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Louise W. King – The Would-Be Wodehouse of Queer Greenwich Village

Cover of the first US edition of The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies by Louise W. King

I first learned of Louise W. King’s queer comedies from Barbara Grier’s capsule book reviews (written as Gene Damon) in the 1960s lesbian magazine The Ladder. “If ever a novel could rightly be termed Gay, this is it,” she wrote of King’s first book, The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies (1964), describing the book as “High camp in full flight.”

I suspect that Grier was the only reviewer who “got” the book. The TLS missed the fact that it’s a work of comic fiction, noting instead that it admirably avoided “the twin temptations of revelatory pornography and sociological exposition.” Hear, hear! Punch’s reviewer, the young Malcolm Bradbury, on the other hand, bristled at the publisher’s description of the book as “camped up Jane Austenese,” writing that “my indignation still hasn’t cooled.” He found it more “camped-down Truman Capotese” and dismissed it as a complete failure as a work of fiction: “Nothing at all in the way of real relationships or convincing dialogue pulls them around in the direction of reality; so that the bright sparkle of the wit seems to have nothing to engage with, and Jane Austen wouldn’t like it at all.”

But then, even its publishers didn’t understand The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies. The U.K. publisher, Michael Joseph, was responsible for the completely off-target Jane Austen comparison. And the U.S. publisher, Doubleday, was even more obtuse. At the time, Doubleday ran a regular ad in The Saturday Review of Literature and similar journals in the form of a “Letter from the Editor” written by one L. L. Day. Their ad for the week of November 14, 1964 called the book “the best novel I ever read about an interior decorator living more or less happily in sin with the cast-off girlfried of a lady truck driver,” which suggests that the copywriter either didn’t read the book or was one of the dumbest straight men on Madison Avenue.

Both The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies and its sequel The Velocipede Handicap (1965) are about the misadventures of an queer threesome living in Greenwich Village. Miss Moppet is a beautiful blonde agent of chaos who carries on like an airhead while maintaining an impressive TBR stack in her bed (“In her bed? You mean by her bed?” “No, in her bed”) with everything from Naked Lunch to the complete works of Shakespeare. Everywhere she goes, she insists on bringing along her pet turtle Emma Hamlet Woodhouse, named for her three favorite works of literature [Woodhouse = Wodehouse. Ed.].

Cover of first US edition of The Velocipede Handicap by Louise W. King

Miss Moppet is alternately loved and loathed by Lillian Richardson, a lady truck driver who hits the road whenever she finds her patience with Moppet’s antics running thin. Rounding out the trio, narrating their tales, and usually cleaning up afterwards, is Maurice Calhoun, an interior decorator and delicate Southern beau. Whenever Lillian heads out of New York City, she leaves Moppet in his charge. Maurice denies any such responsibility:

I might take this opportunity to explain about Miss Moppet and how she doesn’t belong to me at all. And just in case any damnyakee Federalist is making ready to pop up and give me that Union jazz about no one human being owning another since the days of the unspeakable treachery of General Butler and his ilk, I know it sufficiently good and well…. Miss Moppet is more than usually unrewarding as far as I am concerned because not only can you not hitch her to a little basket cart and drive to distant places … but she doesn’t care for men and won’t do the littlest morsel of housework.

In fact, the book opens with Maurice complaining that Moppet has just slipped into the bathroom with a copy of McTeague to avoid washing the dishes.

The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies is no novel, but rather a collection of four stories, and though The Velocipede Handicap is one coherent story, taken together the book more closely resemble The Pickwick Papers or Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour than anything we’d consider a novel today. One story is about a trip to Coney Island where Emma Hamlet Woodhouse (the turtle) gets lost (temporarily). In another, Maurice comes home to find that Miss Moppet has smuggled a racehorse into the laundry room. A racehouse features again in The Velocipede Handicap, but this time outside the apartment and in the clutches of a bunch of mafiosi.

But just as with P. G. Wodehouse, it’s a mistake to read the Moppet/Lillian/Maurice stories for plot. Good comedy is always about the journey, not the destination. And though King’s characters are gay, there’s nothing more titillating in her books than there is in Wodehouse’s. She does, however, slip in more than a few sly observations from the queer side of life.

On one of her road trips, Lillian sends Miss Moppet a postcard of a redhead stripper from Reno. “It’s true what they say about the West, love L.” reads the inscription. Moppet begs Maurice to explain: what did they say about the West? “They always do say the West is wide open.”

When, at Coney Island, Miss Moppet tells Maurice somewhat haughtily that she doesn’t swim, she wades, he informs her,

Moppet, honey, you can wade elegantly near the shore. It’s out deeper all the evil dykes swim, to show how terribly manly they are. You’d be fifty million times happier just messing around in the shallows with the queens…. You don’t want to go wading in deep water where some butch is likely to drown you without ever knowing it.

So much for the TLS reviewer’s claim that King avoids “sociological exposition.”

Louise W. King, from the dust jacket of The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies
Louise W. King, from the dust jacket of The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies.

I have to admit that I found The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies and The Velocipede Handicap somewhat tedious when I first read them straight through (no pun intended) some months ago, and I kept putting off writing this post. But that tends to be true of a lot of comic writing. I thoroughly enjoy S. J. Perelman, for example, whenever I sit down and read one of his pieces. One — not two, and never three. And I’d put the same warning label on these two books: “To Be Consumed in Small Portions.”

Taken in small bites, there is something to enjoy on almost every page. Here, for example, is a moment in a diner, from “The Love Goddess of the Middle West,” about the attempt by Miss Moppet’s third cousin twice removed to make it in the Big Apple as “an editor, or an actress, or a poetress, or all three”:

The Love Goddess said loudly that she’d like a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of sarsparilla to drink, without bothering to say please or thank you. The waitress mopped off the marble top of the table, and carefully wrote down what the Love Goddess wanted on a little pad of paper. No sooner had the waitress turned herself around and got halfway to the safety of the kitchen, than the Love Goddess changed her mind about the sarsparilla. By saying “hey” very insistently several times, the Love Goddess managed to call the girl back. After an unconscionable amount of erasing and a few false starts for the kitchen on the part of the waitress, the Love Goddess settled on a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of sarsparilla.

One of the few critics to mention King’s work after its initial publication called her books “amusing but mindless and stereotyped trash.” While I think that’s quite unfair, I wouldn’t take the Wodehouse comparison too far. One of the reasons we can still read and enjoy Wodehouse is that there is always a certain deftness in his touch. Restraint is crucial for comic writing to survive, and strain is the disease that usually kills it off. King wrote these books in the space of just a couple of years (her first story appeared in The Transatlantic Review in 1962), and there are times when her effort to be funny shows.

Louise W. King only attempted one other work of adult fiction, an apparently un-ironic Gothic thriller titled The Rochemer Hag (1967). She moved to Connecticut, where she took up ceramics and was active in animal rights causes. She self-published a children’s book about two Pekingese puppies, Geronimo and Geranium, in 1979. She died in Washington, Connecticut in 2016.

The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies (1964)
The Velocipede Handicap (1965)
New York: Doubleday & Company; reissued in 1971 by Curtis Books

Harry Bleachbaker, by N. F. Simpson (1976)

Cover of Harry Bleachbaker by N. F. Simpson

This is a guest post by David Quantick.

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.
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 <em>Harry Bleachbaker</em>.
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.

(The documentary Reality Is An Illusion Caused By Lack of NF Simpson is available at http://www.curtainsforradio.co.uk/downloads/reality-is-an-illusion-caused-by-lack-of-nf-simpson-2/)

David QuantickDavid 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

Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon, Lunatics of Genius

Cover of first UK edition of You Were There
Cover of first UK edition of You Were There (1948).

This is a guest post by David Quantick

And so they sat and talked and drank and even sang a little. And the Puppa came beaming up with fresh supplies, and the Mumma sat at the desk and scolded the Puppa roundly because he hadn’t done anything wrong.

And at a table in the corner a pair of palooka writers looked on fascinated and invented fantastic names for them, and imagined their life stories.
The palooka man had a shock of black hair like a Japanese doll without a fringe, a moon-shaped, moon-coloured face that looked like a moon that needed shaving, and ash all over him. His name was S.J. Simon.

The girl palooka looked like a Semitic sparrow. She was Caryl Brahms.

And they didn’t know what the future was to hold for them either.

But you could bet your monomark there’d be a lot of laughter in it.

From You Were There.

I didn’t know what a monomark was when I first read this (an ancestor of the postcode, apparently) but the rest made complete sense to me. It is the final paragraph of the last novel written by Brahms and Simon, completed by Caryl Brahms after S. J. Simon’s death in 1948 and, entirely appropriately, it is the story of their first meeting. Even now I find it moving, because for me it is one of the best farewells of all time. It’s a tribute to a novel-writing partnership that lasted only eleven years but in that time produced eleven books, several short stories and a host of films, stage plays, radio broadcasts and television adaptations. They were called “lunatics of genius” by the press; they invented at least one genre between them, and while only one of their joint novels is currently in print, they remain my favourite writers of all time.

Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon
Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon, from Too Dirty for the Windmill, by Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin (1986).

Caryl Brahms was born Doris Abrahams in Surrey in 1901. S.J. Simon – real name Simon Jacobovitch Skidelsky – was born in Ekaterinoslav in 1906, the son of Russian Jews who emigrated to France after the revolution. The two first met when they were fellow lodgers at a house on Finchley Road, and they first worked together on contributing subjects for the Evening Standard cartoonist David Low; forming an instant rapport, they soon decided to collaborate on a novel. They had known success in other areas – Brahms had written a very A.A. Milne-esque slim volume of verse called The Moon On My Left, while Simon (as noted elsewhere on this site) was one of the best bridge players of all time – but the decision to become a novel-writing duo was a brilliant one.

Cover of first UK edition of A Bullet in the Ballet
Cover of first UK edition of A Bullet in the Ballet (1937).

The first Brahms and Simon novel, A Bullet In The Ballet, was an instant hit. The first of several comic murder mysteries set in the world of dance, A Bullet In The Ballet combined expert knowledge (Brahms was a balletomane and brilliant theatre critic), superb character writing (the member of the Ballet Stroganoff company are fantastical creatures, rendered just the right side of caricature), and a new way of writing crime fiction, that of introducing a long-suffering detective (Inspector Adam Quill) into a closed world of people whose self-obsession, egotism and devotion to their craft would make, frankly, anyone want to murder them.

Cover of first UK edition of Six Curtains for Stroganova
Cover of first UK edition of Six Curtains for Stroganova (1945).

But mostly it was the humour that made A Bullet In The Ballet so good. Characters as disparate as modernist choreographer Nicholas Nevajno, always trying to cash a bad cheque, and the prima donna Stroganova, always hoping for six curtain calls, were depicted in a prose style that combined, unexpectedly, the floriate excess of the ballet world with a new kind of bone-dry wit. One of the great joys of reading Brahms and Simon is their unique way of turning a sentence, the way they can convey changing moods in a sentence, one minute mocking the foolishness of human beings and the next bringing out unexpected sympathies. For lunatics of genius who could write at the same pace as their beloved Marx Brothers, Brahms and Simon were also full of heart and love for their creations. Almost, to use one of their favourite turns of phrase, they might be sentimental writers.

Cover of first UK edition of No Bed for Bacon
Cover of first UK edition of No Bed for Bacon (1941).

A Bullet In The Ballet was the first in a long series of Stroganoff novels, but Brahms and Simon were unable to restrict themselves to ballet mysteries: their other great achievement – many would say greater – was to, essentially, invent the historical comedy. Most people would say that the best Brahms and Simon novel is 1941’s No Bed For Bacon, and it would be insane to argue against this notion (although I will try soon). No Bed For Bacon, written during the London Blitz when both writers were air defense wardens, is not just a magnificent imagining of the London of Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, it is possibly the greatest comic novel of all time. Part romance – it tells the story of Shakespeare’s affair with the lady-in-waiting-turned-boy-actress Viola, it’s also part history lesson (a scene where old seadogs recall the victory over the Armada, written at the last minute to up the word count, is poignant and moving) and it is entirely, outrageously funny. Only a stone carving or a genuinely bad person could not love it.

Shakespeare sprang to his feet. ‘Master Bacon,’ he demanded passionately, ‘do I write my plays or do you?’ Bacon looked at him. He shrugged.
From No Bed for Bacon

Cover of first UK edition of Don't, Mr. Disraeli
Cover of first UK edition of Don’t, Mr. Disraeli (1940).

And great though No Bed For Bacon is, it is possibly not as great as the duo’s other notable historical novel, the epically glorious Don’t Mr. Disraeli, which is nothing more and nothing less than a comic tribute to the entire 19th century (its authors said that it was “not a novel set in the Victorian age but a novel set in its literature”). Based around a Victorian reworking of the Romeo and Juliet story, with Capulets and Montagues replaced by Clutterwicks and Shuttleforths, Don’t, Mr. Disraeli is also infected with the spirit, marvelously, of J. W. Dunne’s long-neglected but at the time hugely-influential An Experiment With Time, which proposed that time was not linear at all but rather simultaneously occurring everywhere, a viewpoint adopted by J. B. Priestley in An Inspector Calls and other plays. Brahms and Simon use Dunne’s notion to present a Victorian era where anyone can appear in the book so long as they lived or died in the 19th century: thus the Marx Brothers and the Duke of Wellington exist side by side, while Victoria herself appears many times at every stage of her life, from dowager widow to young bride. Stuffed with vignettes, running gags (even the title of the book is a catchphrase) and moments of great power (a montage concerning the poor of London is worthy of its roots in Henry Mayhew), Don’t, Mr. Disraeli may sometimes lack the lightness of No Bed For Bacon, but it is an extraordinary achievement.

Cover of first UK edition of Trottie True
Cover of first UK edition of Trottie True (1946).

