, Caroline at once fractures the idealised image of herself as the gentle angel and smashes the tomb within which Mott has buried himself alongside his dead brothers. It is one of the few sharply defined moments of a novel swathed in obliquities and ellipses, a narrative style described by one contemporary reviewer as “typically feminine” and “liable to cause irritation”.
Such assertions call for evidence, so here we go:
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Because he simply longed to kill Mr Forrest with Miss Astley, last edition. The poor old surgeon really thought he knew her, that was the creamy part. She was probably sitting, every day, with her despatch-case, under his eye, just as usual; even though Lancaster had kissed her, and she had – No: it must be laid up in lavender for Forrest; for Miss Astley, final edition, was simply the sequel of all the other tales. Tell one, and you found yourself telling the others, inevitably wherever you were: it all followed on.
The novel is written entirely in this style and such questions as “what does ‘laid up in lavender’ mean?” and “what are earbobs?” and “why is the horse Titus starting to speak human language?” chase each other through the frantic reader’s mind. It is “a thing heavy with lightness”, as Sidgwick wrote of a character’s argument in the novel, but it could easily be applied to her own words, tricky to pin down “because there was nothing in it anywhere to grasp.” While pointing out her difficult style, contemporary reviewers nevertheless encouraged readers to persevere. “Through the greater part of his first perusal the reader has the sensation of being lost in a maze, or endeavouring (sic) to fit together the jumbled parts of a picture puzzle, or trying to work out the meaning of a code message without the key,” confessed a New York Times reviewer of Jamesie (1918). But those who stuck with the novel, even giving it a second reading, would be rewarded with its “fine literary quality” and “piquant character drawing”.
There is indeed something deeply resonant at the heart of this war novel. The male characters emerge from the smoke of Flanders so wounded and damaged that the question of how to make sure there is never again another war would be the contemporary reader’s chief conclusion. This was Sidgwick’s aim: born in 1877 into a progressive, literary and feminist family, she wrote for the pacifist Cambridge Magazine and was a lifelong supporter of the Save the Children fund founded by her friend Eglantyne Jebb. Sidgwick also lost her own brother, Arthur, killed in action at Ypres in 1917.
Because of its difficult style, Madam will not be brought triumphantly back into publication to enjoy a second literary life as have recently the works of her contemporaries Rose Macaulay and Elizabeth von Arnim. But if ever the curious reader were to chase its oblique meaning through the prose, they will be rewarded with moments of shuddering recognition of those early, shattered months after the Great War.
Madam, by Ethel Sidgwick London: , 1921
Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.
I Want is a lovely collaboration between the Liverpool poet Adrian Henri and the novelist/playwright Nell Dunn about the forty-some year affair. Upper-class Dolly Argyll and Albert Hodgkin, a Merseyside lad taking a first step up the social ladder by attending a red-brick university, meet through friends, or friends of friends, in the 1930s. She is attracted by Albert’s raw “authenticity” and he by her passion and perfection, and soon they have their first tryst in the shade of the great forest on her family’s estate — a tryst whose secrecy and subterfuge comes to symbolize their relationship.
We know from the outset that their paths will soon diverge. The story is told through a series of letters, Albert’s written by Henri and Dolly’s by Dunn, and in the first Albert complains about being frustrated and exhausted from taking care of his second wife, who is now bedridden. Dolly is living comfortably in what we can guess is a quaint but well-furnished country cottage.
They have kept up a correspondence over the years, though Albert has had to hide Dolly’s letters from both wives. And, we learn, they have met from time to time, usually in some modest seaside hotel outside Liverpool, for an afternoon. For Albert, these are escapes. Having taken his degree, he ended his climb up the ladder one rung up by joining the engineering staff at the same factory where his father worked, a post he remains in for the next thirty-five years. Although happily married to his first wife, Albert knows his occasional rendezvous with Dolly are his only chance to leave the life he has signed onto.
Dolly’s motivations for continuing their relationship aren’t as clear. She doesn’t see Albert as her one great love. But it’s clear that she’s also not comfortable with surrendering completely to a way of life that’s so thoroughly bound up with appearances, customs, and property. As their correspondence develops, Albert becomes less lover and more confidante.
Henri and Dunn do a marvelous job of portraying a lifelong, if melancholy, relationship. But there is more going on her. For while Albert and Dolly do more than “stay in touch” through the years, there are suggestions that theirs is a relationship built on illusions. Dolly sends Albert and his first wife an expensive basket of good from Fortnum and Mason, not realizing that it raises questions he will struggle to answer or that they have little interest in champagne and pâté. He wonders if he hasn’t simply used Dolly as an outlet for sympathy and sex. They meet for the last time at the funeral for Albert’s second wife, Joan. Surrounded by family and friends, Albert can barely acknowledge the strange woman among the mourners.
Adrian Henri and Nell Dunn around the time they wrote I Want.
One wonders if Albert and Dolly were alter egos for Henri and Dunn. Henri was stubbornly and proudly bound to his Liverpool working class roots, while Dunn, daughter of a baronet, granddaughter of an earl, has been strongly associated with working class situations and characters, despite her upbringing. In their collaboration, they managed in barely 100 pages to create a picture of a relationship with enough shades and suggestions to fill a much longer novel.
I Want, by Adrian Henri and Nell Dunn London: Jonathan Cape, 1972.
By March 1917 Britain had her back against the wall in a way she had never dreamed, nor expected even at the outbreak of War in August 1914. Then, people said it would all be over by Christmas, with the Germans bloodied and suing for peace. By the spring of 1917, for the first time since 1066 the “sceptred Isle” with its great Empire, unequalled industrial muscle and naval strength was facing an existential threat. Tens of thousands of young men had already been killed in France and Belgium, thousands more returned mutilated, shell-shocked and disfigured by new industrial and chemical warfare. On the Home Front, Zeppelin air raids across east and southeast England were showering death from the skies upon women and children. After the first attack, over Great Yarmouth on 19 January 1915, people living under the flight path of those vast, silent whales “flying high with fins of silky grey”, as the writer Katherine Mansfield described, felt exposed as never before. Street lamps were dimmed, blackout curtains were put up and people shrank as shadows passed overhead. While rationing would not be brought in until 1918, already sugar and meat supplies were under Government control to feed the Army first. People were foraging for gulls’ eggs, songbirds and fern bracken roots as alternative food sources. Restaurants stopped providing sugar shakers: a small thing but hugely symbolic of the new bewildering reality. Nearly three years in, and there seemed no way out.
Poets had at first welcomed the war, revelling in this opportunity for glorious self-sacrifice in England’s cause as in Rupert Brooke’s 1914 sonnets. Ironically, Brooke was one of the first to die, making a small corner of the Greek island of Skyros “forever England”. His fellow ‘War Poets’ quickly changed their tone seeing it as their role to tell people the truth about the horrors of the trenches, since the Press was not doing its job. Robert Graves’ ‘A Dead Boche’ (1916) showing the stinking, scowling, green-hued unburied German corpse in horrible close-up provided sobering correction to the Daily Mail’s upbeat accounts of biffing ‘The Hun’.
Novelists too tried to make sense of the new reality but paper shortages and the novelist’s need for reflection meant that few British ‘War’ novels were actually published before the Armistice in 1918. H. G. Wells’ Mr Britling Sees it Through (1916) portrays the confusion of the civilian population who on the one hand read in newspapers that the Germans “had been mown down in heaps” but that in the same papers, these same defeated Germans were advancing on Paris. Mr Britling and his doomed son Hugh spend a desperate Sunday afternoon examining maps of France trying, yet failing to work out the confusing and contradictory information. Similarly, the Home Front civilians in Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and Others (1916) can barely tell the difference between truth and lies, sharing fake news about Russian soldiers landing in Scotland with snow on their boots, along with real news of babies being killed in Zeppelin raids. Readers would have to wait for Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1929), or Storm Jameson’s Company Parade (1934) for more fully worked out meditations on how we had got into this mess and what the War was doing to the national psyche. Yet there is one neglected novel, published in March 1917 at the War’s darkest hour, that is well worth reading for the light it sheds on English social and political life on the eve of War and during its first two years.
Stephen McKenna, from Authors of the Day by Grant Overton (1924).
At its heart, Stephen McKenna’s Sonia: Between Two Worlds is a devastating critique of a spoiled, complacent and too-wealthy ruling class that partied through “the years of carnival”, as he calls them, before August 1914. Too busy drinking champagne, making money and gossiping about the latest unfortunate debutante who had failed to catch a man in her first season, these representatives of the governing class pay heavily for their complacency. But so do hundreds of thousands of young men who had no say in political decision-making, with many working-class men, as well as all women, still unable to vote. About halfway through the novel George Oakleigh, Liberal MP and the novel’s narrator, looks back to those years of plenty (for the ruling classes at least): “I look back to find an infinite littleness in the artificial round we trod during my idle early days in London,” he writes. The world was “clattering into ruins” but just months before the cataclysm, he and his peers, even those with seats in the Lords or Commons, were too busy writing their names on pretty girls’ dance cards to notice.
The novel follows the lives of a group of young men from their schooldays at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign through to the mid-point of the First World War. They are products of Melton, a fictional public school, the finest in the land, that produces future MPs and prime ministers, generals, Whitehall mandarins and captains of industry. Melton is Westminster School, McKenna’s own alma mater, transported to somewhere in Wessex, that quasi-mythical old English Kingdom, once ruled by Alfred the Great. Centuries of English history and legend weigh heavily on the weathered old stone. At Melton the boys learn discipline, loyalty, Greek and Latin but also the cruel system that permits older boys to enslave and beat younger ones who step out of line. They learn that, as the apex of the English social class system, they are inheritors of the Earth. Into this centuries-old world of cloisters and courtyards, well-stocked libraries and finely clipped cricket pitches steps David O’Rane, a youth endowed with epic gifts of intellect, physical strength and rebelliousness. He can recite, perfectly, 30,000 lines of Greek poetry and take on 10 older boys in a fist fight. The Irish surname is no accident. He’s also gorgeous, with large dark eyes, chiselled cheek bones and dark flowing Byronic locks. The other boys would all fall a little bit in love with him, although would never admit to such weakness: the closest they get is to describe him as looking “like a girl”. Receiving regular beatings for refusing to support the school football team, O’Rane forces the other boys to reflect on whether their system is in fact, fit for purpose at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Daily Mail review of Sonia from 7 March 1917.
They don’t reflect for long however, so keen are they to get to Oxford and spend the next four years punting, drinking and deciding whether they’ll go to the Bar or not before they become MPs or take up their hereditary seats in the House of Lords. McKenna, who also attended Oxford and whose uncle was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, was well placed to observe the ruling elite in its process of formation. There is also a great love story that runs through the novel and the roller coaster passion between Sonia Dainton and David O’Rane caught the nation’s imagination so much that in the autumn of 1917, there was, according to the Manchester Guardian something known as “Sonia Fever”, a “pleasant malady” that made McKenna briefly famous. The book inspired the film director Denison Clift to make a silent movie version starring Evelyn Brent as Sonia in 1921 although it has since been lost.
Sonia is not great literature: the characters are two-dimensional and O’Rane is simply unbelievable in his all-round perfection. There is an affecting moment towards the end of the novel though, that captures the horror of the time. O’Rane, once invincible, returns from the trenches a broken man, his blindness a metaphor for his generation’s lack of foresight. A door slams shut by an unfelt gust of wind: there is no clear way out; incoherent rustlings and mutterings could be the ghosts of all those lost young. It is this rare literary focus on the war in the midst of the cataclysm that makes Sonia both unusual and powerful. The Manchester Guardian reviewer at the time made the point that Sonia was perhaps a “rather irritating reminder of mistakes and futility” when everyone was getting on with the job of survival. But this is precisely Sonia’s great strength: it is as a critique of contemporary British society a full decade before the great postwar novels like Parade’s End ventured to tackle the subject. As well as the feckless aristocracy, McKenna blames the new mass media for leading the public to believe false stories of German atrocities and for encouraging hatred, rather than understanding of, the enemy. Written with passion at the point of maximum danger, it thoroughly deserves another outing.
Sonia Between Two Worlds, by Stephen McKenna London: Methuen; New York: George H. Doran, 1917
Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.
Option one: you publish nearly 100 novels and stories – many bestsellers – in your lifetime. You make a good living from your writing and have some impact, particularly within the burgeoning women’s equality movement, as many of your female protagonists are strong, independent and clever. Highbrow critics, suspicious of your copious output however, ignore you. A century after your death, not one of your novels is read, beyond the odd specialist scholar. The occasional mildewed cloth-bound first edition turns up in second hand bookshops and anyone who takes the chance to read your effortless prose is amazed they hadn’t heard of you. But you’re never going to be canonical, not even in this current revival period when forgotten women novelists are being exhumed more rapidly than the dead rise up in a zombie apocalypse. There are just too many of you.
Option two: you publish a handful of well-received literary novels, a couple of which, 100 years after your death are still in print, having made it onto university English studies reading lists. One, about turn-of-the-century English rural life, that critics considered your best (though you didn’t), is turned into a costume drama starring, I don’t know, Benedict Cumberbatch or Alicia Vikander. In your lifetime you’re never quite solvent and never quite satisfied, but you have a kind of immortality, even in a fleeting film credit.
Which would you choose? Or back then, being a writer on a vast production line with very little agency, could you choose at all? So many late-Victorian novels have sunk without trace, victims of what was recognised even at the time as “over-production”. But this is of course what this site is for, to find gems such as those that disappeared under what the Daily Mail described in 1903 as “the flood of fiction”. The Mail complained that of the 1600 novels published each year, barely any would survive the season and that “women are the worst offenders if over-production be an offence.” One estimate is that 99.5% of all nineteenth century novels printed, read and relished in their tens of thousands have vanished into what Franco Moretti called ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’.
Adeline Sergeant, from Notable Women Authors of the Day, by Helen C. Black (1893).
So, now we come to the case of Adeline Sergeant (1851-1904), named and shamed in the Daily Mail as one of the women culprits who wrote too many novels. She wrote 90 novels and stories in her lifetime, her output increasing with her years – publishing six a year 1901-1903 and eight in 1904. Even popular newspaper reviewers expressed fatigue at having to read yet another of her novels, one critic complaining: “Adeline Sergeant, like the poor, will always be with us.” She was so prolific that fourteen novels were published after she died, presumably of writing fatigue, in a boarding house on the south coast of England where so many English spinster novelists went to die. Her productivity meant that reviewers couldn’t keep up and only a fraction of her output received any critical notice. Many of her novels were sensational pot-boilers with romance or crime at their heart, often with a moral, heavily influenced by her religion – she moved from committed Methodist to committed Catholic through her life – and with titles like The Failure of Sibyl Fletcher and The Claim of Anthony Lockhart.
From the Daily Mail, 25 April 1901.
But even in cases like Sergeant’s, there is always the one that got away.
The Work of Oliver Byrd slipped out, unnoticed, in 1902, between The Master of Beechwood and Barbara’s Money. Very different from her other novels, it is remarkable for capturing the lives of early professional women living alone in London and negotiating social opprobrium for not accepting the chosen path laid for them of marriage and motherhood. While post-Second World War writers like Margaret Drabble and Muriel Spark are held to be the first to depict the lives of professional women, Sergeant and other forgotten women writers of the turn of the last century were doing this some fifty years earlier. The popular writer Dolf Wyllarde, for example, goes into great detail on lives in women-only boarding houses right down to the choice of wearing dark colours to disguise ink stains in her novel The Pathway of the Pioneer (1906).
