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An Update on the Recovered Books Series from Boiler House Press

The Recovered Books logo.

I haven’t made much noise about the Recovered Books series I’m editing for Boiler House Press, but as we will soon release our sixth title, Gertrude Trevelyan’s Two Thousand Million Man-Power, I thought it was worth sharing a look back at our first year and a look at where we’re headed for 2023 and 2024.

After I finished my dissertation (thesis in the U.S.) on Virginia Faulkner for the MA Biography/Creative Non-fiction program at the University of East Anglia and while my wife and I were awaiting the end of COVID lockdowns to make our move back to the U.S., I approached Nathan Hamilton, the publisher at Boiler House Press and director of the University Publishing Project at UEA, and offered to help with any publication chores he had. As an ‘in at the deep-end’ training exercise, he asked me to usher the first four titles in its Beyond Criticism series to publication and I was able to see them through to release in May 2021.

While working on this project, I asked Nathan if he would be interested in publishing one of my favorites of the hundreds of books I’ve featured on this site: Herbert Clyde Lewis’s Gentleman Overboard. I had already confirmed with Lewis’s son Michael that the book was in the public domain and I felt it could fine a small but receptive readership based on the success of its Spanish edition from La Bestia Equilatera in Buenos Aires. “Why not do a whole series?” he responded. He invited me to put together a proposal and with him to form an editorial board.

Luckily, Nathan had done some groundwork already with two UEA professors, Thomas Smith and Hilary Emmett. Working with Tom and Hilary, he’d devised a project whereby, through an undergraduate module led by Thomas and Hilary studying 19th century American children’s literature, they were preparing to publish Susan Coolidge’s novel What Katy Did. Although well-known in the U.S., the book hadn’t been available in the U.K. for some years.

So, we agreed to join forces and establish Recovered Books as a series covering both adult and children’s book. As announced in The Bookseller in July 2021, the aim of the series is to bring “unfairly forgotten books of exceptional merit and resounding relevance to the attention of today’s engaged readers.” We set to work on getting What Katy Did and Gentleman Overboard ready for printing and distribution, but also on a production plan for further titles in 2022 and beyond.

We were fortunate to be able to work with some of UPP’s network of terrific book designers. Nathan arranged for two designers who’d worked on other UEA Publishing Project publications. Emily Benton worked with Thomas and Hilary’s students to design What Katy Did for maximum accessibility by a variety of readers, including those with reading challenges such as dyslexia, and Louise Aspinall worked with me to adapt the Boiler House Press fiction design and come up with the logo for Recovered Books.

Even though no joke is improved by an explanation, I will point out that the logo has a couple of them. It shows a book with the letters RE on the cover (RE-covered, see?) and the lower right edge (the pages) incorporates the “smokestacks” logo of Boiler House Press. The smokestacks commemorate the first building erected on the UEA campus: the heating plant (boiler house).

Building further on elements of Boiler House Press’ branding, Louise helped us establish a template for the series that maintains a consistent look and feel while including a variety of elements unique to each title. The cover design is the most obvious variable, of course. Louise created a modern adaptation of the original U.S. dust jacket for Gentleman Overboard that conveys in simple, powerful terms the predicament of the novel’s forlorn hero, Henry Preston Standish. It’s a design, I’m happy to announce, is being used for the German edition of the book, Gentleman über Bord, due out from Mare Books in March 2023.

The cover designs of the 1937 (left) and 2021 (right) editions of Gentleman Overboard.

Other design elements that vary with each title include a full-page photo of the author opposite the title page and a glyph (the life preserver on the title page) used throughout the book as a divider.

The facing and title pages from Gentleman Overboard.

We also included two-page images for the endpapers at the start and end of each book, images that convey a sense of the narrative or the spirit of the book. In this case, an advertisement for a cruise of the type Standish takes from Honolulu before his unfortunate accident and a barren moonlight seascape — the emptiness left after he goes under for the last time.

The front and back endpaper illustrations from Gentleman Overboard.

For me, the biggest challenge was laying out the plan for 2022 and beyond. Or rather, carrying out the plan. For each title, unless it’s in the public domain — and most of our Recovered Books titles are not — three contracts have to be established: one for the legacy permissions, one for the book’s introduction, and one for its afterword. With the legacy permissions, the primary obstacle is often the difficulty in locating who has the legal authority to sign such an agreement. I have been lucky in most cases so far, but a number of the books I’d most like to reissue are still on hold as we continue our hunt for the responsible legatees.

One of our aims for the Recovered Books series is to help current readers discover these wonderful books, and a short introduction by a contemporary writer with some name recognition is part of how we do that. We’ve been lucky in attracting the support of writers such as George Szirtes, Vivian Gornick, Julia Blackburn, and Rachel Hore to this end. But another aim is to encourage further study and research, to help enrich the understanding of the canon by bringing these neglected books and writers back into English departments. And for that, we’re recruiting scholars such as Dr. Paula Rabinowitz, professor emerita of the University of Minnesota and Dr. Nicola Darwood of the University of Bedfordshire, to write afterwords placing each book in its historical and literary context.

This May, we released two titles in the series. Stella Benson’s Pull Devil, Pull Baker is a book that’s fascinated me ever since I stumbled across it a Missoula bookstore back in 2007 and wrote about it here. It’s easily one of the least classifiable books I’ve ever come across: part memoir, part fantasy, part criticism, part melodrama, part revisionism — really a book that anticipates by decades the sort of fiction/nonfiction hybrids that are regarded as uniquely 21st century inventions. Pull Devil, Pull Baker is so odd that after Julia Blackburn, who generously agreed to consider writing the introduction, first read it, she wrote me asking if I would release her from the commitment. Fortunately, I convinced her to take another look and she reached a perhaps grudging truce with Stella Benson’s mercurial creation.

Our second May release proved unexpectedly satisfying. I had been in contact with the journalist and Oscar-winning filmmaker Peter Davis after writing about Life Signs, a novel written by his first wife Johanna Davis. Peter is the son of the film producer Frank Davis, one of Irving Thalberg’s right-hand men, and Tess Slesinger, who wrote several works of fiction before moving to Hollywood, becoming a screenwriter, and marrying Davis, and he confirmed that his mother’s short stories, which had been collected several times, were out of print. Peter was delighted to work with us to publish a new collection and suggested that we look into Slesinger’s uncollected work as well. With help from UEA’s library, I was able to obtain copies of all Slesinger’s uncollected stories and sketches, which appeared in magazines ranging from The New Yorker and Vanity Fair to small magazines such as Pagany and This Quarter. He also agreed that we would use the title of Slesinger’s first collection, Time: The Present, instead of that of the 1971 collection he helped edit (On Being Told That Her Second Husband Has Taken His First Lover and Other Stories). I think it’s safe to say that the result is the single best introduction to Tess Slesinger’s short fiction and a collection that merits a place in the American literature section of any college library.

We had a bit of a puzzle over the cover for Pull Devil, Pull Baker. The title comes from an expression connoting a contest between two opposing forces, but in this case, the opposing forces are Stella Benson’s sense of truth and the significantly more fantastic sense of her devil, the down-and-out Russian nobleman Count Nicolas de Toulouse Lautrec De Savine. Louise Aspinall came up with a simple, striking image of a knotted rope caught midway between unseen hands pulling against each other. I found the photo we used for Slesinger’s Time: The Present as an illustration for “For Better, For Worse,” a story that appeared in a long-defunct women’s magazine called The Delineator, but it was Louise who had the brilliant idea to tint it a deep, dramatic purple. I fell in love with it the moment I first saw it attached to her email.

Covers for the Recovered Books editions of Pull Devil, Pull Baker and Time: The Present.

This month, we have two more books coming out. From Thomas Smith and Hilary Emmett we have Five Little Peppers & How They Grew by Margaret Sidney, again with design and editorial approach led by their undergraduate students. And we are bringing out what I hope will be the first of three or four titles by Gertrude (G. E.) Trevelyan, a writer I’ve been championing since learning of her work back in 2018. Despite its awkward title, Two Thousand Million Man-Power, which I wrote about here, is probably Trevelyan’s most accessible title, a realistic account of the lives of a couple, Katharine and Robert, from New Year’s Eve 1919 to the funeral of King George V in 1936. Trevelyan was influenced by John Dos Passos’s U. S. A.trilogy and incorporates snippets of newspaper headlines and radio reports into her text, creating a vivid picture of English life during this period. At the same time, it’s a caustic view of life in a capitalist society, one as radical in its outlook as George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. I hope that Two Thousand Million Man-Power will build upon the interest in Trevelyan’s work that started with the Abandoned Bookshop’s reissue of Appius and Virginia two years ago.

