The Neglected Books Page

The Weeping and the Laughter by Viva King (1976) — *The Weeping and the Laughter* by Viva King (1976).

I bought Viva King’s autobiography, The Weeping and the Laughter, on the strength of a single review: “How pleasant to know Viva King even if it only be at second-hand through this candid and amusing book.” It also said that “There were few of that period [Bloomsbury, 1920s] whom Viva King did not come to know.” Ezra Pound greeted her naked once (he, not she). She corresponded with Augustus John, dined in Soho with Norman Douglas, had Ivy Compton-Burnett and her partner Margaret Jourdain to tea. Maurice Richardson quipped in the Observer, “If you fired a shotgun at one of Mrs. King’s parties you would risk peppering half the characters in the novels of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell.” Anthony Blond wrote that trying to keep track of the people who flash through King’s pages was like trying to read the names of stations on a fast-moving train.

But reviewers also noted her reputation for exceptional generosity; Richardson called her “a sort of British Higher Bohemian Mother Courage” and admired her honesty in writing of an affair she had with a sailor 40-plus years her junior when she was 70 — despite his tendency to make off with her jewelry. (She offers a fastidious way of saying that her lovers were uniformly bad at foreplay: “I needed revving up — and though the men may have had the right tools, they were bad mechanics.”)

When, as is my habit, I went in search of other reviews of Viva King’s book, I quickly discovered that “The Weeping and the Laughter” is a popular title. The phrase comes not from Shakespeare, as usual, but from an Ernest Dowson poem whose title, “Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam,” is taken, in turn, from a poem by the Roman poet Horace (translation: “The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long”). Dowson’s poem is appropriate for an autobiography written in one’s eighties after a long and busy life:

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

That hasn’t prevented other authors from using it for their own purposes. So, let’s take a look at some of the other books with this title.

The Weeping and the Laughter by Joachim Maass (1947) — *The Weeping and the Laughter* by Joachim Maass (1947).

The first, from what I can determine, to use the title was the English translation of this German novel about the murky details surrounding the murder of a Hamburg businessman. Married to a dancer whose career was cut short by an accident, Ernst Tylmann never understood the artistic temperaments of his wife or their three children, so the police suspect any of them might have killed him for his sheer obtuseness. Several reviewers compared the novel to Crime and Punishment — and then quickly added that Maass lacked Dostoevsky’s obsessive intensity. This may be one of those books whose cover outrates its contents.

The Weeping and the Laughter by Vera Caspary (1950) — *The Weeping and the Laughter* by Vera Caspary (1950).

Vera Caspary’s publisher boasted that The Weeping and the Laughter was her “debut in serious fiction” — which, of course, is a slight against Laura and previous novels that were marked as suspense or murder mysteries and consequently, not “serious.” The mystery here is Beverly Hills widow Emily Arkwright’s own psyche and motivations. Why did she attempt suicide when she was, on the surface, popular, happy, and successful? Dorothy B. Hughes — no slouch at writing “serious fiction” mislabelled as suspense herself — called it a fine portrait of “the self-sufficient modern woman who will break before she will bend.” This was reissued some years ago by the Murder Room Press, but for some reason, Amazon reports the Kindle edition is “out of stock” (is this even a thing?).

*The Weeping and the Laughter by Julian Maclaren-Ross Caspary (1953)*.

Julian Maclaren-Ross, who might have caught some buckshot had a shotgun been fired at one of Viva King’s parties (he was X. Trapnel in Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time), took the phrase as the title for his first memoir. This volume covers his childhood up to the age of ten. Born in Ramsgate, he wrote that his first memory was of seeing an attack by German Zeppelins (an astonishing feat if it was the first raid on Ramsgate in late 1914). Arthur Marshall wrote in the New Statesman that some of Maclaren-Ross’s recollections were “probably tosh,” but overall the book gave a “charmed pleasure” and was “immensely engaging.”