Brahms and Simon have always been immensely popular with other writers: Don’t, Mr. Disraeli was admired by Evelyn Waugh, who namechecked it in his Sword Of Honour trilogy, while No Bed For Bacon is one of Neil Gaiman’s favourite books. Their work has been adapted for stage, radio, television and cinema: particularly worth watching are the film versions of Trottie True and No Nightingales. They wrote superb short stories for Lilliput magazine, some of which were collected in To Hell with Hedda. And when Simon died suddenly in 1948, Caryl Brahms found a new collaborator in Ned Sherrin, with whom she worked until her death in 1982. Not enough of their work is currently in print, aside from No Bed For Bacon, which enjoyed a brief flurry of new recognition when people flagged up its accidental and coincidental similarity to the Tom Stoppard-scripted movie Shakespeare In Love. Now it is the 21st century and it has been three quarters of a century since the “Semitic sparrow” and the man with the moon-shaped face wrote together, but they will always be my favourite writers, and those of many other people. Much of their work is out of print, but copies of their books are easy to find online, and other readers will be drawn to them as I was.

And if I had one, I’d bet my monomark on it.

David QuantickDavid 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.

THE Ride to Khiva, by F. C. Burnand (1877)

Cover of THE Ride to Khiva, by F. C. Burnand

For a place deep in the heart of Central Asia, Khiva got a lot of traffic from English visitors in the 19th Century. In 1875, Captain Frederick Burnaby braved crossing the lines of a Russo-Turcoman to journey to the city, returning in triumph to tell the story in his best-seller, A Ride to Khiva. In 1899, Robert L. Jefferson, author of Roughing It in Siberia, repeated the feat (“as a sportsman”) and wrote about it in his imaginatively titled A New Ride to Khiva.

Between them, however, came the most daring traveler of all, F. C. Burnand (later Sir Francis), then editor of Punch. As he explained in his definitively titled THE Ride to Khiva, unlike Burnaby, he proposed to travel both to and from Khiva. And to travel not with Burnaby’s spartan 85-pound backpack but with saddlebags loaded with provisions and cooking utensils, a semi-grand piano fitted up with a comfortable bedroom, a store of American beef, and a cellaret full of beer and champagne (Pommery and Greno très sec). And finally, to stay in constant contact with his editors back in London, his own private wire (which at various times in the book is a telegraph, a means of escape, and former soldier named Wire).

Of course, all this kit costs a fortune. Luckily, Burnand manages to assemble a list of subscribers from those interested in his going — those interested in his not coming back.

The list of subscribers to Burnand's expedition to Khiva
The list of subscribers to Burnand’s expedition to Khiva.

“A. S. S.” on the list is, no doubt, Burnand’s poke at one of his perennial antagonists, the novelist Albert Smith, author of The Adventures of Mr. Ledbury and his friend Jack Johnson (1866), of whom the playright Douglas Jerrold once said, “When he signs his initials he only tells two-thirds of the truth.”

Scaring off the wolves with a portrait of Gladstone
Scaring off the wolves (in sheep’s clothing) with a portrait of Gladstone.

Traveling through the backlands of Russia brings its fair share of hazards. Burnand is chased by wolves, attacked by Tartars, thrown in jail more than once. He even spends a night in a pig stye — but comes away with a piglet who proves an invaluable ally. He teaches the Pig alphabet as well as to play numerous card games … perhaps too well:

This evening played two games of Double Dummy with the Pig. He won the last rubber. If he repeats this, I shall watch his play closely. The Sleigh-driver backed the Pig. I begin to suspect collusion.

Though the Pig goes on to rescue Burnand from several near-death experiences, the air of suspicion is never entirely lifted. “There is a twinkle in his eye that I don’t half like,” Burnand confides to his journal. Still, the Pig compares favorably to the mouse he befriends while on one of his stays in Russian jails: “An apt pupil, but possessing neither the solidity nor the gravity of the Pig.”

Despite bragging early on that he’d found a more direct route to Khiva than Burnaby followed, Burnand’s journal suggests otherwise. He reports crossing the river Oxus on page 26, but over the course of the following weeks, manages to cross it at least 20 times more. At least he thinks it’s the Oxus. “I suppose,” he confesses, “judging by the position of the stars, as I’ve lost my maps.” He accidentally wanders into Persia at one point, forcing him to backtrack for hundreds of miles.

Burnand's map of his ride to Khiva
Burnand’s map of his ride to Khiva.

As the map he provides in the book clearly shows, Burnand’s ride to Khiva ultimately involved more digress than progress. If, that is, he ever actually made the trip. The editors close the account with a suspicious note that Burnand reported that, “Khiva is a very charming place, and, from his description, not totally unlike Margate.” Burnand was a long-time resident of Ramsgate and perhaps Margate seemed journey enough for the busy editor.

THE Ride to Khiva originally appeared as a serial in Punch. There appear to be just three used copies available for sale, but fortunately you can find it in electronic formats for free on the Internet Archive.

The Ride to Khiva, by F. C. Burnand
London: Bradbury, Agnew & Co., 1877

Andrew Graham, Teller of Club Secrets

Andrew Graham, from the dust jacket of Mostly Nasty

I came across Andrew Graham — Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Graham, to give him his proper title — through his story collection Mostly Nasty (1961). I bought the book purely for its intriguing cover and lovely design, the pages filled with ornate and startling illustrations by Leonard Huskinson. Mostly Nasty reads a bit like a collection of after dinner tales told over a brandy in the comfortable leather chairs of a fine old London club — if the club included men like Roald Dahl or John Collier among its members. For there are streaks of Dahl’s delight in the absurdity of death and Collier’s spirit of jolly misanthropy. There are many deaths in its pages and most are fraught with ridiculousness.

Cover of Mostly Nasty by Andrew Graham

On the other hand, Graham’s stories are told from the perspective of a man poised a rung or two above Dahl or Collier on the social ladder. He is not just familiar with fine country houses but able to spot the details that set a better one apart: “A particularly good set of busts of emperors looked down at us from the tops of the bookcases; firelight from a wood fire twinkled in the silver of the tea-tray; there was hot toast and farm butter and home-made black cherry jam; and a slight smell of vellum, Turkish tobacco and late roses.”

This is from “Dear George,” the story of a painfully well-mannered bachelor uncle who becomes the target of a thoroughly unpleasant nephew’s domestic terrorism. As George and the narrator settle down in the lounge for a bit of tea after their dusty journey, little Cedric launches his first raid: “He wore a Red Indian head-dress, he left the door open, he caught his foot in the wire of a standard lamp and brought it crashing to the ground, and, catching George (ever a slow-mover) unawares, seized hold of both ends of his moustache.” Too kind to heed the narrator’s advice “to give the child a sharp biff on the behind,” he suffers silently as Cedric attempts to extract every hair of George’s moustache by its root. “He must have suffered agony,” the narrator reflects. Little Cedric gets his comeuppance in the end, though, in a shocking if satisfyingly permanent way.

Cedric attacks George. Illustration by Leonard Huskinson from Mostly Nasty by Andrew Graham
Cedric attacks George. Illustration by Leonard Huskinson from Mostly Nasty by Andrew Graham

Graham’s elevated position has its disadvantages, though. His sense of fitness restrains him from taking quite the same evil relish in awful outcomes as a Dahl or Collier. This is not black humor but rather an elegantly muted shade of grey. Writing after two world wars — the latter in which Graham fought as a tank commander — where Britain took more than its fair share of losses, he is fully aware that social changes are afoot, but not yet decided whether he agrees with them:

Nowadays one is so accustomed to old ladies of eighty who do their own housework, bumble about the neighbourhood in Morris 10s, and spend the evening of life baby-sitting, that it was a rare pleasure, like sampling a wine of ancient vintage, to shake the be-ringed hand of this splendid old number, complete with curly fringe of false hair (weren’t they called “transformations”?), lace, altar-frontal held up round the neck by whalebone, locket on black watered-silk ribbon, and lace cuffs: complete, in fact, with all those trimmings which come in so handy if you happen to have a lady’s maid, but which only confuse the issue if you’re doing the washing-up

In structure, Graham’s stories betray a strong grounding in the kind of set-up/punchline structure first mastered by Edgar Allan Poe and then used for the next 100 years by writers like O. Henry and Frank Stockton. If you’re looking for that twist designed to provoke a burst of laughter or gasp of disbelief, read the first paragraph or two then skip to the last.

But what really matters here is the teller, not the tale. Graham is a man of the world, but not a man full of himself. Stick with him for the details, not the drama. If Graham’s mostly nasty tales seem to have had their cutting edges dulled a bit, it’s all in the interest of good taste. “Assuming one’s critical faculties were just a teeny-weeny bit numbed by a glass or two of really good wine,” one reviewer wrote, “these stories would be quite enjoyable.”

Graham would have been your man if really good wine was what you were looking for. He’d not only savored his fair share of the stuff in post-war military liaison posts, he spent much of the 1960s as the Times own wine correspondent — back in the days when the only wines considered worth drinking came from France bearing an appellation d’origine contrôlée. He got his start as a scribbler with a short memoir of his tour as the British Military Attaché in Saigon from 1952 to 1954 titled Interval in Indo-China (1956). The Telegraph’s reviewer praised Graham for his “light, conversational style that is often very amusing,” but I suspect his urbane and ironic account of his experiences now seems a bit ill-timed given what came after.

Cover of The Club by Andrew Graham

His skills as a raconteur, however, made him an exemplary clubman. I haven’t been able to track down a list of his memberships, but according to knowledgeable sources, it was the Conservative Club at 74 Saint James’s Street that inspired his next book, The Club (1957). Although written as a novel with a thin plot centered on the attempt of a nouveau riche manufacturer to gain access to the True Blue Club’s auspices ranks, The Club was closer to an anthropological study than a work of fiction. That is, if the anthropologist took a wicked delight in reporting the worst of his subject’s manners and customs.

Reviewers with some experience of club life took particular pleasure in reading the book. John Betjeman wrote that, “What makes this book so very well worth reading is its author’s accurate knowledge of elderly men and how much more maliciously they gossip about one another than women.” Alan Ross in the TLS found it “full of the most delicately observed character studies, of bores, complainers, retired soldiers, country gentlemen, business magnates, upstart peers, and the hereditary rich.”

One reviewer called it “a plum-cake of a book,” but praised Graham for his restraint: “Yet the joke is not overdone.” And indeed, some thought Graham’s instinct not too cut too deeply laudable. “There have been other books about the malice of men but few which so well describe their pathos,” Betjeman wrote, and Maurice Richardson considered that Graham had hit “the correct note of poignancy, so integral a part of club atmosphere which can turn the most divergent types of human frailty into desirable members of society.”

Cover of A Foreign Affair by Andrew Graham

Graham returned to Southeast Asia for his second novel, A Foreign Affair (1958). Set on a fictional island split between two states in uneasy and impermanent truce — the revolutionary Cheo Republic in the north and Westward-leaning but charmingly corrupt kingdom of Parasang in the south (reminder you of any place?) — A Foreign Affair is a comedy soaked in a genial sort of Foreign Office snobbery. Coups, crises, and conflicts may come and go, but the first priority of the British Ambassador is not to allow matters to upset the peace of a predictable daily routine.

When a crisis does arise, however, the Westerners are prepared to respond: “The Englishwomen of Alassar, with their unrivalled knowledge of auxiliary services in time of war, set about imparting their skills in First Aid, Fire Watching, Ambulance-driving and the making of hot sweet tea, to their Eastern sisters.” The wife of the French ambassador offers her own form of aid: instruction “in that essential weapon in the armoury of modern French healing, the hypodermic syringe.” For the most part, however, life in Parasang is one of late mornings, sleepy afternoons, and long evening cocktail hours. The primary duties of the Parasang Army are ceremonial:

For this they had left their humble homes in the ricefields; for this they had learnt to bear without blubbing the acute pain of wearing army boots and the relatively minor discomfort and airlessness of battledress; for this they had endured long hot afternoons on the barrack square, being screamed at by bull-chested sergeant majors, while their less patriotic brothers dozed till the evening shadows fell; for this they had sloped, ordered, presented, shouldered and trailed their arms, hitting the great unwieldy rifles till, if necessary, their hands bled. This, they felt — one glance of royal recognition — this was It.

And, considering that the Army was not normally called upon to do much else throughout the year, they were not far wrong in their belief.

Graham clearly drew upon his time as a military attaché in Vietnam for the material in A Foreign Affair, but he showed himself more than willing to make a joke at his own expense. Reporting the responses around the world to one of Parasang’s occasional coups, he notes that, “One enterprising London bookseller arranged a window display of an ill-informed and now out-of-date little book called Interval in Parasang, written some years before by a junior officer with literary ambitions who had served at Alassar under the Mandate.

Cover of Lover for a King by Andrew Graham

Graham’s next book, Love for a King (1959), is a lightweight bit of royalist nostalgia set in the early 20th century somewhere along the Adriatic in the kingdom of Quarankol. The love referred to in the title is not romantic but patriotic. Though the King of Quarankol is aging, ill, and somewhat fuzzy-minded, the people know he has only the best intentions. Unlike the Parasangians in A Foreign Affair, the people of Quarankol long for a peaceful transition of power, even if the choice of successors offers slim pickings. Graham tells a good-hearted but forgettable little fairy tale, and the most noteworthy aspect of the book may be the chapter heading illustrations by William McLaren.

Illustration by William McLaren, from Love for a King by Andrew Graham
Illustration by William McLaren, from Love for a King by Andrew Graham

Graham took a break from fiction in the early 1960s, probably due to elbow strain incurred through his work on the wine circuit for the Times. He knew he had a sweet deal, however, and seems not to have indulged in unnecessary flourishes of wine snobbery. Bevis Hillier, John Betjeman’s authorized biographer and an expert on English ceramics, for example, recalled sitting next to Graham at a fancy lunch and asking his opinion of the host’s choices in wines:

“You’re meant to know something about pottery and porcelain, aren’t you?” Graham replied. “How would you like it, if every lunch you went to, you were asked to turn the soup-plate upside down and pronounce on the quality of the ware? Well, that’s the sort of thing that happens to me with wine. So I’m having beer instead.”