Covers of the Recovered Books editions of The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew and Two Thousand Million Man-Power.

Looking ahead, we have a full plate of reissues lined up for 2023. In May, we will release two books:

Quarry, by Jane White
I wrote about this, White’s first novel, published in 1967, a year ago. Having read the book again several times in the course of preparing the text, I can say that this is among the most unsettling books I’ve ever read. White manages to combine a story full of evil and violence with a tone that’s almost eerily normal and dispassionate. It will not be a book people like. I do think, though, it will be a book that gets under the skin — and a book that revives interest in one of the more challenging English novelists of the 1960s and 1970s, a writer long overdue for recognition. Anne Billson is writing the introduction and Dr. Helen Hughes of the University of Sussex (and White’s daughter-in-law) the afterword.

The Sanity Inspectors, by Friedrich Deich
This black comedy about the moral and intellectural difficulty of trying to remain good in an evil system was brought to us by Dr. Chris Maloney, a member of our editorial board and a psychotherapist with deep experience in social causes. The book was first published in 1955 and translated soon after into English. We were honored that the Hoffnung Partnership agreed to let us reuse Gerard Hoffnung’s original dust jacket illustration for our own cover. Chris Maloney wrote the afterword and the historian and novelist Sinclair McKay contributed the introduction.

In September 2023, we’re publishing two books:

William’s Wife, by Gertrude Trevelyan
I will be eager to see how this book is received. Trevelyan’s story of how Jane Chirp goes from being a lady’s companion to scavenging for discarded produce in the gutters and dustbins of London’s markets is unlike anything I know of in English fiction of the 1930s. It’s one of the most powerful accounts of psychological breakdown I know of, and all the more so because so much of the damage is self-inflicted. Pritchett and PEN/Ackerley prize winning author Alice Jolly will provide the introduction and Dr. Ann Kennedy Smith is writing the afterword.

Selected Poetry and Prose, by Genevieve Taggard
I discovered Genevieve Taggard’s work back in 2015 and wrote a long piece about it here. Taggard is certainly the most neglected of the major American modernist poets. Her work is full of powerful images and rooted in both a love of nature and a passion for social justice. In addition, she wrote a number of autobiographical and critical essays that are just too strong and good not to be in print. And yet, since her death in 1948, there has been no comprehensive collection of her work. I’m pleased to be working with Dr. Anne Hammond, who’s editing and providing critical commentary for the collection and the poet and biographer Terese Svoboda, who’s providing the introduction.

In November 2023, we’re bringing out three books:

Stories by Lydia Maria Child
This collection of children’s stories by an American abolitionist and activist for the rights of woman and indigenous people will be produced by Thomas Smith and Hilary Emmett’s undergraduate programme.

No More Giants, by Joaquina Ballard Howles
I’m really excited about this title. A story about a young woman growing up on a rance in remote northern Nevada belongs on the shelf beside Joan Didion’s early novels of California — yet it’s never been published in the United States. As I wrote here in 2021, No More Giants was published in England as part of the Hutchinson New Authors series in 1966 and quickly forgotten. The subject probably held little interest for English readers, and so the book vanished. I hope that Howles, who is in her nineties and living in London now, will be able to see her book reach U. S. readers for the first time. Judy Blunt, who directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana is writing the introduction and Dr. Nancy Cook, an expert in literature of the American West, is writing the afterword.

Time Stood Still, by Paul Cohen-Portheim
This account of Cohen-Portheim’s confinement in England as an enemy alien during World War One is, in my opinion, one of the truly great works of humanism. A man who worked as a theatrical designer, Cohen-Portheim was not physically abused or singled out for mistreatment. Yet as he shows in moving terms, the fact of being imprisoned for no crime other than having been born in the wrong country was a punshment of a thousand little cuts: “The worst tortures of camp life were due to the small failings of one’s fellow creatures everlastingly in evidence, and to unimportant little tricks endlessly repeated.” We are fortunate to have this little classic introduced by Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps and other books, and an afterward written by Dr. Panikos Panayi of DeMontfort University, author of Prisoners of Britain: German Civilian and Combatant Internees During the First World War.

We’re still working on the details of our plan for 2024, but I can announce at least the following titles:

Mortal Leap, by MacDonald Harris
I first discovered this book back in 1980 and as I wrote here, Mortal Leap was one of the works that convinced me that there were riches to be found in unknown and long-forgotten books. Mortal Leap has a small but passionate following on Goodreads and used copies have become almost impossible to locate.
• A new translation of Else Jerusalem’s 1909 novel Der heilige Skarabäus
After I wrote about the first English translaton of this book as The Red House, I was contacted by Dr. Stephanie Ortega of the University of Texas, who is currently finishing a new translation. This version will, for the first time, make the complete text of Jerusalem’s novel about a house of prostitution in Vienna available to English readers.
Broken Images, by John Guest
Over the years, I’ve had several friends pull out of copy of Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek and read from it in a fever of excitement over the power and beauty of its prose. I’ve had that same feeling about Broken Images since I first read it in 2014. As I wrote in my essay about it, Broken Images shares with its reader “a sensibility to life that never, despite all the drudgery and monotony of Army life and all the strains and fatigue of combat, seems anything less than fresh and alert.” I like to call it the most beautiful book written about World War Two, despite that seeming an oxymoron. I’m delighted to be able to bring this back to readers.
Trance by Appointment, by Gertrude Trevelyan
This was Trevelyan’s last novel. Looking back at what I first wrote about this book in 2019, I can see how much has changed. “I’m not sure what the point of this post is,” I wrote then, gloomy about the prospect of ever seeing Trevelyan’s amazing books back in print — or even noticed. Now, I can say that it looks like six out of Trevelyan’s eight novels should be back in print by the end of 2024, just five years later. I am eager to see if other readers find her work as stunning as I did when I first encountered it.

We have yet more candidates in development, but it looks like Recovered Books is slowly becoming what I hoped it could be when Nathan Hamilton invited me to put the series together: a small but significant project in bringing lesser-known books and writers back to the attention of both readers and scholars.

Herbert Clyde Lewis and the Rescue of Gentleman Overboard: A Work in Progress

“Listen to me! Somebody please listen!” cries Henry Preston Standish, the hero of Herbert Clyde Lewis’s 1937 novel, Gentleman Overboard, as he struggles to stay afloat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, exhausted and past hope of rescue. “But of course nobody was there to listen,” Lewis wrote, “and Standish considered the lack of an audience the meanest trick of all.” Lewis died of a heart attack at the age of 41, broke, out of work and alone in the middle of New York City, a victim of Hollywood blacklisting, his three novels long out of print: a writer who’d lost his audience. No one came to rescue him. As long as a writer’s words are preserved, though, there is a chance of his work being rescued. In the case of Gentleman Overboard, it took over seventy years for someone to spot the book, lost in the ocean of forgotten books, and the rescuers came from three different continents. Lewis’s story of one man dying alone and forgotten is now being read by thousands who find it speaks to a sense of “shared loneliness.”

Born in Brooklyn in 1909, Lewis was the second son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His mother Clara came to the U.S. with her family in 1887 at the age of two. His father Hyman arrived a year later at the age of thirteen, apprenticed to work for his older brother Samuel as a tailor. By the time Herbert was born, the Lewises were living in the Brownsville neighborhood around Tompkins and Lafayette Avenues. The area was then the heart of the largest Jewish community outside Europe, the first stop for tens of thousands of like Lewis’s parents, immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe. Between 1890 and 1915, the number of Jews living in New York City jumped from under 100,000 to nearly one million. The name Lewis was Anglicized from Luria and Hyman and Clara helped ease their sons’ integration into American life by giving them solidly Anglo-Saxon names: Alfred Joseph, Herbert Clyde and Benjamin George.

