Advertisement for The Midst of Life by Mina Curtiss. The Midst of Life is subtitled “A Romance,” but knowing a bit about Mina Curtiss, I read it assuming it was a work of nonfiction. I was surprised, then, to discover than Houghton Mifflin marketed it as a novel, for aside from the change of a name or two, this is drawn directly from Curtiss’s life. Born into a wealthy and cultured Jewish family (her younger brother Lincoln rates a 700-page biography by Martin Duberman), she grew up in Boston and graduated from Smith College, where she taught French for over ten years. When she was 30, she married Henry Tomlinson Curtiss, an heir to the Spaulding sporting goods fortune, but Curtiss, who had suffered from lung problems all his life, died suddenly of pneumonia after less than two years of marriage.
“Why shouldn’t I write to you, dead as well as alive,” she asks on the first of June, 1932. The Midst of Life is a widow’s attempt to process her husband’s death. “Of course, I shall write to you — every day. I shall tell you everything, everything you would want to know.”
Mina Curtiss, 1933. Photo by Carl Van Vechten.
Though she says, “I shall write you to remind you in your other world of the simple happiness of this one, its casualness and its excitement,” we soon realize that the one being reminded in Curtiss herself. While she and Henry were married, they wrote each other every day when apart. The act of writing to a ghost is preferable, she admits, to her initial ways of coping with his loss. “At first, I fancied you were in the next room, that accidentally you had left it just before I entered. Then I used to expect to meet you in the street.” She once felt an almost irresistable impulse to stab a man in the street simply for his expression of utter indifference to her pain.
And so, she writes every day, or nearly every day. Not like a wife sharing her day with her husband — such conversations tend to be more about exchanging information than emotions. She shares her impressions and, inevitably, the memories they trigger. Henry was a great lover of gardens, so we hear about the day lilies and delphinium, about the tomatoes and squash in the large gardens around their country home in the Berkshires and her joy or disappointment in their growth. The two of them were avid riders, so we read of the moments when Mina is able to lose all sense of herself in a gallop and of her sadness at having to put down her aging stallion Sandy.
As the summer moves into August, Mina finds herself sifting through her memories of Henry’s last days. Struck down in a New York hotel, he lies struggling to breathe, too frail to be moved to a hospital, his doctors holding out little hope for recovery. For years, she has taken some comfort from believing that his last word to her was “Beautiful.” But as she examines her memories closer, she realizes that what he actually said just before losing consciousness was, “Go away. Leave me alone.” And Mina finds this not the devastating rejection she has feared. “Leave me alone,” was right, she decides. “Man is born into the world alone, he leaves it alone, and in a way he lives in it alone, too.”
In her last letter, on the 10th of October, as the frost comes and forces her to harvest the last fruits and vegetables from the garden, Mina recalls a conversation she had with Henry early in their relationship. He is driving her to the station so she can catch a train back to Smith when he notices her glancing nervously at her watch. “Why do you do that?” he asks. If she misses one train, she can catch another. “Aren’t you happy here and now?” And that, she concludes, is the only way in which she can hold onto something of the love they shared: by concentrating on the moments of happiness she still has the opportunity to experience, even without him.
If Mina Curtiss was able to publish these letters by calling The Midst of Life a novel, so be it. As readers we might do well to think of it as a novel, too. For there are things here that are almost too intimate to be shared with strangers. A fine and touching book.
The Midst of Life, by Mina Curtiss Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933
I wouldn’t recommend the parents of a teenage daughter showing signs of wanderlust leave a copy of Barbara Starke’s Born in Captivity lying around the house. At age sixteen, Starke’s aunt gave her a copy of David Grayson’sThe Friendly Road, an account of a walking tour made by an adult man in 1912’s America. “It was the image of Grayson walking down a wilful road into unknown territory conscious of the delightful prospect of not turning back at night, which suddenly filled my mind with the luminous possibilities of such an act.”
Reading Grayson’s book suggests to Starke that “Perhaps, after all, it was not absolutely necessary” to come home every night –“even if he had no money or other devices to keep him from harm.” A pretty risky proposition, even for a man. For an attractive young woman of eighteen, the age at which Starke finally managed to sneak out of the house and start the journey described in Born in Captivity, it seems certain to end badly.
But Barbara Starke had some special angels looking out for her. She traveled from Massachusetts to California and back to New York City, rarely paying her way, almost always by just walking along the side of the road and hoping some kind stranger would stop and give her a ride. She never actually hitchhiked: she mades that emphatically clear. If offered a ride, she would accept unless she felt uneasy about the would-be good Samaritan. If not, she kept walking. Somehow, in the hundreds of rides she accepted, only once or twice did she have to fight her way out of the car.
More than that, the men who offered her rides — and it was always men, even though she wore mens’ clothes and was usually scruffy enough that many assumed she was a man until she climbed in — would buy her a meal or two, or pay for a separate hotel room, or even hand her five or ten bucks to help out. There were some, of course, who said they believed that “if a girl dared to tramp the road alone she must be prepared to ‘come across.'” She usually managed to change their minds. She felt, in fact, that hers was the superior power to intimidate: “I could look straight at them, could say unexpected things coldly, so that they wondered what weapons I concealed that I should be unafraid.”
On the other hand — and reading this must have made her mother’s hair stand up, if she ever did read her daughter’s book — if Starke liked a man’s company, she wasn’t above sleeping with him. On an early leg, she felt attracted to a handsome and soft-spoken engineer and shared his cabin on a night boat to Albany. And felt not the least regret: “If the captain of this ship should come in now, and there should be a nasty scene, they could not make me feel shame, I feel so proud and clean for having stayed with you.”
Like many young people throughout history, a good part of Starke’s motivation was to reject her parent’s choices. “The net had caught my father, and respectability, the tradition of owning a home and sending one’s children to college, had kept him there.” The only result she could see from their keeping a house and raising a family was to be “cheated of any joy,” to be “shackled by them.”
The freedom of the road allowed her not just to see the country but to sample from a smorgasbord of relationship possibilities. She liked and respected the engineer on the night boat, but she knew she didn’t want to marry him. A safecracker befriends her in Denver and she toys with joining him on a job, but decides a jail cell was the one thing worse than domestic misery. In Santa Barbara, a guy named Joe pulls alongside and serenades her. She joins him and they spend a week or so together. “I began to divine that one could get fond enough of another person to want him about a great deal.” Yet she walks on without regrets. “That priceless feeling of affection as we said good-bye on the Merced road in the early morning was not merely because we had given each other such joy, but because we were not even pretending to try to make it last longer.”
Born in Captivity was called Touch and Go in its English edition, but neither title does the book justice. The roads Starke traveled weren’t always friendly, but they were always free, not only in terms of economics but in terms of her own spirit. Yet just as she recognized in saying goodbye to Joe on the Merced road, she could not pretend to make her months of vagabondage run on indefinitely. Unlike with Joe, however, a regret remains. “How am I going to reach the ground and the sky again?” she wonders at the end as she sits in an office typing pool.
The novelist Henry Williamson raved about the book to his friend T. E. Lawrence. “Have you read Touch and Go by Barbara Starke? Cape did it. That girl can write; and seems the best of the new straight-ahead younger generation — passing the old hulks of 1914-18 and the concrete-ribbed waterlogs of the war-child generation.”
A. T. Simon III and Helen L. Card, with Frederic Remington painting, around 1960.
Barbara Starke was the pseudonym of Helen L. Card. As Starke, Card published one novel, Second Sister, in England in 1933. The only remaining copies of this are in the U.K. registry libraries. Although she received a scholarship to the Breadloaf Writer’s conference in 1937, her work soon became confined to articles and catalogues of Western art, particularly by Frederic Remington. She ran the Latendorf Bookshop on Madison Avenue for years and never married.
Born in Captivity: The Story of a Girl’s Escape, by Barbara Starke Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1931 London (as Touch and Go): Jonathan Cape, 1931
Advertisement for Fortune Grass from the Daily Telegraph.
“Darling, are you sure it will not be too much for you?” Mabel Lethbridge’s first husband asks when she is pregnant and he learns his father has cut him off without a penny.
“Nothing is too much for me,” she replies. Which could well serve as this remarkable woman’s motto. Her portrait ought to be printed next to the word resilience in every English dictionary. Fortune Grass covers a little over ten years in her life, but what a lot she packed into those years!
Born in 1900, she lived an itinerant life as she, her sister, two brothers, and their mother trailed around the British Empire following her father, a soldier of fortune. When Mabel grew sickly (mirroring her parents’ marriage), her mother took the children to Ireland, where Mabel thrived in the quiet rural setting. Her mother then dispatched her to an archetypal horrible boarding school — a stay that was short-lived.
With the start of World War One, the family moved to Ealing and her sister and older brother headed off, one to be a nurse, the other into the Army. Though just 16, Mabel felt frustrated at having to wait two years to join the war effort. So, she lied. Mabel was nothing if not ruthlessly pragmatic and would, as we come to see, cheerfully wield a lie in service to what she considered a good cause.
Dismissed from nursing when the truth about her age comes out, she lies again — to both the recruiters and her mother, who thinks she is sewing uniforms — and volunteers for the dangerous work of assembling shells in a government munitions factory. No matter how many crude safety measures the Ministry of Defence tried to put in place, the women working there were never more than a stray spark away from death. “That’s the last shell, by the time you’ve done that the milk will be here,” one of her fellow workers says one afternoon when Mabel has been there for just over six weeks. “The last shell! The last shell!” she thinks. And then:
… a dull flash, a sharp deafening roaf and I felt myself being ’hurled through the air, falling down, down, down, into darkness. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. . . . Mother! . . . Mother! Leghe! Reggie! [Her brothers.] Wouldn’t someone come? Wouldn’t someone speak to me? I lay quietly on my side. Now a blinding flash and I felt my body being torn asunder. Darkness, that terrifying darkness, and the agonised cries of the workers pierced my consciousness.
When she comes to, Mabel reaches down and discovers her left leg below the knee has been blown off. Her whole body has been peppered with shrapnel and she is blind and almost deaf. Most of the other women in her hut are dead.
Evacuated from the scene, she wakens again in the hospital. A familiar voice, Tattie, one of her friends from the plant, is by her side. But Mabel’s greatest fear is for her mother: “Oh, Tattie, Tattie,” I sobbed, “I have lost my leg and I am blind, but you won’t tell Mother, will you?”