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As Virginia Woolf acknowledged in Three Guineas, the only area of work where women were allowed to compete with men, because of its low pay and prospects, was the world of writing, the world Sergeant chose for herself. The Work of Oliver Byrd records the lives of professional women writers at the turn of the twentieth century and is to some extent, a feminist response to George Gissing’s famous critique of the writer’s life, New Grub Street (1891). Where the literary men of New Grub Street have to battle with populist taste, uncomprehending publishers and critics and lowbrow journalists, the women in Sergeant’s novel have to start by deconstructing their very selves. Women who want to be taken seriously as writers either have to marry a publisher against their better judgement or to conceal their feminity and write under a male pseudonym. The Work of Oliver Byrd follows two women who explore these routes to pursue their writing, the act of which is presented as a grand passion, a vocation that none who is called can resist, no matter the risk. And the risk, with a predatory, exploitative male editor, is great. While these women writers accept being under-paid, even plagiarised, , the worst risk is that of being found out to be a writer at all. For while women were indeed able to scratch out livings with their pen, the woman writer still attracted social opprobrium, hence the widespread use of male pseudonyms at this time. Oliver Byrd, it is no spoiler to reveal, is actually a woman called Avis Rignold, who goes to great lengths to disguise her indentity, using Post Office boxes, false addresses and avoiding in-person meetings.
There is a great detail of autobiography in the novel: while writing it Sergeant was living at the Chenies Street Ladies Chambers in Bloomsbury, a haven for single, intellectual women including the Quaker campaigner Emily Hobhouse, archaeologist Mary Brodrick and the historian Charlotte Fell-Smith. The most important room in the apartment of one of the professional women in the novel is described by Sergeant in loving detail:
It was lined on two sides with books – heavy, ponderous, learned-looking tomes, the bindings of which were darkly, yet richly coloured like leaves in autumn, lit with gleams of gold. A substantial writing-desk, with drawers and pigeon-holes innumerable, stood near the middle of the room, and before it stood a circular-backed, leather-seated armchair, which formed Eleanor’s usual seat when she had work to do.
Be still my beating heart. Perhaps, with the exception of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic poem Aurora Leigh, I haven’t read an earlier depiction of the woman writer at her desk, striving to call words down from the heavens to translate onto paper:
What should she write about tonight? What had she to say? Her head throbbed, her eyes burned: she wanted to lie down quietly and go to sleep. But the wants of the public had to be satisfied and for this she must take up her pen and weave together laboriously the light fancies, the vague dreams of her better hours…she threw on a dressing-gown, turned up the gas and sat down to write.
There is a feminist message to the novel: the women writers are presented as either serious campaigners for justice or as uniquely able to capture “knowledge of the human heart”, while the dastardly male editor only seeks to repress them or pass their work off as his own. Written at a time when few women writers – including Sergeant herself- were taken seriously, it is a passionate plea to women to be proud of their work and continue fighting the fight. I wonder if Oliver Byrd, written towards the end of Sergeant’s life is some kind of letter of regret, that she didn’t allow her talent or novels to breathe, instead chasing one after the other after the other in a phenomenal sense of urgency that prioritised quantity over literary immortality. For she certainly could write – her prose is as easy and pleasant to consume as a jar of warm honey – and her novels are bursting with sparkling and contemporarily urgent ideas on social justice, women’s equality and the plight of the poor in wealthy imperial London. Maybe, like Avis Rignold, she didn’t quite have the courage to say: “This is who I am, and no one else.”
The Work of Oliver Byrd, by Adeline Sergeant London: James Nisbet and Co. Ltd., 1902
Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.
It’s not every day that you might turn on a television without referring to any guides and get to see a dramatised documentary based on a mystical, blind and deaf poet. That programme, ‘The Different Drummer’, in Easter 1980, was my introduction to Jack Clemo. I was spiritually and literary smitten by his unusual story. He saw himself as a poet, novelist, autobiographer, short story writer and Christian witness. The latter description as important as all that preceded it.
As Clemo highlighted in his first autobiography, Confession of a Rebel, he was, from a conventional point of view, unschooled. I myself was a partially schooled poet and wrote from an explicitly Christian point-of-view. As far as I knew, no evangelical-yet-literary poet, like Clemo, existed in Ireland.
I wanted to connect with him, so I wrote, enclosing a small chunk of bog turf as something illustrative of Ireland, just as the Cornish clay was an important symbol to him. Soon I got a reply about the dilemmas and challenges of being both convinced Christian and poet:
… Very few poets since Hopkins have felt this tension between Christianity & art, & I can see why my books & the TV film of my early struggle must have made special appeal to you. When one looks at the general cynicism & triviality of most modern poets, it’s clear that only a faith in redemption, personal guidance & victory in Christ can free a poet from illusion & disillusion…
In time I went to visit Clemo in his small stone cottage, at Goonamarris Slip, Cornwall, where he had been born and lived. The gloomy landscape was all concrete grey. Hills of clay tips surrounded his cottage. Clay dust discoloured everything. However, he turned that stark and ugly landscape into many meaningful metaphors in his prose and poetry.
Jack Clemo in the 1980s.
You may wonder how I communicated with this blind and deaf poet and author. His wife instructed me how to communicate, spelling out sentences letter-by-letter on his rough skinned palm , each sentence requiring a telegram like full stop, for clarity.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but I did not expect such immediate and intimate contact! Clemo’s roughly-accented replies were difficult to decipher at first. After a few hours of my tactile tracing of words and his guttural verbal responses, I got exhausted. Then we continued many conversations on Christian faith, literary hopes and my upcoming marriage, using manual typewriters instead. We exchanged a hundred letters between 1980 and 1994. As far as I know, I became his sole protégé.
After a few false starts, Clemo’s unusual literary breakthrough came when his first novel, Wilding Graft, was published by Chatto and Windus in 1948. It sold an impressive 2,000 copies in the first week in UK. Not at all bad for a first publication.
The plot precis of Wilding Graft:
Set in the clay mining country of Cornwall during WW2, Wilding Graft turns on two characters, Garth Joslin and Griffiths. At the start of the book, Garth has just returned from his mother’s funeral. His relationship with his fiancée, a somewhat frigid and ill-matched girl named Edith, has been disintegrating as his mother’s mental illness has developed, and has finally ended – taking with it Garth’s good reputation in the area—after a flirtation with Irma Stribley, a London girl on a brief visit to relatives in Cornwall.
Garth’s mother, broken from nursing her husband through his final illness, had attempted suicide at the time of Edith’s marriage to another man, and had spent the last four years of her life in Bodmin mental asylum.
Garth, being (unconventionally) Christian concludes that there must be some divine plan working itself out through all that has happened, and determines to wait for it to become plain: to wait for Irma to be brought back to Cornwall.
As L. A. Thompson wrote in his thesis, Jack Clemo, 1916-55: The Rise and Fall of the ‘Clay Phoenix’:
Wilding Graft was written to show how God works and triumphs over atheism, paganism and worldliness… Clemo believed the novel was ‘given to [him] by God as a prophecy for [his] own life’ and as such it developed extra significance. He did not consider it to be a projection or fantasy, but his own future fictionalised: first healing and then marriage, with both just around the corner.
The original publisher’s blurb invited comparisons with Hardy and Powys, and very few reviewers failed to acknowledge the similarities. Expressions of Clemo’s Christian faith caused both praise from Professor of English Mary Ellen Chase and consternation from Maurice Lane Richardson.
Chase, writing in the New York Times, praises Clemo on a number of fronts, and has great sympathy for his Christian outlook. She stated that Wilding Graft an “should deserve attention both from those who like an excellent story and from those who are interested in the novel as a form of art…” She also goes on to say that: “the slow, exhaustive and yet tense treatment of tremendous human conflicts belong to the the 19th rather than 20th century novel….(giving) a certain stature seldom seen in distinctly modern fiction.”
However, writing in the Times Literary Supplement on 27 March 1948, Richardson praised Clemo for his depiction of the region and recognised his potential, but criticised him for including too much ‘mystical religiosity’ and not enough ‘humanism’. As Luke Thompson wrote in his thesis:
It was as though Clemo had been caught between the desires to write a popular potboiler, such as many of the working people used to enjoy, and a literary work of artistic value. As it is, the novel stands alone, a unique and powerful gesture, a page-turning romance with an undercurrent of divine interference and a surface of realism uncommon in writing about Cornwall….
I would be lying to say I enjoyed Wilding Graft’s regional and rather stilted plot. Rather, I read it as a unique accomplishment by a disadvantaged author who saw life through a Biblical lens of hope.
In 1981, at 65, Clemo received an honorary literary doctorate from the University of Exeter. Not bad for a blind and deaf autodidact author who went against the tide and who attended no college.
By the time of his death, in 1994, Clemo had published ten poetry collections of poems. He also had published a second novel, Shadowed Bed, as well as two autobiographies, Confession of a Rebel and Marriage of a Rebel. His third novel The Clay Kiln was published posthumously.
The University of Exeter, UK holds an archive of his manuscripts and papers.
Louis Hemmings worked for much of his life in various bookshops: second hand, religious and a mall bookshop. He also sold used theology books online from 1994 until 2014. His writing has principally been poetry but after a late entry into college, at the age of 62, discovered he could write credible fiction. His third and last novella, A Boarding School Boy’s Regrets will be self published September 2022. Louis collaborates with photographers and artists for his WordPress and Youtube channels. Louishemmings.com.
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.
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
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 first 36 pages of The Monkey Puzzle excited me more than any first novel I have read for years,” wrote the Daily Telegraph’s reviewer, Peter Green. “Here, I thought, is a real winner.”
So did I when I first started the book. It opens in a philosophy tutorial in Professor Marble’s rooms. It’s one of the hottest tickets at this London university, with students squeezed into various forms of seating, increasing in discomfort as they decrease in seniority. Marble has disposed of individuation and problem of identity and is launching into negation. “What is ‘failing to find?’ my cigarette-case?” he asks. “Is it finding my paper the books the ashtray plus the rider that these are all the things on the table? How do we verify ‘my cigarette-case is not on the table’?”
Professor Marble is, as several biographers have pointed out, a fictionalized version of the philosopher A. J. Ayer, under whom Veronica Hull (then Veronica Benton) studied at University College London in the mid-1950s. Though it was later claimed that The Monkey Puzzle satirized Ayer’s affairs with numerous female students, I suspect the people who say this never read the book. When, on several occasions, Hull’s protagonist Catherine says she’s in love with Professor Marble, it’s obvious this is intended with a healthy dose of self-mockery.
Catherine, sitting in one of the more uncomfortable chairs at the opening tutorial, is struggling with the problem of ‘failing to find.’ “She had failed to find anything.” In fact, she is struggling with pretty much everything in her life. She’s taken to attending Mass every morning “in order to give God a last chance to reveal himself.” He has not. Her hairdresser hacks her curls into an Iris Murdoch-like pageboy cut. Her step-mother disapproves of her decision to study philosophy, expects Catherine to transform herself into a completely conventional housewife, and offers no practical or emotional support.
When she fails a critical exam, she becomes so distraught she finds herself admitted to a mental asylum. She awakens to a ward full of unhappy faces that stare back at her “munching and uncomprehending like cows.” They and the nurses are drowning in a slough of despond and Catherine’s greatest concern, even more than how to get out, is how to avoid being strapped down for a dose of E.C.T..
She gradually realizes that there is, in fact, a code of conduct among the inmates,
… the most honourable one she had yet encountered…. United against a common double oppressor, their madness and the hospital authorities, they rose above trivialities and did everything they could to help each other when the nurses weren’t looking. Catherine noticed many instances — a hot-water bottle passed on among four patients, a surreptitious puff of a Woodbine in the lavatory, such possessions as they were allowed to share, and always encouragement which if eccentric was well meant.
Though she frustrates her psychiatrist by preferring to talk about metaphysics than masturbation, Catherine manages to get herself released before experiencing the worst horrors of the asylum, but it soon proves only the first loop of a scarifying rollercoaster ride.
She spends a few weeks at a dismal, unheated boarding school in the North. Friends get her a job as a live-in teacher for the children of a couple of hyper-sensitive intellectuals in Essex: “She had expected them to be dirty but friendly; she found them dirty but extremely unfriendly.” She spends a few weeks homeless in London, going from cafe to cafe, and bar to bar in Soho, “where poets, painters, intellectuals and bums gather in the community of drink.” Her diet of cadged drinks leaves her wound up tighter than a violin string and she falls ill and spends time in a hospital (not mental this time).
All she really wants is “time to look at people and understand.” Everyone around her takes this as a lack of sufficient career-mindedness. What she’s trying to do is to learn to “live with my dirty brain,” to avoid becoming one of “the people I was brought up with” — the people who “hid trouble under a bank balance.” In the U.S., Catherine would have been considered a member of the Beat generation. In the U.K., perhaps one of the Angry Young Men — if she’d been a man. As a woman, however, she’s a bit too early for 1960s’ feminism and too independent to conform to the stereotype of a housewife and mother. (She does end up as both wife and mother, but only according to her own model.)
Catherine provides Veronica Hull with a wonderful vehicle for sharp and satirical observations and The Monkey Puzzle is one of the funnier novels I’ve read in quite a while. Unfortunately, Hull undermines her own work by failing to give the book sufficient backbone. Peter Green of the Telegraph thought the book lost steam after the first chapter. I think it holds up for a good four-and-a-half. but then, instead of keeping a tight focus on Catherine, she wastes her time and ours on characters none of us cares about. Like John, the “interesting” working-class philosopher, who never seems to open his mouth without going on for at least 2-3 pages. Like Adrian, her husband, who might be gay or might be a petty criminal but is probably just the ambiguous blob he seems. In the end, Catherine is not sadder but wiser than she started, just duller.
Not everyone agreed with Peter Green (and me) about The Monkey Puzzle’s diminishing returns. Angela Milne felt that Hull wrote “with an excellent colloquial simplicity, telling dialogue and a biting wit. This novel (her first) may not seem to have much shape, but it reaches its final comment decisively.” Angus Wilson remarked that “I have seldom read scenes at once so comic and so terrifying….” The book met V.S. Naipaul’s demanding standards: “The book is full of good things,” he wrote, though he added that “the early chapters are the most impressive.”
The Monkey Puzzle was Hull’s only published foray into fiction. She wrote several works of history and worked as a translator of French and German. The novelist Robin Cook, who lived with her for several years in the early 1960s, said she “had a brain like a bandsaw” and described himself as “one of her few survivors.” One wonders what might have come from Hull’s having a more supportive editor or a less sexist philosophy tutor.
The Monkey Puzzle, by Veronica Hull London: Barrie, 1958
Robert Harling? Steel Magnolias and The First Wives Club? American playwright, actor and film producer?
No – not that one.
This one: Robert Harling, British author of eighteen titles (fiction and non-fiction) and variously a bookseller, printer, Royal Navy Reserve officer, advertising executive, typographer, veteran magazine editor and cloak-and-dagger commando. And, just possibly, one of the many candidates whose qualities came together to form James Bond in the mind of Ian Fleming. (He certainly has a good claim to this, since he and Fleming were friends of long-standing.)
Harling’s name has fallen out of public recognition. He would have been — even at his peak — a mid-list author, although sufficiently strong-selling that one publisher stuck with him throughout his writing career (and he with them, of course): all of his novels were published originally by Chatto & Windus.
Among other things, Harling had been a writer and typographer and enthusiastic amateur sailor before joining the Royal Navy Reserve at the outbreak of the Second World War. After the war, between 1951 and 1979, he wrote seven very good novels mostly dealing with journalism or having backgrounds based in the newspaper world. They were not quite thrillers, not quite literary fiction but certainly not pulp. Grahame Greene would probably have called them ‘entertainments”.
He also wrote eleven other non-fiction works, including two published before the war, on subjects as diverse as: the typography of Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden (both books being regarded as authoritative still); typographic styles; London by-ways; and famous homes and gardens.
His ability to present information cogently, his friendship and not least his wartime exploits – first in charge of a whaler off the beaches of Dunkirk, then as navigating officer on corvettes assigned to convoy duties in the Western Approaches and the Mediterranean – culminated in him being recruited by Ian Fleming to join 30 Independent Assault Unit, which undertook all sorts of specialist tasks towards the end of the war, with minimal official sanction and maximum dash and daring. He and Fleming had met at a book launch party just before the war.
After the war, Harling became a design adviser to newspapers (including The Times where he held a long-standing consultancy) and then joined Homes and Garden magazine, where he stayed as editor for twenty–eight years, nurturing a band of young journalists into distinguished authorities on cooking, interior design and gardening.
He was also a fabulist.
It was only on his death in 2008 at the age of 98 that it became apparent that much of the story of his early life had been a fiction he’d invented.