When it was publised, The Weeping and the Laughter was intended to be the first of a total of four books of autobiography. They even had titles: Threnody on a Gramophone, The Sea Coast of Bohemia, and Khaki and Cockayne. Drink, poverty, and chaotic habits undermined his plans, and it was up to London Magazine editor Alan Ross to assemble posthumously his fragments into Memoirs of the Forties (1965), which achieved a success that eluded Maclaren-Ross during his lifetime. These were subsequently combined with The Weeping and the Laughter and other pieces into Collected Memoirs, which was published by Black Spring Press in 2005. I’m shocked to see that this edition been out of print for over a decade now. Unacceptable!

The Weeping and the Laughter by Judy Chard (1975) — *The Weeping and the Laughter by Judy Chard* (1975).

I include this only for the sake of completeness. This is the sort of book that no one bothers to review. The publisher’s own jacket blurb suffices to explain why:

Kate Fielding – a widow, but still comparatively young – seems to have everything a woman could wish for in life – except someone with whom to share it. Then she meets and falls passionately in love with a young artist — Larry Stafford. Can their love survive the difference of a decade in their ages, the criticism of friends and of Kate’s daughter, Roz, herself deeply involved with a married man? Can they overcome the terrifying illness which attacks Kate?

Folks, Lloyd Douglas wrote this story back in 1929. It’s called Magnificent Obsession. Save your time and watch the Douglas Sirk – Rock Hudson – Jane Wyman movie version, which put the O in overwrought (and we’re all the better for it).

The Weeping and the Laughter by Noel Barber (1988) — *The Weeping and the Laughter by Noel Barber* (1988).

This was Barber’s 32nd novel, published posthumously. A bestseller, probably because he’d amassed an army of fans with the previous 31. Twins of noble birth are separated in the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. The lucky one makes it to Paris and finds success in love and business. The other is lost and written off as dead. But is he? And what about that teddy bear: is it just an object of childhood obsession like Charles Foster Kane’s Rosebud? Or is there more to the story? I’m pretty sure I will never know. Or care.

Where are the The Weeping and the Laughters of this century? Has Ernest Dowson lost his capacity to inspire?

An uncredited leader titled “Out of Print” published in the April 14, 1961 issue of the Times Literary Supplement opens with the announcement that Christopher Burney’s Solitary Confinement (1952) was being reissued in a new edition by Macmillan: “It seems possible that the period of hibernation may have done it no harm. At least the book’s depth and range of reference are more evident than before: that richness which is there to be dug into not only by ordinary readers but by philosophers, psychologists, priests who want to see their ideas tested by an intelligent and sensitive individual in an extreme state.”

“But how often are books raised from the dead in this way?” the writer goes on to ask. In the noise of the marketplace, many books have “only a short time in which to sell or die — sometimes as little as three months.” It is much easier, he argues, “to think of works which stupidly petered out and are now only known to a handful of devotees,” and he offers the following examples:

• The Bridge in the Jungle (1929, first English pub. 1938), by B. Traven

In 1961, the ever-mysterious B. Traven had largely been forgotten, but he is solidly in the canon now. All of his novels and story collections set in Mexico are available under Rowman & Littlefield’s Ivan R. Dees imprint, and most of his other books are in print as well. Some people consider The Bridge in the Jungle Traven’s best novel, almost a parable about the insensitivity of capitalism to the plight of the people it impacts, summed up by the bridge without railings set up by a mining company that allows a little boy to fall to his death in the alligator-filled river below.