Having poked fun at the ways of London clubs and the Foreign Office, it was only natural that Graham would turn in his next books to a subject he knew best: the Army. He made an exception, however, and took time to write a straightforward history of the regiment he served with through most of the War. Sharpshooters at War (1965) was an account of the wartime exploits of the 3rd, the 4th and the 3rd/4th County of London Yeomanry (the 3rd and the 4th were combined into the 3rd/4th after D-Day — who says the military can’t be efficient?).

Cover of The Regiment, by Andrew Graham

He then spun the table and in The Regiment (1967), Graham told the story of an earnest young historian’s struggle to extract a serious history from the records of a thoroughly dishonorable unit, Queen Adelaide’s Imperial Heavy Infantry. Vernon Scannell, who’d served as an enlisted man at El Alamein and spent much of his war years as a prisoner in military jails for desertion, didn’t think much of the book: “Most of the members of the regiment have comic names, long and difficult if they are officers, but Meagre and Lumber if they are Other Ranks. There are some jokes about bed-wetting, boils on the bottom, and homosexuality.” Simon Raven, on the other hand, who’d resigned his commission for “conduct unbecoming”, however, enjoyed the richness of Graham’s insider knowledge, offering as an illustration his translation of one particularly dusty dispatch:

The Original
Z Coy [Company], till recently out of luck, has made a successful foray on a hide-out in its area and captured several suspected terrorists. Well done, Z Coy; keep it up. But all work and no play makes Jack a dull soldier, so we are happy to say that they are showing their usual resource in finding off-duty recreations. A party from the Coy recently came down to the Battalion HQ on a short visit for administrative purposes, and impressed all by their cheeriness.

Translated into plain English
Z Coy, after months of incompetence, accidentally picked up two drunk natives in a ditch. Both were subsequently released, as being entirely harmless, by a contemptuous Inspector of Police. Meanwhile, native women were enticed into the Coy camp on numerous occasions and gave 37 soldiers clap. There were sent down to be treated by the MO at Battalion HQ and were delighted to get shot of their tedious duties.

Cover of The Queen's Malabars by Andrew Graham

Graham had such a good time with the book that he persuaded Leo Cooper, whose imprint published a long series of histories known as the Famous Regiments, to allow him to write a pastiche of the genre, The Queen’s Malabars (1970), subtitled “A Not-So-Famous Regiment.” The Queen’s Malabars were, if possible, even more disreputable than Queen Adelaide’s Heavy Infantry, having spent much of their time being shuttled off to places where they could be kept at a safe distance from anything remotely resembling armed conflict.

Graham’s books are all out of print now, but The Club, The Regiment, and The Queen’s Malabars get passed around among small circles of admiring readers. None of his books will go down in literary history, but he can always be relied upon for a good yarn and a good laugh — especially if accompanied by a good stiff drink within easy reach. And I have to admire the good nature of any author who would allow his illustrator to place his head on a plate as in this Leonard Huskinson illustration from Mostly Nasty.

Andrew Graham's head on a plate. Endispiece illustration by Leonard Huskinson, from Mostly Nasty
Andrew Graham’s head on a plate. Endispiece illustration by Leonard Huskinson, from Mostly Nasty.

The Laughing Cavalier, by Allan Turpin (1969)

Cover of first UK edition of The Laughing Cavalier by Allan Turpin

How does a book or writer get forgotten? There are a few instances where it’s a matter of deliberate suppression: who in Nazi Germany read the work of Stefan Zweig or Thomas Mann after their books were burned? There are cases where it’s a matter of institutional prejudice, such as the tendency of university English departments to ignore the work of women writers and people of color. Cultural disinclination is a big factor: until magic realism burst upon the scene with One Hundred Years of Solitude, Latin American literature was considered as obscure specialty subject in the U.S. “Canadian novelist” is a label still dismissed by many American and U.K. readers; and “French Canadian novelist” is almost the kiss of death, as the example of Marie-Claire Blais illustrates. Product distribution channels disable as much as they enable access to writers’ work: where U.K. books routinely leap over to U.S. bookshelves, one in ten of the same number of Australian titles make the trip across the Pacific.

But the most common and by far most effective way things get forgotten is inertia. Forgetting is the human condition. Dementia is only noticeable because it’s such an aggressive form of forgetting. Remembering takes effort, and if no one makes the effort, the inevitable result is that people and what they accomplished in their lives are forgotten.

Take Allan Turpin as an example. He published ten novels in his lifetime, most of them in the space of a little more than dozen years between 1964 and 1977. All received favorable but not glowing reviews: praise for his light, sophisticated comedy, mild caution over his old-fashioned style. None of them were ever reissued. When he died in 1979, there was no notice in any of the major papers. He died without heirs and left his entire estate to the Royal Literary Fund.

If Turpin is remembered at all today, it has nothing to do with his writing. In 1925, he and a young woman named Molly Ackland convinced themselves they were in love and decided to get married. He was 22, she was 19. He had little experience of romantic love and neither had experience of heterosexual love. The marriage was misguided from the start and was ultimately annulled. Molly Turpin began wearing male clothing, transformed herself into Valentine Ackland, became a poet and met and became the lifelong companion of the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner. Richard Turpin — born Allan Richard Turpin, he was known to his friends as Richard — exited stage left and disappears from Ackland’s story.

Part of the problem with the marriage, as Ackland later wrote in her memoir For Sylvia, was Turpin’s confusion over his own sexuality: “Richard was without any experience of women, and he was suffering from remorse and fear because of certain homosexual relationships he had enjoyed recently. ‘Enjoyed’ is the important word. He was now horrified to remember that he had been happy.” Her suspicions may have been well-founded. After the annulment, Turpin remained single for the rest of his life and census electoral records show him sharing an address with another man or a married couple.

Turpin shared some of Ackland’s desire to write, though it manifested in a very different way. Where she wrote confessional poetry, he converted his own experiences into a diffident sort of comic fiction. His first novel Doggett’s Tours, published as Richard Turpin in 1932, drew from the several years he spent as a tour guide on the Continent. His first love was for the theatre, but he had little success there. A comedy titled “The Fare Includes Romance” was produced in 1933 and closed after a week. His adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw was forgotten just as quickly in 1946.

James remained, however, a dominant influence on his writing. On the strength of The Laughing Cavalier, I would describe Turpin’s work as Evelyn Waugh channelled through Henry James: his pages are peopled by ridiculous people, his paragraphs riddled with sentences of near-Jamesian convolution:

No particle of her was excited by George, fair-haired, as pink-cheeked as a girl, naïve, awkward, diffident; with the wrong ties, slovenly speed, and an unappetizing background; given, once his diffidence had worn off, to a great deal of rather foolish laughter and talk about nothing; generous, but feckless, and apparently without ambition ever to be anything more than a clerk on 30/- a week; a young man who, although the least knowable of young men since he never knew himself, seemed on first acquaintance rather boringly knowable and predictable; an absurd young man who, nevertheless, like all men, took his feelings seriously and could be alarmingly melodramatic and sentimental — than which nothing is less attractive when you don’t want it.

If Turpin’s style owed something to James, his attitude could be attributed to Waugh (or perhaps, going back a generation, as Turpin often seemed wont to do, Wilde). “I think that animals are fortunate in that their relationship with their parents is healthily short,” Turpin’s narrator announces at the start of The Laughing Cavalier. “Rather than see children exposed to the enormous risk of being brought up by their own parents,” he argues, “I would prefer state rearing. A visit to hospital must convince anyone of the extraordinary amount of disinterested humanity that exists where there is a need for it.”

The Laughing Cavalier was one of what Turpin at some point intended to be an eight-novel sequence called Memoirs of a Naïve Young Man. The naïve young man, Geoffrey Gillard, clearly becomes a fictional stand-in for Turpin himself once one discovers the coincidences between Gillard and Turpin’s life.

Allan Richard Turpin was born in 1903 to Frank Turpin and Clara Turpin (née Gillard). At the time, Frank Turpin’s profession was listed as “stamp dealer” — the same profession as George Gillard, the narrator’s father and the subject of the book. An earlier volume in the Memoirs series, Innocent Employments, describes the rise of this stamp business. As in the book, Richard Turpin joined his father in the business after a few unsatisfactory years as a tour guide. A passenger list from a trip he made to the U.S. in 1927 identifies Turpin as a “philatelist.” In 1930, Turpin and his older brother took over F. B. Turpin when their father retired.

Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals
Laughing Cavalier, a portrait by Frans Hals (1624)

Turpin/Gillard takes his title from Frans Hals’ famous 1624 portrait Laughing Cavalier. Remembering his father as seen through his son’s fourteen-year-old eyes, Turpin describes “a man who, although his thick auburn hair and pointed imperial were quite impressive, was, beneath them, unexpectedly short and rather self-indulgently plump; a man who, because of this beard, his rich red complexion, and light blue, constantly smiling, not very penetrating eyes, rather resembled, everyone said, Hals’s Laughing Cavalier, of which we had a colour print in the hall; a man than whom, in fact, no one could be more amiable and less terrifying.”

George Gillard disappoints his son by his obstinate insistence on being himself. It’s not the obstinacy that irritates: it’s his father’s blithe disregard for how relentlessly mundane his taste, talk, habits, thoughts, opinions — even his gestures are. Though a tremendous success in his stamp business, he is utterly lacking in ambition. Though he can afford to go to the theatre regularly, he enjoys the most formulaic romance every bit as much as something by Shaw. And yet, to his son’s annoyance, he is also “the most universally liked man I have ever met.”

If you pick up The Laughing Cavalier hoping for a Waugh-like dissection of the older generation, however, you’ll be disappointed. Writing reflectively at 66, Turpin finds it harder to maintain the uncompromising standards of a twenty-something. “If I did not admire my father, I, as I have already suggested, loved him much more than I knew,” he writes about halfway through the book.

George Gillard’s greatest failure in his son’s eyes is his failure to adequately mourn the death of his wife. Although her son acknowledges that his mother, who was often ill through his childhood, often left his father in the position of having to attend social engagements solo, he is shocked when — just six months after her death — he begins to court another woman. “If he had not murdered my mother, he had, in my youthful eyes, committed a crime that was almost the equivalent of murder”: “he had not regretted her death.”

Choosing to close up and sell off the house his sons had grown up in, George falls from an exotic-looking younger woman he meets when viewing a prospective new flat with his son. Turpin’s description of their accidental encounter contains one of the many gems of observation that are studded throughout the dense weave of his prose: “We moved across the sitting-room and, at the door, confronted the ladies, who were just about to wander in. There was the usual exchange of ‘sorries’ by which the English cover their acute embarrassment when proximity forces them to recognize the existence of strangers.”

Fifty-seven to the woman’s thirty-five, ready to retire from a successful but not wealthy business, George fails to see the limitations of his attraction, much to his son’s further exasperation. To everyone’s great relief, when the woman does let him down, she does so with enough grace as to merely deflate, rather than shatter, his ego, and a much more suitable mate is soon found. Turpin lacks the cold-bloodedness to leave any of his characters in shreds.

And this may offer a clue to why Allan Turpin’s work has become forgotten. It was just this quality that appealed to Turpin’s original reviewers. Claire Tomalin wrote that, “With fewer ponderous generalisations and more laughter this would have been an even better book: as it is, it deserves a place in the rich chronicles of the English petty bourgeoisie of our century.” Robert Baldick, in The Daily Telegraph, observed that “If Mr. Turpin cultivates a small plot of literary earth, he tends it with exquisite skill, and the results are never disappointing…. Few authors have written so perceptively about the father-son relationship: it is high time Mr. Turpin’s quiet talent was more widely recognized.” Instead, Turpin’s quiet talent was forgotten soon after his last book was published. This is good but unshowy work. The lack of cold-bloodedness is considered a virtue in a female middlebrow novelist: gentle-hearted satire has long legs in this era of Persephone Books and the Dorothy Whipple revival. In a male middlebrow novelist, however, gentle satire is reason enough to let his work slowly moulder into earth.

I’ll admit that when I first started reading The Laughing Cavalier, I was put off by the Jamesian-ness of Allan Turpin’s prose. But at a certain point, probably no more than a chapter in, I found myself relaxing, giving in to the leisurely pace, appreciating the subtlety of observation and the lightness of the comic touches. And once you adapt to Turpin’s Edwardian speed, the journey becomes much easier to enjoy.

The Laughing Cavalier, by Allan Turpin
London: Michael Joseph, 1969

Strange Journey, by Maud Cairnes (pseudonym of Lady Kathleen Curzon-Herrick) (1935)

Cover of first UK edition of Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes

Body swapping, where two characters end up in each other’s bodies is such a staple of comic and fantastic theater, fiction, and film that it’s got its own Wikipedia page, which links in turn to a list of over 100 examples of body swapping in media. Many of the modern interpretations can be traced back to F. Anstey’s 1882 novel, Vice Versa. Usually the exchange occurs between sharply contrasting individuals: a father and his son (Vice Versa); a mother and daughter (Freaky Friday); a boy and a girl (The Swap). In the case of Strange Journey, the opposites in question are a middle-class suburban English housewife (Polly) and a landed/titled member of the ruling class (Lady Elizabeth).

Polly and Tom live in one of the new garden cities ringing London that began popping up after the First World War. As much as she loves Tom and her two children, she does tire of the endless demands that other people make on her time and energy. One day, as she stands at her front gate watching a queue of traffic idling behind a bit of road work, she sees an elegant woman sitting inside a Rolls Royce and looking out idly:

Suddenly I felt a longing to change places with her, to get into that big, comfortable looking car, lean back in the soft cushions I felt sure that it contained, while the chauffeur made it glide away through the dusk to some pleasant house where there would be efficient servants and tea waiting, with a silver teapot, thin china, and perhaps hot scones, nice deep arm chairs to sit in, and magazines lying on the table.