For Herbert Clyde Lewis, Brownsville was the quintessential American melting pot — at least in hindsight. In 1943, he wrote an article titled “Back Home” for The Los Angeles Times about visiting his boyhood streets for the first time in twenty years. “As I walked slowly around the block and let the memories flood back,” he wrote, “it seemed to me that my old neighborhood was a miracle—the greatest miracle that had ever visited the earth. Here, for the first time, people came from all the corners of Europe, the Near East and China — and lived side by side in close quarters and did not cut each other’s throats.” There was something in the air, he believed, “that made us feel maybe the other fellow’s beliefs and background were all right too.”

However rosy Lewis’s memories of his boyhood in Brownsville may have been, he left home early and quickly established what became a lifelong pattern of short stays and frequent moves. He quit high school at the age of sixteen, worked a variety of jobs with local newspapers, briefly attended both New York University and the College of the City of New York (finding “neither institution suited him”), then spent the winter of 1929-1930 in Paris. He returned to America in March 1930, took a job as a sports reporter in Newark, New Jersey, then moved nearly halfway across the world to Shanghai, China. He spent the next two years there working as a reporter for The China Press and The Shanghai Evening Post.

Herbert Clyde Lewis in his early 20s
Herbert Clyde Lewis in his early 20s, courtesy of Michael Lewis

Living in China may have satisfied his appetite for travel at first. In early 1933, Lewis returned to New York, took a job with The New York World Telegram, switched to The New York Journal American, got married, and rented an apartment in Manhattan — one of the few times he kept the same address for longer than a year. His time in China provided the material for his first ventures into fiction, which were short but action-packed. “Tibetan Image,” for example, tells of fortune hunters forced to abandon a million dollars’ worth of silver fox pelts in the Gobi Desert when they are attacked by a pack of man-eating dogs. It appeared in Argosy magazine in November 1935 and was followed by others full of stereotypes of enigmatic, slightly sinister Chinese. He also tried to his hand at writing for the stage, collaborating with a former reporter, Louis Weitzenkorn, on “Name Your Poison.” In the play, a group of petty crooks take out a life insurance policy on a homeless derelict and then attempt — unsuccessfully — to kill him through a series of “accidents.” The show opened for a pre-Broadway run in late January 1936 and closed after six performances. The play needed “repairs” was the only explanation offered by its producer, who let his option lapse a few months later.

Although Lewis claimed he was happy with his job at the Journal American, a certain discontent with comfortable situations seems to have been part of his nature. As he later told Newsweek magazine, the idea for his first novel, Gentleman Overboard, came to him as he stood on the roof on his apartment in Greenwich Village one evening in late 1936. Lewis looked down on the street below and considered what would happen if he fell: “How would a man bridge that dizzy mental gap between the security under his feet and that world ‘down there’?” He decided to write a story to find out. To emphasize that mental gap, he chose as the subject of his experiment not an itinerant reporter like himself but with a man whose very being embodies security.

Henry Preston Standish, the gentleman of Gentleman Overboard, is as solidly fixed to the bedrock of the American establishment as a man could be. His family name evokes the English man of arms who sailed with the first Pilgrims on the Mayflower, the subject of “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem memorized by generations of schoolchildren. Graduate of Yale, partner in a Wall Street investment bank, member of the Finance Club, Athletic Club and Weebonnick Golf Club, owner of a comfortable apartment on the Upper West Side, faithful husband and loving father of two, Standish is the definition of a solid citizen. “He drank moderately, smoked moderately, and made love moderately; in fact, Standish was one of the world’s most boring men.” When Standish contemplates the prospect of a world without him, he thinks with regret that “New York City would be dotted with spaces that could never be filled by anyone but the real Henry Preston Standish.”

And yet, like Lewis, Standish feels an irresistible urge to leave and find something that was missing at home. In Standish’s case, the impulse hits him out of nowhere. One day, sitting in his office, he “suddenly found himself assailed by a vague unrest.” He feels compelled to get up, leave his office, and take a walk along the Manhattan waterfront in Battery Park. As he looks out at the water, “Forces beyond his control grasped him and shook him by the shoulders, whispering between clenched teeth: ‘You must go away from here; you must go away!’”

Standish does not understand this impulse. “There was no sane reason why he must go away; everything was in its proper place in his life.” At the same time, his instincts tell him “that he never would be able to breathe freely again unless he went far away.” Standish wasn’t the first character in American literature to feel this urge to escape. Fifty years before Gentleman Overboard, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn lit out for the Indian Territory “because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it.” Perhaps what Lewis called “security” was just another name for Huck Finn’s “sivilization.”

But when Standish sees the last sight of New York slip over the horizon as he sails away on a cruise through the Panama Canal to California, he feels as if “all his weariness, all his doubts and fears, vanished magically into the sea.” In California, the sense of relief continues. Standish discovers “a certain zest to things now that he had not experienced back home before; all his sensations were intensified.” He decides to keep going, to take another cruise, this time to Honolulu. “Why, Henry?” his wife begs when Standish calls to break the news. “I don’t know,” he replies. Even after he reaches Hawaii, he delays his return, exchanging his ticket back to San Francisco for a berth on the Arabella, a freighter taking a leisurely three-week voyage from Honolulu to Panama.

Lewis then sets his experiment in motion. Early one morning, while most on the ship are asleep and Panama still at least ten days away, Standish slips on a spot of grease while strolling on deck and falls overboard. Lewis has put his subject about as far away from the security of a comfortable life in New York City as one can get — two thousand miles from Panama, three thousand miles from Hawaii, along an infrequently-traveled route. Even here, though, conventions manage to reach out and control Standish. After he surfaces, when there is still a chance of his being heard by someone on the Arabella, he finds himself “doomed by his breeding”: “The Standishes were not shouters; three generations of gentlemen had changed the trumpet in the early Standish larynx to a dulcet violoncello.” Standish hesitates to cry out and the Arabella steams away, its crew and other passengers oblivious to his plight. Another twelve hours pass before his absence is confirmed—and, in a cruel irony foreshadowing Lewis’s own death, some onboard conclude that Standish’s accident was, in fact, suicide.

With cool precision, Lewis peels back the layers of “sivilization” as the hours pass and his subject tries to stay afloat, waiting to be rescued. Standish kicks off his shoes, then bit by bit removes his clothes, until he is naked, his eyes and lips scorched by the sun. At first, he feels embarrassed at making the Arabella turn around and rescue him; then pride in his “tremendous adventure” of staying alive until his rescue; and finally, when he realizes there is no hope, of regret. “And with each thought a pang came to his heart that had shattered, a pang of regret that he could not go on like other men having new extraordinary experiences day after day.” Extraordinary experiences like his heart “having gone on beating thirty-five years without once stopping”; like never having gone hungry; like having been given everything he had ever desired. In the end, “there is one desire that will not be satisfied”: to live.

When Lewis finished writing Gentleman Overboard, his own situation was precarious. He’d been living beyond his means, borrowing money and falling months behind in his rent. Just weeks before Viking published Gentleman in May 1937, Lewis declared bankruptcy with debts of $3,100—over a year’s income for a newspaperman—and “no assets, except possible royalties” from the book. It would not be the last time that Lewis would find himself flat broke. Reviews of Gentleman Overboard began appearing soon after—the first on May 23 in The New York Times, the same paper in which his bankruptcy notice had appeared. Reviewer Charles Poore called the book “entertaining” and “a flight of fancy,” but sensed Lewis’s underlying design: “Standish seems to be undergoing an experiment rather than an experience.”

The book’s brevity seems to have led many reviewers to consider it insubstantial. “It is a good enough book of its kind, but it is one of those stories that might have been a masterpiece and is by no means one,” William Rose Benet wrote in The Saturday Review. Only Arnold Palmer, reviewing the British edition published by Victor Gollancz in the magazine Britannia and Eve, saw the book’s length as a virtue: “He has told, with unusual skill and intensity, a story which ninety-nine writers in a hundred would have ruined by expanding into a full-length novel or compressing to the requirements of a magazine editor.” Evelyn Waugh on the other hand, writing in Time and Tide, thought it wasn’t short enough: “In spite of its brevity it is too long; a Frenchman could have told the story in 50 pages.” Viking issued a second printing; Gollancz did not.