Far from being an only child orphaned young and brought up by an aunt and uncle in Brighton (the story he had told even his children), he and his brother had been brought up in Islington. His father was a taxi driver and he had married (and divorced) early. Many of his family relationships he Harling concealed, for unknown, and unknowable, reasons.
It does appear that he ran a bookshop in Holborn briefly, but whether as proprietor or manager is unclear. He spent some time at the Daily Mail but then left to work as a printer in two specialist printing houses. By the beginning of the war, he had begun to develop a reputation as a minor authority on typefaces as editor of the journal Typography. He developed at least three new typefaces which have endured and on his death was described in the Times obituary as ‘the most innovative and distinguished typographer of the last century’. Some claim!
Aside from his typographical expertise, Harling is worth remembering for a number of his books. The Amateur Sailor and The Steep Atlantick Stream, the two he wrote about his time at sea, are the equal and possible superiors of The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat, one of the most famous books about the Royal Navy in the Second World War. The Cruel Sea is not presented as anything but fiction and drew heavily on Monsarrat’s conversations with fellow officers in addition to his own experiences as an officer in corvettes and frigates in the Battle of the North Atlantic. One of the turning points in the novel, for example, comes when the ship Compass Rose is torpedoed. None of Monsarrat’s ships was torpedoed, and this stunning feat of plot and descriptive writing is all derived from second-hand information, possibly from someone involved in the sinking of HMS Firedrake in 1942.
The Cruel Sea, both the 1951 book and the 1953 film, was responsible for weaving into British boyhoods the myths and legends of the Second World War. It is without doubt, a great piece of writing that conveys the terror, stress and exhaustion of fighting a long, dogged war with the both the sea and human foes as the perpetual enemy. Harling’s books do the same, if perhaps less showily. They are less obviously fiction — although given his propensity to invent it cannot be held that they are entirely autobiographical. They are probably heavily embellished fact. They also avoid the serious flaw of Monsarrat’s book — a sub-plot of love interest in the second half of the book which grates oddly with the intensity of the main story and, far from acting as counter-point, distracts from the overall impact of the book.
The other candidates for burnishing his neglected memory are his novels based in Fleet Street – the ‘old’ Fleet street of hot metal printing and larger than life reporters and editors, particularly The Paper Palace and The Hollow Sunday.
The Paper Palace, written in 1951, was Harling’s first ‘civilian’ novel and his first venture into obvious fiction. The story concerns a columnist tasked by his editor, much against his objections, to uncover the reasons behind an obituary about a Communist written by a very capitalist newspaper proprietor – in fact their newspaper proprietor. This bare plot is the means of erecting a very satisfactory scaffolding about a power struggle between the editor and the proprietor, with the columnist being the instrument by which the duel is (partially) resolved. It is an exemplary ‘Fleet Street’ novel with the relationships between the two antagonists superbly described through the experiences of the columnist.
His second novel, The Dark Saviour (1952) continues the Fleet Street theme with a New York correspondent (who may or may not be the same man) being told by his London office to investigate an evangelistic, mystical revolutionary whose emotional appeal to the population is threatening the stability of a Caribbean island — run mostly for an elite. There are multiple betrayals between the characters and, like the correspondent, the reader is never quite sure whom to trust.
The Enormous Shadow (1955) is more obviously towards the thriller end of the spectrum; the denouement is much more ‘actionist’ than the previous two novels he had written to that date. The main protagonist is again a newspaper columnist (this time a recalled Washington correspondent) who is asked to pursue the story of the disappearance of a conscience-stricken atomic scientist. The scandal of the defections of Burgess and Maclean in 1951 were still in the front of the public memory and the novel draws on a similar context. As with the previous novel, there is a love-interest element, well-handled, which is central to the story.
The background to The Endless Colonnade (1958) departs from the world of journalism, having as its protagonist a holidaying physician taking his first holiday after the death of his wife. Meeting an attractive Italian woman who flirts with him turns into an affair. She entrusts him with a secret that may endanger both of them; needless to say, the female character is a foundation for the entirety of the story. The format of the novel is also different from the previous three being much more like a journal written by the protagonist than a third person omniscient narrator. Without spoiling the story, the conclusion is melancholy and much like an ending of a Greene novel.
The Hollow Sunday (1967) returns very successfully to Fleet Street and is occasionally cited (by journalists) as being one of the best of the genre, up there with Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop and Michael Frayn’s Toward the End of the Morning. The plot concerns the introduction of new technology into the printing of newspapers and how that will up-end the economics of the business. It is another ‘power-struggle’ story with politics and adultery thrown in for good measure. The characters are both well-drawn and likeable/dislikeable as required.
The Athenian Widow (1974) continues the investigative reporter theme — not a door-stepping tabloid man but a more genteel and refined exponent of the subtly pointed question and thorough, but discreet, research. It deals with issues of truth and journalistic responsibility. Somewhat flatter than the other Fleet Street books he wrote, it is slower in both development and outcome but no less gripping on its own terms.
Finally, in 1979, came The Summer Portrait, his last novel. Harling departed radically from previous themes and chose as the main character a painter on the verge of fame who paints the portraits of two very different people as summer commissions. Through them he has love affairs, all the while caught on the dilemma of whether to commit himself to one lover, or not. It is a very satisfying read, although much slower perhaps in some ways than anything else he wrote but, again, the conclusion is almost Greene-like.
In all his books, Harling’s writing is fluid, well-paced and engaging. He is a craftsman: he does not write bad sentences; the conversations and dialogue are well-enough handled — even at the distance of thirty, forty or fifty years — to be realistic and not stilted; though, admittedly, some of the words used to describe characters might now be regarded as unusable and the concepts about the dynamics of relationships (particularly between men and women) are very much of their time.
Harling was a psychological writer rather than one who relied on twists in the plot to drive books forward. What marks out his books is the psychological depth to the descriptions of his characters — going deeper into motivations and thoughts than simply skating along on plot and action. But the analysis is not so deep or introverted to be a drag on the plot and always relevant to the decisions that the characters take. . They are not flat cut-outs responding to the plot but rather the plot is pushed on by the psychological foibles, strengths and weaknesses – even the moral dilemmas — of the characters.
Harling was able to write convincingly about the effects of the demons which drove others to do things that they were often not proud of or had to defend against their own consciences and others’ criticisms. He probably conveyed much of himself through his novels in writing about the way his characters behaved.
Engagingly, Harling writes very well about women (at least from a male reader’s perspective). Although they conform to a certain type throughout his novels they are substantial and rounded characters. Their contributions to the plot are never peripheral and most often are central. This might be seen as unusual given the time in which he is writing. Harling’s female characters might not be as forceful as those of some modern authors but they are far more than the decorative ciphers of say, his great friend Fleming or any of the other fifties/sixties thriller writers like Maclean or even Innes..
None of his books were made into films (although The Paper Palace and The Enormous Shadow were both adapted into tv plays, one with Denholm Elliott in the lead role) – which may explain to some extent their lack of longevity in the public’s interest. Given the psychological complexity of Harling’s male central characters, it is an interesting parlour game to speculate who might have played them if the films had been made: Cary Grant is an obvious candidate for the suave, worldly columnist of, say, The Paper Palace. But generally he is a little too smooth for anything else. James Mason is sufficiently hard-edged for at least three of the stories perhaps but doesn’t have the crucial self-doubt that Harling’s central characters often display. Connery might have pulled it off more often than not – especially in The Enormous Shadow and The Athenian Widow. The tough one to cast would have been The Hollow Sunday. All of the male central characters are self-doubters to some extent, analytical of their own motives and very much the dissectors of the behaviour of others, which is why the books are such good reads.
Harling was not universally popular as a colleague. Not particularly gregarious, he shunned his own (secretly-prepared) retirement party from The Times with a rude remark about such affairs being nauseating. He admitted that some of the sparkle went out of his life when Fleming died. But he also found fierce devotees in the staff of House and Garden, some of whom – the cookery writer Elizabeth David for example – became famous in their own right after being taken on by the magazine.
Perhaps his attempts to conceal his background – successful until after his death – fostered his reluctance to talk much about himself, lest he betray his story. The last book he wrote – Ian Fleming: A Personal Memoir — was completed by his daughter and published posthumously. The title was probably chosen to capitalise on the cult of Bond, since it is mostly about Harling rather than Fleming (although it does reveal something of Fleming’s sexual proclivities in passing).
The book is something of an essay at autobiography, dealing extensively with Harling’s exploits in 30 Assault Unit. But even in this he could not bring himself to tell the complete truth about his past. Perhaps, having spun the story that long (he died at the age of 98), it had become more real than the truth – so “print the legend”.
Keeping people at arms length is one way of concealing one’s own history. And private people often listen well and become the most acute evaluators of others foibles, since they are testing themselves against what they see in others and vice versa. Writing then becomes a way of explaining personalities.
But few people who do those things can write as well as Harling did.
Robert Harling 27 March 1910 – 1 July 2008
As an ex-journalist and writer of academic texts, Stephen Bloomfield is baffled why so many excellent books become neglected.
Photo of the cover of Laugh a Defiance courtesy of Sarra Manning.
I recently engaged in a brief and pointless debate on Twitter with an impassioned adherent of the school of Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” who argued that it was not only unnecessary to know anything about the person who wrote a book but limiting, the intellectual equivalent of showing up to compete in the Tour de France with a set of training wheels.
To read Laugh a Defiance, Mary Richardson’s memoir of her experiences in the Suffragette movement without some biographical context, however, would set you up to reach some seriously mistaken conclusions. On the surface, it’s terrific book — immediate yet self-reflective, moving but frequently quite funny. You would wonder why on Earth it’s been out of print since 1953.
Mary Richardson was a Canadian woman who settled in England and was working as a reporter for the Toronto Globe and other Canadian newspapers when, one day in early 1913, she encountered a young man distributing Suffragette pamphlets. This led to a meeting with Christabel Pankhurst, and she was soon set to work in the campaign aimed at raising public awareness through acts of property destruction. On her first mission, she threw rocks through windows of the Home Office before she was chased away by policemen. She was able to get away in part due to their being encumbered by heavy capes, which, she observed, “must surely have been designed before any idea of quick-footed, quick-firing felons like Suffragettes had disturbed the official mind.”
Richardson was an ideal foot soldier for the cause. “I was better able to undertake the more difficult tasks,” she wrote, “in that I had no family to worry about me and no one I needed to worry over. In the fullest sense I was free to do what was asked.” Soon after stoning Whitehall, she was sent to the Derby on the day that King Edward II and Queen Alexandra would be in attendance. There, as she stood holding a copy of The Suffragette in her hand, she watched in horror as one of her fellow militants, Emily Davison, calmly slipped under the rail, stepped into the racecourse in front of the oncoming horses and riders, and was knocked down and fatally injured. The hostility of the mob towards Davison, both at the track and at her funeral, only hardened Richardson’s resolve.
Richardson joined the Suffragettes when they had made a deliberate shift in tactics, one aimed at raising awareness of the movement through acts of disruption and, in particular, the destruction of property. This was considered an appropriate response to a prevailing order in which “values were stressed from the financial point of view and not the human.” She witnessed this attitude in its most glaring self-contradiction when she and several others tried to interrupt an Anglican church service to offer a prayer for Emmeline Pankhurst, then gravely ill in Holloway Prison. Their actions, she wrote, “had the effect of so changing the faces of Christians that they resembled gargoyles on their own medieval churches.”
Some of the incidents recalled in Laugh a Defiance make you want to cheer for their ingeuity. Marion Wallace-Dunlop, raised in a stern Scottish family and reluctant to become involved in violence, arranged for a male friend to sneak her into the House of Commons disguised as an older woman. Once there, she started marking up the walls of the lobby with an inked rubber stamp reading, “No taxation without representation.” When MPs finally noticed what she was doing, much of one wall was defaced and it took hours for cleaners to remove the graffiti. Wallace-Dunlop later introduced the hunger strike as a non-violent response to the abusive treatment the Suffragettes received in prison.
Few Suffragettes saw the inside of a prison as often as Mary Richardson. Between July 1913 and June 1914, she was arrested nine times, and she was one of the first to be subjected to forced feeding, the initial and barbaric response to the Suffragette’s hunger strikes. Heading off on one mission, she handed a bundle of her things to a housemate and told her, “If I’m not back for breakfast tomorrow morning, send this parcel to His Majesty’s prison at Holloway for me.” After the Cat and Mouse Act was passed, prisoners such as Richardson who staged hunger strikes were merely discharged when they fell ill and weak and then imprisoned again once they’d recovered, but that didn’t stop prisoner authorities from trying get the upper hand. On one visit to Holloway, the warders sent in a woman trained in ju jitsu to subdue her.
Article on Mary Richardson’s slashing of the Rokeby Venus, from The Daily Mail.
Richardson’s best known act of destruction was her slashing of Velasquez’s painting The Toilet of Venus, better known as the Rokeby Venus, in the National Gallery in March 1914. For Richardson, the Venus and its prominent display — then one of the most expensive works of art in the gallery — symbolized much that she despised in the British establishment, including its public display of the nude female form. So, acting alone, she decided to damage or destroy the painting as an act of protest.
She bought what she refers to as an axe — but in photos looks more like a cleaver — at an ironmongers in Theobalds Road, then walked to the National Gallery. She slipped the cleaver up her sleeve and entered. The Venus painting was being guarded by two police detectives and, at first, there was enough of a crowd that it was impractical for her to approach the painting. So, she wandered for a while, then returned and started to sketch in a drawing pad. When one of the detectives left the room, the other took out a newspaper and she saw her opportunity:
I dashed up the the painting. My first blow with the axe merely broke the protective glass. But, of course, it did more than that, for the detective rose with his newspaper still in his hand and walked round the red plush seat, staring up at the skylight which was being repaired.
Though the detective and the nearest attendant were caught off guard, two visitors were not:
Two Baedeker guide books, truly aimed by German tourists, came cracking against the back of my neck. By this time, too, the detective, having decided that the breaking glass had no connectio with the skylight, sprang on me and dragged the axe from my hand. As if out of the very walls angry people seemed to appear round me. I was dragged this way and that; but as on other occasions, the fury of the crowd helped me. In the ensuing commotion we were all mied together in a tight bunch. No one knew who should or should not be attacked. More than one innocent woman must have received a blow meant for me.
Amazingly, this was not her last blow for the Suffragettes. Once in prison, she again went on a hunger strike and she again was released after falling ill. While out, however, she took on another job that was almost as spectacular, if not as public. She and another young woman, a new recruit, were sent to torch a large but abandoned country house on an estate outside London. Finding the grounds surrounded by a dense hedge, the recruit balked. Richardson simply wrapped her scarf around her head and went crashing through it.
She made her way to the house, dowsed the walls and floor with kerosene, and climbed outside to set light to the fuse. As soon as the flame caught, she ran back to where she’d broken through the hedge. Expecting the police to show up at any moment, she began crawling on hands and knees across the field when, “Suddenly, I felt a moist gust of warm air in my face and froze with horror.” In the darkness, she had smacked into the side of a cow.
Though she was quickly apprehended and charged, this would be her last mission. After war was declared in early August 1914, Emmeline Pankhurst called the Suffragette’s campaign to a halt and urged the women to support the war effort.
In popular accounts, the actions of the Suffragettes have taken on a certain rosiness of hue. No doubt their acts of protest were heroic and dramatic and their punishment by police and jailers disproportionate to their crimes. But some historians question the efficacy of their tactics. Brian Harrison and Martin Pugh have suggested that non-militancy, rather than militancy, and particularly violent militancy, ultimately played a bigger role in winning the vote for women.
In a detailed survey of Suffragette acts of destruction, C. J. Bearman raises the question: Did the WSPU’s campaign of distruption actually work? Based on his analysis, “The only returnable answer is that it did not. The main reasons for the militancy’s failure were that it did little economic damage and that it visibly lacked mass support….” The acts of arson, in particular, made not even a marginal difference in the number of arsons that occurred in an ordinary year — in fact, fire damage in the greater London area decreased in 1913, the year when WPSU arsonists were most active.