The traffic moves, the Rolls passes, and Polly goes back into the house. A week or so later, a picture of a similar Rolls in a magazine brings back that daydream. But suddenly, Polly feels a moment of dizziness, after which her head clears and she looks down at her hands.

They are not hers. They are hands “of the sort that I should have loved to possess, white and slim, with long fingers and shining almond-shaped nails.” She finds herself in exactly the sort of place she’d dreamt of: fireplace roaring, walls lined with portraits, battle scenes, and books, and a butler bringing in the afternoon tea. She manages to mask her complete disorientation, but quickly finds herself unable to come up with the appropriate responses to the older woman sitting with her. Worse, two large dogs that wander in bristle and growl at her. “Good Lord, one would think they were seeing ghosts,” the woman remarks. After a few more moments of panic, Polly finds herself back home again.

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Over the following months, she finds herself transported to the grand country house again and again, and she begins to suss out a little about the woman whose skin she’s in. Her name is Lady Elizabeth. She is married to Major Forrester — Gerald — who appears to enjoy flaunting his interest in several different beautiful and flirtatious women. She is an avid shooter and rides to the hounds, skills which Polly utterly lacks, leading to embarrassing and awkward moments with Lady Elizabeth’s acquaintances. The shooting in particular proves particularly disturbing:

All those people who seemed quite pleasant and ordinary had taken the massacre as a matter of course. Only I had never seen things killed, except on the films, when naturally one knows that it does not hurt…. Of course I had known that such things took place; that the meat people eat gets knocked on the head, and chickens have their necks wrung, but I had never visualised what slaughter was actually like. I simply had never thought about it.

Polly struggles to navigate her passages through Lady Elizabeth’s life — just which of the dozens of bedrooms in the house is hers, for example? She also realizes how little she actually knows about the simplest protocols and assumptions of the gentry. £1,000 a year, for example, seems a fortune to her; it is, however, considered one step from the poorhouse for any young man hoping to marry into a good family. On the other hand, she’s a whiz at bridge, which astonishes everyone who thought Lady Elizabeth looked on all forms of card play with distain.

She also soon realizes that her exchanges are mutual. When she’s transported into Lady Elizabeth’s skin, the Lady finds herself in Polly’s. She’s dismayed to learn that her children love the stories of castles and knights their mother has been telling them, stumped to come up with a good explanation of how she can suddenly play the piano with ease. Worse, while she feels certain the Lady Elizabeth views her own husband Gerald with a mixture of dislike and disinterest, she begins to suspect the Lady of having designs on Tom.

Eventually, Polly and Lady Elizabeth — as themselves — make contact and attempt to come to an understanding of how the mechanism linking them operates. Much of it seems to depend on a sort of synchronized wishful thinking, just the kind of idle daydreaming that led to their first experience. Simply arranging to meet, however, brings Polly to an understanding of just how constrained her lot is compared to Lady Elizabeth’s. “Gerald would never ask what she had been doing, and she could go to a picture gallery or a concert and nobody would think it at all queer.” Polly, on the other hand, sees that “I really had no private life at all”: “If I should feel inclined to do something quite ordinary like that, by myself, everybody in my neighbourhood would wonder why.”

The most interesting the twist in Strange Journey is not the details of how the two women are able to exchange lives — and they do, at least for a while, manage to use it at will — but the author’s attempt to pull off her own swap.

Maud Cairnes - Lady Kathleen Hastings Curzon-Herrick
From The Bystander, 3 April 1935.

Maud Cairnes — as The Tatler and several other society-radar magazines revealed soon after the publication of Strange Journey — was a pseudonym. She was not a literarily-inclined middle class woman but the Lady Maud Kathleen Cairns Plantagenet Hastings Curzon-Herrick, eldest daughter of the 14th Earl of Huntingdon and wife of Mr. William Montagu Curzon-Herrick, whose own grand house, Beaumanor Hall, and its surrounding estate had been in his family for over 300 years. When William and Lady Kathleen were married in 1916, their wedding was called “The Event of the Week” and featured in a full-page spread in The Illustrated London News. Going by the story in The Times, I counted fourteen lords and ladies, at least eight counts and countesses, three viscountesses, one earl (Huntingdon, of course), and one each baroness, duchess, and marchioness.

A Hunting Party at Beaumanor Park
A Shoot at Beaumanor Park, from The Illustrated London News, 1925. Lady Kathleen Curzon-Herrick is third from left.

Lady Elizabeth’s world was Lady Kathleen’s. Her father the Earl, and later she and Mr. Curzon-Herrick, regularly hosted great shooting slaughters at their estates. Lady Kathleen was as much at home in the saddle, if perhaps not cutting quite the same slim, elegant figure in her riding gear. She frequented the ballet, theater, and concert hall, saw her name in Court Circulars, set an example for housewives like Polly with her reputation for wit, grace … and heavy smoking.

Lady Kathleen Curzon-Herrick in riding gear, from The Illustrated London News, 1930
Lady Kathleen Curzon-Herrick in riding gear, from The Illustrated London News 1928.

She was also long an amateur at the writing game. Her sister Grace recalled Kathleen writing plays the three Hastings girls would perform while still being taught at home, and in the mid-1920s, the Lyceum’s Stage Club put on a production of Kathleen’s play, “It is Expedient.” Strange Journey was her first novel, but its reviews in both England and the U.S. would have pleased most seasoned writers. In The New Statesman, Cyril Connolly — after savaging the more established Kay Boyle’s novel The Next Bride (“a very annoying book”) — praised it as “an original and charming story; a very good idea is neatly worked out, and there is something fresh and delightful about this first novel.” The Illustrated London News repaid Lady Kathleen for her many appearances on its pages by calling her book “fresh and odd, and an unusually good first novel.”

The Spectator’s anonymous reviewer, after saying that Strange Journey was “a remarkable little book: a good novel on a theme that is pure housemaid’s delight,” identified its greatest strength:

It does verge on the romantic; but it is saved, and made, by being told in the practical words of Polly Wilkinson herself. Her gaffes on her various translations into the body of Lady Elizabeth, her suburbanisms, her anguish when she finds herself suddenly on horseback in the middle of the hunting field, are all related with extreme common sense. One likes Polly Wilkinson.

Considering that the voice of Polly Wilkinson is the voice of a Lady Elizabeth translating herself into the mind of someone she could only have experienced or imagined at some remove, Lady Kathleen’s success in her first attempt at fiction is even more remarkable. And the down-to-earth tone of Polly Wilkinson’s voice is what prevents Strange Journey from sinking into cringe-worthy farce and keeps it at the level of simple human comedy:

She then opened a big jewel case in which there were several tiers. I thought it looked like a real treasure chest, when I saw brooches and necklaces, bracelets, ear-rings and rings, all in velvet compartments. I just stared. Late for dinner or not I had no intention of hurrying over my choice. I took a sort of collar of emeralds and diamonds, and put it round my neck; it looked wonderful. Then I found some emerald and diamond ear-rings, long ones, and some bangles; I put two or three of these and a big diamond brooch like a spray, that cheered up the dress a lot.

Then I saw the pearls — three long ropes of them — and one shorter one. I put the ropes on and looked happily at my reflection in the mirror.

“I think I want something on my head now,” said I, wondering if it was a grand enough party for a tiara.

Foley, who had been looking rather stunned, smiled respectfully as though I had made a joke. I gathered that it was not a tiara occasion.

Lady Kathleen made just one other excursion into novel-writing. She followed up a few years later with The Disappearing Duchess (1939), which required less of an imaginative stretch. It told of how the Duchess of Darenth went missing from a French villa while on a visit in the summer of 1913 and how an ex-Secret Serviceman found her. Sold and reviewed as a conventional mystery, it earned brief, respectful reviews: “A neat and pleasantly readable story” (TLS); “cunningly compiled to sound plausible to our expectant ears” (The Daily Telegraph).

From this point forward, Lady Kathleen faded slowly from sight. Her husband died suddenly in 1945 and much of the land around Beaumanor Hall had to be sold off to pay his death duties. When the Curzon-Herrick name appeared in the press, it was more likely to be about her daughter. She died in Hove in February 1965 at the age of 71, earning no more than a one-line notice in The Times.

Strange Journey, by Maud Cairnes (pseudonym of Lady Kathleen Hastings Curzon-Herrick)
London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1935
New York: Norton, 1935

By the Sea, By the Sea, by George Sumner Albee (1960)

Cover of first UK edition of By the Sea, By the Sea by George Sumner Albee

Few things give you as good a picture of life at a particular time and place as seeing what people considered satire. Satire with legs is tough to write. Barbs that seemed razor sharp at the time can strike today’s reader as dull — or worse, off-target or unsuccessful to an extent that can be excruciating to watch as a rerun. What was meant to poke the funnybone can seem like an unwelcome jab in the ribs. George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea is an example of the dangers of consuming satire too long after its sell-by date.

By the Sea is set in the remote seaside town of Plankton. When I read the book, I was sure that Plankton was somewhere along the Central California coast, but many of its contemporary reviewers were convinced it was in New England. Albee offers no good geographic reference points to anchor it, so let’s say we’re both right.

Plankton’s original name — as not even the Indians found the place habitable before the crazy white men showed up — was Zion’s Golden Strand. A religious sect named the Semi-Submersion Redemptionists, whose men wore beards like Spanish moss and women dressed “like adders in calico,” settled there around 1900 to practice their faith in peace. Which they did for several decades, until their stricture against sex in any form began to whittle their number down to a handful. Then, during Prohibition, the rumrunners moved in, using it as a quiet and safe to land fast boats full of illegal hooch. After FDR eliminated the profit margin, the town was left for the strays and stragglers to occupy.

There is Bonesetter, a retired seaman who runs the town’s drug store and lives in a loose menage with his wife and her ex-stripper sister, Zarafa. There is Manuel Ortega, known to everyone as “Spic” (and here we begin to see the stretchmarks in the satire), who lost an arm bringing a load of whisky ashore and stayed to run the general store. There are the Tatum sisters, two retired librarians, and their mother, whose dementia takes the peculiar form of believing herself to be General George Custer. And there are a handful of artists, sculptors, and miscellaneous Bohemians.

The diverse collection of Planktonians is united on one point: that success as defined by the world outside is an anathema. “The human race, friends, cannot stand success,” Bonesetter tells his fellow townspeople. “Prosperity makes monsters of us all. Plankton has never known prosperity, and never will. Plankton is a serene place, a joyful place, an undiscovered place; what the literary critics call a happy valley. Let us keep it that way.”

Cover of first US paperbackedition of By the Sea, By the Sea by George Sumner Albee

Of all the misfits, none is quite so ill-fitted as Myrthis Lathrop. Having been sent to university to study law by his father, Myrthis rejected the notion that commerce was a game he needed to play. “The world is a mighty tough place, my fine young liberal,” he father told him, “as you’ll find out when you try to make a dollar.” To which Myrthis replied, “The world is a mighty tough place because it’s full of men trying to make a dollar.” He decided instead to move to Plankton, where he could live in one of the old abandoned Redemptionist houses for nothing, and be a bum, making a few bucks by selling samples of plants, sea creatures, and insects to his old university’s laboratories. When we first meet him, Myrthis is spending his day lying on the ground, taking notes on the second day of the Ant War.”22 blacks still on their feet, to 112 browns.”

Myrthis is himself a bit of a parasite. His fellow Planktonians feed him, fuel him, clothe him, fix his plumbing, and when necessary, save him from drowning. As little as they aspire to material success, Myrthis’s obstinate aimlessness irritates many and maddens Bonesetter in particular. He concocts a scheme to marry Myrthis off to Vitalia, a scroungy young woman recently arrived in town.

Hoping this will force Myrthis to settle down, Bonesetter is disappointed. Myrthis and Vitalia decide to establish a newspaper, despite the fact that they have no printing press and can’t write — or at least, spell. Undismayed, Myrthis types up the first issue with its front page story, “YOUR FRIEND AND MINE THE COKROACH.” Myrthis is not just pro-roach: he is a zealous roachist. “Those of us who are a bit too sure that we are the final and fairest flower of Creation will do well to reflect upon the fact that the cokroach has been here longer than we have and will be here when we are all through.” When the universe comes to its whimpering end, he assures his readers, “it will be the roach, not Man, who will stand on tip-toe on the last charred Reef of Earth and cry farewell my brothers farewell farewell.”

Somehow, Myrthis’s piece gets into the hands of a desperate syndication agent, and the next thing you know, all of America is calling for more. Myrthis and Vitalia are swept off to New York City to make the rounds of television game shows, news shows, and talk shows, all of which offer Albee opportunities to satirize What’s My Line, The Tonight Show, and other artefacts of the time that have now grown quaint or forgotten.

Cover of first UK paperbackedition of By the Sea, By the Sea by George Sumner Albee

P. G. Wodehouse described By the Sea, By the Sea as “like a sort of innocent Peyton Place,” which may be more accurate now than when he said it. Peyton Place long ago lost its scandalous reputation, and so, by extension, has By the Sea. When the book was marketed, the favored hashtags were #lusty and #Rabelaisian, neither of which could manage to raise the lightest eyebrow today. Yet some of the reviewers were still able to wind themselves into a righteous tizzy about it. Writing in The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Martin Quigley practically issued an invitation for a book-burning: “This is a rather pleasant and funny little summer story that has been spoiled by self-conscious and witless dirty talk. The publisher and the author are trying to justify and exploit the dirty talk on the grounds that it is Rabelaisian.” Scoring points with the chauvinists in his audience, he added, “It is remindful of a sissy trying to pass himself off as a tough guy.”

Barely two hundred pages long, By the Sea, By the Sea could easily sit at one end of the bookshelf alongside Tobacco Road and Cannery Row — neither of which, IMHO, carry much more than trace amounts of the humor and raucousness that made them favorites of a generation or two of mostly male readers. It takes a lot more to stand out as a drop-out from society in today’s world.