Hollywood came to Lewis’s rescue. In August 1937, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Metro Goldwyn Mayer had signed Lewis as a “term writer” — a staff writer with a contract for a term, usually six months at the then-lucrative salary of $250 a week. Lewis, his wife Gita and their infant son Michael headed for California, arriving in early September “in our original protoplasmic state,” as he wrote his brother Ben (on MGM stationery). By Christmas, Lewis could report that he was busy working on a remake of the silent movie Tell It to the Marines and expected to “be here for a long time.”

He was still struggling to pay off his debts, though. He wrote Ben that people were “pressing me for debts and making my life miserable by threatening to sue me and attach my salary.” “All the other writers live in big houses and entertain,” he complained, “and we live in a shack.” MGM shelved the remake of Tell It to the Marines and Lewis’s contract was not extended. He was able to get a job with RKO, collaborating with Ian Hunter on a pair of B-movie musicals starring the boy tenor Bobby Breen, Fisherman’s Wharf and Escape to Paradise, both released in 1939 and both forgettable. By the end of that year, Lewis quit RKO and moved back to New York City with a job offer from the J. Walter Thompson advertisement agency and the manuscript of a second novel in hand.

Cover of Spring Offensive by Herbert Clyde Lewis

Lewis’s anti-war sentiments had been stirred by the outbreak of war in Europe. In Spring Offensive, Peter Winston, a young American out of work, unhappy in love and at odds with the isolationist mood in America, concludes “There was no place for him in his own country” and travels to England to enlist in the British Army. When he completes his training and deploys to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force, however, he finds there is nothing to do in the months of stalemate known as the Phony War. He decides to make a small protest by sneaking into the no-man’s land between the Maginot and Siegfried lines and planting a packet of sweet pea seeds. As Winston crouches there planting his seeds in the early hours one morning, however, the Phony War comes to an abrupt and violent end. He finds himself stranded between the two sides, unarmed and with little chance of survival. Like Standish in his last moments, Winston loses all hope: “There was no one who wanted him anywhere.” A shell strikes and Winston is obliterated.

Lewis’s timing could not have been worse. Spring Offensive was published in late April 1940. Two weeks later, German panzers began rolling into Belgium, France and the Netherlands. By the end of June, France had capitulated. “For its own sake, this slender novel should have made its appearance well before the beginning of the actual Spring Offensive,” concluded The Saturday Review. Ralph Ellison predicted in his New Masses review, “little will be said of it these days in the capitalist press.” He was right: the book sank without a trace.

Lewis still had hopes for his career as a novelist, though. Convinced that his handicap had been trying to write while holding down a full-time job, he took his family, now including a baby girl, Jane, to quiet Provincetown, Massachusetts. There he wrote his third novel. Focused on the residents of a rooming house in Greenwich Village on Christmas Eve, Season’s Greetings is a love-hate letter to New York City. Lewis allowed himself a much richer prose style; the book is filled with vivid descriptions:

Slowly the noises of the city came to life, autos shifting gears, horns honking, doors slamming shut, trains rumbling underground, machines chugging and whirling, feet tramping, babies wailing, children shouting, peddlers calling their wares. Slowly the smells of the city came to life, coffee brewing, bacon frying, garbage stewing, chemicals churling in cauldrons.

Despite the vitality of Lewis’s writing, though, his subject once again was grim: “the problem of loneliness in a city of eight million people.” One of the residents is a German refugee without a single friend or acquaintance in his new country. Another is an embittered alcoholic, a third an old woman who has outlived her family. Although some of the residents do come together to create, for a few hours, a sort of community, Lewis refuses a happy ending for all. As his neighbours gather for an impromptu Christmas party, Mr. Kittredge, who began the day convinced “there was no purpose in living any longer,” finds that nothing in the course of the day has changed his mind. He quietly slips out to Washington Park with a rifle and commits suicide—alone and unseen: “Around the whole windswept park, in all the apartment houses and brownstone mansions and college buildings, not a single window opened and not a single person looked out.” Less than ten years later Lewis himself died alone and unseen in the Hotel Earle across the street.

Cover of Season's Greetings by Herbert Clyde Lewis

Published in September 1941, Season’s Greetings received favourable but not glowing reviews. The New York Times’ reviewer called it “a story that pulses with feeling for the complex and comprehensive personality of New York.” The American Mercury did not care for Lewis’s change of style: “Overwritten in spots, it belabors its point, yet it holds the reader’s interest.” Once again, Lewis was a victim of bad timing. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, fewer Americans were in the mood to buy books about Christmas. The short biographical sketch on the back of Season’s Greetings mentioned that the author and his family had returned to New York and promised that “This time Mr. Lewis expects to stay home for good.” But it didn’t work out that way.

After working for The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter for about a year, Lewis tried again to make it on his own as a writer—without much luck. As Los Angeles Times’ film industry reporter Fred Beck later told the story, by late 1942, Lewis “was a small, sad man, shivering on the streets of New York.” A short story Lewis had written, “Two-Faced Quilligan,” had been rejected by 33 magazines and he worried that his family “would have salami for Christmas dinner.” As Beck put it, “Herbie wished somebody he knew would come along so he could borrow a buck.” Instead, Lewis came home to find an acceptance letter from Story magazine and a check for $50—enough for a generous Christmas and a month or two more. Soon after, Variety reported that 20th Century Fox had bought the movie rights for the story and hired Lewis as a writer for $500 a week. Lewis and family returned to Los Angeles.

Despite the turnaround in his financial situation, Lewis was never content in Hollywood. “Life is rather dull here,” he wrote his brother Ben in July. “It’s completely unreal going to the studio every day and writing scripts about make-believe people while the real people are cutting each other’s throats with gusto everywhere.” In November, he complained, “I look around me and see the things that success buys out here, and I don’t like any of them. Swimming pools get full of dead flies and uninvited guests. Big houses get full of live flies and uninvited guests.” Lewis wrote that he had decided to take a job offer with radio comedian Fred Allen and move the family back to New York. Fred Beck made the news public in The Los Angeles Times with a sly aside: “Fred Allen has a new writer, brand new, and I’m just wondering if everybody is now going to be happy now that they’ve got what they wanted.”

The answer was no. Lewis expected to replace several writers who were going to be drafted. They weren’t. After eight weeks with Allen’s show, Lewis decided “I was tired of taking money under false pretenses” and returned to Hollywood. Lewis continued with 20th Century Fox, which released the movie version of Lewis’s story, Don Juan Quilligan, in June 1945. As little as he cared for the work, Lewis desperately needed the studio’s money. In early 1945, he complained to Ben that “the Internal Revenue Bureau has attached my salary to make me pay off an old tax debt to Uncle Sam, which cuts down my fun, finances and practically eliminates (for the next few months) all the plans we had to send you our wedding gift.”

Herbert Clyde Lewis (lower left), Dalton Trumbo (rear center), and other reporters in the South Pacific, June 1945
Herbert Clyde Lewis (lower left), Dalton Trumbo (rear center), and other reporters in the South Pacific, June 1945

Lewis’s only break from the studio grind came in May 1945 when he, Dalton Trumbo, and four other writers were sent on a six-week tour of combat areas in the Southwest Pacific at the invitation of General Henry “Hap” Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps. “I’m really seeing the war on this 16,000-mile junket,” he wrote from Guam on June 16, 1945: “the planes, the fleet, the infantry, almost everything else.”

The war ended just two months after Lewis’s return from the trip. He sold more stories: “D-Day in Las Vegas” to RKO and “The Fifth Avenue Story,” which Lewis co-wrote with Frederick Stephani, to Liberty Films. Filmed as It Happened on Fifth Avenue, the story earned Academy Award nominations for the two writers in 1947. But by then Lewis’s life had begun to fall apart. He was drinking heavily and taking barbiturates to help him sleep. His son Michael remembers seeing his father “naked and completely comatose, in a chair” around this time. “My mother told me it was alcohol and seconal.” Gita Lewis had begun to work for studios as a writer herself. As Michael recalls, “my & my sister’s real parents” during this time were the full-time maids his parents hired. The couple separated in 1947.

Lewis’s professional life was also coming apart. In January 1947, he became a member of the editorial staff of The Screen Writer, the magazine of the Screen Writers Guild. Unfortunately, the Guild was about to become the focus of Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiries into possible Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. Working in support of the U. S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the F.B.I. interviewed dozens of witnesses and collected thousands of documents related to liberal political activities in Hollywood. An F. B. I. informant identified Lewis as a member of the American Communist Party.