And ironically, Richardson herself recounts a most un-violent incident that may have had a greater impact that all her other missions. Once, she camped out on the doorstep of the Bishop of London to persuade him not to deliver a speech against suffrage he was scheduled to deliver in the House of Lords. After being put off all day, she was finally invited by the bishop’s secretary to return the following morning at 11. Once seated with the Bishop, though, her mind went blank.
I must earlier had rehearesed a dozen speeches. But I could remember nothing of these. It was as if I were compelled by something outside me to speak as I did. I could not remember afterwards what I did say. When I was at the end of my arguments, I remember, I paused and waited for the Bishop’s reaction.
“Before we discuss this any further, you must take refreshment,” he told her. He pushed a button and a servant came in with coffee and pink-iced cakes. The Bishop produced the text of his speech and said, calmly, “In view of what you have told me, I shall not make the speech I have written…. I think you have persuaded me.” And that was that.
And, indeed, based on Richardson’s account, the Suffragettes ultimately succeeded through a similarly peaceful conservation. After hearing that the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Enfranchisement Bill, which greatly expanded suffrage among men, made no mention of “Votes for Women,” Emmeline Pankhurst called upon Prime Minister Lloyd George. She warned him that her followers would resume militant action if women’s suffrage was not also addressed. Lloyd George, who supported the cause, expressed dismay, and afer consulting with his Cbinet, ensured that language was added to give the vote to women over the age of thirty.
As a historian, Brian Harrison has little patience for Richardson, who he describes as coming “as near as anyone to the ideal” of the self-sacrificing follower he claims that the Pankhursts sought to inspire. Likewise, Bearman dismisses Laugh a Defiance as “the unreliable memoirs of a self-dramatizing woman.” On this point, at least, their views don’t differ greatly from those express by the editors of the Evening Standard, who wrote after the slashing of the Rokeby Venus that “her lack of a sense of proportion pass the frontier between eccentricity and mental unsoundness.”
But we must bear in mind that historians, unlike some literary critics, do take context into consideration. And if we do the same, Laugh a Defiance no longer seems simply an entertaining piece of writing. Diane Atkinson, a historian overall favorable to the Suffragette cause, notes that after her time with the cause, Richardson “published several books during the war, … owned properties and was a somewhat unsuccessful landlady.” She also became one of a wave of women who sought public office after suffrage was approved.
Mary Richardson speaking for the British Union of Fascists in 1934.
Atkinson also notes, however, that in the early 1930s, Richardson joined the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley and set up the Women’s Section for the party. Between 1932 and 1934, she spoke frequently in support of Fascist policies and candidates. Although she eventually grew disillusioned and rarely became involved in political causes after that, while she was as enthusiastic in her support of the Blackshirts as she had been of the Suffragettes. She illustrates a point made by Eric Hoffer in his classic study of extremist movements, The True Believer: “The danger of the fanatic … is that he cannot settle down…. The taste for strong feeling drives him on to search for mysteries yet to be revealed and secret doors yet to be opened. He keeps groping for extremes.”
I learned about Laugh a Defiance after Andy Miller mentioned it in a recent tweet. As Andy noted in speaking of the book on the Backlisted podcast, anyone thinking of reissuing it would need to ensure that appropriate historical and biographical context was provided. Without it, readers might fail to see the narrow but crucial line that divides Mary Richardson’s actions from ones with far more sinister conseqeuences.
The book is extremely rare — I was unable to find any copies available for sale — but there are over eighty copies available in libraries worldwide, so it wasn’t too hard to borrow one via Inter Library Loan. Here is the link to the WorldCat.org listing: Laugh a Defiance
Laugh a Defiance, by Mary Richardson London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953
Sense and Sensuality is a novel caught somewhere between Queen Victoria and Dr. Kinsey. Richard and Laura, a young upper-middle class couple living in London in the late 1920s consider themselves sophisticates in taste and morality. Richard, a publisher, recognizes the growing appeal of modernism and Laura knows this means one should appreciate the work of Gertrude Stein, though she can’t find the patience to read it.
Had they existed in real life, Richard and Laura would undoubtedly have been a part of the Bright Young Things, and they will remind some readers a good deal of Tony and Brenda Last of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, though that novel came five years later. They are out almost every night at parties or clubs while a servant takes care of the tiresome details of raising their child. Laura in particular adores the company of the ever-changing cast of handsome young men. “When she was jolly and happy, she enjoyed kissing strange young men. And it never occurred to her to have a bad conscience about it.”
Laura enjoys playing the coquette, though at times she has a hard time knowing “how much was pretence and how much was true.” Richard, on the other hand, is a bit suspicious of many new ideas like psychoanalysis (“It’s too easy, somehow”). Yet they both feel themselves almost obliged by modern mores to experiment. One of Richard’s friends tells him that “One ought to have three women. One for a companion. One to feel romantic about. And one to make love to.” “It sounded silly,” he thinks, “but as a matter of fact it also contained a good deal of truth.”
In reality, what appeals to him is less a modern notion of an open marriage than the good old-fashioned double standard of chauvinism. So, when he begins an affair with April, a pretty younger woman a bit in awe of his worldliness, he considers it “a bit off” when Laura objects. And so she, in response, begins an affair with the shallow but funny Julian.
But neither is prepared to accept infidelity as just another part of modern life, like air travel or jazz. Julian is a better dancer, a better lover, than Richard, but somehow Laura longs for her husband’s solidity. Richard enjoys playing with April but would never for a moment think of ending his marriage to be with her. Laura struggles to make sense of the situation: “The Victorians thought they ought not to commit adultery, and did! We think we ought not to be jealous and are!” “Am I just being a suburban wife?” she wonders.
Critical acclaim for Sense and Sensuality.
To the give-and-take drama between Richard and Laura, Salt adds an updated version of the Greek chorus in the form of letters from Daisy, their maid, to her friend Nellie:
The drawing-room here has got pictures of naked women. I suppose it all depends on what one likes. I was never one to like that sort of thing. It’s not that I’m what you’d call narrow-minded, but I’ve got my feelings like anyone else and I never did like dirt. I believe Mrs. L. would run about the house without a stitch on. She’s not sensitive like I am.
Nellie isn’t terribly upset at Laura’s carrying on an affair (“with some women, one man is never enough”), but she doesn’t think much of her choice in lovers (“He’s got something sly in his face”).
How to resolve this situation? Around the time that Sense and Sensuality was published, Evelyn Waugh and his first wife dealt with it the “modern” way: they divorced. Salt, however, reached back to a tried-and-true denouement from the Victorian era: tuberculosis and tragic death. And for all its cleverness, Sense and Sensuality is ultimately undermined by Salt’s apparent preference for the mores of the previous century. The first time Laura coughs, you know where this story is headed.
Sarah Salt was the pseudonym that Coralie Von Werner Hobson adopted in the late 1920s for some reason. She’d already published several somewhat well-received novels under her own name, beginning with The Revolt of Youth in 1919. She’d previously used it as a stage name when she’d spent a season as part of a touring theatrical company — an experience she twice put to fictional use: once with Revolt and the second time with Joy is My Name (1929) (published as Sarah Salt). She published several more books as Salt, ending with Murder for Love in 1937. She died in 1946 at the age of 55.
Sense and Sensuality, by Sarah Salt (pseudonym of Coralie Hobson) London: Victor Gollancz, 1929 New York: Payson & Clarke, 1929
This is a guest post by the novelist and childrens’ book author Eric Brown
‘The summer of nineteen-thirty-nine was a thoroughly rotten one.’ So opens Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting, a chapter of autobiography by the Hungarian writer Adam Martin de Hegedus, published in 1944.
De Hegedus first came to England in 1927, staying five months to study reference books at the British Museum Library on International Law and to learn English in order to enter the Hungarian diplomatic service. At the end of that time, however, he decided to return to Hungary only to pass his final law examination: then, as he writes in Vanman, to abandon his plans to become a diplomat and ‘return to England and settle there for good and become an English writer.’ He continues: ‘It was England’s mental climate that had proved so all absorbing, so conquering, all powerful, compelling, that it made me feel at home at once…’
Throughout the Thirties he was based in London, working as the London correspondent for several Hungarian newspapers as well as placing articles with British periodicals as varied as Esquire, The Observer, Evening Standard and the London Mercury. 1937 saw the publication of his first book, Hungarian Background, and he completed his debut novel, Rehearsal Under the Moon, in 1940. Later that year, when Hungary allied itself with Germany, Britain broke off diplomatic relations with his homeland and de Hegedus was no longer able to send his daily cables to Budapest. He had lost his main source of income and decided ‘the best thing I could do was to volunteer for one of the Forces.’ In October 1941 he was sent to train as a gunner near Wakefield in West Yorkshire.
Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting is his record of the following year, his training in Yorkshire and Nottingham and his posting to Kent to await assignment overseas. In the memoir, de Hegedus portrays himself as an outsider, forever looking in. There were the obvious facts that he was a Hungarian in Britain – despite having taken British nationality in the Thirties – and a writer, about which he commented: ‘I am to some extent inhuman and cold. Looking for copy all the time […] And the writer is lonely. The job has its gratifications, but it has dreadful drawbacks. The writer, you see, is not allowed to live.’ But what de Hegedus could not confess in his otherwise starkly honest account was that he was even more of an outsider because he was homosexual.
In hindsight, knowing what we do about de Hegedus, it’s not difficult to read between the lines and decode the sometimes buried messages in the text. In the chapter entitled ‘The Girl From Newcastle’, he describes his meeting and subsequent one night stand with a woman in the WAF: she ‘had a workmanlike handsomeness’ and ‘a nice deep voice’ and ‘there was something brave, almost heroic and masculine in [her] spirit’. He’s at home in the all-male environs of barrack life and describes the camaraderie (and the physical attributes) of his fellow soldiers.
On one occasion he is more overt in his sympathies and attraction. In Nottingham he meets Bombardier Brown, a troubled young man who says of himself: ‘I know that I am different. I have known it ever since I was a kid and I made up my mind that I would fight against it even if it’s impossible.’ In a moving passage, de Hegedus recounts an intimate meeting with Brown in which the young man unburdens himself. ‘… I am putting up a terrific fight. I may be beaten in the end, but I’m trying not to give in.’
De Hegedus questions Brown about his ambitions and learns that the Bombardier was turned down by the RAF because of his eyesight.
‘I wanted so much to become a pilot and I would have made a good pilot too.’
‘Yes. And it would have made you happier,’ de Hegedus assures him. ‘All that preoccupation with danger and adventure. You wouldn’t have found time to think of your personal problems…’
‘And it would have been so easy to end my life. Just shot down and finished […] Sometimes I really wish I was dead.’
Weeks later, de Hegedus is stunned to learn of Brown’s death in a motorcycle accident outside Nottingham. He was speeding, ran into a lorry, and died instantly – the inference being that the young man took his own life.
De Hegedus’s grief is followed by remorse. ‘Oh, how bloody cold-blooded I sounded […] when I asked him question after question. And what a thrill I had when he answered, full, honest, clean-breasted. Well, of course, he was confessing…’
It’s tempting to wonder to what degree his grief was responsible for his subsequent nervous breakdown, compounded by what happened next.
During his time as a gunner, de Hegedus applied for a commission and was refused; later he requested a transfer to the Army Education Corps as a lecturer, a role for which he was eminently suited. He was a Doctor of Law, could speak four languages, and had experience lecturing – quite apart from the fact that he was phenomenally well-read and had a wide knowledge of the arts. After an interview with the Selection Board, however, his application was rejected for reasons he was unable to fathom.
Following a bout of insomnia and depression, de Hegedus suffered a nervous breakdown and was referred to a military hospital in Leeds. After a period of recuperation, he was discharged from the Army in 1942. His later attempts to find work to aid the war effort were stonewalled for the same reason he was refused a commission and turned down as an Army lecturer: as his parents were enemy nationals, de Hegedus was considered a security risk.
The autobiography closes with de Hegedus working as a van driver, delivering film posters to cinemas in London and the suburbs. It was menial work for a man of his ability, but it did have the advantage of allowing him time to write.
At one point in Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting, while awaiting his posting overseas, de Hegedus contemplates the possibility of being killed in action: ‘It was, of course, unpleasant that from the literary point of view I had not had my season. I wanted to write at least five books, the kind of books I always wanted to write, messages in a bottle dropped into the sea, waiting for someone, like me, to pick up and read.’
Cover of an English edition of The Heart in Exile by Rodney Garland (Adam de Hegedus).
Adam de Hegedus succeeded in his ambition to become ‘an English writer’. He wrote ten books: six works of non-fiction, two novels under his own name, and two1 under the pseudonym of Rodney Garland. The searingly honest and heartbreaking best-seller The Heart in Exile>2, 1953, as by Garland, was the very first work of fiction to tackle the theme of male homosexuality in 1950s Britain. De Hegedus died of poisoning, a suspected suicide, in October 1955.
Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting is not only a wonderfully well written and compelling account of the times – his evocation of army life is on par with anything by Julian MacLaren-Ross – but an insight into the complex personality of the man himself and a neglected memoir that deserves a wider audience.
Notes 1 Three later novels attributed to ‘Rodney Garland’, published after Adam de Hegedus’s death in 1955, were the work of fellow Hungarian novelist Peter de Polnay: World Without Dreams (1961); Hell and High Water (1962); and The Sorcerer’s Broth (1966).
Eric Brown has published over seventy books. His latest is Murder Most Vile, and forthcoming is the SF novel Wormhole, written with Keith Brooke. He lives near Dunbar in Scotland, and his website is at: ericbrown.co.uk
Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting by Adam de Hegedus London: Staples Press Ltd., 1946
“I got the idea from a detective novel. I read a lot of detective novels…”
The 1970s were full of the 1940s. In fashion, Halstead and Yves St Laurent brought out lines based on the 40s’ look. In music, Bette Midler and The Manhattan Transfer were reviving Glenn Miller and the Andrew Sisters, while in Britain, Roxy Music sang 2HB, an ode to Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. But it was in cinema that the 1940s – and noir in particular – came back with a vengeance, like a spurned lover with a gun in her hand: Play it Again Sam (1972), The Long Goodbye (1973), Chinatown (1974), all updated noir tropes to suit the times. Perhaps it was all the old movies being rerun on US TV, maybe the scepticism of the archetypal 40s PI suited the post-idealism of the 1970s, or perhaps people just liked the clothes, but there it was: the 70s were full of the 40s.
Eddie Ginley’s ad.
Ahead of the game were two British movies: 1972’s hard-bitten classic Get Carter (based on Ted Lewis’ novel Jack’s Return Home) and the much more low-key Gumshoe, from 1971. Written by Neville Smith and directed by Stephen Frears, Gumshoe is a fantastic movie, set in contemporary Liverpool, starring Albert Finney as Eddie Ginley, a dreamer and would-be stand-up comedian who puts a joke ad in the paper on his birthday (see above) and gets more than he bargained for. With superb performances from Finney, Billie Whitelaw, Frank Finlay and a host of local actors, including the great Bill Dean, Gumshoe is a perfect marriage of old and new, understated Liverpool wit and noir attitudes (and there’s an astonishingly good pastiche soundtrack by Andrew Lloyd Webber).
But it’s the script that makes it. Neville Smith was to become a popular actor in the 1970s – best known for playing the lead in Alan Bennett’s Me, I’m Afraid Of Virginia Woolf (Trevor, a surrogate for Bennett himself), as well as his work with Ken Loach and others. Smith also wrote The Golden Vision, a Loach-directed television play about a group of Everton supporters and Long Distance Information, another TV play about a Elvis fan coming to terms with changes in his life on the night the King dies.
Smith’s central character Eddie is an Elvis fan too, his nostalgia for the past all mixed up, but what he mostly resembles, of course, is a Raymond Chandler hero. But Gumshoe is more than a pastiche of noir thrillers: it contains all the elements – a dame, a fat man, a murder, a betrayal, and plenty of mean streets – but adds to them a sense of the now. Eddie Ginley is not Philip Marlowe. He’s a socialist, a Labour voter. He signs on (“Down at the dole things move slowly. Down at the dole things always move slowly.”) He lives in a world not of night clubs, cabarets and torch singers, but working men’s clubs where the bingo takes precedence over the acts. (And there are odd little Beatles references throughout: Ginley lives in Gambier Terrace, as John Lennon once did, and has a friend called Mal Evans, the same name as the Beatles’ roadie).