Not that George Sumner Albee hadn’t earned his stripes as an outsider. He’d taken to the road early in life, traveling around the world in his twenties, stepping in to save Hemingway from getting pasted by a boxer in Key West in the thirties, taking a house in Cuba’s own Key West, Varadero, in the 1950s. He was a connoisseur of the laidback expat lifestyle, capable of writing a long and gushing letter in praise of Under the Volcano to Malcolm Lowry. Lowry, replying from an unhappy spell in England, was somewhat envious: “I have an impression that Cuba must be a marvellous place in which to live, and pursue the Better Life, the Better Thing, and indeed celebrate generally the Life Electric.” Finding the political climate in England not much more enlightened that that of Eisenhower’s US, he added, “… the only thing one could do is to put one’s school cap back on and read Wordsworth, or perhaps Henry Adams, until it all blows over. Meantime it is likely that no contribution will be made to human freedom.”

Albee had made his living as something of an acceptable rebel, a gentle satirist. His first novel, Young Robert, was a semi-autobiographical jab at his own young self, a story about a San Francisco youth full of the spirit of the Gold Rush and progress with a capital P. Although he published a couple of softer, more nostalgic novels in the 1950s, he earned his living as a writer of magazine fiction back in the days when that was still possible.

Albee’s magazine fiction was often satire a soft S. His 1948 story for Cosmopolitan, “The Next Voice You Hear,” played out a premise he came up with over lunch with a friend. “You know,” he said, “wouldn’t it be something if God would come on the radio and give people such a bad scare they’d wake up and behave themselves!” He repeated the story to his friend, Cosmopolitan’s fiction editor, Dale Eunson, and Eunson told Albee the magazine would buy the story if he wrote it.

George Sumner Albee's story, "The Next Voice You Hear," from Hearst International - Cosmopolitan, August 1948.
George Sumner Albee’s story, “The Next Voice You Hear,” from Hearst International-Cosmopolitan, August 1948.

In the finished product, the voice of God goes out over every radio station on Earth one day: “A plan of creation ought by rights to go forward under its own rules, but you, dear children of the Sun’s third planet, are so near to destroying yourselves I must step in. I shall spend this week with you.” As you might expect, this news sends everyone but the most deeply devout into a panic, but God’s subsequent broadcasts are written in a wholly New Testament voice. When he takes leave on the following Saturday, his voice has “the gentleness, the fondness, the inifinite patience of the voice of an older brother teaching a beloved younger brother to skate, or make a kite, or whittle”: “A planet is a school. Live, dear children, and learn.”

Poster for the 1950 movie, The Next Voice You Hear
Poster for the 1950 movie, The Next Voice You Hear

“The Next Voice You Hear” was made into a film with the same name in 1950, starring James Whitmore and Nancy Davis (soon to be Reagan). Producer Dore Schary wrote an account of the making of the film, Case History of a Movie, soon after. James M. Cain, reviewing the book for the New York Times, wrote that “it gives a picture of movies that is almost definitive, with a singularly candid viewpoint.”

First page of The Mysterious Mr. Todd, from The Saturday Evening Post Feb 9 1957
Illustration from The Saturday Evening Post, February 9, 1957.

Albee was a flower child before the name existed. In his 1957 story, “The Mysterious Mr. Todd,” an updated version of Twain’s Mysterious Stranger pleas for a town council to turn a patch of land into a park instead of a prison:

There are people in this world who like prisons. They like them because prisons lock up souls, and they believe in locking up souls. They want to see all of us in uniform, marching along in lock-step, saying, “Yes, boss; yes, Fuhrer; yes, commissar.” A prison is the sorriest place in the world, sorrier than any cemetery, because in prison you bury souls. Now what does a park stand for? A park is a scale model of what we hope we’ll turn the whole danged world into someday. A park is a place where we can walk under trees, with flowers around us, and meet our neighbors and shake their hands and ask them how things are going and meet ourselves, too, maybe, on a quiet path, and find out who we are. A park is a freespace for free men. That’s why we’ve got to choose it every time — every time! Because the men in prison are the men who never had parks.

Illustration from "Let's Put Women in Their Place," by George Sumner Albee, from The Saturday Evening Post, December 16, 1961
Illustration from “Let’s Put Women in Their Place,” by George Sumner Albee, from The Saturday Evening Post, December 16, 1961.

But not all of Albee’s satire reads quite so benignly today. In a 1961 piece for The Saturday Evening Post, for example, his tongue was perhaps too deeply buried in his cheek for his self-mockery to come through. Titled, “Let’s Put Women in Their Place,” he criticizes the U.S. for being the only country where women are not banished when men sit down to talk. He sorts women into seven categories such as “The Frustrated Actress” and “The Compulsive Talker.” He then lays out a program by which husbands can retrain their wives: “Take her to court trials. Take her to visit a chemical laboratory. Play Bach to her. Read her a bit of Kant, showing her how he extrudes one idea from another. From time to time, hit her.” With a little patience and persistence, he assures the reader, “in a year’s time you may find you have a chastened, thoughtful, well-mannered, reticent woman who can actually join in a conversation without destroying it.” And if she happens to slip into her old habits, “Check her promptly. ‘How would you like a rap on the mouth?’ is a query that startles the sturdiest woman.”

This is impossible to read without cringing. If you ever wondered what men like Mad Men’sDon Draper were reading, it was far more likely to be this than the poetry of Frank O’Hara, I’m afraid. George Sumner Albee may have been lucky that he died in 1965: I’m not sure how he would have fared when the Women’s Lib movement got going.

In 1974, by the way, Paramount Studios announced that producer Jerry Bruckheimer would be filming By the Sea with a script by Steve Tesich, but the project appears to have stalled soon afterward.

By the Sea, By the Sea was recommended to me by Kate Peacocke, who wrote from New Zealand, saying her father “loved its zany humour and its gentle wisdom, and so do I.” For me, the book lands halfway between unjustly and justly neglected. If you do read it, it’s best to look for the spirit of “Mr. Todd” and ignore the brief flashes of “Let’s Put Women in Their Place.”

Other Reviews

• Vernon Fane, The Sphere

… a happy, bawdy and very funny novel indeed; Mr. George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea, which I propose to re-read often and certainly not to lend, unless it is to benighted travellers unable to get to a bookshop. Mr. P. G. Wodehouse has gone on record as finding it one of the funniest books he has read for ages and full of charm, too. He adds that it is like a sort of innocent Peyton Place, as contradictory a statement as the old master can ever have emitted. Be that as it may, he is certainly right about its being funny, and since that is a quality fairly thinkly parcelled out in contemporary fiction, I can recommend it to those readers who are free, broadminded and twenty-one.

• Dave Lipman, The Kansas City Star

If Aldous Huxley had stumbled across Plankton, he would not have had to search around bravely for new worlds. He could have loosened his tie and luxuriated in the company of somebody like Myrthis Lathrop…. There’s a theory, unproved, that a man who uses shingles from his own roof for firewood is a man worth meeting. It follows that a book in which such a man plays a leading role is a book worth reading.

• Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Guardian

the funniest book I have read in years: that is to say it is not “a riot of fun” but witty; satirical, not smart; adult, not “adult”; and like funny books from Candide to Lucky Jim, basically serious…. A young man’s book, presumably, which I wholly recommend.

• Lynn Hopper, The Indianopolis Star

Light, brassy, with serious undertones, and definitely on the wild side. A new book with more charm than most summer fiction is George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea.

By the Sea, By the Sea, by George Sumner Albee
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960
London: Victor Gollancz, 1960

The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, by Gay Taylor and Malachi Whitaker (1937)

Ethel Firebrace
Ethel Firebrace

In The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, Malachi Whitaker and Gay Taylor offered the world a feminine match for H. H. Bashford’s really good man, Augustus Carp, Esq. Lost now to literary history, Ethel Firebrace was prolific novelist of the early 20th century, churning out dozens and dozens of works such as Clothed in White Samite, Ecstacy’s Debit, His for an Hour, and the thrilling wartime romance, An Airman for Averil. Firebrace followed in the footsteps of such industrious Victorian women writers as Margaret Oliphant and Eliza Lynn Linton. In fact, I half suspect that Whitaker and Taylor, who probably met at one of Charles Lahr’s literary evenings in London in the late 1920s, had skimmed Linton’s My Literary Life, which is one of the snippiest memoirs ever published.

I must caution, however, that unlike Augustus Carp, whose righteousness in all things stems from his utter blindness to the world around him, Ethel Firebrace maintains her moral superiority from her firm understanding that she is simply better than everyone else. It is not selfishness that prevents her from helping others but simply “a nature too finely tuned.” Unfortunately, though her family early recognized that little Ethel was too busy “thinking of higher things,” they failed to spare her “the sight of their toil-worn hands, dust-laden hair, and brows which bore the wrinkled imprint of perpetual household budgeting.” Consequently, “being a very sensitive child, this left a deeper mark upon me than they realised.”

Indeed, for Ethel, the world is divided between the sensitive and the insensitive — there being far too few of the former and far, far too many of the latter. When she marries and gives birth, she vows “at whatever cost, never to let this event repeat itself during my married life” and finds it difficult to forgive her daughter “the eternity of torture she had caused me.” How was it that women before her were able to bear so many children? “Cast-iron insensitiveness,” of course.

Fortunately for the reading public, however, Ethel found the inner strength to steel herself against her baby’s cries of hunger and other ill-considered attempts to distract her and focus on her great gift: writing. Starting with Jessica’s Secret, she works diligently at the coalface, wearing out four typewriters along the way, generating, by her own count, over five million words. By the time she begins her autobiography, she can state with confidence that “I do not think there can be many, well versed in book-lore, who are unacquainted with at least one of the works of Ethel Firebrace.” I feel some shame in admitting that until I read this book, I was one of the unenlightened minority.

For her many gifts to literature, she has received countless in return from her admirers, including “a leopard-skin rug, a transparent nightdress, twenty pounds of quince jelly, what turned out to be a very sick monkey, a fountain-pen, and a set of alleged performing fleas.” Beside the talents that God bestowed upon her, she attributes her success (“or very nearly all of it!”) to her habit of gargling after food. She suggests that the literary world can be divided infallibly between the garglers and the non-garglers. The non-garglers such as Mr. Aldous Huxley are destined to “spring up like toadstools, live as long, and disappear as ignominiously.” Needless to say, but “there are no garglers among modern poets.”

Cresset Press advertisement for The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace
Cresset Press advertisement for The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace

The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace is easily one of the rarest books I’ve featured on this site. There are just two copies available for sale — one for $600+ and one for almost $900. I was able to read it thanks to my British Library and a quick stop through London last month. It was hard to keep quiet at some points while reading it: while not quite as fine-tuned as Augustus Carp, Esq., The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace absolutely deserves rediscovery as a perfect little comic gem. In a fictional heaven somewhere, Ethel Firebrace and Augustus Carp, Esq. live together in sympathy, both confident in their superiority of character and intellect if slightly disappointed that the rest of existence will never fully appreciate their brilliance. Such is the cross the truly great must bear.

The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, written anonymously by Gay Taylor and Malachi Whitaker
London: The Cresset Press, 1937

Heart in a Hurricane, by Charles G. Shaw (1927)

Cover of Heart in a Hurricane
Charles G. Shaw’s 1927 novel Heart in a Hurricane has a great deal in common with Fillmore Hyde’s The Ritz Carltons from the same year. They’re both grounded in comic stereotypes of the idle rich — specifically, the idle rich of Manhattan in the midst of the Roaring Twenties. Almost every character wears a top hat, white tie, and tails, or plus-fours, or an evening gown. If anyone appears in tweed, you can bet they’re not quite our type, no matter what their other qualities might be. The Ritz Carltons features illustrations by Rea Irvin, inventor of the New Yorker’s signature character, Eustace Tilley; Heart in a Hurricane features illustrations by Ralph Barton, whose work graced New Yorker covers nearly as often as Irvin’s and Peter Arno’s in the Twenties.

Rupert and DorisAnd both books are less novels than strings of episodes that don’t so much conclude as stop. In the case of Heart in a Hurricane, the episodes revolve around the unsuccessful romantic encounters of an idle rich young man named Rupert Twombley. We first spot Rupert alone in his box at the Opera, munching away at a bag of peanuts while listening to Siegfried and watching the crowd:

To Rupert’s immediate left sat the Q. Maynard-Lents, an over-ripe couple who had with them Creighton Bloat, 3rd. and his very latest bride, Juliette Goslyn — looking like nothing so much as an advertisement for listerine, one of the Archer boys, and Ulysses W. Schmonk — lord of linoleum; while just beyond, in the Paisley’s box, borrowed by the Leslie Dennings, were, in addition to the latter, little Estelle Tennis and four odd bachelors who at once recalled the Elm City Quartet. Further along was Mrs. de Haven Shattuck, commonly known as “Duckie,” having as guests the Rill twins (who had not merely fallen asleep but were snoring sonorously), as well as a cousin from Bernardsville who had been stone deaf for the last seven years…. Also present were the Beverley Something Joneses, just back from Jekyll Island, the Tackwit girls and two adolescent bond salesmen, the Willie Clayducks with H. I. H. Prince Nuga (who understood not a word of English), old Mrs. Bass, still wondering whether she would every marry off her unfortunate duaghter — Fern, Aggie Larchmont, as gorgeous as an Arabian night and twice as unreal, the Julian Gorlocks, Otto Kahn bowing in every direction, Cyril Hatch, the de Rinkleys, and Fuzzy Dilworth, who was said to possess the most beautiful toes on Long Island.

If you get a chuckle from this sort of thing, rest assured — it’s a feature of every chapter.

It’s no wonder that Shaw’s good friend F. Scott Fitzgerald offered some gentle criticism of the book:

My reason for the long delay is the unusual one. That, owing to a review I’d read, I didn’t approach “Heart in a Hurricane” with high expectations. I’m happy to say that I was absolutely wrong. It is a damn good piece of humorous writing from end to end — much better than anything of its sort I’ve read in years. The character is quite clear — clearest, if I may say so, when his tastes are least exhaustively cataloged…. I wish you’d try something with a plot, or an interrelation between two or more characters, running through the whole book. Episodes held together an “idea,” in its fragilest sense, don’t give the opportunity for workmanship or for really effective effects. I take the liberty of saying this because there is so much talent and humor and discernment in the book as a whole. [The full letter is available on Slate.]