• Land Without Heroes (1948), by G. F. Green

Someone might have been inspired by this article, because Land Without Heroes was reissued by Four Square in 1963. Although it’s been out of print ever since, Green’s 1952 novel, In the Making was reissued in 2012 as a Penguin Modern Classic. The TLS greeted that event with an article by Peter Parker, who wrote, “Of those writers who were well known in their day but have since sunk almost without trace, few have lain buried deeper in the thick silt of ‘lost’ twentieth-century authors than G. F. Green.” Of Land, the Spectator’s reviewer compared Green to D. H. Lawrence and wrote, “The stories are all tragic—frustration, squalor, unemployment, disappointment and murder are their themes—and they are told, like Mr. Henry Green’s Living, in a sparse language which here sometimes touches on stringiness. No attempt is ever made to jerk the emotions by a false situation. A writer of Mr. Green’s integrity, whatever his limitations, must deserve our respect and admiration.”

• The Tribulations of a Baronet (1933), by Sir Timothy Eden

Dedicated “To all those who are interested rather in character than in names, in failure than success, in beauty than progress,” this portrait of Sir William Eden. “Here was a man who, with every encouragement from nature and from circumstance, should surely have set his mark upon the world. And yet he failed to so do.” This failure, Sir Timothy argues, “should be at least as interesting and as instructure as the successes of more limited and more commonplace personalities.” In a way, Tribulations appears to be a bit like Joe Gould’s Secret, another masterful portrait of a man of great promise and much disappointment. Certainly Sir William seems to have idled at difficult: “It is not easy to understand how a terrible tornado of oaths, screams, gesticulations and flying sticks can be seriously prompted by a barking dog,” the author admits, although he excuses this behavior because Sir William was “too eager for suffering, too susceptible to beauty, too easily unbalanced by opposition and obstruction, by noise and ugliness” — or in the words of a great Ben Vaughn song, “Too Sensitive for This World.” Tribulations is available in electronic format on the Internet Archive (Link).

• Of Love And Hunger (1947), by Julian Maclaren-Ross

Depicted in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time as X. Trapnel, gregarious bohemian novelist, Maclaren-Ross’ name was known from decades while his books remained out of print. In the last decade, however, he seems to have been safely restored to the canon of 20th century British literature. In an overview of Maclaren-Ross’s work in The Guardian, DJ Taylor wrote that Of Love And Hunger “has a queerly provisional quality, full of staccato scene-setting, telescoped descriptions (‘Rain’d almost stopped. Sun made a white rim on the edge of a cloud’) and nervy dialogue that looks as if it was written more or less on the hoof.”

• Nightmare (1932), by Lynn Brock

Lynn Brock was a prolific English writer of mysteries best known for his series featuring the detective, Colonel Gore, some of which will be reissued in The Deductions of Colonel Gore as part of Collins’ Detective Club Crime Classics in 2019. When Nightmare was first published in 1932, the TLS reviewer wrote, “Here is a thriller that ought to have been written by Poe. Every now and again Mr. Brock lives in the nightmare he has created by the trigonometry of detective fiction, and gives you a vivid glimpse of it that startles you into a gasp not only of horror but also of fervent admiration. Full justice to his subtle insight into character and contrasts of character could be done only by revealing the secrets of his plot, which is not permissible…. There is genius in Mr. Brock’s power of charging a moment with noises, colour and feeling until it seems more real than life.”

• Rudder Grange (1879), by Frank Stockton

Most Americans who took high school English will recognize Stockon’s name from his story, “The Lady or the Tiger?” Rudder Grange is a dead-pan comedy about a married couple living on a canal boat, and contemporary readers liked it so much that Stockton wrote two sequels, Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories (1891) and Pomona’s Travels (1894). Many of Stockton’s books are in print, but they’re also all in the public domain, so you can find them on Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. Personally, I prefer Stockton’s desert island comedy, The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine, which repeatedly demonstrates that the two middle-aged women of the title, put up as comic figures, are more resilient than the bright young gentleman who shares their fate: “I soon perceived that it would have been difficult to find two more valuable assistants in the bailing of a boat than Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine. They were evidently used to work, and were able to accommodate themselves to the unusual circumstances in which they were placed.”

The Weepings and the Laughters

“Out of Print,” from the Times Literary Supplement, 14 April 1961