Stephen Frears met Neville Smith in 1968 and, recognising his talent, asked him to write a thriller. As a writer, Frears said, Smith had “the grace of Jackie Milburn* and the wit of SJ Perelman**” – but he also saw that in Gumshoe, “within the framework of a pastiche of a film noir there lurked a human story.” Frears wrote in the introduction to the 1998 reissued paperback, “I had thought he was writing a thriller. In fact, he was constructing a self-portrait; a record of what it was like to have been a teenager in the English provinces in the Fifties.” Frears is right. Eddie Ginley is no hard man, no Spillane anti-hero packing heat. He’s a boy, with the sense of right and wrong of a boy. He wears the costume of a cynic – the trenchcoat, the whisky, even the gun – but he’s an innocent and, like all innocents (like all great movie private eyes), he’s going to get hurt.
Lobby card for the film Gumshoe.
The movie was made, released and went on to become, quite rightly, an acknowledged classic of British cinema. And before it came out, Neville Smith was asked to write a novelisation. Experienced screenwriter or not, he never written a book before. “I dithered and ended up with a week to the deadline,” he recalled later, and – borrowing a room at Frears’ house – dictated the book, as he had done the film, this time to a typist from a firm called Graduate Girls.
Perhaps it’s these unusual circumstances – dictating a novel in a few days from a script – that give Gumshoe the novel its voice. Laconic, but fast-moving. Drily funny, but also desperately melancholic. World-weary but also innocent. It’s a perfect noir and a perfect book. Is it better than the movie? Impossible to say: but without Finney and Frears, there’s more of Smith’s voice, and that’s not a bad thing.
Gumshoe the movie wasn’t a hit. Its stars continued their brilliant careers. Its soundtrack composer reused the movie’s main theme for another piece rooted in nostalgia, his musical version of Sunset Boulevard. Stephen Frears went on to well-deserved international success as a director, and Neville Smith continued to write and act (now in his 80s, he politely declines invitations to events where his work is shown).
It’s only the novel of Gumshoe that rests in the cold cases files. Issued by Fontana in paperback in 1971, it was reissued by Slow Dancer Press in 1998 with an introduction by Stephen Frears and a pithy afterword by Neville Smith: since then, nothing, which is a pity. Both versions can be acquired cheaply. Acquire them.
David Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Night Train, was published in September 2020. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.
Gumshoe, by Neville Smith London: Fontana Books, 1971 New York: Ballantine Books, 1972 London: Slow Dancer Press, 1998
‘NOVELIST LECTURER VANISHES’ announced a headline in The Sheffield Telegraph on Wednesday, June 26, 1963. ‘What has happened to Kathleen Sully, the writer who should have arrived in Sheffield yesterday to lecture at the Sheffield Arts Festival?’ the reporter asked. Sully, then at the height of her career, had been invited to lecture on ‘The Modern Novel’ as a highlight of the festival held at the University of Sheffield.
She was looking forward to it. ‘They think a lot of me up there,’ she had written her friend, the director Lindsay Anderson, a few days earlier. ‘Know the Heads of Languages and they set my work for 3rd year students.’ Instead, she failed to show up. No explanation was ever given. Two members of the faculty appeared in her place and discussed Sully’s writing. It may have been the last time anyone discussed her work in a public form. For although she continued to publish for another seven years and lived nearly forty more, as far as English literary history is concerned, Kathleen Sully has vanished completely.
Her name means nothing to you. I can say this with confidence because it meant nothing to me and I have been studying English novels and novelists great and obscure for over forty years. I first saw Kathleen Sully’s name in a list of 100 or so English woman novelists of the 20th century, a list running from Margaret Atwood to Virginia Woolf. It was the only name I didn’t recognize and given my hobby of tracking down forgotten books and writers, that fact immediately set me searching for more information. I quickly determined that she had written over a dozen books, that none of them were in print and few used copies were still available for sale. I located an electronic copy of her 1958 novel Merrily to the Grave on the Internet Archive and began reading.
Merrily to the Grave opens as Harold and Melanie Thydes, an elderly couple with ‘three small suitcases full of odds and ends, and each other,’ are wandering along the promenade in Brighton, cold, tired and desperately looking for a cheap place to stay. A policeman befriends them and takes them to Hesta Blazey’s. Hesta’s rooming house is not a desirable address: ‘It smelt of kippers, dust, onions, hair-oil, soap, turpentine, bath cubes, floor polish (though nothing looked polished), human sweat and cat.’
But it is a refuge of sorts. Whether pensioner, two-bit performer, shop girl, prostitute or thief, one thing unites the residents: failure. Rejected long ago by a fiancée returning from the Great War, Hesta expresses her love through acceptance. ‘Not all of us can withstand the inequalities of life: its buffeting, its knocks,’ she maintains. Though her tenants have reached rock bottom in the eyes of society, some of them learn there are even lower depths to which a person can sink: ‘other kinds of poverty, other kinds of nakedness, other kinds of crime’—the depths where the quality of compassion is lost.
Kathleen Sully’s writing is almost addictively readable. Her prose is spare, unstudied, brisk. She relies heavily on dialogue—but not on deep conversations. Scenes move quickly. Emotions run close to the surface. Merrily to the Grave was fuelled by a raw energy, a brutal honesty I’d only seen in Orwell or Patrick Hamilton. I was eager to go further. I located cheap copies of more novels, gulped them down, posted my initial reactions and became obsessed with learning more.
These were not like anything I’d read before. There were hints of Joyce’s rawness, of Lawrence’s bluntness and, in Sully’s use of dialogue, of Ivy Compton-Burnett, but only hints. Her first novel, Canal in Moonlight, opens: ‘Bikka’s rats are large, fierce and tenacious. They find rich pickings in the garbage of the extravagant Bikka poor which nourishes bodies and whet appetites for yet more.’
Canal centres on the Hoppes, a family with sixteen children living in a filthy house with a broken toilet and a pregnant goat in the kitchen. Horace Hoppe is soft-headed and idle, his wife Belle a fat sloppy former prostitute. Their children run wild. They steal. A little boy comes home with a ball smeared with the blood of a murdered young woman. Even the Dyppes, the ‘proper’ family next door, is dysfunctional: Mrs. Dyppe torments her spinster daughter about maintaining an upright reputation, all the while concealing the fact that Mr. Dyppe had committed suicide after learning he’d caught a venereal disease from his wife. This was beyond kitchen sink realism: this was toilet bowl realism.
Kathleen Sully’s 1960 novel, Skrine, set in the aftermath of some unspecified global apocalypse, opens with a woman murdered for a pack of cigarettes. A Man Talking to Seagulls opens—and closes—with a body lying dead on a beach. In Through the Wall, little Celia Wick shivers outside while her parents fight, throwing plates and punches. ‘The Wicks were the scum of Mastowe: drunkards, loafers, petty thieves, and worse,’ Sully writes. And yet through this grim world flows a current of magic and spirituality. At night, Celia rises up from her miserable bedroom and flies above her street, up into the moon, ‘a million years away to where tigers ate apricots, and birds, honey-coloured and smelling of wall-flowers, flew in and out of her heart.’
The nameless madwoman in ‘The Weeping and the Laughter,’ one of the short novels in Canaille, tells how she used to ‘flow through the top of my head, go to the window, jump off into space and fly about like an owl.’ In A Man on the Roof, a dead husband comes back to his wife as a ghost and the two carry on as if nothing had happened. One of Sully’s later novels, A Breeze on a Lonely Road, is about a solicitor searching for the people and places he dreams about each night. As a man stands over a dead body at the end of A Man Talking to Seagulls, he suddenly realizes ‘that he beheld a husk—that the man was elsewhere—no matter where—but somewhere—and that life was life and could not be denied or extinguished—ever.’ The only equivalent I knew to this combination of realism and the fantastic was the magical realism of Latin American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez—but Sully began publishing a decade before these works were known in England.
Seeing how little had been written about Kathleen Sully’s work, I decided to carry through to the finish. I tracked down the rest of her books, locating the rarest—Not Tonight (1966)—at the British Library, one of just a dozen libraries worldwide still holding a copy. It was clear that Sully followed in no one’s footsteps. This uniqueness unsettled reviewers when her books first came out; now, it was what intrigued me. Even relative to my own extensive knowledge of neglected writers, the extent to which Sully’s work had vanished seemed astonishing.
So, I began looking into Kathleen Sully’s life and critical reputation, trying to understand why she had gone from being such a prolific and original writer to being utterly forgotten. Aside from contemporary reviews when her books were first published, critical assessments of her work are virtually non-existent. Walter Allen, part of the bedrock of the English literary establishment of his time, considered her work worth mention alongside that Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and future Nobel Prize winners William Golding and Doris Lessing in his 1960 survey, The Novel To-day. Ironically, Allen’s short paragraph on Sully is still the only critical consideration of her work to appear in print in the last nearly-sixty years. Her name appears in no encyclopaedia, in no dictionary of biography, in no other survey of the English novel.
One reason for her critical neglect is that she didn’t fit in—a reflection of the institutional prejudices of the English literary world. She was a woman writing when writing was a man’s game—not just a man’s game, but a public school/university-educated man’s game. She was the wrong age: too young for the generation of Greene, Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen, too old for the likes of Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch and the Angry Young Men. Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson, then rising stars in a new wave of gritty, ‘kitchen sink realism’ theatre, were so impressed with her early novels they chose her first play to initiate a bold new series of Sunday night ‘productions without décor’ at the Royal Court Theatre in London—but remembered her years later as a ‘middle-aged woman standing in the wings.’
She didn’t write the sort of domestic dramas and comedies that were considered standard middlebrow fare. There is not a lot of tea being served in china cups and saucers in her books. Sully’s characters ate bread and drippings huddled around the kitchen table. They didn’t fit the mould of other fiction of her time. ‘Her people constantly say the untoward thing, move strangely against conventional furniture,’ as one reviewer put it. But they weren’t rebels, either. Sully’s novels are utterly a-political and virtually a-historical: while they’re mostly set in mid-20th century Britain, they provide few references to events that might allow one to pin the story to a specific time.
And her work itself didn’t fit in. ‘Every now and then a novel comes along which appears to possess outstanding merit, and yet to fit into no known category,’ read the fly-leaf blurb, and for once the publisher’s statement wasn’t hyperbole. ‘Bizarre? A nightmare prose-poem, a lyric nightmare? How shall one describe Canal in Moonlight?’ asked Elizabeth Bowen in The Tatler. ‘I have never read anything like it,’ John Betjeman wrote in the Daily Telegraph. John Davenport, in The Observer, was equally baffled: ‘I don’t, quite honestly, know what to make of it.’
As further books followed, reviewers seemed to reach consensus on two points. First, that Sully was a powerful storyteller: ‘It is impossible to stop reading Miss Sully, who takes a vice-like Ancient Mariner’s grip on your nerves and feelings,’ wrote Siriol Hugh-Jones of her fifth novel, Burden of the Seed. And second, that no one knew how to take her. ‘Kathleen Sully beats me,’ Karl Miller confessed in reviewing Shades of Eden for The Observer. Even after she’d published nine books, they remained stumped. ‘Kathleen Sully is another mystery, which on the evidence of her new novel [The Undesired, 1961] I can’t solve,’ confessed Ronald Bryden.
In his survey, Walter Allen precisely assessed the cost of her uniqueness: ‘Kathleen Sully is a novelist very much on her own, which may account for her comparative lack of critical recognition.’ By her eleventh novel, The Fractured Smile, The Times Literary Supplement—‘that British bastion of highbrow book culture,’ as Publisher’s Weekly once called it—seemed to have found a way to deal with her: ‘Miss Sully has established a reputation as something of an eccentric among novelists.’ By her 14th novel, the TLS simply stopped reviewing her work entirely.
A selection of Kathleen Sully’s novels.
Sully did little to ensure her own legacy. She donated no papers or manuscripts to any archive for eventual research. If she had any friendships with other writers of her time, none of them considered her worth mentioning in their own letters or memoirs. I looked through biographies of the literary figures of her time, from Kingsley Amis to Angus Wilson, and found not one mention of her. And from the story about the Sheffield Arts Festival we know that she didn’t show up on the one occasion when her work was publicly recognized by academics. Whether she was flouting the school, taken ill, caught up in some personal crisis or simply the victim of an automobile breakdown doesn’t matter now—she never got another opportunity.
Kathleen Sully lived for over thirty years after her last novel, Look at the Tadpoles, was published in 1970, and yet at that point, as far as the literary world was concerned, she vanished forever. Even her own literary agency lost track of her. In 1986, the Curtis Brown agency published a notice in the Times trying to locate her in connection with the renewal of American publication rights.
None of the journals that reviewed her novels noted her death at the age of 91 in September 2001. When I began to investigate Kathleen Sully’s life for a biographical entry on Wikipedia, I soon found that the fifteen years she spent as published novelist were an anomaly: aside from her books and their reviews, there seemed to be nothing. If I wanted to find any record of her life beyond the books, I would have to look in other places: genealogical databases, census records, civil registers and telephone directories. I would also have to locate surviving members of her family, if there were any.
By picking through public records, one can sketch the bare facts of Kathleen Sully’s first thirty-two years. The second of seven children, she was born Kathleen Maude Coussell in a poor neighbourhood on the south side of London in 1910. Her father Albert was a skilled mechanic, credited in a 1910 issue of The Engineer with the design of an automotive device, but that didn’t appear to have improved his family’s economic status. Between 1911 and the 1929, the family moved at least six times—mostly back and forth between poorer parts of London (Peckham, Lambeth, Camberwell) and market towns in Cambridgeshire (Wisbech) and Norfolk (Downham Market).
If Sully’s fiction contains any traces of her childhood, it suggests the Coussell household was poor, overcrowded, and chaotic. Canal in Moonlight centres on a family with sixteen children living in squalor with dogs, cats, rats, goats and even a broken-down horse. Overcrowding and families with odd assortments of generations and relations are constant themes in her early books. These were, in fact, among the first aspects of her work to draw the attention of reviewers. ‘[T]he house in it stinks of goats, blood seeps under the garage door for a child to bounce his ball in, and the warehouse rats are as big as cats,’ Isabel Quigley wrote in her Spectator review of Canal in Moonlight.
Children in her books are often left to fend for themselves. In Through the Wall, Celia Wick sleeps on a filthy sack of straw, has one pair of dirty, ripped underpants, and is handed over to another woman to raise when her mother remarries. Stephanas in Burden of the Seed steals from a pair of senile aunts to buy food for himself. Sully may have taken liberties in her fiction, but families living in poverty on the fringe of society are such a constant in her work it seems reasonable to assume that she experienced something of the same in her own childhood.
At twelve, Sully was sent to the Barrett Street Trade School, where she studied dressmaking. She left the school at fifteen and worked in a garment factory in East London. She was still living at home when she married Charles Sully, a skilled mechanic like her father, in 1932. Within a year, she gave birth to a daughter, Victoria, and a second daughter, Shirley, followed in 1934. Charles and Kathleen carried on with the itinerant lifestyle she’d grow up with. Victoria (Vicki) was born in Paddington, Shirley in Billericay in Essex. In the 1939 register, they are listed in Weston-Super-Mare on coast of Somerset. Then a civil register records the birth in 1942 of a son, Fraser, listing Charles as the father, in Southend-on-Sea—back in Essex.
From here, the facts are hard to find and harder to verify. Many of the official records that could provide dates and addresses to trace her life over the next sixty years have not yet been released. Much of the rest of the available information came from Sully herself. In a short ‘About the Author’ sketch printed on the dust jacket of Canal in Moonlight she reported that ‘At 38 years of age’—around 1948—she attended Art College for two years and then ‘went on to a Teacher’s Training College to take a teaching post (Art and English).’ A biographical sketch taken from Sully’s response to a questionnaire included in Contemporary Authors (1966) further specified ‘Art College’ as Taunton Art College and St. Alban’s Art College and ‘Teacher’s Training College’ as Gaddesden. This last fact helps narrow the timeline somewhat, given that Gaddesden Training College operated just from 1946 to 1951.