Heart in a Hurricane was Charles G. Shaw’s first and last novel. After it, Shaw returned to his first profession, art, where he achieved success as an abstract painter, designer, and sculptor. One of his rare attempts as authorship after Heart in a Hurricane was the innovative children’s book, It Looked Like Spilt Milk (1947). His 1937 painting, Wrigley, now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, shows that Andy Warhol was not the first to see the artistic possibilities in commercial packaging. Shaw died in 1974.

Wrigleys, by Charles G. Shaw, 1937
Wrigleys, by Charles G. Shaw (1937)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You should have forced my hand.”

“Easier said than done.”

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

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

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

The Club, by A. D. Wintle (1961)

Cover of "The Club" by A. D. Wintle

Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Daniel Wintle MC, or A. D. Wintle for short, was one of the great characters of the 20th century, a genuine war hero, egoist, eccentric, and defender of all things gentlemanly. He died before finishing his autobiography, but when his friend Alastair Revie condensed the million-some words of manuscript that Wintle left behind him into under 300 pages, he was sure to keep Wintle’s chosen title: The Last Englishman (1968). I’m sure Wintle would have held that there was nothing the least bit presumptuous about it.

This is the book I wanted to write about, but unfortunately, copies fetch anywhere from $300 to $2,000 — too rich for my peasant blood. So I had to make do with what I could find and afford: Wintle’s 1961 novel, The Club, which can be had (at the moment) for as little as 64 cents. Although calling it a novel vastly exaggerates the book’s substance. It’s more of a will-o’the-wisp in hardback form.

The Club of The Club is THE Club:

It is not one of the leading clubs. It is The Leading Club itself. It is the standard club on which all other clubs leading or following would wish it to be supposed that they themselves are modelled.

It is “The Club,” and as such it is known, not only to taxi-drivers and other persons in equally specialized professions, but also to all members of all clubs or would-be clubs.

The Club claims to be a history of The Club assembled by a group of distinguished editors, but it is in fact merely a collection of old warhorses of anecdotes told by Sir Milner Gibbard, Baronet, of Blandwich Place in the County of Wessex, the member of over fifty years’ standing proposed as their expert source — although Sir Milner’s first reaction is to dismiss the idea outright: “‘No!’ he snapped. ‘Absolutely out of the question,’ he added, no doubt with the intention of making his intention crystal-clear.”

“The trouble is … the great trouble is, that I don’t know anything about it.”

The editors are confused.

“You talk as if I had been here for five thousand years instead of fifty,” he explains.

After a fair amount of fruitless negotiations, one of the editors suddenly realizes the problem. “He paused, then raised his voice and spoke very slowly and very clearly: ‘We were asking … I mean to say, that I was asking you to write us a History of The Club.”

“The Club!” he exclaims. “Good God, I thought you said The Flood.”

This gives you an idea of the tone (and content) of the rest of the book. Just imagine Spike Milligan in the role of Sir Milner and you’ll find you’re reading a collection of never-performed skits from The Goon Show.

And just what exactly is wrong with that? I hear you ask. My point precisely, sir!

The Club, by A. D. Wintle
London: Cassell, 1961

Complete Cheerful Cherub, by Rebecca McCann (1932)

cheerfulcherubThe first time I saw a copy of a Cheerful Cherub book was in an enormous antique mall that seemed to have swallowed my wife, leaving me to seek some meager distraction in the tiny handful of books that could be found there. As hours dragged on and I found myself beginning to think, “Hmm … Taylor Caldwell. Maybe I should try one of hers,” I finally picked up what I had taken to be the world’s oldest and fattest “Love Is” book.

My mistake was understandable. There is a certain similarity between the cartoon style of Kim Casali (creator of “Love Is …”) and Rebecca McCann (creator of the Cheerful Cherub). Both feature nude but genital-free homonculi with infantile bodies but engaging in adult activities. Both refine cuteness to near-lethal intensity. Casali always shows a male and a female character (we can tell only by the hair and eyelashes). McCann always showed an infant neither male nor female and an adoring little puppy.

If you were me, you’d probably have stopped reading already.

But stay with me, people.

Because as I took more time to read through that Cheerful Cherub book, I began to realize that Rebecca McCann’s little cartoons operated on a level of sophistication and yes, even wisdom, far beyond that of the “Love Is …” pieces.

nb341

Take “Masks” (above). “And yet sometimes I see/A prisoner behind their eyes.” That’s not “Love Is …” or “Family Circle”–that’s the existential attitude in four lines of iambic pentameter. Or “Innocence,” which could easily be read as a damning commentary on the detachment with which we view events going on in the world around us. “Oh, the dreadful business in Gaza. Well, nothing to do with me.”

Rebecca McCann began publishing Cheerful Cherub cartoons in the Chicago Evening Post around 1917, when she was just twenty, after editor Julian Mason took an interest in the little drawings and verses that dropped out of McCann’s portfolio as she tried to show him more serious work. The feature was soon picked up for syndication, and at its peak appeared in over 100 papers around the United States.

McCann also continued to work as an illustrator for magazine stories and wrote a childrens’ book, About Annabel (1922), about the fantastic adventures of a little girl–a slightly milder version of Windsor McCay’s “Little Nemo.” The first collection of Cheerful Cherub cartoons was published by Covici-McGee in 1923, and a second in 1927.

nb344

Meanwhile, McCann’s personal life was a series of disasters. She moved to New York City in late 1917, where she met, fell in love with and married Harold “Jimmie” Watson, an Army pilot, five days before he shipped out to France. Although he made it through the war, he died in an accident not long after. On the rebound, she married another officer, this time in the Naval Medical Corps, but the marriage soon ran into problems and the couple divorced. Around 1924, she met the novelist Harvey Fergusson (whose 1923 novel, Capitol Hill, was featured here back in 2006).
rebeccamccann
Fergusson was married at the time, but the two felt enough of a connection that Fergusson eventually divorced his wife and married McCann. Fergusson was working on perhaps his best-known book, Wolf Song (1927), and the couple spent happy weeks in the mountains outside Salt Lake City.

In December of 1927, Fergusson drove down to Albuquerque, where they planned to spend Christmas with his parents, while McCann took a quick shopping trip out to San Francisco. Never having a robust constitution, the trip and the winter weather brought on a cold. A few days after arriving in Albuquerque, it developed into pneumonia and McCann died soon after. She was just 32. Fergusson had her body cremated and scattered her ashes along the shore of Lake Michigan near Chicago.

Covici-Friede collected 1,001 Cheerful Cherub cartoons, along with a short memoir by McCann’s friend, Mary Graham Bonner, in Complete Cheerful Cherub, which was published in 1932. The book was a perennial favorite and was reprinted sixteen times between 1932 and 1945. They also posthumously published a collection of McCann’s poems, Bitter Sweet: Poems, in 1929.

“I’m not trying to reform the world or to make every one smile,” she once told Bonner. “I’m trying to make my little verses human; sometimes they’re sarcastic, sometimes they’re ‘flip.’ They’re cynical, too, and I like to make them about all subjects–including the frailties of the readers….” And of the author, too, as one quickly sees.

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Complete Cheerful Cherub, by Rebecca McCann
New York: Covici-Friede Publishers, 1932

Lady with a Pretzel, from Celibate at Twilight, by John Mosher (1940)

The waiter slammed the shallow basket of pretzels down on the table, and turned away. It never occurred to him, evidently, to pass the pretzels to each person at the table. That was the sort of place it was. Rough! The lady sighed with satisfaction. This was Life. Life in the raw. She was seeing Life.

At the same moment she saw herself in the dingy mirror opposite, and her satisfaction was in no way diminished. While seeing Life she retained all her own perfect style. She was pleased now that she had not borrowed her maid’s hat, as she had thought of doing while planning her costume for this excursion into the underworld. In novels great ladies always borrowed their maids’ things when circumstances compelled them to venture in dubious regions. But Cécile’s hats were grotesques, and there was no sense in making a comic of yourself just because you were going to dine with gunmen. It was only fair to them to try to look your best. Poor things, they had so few chances to view the authentically chic! She had no doubt that these various persons about them, though not outwardly as sensational as she had hoped, were gunmen and gangsters of the deepest dye, for she had been assured that this place was the real thing, and not faked in the least. It ought to be. They had had a hard enough time finding it.

She would have to stretch across the table for the pretzels. The others of her own party were absorbed in their beer, and their own noisy foolish familiar jokes. They weren’t paying any attention to her. The men felt obliged to forget their manners as soon as they got in a dive like this. The waiter, of course, had put the pretzels at an awkward distance from her. She was sure that he had done it just to annoy her. She had noticed the minute she saw him that he had taken an instantaneous dislike to her. He resented her. She was sorry that he did. He probably thought that she was just a sheltered, nurtured parasite, exquisite and fragile. He could have no comprehension of the peculiar problems that made her life hell. She felt very helpless and unhappy and weak. He wasn’t even looking at her!

A criminal type, obviously. He was too strong to be a Waiter by rights. A criminal temporarily disguised as a waiter to evade the police. Then a waiter had to be strong in a place like this. He must also be a “bouncer,” she believed. A bouncer? Such an odd word. To be bounced. Wasn’t there a song: “I Want to be Bounced by You”? If she got Oswald to take him into their house as a butler, he would look distinguished behind her chair, or behind Oswald’s chair facing her. . . . “Really, Adele, what an unusual-looking butler you have! Quite handsome!” . . . “I shouldn’t say he was handsome, my dear. We found him in one of those awful drinking places Oswald is always dragging me to. Marvellous beer! He’s an ex-convict. . . .”

She couldn’t understand how that couple in the corner who had just ordered two more beers from the ex-convict ever got to such a place as this. They looked so respectable. Iust a respectable married couple from the suburbs. Drab middle-class people. It was disconcerting to see people like that here. You only expected to find underworld types, and perhaps a few smart adventurers like themselves. But this couple was so obviously married, plain good honest shopkeeping people. The maid’s night out. Or their wedding anniversary. They gave a drab dull note to the whole room. Why was it that you could never get away from the respectable? They popped up everywhere, with their ethics and their morals and their good sensible shoes, and their appalling appetite for nutritious food.

Not that the food here was likely be nutritious. She eyed the remote pretzels skeptically. Hard, crustaceous edibles they were. Heaven knows how long they had been exposed to the dusty draughts of this place. Countless calloused hands had doubtless pawed them over, the hands of killers. Brutal hands! She shivered. She couldn’t imagine the submerged, distorted depths of society where such ugly contortions of pastry would be looked upon as really palatable and a delicacy.

But it was proof of the independence of the true aristocrat that she did not scorn an interest in the underworld. One must be amused at all costs. Had not great ladies long ago sneaked out of the Tuileries to have supper with the apaches? What she was doing now was all in the great tradition.

It required courage, too, to be here. Any moment there might be trouble. A fight! Some row. Someone at a near-by table might jump up and pull a gun. For all she knew they might keep a machine gun in the pantry. The respectable married couple in Hie corner would jump up and scream and carry on, but she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t flicker an eyelash. She had courage, the courage of the great lady. That waiter was looking at her now, scornfully, icily. He thought she was fragile, did he, and afraid? She would show him. She straightened in her chair, leaned across the table, and took a pretzel.

Cover of first US edition of 'Celibate at Twilight'Celibate at Twilight is a collection of fifty short stories (most under five pages long), many of them published in The New Yorker between 1925 and 1940. (I will probably get in Dutch with the magazine for daring to post this without their permission, but this book has been out of print for 70+ years). Mosher went to work for the magazine about a year after it debuted, and worked more as a manuscript-reader and editorial staff member than a writer until he started writing the “Current Cinema” column in 1937.

About fifteen of the stories deal with Mr. Opal, a middle-aged, mild-mannered bachelor most popular among members of the better society as a last-minute man to round out a dinner party. Mr. Opal is an upper-crust equivalent of cartoonist H. T. Webster’s timid soul, Caspar Milquetoast. But I prefer the character sketches like “Lady with a Pretzel,” which is such a perfect distillation of the stereotype society woman indulging in a bit of slumming so she can see “Life in the Raw.”

Mosher served as an orderly in a U. S. Army hospital in France in World War One, and after kicking around the Continent for a while after the war, returned to the States and eventually landed a job with the magazine. He was friends with Willa Cather, Janet Flanner, Wolcott Gibbs, and James Thurber and was one of the first members of the Manhattan gay community to make Fire Island his summer base. He died of a heart ailment at the age of 50 in 1942.

In one of the few obituaries ever published in the magazine, Wolcott Gibbs wrote of Mosher,

His editorial judgment has been responsible for much of the tone of The New Yorker and the appearance in it of a great many new writers. The fiction he produced from time to time, and collected in a book called Celibate at Twilight, was a very accurate mirror of its author’s personality–witty, perceptive, and informed by a deep and tolerant knowledge of the world. He was one of the most delightful companions we have ever known, and we record his death with a heavy sense of loss.