From the Daily Mirror, 18 May 1918.
For her sacrifice, Mabel is awarded the Order of the British Empire — at the time, the youngest person ever to win it. Because of her injury, the Viscount officiating, rather than she, had to get down on his knees to present it. The medal is not enough, however, to change how her family viewed her condition. “Don’t you realise you are a cripple?” her mother asks when Mabel declares her intent to go out and find work again. Other relatives give her the cheapest of hand-me-downs — a skirt with a large burn in the back: “That’ll do for Mabel, she never goes anywhere.”
But Mabel refuses to be a victim. She teaches herself to walk, first with crutches, then a cane. She stuffs some clothes into her purse, climbs aboard a bus, heads to Whitehall, and gets a job filling out for a ministry. After she finds a room she can afford in a miserable women’s hotel, she writes to inform her mother, begging her to stay away.
The squalor of the hotel and its older inhabitants — widows and spinsters who “exuded an air of tragedy” — combined with the tedium of her work and her still-weak condition and soon Mabel has to obtain a medical waiver and stop working. Stop working for ministry, that is, because what now commences is a whirlwind two years of jobs, relationships, and living arrangements.
Mabel washes dishes in a restaurant, sells matches at Tube stations, cleans stoops in Westminster and Knightsbridge, minds stalls in Borough Market, hawks newspapers, poses for art students, operates a crank organ, and works at least a half dozen other jobs. She sleeps in the bushes along the Embankment and works as a live-in companion. She co-habits with “Daddy,” the demobbed Army officer with whom she’d started a correspondence during the war — despite the fact that he’d married another woman in a mad moment — then falls in love with his cousin Noel, who moves in with them.
“Peggy the chair girl,” from the Sunday Pictorial, December 3, 1922.
In her own mad moment, she decides she and Noel must get married. And in nearly the same moment, she devises the scheme by which she makes her first fortune: renting folding chairs to people waiting in queues outside West End theaters. From offering a handful of chairs outside the Ambassador Theater, near the apartment she shares with Noel, “Peggy the Chair-Girl” expands her business in the space of a year to one involving thousands of chairs and several franchisees. She even finds herself in the midst of a turf way when a group of thugs attempts to take over her concession outside the wildly popular revival of Gilbert and Sullivan musicals in 1922.
Article about Noel Kalenberg’s failed suicide attempt, 1922.
Her marriage to Noel, however, proves a complete failure. Claiming to be studying for the bar, he is nothing but the polar opposite of Mabel: lazy, snobbish, and a drunkard. Mabel decides within the first month that she must leave and says so to Noel. She then marches out to manage the chair rentals at the Ambassador. Standing on the sidewalk outside the theater, she and the patrons hear two shots from the direction of her apartment. She rushes upstairs to find Noel has attempted suicide. There is a great hubbub and Mabel is briefly suspected of murder.
Like everything else he puts his hand to, suicide is yet another failure for Noel. He recovers and Mabel takes him back in. Mabel is carrying his child, but that doesn’t prevent him from knocking her around and drinking up her earnings. The situation only gets worse when he stops studying for the bar and his father cuts off his allowance.
Ad for Mabel Lethbridge, Estate Agent (1934).
Yet none of this gets Mabel down. Her water breaks as she’s vending chairs. She delivers the child and promptly goes back to work, carrying the baby in one arm and passing out chairs with the other. And she soon manages to dispatch Noel off to his family in Ceylon. As we leave our heroine at the end of Fortune Grass, she has just established herself as the first woman estate agent in England. And she’s just 28!
Mabel Lethbridge went on to write two more autobiographies and rack up another marriage and many more accomplishments, making herself a wealthy and widely popular woman in the process. By the time she died, she’d been the subject of a “This is Your Life” television show and included in the historic BBC “Great War Interviews” series.
Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, who knew her as “Granny Mabel” in the 1960s, just before her death, mentions Mabel in her book The Slow Train to Milan:
I was always frightened of cupboards, ever since the day in Cornwall at Granny Mabel’s when a leg sprang out and hit me, and it was her leg, with her thick stocking and built-up shoe, and I screamed and dropped it, and Granny Mabel laughed. I had been seven at the time, and I had never realised that Granny Mabel had only one leg. Mabel Lethbridge O.B.E., who didn’t like you to miss out the letters after her name, and who had worked in a munitions factory during the First World War when she was sixteen. The factory had been bombed, and a whole wing of the nearest hospital had been cleared for survivors, but Mabel alone had survived with one leg blown away, and the other ruined. She had received her O.B.E. in hospital from the King. Granny Mabel, who had been everywhere, and married a millionaire and who could swear more than any sailor on the quay at St Ives.
So, the next time you feel, as they say in Texas, like climbing aboard your pity pot, think what Mabel Lethbridge would do in your shoes — one of which had an artificial leg stuck in it!
Fortune Grass, by Mabel Lethbridge London: Geoffrey Bles, 1934
My friend Robert Nedelkoff recommended this book to me after stumbling across a reference in a 1980 collection of Ronald Firbank’s prose titled Firbank: Memoirs and Critiques edited by Mervyn Horder. In Horder’s preface, he dismisses the notion of dramatic death scenes, writing, “We are assured by a competent technical observer of the subject that people tend to meet the moment of their death in the same manner as they live — the self effacing quietly in their sleep, the egocentric giving the maximum trouble to all concerned, the theatrical speechifying away con brio, the athletic with one foot out of bed, and so on.”
Horder’s competent technical observer, we learn from a footnote, was Pamela Bright, whose The Day’s End he describes as “a neglected book of 1956” — which of course caused Robert to reach for the Neglected Books phone. It sounded like the real deal, and I was delighted to find it awaiting patiently on the Internet Archive (link).
The Day’s End is a study in how we die. Set on the cancer ward of an unnamed women’s hospital on the western edge of London, the book takes us through two days on the ward as seen by its head nurse (Bright, though she never identifies herself in the book). There are old women and young, some there just for an exam or two, others doomed to spend their last days within its walls. Bright confirms Horder’s paraphrase above, but more from the perspective of a nurse:
The ways people die are as varied as the pictures on the wall ofa gallery, and each death remembered for a different reason: one for its setting; one for its atmosphere and whether there was summer in it or frost, or darkness and an oxygen cylinder; one for its human characters, for its peace, for its distress, and whether it was in the order of things or sudden in its unexpectedness.
At the time Bright wrote the book, she had been a practicing nurse for over 18 years. Earning her cap just after the outbreak of World War One, she served in military hospitals in Palestine and, after the D-Day invasion, trailing the British Army through northern Europe. The latter experience she described in her first book, Life in Our Hands (1955), and there are flashbacks to her time in Palestine throughout The Day’s End.
Also throughout the book are mentions of the stress of being responsible for a ward full of patients and a team of nurses and orderlies that almost seem like Bright’s reminders to herself: “it demanded constant wariness, the habit of keen observation, the noting of others’ moods and tempers, the habit of explaining, and the ability to learn the knack of not always depending on the advice or backing of others, but of believing in one’s own judgment and ability.” As she rides the bus home after her shift, her thoughts scroll through the patients — who’s improved, who’s failing, who may need to be shifted to one of the side rooms where a patient nearing death can have some hours of privacy and peace — and which nurses need to be encouraged or restrained the next day. She acknowledges, though, that she gains a form of comfort from that stress: “Although theoretically I abhor the business of being busy and in a hurry, yet I must confess that often it is in that condition I find myself happiest — it is a drug, and one can forget.”
Caring for a terminally ill patient proves among the most demanding of a nurse’s duties because it represents, in effect, a failure. So, on top of the inbred discretion of the English middle class there is a reluctance to draw attention to the obvious: “However acute a patient’s illness, we never admitted the signs of impending death.” Some of this reluctance stems from the difficulty of admitting how much about death remains unknown to medical professionals, but some also results from having seen the process repeated hundreds of times. “A dying man rarely looks death in the face,” Bright reports, “and who are we to tell him the truth? Why should he not go on building castles in the air when to some extent he has been doing it all his life?”
What makes The Day’s End memorable, however, are not such generalizations but Bright’s portraits of her patients. Mario, the dashingly handsome Italian soldier in her hospital in Palestine, who insisted on wearing a pink hairnet each night to keep his long, oiled black hair from getting mussed — until the night when he no longer called for it and Bright knew he would not last until morning. Or the lonely woman whose sad tale takes less than a sentence: “Miss Smart, for instance, who had had not a single friend and who couldn’t be forgotten when she died, for no one remembered her while she was alive….” And especially Mrs. Ferrett, possessed of a malevolent intensity worthy of a character in Balzac:
Her face seemed crudely sculptured, following the curves of a gargoyle on some cathedral front; and as one invariably gazes with delight upon such goblins and the workman’s freedom of expression, so one had to smile at Mrs. Ferrett. When she sat in bed she was coiled up in the smallest possible space, her chin almost resting on her knees, her hands close to her sides, like a child in embryo: when she was on her feet she moved softly and half inclined sideways like a crab: when her sharp eyes glistened, she pierced the ward from end to end and gleamed upon her neighbours, nurses, visitors, indeed everything. Mumbling, or munching peppermints; crabbed and cranky, she would gaze upwards at the plain corners and downwards at the dust, and in silent glee hug to herself some fearful secret.
She occupied the first place among the simplest. But she occupied it with such force, daring and calm that none of us would have thought of taking it away from her. This selfish, wicked woman bewitched even the people least susceptible to such influence: us nurses and the doctors.
Bright chronicled her career in a total of five books: Breakfast at Night (1956), about her training at an Edinburgh hospital; Life in Our Hands about her service in Europe during the war; The Day’s End, which found her in mid-career; A Poor Man’s Riches (1966), about her experiences caring for Palestinian refugees in the early 1960s; and Hospital at Night (1971), a fictionalized account based on her time as chief nurse of a busy metropolitan hospital. After retiring from service, she wrote a biography of her ancestor, Dr. Richard Bright, a pioneering surgeon who first described the ailment of the kidneys that now bears his name. She died in 2012 at the age of 98.
The Day’s End, by Pamela Bright London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1959
When Studs Terkel titled his 1984 oral history of the American experience in World War Two The Good War, he meant it ironically. Terkel’s book is full of accounts of G. I.s and civilians who could still, decades afterward, think of themselves as casualties. Thanks, however, to Tom Brokaw’s hagiographic 1998 bestseller The Greatest Generation, however, the honeyed glow that Terkel refused to give his portrait of the war is now once again well-established and part of the current dementia among some Americans for a history that’s all nice, clean, and guilt-free.