Whether the allegation was true or not, Lewis had taken up with the losing side. He joined over 100 writers, actors, directors, and musicians signing a full-page advertisement protesting the House committee’s hearings — which only added to suspicions about his politics. A month later, Dalton Trumbo and nine other members of the Screen Writers Guild were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the committee. A group of the most powerful studio executives met in New York in December and issued a statement vowing, “We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the Government of the United States.” The practice of blacklisting had begun. “The swimming pools are drying up all over Hollywood. I do not think I shall see them filled in my generation,” Lewis remarked to a reporter, jokingly. But he did not take the experience so lightly. He suffered a nervous breakdown in mid-1948 and was unable to work for a year.

In September 1949, he returned to New York City for what would be the last time — alone. His wife Gita chose to stay in Hollywood. He took a job as rewrite man for The New York Mirror. “I’ve enjoyed myself thoroughly and straightened myself out completely,” he wrote Ben from New York in October 1949, adding that he’d sold several of his stories to provide an allowance for Gita and the children. Michael Lewis recalls that “the four of us tried living together again as a family” in New York around Christmas 1949, but the marriage may have reached a breaking point. Gita took Michael and Jane back to Hollywood and moved in with Tanya Tuttle, wife of blacklisted director Frank Tuttle, who had gone to France in search of work.

In April 1950, Lewis filed for bankruptcy, citing over $26,000 in debts and unpaid income taxes. He moved into a room at the Hotel Earle in Greenwich Village. Although once considered among the best residential hotels in the city, in 1950, the Earle was, in the words of the poet Dylan Thomas, who stayed there around the same time as Lewis, “a pigsty.” Lewis moved from the Mirror to Time magazine, but he was still broke. He apologized to Ben for not being able to help pay their father’s bills from a prostate operation.

In late September, he left Time—whether voluntarily or not is unclear. Three weeks later, he was found dead in his hotel room. Although his death certificate stated the cause was heart attack, some of his acquaintances believed Lewis had committed suicide — which, Dalton Trumbo wrote his wife, was “sad, but no more than to have been expected.” “The only food on which a drowning man could subsist was the hope of being rescued,” Lewis wrote in Gentleman Overboard. Perhaps he had lost hope of being rescued himself.

He passed on to his widow only the prospect of future sales of his writing — of which there were few. In December 1950, one of his early stories, “Surprise for the Boys,” was adapted for the CBS television series Danger. A few years later, a producer bought the rights to Lewis’s story “The Bride Wore Pajamas,” but the film was never made. Finally, in 1959, Gita, now remarried, sold his unfinished novel, The Silver Dark, to Pyramid Books, a paperback publisher. Despite a cover plug by novelist Budd Schulberg proclaiming it “A genuinely original and compelling novel,” the book was never reviewed and never reissued. According to WorldCat.org, just two copies remain in libraries.

Cover of The Silver Dark, by Herbert Clyde Lewis

The Silver Dark might have marked the end of Lewis’s story. His work was ignored in studies of American novels. His film credits alone kept his name alive in occasional reference books. His daughter Jane died in 1985 from complications related to diabetes; his brothers both died in the late 1990s and his widow Gita in 2001. Only Michael, with a handful of his father’s letters and one lone page from his journal, remained to remember Lewis.

In the spring 2009, I came across a review of Gentleman Overboard while browsing through the archives of Time magazine. “What would it feel like to fall off a ship in mid-Pacific?” the reviewer asked. “With as much calm authority as though he had fallen overboard himself, Herbert Clyde Lewis tells just what it feels like.” Having established this website three years earlier, I was looking for long-forgotten books with unique qualities and Gentleman Overboard sounded like a perfect candidate. I located a copy, read it and posted a short enthusiastic review. Without having seen the Newsweek article describing Lewis’s original idea, I referred to the book as an experiment:

What matters is not whether it succeeds or fails but simply seeing what happens. Lewis puts his subject into the experiment and observes. This novel holds his notes. Few scientists could have recorded the results with such an elegant and light touch. It’s been said that a true artist knows when to stop … and does. By this criterion alone, Herbert Clyde Lewis proves himself a true artist with Gentleman Overboard.

A few months later, I received an email from Diego D’Onofrio, an editor with La Bestia Equilatera, a small Spanish-language publisher in Buenos Aires. “I would like to ask you,” he wrote: “Which neglected book do you recommend me to publish?” Not familiar with La Bestia’s audience, I was reluctant to offer many suggestions, but replied, “If I had to pick one off the top of my head that is very accessible to a wide range of readers, I guess I’d pick Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis. It should be relatively easy to translate and has a strong narrative line that should grab most readers very quickly.” Diego thanked me and said he’d order a copy.

Diego and his editor-in-chief Luis Chittaroni loved the book and in May 2010, they contracted for a translation and scheduled the book for publication. The Spanish title would be El caballero que cayó al mar (The Gentleman Who Fell into the Sea). The challenge of publishing a neglected book in another language is considerable, D’Onofrio later wrote. “Because nobody knows the author, not least the book, which is also not known in his native language … the only tool you have to sell the book is that it must be extraordinary in itself.”

Cover of El Caballero qui Cayo al Mar by Herbert Clyde Lewis

By this standard, El caballero que cayó al mar performed exceptionally well. Its early reviews were consistently enthusiastic: “Simple y magistral. Sólo eso. Sencillamente eso,” Alejandro Frías proclaimed in El Sol de Mendoza: “Simple and masterful. Only that. Simply that.” Another reviewer called it “una perlita”: “a little pearl.” The book continued to win critical acclaim as its readership spread beyond Argentina. In August 2018, one of Spain’s leading critics, Ignacio Echevarría, praised the book in his monthly column for El Cultural and in September 2019, a feature on CNN Chile recommended it: “Con magistral sencillez, Herbert Clyde Lewis lleva el relato a una dimensión filosófica.” (“With masterful simplicity, Herbert Clyde Lewis takes the story to a philosophical dimension”). Eight years after the first publication of El caballero que cayó al mar, D’Onofrio reported, “It is the book with the most unanimous praise from our entire publishing house, which now has more than 90 books.”

Even as the Spanish translation was underway, Luis Chittaroni began to share PDF copies of the original Viking edition with acquaintances in the Argentinian literary community. The novelist Pablo Katchadjian in turn recommended the book to his friend Uriel Kon, an Argentina-born Jew living in Jerusalem and then starting up his own small press, Zikit Books. Looking for English-language novels that could be easily translated and published in Hebrew, Kon found the book matched his criteria perfectly: “Clear, elegant prose; a compelling, existential story; a book you can sit down and read in a night.” He arranged for a Hebrew translation and Zikit published האדוּ שבפל לים (roughly, The Nobleman Fell into the Sea) in June 2013.

The book struck a chord among Israeli readers. A feature review in Ha’aretz, one of Israel’s most widely read newspapers, called it “A miniature masterpiece that emerged from oblivion.” Zikit printed 1,00 copies — a number Kon considered “somewhat optimistic” at the time. That edition sold out in under two months and Zikit went on to sell over 7,000 copies. “There are around three to four thousand serious literary readers in Israel,” Kon estimated. “By that standard, this was a huge best-seller — a cult classic.” Standish’s predicament — lost and forgotten in a great ocean — Kon believes, “Resonated with many Israeli intellectuals who felt themselves isolated—not only as Jews surrounded by the Arab world but also unheard in a society dominated by conservative forces.”

Cover of Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis

In September 2019, Auteursdomein, a small Dutch press based in Amsterdam, published the English-language text of Gentleman Overboard under the simplified title, Overboard. This edition was sponsored by Dutch novelist Pauline van de Ven, who had come across Gentleman in a box of old books and ashtrays left by a distant uncle. As she writes in her foreword, “I read it without interruption from cover to cover and was impressed by the austere language, the strong images and the universal scope of the haunting story.” For van de Ven, the book’s power lies in its appeal to a paradoxical sense of “shared loneliness.” It belongs, she believes, in “same gallery of honor” as Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a another short novel about a prosperous businessman facing his imminent death: “It’s an existentialist masterpiece.”