Celibate at Twilight, by John Mosher
New York: Random House, 1940

Ginx’s Baby and Little Hodges, by Edward Jenkins

Son of a missionary and minister who took his family to India, Canada and the U.S. and who was ordained in three different churches–Wesleyan, Methodist, and Presbyterian–Edward Jenkins had stronger Protestant and anti-imperialist roots than perhaps any other Victorian radical, which is why he might be considered 19th Century England’s closest counterpart to Jonathan Swift. And like Swift, he used the infant as the instrument for his most savage satires.

edwardjenkinsJenkins’ first book, Ginx’s Baby: His Birth and Other Misforuntes (1871), used its title character–the thirteenth child both to Mr. and Mrs. Ginx, a London navvy and his wife–to mock the pretensions of religious charities and high-minded reformers, who claimed to serve the poor but more often used them to serve their own interests. Ginx, his wife, and all their children manage to fit into one tiny room filled mostly with on “thirteenth-hand” bed:

When Ginx, who was a stout navvy, and Mrs. Ginx, who was, you may conceive, a matronly woman, were in it, there was little vacant space about them. Yet, as they were forced to find resting-places for all the children, it not seldom happened that at least one infant was perilously wedged between the parental bodies; and latterly they had been so pressed for room in the household that two younglings were nestled at the foot of the bed. Without foot-board or pillows, the lodgment of these infants was precarious, since any fatuous movement of Ginx’s legs was likely to expel them head-first. However they were safe, for they were sure to fall on one or other of their brothers or sisters.

Although the Ginxes, like good Victorian subjects, take their lot in life for granted (“They regarded disease with the apathy of creatures who felt it to be inseparable from humanity”), the latest Ginx is one too many, and Mr. Ginx considers drowning the newborn in the Thames as a solution. A crowd gathers, and a debate erupts among them as to where the responsibility for the situation lies. One man blames Ginx and his wife for having children when they couldn’t afford them and another wonders why “Parlyment” doesn’t provide better care for the poor. Finally, a nun intervenes and persuades a policeman to let her take the baby back to “the Sisters of Misery.”

There, the nuns consult with the Church authorities and soon little Ginx–now named Ambrosius–becomes the centerpiece of a campaign to encourage procreation as a means for creating more Catholics. This draws the wrath of Protestant churches, and an “Evangelical Alliance” forms to rescue him. They “favor of teaching him at once to hate idolatry, music, crosses, masses, nuns, priests, bishops, and cardinals,” and form a Committee of the Protestant Detectoral Union on Ginx’s Baby to determine the correct approach to the infant’s religious education. Unfortunately, after holding twenty-three meetings and releasing countless announcements, the Committee is forced to disband for lack of funds.

In the meantime, Mr. Ginx resorts to abandoning the baby on a shopkeeper’s doorstep, which then leads to his being placed in one poorhouse and then another. Now near death, the child is rescued by a visiting doctor and his case becomes a cause celebre in the press. The respective guardians of the two poorhouses go to court to determine which is at fault. The baby is returned to the Ginxes, who have given up any hope of surviving in England and decided to emigrate to Australia, and once again Mr. Ginx abandons him, this time on the doorstep of a political club in Pall Mall.

Here he comes to the service of the Radicals, who attempt to launch a debate in the House of Commons on the plight of the poor. However, the Minister for the Accidental Accompaniments of the Empire takes them by surprise by launching his own debate in the House of Lords. Though “he never seen the Baby, and knew nothing or very little about him,” this does not prevent him from delivering “an elaborate speech in which he asked for aristocratic sympathy on his behalf” and proposes a practical solution: send the child to Australia. Unfortunately, this motion runs afoul of the great economic authority, Lord Munibagge, who protests, “Ginx’s Baby could not starve in a country like this. He (Lord Munnibagge) had never heard of a case of a baby starving.” The Lords conclude that “there was no necessity for the interference of Government in the case of Ginx’s Baby or any other babies or persons.”

In the end, passed along from charity to charity, Ginx’s baby grows into a young and still hungry delinquent and decides one night to resort to his father’s first solution: he quietly jumps off Vauxhall Bridge and drowns himself in the Thames.

littlehodgeSeveral years after publishing Ginx’s Baby, Jenkins took another satirical stab at the inertia and hypocrisy of Victorian society through the instrument of a baby–this time in the form of the world’s tiniest baby, known as Little Hodge (1878). Weighing just over three pounds at birth, Little Hodges’ fame soon spreads: “Many visitors came to the workhouse — physicians, surgeons, comparative anatomists, and one or two social science philosophers.” They all come to the same conclusion: “that he was very small,” and “that he could not live.”

Unfortunately for Mr. Hodges, a farm laborer with eight other children, he does live, and, with his mother dead from childbirth, he needs to eat. Hodges turns to his landlord, then to his parson, then to his local poorhouse, and so on, finding all of them greatly concerned and utterly unable to help. When he tries to forage and poach to find some free food for his family, he’s brought up on charges. His plight inspires some of his fellow farm workers to form a union and revolt against the landowners, but this movement also fails to provide solution to the immediate problem of getting enough to eat. Hodge dies one night, probably murdered by his landlord, and his children are taken off to America by a Yankee philanthropist.

Like many other attempts to rework a fictional formula, the tone of Little Hodges seem tired and bitter compared to the gusto with which Jenkins skewered English society high and low in Ginx’s Baby. Where in Ginx’s Baby Jenkins pumped up his targets to exaggerated proportions before bursting them with quick jabs, in Little Hodges, mockery too often gives way to anger and sermonizing. One could trace a line from Swift to Kafka’s The Trial that passes through Ginx’s Baby; Little Hodges, though, is closer to Ten Nights in a Bar-room than anything in the way of lasting satirical literature.

Both Ginx’s Baby and Little Hodges are available at the Internet Archive.

Ginx’s Baby: His Birth and Other Misfortunes, by Edward Jenkins
London: Strachan & Company, 1871

At the Green Goose, by D. B. Wyndham Lewis

greengooseAt the Green Goose, by D. B Wyndham Lewis (“not to be confused with the novelist Wyndham Lewis,” as nearly every biographical sketch notes), is an utterly throw-away book that you will either love or wonder why anyone would have published it.

It’s nothing more than a collections of absurd philosophico-academic monologues–or rather, monologues with occasional interruptions–by one Professor Silas Plodsnitch, “great poet, philosopher, and neo-Pantagruelist.” The professor walks into the Green Goose, orders a coffee, lights up his pipe, and begins to talk. His subject may be bees and bee-keepers, celebrity, matrimony, the works of Ethel Biggs Delaney (writer of stories for women’s magazines) or the Sitwells (Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell), but he veers off into other topics, carries on erratically, and then exits, usually without reaching a point.

“For three pence you can buy the index to the Estimates for Civil Services for the year ending March 31, which I have been looking through with some interest,” starts one of his lectures:

I calculate, after reading under the index letter I that every third man in these islands is an inspector of something or other–agriculture, aliens, alkali works, ancient monuments, audits, bankruptcy, canal boats, explosives, fisheries, inebriates, milk, mines, prisons, town planning–heaven knows what beside! This does not include, I suppose, the hordes of sub-inspectors, assistant inspectors, and pupil-inspectors (at present taking a correspondence course), nor yet the Inspector of Inspectors and his staff.

This leads to an imagined dialogue between a harried Inspector of Bankruptcy and an Inspector of Ancient Monuments, whose schedule is considerably more relaxed, which ends in one biting the other on the leg. Then he cuts abruptly into a meditation on the various ways of pronouncing the line, “Bring in the body,” which he’s recently read in a contemporary poem, and the various meanings one might take from them. After detours into a couple of more topics, he breaks off abruptly and marches out of the pub.

These pieces came from Lewis’ humorous column, Beachcomber, which he started writing for the Daily Express starting in 1919. Equally worth finding, if not quite so anarchic in style, are two collections of Lewis’ “Blue Moon” pieces from the column he wrote after switching over to the Daily Mail: (At the Sign of the Blue Moon (1924) and At the Blue Moon Again (1925)). They are, arguably, the funniest and most surreal things to have been printed in a major newspaper until the Irish Times started publishing Flann O’Brien’s amazing Cruiskeen Lawn column.

If you’re a fan of shaggy-dog tales, Tristram Shandy, Professor Irwin Corey, or Monty Python, you’ll find At the Green Goose well worth a read. If, however, you prefer to get from Point A to Point B by the shortest path, keep moving. Nothing to see here.

At the Green Goose is available on the Internet Archive.

At the Sign of the Green Goose, by D. B. W. Lewis
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1923

The Young Person’s Complete Guide to Crime, by C. G. L. Du Cann

youngpersonsguidetocrimeLast month, I posted an item on The Toady’s Handbook by William Murrell, a satirical D. I. Y. guide on how to succeed through concerted obsequiousness. Murrell’s book was part of a trilogy of sly little self-help books published by Grant Richards and Humphrey Toulmin back in 1929. Of remaining two, Charles Duff’s A Handbook on Hanging was rescued a few years ago as a New York Review Classic. The Young Person’s Complete Guide to Crime, by Charles Garfield Lott Du Cann, however, shares a common state of neglect with Murrell’s book.

The three books take a contrarian view of their subjects. Murrell argues, quite convincingly, that toadying is not only an effective way to gain a secure and influential place, but the only sane way to approach life as a member of society. Duff disparages those who would abolish hanging as cruel and offers a defense of its merits as both deterrent and art-form. And Du Cann holds that “the real truth is that crime is a highly respectable, semi-skilled, sheltered occupation,” one “reasonably accessible to the ambitious” and to be commended to the young.

A barrister and member of Gray’s Inn, Du Cann clearly took an impish delight in his tongue-in-cheek argument. Perhaps a little too much–for the book quickly veers down a side street and Du Cann spends most of the work skewering the ways and players of the British system of justice rather than noting the advantages of a life of crime. One gets the sense that the profession Du Cann referred to in his expansive subtitle is that of the law, not crime.
crimesubtitle
In fact, one of the primary advantages to becoming a criminal, according to the book, is that prison isn’t such a bad place to end up if you do get caught. That’s a little like recommending a restaurants by saying, “If you do get food poisoning, it won’t be too bad.” Du Cann does score a point, however, in noting that, for older men without fortune or family–at least in the England before the time of social welfare–prison offered a safer and healthier alternative to anything else life could offer.

Aside from this Swiftian advocacy of life in prison, however, the main pleasures of The Young Person’s Complete Guide to Crime are the epigrams Du Cann tosses in as asides to his mocking commentary. “When a respectable Englishman is convinced that there is nothing more to be done he always writes to the Times. It is the last gesture of despair and disillusionment,” he observes in the midst of a discussion of whether all or just almost all persons brought before court are guilty. (Du Cann sides with the “all guilty” camp).

He also offers, at the end, his own variant on Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary:

  • ACCUSED (THE). Indispensable raw material of the industry. Often manufactured by the industry itself.
  • HEARING IN COURT. A talking match. Hence the name.
  • SEX-OFFENDER. A male.

Of the three books in Richards & Toulmin’s set, Du Cann’s has aged most poorly in terms of subject and is least suitable for export. Occasionally, though, a still-relevant observation leaps off the page:

Expert Witnesses are often highly-paid, and they are expected to be (and are) entirely unscrupulous. It is true that Expert Witnesses are more frequently employed in civil than criminal proceedings, but the world of crime has a great use for them in deciphering hand-writing, detecting poisoning, and the like. The expert witness is not (as his name seems to say) an expert in giving testimony (that is called a policeman) but a man who considers himself, and is put forward as being, an authority on the matter upon which he testifies. He speaks to opinions, not to facts, but of course he tries to make the Court accept his opinions as facts.

Although only a slight jest, The Young Person’s Complete Guide to Crime remains entertaining today on the merits of Du Cann’s amusing and self-deprecating commentary. Du Cann wrote at least a dozen other books, but most of them appear to have been taken up as escapes from the duties of his life as a working lawyer. He seems to have been quite adept at adapting his arguments to his clients and subjects–how else can you explain the same man writing Getting the Most Out of Life and Will You Rise From The Dead? An Enquiry Into the Evidence of Resurrection?

The Young Person’s Complete Guide to Crime, by C. G. L. Du Cann
London: Grant Richards and Humphrey Toulmin at the Cayme Press, 1929

Ira Wallach, parodist

Humor is a bit like wine: a lot of it doesn’t age well, and depending on your taste, it might not even young well. And unlike other forms of literature, for which there’s a chance that the right teacher or critic might help you appreciate what first turned you off or left no impression at all, it’s pretty hard to make something funny by persuasion.

Cover of 'Hopalong Freud Rides Again'Given that, I caveat all that follows by saying that while I found Ira Wallach’s four collections of parodies–How to be Deliriously Happy (1950); Hopalong-Freud and Other Modern Literary Characters (1951); Hopalong-Freud Rides Again: Another Literary Ambush (1952); and Gutenberg’s Folly: the Literary Debris of Mitchel Hackney–funny, they may strike you as stale as sixty year-old bread. Or, as they say on the Internet, your mileage may vary.

If you Google “Ira Wallach,” you’re more likely to find pages about the millionaire philanthropist than about the novelist, Hollywood screenwriter, playwright and, back in the early 1950s, industrious writer of parodies. Even the bios of Ira Wallach the writer focus on his work for Hollywood and the stage. Frankly, unless you’re S. J. Perelman, writing parodies is unlike to earn you a significant spot in literary history. Parodies rank pretty low on the totem pole, just slightly above “How To” books.

Actually, “How To” books have a better chance of surviving in the eyes of the reading public. Dale Carnegie still sells thousands of copies a year, while no one cares about How to be Deliriously Happy, Wallach’s send-up of the blithely optimistic Carnegian school of self-help books.

Wallach, who turned to satire after his first book, The Horn and the Roses (1947), had better luck with Hopalong-Freud and Other Modern Literary Characters, which not only went into five printings but spawned a sequel, Hopalong-Freud Rides Again.

Both Hopalong-Freud books collect parodies of a wide variety of then-current writers and styles. Fortunately for today’s reader, most of Wallach’s targets have since earned a lasting place in the literary canon, so one can easily appreciate his success or failure in exaggerating their quirks and flaws. Hopalong-Freud, for example, is a take-off of T. S. Eliot’s 1949 play, The Cocktail Party, which was his greatest popular success. Freud, Wallach’s twist on Eliot’s psychiatrist-comme-priest, Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, offers up such weighty pronouncements as,

No, no, one never knows the Glutzes.
One may have the glimmer of the Glutzes
Or feel the shadow of the Glutzes as they pass,
But to know the Glutzes is to know oneself,
And to know oneself is more than
It is given to man to know.