If you count yourself among these folks, Mary Lee Settle’s 1966 memoir of her time in the Royal Air Force, All the Brave Promises, is not for you. Indeed, Settle opens the book with a salvo designed to eradicate any inclination a reader might have of looking on that time nostalgically:
We are accused of being nostalgic. We have been. What we have remembered are events. The Second World War was, for most of us, a state, a state of war, not an event. It was a permeation, a deadening, a waiting, hard to recall. What we have told about is the terrifying relief of battle or the sweet, false relief of leave.
These were not the causes of a psychic shock from which a generation of people are only now beginning to emerge. For every ‘historic’ event, there were thousands of unknown, plodding people, caught up in a deadening authority, learning to survive by keeping quiet, by ‘getting by,’ by existing in secret, underground; conscripted, shunted, numbered. It took so many of them, so many of their gray days and their uprooted lives. It taught them evasive ways to survive. These ways, dangerous to the community and to the spirit, have been a part of the peace.
“It taught them evasive ways to survive” is not how Tom Brokaw wanted us to look on the experience of American veterans of World War Two. But it’s the sort of bracingly brutal respect for honesty that makes Mary Lee Settle’s writing seem at times like a slap across the face. Not an insulting slap — a “Wake Up!” slap.
Settle came to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, the women’s arm and second-class component of the Royal Air Force by a circuitous route. After marrying an Englishman named Rodney Weathersbee in 1939, she followed him to Canada when he joined the RAF and was sent there for training and delivered their son Christopher while still there as a military wife. The marriage soon fell apart, though, and she headed back to West Virginia, where her parents took over the care of Christopher while Settle headed to Washington, D.C. to get involved in war work.
During that period before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it wasn’t easy for an American woman to get into the British forces. She started by applying at the British Embassy in Washington, where she was aided by the young Roald Dahl and the playright and World War One veteran flyer Ben Travers. Then it was a matter of getting to England, which she finally did in October 1942, along with a boatfull of Roayl Navy and RAF trainees.
Through Weatherbee and her embassy friends, a posh welcome was arranged and Settle spent a week enjoying the finest comforts wartime London could offer. But then she reported for duty and the fun part came to an end.
Her first day as a WAAF was a foretaste of what much of the next 13 months would be like. With her foreign accent, refined looks, and High Street clothes, Settle was quickly labelled an outsider by her fellow enlistees, most of whom came from poor families in the East End. They stuck together like a chorus, commenting savagely on the faults of their superiors and anyone else who wasn’t “their type.” For Settle, “It was the first glimpse of the stratification, almost Chinese in its complication and formality, which covered everything from a hairdo to a state of health to sugar in tea and by which each Englishman holds himself apart, himself his castle, from his fellows.” Although she did manage to establish a few weak friendships during her time, Settle son grew accustomed to her permanent position in the eyes of the other WAAFs as an undesirable and untrusted alien.
The year or so Settle spent in the WAAFs included some of the grimmest days of the war. This was the long, slow, unthrilling buildup to D-Day and beyond. Settle was assigned to RAF Hullavington, the Empire Central Flying School, where much of the RAF’s basic flight training took place, There, she was assigned as a radio operator, spending hours each day in the darkened control room and trying to communicate with pilots over weak and heavily jammed signals. It was like staring into a solid fog hoping to make out the faintest shapes, and it eventually led to aural hallucinations that nearly drove her mad.
The food was bad, the showers cold, the barracks largely unheated, and the days full of damp, grey, chilly English weather. The WAAFs were at the bottom of the station’s pecking order, lower even than the kitchen staff, some of who were prisoners of war. To make matters worse, any possibility for camraderie was undermined by the fact that WAAFs were assigned to positions individually, rather than as a formation. As Settle puts it,
It showed even in the language — one was ‘attached’ to a station, each new place approached without knowing a soul, so that to be posted off your station was a thing to be feared and in it was a vague sense of punishment. Such isolation among the vast majority of the ground crews bred an unseen poisoned miasma, secret beneath the structure as sex was secret to authority.
Her work and the living conditions proved exhausting, relentless, and utterly thankless. Any sense of contributing to a greater cause was life. On the other hand, as she realized one afternoon off as she cycled through some nearby villages, being treated like a cog in the war machine brought a novel, if odd, sense of freedom:
[For] the first time I sensed an irresponsibility, an ease of letting go. My uniform was issue, my bicycle was issue. I was utterly without worry about where my food was coming from. So long as I did what I was told, kept silence and remained acquiescent, I had freedom from decision, freedom from want, freedom from anxiety for survival. That, too, seemed out of my hands—the deci- sion of an abstract, an order from “above.” For a few minutes the rose hedges swept past me; I felt an almost mystic contentment. Then, even in the sun, cold fright caught me and I pedaled faster, as if I could ride away from the space of that feeling. I had experienced the final negative freedom, that of the slave.
There’s another one of those Settle slaps: “the negative freedom … of the slave.”
After a particularly long and demanding shift, Settle collapsed and was diagnosed as severely underweight and malnourished. She was sent to London to recouperate and quickly realized that her talents and temperament were better suited for work with the U.S. Office of War Information. The OWI arranged for her separation from the WAAF and her induction — as a major, though without uniform — into the U.S. Army.
The framing facts of Settle’s story — her marriage, her son, her escape into the OWI — are missing from All the Brave Promises. It took her much longer to provide these facts, in her unfinished memoir Learning to Fly, which was published shortly after her death in 2005. All the Brave Promises is not, however, a book that depends on external context to succeed. Her aim, as she later wrote, was simply to document how thousands of young English women were used by their country and to counter what she called “the official peacetime bravery … the self-congratulation of it, its terrible mistakes.” “It was such a tiny arrow thrown,” she acknowledged, “But it was all I could do.”
With an aim as keen as Mary Lee Settle’s however, even tiny arrows can be deadly. If you should ever find yourself giving into notions of the romance of war, I recommend All the Brave Promises as an antidote.
All the Brave Promises: Memories of Aircraft Woman 2nd Class 2146391, by Mary Lee Settle New YorK: Delacorte Press, 1966 London: Heinemann, 1966
I don’t remember how many years ago I bought this book, but it sat on the shelf long enough to have escaped my notice until I took it down to kill a few minutes while waiting for my wife to get ready to go out. One of the downsides to reading and writing about books all the time is that one loses touch of that magical experience of opening a book and commencing to read without any prior knowledge to cloud one’s judgment.
If I ever knew much about I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye, I’d forgotten it long ago. I suspect it was nothing more than the loveliness of the title that made me buy it in the first place. So I was naively putting myself in Madeleine Masson’s hands, knowing that I would be setting it down in a few minutes, perhaps not to pick it up again for a matter of years, if ever.
“It was a beautiful day in June 1940” opens the first chapter, “Paris — June 1940.” Of course, we know enough history to realize that a beautiful day in Paris in June 1940 is not going to end beautifully. Masson’s lover arrives to persuade her to leave for Switzerland with him. As a Jew, she understands the risks she faces. “They say that the Germans will be entering Paris at any moment,” her anti-Semitic landlady announces with undisguised delight. Masson chooses not to go to Switzerland but carries on packing up, prepared to join the flood of refugees leaving the city for … well, any place else.
We understand by the end of Chapter One that Masson’s title is a lie, which gives everything that follows a certain poignancy, rather like that one feels in watching the silly bourgeosie in Jean Renoir’s masterpiece La règle du jeu. And Masson herself could easily have been one of the characters in Renoir’s film. Raised in South Africa by a French father and Austrian mother, she came to Paris in 1934 with her mother, who was hoping to establish her own salon and effectively separate from her dull diamond broker husband (if not from his money).
For Masson, however, Paris is a different kind of escape — from her mother, in fact. She quickly finds herself a job as secretary to a wealthy American dowager and a room of her own in a pension, and begins to assimilate into a peculiar cross-section of Parisian society. At the high end, she meets the idle rich and idle not-so-rich (the latter often of noble descent) through her enployer and mother. At the low end, she meets people like Madame Tricon, the patronne of her pension:
She told me that she was one of the first women in Paris to have eyelashes made from the hairs of her current lover’s legs. “Imagine, ma petite,” she said, batting two black centipedes at me, “Imagine to yourself the voluptuousness of giving him Japanese kisses with his own hairs.
At one of employer’s soirees, Masson meets Baron Renaud Marie de la Minaudière, who plies her with food and drink and by the end of the evening declares himself desperately in love. She takes quick stock of his character: “lazy, amoral, deeply religious, sentimental, and selfish.” Nonetheless, when he proposes, she accepts.
Then she discovers that she is the third player in a duet. The Baron is in thrall with the Marquise de Rastignac, a fifty-ish noblewoman his mother enlisted to introduce her son into the mysteries of sex. Some twenty years later, the two are still carrying on their affair, aided in part by the fact that the Marquise is footing much of the bill for the Baron’s playboy lifestyle. Masson’s account of the Baron and the Marquise is just one of the nuggets of la vie Parisienne pluperfect that are studded throughout this book:
The Marquise’s finest hour, L’heure bleue, was her hour of triumph. From 5 to 7 p.m. was visiting time for French lovers; and in love nests all over the country, and in Paris particularly, men were taking down their trousers and heading for the Louis XVI style bed where lay la petite amie in a frilly négligée. Tearing off this garment was part of the ploy. I could never visualise the Baron’s Laure frivolling naked on what the Baron called with some respect the battlefield. For this lady, who to me resembled a Roman matron, had amisleading air of impenetrable virtue. Her clothes appeard welded to her massive frame, and her large handbags and tiny feet were as much a legend in Paris as was her vanished beauty.
Not long after Masson and the Baron are married, the Marquise pays a visit and informs the new bride that “Renaud is my life and I don’t propose giving him up.” Masson’s job is to produce an heir and interfere as little as possible in the status quo ante matrimonium.
This is also the view of the Baron’s family, who don’t bother to hide the contempt they feel towards a pretender with three strikes against her: a Jewess, a foreigner, and a commoner. They refuse to even acknowledge her existence. The shock of her rejection on all fronts causes Masson, now pregnant with the Baron’s child, to miscarry. And this, ironically, then enables Masson to get the marriage annulled through some intricate maneuvers through the Byzantine processes of the French bureaucracy and the Catholic Church.