This list of dates and places would not have been particularly illuminating had it not been supplemented by an email I received from Paul Hunt, Vicki’s son, in March 2019. He had seen my posts about his grandmother’s novels and confirmed that the information in her Wikipedia entry was correct to his knowledge. ‘I think I can help in explaining why she faded,’ he wrote. According to Paul, Kathleen and Charles Sully’s marriage was ‘rancorous’ and marked by separations. Sometime before the start of World War Two, Kathleen took the girls to a cottage in Paignton, Devon, where she tried to run a dress shop. She then reunited with Charles and they lived in Weston-Super-Mare as recorded in the 1939 register.
Not long after, the couple had ‘a furious row’ and Kathleen took the girls to Denbigh in Wales. Charles pressed to be allowed to visit his daughters and Kathleen relented. She would regret this decision. As Paul wrote:
My mother remembers the event clearly. They were living in a small cottage in a village close to Denbigh. Her father came to visit and when her mother left for work, he threw the children’s clothes into a suitcase and then rushed them to the station. She believes they left by train. He had nowhere to live and so his mother came and cared for the children. They all lived for some time in a room in a house in Hereford.
‘Much as I loved my grandfather, I knew him as an uncompromising person and I could imagine him doing this,’ Paul added. This account also seems credible considering a few other facts: Vicki married in Newbury, Berkshire in 1957; Charles died there in 1997; and Shirley died there in 2008. So, Charles stayed in Newbury for decades, while Kathleen moved from place to place, almost always near the sea, always miles from Newbury. In Kathleen Sully’s entry in Contemporary Authors, it states, ‘children: three.’ There is no mention of her marriage.
If the story of Charles abducting the girls is true, it does raise questions about Fraser Sully. If Charles was father, as stated in the birth register, why didn’t he take Fraser as well? Or did the incident take place before Fraser was born? Was Fraser illegitimate, as Paul speculates, conceived in an affair that took place afterward? Regardless of the boy’s paternity, however, picturing Kathleen Sully as a single mother raising a son—possibly without any financial support—provides a context that helps make sense of the few available facts about her life after 1942. Financial considerations and the need to care for her son, for example, would likely have been her foremost concerns after 1942.
With no family money, no university degree, and a young son to look after, Kathleen Sully would have few options. ‘Almost every mother of fatherless children has to find work to help in their support,’ Leonora Eyles wrote in her1947 book Unmarried but Happy. ‘On the whole, it is better if a single woman with children can earn money in the home,’ she continued, recommending child-minding, typing, keeping a small shop, dressmaking, graphic arts and writing as possible ways to earn money working in the home.
In her ‘About the Author’ sketch, Sully devoted the most space to listing the many jobs in her ‘varied career’: ‘domestic, lift attendant, dress model, dress cutter, dress designer, dress-shop owner, professional swimmer and diver, canvasser, bus conductress, cinema usherette, free-lance artist and writer, tracer in the Admiralty, dressmaker.’ She later repeated this list in her Contemporary Authors questionnaire, adding ‘owner of antique shop and now full-time novelist’—which correlates with a remark in her June 1963 letter to Lindsay Anderson: ‘I have finished with shops and all else other than setting down the human agony and joy.’
Looking at this list alongside Eyles’ Unmarried but Happy, I wondered if Sully had her own copy of the book. My suspicions only increased after reading the following: ‘There is only one art that is blithely taken up without training, without discipline and without the appreciation of difficulty with which one approaches even the learning of knitting, and that is the art of writing.’ We know that writing was one of Sully’s first ventures as a working single mother because her first book wasn’t published in 1955 but in 1946, when Edmund Ward, a children’s book publisher, released Small Creatures and Stony Stream, listing Kathleen M. Sully as the author. Small Creatures contains two stories, about a dormouse and a dragonfly; Stony Stream is about fish. Neither the stories nor the style is noteworthy, but the books did get reprinted at least four times each. They appear to be her only attempts at juvenile fiction.
How did Sully get from ‘It was a warm day in Spring, and the East Wind blew gently through the grasses growing in the meadow’—the opening line of Stony Stream—to the fierce and tenacious rats that greet the reader of Canal in Moonlight? Perhaps she found, in her arguments with Charles, in their separations, in having her daughters stolen from her and in her effort to support herself and Fraser, that she had to be fierce and tenacious herself. In her June 1963 letter to Anderson, she reassures him, ‘You will find me much changed: not so arrogant and childish,’ and closes by saying, ‘it is so good to hear from one who was my first friend.’ Did she really spend those years before the success of her first novels friendless? Or did she attack would-be friends like one of Bikka’s rats?
Kathleen Sully, from the dust jacket of Merrily to the Grave.
A clue to Kathleen Sully’s temperament—and stunning evidence of the anger and pain wrapped up in her separation from Charles—can be found in a poem that Vicki shared with me. Written in the late 1980s after she attempted to visit her mother, who was by then living in Camborne in Cornwall, it was part of Vicki’s extraordinary effort to restart her life after her traumatic childhood and an unhappy early marriage. I reprint the poem here in full (and with Vicki’s permission) because it reveals so much that lies beneath the sparse facts.
Lost Person
The first time I lost her I was six in a whitewashed cottage in Wales my father came to visit he said but he threw my sister’s and my things into a suitcase and rushed us to the station
the second time came after twenty years I found her on the back of a book a middle-aged woman and the name was right I wrote her letter said why see me now I am successful and not before
the third time my son tracked her down and she said I could meet her too with her dark eyes and beauty she resembled my sister not me my mentally ill sister both with long white hands not like my gardening ones
she told me of her struggles, her travels in Spain and her achievements she didn’t ask about mine she said my hair and clothes were wrong she gave advice on diet and lifestyle I must put castor oil on my eyes to prevent cataract I was drowning in words when my letters went unanswered I knew I had lost her again years later I found her new address and phoned she said I could visit rain was forecast and the air was heavy with sour scent of cow parsley as I drove the pre-motorway tangle of roads to her terraced house in Camborne weeds straggled over her doorstep when I knocked, a ragged curtain jerked at the grimy window the front door inched open
hunched over a frame her eyes glittered up at me and with a voice reverting to the cockney of her youth she said I have two things ter say ter yer one is Go Away and the other is Piss Orf the door slammed shut cold rain began to fall and I left
In this poem, ‘the first time’ is clearly Charles’ abduction of Vicki and Shirley; ‘when I was six’ fixes the time as late 1939 or early 1940. The ‘second time’ would have been around 1959 or 1960, after seeing Kathleen’s photograph on the back cover of Merrily to the Grave—the only book on which it appeared. If Sully did write ‘why see me now I am successful,’ one can hardly imagine a more ‘arrogant and childish’ response by a mother to her long-separated daughter.
Paul Hunt incorporated the ‘third time’ into Mahogany Rose, the novel loosely based on his family that he published as ‘Paul Sully.’ I say loosely because Paul merges the stories of his grandmother and mother into his character Suzy. Much of Suzy’s story—living in Ghana at the time it attained independence, working in a defence laboratory, participating in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – comes from Vicki. But there is also the visit to Kathleen at the house in Cornwall and elements of the bitter relationship between Kathleen and Charles.
Vicki’s poem offers some further clues into Kathleen Sully’s life and the family’s emotional traumas. Vicki refers to ‘my mentally ill sister’—Shirley. Looking for more information on Shirley Sully, I located a letter she wrote in 1986 to an imaginary lover named Frederique, which the artist Lisa Marie Gibbs posted on her blog in 2016 in tribute to ‘My mentor, my friend, my inspiration.’ Gibbs confirmed that Shirley lived with her father and struggled with mental illness as an adult. Shirley’s letter quotes Stevie Smith’s poem ‘The Frog Prince’—‘I have been a frog now/for a hundred years’—and adds, ‘As I have not had a family to look after, I have tried to make as many things as possible–my clothes, sculptures, paintings.’
Vicki shared with me a set of poems that she wrote after Shirley died. Through these, we can trace not only Shirley’s troubles but the parallels between her and Kathleen. In her ‘prologue’ Vicki writes,
we sisters shared a map shared the haemorrhage of streaks and runs and patched-up places
After taking the girls from Kathleen in Wales, Charles – who was working as a contractor for the Royal Air Force and moving from airfield to airfield – left the girls in the care of a Mrs. Crane, ‘the lonely woman/who cared for us/a bit/when she was sober.’ Vicki married, mostly as a means of escape, she says, and Shirley was left to deal with Charles, who was, according to Vicki, an angry, controlling, and violent man. She displayed a talent for art and was able to get work in London, where she soon fell in with a group of friends as full of vices as they were of promises.
She also began suffering from a combination of alcoholism and mental illness and was forced, on more than one occasion, to beg Charles to return to live with him. During these years when Shirley’s life was punctuated by various crises, she made contact with Kathleen and even went to stay with her in Cornwall briefly. This must have been in the late 1960s, for the sole dedication in all of Kathleen’s 17 novels appears in 1969’s A Breeze on a Lonely Road. It reads ‘For Shirley—My Daughter.’
Kathleen Sully letter to Lindsay Anderson from June 1963, courtesy of the University of Stirling archives.
It’s not clear if Kathleen Sully ever shared the loss of her daughters with people who knew her as a writer. There is no hint in her few letters in Lindsay Anderson’s archives that she had any children but Fraser. In her June 1963 letter, she writes that Fraser is finishing his first year at the University of Manchester, which meant ‘I am free to go where I like and do what I like.’ Fraser’s attendance at university might also explain why she could be ‘finished with shops and all else,’ and why there was a break of nearly four years between the publication of The Undesired in 1961 and The Fractured Smile in 1965.
Did the furious rate at which she first published—ten books in the space of less than six years—have something to do with Fraser’s situation? Was Sully paying for school fees? In my copy of Canal in Moonlight, I found a short letter she wrote from Brighton in early 1957 and was able to confirm that the address had been a rooming house at the time—possibly the inspiration for Merrily to the Grave—suggesting she might have been living alone while Fraser was at boarding school. Her June 1963 letter to Anderson, on the other hand, was sent from a house in The Lizard, a hamlet at the southernmost tip of Cornwall, which she had recently purchased as ‘a permanent home (retreat).’
This period between books may also have been when she took ‘her travels in Spain’ mentioned in Vicki’s poem. Two of her subsequent books—Horizontal Image and Island in Moonlight—largely take place in Mediterranean settings. Within a year or so of failing to show up for the Sheffield Festival, however, Sully resumed writing at an even more fevered pace, publishing another seven novels in just five years.
There is a noticeable difference in these books from her first ten—a difference in tone and in intensity. The Fractured Smile is an infidelity farce, Dear Wolf a limp comedy about a small-town Lothario. Not Tonight was described as a ‘whimsy, flimsy piece of sugary shockingness’ by one reviewer. Christopher Wordsworth, in The Guardian, found that The Fractured Smile ‘meanders artlessly’ and Dear Wolf displayed ‘a rather simpleton humour.’ Mary Holland was scathing in her assessment of Not Tonight: ‘At best it is the novel one might expect from an aunt who had been told once too often: “You write such droll letters, you should put it all down in a book.”’ By 1968, when Horizontal Image was published, The New Statesman’s reviewer complained, ‘She is prolific and seems to have created a standard expectation in her readers—the deadliest way of paralysing critical faculty.’ Both Sully and her critics were, it seems, becoming exhausted. Where her early books were reviewed in major periodicals by top-flight reviewers, her last few barely received notice.
Why does the list of books end in 1970? Did she lose her readership? Did her publisher lose interest? She didn’t stop writing. On New Year’s Day in 1992, she informed Anderson ‘Am still writing—but you know how things are in the publishing business—and my work has become more controversial.’ In the same letter, she mentions that Fraser ‘is very well—works full time and held on as a member of staff’ and implies he is living with her. This letter is addressed from Camborne, very likely the same terraced house mentioned in Vicki’s poem. Paul Hunt believes that the reason Kathleen stopped publishing was that her energies became consumed in dealing with Fraser’s schizophrenia. Mahogany Rose includes a conversation in which Matt (Charles Sully) tells Paul’s fictional counterpart that Fraser (whose name, interestingly, is not changed) hung himself in his bedroom in the Camborne house. Paul did later acknowledge to me that ‘I never met him [Fraser] so I could not be sure of this fact.’
Paul’s disclaimer raised my suspicions because, at the time, I’d been unable to find any record of Fraser Sully’s death. When I ordered a copy of Kathleen’s death certificate from the General Register Office, I decided to search for Fraser’s as well, and soon obtained information that both disproved and proved what Paul had written. Fraser Sully did not commit suicide. He died of heart failure at the age of 76 in May 2019, just two months after Paul’s email. However, according to his death certificate Fraser died at Woodtown House at Bideford in Devon, a care home that, according to its website, ‘provides nursing care and rehabilitative support for 28 adults experiencing complex mental health needs.’ Although the staff at Woodtown House could not discuss Fraser’s condition, they did acknowledge that he’d been living in the home for nearly twenty years—probably from the time that Kathleen entered the care home in Camborne where she died. It’s safe to assume that Fraser’s care would have consumed much of his mother’s time and energies in the years before she had to seek full-time care for herself.
So perhaps Paul was right, after all. Perhaps the reason Kathleen Sully vanished from the literary world had less to do with institutional prejudices and more to do with the simple fact of a mother struggling, with few resources and little support, to cope with her son’s mental illness. ‘Not all of us can withstand the inequalities of life: its buffeting, its knocks,’ Hesta Blazey says in Merrily to the Grave. Kathleen Sully had been isolated from her family for decades. She had few connections to the literary world to start with. Her few letters to Lindsay Anderson may, indeed, represent the only ones to have survived the buffeting and knocks that would have been the daily life of an aging woman caring for an adult son with schizophrenia. Orwell said that history is written by the winners. It’s easier to win when you’re not isolated, out on the margins, old and out of print. Perhaps, in the end, there is no mystery why Kathleen Sully vanished.
I thank Vicki Sully and Paul Hunt for their generous cooperation in my research on this article.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece titled “The Mystery of Jessamy Morrison” that surveyed four of the six novels published between 1963 and 1972 by a writer of that name. Aside from the fact that the British Library’s catalogue listed “Jessamy Morrison” as a pseudonym, I hadn’t been able to determine anything more about Morrison’s true identity. Indeed, although the pioneering lesbian critic and publisher Barbara Grier considered two of Morrison’s early books, The No Road (1963) and The Girl from Paris (1965) among the best books on gay themes in their respective years, certain aspects of the books made me wonder whether Jessamy was, in fact, male.
Soon after I posted the piece, the British novelist and editor Eric Brown emailed me. “Now this is a long shot,” he wrote, “and I suspect it might come to nothing — but I wonder if there is a possibility that Jessamy Morrison was a pseudonym used by Peter de Polnay?” Eric felt the descriptions of Morrison’s novels seemed “like synopses of works by Peter de Polnay: upper middle-class characters, continental settings, unpleasant female characters, and sex.”
I’ve been fascinated by Peter de Polnay for some time and wrote de Polnay’s Wikipedia biography several years ago. Born into a Jewish-Hungarian noble family, he and his sisters were raised mostly by governesses and caretakers in Switzerland and England. After a series of misadventures in Austria, Argentina, and the French Riviera, de Polnay settled in Paris and began writing novels in English. His first book, Angry Man’s Tale (1939), was described by one critic as “a curious and effective blend of James M. Cain and Noel Coward.” De Polnay tried to blend into the woodwork when the Germans occupied Paris in 1940 but eventually chose to flee, making his way south through Spain to Gibraltar, from where he was evacuated to England — an experience he recounted in his 1941 book Death and Tomorrow.
De Polnay tried to assume the life of an English country gentleman, renting Boulge Hall, formerly the home of the poet and translator Edward FitzGerald (responsible for the hugely popular English translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam). He soon found this lifestyle unaffordable and after his first wife died in 1950, he spent most of the rest of his life circulating through Spain, France, and southern England. And all the while, he wrote like a demon, amassing something like 80 books under his own name before his death in 1984.