Despite its rescue by publishers on three different continents, however, Gentleman Overboard remains out of print in the United States. Just three copies of the 1937 Viking edition are available for sale. The book’s success with readers in Argentina, Chile, Spain, Israel, and the Netherlands suggests the time is ripe for its reissue in its native country. There is still a chance for a new generation of American readers to discover Herbert Clyde Lewis’s “little pearl.” All it will take is the right person to listen.

My sincere thanks to Michael Lewis for allowing me to quote from his father’s letters and his own emails.

Video feature on Herbert Clyde Lewis, a neglected writer long overdue for rediscovery

Now available on YouTube–a video feature on the life and works of Herbert Clyde Lewis:

All four of his novels have been featured on this site:

I just learned that Gentleman Overboard has been published in a new Hebrew translation by Zikit Books in Israel. When will an American publisher discover this fine writer’s work?

Herbert Clyde Lewis’ Gentleman Overboard Reissued–in Spanish

Several years ago, Diego D’Onofrio, one of the partners in La Bestia Equilátera, a small press located in Buenos Aires, contacted me asking for suggestions of neglected books that might be of interested to his readers. La Bestia Equilátera, which translates literally to “The Equilateral Beast,” had already published the works of a number of English-language authors that qualify as neglected–or at least until-recently-neglected: Julian McLaren-Ross; Alfred Hayes; David Markson; Ivy Compton-Burnett; and Lord Berners.

Cover of 'El caballero que cayó al mar' translation of 'Gentleman Overboard'After a quick check of La Bestia’s catalog, I knew just what to recommend: Herbert Clyde Lewis’ Gentleman Overboard, which I’d just featured on this site. Gentleman Overboard is a small masterpiece, a marvel of precise writing and imagination. One reader on Goodreads describes it as “Wodehouse meets Sartre”–which is an excellent précis. It starts out as a restrained comedy and evolves into a profoundly moving meditation on existence.

I didn’t hear from Diego again until a couple of months ago, when he contacted me looking for some more recommendations. To my surprise and great pleasure, he informed me that La Bestia Equilátera had, in 2010, published El Caballero que Cayó al Mar: a translation in Spanish by Laura Wittner of Gentleman Overboard. Diego reported that the book had sold well and earned some good reviews from critics and bloggers. They had even put together a fun little website dedicated to the book: elcaballeroquecayo.com.ar, where you can read the first chapter.

Diego was kind enough to send me a copy of the book, along with two others from La Bestia that deal, at least in part, with lesser-known books. Siluetas, by Argentinian writer Luis Chitarroni, an editor at La Bestia, is a collection of essays and reviews of a wide range of authors and their works. Many are fairly well-known, even best-sellers such as P. D. James. However, there are also a few that will appeal to any fan of neglected books–including William Gerhardie, Flann O’Brien, Logan Pearsall Smith, and Oliver St. John Gogarty. Informes de lectura/Cartas a Montale is a collection of letters written by Roberto Bazlen, a lifelong resident of Trieste, to friends, writers, and publishers about books. Bazlen was a voracious reader, fluent in a number of languages, and he was constantly championing the works of writers from far and wide. Bazlen was, in particular, a friend of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Eugenio Montale, and the second half of the book is a selection of letters Bazlen wrote to Montale between 1925 and 1930.

I won’t mention the books I recommended when Diego contacted me again in May, for fear of jinxing them, but one of them was one of Isabel Paterson’s three amazing novels from the 1930s. I notice that all three are available now from Amazon in Kindle format, but when the heck will someone reissue one or all of them in paper?

Season’s Greetings, by Herbert Clyde Lewis

It’s fitting that the last book I feature this year is Herbert Clyde Lewis’ Season’s Greetings. His work–particularly his first novel, Gentleman Overboard, which I reviewed here back in July, has been one of the best discoveries and pleasures of this year. I only regret not getting this piece written a few days ago, since Season’s Greetings, his third novel, takes place on Christmas Eve.

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Season's Greetings'The story takes us through the day in the minds of the residents of a rooming house in the Greenwich Village – Lower Fifth Avenue area of Manhattan. Mr. Kittredge–we never learn his first name–is a depressed, dyspeptic, world-weary World War One veteran who plans to commit suicide that night. Betty Carson is a young girl from Cape Cod, now working at Macy’s. Betty has discovered that she’s pregnant, by a man named Joe Henderson who left a month ago and hasn’t contacted her since. Having given up hope of seeing him again, Betty has decided to visit an abortionist after work.

Hans Metzger is a German Jew, a refugee stuck in limbo–unable to return home, unable to join his surviving sisters in South America. Minnie Cadgersmith, a widow in her seventies, suffers from a variety of ailments and has determined that she will die in her sleep that night after paying a visit to her three grandchildren. And Flora Fanjoy takes pride in having saved her pennies over the years and managed to rise from serving girl to own her own humble but upstanding rooming house.

As might be expected of any story set on Christmas Eve, each of Lewis’ main characters experiences a revelation of one sort or another in the course of the day. Soon after her tenants leave, Flora is struck on the head by a falling can of cleanser and falls down her basement stairs, landing paralyzed and unable to speak. Her only witness, her cat Flossie, soon abandons her to roam the neighborhood, and Flora gradually becomes aware that she will, in all likelihood, die before anyone comes to look for her. Lewis provides a fine passage describing how Flora learns “that there were tones and shades of blackness”:

It was nighttime, Mrs. Fanjoy realized. When first she opened her eyes the blackness had been gray, so that she had been able to discern dimly above and ahead of her the flight of stairs leading to the first floor hallway. The eyes of Flossie her cat had shone milkily opalescent in this gray blackness, she remembered. But after a while Flossie had gone away, and Mrs. Fanjoy, straining her eyes at the stairs, had watched their color and the color around them change imperceptibly to brown black, so strikingly brown black that it seeme she was lying in the center of a chocolate world. She had watched the brown black then, watched it fearfully a long time, until without warning it had vanished in the surrounding gloom, and a new color, a majestic, funereal color, had appeared to take its place. This was purple black, a blackness of such incredibly pure purple that it made each stair on the staircase stand out solemnly and distinctly from the others. And Mrs. Fanjoy had looked at the purple black, looked at it and dissected it and mentally run her fingers through its rich thickness, for a timeless time of endless minutes and hours, until, at last, she had seen it start to fade. She had watched it fade, watched it thicken and solidify and drop down into the well of darkness around her, until the last hard fleck of it was no more, and then, all of a sudden, it was black black, and Mrs. Fanjoy knew what time it was.

This quote may offer a hint of a prevailing feature of Season’s Greetings. Coming it at just over 400 pages, it’s over twice as long as Lewis’ three other books. In writing of Gentleman Overboard, I remarked that, “It’s been said that a true artist knows when to stop–and does. By this criterion alone, Herbert Clyde Lewis proves himself a true artist….”

Well, by the same criterion, Season’s Greetings proves something less than a work of art. There are plenty of places where a healthy application of blue pencil would have enabled Lewis to make his points with the kind of subtlety and grace one finds throughout Gentleman Overboard.

On the other hand, one of the great pleasures of the novel is the space it can offer the writer, the space to stretch out and explore alleys and sideways that run off the course of the main narrative–detours that can’t be afforded in a more economical form like a short story. And Lewis constantly goes wandering off into the maze of streets and lives one finds in Manhattan. He devotes a whole chapter to the thoughts of Mrs. Fanjoy’s cat, Flossie, as she leaves her owner’s side, looks around the house for food, then heads out to the tiny, barren backyard–her kingdom. Metzger befriends a bum who relates much of his life’s story, full of travel to seaports around the world and violent struggles in the early days of labor.

And he spins out many prose poems to Manhattan itself:

Very slowly the city came to life on this morning of the day before Christmas. The sun rose out of the ocean, out of Queens, out of Brooklyn, and shone listlessly through the heavy black clouds upon the slush-covered rooftops, the dirty windows, the grimy east sides of buildings, the sooty smokestacks, chimneys and air vents. Slowly the noises of the city came to life, autos shifting gears, horns honking, doors slamming shut, trains rumbling underground, machines chugging and whirling, feet tramping, babies wailing, children shouting, peddlers calling their wares. Slowly the smells of the city came to life, coffee brewing, bacon frying, garbage stewing, chemicals churling in cauldrons. And men who had a talent for putting one stone on top of another built towers into the sky so they could look down upon all this.