Madeleine Masson in 1942.
For proper Parisians, there is no difference between an annulée and a divorcée. Official recognition as a wanton woman, however, frees Masson to explore less-sanctioned aspects of Parisian society. She takes a series of lovers, some who fall for her, others whom she falls for, none of them remotely suitable. Early on, she is aided and abetted by Lucy de Polnay (sister of the author Peter de Polnay, whom Neglected Books fans may recall). Lucy instructs her in the fine art of judging a lover, dismissing one for having what she called “the postman’s knock method”: “three sharp rat-a-tats, put it in the letter box, and away.”
Masson also comes to know — intimately or briefly — many of the celebrities of Paris of the 1930s: Colette, Nathalie Barney, Anaïs Nin, Suzy Solidor, Marie Laurencin. So, if you’re not satisfied with savoring Masson’s delicious tales, you can also feast upon pages rich with vintage Parisian gossip, including their “curious sexual appetites and habits.” (Masson could never share Count Serge Cheremeteff’s “passion for the whip and the rod,” for example.)
And, as we know from the start, there is the tragic goodbye to all that, as Masson tries to find a way out of France with thousands of other refugees. The streets of cities like Tours and Bourdeaux “black with people, like flies on a wound.” Just what happens to her in the end, however, is unclear. In the book, she writes that she managed to book a passage to South Africa from Marseilles. Her Wikipedia page, on the other hand, suggests that she stayed and became involved with the Resistance. After the war, however, it’s clear that she married again (a Royal Navy captain), had a son, to whom the book is dedicated, settled in England, and became a biographer and playwright. She died in 2007 at the age of 95.
I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye is as insubstantial as an éclair — and every bit as irresistible.
I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye, by Madeleine Masson London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978
Charlotte Salomon’s “autobiographical play” Life or Theater? is often described as a work of Holocaust art. It’s true that Salomon created it while living as a Jewish German refugee in the south of France and that she was arrested, shipped to Auschwitz, and murdered there on 10 October 1943. And the repression of the Jews by the Nazis is a backdrop whose shadows grow longer as the story reaches its climax.
But Life or Theater? is first and foremost a story of private tragedies, tragedies whose full details have only gradually come to light over the course of decades.
Beween July 1940 and February 1943, Salomon, daughter of a wealthy Berlin surgeon, Dr. Albert Salomon, told a story in nearly 1,300 paintings on 10×13-inch sheets of paper with a narrative of 32,000 words of dialogue and description inscribed on their backs. From these, she selected 769, which she entrusted to her French doctor in Villefranche, with instructions for him to pass them on to Ottilie Moore, the German-American millionaire in whose villa Salomon and her grandparents were living. A few months later, she and her husband were arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where she was executed, probably on the day of their arrival.
Charlotte Salomon and her grandparents in France 1939 or 1940.
By the time of her arrest, Salomon’s grandfather was dead. She had killed him, preparing an omelette laced with the poison veronal. As Toni Bentley wrote in her 2017 New Yorker article, “Salomon’s crime that morning was not a mercy killing to save the old man from the Nazis; this was entirely personal.”
Life or Theater? itself is entirely personal, despite its historical context. Every character is someone from Salomon’s life. Its dramas are family dramas, its emotions individual and specific to her. And it is a work of self exploration, though the explorer admits her expedition is incomplete. As she wrote in a preface to what she described as “Ein Singespiel” — a libretto, if you will:
Since I myself needed a year to discover the significance of this strange work, many of the texts and tunes, particularly in the first paintings, elude my memory and must — like the creation as a whole, so it seems to me — remain shrouded in darkness.
The suicide of Charlotte Knare.
The story opens in darkness. The first painting shows a Berlin street at night, what appears to be a bridge, and a sequence of figures — a woman at first but growing less distinct — leading to the darkness at the lower lefthand corner. “One November day, Charlotte Knarre left her parents’ home and threw herself into the water,” the text tells us. Knarre is the name she gives her mother’s family, the Grünwalds; Charlotte Knarre is the aunt for whom she is named, the aunt whose suicide four years before Salomon’s birth proved only the first in a series of deaths that shaped her life.
In the next scene, Dr. Albert Kann, a young military doctor, courts and marries Franziska Knarre. Charlotte is born in 1917, but her mother suffers from depression and, within six panels afterwards, is shown taking an overdose of opium. Though she is found before it can take effect, she then jumps to her death while recouperating at her parents’ apartment. In reality, nine years passed between Charlotte’s birth and her mother’s suicide.
Charlotte waits for her mother to come at night.
Charlotte struggles to understand her mother’s death. She leaves a letter on her mother’s gravestone: “Dear Mommy, please write to me.” She sits up nights expecting her mother to visit, like an angel.
Her life improves somewhat with the arrival of a governess, but then, in 1930, Dr. Kann meets and marries Paulinka (Paulina Lindberg in real life), an aspiring singer. For much of the next few years and several hundred pages, the focus shifts from Charlotte to Paulinka — her increasing popularity as a singer, the obsession of an older man, a theater director, for her and then Paulinka’s own obsession with a poet and mystic named Amadeus Daberlohn (“penniless Mozart”).
For Charlotte, Paulinka is a figure of fascination for her beauty, talent, and glamorous lifestyle — and a source of intense jealousy, first as a competitor for her father’s affection and then as Charlotte herself becomes obsessed with Daberlohn. At the same time, Charlotte learns from her grandmother that she has experienced even more tragedies that the suicide of their two daughters. Her brother and sister also took their lives; her husband has had affairs, stays with her only for the sake of appearances.
Der Sturmer announcement of the boycott of Jews.
History begins to intrude upon this private story at the start of Act Two: “The swastika — a symbol of bright hope!” reads the text over a picture of brownshirts marching down a street, featuring the date “30.I.1933.” By the next panel, however, Der Sturmer announces the boycott of Jewish businesses. Dr. Kann is dismissed from his university post.
Two panels of Daberlohn’s monologues.
But the greater shadow that descends over Charlotte’s world is that of Amadeus Daberlohn. Page after page after page appears with a series of his head and lines of dialogue –or rather, monologue. At one point, there are fifteen straight pages of his head and his talk; at another, nearly a dozen of Daberlohn shown reclining, the images and words growing more rushed and indistinct. One has to wonder whose madness is being depicted: Daberlohn’s or Charlotte’s?
Charlotte and Daberlohn in a park.
Charlotte and Daberlohn meet away from the Kann’s home. He encourages her affection: “You are so beautiful. When you smile, your hands smile too.” The two are shown kissing. Embracing on a park bench. Arm-in-arm on the street.
And the focus shifts again, from Charlotte and Daberlohn to Daberlohn himself. To his attempt to create a masterpiece, an adaptation of the story of Adam and Eve into a contemporary setting. He superimposes this story onto his own relationship with Charlotte. Then he turns his back on her and his “masterpiece” becomes a version of the Resurrection blended with that of Orpheus and Eurydice. “My hopes, therefore, life with the future souls of young girls who are willing to tread the path of Christ, the Orpheus path,” he writes. Daberlohn’s “masterpiece” seems more than a little creepy as portrayed by Charlotte, still clearly infatuated with the man at a distance of some years.
Suddenly, it is 1938, and the public and private tragedies converge and accelerate. The assassination of a Nazi diplomat in Paris by the Jewish exile Herschel Grynszpan incites the destruction of Jewish shops and properties in Kristallnacht. Dr. Kann is sent to prison at Sachsenhausen. Paulinka manages to get him released and they leave Germany for the Netherlands.
After Grandmother Knarre’s suicide attempt.
Charlotte joins her grandparents in France. There, her grandmother attempts to hang herself. In the aftermath, her grandfather reveals more dark family secrets. The grandmother makes another attempt, throwing herself out a window like her daughter had. And succeeding like her daughter had.
Charlotte talks with her grandfather.
Yet, somehow, Charlotte manages to find hope. She draws energy from the warmth and beauty of southern France. “You know, Grandpa,” she says, “I have a feeling the whole world has to be put together again.” To which he replies, “Oh, go ahead and kill yourself and put an end to all this babble!”
“She had to vanish for a while from the human plane and make every sacrifice in order to create her world anew out of the depths,” Charlotte writes of her work over the year following her grandmother’s suicide. “And from that came: Life or Theater?”
This ending omits the poisoned omelette. And none of the words in Salomon’s text touch on the question that naturally arises when one learns of it: what was Salomon’s real motivation for killing her grandfather? It is hard not to look for answers in the pictures, however. Is there another untold story, a story about abuse, lurking in the many dark pages of Life or Theater?, written beneath the pages and pages of talking heads and feverish monologues, in the frenzied speed that seems to have driven Salomon’s brush throughout so much of this project?
The last panel of Life or Theater?
The last image shows Charlotte in a bathing suit, kneeling on the beach, looking out over the blue Mediterranean as she paints or sketches. On her back are painted the words Leben Oder Theater. When I first read the book, I assumed the question was being posed as a choice between Life (as in real life) and Theater (as in Art). But now I wonder if Salomon intended it to be read differently: as a choice between Life (her own desire to draw inspiration from the beauty around her, to put the world together again) and Theater, as in the Greek tragedy, the family drama that the women in her family seemed to feel condemned to sacrifice themselves to.
Life or Theater? has appeared several times in English, each time with more material as new papers and paintings are discovered. The best and most comprehensive was the 2017 edition from the Overlook Press. Unfortunately, this edition is already out of print and hard to find. Taschen’s edition from the same year is still available, though it’s slightly abridged. Previous versions appeared in 1963, with a foreword by the theologian Paul Tillich, and in 1981 following the exhibition of 250 paintings at the Jewish History Museum in Amsterdam.
In all cases, the book is presented as an art book — large and very heavy with its hundreds of pages of full-color images. But I think this does the book as a book some disservice. For it can also be seen as a graphic novel. Indeed, many of its images will seem familiar to today’s readers, much more accustomed to the presentation of graphic novels.
Take this image from early in the book, showing Charlotte’s mother and father at the hotel when they spend their wedding night. Three wordless panels as they progress up the staircase, into the room, and into the bed.
The wedding night of Charlotte’s parents.