Of course, shooting at Eliot as his most solemn is a bit like shooting at a balloon: it’s already laden with enough gas to be on the verge of bursting. The same goes for “Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Soup,” which blasts Hemingway with a mortar–rather as Wallach’s protagonist does a duck (along with “one sparrow, one caneton, and a B-36″) in the story’s opening scene.

A couple of Wallach’s pieces no longer have a solid point of reference to stand up against. How many will recognize Lin Yutang’s somewhat dated bits of Chinese wisdom, let alone Wallach’s pastiche (which naturally involves large quantities of tea). On the other hand, while Bob Hope’s ghostwriters have long since put down their pens, the best-seller lists are still full of routines by stand-up comedians recycled as books. Wallach’s “Modern Joe Miller” is a wonderful example, taking the following story and running it through the wringer several times in a row:

Walter Hampden told this to Eddie Cantor when they were visiting Eleonora Duse at George Bernard Shaw’s house shortly after they had all been guests of the Prince of Wales at the Ascot Races. Seems the late Czar of Russia once met a familiar figure walking down the streets of Moscow. Seizing him by the shoulders, the Czar exclaimed, “Rasputin, how you’ve changed! You used to be tall. Now you’re short. You used to have a beard. Now you’re clean-shaven. You used to be stoop-shouldered. Now you stand erect.”

The Czar’s friend stopped him. “Your Majesty,” he said, “my name’s not Rasputin. It’s Kerensky.”

“Oho!” cried the Czar. “So you’ve changed your name, too!”

Cover of 'Gutenberg's Folly'The best of the four books, for me, is Gutenberg’s Folly, which provides a sampler of the works of the late Mitchel Hackney, a contemporary of Hemingway, who tried his hand at most of the major literary styles and genres of the 1930s to 1950s, along with a selection of critical commentaries. This device allows Wallach to play upon the worst aspects of Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, William Saroyan, William Faulkner, and others.

I particularly liked “The Pilgrimage of Bixie Davis,” Hackney’s attempt to trump Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. Having recently tried to listen to an audiobook version of another Bellow novel, I was ready to appreciate Wallach’s spot-on version of Bellow’s style, which always seems hell-bent on tossing another ingredient into an already-overloaded prose stew:

Uncle Gordon who lived with us had a stand where he sold rubber goods, razor blades, sundries, and life insurance. His face was clear of wens but he had blebs, straggling hairs anchored at the top of his head, the whites of his eyes green, and above the eyes two eyebrows, one black, one red, condor-nose horning a Roland-call for breakfast. Which was oatmeal and tea. He was a Tenth Avenue Marco Polo and he Cathayed the years away, Gordon, until he parlayed a fortune into three more, Midas-fingered, gilding his daughter into the arms of Bolo Snider, the bookie.

Bolo gave me my first job taking the phone and keeping book behind the cigar store, buttering the cops and dunning the deadbeats while the ponies dug hooves into Belmont. A two-buck-across-the-board life. In general Bolo was a good man but constricted, a frog in the mouth of a snake, bug-eyed, face wenned and warted, full of blebs, long hairs dropping from his nose to his chin, one ear quartered, the other halved–O judgment of Solomon!–nose straight, Praxiteletic, from having been knocked to one side in a fight and knocked back in another. Well, “le présent est chargé du passé, et gros de l’avenir.” Or if you wish, dolce far niente. What the hell!

After publishing Gutenberg’s Folly, Wallach headed Hollyward, where he wrote a few novels and a lot more screenplays. His 1959 novel, Muscle Beach, a typical satire of Los Angeles life, was eventually filmed as “Don’t Make Waves” (1967). His 1960 novel, The Absence of a Cello, was recently remembered by one of the tweeters responding to a request by the Guardian’s Hannah Freeman for “the best and most obscure book you have read?”: “Wonderful slice of late 50s US middle-class angst.”

Wallach returned to the East Coast, where he lived, mostly writing for Broadway, until he died of pneumonia in 1995 at the age of 82.

If you’re interested in sampling Wallach’s work as a parodist, you can find electronic versions of Hopalong-Freud: and Other Modern Literary Characters on the Internet Archive: Link.

The Toady’s Handbook, by William Murrell

toady
I discovered this book in a very roundabout way. A few months ago I posted the title essay from Alec Waugh’s 1926 book, On Doing What One Likes. I didn’t recognize the name of the publisher–Cayme Press–but admired the book’s construction and wondered what else Cayme might have published.

This quickly led me to Charles Duff’s A Handbook on Hanging, originally published in 1929 but reissued as one of the early NYRB Classics, with an introduction by the late Christopher Hitchens. Hanging is very much in the tradition of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,”–in this case, reflecting upon the many advantages of an aggressive policy of capital punishment. Duff advocates, for example, to reintroduce the practice of public hanging on the basis of the economic benefits (ticket sales, film rights, concession sales).

Hanging was one of three books published “Uniform with this volume,” as noted on the fly-leaf. The other two titles, one can easily deduce, are variations on Duff’s satirical tract: The ‘Young Person’s’ Complete Guide to Crime, by Charles Garfield Lott Du Cann, and The Toady’s Handbook, by William Murrell. The ‘Young Person’s’ Complete Guide to Crime took the format of an earnest guide to a worthy subject such as art (or, as Benjamin Britten did some years later, the orchestra) and turned it into tongue-in-cheek tour of the upside of crime–which has, throughout history, proved a profitable venture–at least for some.

The third book, The Toady’s Handbook is a celebration of the benefits of artful obsequiousness. “Toadyism,” Murrell writes, “may accurately be defined as that art which deals with life in terms of its own vanity.” The vanity he refers to is the vanity of others: “the Toady is he who most per-, con-, and insistently administers to our vanity”–and as such, he argues, “should be and is nearer to us and more fervently to be embraced than our own blood brothers.” Indeed, the English word “toady,” he notes, “comes from the Spanish mia todita, my servitor. And what more honourable function than that of service?” [My Spanish colleague tells me that mia todita actually means “my little whole” or “my humble share.”–Ed.]

Murrell’s great model of the toady is Talleyrand, who managed to hold influential positions under eleven different French regimes–Royalist, revolutionary, Republican, Imperial, Restoration and, again, Royalist. Talleyrand’s motto is a précis on the art of survival as a toady: “Be a lion in triumph, a fox in defeat, a snail in council, and a bird in the hour of action.” Talleyrand today has a reputation for intrigue, deviousness and manipulation, but Murrell argues that this assessment utterly misses because it’s rooted in the assumption that whatever regime was in place was, in its way, rightful and deserving of honest support.

Instead, the Toady is the one sane person in an otherwise mad world. “I have been faithful to individuals as long as they obeyed the dictates of common sense,” Talleyrand once said. Murrell holds that by ensuring that his lot endures through all the follies of life, love, art and politics, the Toady displays better sense than all the fools who throw themselves completely into their causes. “All our painfully developed notions of honour, loyalty, fraternity, et cetera, are nothing but hypocritical humbug,” he writes.

Of course, the irony of the Toady’s situation is that there is nothing to guarantee that survival is, in the end, any less of a folly than pursuit of some noble cause–as Murrell recognizes by ending his short tract with a verse that appears in Thomas Love Peacock’s comic dialogue novel, Crochet Castle:

After careful meditation,
And profound deliberation,
On the various pretty projects which have just been shown,
Not a scheme in agitation,
For the world’s amelioration,
Has a grain of common sense in it, except my own.

All three of these little books (each measures 4.5″ by 7″ and is under 150 pages long) deserve to be brought back to print, at least electronically, as they are wonderful examples of just how much we can learn about ourselves by taking a completely contrarian viewpoint for an hour or two.

The Toady’s Handbook, by William Murrell
London: Grant Richards & Humphrey Toulmin at the Cayme Press, 1929

Lord Bellinger: An Autobiography, by Harry Graham

Cover of first U. K. edition of 'Lord Bellinger'Imagine my delight, upon taking Lord Bellinger down from a shelf in one of the few remaining used book shops along Charing Cross Road and discovering that it was not some arthritic attempt at a ripping yarn or a petrified Edwardian romance novel, but a mocking pastiche on the life of the idle nobility. Visions of Augustus Carp, Esq. danced in my head as I took it up to the cashier. This could easily be one of my great finds.

Sadly, after devouring the book in the course of the next day or so, I had to conclude that Lord Bellinger is a good find, but not a great one. Unlike H. H. Bashford, who managed in Augustus Carp, Esq. to find a narrative voice that was both sincere in its allegiance to his subject’s smugness and withering in its comic mockery, Graham displays a restraint that often undermines his satirical intent.

Despite being just one generation away from his family’s roots in the brewery business, Richard de la Poer Tracy Bellinger, the third son of John, the first Baron Bellinger, is truly to the manor born. He prides himself that, like his father, he is “naturally disinclined to anything approaching effort.” When he succeeds his father to the House of Lords, he takes it as given that the peers of the upper chamber are the rightful rulers of England: “I feel sure that I am only voicing the unanimous opinion of my class when I say that it is essential for the maintenance of the Constitution that the affairs of Empire should be conducted by gentlemen who are prepared to consider the questions of the day with open minds, unbiased by any kind of commercial or business experience whatsoever.”

Although still a relatively young man, Lord Bellinger has chosen to write his autobiography as a protest against the effects of the Parliament Act of 1911, which removed many of the legislative powers of the House of Lords. He is proud to stand–or rather, sit–beside “able, brilliant, painstaking men, inspired by a strong sense of duty to themselves: the solid backbone upon which the House and the nation can always depend.” Among these luminaries are such men as:

Lord Slaugham, with whom divorce has become more of a habit than an event (his marriage with his fourth wife was quite one of the most interesting of last year’s society functions); Lord Thrapstone, who absentmindedly wrote a friend’s name on a cheque, was found guilty, and bound over to come up for judgment if called upon, it being rightly considered that the disgrace of being found out was a sufficient punishment for a man of his social standing; Lod Blissworth, who, on the strength of possessing an acre of land and two gum-trees in the West Indies, floated the Yumata River Company, whose collapse ruined so many domestic servants. Here, too, was Lord Lythe and Saythe (formerly Sir Benjamin Salmon), who so generously offered to subscribe £50,000 to the scheme for a National Opera House on condition that a thousand other people would do the same; old Lord Bletchley, who, though eighty-nine years of age and mentally deficient, is still able to touch his toes with his fingers without bending his knees; Lord Meopham, who shot his coachman in the back with a revolver because that domestic happened to take a wrong turn in Park Lane; Lord Swaffield, who as Sir Moses Hamilton earned a world-wide reputation by walking down the Duke of York’s steps on his hands for a wager; Lord Dunbridge, famous as the husband of Lady Dunbridge, whose enthusiasm for the cause of Woman’s Suffrage has caused her to cut her hair off, and to take her meals in a liquid form and exclusively through the nose; Lord Brancaster, who as Sir Thomas Tilling failed seven times to get into Parliament–though he stood impartially on both sides–but who, on the death of his uncle, at last earned the reward of patriotism and became a true representative of the people; and a host of others.

Richard Lord Bellinger’s preparation for a seat in the House follows a well-worn path: Eton, a stint in the Army, a bit of sports, a bit of travel, and marriage into greater wealth. His two elder brothers conveniently give way before him: one, a churchman, decapitated in the Boxer Rebellion; the other a con artist who disappears in the South Seas after scandalous detours at the gaming tables of Biarritz and Monte Carlo. He takes naturally to his peerage, and accepts the responsibilities that come with the position. He relates, for example, the heart-rending tale of Alfred, his family’s doorman, who is fired for being found asleep on the job (at 4 A. M.), and who ends up spending his last penny for his son’s Christmas present. Lord Bellinger is so moved by this glimpse into the lives of the lower classes that he is moved to undertake charitable work. “I found, however, that this would entail the sacrifices of more time than I could possible spare–and was consequently forced to relinquish the idea.” He is, however, proud to declare that each Christmas he presents a brace of rabbits to “Every labourer on the estate who has reached the age of ninety without receiving a ‘parish relief.'”

Lord Bellinger ends with a fond look back at his wedding, which has somewhat the effect of a hanging note. Having gently skewered his peer for the last two-hundred-some pages, Graham balks at a final thrust and, instead, leaves him to live happily ever after. Sixty years later, the Monty Python troupe dispatched with the grandchildren of Lord Bellinger’s counterparts in under five minutes in their memorable “Upper Class Twit of the Year” sketch. Not all forms of restraint are laudable.

The best part of Lord Bellinger isn’t the ending, in fact–it’s what comes after the ending. This is one of the few works of fictional autobiography to come with an index. It starts with this highly informative quartet:

Abergeldie. See Aberlochie
Aberladdie. See Abernethy
Aberlochie. See Abergeldie
Abernethy. See Aberladdie

And continues on to such gems as:

Banchory, Earl of, half-witted condition of, 221; unattractive nature of remaining half, 221

or

Cowan, Sir Simeon, 44; worth a million and a quarter, 45; not safe to kick his son, 45

and coming, finally, to words I will always prefer to remember as the true ending of Lord Bellinger:

Zinc, grandmother’s dental cavities stopped with, 172

Harry Graham, himself the son of a K. C. B. and former Guardsman, was a prolific writer of comic poems, stories and plays. He’s probably best remembered now for his very first book, Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes and More Ruthless Rhymes (Hilarious Stories), which can be considered the forerunner of Belloc’s Cautionary Tales, Edward Gorey’s macabre ABC books, and A Series of Unfortunate Events:

Making toast at fireside,
Nurse fell in the grate and died;
And, what makes it ten times worse,
All the toast was burned with nurse.

Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes and More Ruthless Rhymes (Hilarious Stories) is available in all sorts of forms: as a Dover Thrift paperback, as an Audible audiobook, in ebook formats on Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, and on its own website, www.ruthlessrhymes.com.

Lord Bellinger: An Autobiography, by Harry Graham
London: Edward Arnold, 1911