Needless to say, a book set in Manhattan leaves its author with no shortage of excuses to indulge in such descriptive flurries, and you’ll find them here by the dozens. Perhaps a few too many for some readers, but I was usually happy to follow along whenever Lewis strayed from his course.

Lewis had devoted much his first two books–Gentleman Overboard and Spring Offensive–to coldly watching his protagonists die alone. And even though Season’s Greetings is a Christmas story and most of his characters reach the end of the day at least a little happier than they started, Lewis retains a bit of his trademark dispassion. As most of the other characters come together in the rooming house, Mr. Kittredge calmly walks to Washington Square, finds a secluded park bench, and blows a hole through his chest.

No one heard the loud report or saw Mr. Kittredge half rise from the bench and topple over onto the snow. A motorist driving under the arch on Fifth Avenue thought for a moment he had heard a shot, but decided it was only an auto backfiring. Around the whole windswept park, in all the apartment houses and brownstone mansions and college buildings, not a single window opened and not a single person looked out.

Lewis’ theme is, as one character puts it, “the problem of loneliness in a city of eight million people.” While Hans and Mrs. Cadgersmith find its solution in the company of others and Betty Carson is reunited with Joe Henderson instead of left alone to recover from an abortion, Lewis is too much of a realist–he was at one point a crime reporter for the New York Herald Tribune–to let Christmas miracles fix everyone’s problems. Frank Capra would undoubtedly left Mr. Kittredge out if he’d filmed Season’s Greetings.

Ironically, Liberty Films acquired the rights to another Christmas story by Lewis, “It Happened on Fifth Avenue,” intending it to be directed by Capra. Although Capra opted for “It’s a Wonderful Life” instead, a film version of Lewis’ story was released in 1947. Starring one of the best character actors of the 1940s, Victor Moore, “It Happened on Fifth Avenue” is something of a neglected film classic and earned Lewis an Oscar nomination for his original story. Lewis worked in Hollywood for about six years in the mid-forties, becoming friends with Humphrey Bogart and others, but he returned to New York City around 1948 and joined the editorial staff of Life magazine. He died of a heart attack in 1950, leaving behind a wife and two children. Some years later, somewhat inexplicably, a fourth novel, The Silver Dark was published as a paperback. All his work has been out of print for over 50 years now, and Season’s Greetings is so scarce that Amazon.com doesn’t even list it.

Here’s hoping a Christmas miracle might come to one of Herbert Clyde Lewis’ books soon.


Locate a Copy


Season’s Greetings, by Herbert Clyde Lewis
New York: The Dial Press, 1941

Spring Offensive, by Herbert Clyde Lewis

Spring Offensive takes place during the first twenty-four hours of the German attack against French and British forces along the Maginot Line in April 1940.

Cover of first U. S. edition of 'Spring Offensive'Of course, the Germans didn’t attack the French and British in April 1940, but two months later, in June, and when they did, they wisely bypassed the Maginot Line in favor of a blitzkrieg through the Ardennes and the Lowlands. This is a major reason why Herbert Clyde Lewis’ second novel, Spring Offensive, quickly flew from the new release stacks to obscurity. While the Phoney War dragged on, there was still an opportunity for a writer like Lewis to fantasize about what might happen when the shooting started. When it did start for real, events moved too fast for anyone to have time for fiction.

Peter Winston, Lewis’ protagonist, is a young American from outside Indianapolis serving with a British Expeditionary Force unit encamped in a small French town along the Maginot Line. He’d joined out of mixed motives–a bit of anti-Nazi fervor and a bit of self-pity. His girl had dumped him, he’d lost his job as a newspaper reporter, and his best friend had begun to avoid him as a hopeless loser. Readily accepted into the British Army, he now finds himself killing time in the most meaningless military drills.

One night, he decides to sneak out of the barracks and commit a small act of eco-vandalism. Taking a packet of flower seeds he’d obtained from a villager, he quietly slips into the barbed wire and anti-tank obstacles of the No Man’s Land between the Allied and German lines and spends the night planting seeds.

As dawn breaks the next morning, however, the sky is suddenly filled with the shriek of incoming German artillery shells. Winston injures his ankle in trying to run back to his unit. He takes a piece of shrapnel in his shoulder and winds up pinned down in a shell hole. Over the next few hours, he watches as the fearsome blood-letting of First World War battles like the Somme are re-enacted with faster-firing machine guns and deadlier explosives. Late in the afternoon, a young, frightened German soldier rushing forward in another futile charge bayonets him in the gut, leaving him to die in his muddy crater.

In many ways, Spring Offensive reworks the situation of Lewis’ first novel, Gentleman Overboard, which I covered here several months ago. Instead of a stockbroker slowly drowning in the Pacific, we have a young soldier dying in No Man’s Land. In each book, Lewis switches between the present and flashbacks to his protagonist’s past and between the mind of his unlucky hero and the thoughts of other people in his life. And in both, Lewis is quite effective in conveying the wavering emotions and wandering thoughts of a man consciously moving closer and closer to death.

Unlike in Gentleman Overboard, however, a rather abstract situation is replaced by one very much within the reality of his contemporary readers. In early 1940, the American public was torn between support for the Allies and the isolationist views of the “America First” movement. Some of the thoughts that run through Winston’s mind as he lays in his shell hole touch directly on that debate:

And he was wondering why he had come all the way across the ocean to fight when he might have stayed at home, right in Indianapolis, and fought there. There was a war to be fought in America, he thought, and what a war it was! He was not proud of having been a private in the B. E. F., but he would be proud to be a general in that other army. And millions of men would volunteer, brave young men with hard brave faces, men from the fields and the factories and city streets and country roads, men marching west and shaking their fists at the setting sun. Winston moaned softly and moved his head from side to side. He didn’t want to die; he wanted to live and go home and fight in America’s war, in the war to make American a Land of Promise once again.

Now it could be that this is only meant to be a last thought of a dying man, no more or less significant than his memory of slipping his hand around the waist of his old girlfriend. But it’s hard for me to separate this passage–which, by the way, goes on with yet more Hollywood-ish populist cliches (Lewis did go on to work for the studios)–from the general premise of the book: the young man going out to plant flowers and being caught in the crossfire of a vast, bloody, and largely pointless battle. Perhaps Lewis truly did not intend to take a stand against anything but war itself, abstracted from the context of Nazism, Antisemitism, and Fascism, and was not casting a vote with the America Firsters. He did, after all, demonstrate an ability to view the most desparate situation–a man drowning alone at sea–with remarkable objectivity in Gentleman Overboard.

If he did, then Spring Offensive must rank with one of the great examples in literature of bad timing. Within weeks of its publication, the statis of the Phoney War was replaced by images of Panzer tanks rolling across France and the Nazi flag flying under the Arc de Triomphe. And within a few years, the abstract image of anonymous young German soldiers was replaced by that of S. S. troops carrying out mass executions. Whatever Lewis’ intention, it’s impossible now to view this book outside the context of its time.

In the very last lines of Spring Offensive, a German shell lands directly on top of Winston. “… [A]nd when the smoke cleared away, he wasn’t there any more.” History appears to have had the same effect on Spring Offensive.


Spring Offensive, by Herbert Clyde Lewis


New York City: Viking Press, 1940

The Silver Dark, by Herbert Clyde Lewis

This book is a bit of a mystery. My copy, a 1959 Pyramid Books paperback, shows no prior publication history. There is a quote from Budd Schulberg (“A genuinely original and compelling novel”) on the cover, which is the sort of thing one might expect to be carried over from an original hard cover release–but this appears to be the first and only edition. And there is the fact that Herbert Clyde Lewis died from a heart attack in 1950, which makes this a posthumous first-time publication–something that’s also a little unusual in a cheap paperback.

However this came to be published, it did little to revive Lewis’ reputation. His three other novels–Gentleman Overboard, which I reviewed here a couple of months ago; Spring Offensive, an anti-war novel from 1940; and Season’s Greetings from 1941–were already long-forgotten by then. The Silver Dark soon disappeared, too. I could locate less than a handful of copies for sale on the Internet today and virtually no library has a copy.