In 1943, this would have seemed novel, more like three shots from a film than any painting. But we can easily picture similar images from a book by Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown or Jimmy Corrigan. And I do hope that one day some editor will have the courage to package the book in this way. Not only because it seems truer to the spirit of the book, but also because its readership will remain limited as long as reading it means holding a great ten-pound lump in the lap for hours at a time.
Life or Theater? is one of the most intense and moving works of autofiction I’ve ever read, and I highly encourage others to discover it, even in ten-pound lump form.
Life or Theater? by Charlotte Salomon New York: Overlook Press, 2017
Photo of the cover of Laugh a Defiance courtesy of Sarra Manning.
I recently engaged in a brief and pointless debate on Twitter with an impassioned adherent of the school of Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” who argued that it was not only unnecessary to know anything about the person who wrote a book but limiting, the intellectual equivalent of showing up to compete in the Tour de France with a set of training wheels.
To read Laugh a Defiance, Mary Richardson’s memoir of her experiences in the Suffragette movement without some biographical context, however, would set you up to reach some seriously mistaken conclusions. On the surface, it’s terrific book — immediate yet self-reflective, moving but frequently quite funny. You would wonder why on Earth it’s been out of print since 1953.
Mary Richardson was a Canadian woman who settled in England and was working as a reporter for the Toronto Globe and other Canadian newspapers when, one day in early 1913, she encountered a young man distributing Suffragette pamphlets. This led to a meeting with Christabel Pankhurst, and she was soon set to work in the campaign aimed at raising public awareness through acts of property destruction. On her first mission, she threw rocks through windows of the Home Office before she was chased away by policemen. She was able to get away in part due to their being encumbered by heavy capes, which, she observed, “must surely have been designed before any idea of quick-footed, quick-firing felons like Suffragettes had disturbed the official mind.”
Richardson was an ideal foot soldier for the cause. “I was better able to undertake the more difficult tasks,” she wrote, “in that I had no family to worry about me and no one I needed to worry over. In the fullest sense I was free to do what was asked.” Soon after stoning Whitehall, she was sent to the Derby on the day that King Edward II and Queen Alexandra would be in attendance. There, as she stood holding a copy of The Suffragette in her hand, she watched in horror as one of her fellow militants, Emily Davison, calmly slipped under the rail, stepped into the racecourse in front of the oncoming horses and riders, and was knocked down and fatally injured. The hostility of the mob towards Davison, both at the track and at her funeral, only hardened Richardson’s resolve.
Richardson joined the Suffragettes when they had made a deliberate shift in tactics, one aimed at raising awareness of the movement through acts of disruption and, in particular, the destruction of property. This was considered an appropriate response to a prevailing order in which “values were stressed from the financial point of view and not the human.” She witnessed this attitude in its most glaring self-contradiction when she and several others tried to interrupt an Anglican church service to offer a prayer for Emmeline Pankhurst, then gravely ill in Holloway Prison. Their actions, she wrote, “had the effect of so changing the faces of Christians that they resembled gargoyles on their own medieval churches.”
Some of the incidents recalled in Laugh a Defiance make you want to cheer for their ingeuity. Marion Wallace-Dunlop, raised in a stern Scottish family and reluctant to become involved in violence, arranged for a male friend to sneak her into the House of Commons disguised as an older woman. Once there, she started marking up the walls of the lobby with an inked rubber stamp reading, “No taxation without representation.” When MPs finally noticed what she was doing, much of one wall was defaced and it took hours for cleaners to remove the graffiti. Wallace-Dunlop later introduced the hunger strike as a non-violent response to the abusive treatment the Suffragettes received in prison.
Few Suffragettes saw the inside of a prison as often as Mary Richardson. Between July 1913 and June 1914, she was arrested nine times, and she was one of the first to be subjected to forced feeding, the initial and barbaric response to the Suffragette’s hunger strikes. Heading off on one mission, she handed a bundle of her things to a housemate and told her, “If I’m not back for breakfast tomorrow morning, send this parcel to His Majesty’s prison at Holloway for me.” After the Cat and Mouse Act was passed, prisoners such as Richardson who staged hunger strikes were merely discharged when they fell ill and weak and then imprisoned again once they’d recovered, but that didn’t stop prisoner authorities from trying get the upper hand. On one visit to Holloway, the warders sent in a woman trained in ju jitsu to subdue her.
Article on Mary Richardson’s slashing of the Rokeby Venus, from The Daily Mail.
Richardson’s best known act of destruction was her slashing of Velasquez’s painting The Toilet of Venus, better known as the Rokeby Venus, in the National Gallery in March 1914. For Richardson, the Venus and its prominent display — then one of the most expensive works of art in the gallery — symbolized much that she despised in the British establishment, including its public display of the nude female form. So, acting alone, she decided to damage or destroy the painting as an act of protest.
She bought what she refers to as an axe — but in photos looks more like a cleaver — at an ironmongers in Theobalds Road, then walked to the National Gallery. She slipped the cleaver up her sleeve and entered. The Venus painting was being guarded by two police detectives and, at first, there was enough of a crowd that it was impractical for her to approach the painting. So, she wandered for a while, then returned and started to sketch in a drawing pad. When one of the detectives left the room, the other took out a newspaper and she saw her opportunity:
I dashed up the the painting. My first blow with the axe merely broke the protective glass. But, of course, it did more than that, for the detective rose with his newspaper still in his hand and walked round the red plush seat, staring up at the skylight which was being repaired.
Though the detective and the nearest attendant were caught off guard, two visitors were not:
Two Baedeker guide books, truly aimed by German tourists, came cracking against the back of my neck. By this time, too, the detective, having decided that the breaking glass had no connectio with the skylight, sprang on me and dragged the axe from my hand. As if out of the very walls angry people seemed to appear round me. I was dragged this way and that; but as on other occasions, the fury of the crowd helped me. In the ensuing commotion we were all mied together in a tight bunch. No one knew who should or should not be attacked. More than one innocent woman must have received a blow meant for me.
Amazingly, this was not her last blow for the Suffragettes. Once in prison, she again went on a hunger strike and she again was released after falling ill. While out, however, she took on another job that was almost as spectacular, if not as public. She and another young woman, a new recruit, were sent to torch a large but abandoned country house on an estate outside London. Finding the grounds surrounded by a dense hedge, the recruit balked. Richardson simply wrapped her scarf around her head and went crashing through it.
She made her way to the house, dowsed the walls and floor with kerosene, and climbed outside to set light to the fuse. As soon as the flame caught, she ran back to where she’d broken through the hedge. Expecting the police to show up at any moment, she began crawling on hands and knees across the field when, “Suddenly, I felt a moist gust of warm air in my face and froze with horror.” In the darkness, she had smacked into the side of a cow.
Though she was quickly apprehended and charged, this would be her last mission. After war was declared in early August 1914, Emmeline Pankhurst called the Suffragette’s campaign to a halt and urged the women to support the war effort.
In popular accounts, the actions of the Suffragettes have taken on a certain rosiness of hue. No doubt their acts of protest were heroic and dramatic and their punishment by police and jailers disproportionate to their crimes. But some historians question the efficacy of their tactics. Brian Harrison and Martin Pugh have suggested that non-militancy, rather than militancy, and particularly violent militancy, ultimately played a bigger role in winning the vote for women.
In a detailed survey of Suffragette acts of destruction, C. J. Bearman raises the question: Did the WSPU’s campaign of distruption actually work? Based on his analysis, “The only returnable answer is that it did not. The main reasons for the militancy’s failure were that it did little economic damage and that it visibly lacked mass support….” The acts of arson, in particular, made not even a marginal difference in the number of arsons that occurred in an ordinary year — in fact, fire damage in the greater London area decreased in 1913, the year when WPSU arsonists were most active.
And ironically, Richardson herself recounts a most un-violent incident that may have had a greater impact that all her other missions. Once, she camped out on the doorstep of the Bishop of London to persuade him not to deliver a speech against suffrage he was scheduled to deliver in the House of Lords. After being put off all day, she was finally invited by the bishop’s secretary to return the following morning at 11. Once seated with the Bishop, though, her mind went blank.
I must earlier had rehearesed a dozen speeches. But I could remember nothing of these. It was as if I were compelled by something outside me to speak as I did. I could not remember afterwards what I did say. When I was at the end of my arguments, I remember, I paused and waited for the Bishop’s reaction.
“Before we discuss this any further, you must take refreshment,” he told her. He pushed a button and a servant came in with coffee and pink-iced cakes. The Bishop produced the text of his speech and said, calmly, “In view of what you have told me, I shall not make the speech I have written…. I think you have persuaded me.” And that was that.
And, indeed, based on Richardson’s account, the Suffragettes ultimately succeeded through a similarly peaceful conservation. After hearing that the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Enfranchisement Bill, which greatly expanded suffrage among men, made no mention of “Votes for Women,” Emmeline Pankhurst called upon Prime Minister Lloyd George. She warned him that her followers would resume militant action if women’s suffrage was not also addressed. Lloyd George, who supported the cause, expressed dismay, and afer consulting with his Cbinet, ensured that language was added to give the vote to women over the age of thirty.
As a historian, Brian Harrison has little patience for Richardson, who he describes as coming “as near as anyone to the ideal” of the self-sacrificing follower he claims that the Pankhursts sought to inspire. Likewise, Bearman dismisses Laugh a Defiance as “the unreliable memoirs of a self-dramatizing woman.” On this point, at least, their views don’t differ greatly from those express by the editors of the Evening Standard, who wrote after the slashing of the Rokeby Venus that “her lack of a sense of proportion pass the frontier between eccentricity and mental unsoundness.”
But we must bear in mind that historians, unlike some literary critics, do take context into consideration. And if we do the same, Laugh a Defiance no longer seems simply an entertaining piece of writing. Diane Atkinson, a historian overall favorable to the Suffragette cause, notes that after her time with the cause, Richardson “published several books during the war, … owned properties and was a somewhat unsuccessful landlady.” She also became one of a wave of women who sought public office after suffrage was approved.
Mary Richardson speaking for the British Union of Fascists in 1934.
Atkinson also notes, however, that in the early 1930s, Richardson joined the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley and set up the Women’s Section for the party. Between 1932 and 1934, she spoke frequently in support of Fascist policies and candidates. Although she eventually grew disillusioned and rarely became involved in political causes after that, while she was as enthusiastic in her support of the Blackshirts as she had been of the Suffragettes. She illustrates a point made by Eric Hoffer in his classic study of extremist movements, The True Believer: “The danger of the fanatic … is that he cannot settle down…. The taste for strong feeling drives him on to search for mysteries yet to be revealed and secret doors yet to be opened. He keeps groping for extremes.”