Peter de Polnay.
I’ve written about several of de Polnay’s books. All that I’ve read are short, spare, speedy, and utterly cynical, leading me to refer to him as “a poor man’s Georges Simenon.” Poor because de Polnay is not quite the master that Simenon can be at his best. As a novelist, de Polnay lacks something of Simenon’s ruthless efficiency. None of the de Polnays I’ve read so far is without an extraneous character or two, or a narrative detour down what proves to be a dead end. And unlike Simenon, de Polnay was not working in his native language (which he’d probably say was French rather than Hungarian, in any case). Now, that alone is not necessarily a handicap (viz. Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov to name just two who put many native English writers to shame), but combined with the speed with which de Polnay wrote (averaging 3-4 books a year), it led so some stylistic tendencies that Eric Brown felt might offer further hints to Jessamy Morrison’s identity.
The moment I read Eric’s first email, I knew he had to be correct. “It seems obvious now that I think about it. Many similarities. Many,” I replied. However, I was also checking with other sources to see what I could find. The Humanities staff of the British Library diligently looked through their records but found no further clue to why their catalogue listed Jessamy Morrison as a pseudonym. The Society of Authors drew a blank as well, and so did several agencies I contacted.
I sent Eric a selection of chapters from Morrison’s novels to aid in his comparison with Peter de Polnay’s prose. “I’m convinced it’s Peter de Polnay,” he wrote back a few days later:
Even if we were to disregard the many stylistic similarities, it ‘feels’ like de Polnay: the narrative is leisurely and slapdash, interspersed with often irrelevant asides concerning the narrator’s relatives or acquaintances (a typical de Polnay trait.) The milieu is pure PdP. At the start of The No-Road he mentions shooting (he was a keen shooter) and the specialist phrase ‘walk up partridges’ – which has echoes with a character in his 1970 novel Spring Snow and Algy. He’s casually disparaging about stout women, and garrulous swearing women, who often crop up in his books.
Eric’s comparison of de Polnay’s prose with Morrison’s added to his conviction:
The stylistic similarities are telling. The prose is littered with ugly sentence splices; there’s an under-use of commas; minor characters are described coming and going to no real effect; he employs ‘whereby I mean’ and ‘As a matter of fact’ and ‘In short’ which crop up again and again in DpD’s novels; he combines in the same paragraph dialogue attributed to different characters which other novelists would lay out on separate lines; there are one or two instances of the absence of a comma between verb and gerund, a DpD trait; in dialogue, characters are oddly off-hand with each other.
Like de Polnay, Morrison had a predilection for splicing sentences:
We had a couple of hours to kill, Clarissa went off with the children, I called in on my club, and then we all met at the air terminus.
Like de Polnay, Morrison composes with a slapdash brush, introducing, as Eric put it, “willy-nilly, background detail into a section of dialogue, thus wrong-footing the reader when returning to the dialogue”:
My father had been a shipbroker in Leadenhall Street and my brother John and I inherited the business. In furtherance of our business I went abroad from time to time to places like Antwerp and Rotterdam and Hamburg. “That doesn’t come into it,” I added. Clarissa remembered she had something or other to do, so left the room, and if I come to think of it she never thanked me properly for agreeing to the holiday in Majorca.
And, like de Polnay, Morrison’s stage directions can be haphazard:
I said I intended to settle in the town. Before he could make some appropriate remark an ill-dressed old woman, in a not too clean apron, waddled in and asked for ten Woodbines. Meanwhile the man in the green hat had left. The landlord served the woman, the door closed on her and we were alone.
“He likes having minor characters wander off set for no reason!” Eric observed.
By this point, I was convinced as well. So, I wrote to Peter de Polnay’s son Greg, a retired actor now living in France. I’d interviewed Greg for the Wikipedia article on his father. “Yes, indeed Jessamy Morrison was a pseudonym of my father’s,” he replied. “But I had no idea he had written so many novels.” Greg de Polnay’s relationship with his father had been difficult at the best of times — as evidenced by the fact that Peter de Polnay never mentioned his son in any of his autobiographies.
Chances are that Peter de Polnay adopted the pseudonym of Jessamy Morrison for two reasons. First, to avoid saturating the market. But more importantly, to avoid incurring the wrath of the Catholic Church, which still maintained its index of forbidden books. De Polnay had converted after marrying his third wife, Maria del Carmen Rubio y Caparo, daughter of a Spanish theater director and a devout Catholic.
And, by 1963, he had become accustomed to using a pseudonym. As Greg confirmed, his father published a number of novels for W. H. Allen under the name of Rodney Garland. Rodney Garland was itself a pseudonym, adopted by a fellow Hungarian emigre named Adam Martin de Hegedus. De Hegedus was a journalist and commentator who’d published several works of nonfiction between the late 1930s and early 1950s. He took the pseudonym when W. H. Allen published his 1953 novel The Heart in Exile (recently reissued by Valancourt Books). Now considered a landmark book for its candid and positive portrayal of the relationship between two gay men, The Heart in Exile risked condemnation, if not censorship, given the fact that homosexuality was still illegal under English laws.
De Hegedus died in October 1955, though the circumstances of his death are still in doubt. Soon after his death, W. H. Allen published a second Rodney Garland novel, The Troubled Midnight, which was undoubtedly by de Hegedus. Over the course of the next ten years, however, W. H. Allen published three more novels by “Rodney Garland”: World Without Dreams (1961); Hell and High Water (1962); and Sorcerer’s Broth (1966). Greg de Polnay has confirmed that the last two were written by his father. I’m waiting on a copy of World Without Dreams to see if it passes the subject/style test.
So, there we have it: Jessamy Morrison was Peter de Polnay. I shall have to amend his Wikipedia page now.
Prayer: “Let us throw back our heads and laugh at reality.” Response: “Which is an illusion caused by mescaline deficiency.”
N. F. Simpson wrote those words in his play A Resounding Tinkle, and they are as true today as they were then, which is to say as true as anything else. Simpson, born Norman Frederick but known to everyone as “Wally” – a play on the name of Edward VIII’s lover, of course – was a great writer, an influence on Cambridge comic writers like Peter Cook and John Cleese, and a popular and critically-acclaimed playwright from the 1950s onwards, admired both by Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. Wally wrote mostly for the stage, but also for television and cinema and, on one exceptional occasion, as a novelist. He was able to outdo Lewis Carroll by thinking of a million impossible things for breakfast but, unlike his contemporaries who could make their work only absurd, he could also be as funny as a writer he admired greatly, P. G. Wodehouse. More philosophical than absurdist, Simpson nevertheless created surreal worlds whose logic was as rigorous as that of Aristotle, only much more hilarious.
N. F. Simpson, around 1976.
In his long career – his work was first performed at the Royal Court in London in 1957, and his last new work for the stage, If So Then Yes, debuted in 2009 – N. F. Simpson produced many extraordinary works, from A Resounding Tinkle and One Way Pendulum (the latter filmed by Peter Yates in 1964) to television work as diverse as episodes of the ITV serial Crown Court (which vehicle Simpson subverted to near-breaking point) and Elementary My Dear Watson, a 1973 TV play in which John Cleese played Sherlock Holmes.
An illustration from Harry Bleachbaker.
Harry Bleachbaker, published 1976, is not his only prose work, but it is his only novel and, being an N. F. Simpson novel, is very little like anything else in fiction. Based, at times so closely as to be verbatim, on his 1972 play Was He Anyone, Harry Bleachbaker has very little in the way of plot and an enormous amount in the way of diversion, rumination and side-tracking. Its plot, which unfolds over a hundred or so pages with the speed of a Galapagos tortoise making its mind up, is extremely simple: a man named Albert Whitbrace has fallen into the Mediterranean and plans are put into motion for his rescue. Or rather, plans to make plans to rescue him are put into motion, or if not put into motion, then discussed. The whole thing reads – probably intentionally – at times like the minutes of a very tortuous civil service meeting. Practicalities are weighed up, pros and cons are debated, issues are raised, and all the time Albert Whitbrace remains floating in the Med. There are footnotes, there are illustrations, there are sections rendered in dialogue but the thrust of the story is never out of focus: Albert Whitbrace is in the sea and he must be got out. And eventually, a decision is made.
At times Harry Bleachbaker (the titular character remains obscure) reads like Flann O’Brien, at others like Samuel Beckett, and at still others like an extended Monty Python sketch, but always it is pure N. F. Simpson: a world gone mad which is nevertheless ordered by the strictest rules of logic. Simpson, who laughed at reality, nevertheless went to great pains to replicate it faithfully at the same time as he was mocking it. And from the very first page of Harry Bleachbaker, nothing is safe. The Author’s Note at the beginning warns the reader:
This is an uneven book, parts of it having been deliberately made more boring than was in itself strictly necessary in order to highlight those parts which are less so.
Even the blurb cautions, “This is not, it goes without saying, a book to be read through from cover to cover at one sitting, or even at several sittings. It is not, indeed, a book to be read from cover to cover at all….” Simpson’s own biography lacks the usual elements of self-promotion and enthusiasm: “He was born in 1919, though without having first gone into the thing properly to see what it was likely to entail. Had he done so he would not be here now.”
The whole thing sounds quite daunting, and the lack of a conventional storyline doesn’t help the casual reader. Simpson’s lack of interest in narrative, he explained in the radio documentary Reality Is An Illusion Caused By Lack of NF Simpson, was caused by stems from the death of his mother when he was a child: ever since then, he seemed to imply, nothing had made sense. But the book, whether dipped in from time to time or read from cover to cover in a manic burst of brain-frying, is fantastic. Simpson’s ear for dialogue is incredible. His ability to capture the details of human selfishness (for this is not a book about Good Samaritans) and the tangled mess of bureaucracy (this is also a satire on the modern age of red tape) creates a world where the reader, who should feel like ALBERT WHITBRACE that they are drowning in a sea of madness, is buoyed up by laughter and a sheer helplessness at the force of Simpson’s imagination.
As an introduction to Wally’s work, Harry Bleachbaker is accessibly hilarious as well as being fairly easy to find online. As a stand-alone novel, there is very little like it, however you choose to read it. Be careful, though: it will lure the reader into the world of N. F. Simpson, from which, thank God, there is no escape.
David Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Night Train, was published in September 2020. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.
Harry Bleachbaker, by NF Simpson London: Harrap, 1976
Back in August 2021, when I interviewed Michael Walmer about his independent press MichaelWalmer.com, which has reissued dozens of fine neglected books, he asked if I knew anything about the 1960s British author Jessamy Morrison: “I’m wondering whether or not you’ve looked into her,” he wrote — “Who she actually was — if indeed it was only one person. My searching so far has revealed nothing.”
The name was completely new to me, and that in itself is an increasingly uncommon thing.
Well, having since tracked down, purchased, and read four of Jessamy Morrison’s novels and awaiting a fifth to make its way from South Africa, I can answer Michael’s inquiry. I’ve looked into her, who she actually was.
And my searching so far has revealed nothing.
According to the British Library’s catalogue, Jessamy Morrison is a pseudonym. Having checked with the Society of Authors, Penguin Random House (which now owns the backlist of Morrison’s original publisher, W. H. Allen), and several major literary agencies, I’ve been unable to find any record outside library catalogues and a handful of bookseller listings.
What’s worse, I’m no longer even sure that Jessamy Morrison was, in reality, a she or a he. Or both.
Three of Morrison’s books have male narrators, which in itself offers no clue. Plenty of women have written novels with male leads and male narrators.
Of the very, very little that was written about Morrison’s books even when they first came out, the one thing consistently mentioned in reviews was the “unusual” nature of their subjects. Given that these books came out when England was just learning how to swing, that was undoubtedly code for homosexuality. W. H. Allen dropped a big, unsubtle hint on the cover of Morrison’s first novel The No-Road (1963) by announcing it as “A brilliant new novel in the tradition of The Well of Loneliness” — Radclyffe Hall’s one-scandalous novel of lesbian love. And that’s confirmed through the rave reviews that Barbara Grier, a pioneering lesbian writer and publisher, wrote for The Ladder, a 1960s lesbian journal, in her identity as Gene Damon.
Grier delighted in the ways in which Morrison puts the reader into the minds of men who consider themselves urbane and intelligent and then demonstrating beyond all doubt that they’re as thick as bricks when it comes to understanding women.
Gerald Milton, for example, acknowledges at the very start of The No-Road that he failed to see what was going on with his wife Clarissa: “One needs detachment in order to know. Detachment is easy when one isn’t involved.” He admits that he was “involved up to the neck,” yet still prides himself in thinking that “I retained my detachment to the last.”
Gerald and Clarissa are a fairly conventional upper-middle-class English couple. He is a shipbroker whose business to various European ports and Clarissa’s primary passion is for horses. They enjoyed a very British sex life, “neither of us attaching too much or too little importance to sex.” Gerald does share with the reader that he takes the occasional opportunities that arise on business trips through “a drink too many but never by planning or premeditation.”
On a holiday to Majorca, the Miltons encounter a boisterous group at a restaurant that Clarissa suggests are probably gay men and women but that Gerald dismisses as simply loud and unpleasant. One of the group, a self-confident woman named Diana Upton, however, befriends Clarissa on the beach and soon the two are inseparably. After their time on the island, though, the Miltons return to London on schedule.
Within a few weeks, however, Diana Upton arrives in London and begins making frequent calls on the Milton house. The two women go out riding together. Gradually, even Gerald starts to realize they’re having an affair. Though he puts all the blame of Diana as the devious seductress, he condemns Clarissa as a deviant:
I know, I said to myself, there are women homosexuals the same way as male homosexuals, but I know too that society has to defend itself against them. In my own nest was an enemy of society and to my misfortune the enemy happened to be my wife. And what she had down was in my eyes, and according to my sense and rules or morals, almost as illegal as murder. There are no extenuating circumstances for sexual depravity.
Clarissa agrees to end the affair and Gerald agrees to bring in Jill, a rather plain and dumpy woman in her thirties, to help with the children and household matters in consideration. And all is forgotten, bygones easily becoming bygones.
And so, this particular story might end, were it not for Gerald’s indominable obtuseness. For him, Clarissa’s affair was a disgraceful but forgivable dalliance. For her, it was a transformative experience. As John Lee Hooker’s mother observes in “Boogie Chillen,” once the boogie-woogie’s in someone, “it’s got to come out.” Or, to put it another way, three into two won’t go. And it’s not Gerald the Upright who fails to live happily ever after.
Herbert Brownlow, the narrator of Morrison’s next book, The Wind Has Two Edges (1964), is equally obtuse but perhaps a bit less hypocritical in his propriety. Herbert has retired from civil service to a flat in a Channel-side town neither too touristy for comfortable nor too dull to be deadly, where he intends to write the definitive history of administration.
His sole acquaintance is Stephen, a fellow civil servant who seems, upon their meeting again, to have become somewhat too louche and fond of drink for Herbert’s taste. Stephen has also made friends with two young, noisy, and brutish brothers named Alan and Michael. They spill drinks, jostle tables, make lewd comments about girls, and generally unsettle Herbert when he tries to have a quiet drink in the pub with his old friend.
Herbert becomes particularly offended by the brothers when they begin toying with the affections of Beryl, the beautiful and apparently strait-laced granddaughter of his landlady. In hopes of putting affairs back into good order, Herbert ends up thoroughly entangled in lives his entire worldview makes him ill-prepared to deal with. He attempts to play matchmaker, then peacemaker, and finally, the knight in shining armor to resolve matters in what, to him, seems a straightforward and rational manner.
Unlike Gerald Milton, however, when the facts of the situation — which include the efforts of several gay men and women to love as they choose without running afoul of the law or their community — are make clear to him, it is Herbert who adapts his values and put friendship ahead of such labels as “deviant” or “enemy of society”: “If you want to give it a label, Beryl had said on that unfortunate morning, then call me a lesbian. I could not. For I remembered only two nice and happy girls who in their harmonious way had given me a delightful meal.”