Cover of first edition of 'The Silver Dark'It’s a real shame, for The Silver Dark is a memorable story told remarkably well by Lewis. Theodore Huber is a dwarf, living alone in a small Manhattan apartment, working as a bookkeeper, shuffling through the streets trying to avoid the looks of pity and disgust. The emptiness of his life rings in our ears:

He ate with automatic movement, spoon from plate to mouth and back to plate again. He had no chance for happiness. He was trapped. He was tired of living and unable to die. He was in a void; he was existing in a vacuum. Slowly, he got up and carried the half-empty dishes into the kitchen for Mrs. Asgood to wash in the morning. Time had stopped, as far as he was concerned. For the rest of his life he would feel the same way, think the same thoughts, do the same things every day and every night. He would go on like this. He would observe his fortieth birthday and his fiftieth birthday in this fashion, and then his hair would grow gray and his breath would come short, and one day, alone, he would die a natural death.

His only real interest is in the lives of the beautiful women and handsome men he sees in the streets and through apartment windows. Theodore is not a peeping Tom, but he is at least a glancing Tom. He fantasizes about the lives they live: “She worked in a department store, and now she was hurrying home to her man, who worked in a bank. He was waiting for her, and as soon as she came in they kissed each other. Theirs was not a passionate kiss; theirs was a friendly kiss. Everything they did was friendly, easy, companionable.”

One night, he goes up to the roof of his apartment building to look out at the city. He sees a man and woman in an apartment and watches as they begin to make love. Suddenly, he becomes aware that someone else is up there with him. He panics, but then a strange, misshapen woman sees him, screams and faints. He carries her to his apartment. She revives in a few moments and runs out into the hallway in fright.

He hears no more of this, but over the next few days he starts ruminating, turning the incident over and over. He convinces himself that this woman is his only chance, the one woman who might actually accept him. He tracks her to a neighboring apartment and learns her name–Jane Liste. He decides to write to her. It’s the kind of letter a novice stalker might write: “I have very few friends, in fact, I haven’t any, and you were the first person I talked to, outside of business hours, in a long time…. I’ve been thinking it would be good if we could see each other, because we hardly know one another and might have a lot to talk about.”

A reply arrives. It’s polite, a little friendly. But there’s a hitch. Jane left New York, where she’d been visiting an aunt, the day after the scene on the roof, and returned to Bakersfield, California. A few more letters are exchanged–still friendly, but no more. Theodore, however, manages to talk himself into a romantic whirlwind. He quits his job, put his few belongings in storage, and flies off to Bakersfield. (In Lewis’ world, by the way, there are direct flights from New York to Bakersfield.) He has decided that he and Jane must get married.

Jane, a hunchback who leads an even more isolated life, lets Theodore into her apartment, and an hour or two later, they head off to City Hall for a marriage license. It’s a mark of Lewis’ skill that he manages to make this implausible sequence of events believable. I think it’s due in part to the jarring contrasts he creates. On the one hand, everything going on in the world around these two people is mundane, muted. On the other, there are their emotional worlds, which are filled with bone-aching loneliness and wild dreams of idealized love. While other people go on about their lives, Jane and Theodore are so used to living in pain that it seems sensible to take each other’s hand and go leaping off a cliff into marriage.

It’s not an easy landing, though. One thing they have learned and internalized from decades of living in a world full of normal looking men and women: a deep, deep disgust for people who look like–well, they do. They both want to find not just companionship, but romantic, sexual love; what they feel at the sight of their naked bodies, though, is repulsion.

How Jane and Theodore get beyond these feelings and come to discover a genuine, mature love involves yet more implausible events, but to the very last page, Lewis does a remarkable job of pulling us along and leading us through their emotional transformations. The Silver Dark reminded me at times of McDonald Harris’ Mortal Leap, another book about making a radical life decision. Our rational mind keeps whispering, “This just doesn’t make sense,” and yet we keep turning the next page and reading on.

Coming across a book like The Silver Dark is what makes the pursuit of neglected books so enjoyable. I had essentially no information whatsoever about this book, aside from the fact that I had enjoyed Lewis’ first novel, Gentleman Overboard. I had no idea if this would be good or bad, interesting or tedious. So if it hooked me, it had to do so solely on its own merits, without the aid of reputation, reviews, or anyone’s word of mouth.

And it did. I finished The Silver Dark in three days of a working week, which is exceptional for me. I wouldn’t call it a great novel, but it is certainly a good one–original, unusual, and continuously interesting. It proves once again what treats lie in store for those who dare to dive deep into the stacks.


The Silver Dark, by Herbert Clyde Lewis
New York City: Pyramid Books, 1959

Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis

Men of Henry Preston Standish’s class did not go around falling off ships in the middle of the ocean; it just was not done, that was all. It was a stupid, childish, unmannerly thing to do, and if there had been anybody’s pardon to beg, Standish would have begged it. People back in New York knew Standish was smooth. His upbringing and education had stressed smoothness. Even as an adolescent Standish had always done the right things. Without being at all snobbish or making a cult of manners Standish was really a gentleman, the good kind, the unobtrusive kind. Falling off a ship caused people a lot of bother. They had to throw out life preservers. The captain and chief engineer had to stop the ship and turn it around. A lifeboat had to be lowered; and then there would the spectacle of Standish, all wet and bedraggled, being returned to the safety of the ship, with all the passengers lining the rail, smiling their encouragement and undoubtedly, later on, offering him innumerable anecdotes about similar mishaps. Falling off a ship was much worse than knocking over a waiter’s tray or stepping on a lady’s train. It was even more embarrassing than the fate of that unfortunate society girl in New York who tripped and fell down a whole flight of stairs while making her grand entrance on the night of her debut. It was humiliating, mortifying. You cursed yourself for being such a fool; you wanted to kick yourself. When you saw other men committing these wretched buffoon’s mistakes you could not find it in your heart to forgive them; you had no pity on their discomfort.

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Gentleman Overboard'In Gentleman Overboard, Herbert Clyde Lewis takes no pity whatsoever on his character’s discomfort. While taking a leisurely cruise from Honolulu to Panama aboard the freighter Arabella, Henry Preston Standish of Central Park West–partner of Pym, Bingley and Standish, member of the Finance, Athletic, and Yale Clubs, father of two–slips on a bit of kitchen grease and tumbles into the Pacific Ocean as he takes an early morning stroll around the ship.

No one notices. Several passengers and crew members think they see him, and what with the rush of the day’s tasks and a general inclination not to bring up unpleasant issues, no one says a thing about his absence until over ten hours later. Grumbling about the loss of time and fuel and the unlikelihood of ever finding a lone man floating in the middle of the ocean, the Captain turns the ship around to search.

Meanwhile, Standish treads water. He takes pride in his mastery of the dead man’s float, something he learned as a boy at the club. After a while, he kicks off his shoes and jacket. A bit later, the shirt and pants go. Finally, he slips off his shorts. This, he realizes, is the first time since childhood he’s been naked in the water.

Overall, Standish does quite well for the first few hours. His spirit is high. He has the self-possession to keep his head in the face of a seemingly hopeless situation. The ship will return for him, after all.

Gradually, though, confidence fades into frustration. It is quite tedious that the ship is taking so long to come back. It does say something about the quality of the Captain and his crew.

He grows hungry and desparately thirsty. “… [N]ever once before in his life had he gone hungry or thisty…. the real meaning of hunger and thirst, to be hungry for bread and thirsty for water, had not existed for him.” He grows tired. Every once in a while he forgets that “he was a doomed man and it was damned annoying when he had to remind himself.”

Night falls. There is still no sign of the ship. Standish grows weaker.

Is he rescued? In a sense, we never really know. Lewis leaves us as Standish’s thoughts grow hazy and dreamy. Perhaps the ship finds him. Perhaps it doesn’t. It’s not really the point. What Lewis does is to take a simple situation–a man falls overboard–and play it out with no fuss or dramatics. So deftly and elegantly that when we begin to feel Standish’s growing fear it comes like a shock, like a plunge into icy waters. What might go through one’s mind? What kinds of emotions would one feel? This is one way it might transpire.

It’s something of an experiment, then. What matters is not whether it succeeds or fails but simply to see what happens. Lewis puts his subject into the experiment and observes. This novel holds his notes. Few scientists could have recorded the results with such an elegant and light touch. It’s been said that a true artist knows when to stop … and does. By this criterion alone, Herbert Clyde Lewis proves himself a true artist with Gentleman Overboard


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Gentleman Overboard, by Herbert Clyde Lewis
New York: Viking, 1937