I learned about Laugh a Defiance after Andy Miller mentioned it in a recent tweet. As Andy noted in speaking of the book on the Backlisted podcast, anyone thinking of reissuing it would need to ensure that appropriate historical and biographical context was provided. Without it, readers might fail to see the narrow but crucial line that divides Mary Richardson’s actions from ones with far more sinister conseqeuences.
The book is extremely rare — I was unable to find any copies available for sale — but there are over eighty copies available in libraries worldwide, so it wasn’t too hard to borrow one via Inter Library Loan. Here is the link to the WorldCat.org listing: Laugh a Defiance
Laugh a Defiance, by Mary Richardson London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953
Mentions of Eda Lord are sprinkled in the margins of dozens of biographies of 20th Century writers. She was food writer M. F. K. Fisher’s schoolmate and first love at the Bishop’s School in La Jolla, California in 1924. In 1930, she’s in France, having an affair with Lawrence Clark Powell, one of five he memorialized in his short novel The Blue Train (1977). Two years later, Christopher Isherwood sees her walk into a Berlin nightclub on the arm of Tania Kurella, a German woman who met the Anglo-Irish writer James Stern that evening and later married him.
In 1948, Malcolm Lowry gets drunk at a party at the house outside Paris she shared with her then-lover Joan Black. Her name pops up in accounts of Julia Child, Richard Olney, James Beard, and other culinarily-minded Americans who clustered around Child’s villa, La Pitchoune, outside Cannes. Even in Quicksand (2005), a memoir written by Sybille Bedford, with whom she lived for twenty years, Eda rates less than three pages.
She only emerges from the margins in two places: in her three brief and largely autobiographical novels — Childsplay (1961), A Matter of Choosing (1963), and Extenuating Circumstances (1971); and in Selina Hasting’s just-published biography of her long-time lover and companion, Sybille Bedford: A Life (2020). Through Eda’s first two novels we can follow her story up to her early twenties; Hastings fills in many of the gaps thereafter.
Eda grew up in material, if not psychological, comfort. She was born in 1907 in Durango, Mexico, where her father, Harvey Hurd Lord, a former Olympic athlete, managed a copper mine. In late 1910, her father and mother were forced to flee from Mexico on horseback, taking Eda with them, when miners and peasants turned on the Americans who owned much of the land Durango in one of the early incidents in the Mexican Revolution.
Cover of UK edition of Childsplay
Though Harvey Lord came from a wealthy family, he had an unfortunate knack for investing in unproductive mines. As a result, in her childhood Eda became accustomed to moving from place to place — a pattern revealed in the chapter names in Childsplay: Joplin, Missouri; Neosho; Webb City; Okmulgee, Oklahoma; Embreeville, Tennessee. The one constant was her grandmother’s home in Evanston, Illinois, where she spent most summers. Her mother died of cancer when she was three; her father remarried but Eda was never really accepted by her stepmother, and when Harvey Lord died in 1920, Eda became a ward of her grandmother Eda Hurd Lord.
Eda Hurd Lord was something of a force of nature. Daughter of the abolitionist lawyer and Chicago pioneer Harvey Hurd, she became a real estate developer, building up Evanston, Illinois as one of Chicago’s first suburbs. She was a patron of the arts, purchasing works by Winslow Homer and others and contributing money and paintings to museums. She was not, however, interested in matters of the heart. When Eda’s father died and her future was uncertain, her grandmother put the choice to thirteen-year-old Eda in business-like terms:
She said I had a lot to think about. She wanted me to make a decision, but I must do it slowly and carefully. I should not answer at once; tomorrow would be soon enough. She said she did not want to influence me one way or the other; I should make up my own mind. Did I want to stay on with her and remain a member of my own family? Or did I want to go to Oklahoma and live with my stepmother?
Her grandmother warned Eda, however, that “if I did decide in favor of my stepmother, she could no longer have anything to do with me. She could not.” “My grandmother might be cold,” Eda later wrote, “but at least you knew where you stood with her.”
As the title of Eda’s second novel A Matter of Choosing suggests, her grandmother continued to treat her as an autonomous being rather than a child in her care. Eda Hurd Lord moved from Illinois to California, first Glendale and then La Jolla, for its environment. She gave her granddaughter the choice of attending a public or private school. Eda chose private, entering the Bishop’s School in 1922.
Eda Lord, from the Bishop’s School yearbook, 1924.
Still busy with investments, her grandmother was often away and Eda became accustomed to the company of adults. One, a financier, took her along on trips down to Tijuana. Here she became acquainted with what she called “the idiot world of Prohibition drinking:
… the crazy behavior, the stumbling walk, women in evening dress out cold and carried off on stretchers. No one lifted an eyebrow; the Hamiltons did not even look up. I was learning not to be surprised at anything.
Unfortunately, Eda’s own drinking habits came to be modelled on what she witnessed in Tijuana.
With her talents and precocious sophistication, Eda became the “It” girl of the Bishop’s School. When Mary Frances Kennedy (later M. F. K. Fisher) entered the school in 1924, a year behind, Eda was the vice president of the Junior class, a member of the Debate and Thespian clubs, editor of the literary annual, and a player on the basketball, hockey, and baseball teams. “She could always do anything, anything at school better than we could,” Fisher later wrote; “she was more exciting and brilliant than any student had ever been.” Not surprisingly, Fisher developed an intense schoolgirl crush, an “awkward, bewildered, confused” love for Eda.
Eda then went to Stanford — her grandmother’s decision this time — where she quickly earned a reputation for flouting the rules. On a whim she and a fellow student paid $5 for a ride in an airplane, which resulted in a counseling from the women’s dean. This was just the start. Before the end of her first year, she was put on “social probation” (prohibited from speaking to other students on campus). As a sophomore, she began making outings with male students. One evening, after visiting a speakeasy in San Francisco, the car she was riding in was involved in an accident. Though everyone covered it up, word eventually reached the school administration and she was expelled. “They tell me that you break the laws of our country, as well, that you have taken to drink,” her grandmother confronted Eda upon her return. “Do you enjoy muddling your words?”
Intent on gaining independence from her grandmother, Eda got a job in the advertisement office of a department store in Los Angeles and took an apartment. A middle-aged bootlegger took a fancy to her and soon she was making the rounds with him almost every night. He was proud to be seen with a fresh-faced college girl on his arm. After a few months of this, however, she was ready to move on: “With Pat, I had seen it all; I was familiar with every used car park, gas station, restaurant, street corner. Los Angeles was an uninspired, sprawling, provincial conglomeration.”
She decided to try her luck in New York City. Her grandmother took the news in her usual matter-of-fact fashion: “Experience cannot be passed on to others,” she said. “Each human being has to find out for himself.” Eda was able to find work in New York but soon grew restless again. She met Karl Robinson, a young executive with an American oil company operating in China and the two were wed in early 1930. Soon after the couple arrived in China, however, Eda realized that married life was not for her. She journeyed north to Vladivostok and made her way to Europe via the Trans-Siberian railway.
Eda eventually made it to France, where she met her old classmate Mary Frances Kennedy, now married to Alfred Fisher. She ingratiated herself into the budding gourmet with a ten-pound tin of caviar she’d bought in Moscow. Mary Frances in turn introduced Eda to Lawrence Clark Powell, who was renting a room from them while studying at the University of Dijon. Eda and Powell had a brief affair, little more than a few days together. Powell was infatuated, Eda less so. As he recalls in The Blue Train, she said there was little “an old drunkard like me” could offer:
Besides, you’re my last man. I intend to live with women after this. Anyway, I’ll be dead of lung cancer before I’m forty. Look at my fingers. You’d think I was Chinese. What could I give you? A child? No. The good father took care of that. He told me it was an appendectomy when he destroyed my ability to bear a child. My best gift to you would be my body in alcohol.
In his retrospective account, Powell made Eda older and a redhead to enhance her allure and mystery.
From France, she headed to Berlin, where she began working as a writer. The city’s pre-Nazi Cabaret decadence suited her perfectly. She may have had an affair that led to her having an abortion (Powell suggests this came earlier), but she began sleeping with women and frequenting nightclubs. It was in one of these that Sybille Bedford first met her. Sybille was in the company of Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria, Eda with her lover Tania. Eda later said that Bedford seemed “occupied and preoccupied.” Sybille, on the other hand, claimed that she “mostly sat prim and shocked — reading a review.” The two women went on their separate ways.
They met again briefly at a cocktail party in Paris in early 1939. The web of attractions at this affair was complicated to say the least. Sybille met Allanah Harper, a wealthy and worldly Englishwoman who would become her partner through the war years and later her supporter in many practical matters. Eda was with Joan Black, also a wealthy Englishwoman, with whom she would be involved through the same period. Sybille was interested in Joan and Eda. Though the two couples parted, lines between these four women would cross in numerous ways in the years after the war.
Sybille and Allanah sailed to America shortly after the Germans invaded in May 1940. Eda and Joan Black were trapped in France. Their different fates did much to determine the direction of Sybille’s and Eda’s careers. Eda and Joan made their way to the south of France, then under control of the Vichy government. They struggled with all the challenges of life under occupation — food shortages, fuel shortages, suspicion and harassment — but at least Eda’s status as a neutral foreigner offered some protection until Hitler declared war on the U.S. in December 1941.
The contrast between the account of living under occupation Eda tells in her last novel, Extenuating Circumstances, and the evidence of history is intriguing. In the book, Eda foregoes the first-person narrator of Childsplay and A Matter of Choosing for an impersonal third person. Her lead character, Letty, the widow of a British Army veteran, survives through a combination of ingenuity and good luck. A wealthy American couple leave her with the keys to their villa, which provides Letty with relative comfort and privacy — privacy enough to act as a safe house for escaping Allied airmen on occasion. The story as a whole carries a bit of a Swiss Family Robinson air as Letty and her friends overcome difficulty after difficulty by improvising solutions and outwitting the Vichy police and Gestapo. In the end, after Liberation, one character observes to Letty, “You have come a long way.” “I have,” she replies, “And you won’t catch me looking back.”