His error in trying to make sense of affairs deliberately convoluted to disguise the actual sexual orientation of its participants, as he admits in the end, was failing to consider “the human element.” The Wind Has Two Edges reminded me very much of Kathleen Sully’s novel Merrily to the Grave, similarly set in a house in a Channel-side town and similarly about how a collection of society’s outcasts and misfits can find community and acceptance together.
If The Wind Has Two Edges ends in a sort of sadder-and-wiser sunset glow, Morrison’s third novel The Girl from Paris (1965) opens with a scene certain to offend conventional British proprieties of its time. Duncan Diplock (which sounds like a name out of Catch-22) is trolling the streets of Montparnasse after midnight in search of a prostitute. Not just any prostitute, however, and not, as you might expect, for sex. Duncan is on a recruiting trip. He’s looking for a suitably attractive and refined prostitute to bring back to London and install in his mate Martin’s call-girl service. Duncan and his wife will host her as, ostensibly, an au pair to fool the immigration authorities, while she earns a small fortune for Martin by bringing in a better class of client.
Duncan selects Josette, a stunningly beautiful widow on the stroll to pay for her daughter’s care in a safe and respectable country home. After her initial surprise when Duncan starts talking business instead of hopping into bed, the wheels in her head begin turning and she negotiates a tough bargain: she will take the job for just one year and at a higher than planned rate.
Once settled London, though, Josette proves an agent of chaos — sexually, emotionally, financially, and practically. Martin the pimp falls in love with her, Duncan’s wife Wendy is seduced by her, a wealthy and shallow young lord contemplates marrying her, and Duncan simply struggles to keep it all from attracting the attention of the police. Josette, as he slowly realizes, is calculating and acting at a level of self-interest that makes the rest of the cast look like hapless amateurs. While their lives fall to pieces, Josette is able to return to Paris with a tidy sum to open a dressmaking business with — her intent all along.
The Girl from Paris is not a particularly profound book, but Morrison is quite effective in making Josette’s highly unconventional position seem more balanced than that of any of the lovestruck or simply bewildered English men and women around her. And as with all of the Morrison novels I’ve read so far, it flies like the wind. You keep turning the pages in each out of fascination, wondering just where this is all going.
I haven’t located a copy of Morrison’s rarest novel, Rusty (1967), which seems to be about the affair between a wild ingenue and a prominent author, and I’m still waiting to get my copy of The Office Party (1967), which was the only one to be widely reviewed. But the sixth and last novel, The Widow (1972), offers a few hints that clarify, if not solve, the mystery of Jessamy Morrison.
The Widow has, again, a male narrator. Nigel Hood is a successful art dealer dealing with an exclusive network of artists and clients. While in Durban to arrange a sale, he runs into an old Oxford friend, a South African poet named Roy Banting. After great initial fame and critical success, Banting has become something of a has-been, spending much of his time building an elaborate garden on a country estate and looked after by his adoring wife Charlotte Ann.
When Roy dies suddenly of a heart attack, Nigel finds himself enlisted into the roles of executor, counselor, and problem solver. The root of the problem is that Roy and Charlotte Ann’s marriage was a fake. He’d married a sexy but troubled undergraduate while teaching in the U.S. and never managed to secure a proper divorce. And now Charlotte Ann is pregnant with Roy’s child. So, will the child be a bastard or will Roy be revealed as a bigamist? This leads Nigel to devise an elaborate charade with all the complexities of a Feydeau farce and none of the humor.
Morrison spins out the tale with the usual flair for convolutions, but this time around it’s a little like listening to a very long-winded explanation of a situation you weren’t much interested in to start with. “Yes, yes,” I found myself saying, “get on with it.” If the real author behind Jessamy Morrison gave up publishing after The Widow, it may simply have been that he or she ran out of ideas.
I say he or she because I found it difficult to convince myself that The Widow was written by anyone but a man. Not only is there not the slightest hint of anything but good old-fashioned heterosexuality going on, but the book is riddled with one of the most notorious tells of male writers: a fixation about breast size. Nigel makes sure the reader knows that Charlotte Ann is well-endowed while Nancy, his long-time girlfriend, is not. He even makes sure we are forced to witness a scene in which Charlotte Ann lactates for his edification.
Perhaps this alone is not enough to prove that Jessamy Morrison was, in fact, a male author, but it certainly raises questions. Why would a man take a woman’s name and then publish novels written from a man’s perspective? The Wind Has Two Edges aside, is the lesbian element in two of the other three novels a serious attempt to stimulate a conversation about the complexities of gender and sexual preferences, or is it simply a literate version of the very old story of a guy trying to talk his wife or girlfriend into a threesome with one of her friends?
I still hope to unravel the mystery of Jessamy Morrison, but at this point it’s more out of curiosity than any interest in trying to bring a lost-lost talent back to light. Three of the four novels discussed here may have some value as artifacts of a time when sexual mores in England were beginning to change, but only The Wind Has Two Edges has more than average merit.
I welcome any assistance any reader of this piece might be able to lend in solving this mystery. It would still be nice to know what was going on with these books. If nothing else, they are certainly atypical for their time.
The No-Road, The Wind Has Two Edges, The Girl from Paris, and The Widow were all published by W. H. Allen in London.
Brooks Peters, who had a wonderful website devoted to neglected gay writers before he lost it to Russian hackers, wrote me back in 2008 to recommend Jane White’s 1967 novel Quarry:
It’s a British novel from 1960s about three adolescent boys who kidnap a boy and keep him in a cave in a quarry. It’s been compared to Lord of the Flies. It got great reviews when it came out. I’ve just finished it and thought it was extremely well done. But a real enigma. I can’t figure out what it is really about except perhaps the breakdown of society
Photo of Jane White, from the dust jacket of Quarry.
The post I wrote building on Brooks’ recommendation produced far more comments than usual. Some were about the book, but most were about White herself — including one from her son Martin Brady, a specialist in German literature and film at King’s College London. White was her maiden name and she was known in real life as Jane Brady, who taught at St. Catherine’s School in Surrey. She wrote seven novels between 1967 and 1979, as well as a memoir, Norfolk Child, published in 1973. She contracted multiple sclerosis in her forties, however, and was forced to stop teaching and writing. At a time when treatments for MS were few and ineffective, and, in her son’s words, “made what I believe was a brave decision to get out before things got (more) unbearable,” dying in 1985 at the age of 51.
I’ve long felt that Jane White greatly redeserved rediscovery, but must confess that while I collected all her books, I read none of them until last year, when I took Norfolk Child along when we spent a long and quiet Christmas break at a house located about ten miles from the isolated Norfolk farm where White grew up. I then tucked into Quarry, which is also set in the Norfolk countryside.
There is nothing bucolic about this novel, however. In fact, it simmers with sense of the danger that’s fostered by apathy. Early in the book, three teenagers — Todd, Randy, and Carter — persuade a younger boy to come with them to a cave in the side of an abandoned quarry near their town. The boy, who’s never given a name and who seems to lack any parent or guardian to notice his absence, is nothing but an abstract victim for them to toy with. “Who do you think he is?” Randy asks Todd.
The question never gets answered. Nor does the boy help. He seems, in fact, to be happy to leave his identity ambiguous. “But who are you,” Todd asks him after a few days. “You know who I am,” he replies. When asked for his name, he answers, “Fred. Or Bert. Or Jim. Anything will do — I really don’t mind.”
The friends aren’t even quite sure what they intend to do with the boy. All three are products of the 1960s, when parents let children — or at least boys — spend most summer and weekend days running around outside with little sense of how they spent the time. “Well? Where’ve you been?” Cater’s mother asks him. “Up at the quarry.” “Oh, the quarry again,” she concludes, moving on to another subject. And so, it’s easy for them to smuggle small amounts of food that they take to the boy.
Cover of first US edition of Quarry.
White deliberately leaves the boy’s situation abiguous. He’s not quite free to leave but neither is he restrained like a prisoner intent on escape. They soon decide, though, to build a cover for the cave that’s both shelter and jail. This being the 1960s, Carter is able to get the materials by simply sneaking into a nearby construction site one evening and taking what he needs. They see the building of the wall as a “Boy’s Own” project: “You’re making a good job of that, Randy,” says Carter. “I like doing it,” Randy tells him. “I like making things.”
The first casualty, however, isn’t the boy but a girl who wanders into the quarry and begins exploring. They chase her away, through a woods, and onto a road where she’s knocked down and killed by a passing motorcycle. Carter’s mother reads the news of the accident with as little interest as if looking at yesterday’s temperature.
The apathy of the adult world toward the teenage boys creates a vacuum which they are allowed to fill with their own fantasies, some sinister, some as childish as playing at being pirates. Randy and Todd, however, are near the end of secondary school, soon to be pushed out to join the adults. They look upon that prospect with complete uninterest. Far better to remain in the limbo of teenage life, able to take a parent’s car for joy-riding but never expected to pay for the fuel.
Cover of US paperback edition of Quarry.
Their toying with the boy, however, must come to an end, and when it does, the result is brutal but almost anticlimactic. The boy’s death seems almost as unreal as has his weeks of uncomplaining imprisonment.
Brooks Peters wrote, “I can’t figure out what it is really about except perhaps the breakdown of society.” I think he was half-right. I think that Quarry isn’t about the breakdown of society but about a society that has already broken down without realizing it. Most of the adults in the book seem to be sleepwalking through their lives. If there is a voice at the back of their heads to urge them to look a little more closely into what their children are up to, it’s tiny and faint, almost inaudible.
It was perhaps unsurprising that Quarry was compared to Lord of the Flies by numerous reviewers. Golding’s stranded schoolboys, though, had far richer imaginations than White’s teenagers. The violence of Randy, Todd, and Carter is not savage but mundane. Their captive boy is a welcome diversion from their otherwise tedious lives, but when he becomes an impediment, they have no choice but to make him go away, like disposing of the sheet of newspaper after finishing a packet of chips.
At the time it was published, Quarry seemed shocking to readers and reviewers, but after Columbine and countless other school shootings in America, after the murder of James Bulger in England, I suspect it will seem either prescient or all too numbingly familiar. What it will not seem like is the work of a private school English teacher in her offtime.
Quarry, by Jane White London: Michael Joseph, 1967 New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967
“At the office Miss Finlay was something of a dark horse.” That opening line hooked me.
A while ago, someone on Twitter posted a picture of Give Me Your Answer Do in answer to a request for books that changed readers lives. I’m always intrigued when I come across a book that’s completely new to me, and this one was a blank slate. The poster provided no further information, but the sheer scarcity of the book (fewer than five copies for sale) was enough for me to take the plunge.
There’s something comfortably nonconformist about Give Me Your Answer Do. This might have been what made the book a life changer for its fan on Twitter.
Miss Finlay, Marchant’s heroine, is both dark horse and ugle duckling. She’s “tall and ungainly, with large feet and hands which made sudden, gawky movements. Her hair was flat, her upper teeth protruded, and she wore spectacles with plain, tortoise-shell rims.” Her fellow typists at Boothby, Gold & Co. think she looks “as if she scrubbed herself very regularly with carbolic soap.”
Miss Finlay engages with the other women at Boothby, Gold as little as possible without seeming rude, offers nothing about her private life. Which is probably wise. To them, her practical diversions when off work — mostly taking long bicycle rides into the countryside beyond London — would merely confirm she is as dull as they think. And her imaginative diversions would have been too wild and grand for their sedate little office.
For Miss Finlay — Margaret, not that anyone seems interested in her first name — has for many years carried on a passionate friendship with a large white horse named Ponikwer Peter Aylestone Bradshaw, or Bradshaw for short. Through dreary years at a bleak girls’ boarding school and further years of workday routine at Boothy, Gold followed by solitary nights in her little coldwater flat, Bradshaw has comforted and amused Margaret.
Margaret’s mother was happy to be rid of the girl. Beautiful and easily bored, she’d only had the child because an abortion was too hard to obtain and she’d only married Margaret’s father to put a wrapper of propriety around her pregnancy. Once Margaret could be put in the care of someone else, her mother could resume amusing herself with handsome and vapid men like her husband’s former commanding officer, Margaret’s real father. And to keep up with Margaret’s school fees and her mother’s expensive tastes in clothes and men, her father dutifully returns to labor at the coalface in India.
Socially awkward, physically inept, and deeply introverted, Margaret finds the experience of boarding school near unbearable. It’s only the odd moments when she can escape to the WC, lock herself into a stall that she has any privacy, and carry on a conversation with Bradshaw that can find any respite. He is the perfect companion: understanding, a good listener, always ready with a hug. She lulls herself to sleep each night imagining herself in the strong, protective arms (legs?) of Bradshaw.
When school comes to an end, Margaret’s mother deems her too ugly to be marriagable material and so packs her off to London to find secretarial work. Margaret soon manages to find herself a room of her own: a coldwater flat with a WC down the hall, perhaps, but a haven nonetheless. Within its four walls, she is free to paint the ceiling yellow, to fix the food she likes, and to carry on long conversations with Bradshaw.
Then, one day, Mr. Bacon, a divorced Yorkshireman as uncomfortable in his own skin as Margaret, invites her on a Saturday outing. One outing leads to another and soon companionship blends into friendship and begins to blend into … well, neither one of them feels quite comfortable putting a name on it. These are two extremely introverted people.
We know, of course, that a collision between Margaret’s fantasy world and her real world is inevitable, but the tension derives from our uncertainty over just how disastrous that crash will be. I’ll just say that Peter Marchant would have had Hollywood rom-com producers knocking on his door if he’d published this book in the 1990s instead of 1960. His ending is suspenseful, sappy, and satisfying in equal measure.
Marchant dedicated the book to Marguerite Young. Yes, the Miss Macintosh, My Darling Marguerite Young. Marchant had followed an unusual path to arrive at Young’s seminar at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in the late 1950s. He’d taken an MA in the classics at Cambridge and taught a variety of subjects while serving in the British Army Training Service, then emigrated to Iowa, where he both taught in the School of Education and attended the Writer’s Workshop.
“I’ve heard you have a story about a girl with an imaginary pony,” Young said to Marchant soon after meeting him. Marchant told her it was a flop, having been rejected by magazines and even his agent. “T’d like to read it,” she insisted.
Marchant had few hopes for the story. If it was going to survive and get published, it would have to be cut back severely.
No, Young told him: “You must let it grow. It’s a treatment — it needs expansion.”
When he next brought her a draft, it had grown to over eighty pages. Young’s criticism was harsh but supportive: “With unerring ruthlessness,” she said, “you’ve crossed out the best parts of your writing…. You’ve massacred all your flowers, leaving only the bare branches. She pointed out a passage where Margaret is sitting alone on a hillside. Mr. Bacon, in a fit of passion, has tried to kiss her — an act that she receives like a full-fledged sexual assault.
“She saw the sun glittering on hothouse roofs and wondered why it didn’t crack from the heat,” Young read. “Why did you cut it?” she asked.
“It seemed to me nonsense. Hothouse roofs don’t crack from sunlight.”
“Her fear of sex has nothing to do with her fantasy about glass shattering? Come, now,” Young scolded him.
“Oh,” said Marchant. The lightbulbs were beginning to come on. Over the next weeks, Marchant wrote furiously, soon producing a 300-page manuscript he turned in as his MA thesis for the workshop. He sold the book to the British publisher Michael Joseph, which released the book in 1960. It garnered a few reviews, but its combination of an unconventional heroine and a theme of escape through fantasy was perhaps a little too far ahead of its time. The most frequently-used adjective in its review was “odd” — which probably turned folks off in that conformist day but ought to pique the interest of today’s readers. I think the book would do very well if reissued now.
Marchant put fiction behind him after publishing Give Me Your Answer Do. According to his obituary, he stayed in academia, becoming a specialist in the 19th century British novel and teaching for decades at Penn State and the State University of New York – Brockport. Instead, it was his wife, Mary Elsie Robertson, who focused on fiction, writing a half dozen novels starting with After Freud in 1981. A Quaker, holder of a black belt in judo, and a historian of the Holocaust, Marchant must have been a remarkable man, and Give Me Your Answer Do deserves a high place in any list of his accomplishments.
Give Me Your Answer Do, by Peter Marchant London: Michael Joseph, 1960
Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.
David Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Night Train, was published in September 2020. You can find out more at 