Compare this with Hasting’s description:
To those who knew Eda in the post-war period, she appeared a timid, fragile creature, shy and retiring, clearly reluctant to attract attention or to express any opinion that might be considered remotely contentious. In her younger days, however, Eda had presented a very different image, a dark-haired beauty, sociable, intelligent and high-spirited, attractive to both men and men, eager for adventure and determined to make a successful career as a writer.
Elsewhere, she writes that Sybille found Eda “pale and thin, very anxious and shy, clearly traumatised by her wartime experiences.”
What separated Eda from the fictional Letty was the reality of her experiences during the war. She and Joan were ill-prepared to deal with deprivation. Their life in Paris had been one of sleeping late, partying long, and drinking heavily. “We were too hazy with drink to notice a kerb,” Eda later wrote. Though they made their way to the Riviera, they didn’t end up in the comfort of a luxurious villa. Instead, they found a humble country house prone to the worst of the Riviera’s wet grey months: “dampness everywhere, between one’s ribs, dripping from one’s fingers, mud all over the floor. It corrodes one’s very soul.”
And instead of the Famous Five-style adventures of Extenuating Circumstances, Joan and Eda found themselves, in March 1943, interned along with hundreds of English and American women, in Cavaillon, one of the towns “approved” for them to live. As Eda wrote in an unpublished account that Selina Hastings most generously shared with me,
Cavaillon is the mouth of the funnel of the Rhône Valley and, in consequence, is the suction vent of mistrals blowing throughout the south. Wind shakes the ugly raw-blown houses and for weeks on end, wind flings dust everywhere: into eyes, mouths, nerves.
A few days later, however, they were rounded up and loaded onto a train. No one explained what was happening or where they were going.
Women at a Vichy French internment camp.
They ended up being offloaded into a camp on the outskirts of Paris where English and American women from throughout Vichy France, nearly two thousand in all, were being held for transfer to a German Internierunslager. In some ways, Eda felt more at peace there than at any time in the south:
In this prison life I was startled to discover a curious sense of leisured ease. There was no possibility of outdoor exercise: we were not allowed out; not necessity of wangling for food: we were given so much and no more, but, even so, more than we could buy outside. I walked from the dining room back to my bed and lay down with a book, savouring the peace and luxury of it. There was nothing I could do about anything.
… Outside, I could have been shot for no reason. Here I was known, named, numbered, and certainly under someone’s care and responsibility.
After a few weeks of this, however, the internees were told that they were being shipped back to Vichy with instructions to return to their places of enforced residence. Ironically, this news was nearly as bad as being handed over to the Germans. “It was as though a steel band had snapped,” Eda wrote. “The team spirit had been broken. People began grumbling.”
The women were transported back to the south of France to live, effectively, under house arrest. “We were a present from Vichy to the Germans, but they didn’t want us,” as Eda later put it in the words of a minor character in Extenuating Circumstances. The remaining months until the Allied landings in August 1944 were dreary, anxious, and hunger-filled. Eda later said that Joan took to reading cheap English mysteries for their descriptions of food and drink. “Literary bacon and eggs,” however, “are not very sustaining.”
Following Liberation, Eda and Joan made their way back to La Cerisaie, the farmhouse near Giverny that Joan owned. There, the women reconnected with friends from before the war and Joan began drinking great quantities of cheap red wine. For Eda, on the other hand, the one positive outcome of the wartime lockdown was recognizing that she was an alcoholic:
It was then that I had to decide that I must give up all alcohol and completely. Because that was the only real trouble: my liver had long before given up in despair and the alcohol went immediately into my blood stream, poisoning me, puffing me up, giving my mind strange illusions. I did this in as unobtrusive a way as I could, so that even now most people don’t know whether I drink or not.
Eda kept herself sober, as Sybille later put it, “with unrelenting effort — and the crutches of cigarettes and caffeine.” Eda would come to be known among acquaintances for her habit of arriving at parties with a thermos of coffee in hand. It seems as if Sybille saw Eda’s alcoholism as a purely a weakness rather than acknowledging her general success in maintaining sobriety.
Eda continued to write but published little. Malcolm Lowry praised a story she wrote titled “The Pig,” based on her experiences during the Occupation. “As a story perhaps it has, in one way, a kind of intolerance or lack of centre, even when it is being most subtle,” he wrote a friend, but admitted that “perhaps this imbalance is the clue to the author’s talent, or one clue.” He even suggested that Eda might pull together a collection of stories about “the gruesomes & comedies of the occupation.”
It was not until August 1956, after several more encounters, that Sybille and Eda became lovers. The relationship started with crash. Driving south from Paris, they were involved in an automobile accident that left Sybille with a broken hip. They recuperated at La Bastide, a villa in the hills above Cannes that Allanah Harper — a former lover of both women — was restoring with her husband. In many ways, La Bastide became the closest thing to home that Eda was to experience in her adult life.
For much of their time together over the next twenty years, Eda and Sybille lived on the move, never settling anywhere for more than a few months. As Sybille wrote in Quicksand,
… [W]e were living in years’ or half-years’ snatches in rented houses or flats in Dorset, in London, in Portugal, in Essex, then London again, then Italy: the Browning Villa at Asolo, an intolerable mistake with a sudden recourse to where we should have started: the South of France. And there we found the only both loved and permanent home I ever had: a conversioned annex built on Allanah Harper’s property.
This period, however, represented Bedford’s most productive time as a writer, as she published two novels, several collections of reportage, and a two-volume biography of Aldous Huxley. And Eda, who’d never written more than magazines and short stories, finally got down to work on a longer piece. She may have intended to write something about the Occupation: in one of Sybille’s letters, she writes that Eda is working on a piece about Marseilles and that “it is like a door burst open, then freedom and imagination and originality of the writing, filled with joy.”
Cover of US edition of Childsplay
What Eda published in the end, though, was Childsplay, which was essentially her autobiography up to the time of her father’s death in 1920 (though she places the event in 1917). Childsplay was published to good reviews in both the U.S. and England. The New York Times’ reviewer singled out Lord’s spare, elegant prose style. “She writes with great clarity and is able to make each separate scene count for exactly what she intended.”
Monica Furlong, writing in the Guardian gave the book its most enthusiastic review: “Masterpiece, tour de force, work of art — all the silly rave words of reviewers fail one utterly, yet the fact remains that here is a writer who uses language as if it had just been invented, who remembers precisely what it was like to learn to read, to get stuck on a roof and not be able to get down, to mistake a puppet for a real monkey. Miss Lord has no self-pity, no sentimentality, no vulgarity. Her greedy appetite for life takes a well-judged bite at America in the early years of this century….” Furlong later named it as one of the books she’d most enjoyed during the year, saying the book’s “vivid, singing prose” had “haunted me for months.”
Cover of US edition of A Matter of Choosing
Eda followed two years later with A Matter of Choosing, which carried her story forward to her arrival in New York City in her early twenties. Like Childsplay, it was written in a frank, unsentimental first-person voice that was as tough on herself as on those around her. The book displayed a remarkable level of constraint — not reticence, mind, but a maturity that recognizes the danger in making sweeping statements. As one reviewer put it, Lord’s prose was “cool and spare and always beautifully exact both in what it says and what it implies.” Only Anne Kelley though, writing in Chicago Tribune saw through Lord’s reserve to the vulnerable orphan she really was: “The sense of loneliness in the midst of so many people is overwhelming.”
M. F. K. Fisher, who saw Eda in the late 1950s after a break of many years, recognized that time had taken its toll on her. “I know that you are everything I recognized in you so long ago,” she wrote Eda in 1959, “tempered and refined and of course wearied by those processes.” Martha Gellhorn, who was a close friend, cautioned Sybille that “Eda will never decide anything because she cannot, and her motives are not what you think (gratitude, duty, affection) but plain terror.”
It was Sybille, not Eda, who took the lead in things. When Eda returned to the U.S. for the first time in over thirty years in early 1964, it was because Sybille had agreed to report on the trial of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby, for LIFE magazine. While Sybille attended court, Eda went on to California to stay with M. F. K. Fisher, where, as Sybille wrote after they met again in New York City, Eda had “put on some weight, thank God.”
Once back in France, however, Eda found it hard to get back to work on her long-delayed novel about the Occupation. Living with Sybille when she was working on a deadline was “like living with a caged tiger.” Eda had to take on most of the domestic duties. “I’ve been nurse, housekeeper, errand boy,” she complained, along with having to do most of the work in the large garden that Sybille wanted but could not care for. But Eda was also suffering from depression. Sybille wrote a friend that Eda refused to discuss what was going on: “That wretchedness was neither admitted, nor discussed; it was concealed.”
By the summer of 1968, however, Eda was dealing better with depression, thanks in part to effective medication. She returned to her third novel “without great faith but with tenacity and courage,” as Sybille put it. Deep into her research for the Aldous Huxley biography, Sybille traveled to the U.S. with Eda again. The two women spent some time with her aunt Margaret Burnham, the last of Eda’s father’s siblings. Sybille the experience stifling: “the days are spent in maddening slow rounds of trivia.” Aunt Margaret disapproved of Eda’s smoking and made a point to say so frequently. Yet she also insisted that her niece take part her busy social life, which left Eda “shrivelled with boredom” and with no energy to work on her book. The only relief was a visit to M. F. K. Fisher in Napa Valley, although Eda’s frailty worried her old friend: “I feel as if she is nourished on cobwebs,” she wrote afterward.
Cover of U.S. edition of Extenuating Circumstances
Eda finally finished Extenuating Circumstances in October 1970. Sybille’s long-time editor Robert Gottleib was happy to accept the book for Knopf. By now the story had only a loose connection with Eda’s own experiences during the Occupation. Instead of a grim account of survival and deprivation, it had become, as one reviewer put it, “a wry comedy” in which the heroine — seen through the distance of an impersonal narrator — was transformed from “starveling to spiv entrepreneur.” It was as if the only way Eda could put that time down on paper was to step out of the story completely.
Eda grew more and more reluctant to leave the annex of La Bastide that had become their home. She continued to struggle with depression, took no interest in eating — which would have been difficult for Sybille, who always relished good food and wine, of which there was plenty to be had with friends like Julia Child and Richard Olney nearby. Eda was likely dealing with a serious case of agoraphobia. As one can imagine, it was difficult to be around someone with such dark moods — hard to show love, harder to feel it. Reading the account of Sybille and Eda’s relationship in Hastings’ biography, you realize that while we may not have progressed much in the priority we give the treatment of mental illness, we are at least better at recognizing it. Neither woman was well prepared to deal with Eda’s depression.
And Eda’s smoking began to take its toll. She finally gave it up, but the damage had already been done. She was diagnosed with throat cancer. Worse, after suffering a hemorrhage, Eda was told that she needed to undergo a hysterectomy. Already weakened, she had no reserve to draw on for recovery and she died soon after. M. F. K. Fisher later raged at the decision about the operation: “It was cruel to make Eda submit to an obviously useless surgical interference so late in the game. After that biopsy, why not just keep her warm and as comfortable as possible? DAMN.” In the last days, Sybille wondered just what connected her with the woman she’d lived with for two decades: “The difficulty with Eda is that she is so hard to know. I feel that I do not really know her (which makes everything even sadder).”
Sybille survived Eda by almost thirty years. In contrast to Eda’s grim decline, she enjoyed her greatest recognition, earning an OBE in 1981, making the Booker Prize shortlist in 1989 with her novel Jigsaw, wining a Golden PEN award in 1993. After dedicating several of her books from the 1960s to Eda, Sybille finally addressed their relationship, if only briefly, in her 2005 memoir Quicksands. Now, fifteen years after her death, most of Sybille’s books are in print and likely to gain more readers as a result of Hastings’ outstanding biography. Eda Lord, on the other hand, is likely to remain where she is: on the margin of other lives.
My sincere thanks to Selina Hastings for her help with this piece. Her biography, Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life, is available from Penguin/Random House (U.S. and U.K.)
Advertisement for Enter a Child by Dormer Creston.
Excerpt
There must, I suppose, have been wet days during the summer holidays at Hilldrop but actually, I cannot remember a single one. It may have been on these supposititious wet days that Uncle Reggie had out his toy engine; not for us to play with; it was far too expensive, also far too dangerous for that: Uncle Reggie’s engine was a grown-up toy, an engine of importance. All the male members of the family were pressed into the service of laying down the rails — which were heavy. In this Adam house the billiard-room, drawing-rooms, hall, library, and dining-room all opened out of each other: when all the double mahogany doors were thrown back there was revealed a charming landscape of room beyond room, the whole length suffused with streams of light from the windows at one side. But when the rails were all down, crossing every room, running through every doorway, it gave a most desolate look.
But still that was not the point; the point was to make the engine go, and for such an extremely grand and impressive toy I must say I never saw anything that demanded so much inducement, that necessitated so many people to attend to it, before it could be persuaded to perform. It appeared to require not only the encouraging presence of the entire family but that too of Randall, the carpenter (who was always sent for on engine-days as a matter of course), before it could be persuaded so much as to stir. The amount of discussions, tapping, screw-turning, adjustment, and readjustment that polished brass and green enamelled object required! Matches were lit … blown out … further matches lit … the smell of methylated spirits impregnated the air. The attendant family got tired of waiting … it seemed as if nothing would ever happen … as if there would never be any other show to look’ at than that of the two bending, arguing figures of my uncle and the carpenter hiding the engine from our view.
And then suddenly there would be a cry. “She’s off!” There would be a fizzing and a puffing, and actually, yes, actually, there was the little creature moving along the rails of its own accord … beginning to go quite quickly … quicker … now really fast; and my uncle, flushed with success, and brandishing a walking stick (which he used for poking into the engine’s tender when he wanted it to stop) would run along by its side, occasionally, for some strategic purpose, vaulting over the rails. The whole family, headed by Aunt Flora crying out, “Splendid, dear Reggie, splendid!” would try to rush after him. I say try because, (being so many, there was generally a jam at the doorways.
Uncle Reggie, meanwhile, by his leaps over the rails, invariably got left behind by the engine which, now at the height of its form, would rush from room to room, a terrifying demon that no one of us dared interfere with for fear — as was constantly impressed on us — that it would either explode, burn one’s fingers, or set the house on fire. For us it was this very diabolic quality that was the engine’s charm; the delicious feeling at the back of our mind that anything might happen at any moment. “Oh, Uncle Reggie — what’s that funny noise it’s making? Is it going to explode?”
“Get off the rails, dear child! Get off the rails!” And then, seeing the engine was nearing a side line on to which she was to be shunted, “Quick, Harry, she’s coming — quick, quick — the points!” To see all the grown-ups so excited seemed very odd. It made one wonder whether at bottom they were really so very different from oneself as one had imagined.
It’s been a long time since I opened a book and was instantly taken by the freshness of the writing. I stumbled across Enter a Child when it came up among the results when I went to the Internet Archive in search of a Patricia Traxler poem. It was about a woman’s memory of an abusive relationship and the only words I could remember were “kidnappers, burglars.”
Amazingly, Traxler’s 1994 collection, Forbidden Words was the first title returned, but what caught my eye was the one at the end of the first line of results: Enter a Child, by Dormer Creston.1 It came from the Public Library of India, which includes a wonderful assortment of books that appear to have been left behind in the officer’s libraries of various army outposts when the British cleared out after Partition in 1947. The phrase appears in the following sentence, which was by itself enough to make me want to keep reading:
My mind, stretching out all round me to get to know the kind of world I had entered, discovered through stories read to me, gossip, and teasing that, apart from the few home figures, it was peopled by a most sinister company: kidnappers, burglars, ghosts of many kinds, a witch who lived in the nursery bathroom, and a “little man” who, if I did not behave myself, would leap like an acrobat out of the chimney.
That “little man” made me remember with some shame a story we used to tell our children about the fearsome Turtle Lady. The Turtle Lady hid in the bushes around the front door of houses and jumped out and grabbed little kids who made the mistake of wandering alone outside after dark. She would snatch them with her great clawed hands and stuff them inside the empty turtle shell she carried on her back. I’m sure the Turtle Lady held a prominent place in the “most sinister company” that peopled the world of our children’s nightmares.
Enter a Child is structured in five sketches, but in reality, it’s just two parts, one dark and one light. The book opens in the dark, in the memories of the fears that filled the author’s early years as Dolly, the youngest daughter of an upper-class English family in the late 19th century. “As regards fear I was an expert,” she writes of those days.
Her one safeguard was her beloved nurse, Mary, in whose company she spent most of her days. Yet even Mary brought fears into the child’s life. Decades before, when Mary have been her mother’s nurse, she incurred the wrath of no less than Queen Victoria herself. While walking together in Hyde Park, the mother — then just seven — had broken away to run alongside the Queen’s carriage as she was out for a ride. Seeing the child, the Queen called for the driver to stop, then instructed a policeman to escort her back to her guardian. The man asked for Mary’s name and address, and ever after Mary remained convinced that at any moment, there might come an angry knock at the family’s front door.
The thought of Mary being taken away in irons became one of Dolly’s nightmares. Imagine, then, the girl’s anxiety when she was sent away from a few days in the charge of another maid. Why wasn’t Mary taking her? she wondered. And then to discover, upon their return, that Mary had vanished.
“Please, please tell me about Mary,” she begged her mother. “When will she be here? To-night? To-morrow?” Her mother gave evasive answers and tried to distract the child with a game of “Happy Families.” But her mother’s avoidance only increased Dolly’s panic. So, she sought out another maid, Ellen, Mary’s best friend among the servants. “Why, don’t you know, Miss Dolly?” Ellen answered, matter-of-factly. “She’s never coming back! She’s gone for good, she has!”
Dolly’s parents were classic Victorian in their attitude towards children. Many days, they neither saw nor spoke to their children aside from saying good morning or good night. Her relationship with her father, in particular, had only two modes: great periods of completely ignoring her, alternating with short bursts of fearsome discipline. “My father was one of the major problems of my life,” she recalls. “A problem in the sense that I was always making little bids to enter into friendly relations with him, which little bids were invariably repulsed.”
One of these bids, heart-breaking for most parents of today to read, was when Dolly heard that her father’s birthday was approaching. She felt compelled to offer him a present but having no money and no means to shop for him, decided to create one. She cut out several pictures of bowls from a newspaper advertisement and decorated them with the brightest colors in her paintbox:
My system of painting was first to ram the paint brush with all my force down on top of the paint, and then to twist the brush this way and that. I then pressed the brush with equal force on top of the drawing, splurged it round, and would note with satisfaction a spatter of paint arrive, more or less, on the object I wished to colour.
Then, when the happy day arrived, Dolly carefully laid out her offerings in front of her father as he read his newspaper at the breakfast table. He briefly glanced over at them then resumed reading. That was the end of it.
I could not believe that nothing more than this was going to happen. I stood there waiting. The clock ticked, the breakfast things lay glistening in the strong morning light, my father continued to read. It was driven in on me that the Great Moment had come, had passed. No more notice was going to be taken of my present: my father had not accepted it and was not going to: he did not think it even worth a thank-you.
“If Miss Creston’s parents had possessed as much common-sense as the ordinary farm labourer’s wife,” one of the book’s reviewers wrote, “she would have been a far happier child, but might never have grown into so acute a writer.” “Their cruelty was the more intolerable,” he continued, “because it was unintended, and their daughter could not console herself with hating them.”
Instead, the author sees her parents’ cool uninterest as their peculiar eccentricity, just one of the many forms of it she observed among her relations. Fortunately, charm rather than aloofness characterized the majority of her family’s eccentricities, and these — related through Dormer Creston’s vivid prose — brighten the sketches that comprise the latter two-thirds of the book. As Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy later wrote in his book The Unnatural History of the Nanny, “She manages to create, out of what must have been numerically a tiny proportion of her childhood months, the illusion that she had a perfect, radiant, sunny Edwardian girlhood.”
A bit of Dorothy Julia Baynes’ pedigree.
Gathorne-Hardy was mistaken, however, in placing the book in King Edward II’s reign. Its author had, in fact, come of age by the time Edward came to the throne. Dormer Creston was the chosen pseudonym of Dorothy Julia Baynes — Dolly in the book — born in 1880 and the beneficiary of not one but two baronetages. Her father Sir Christopher William Baynes was the 4th Baronet Baynes of Harefield Place, Middlesex; on her mother’s side, her uncle Charles was Charles Edward Hungerford Atholl Colston, 1st Baron Roundway and heir to Roundway Park, a large estate in Wiltshire. When she was in her mid-sixties, she applied by Deed Poll to change her name to Colston-Baynes to emphasize her pedigree.
Roundway Park — referred to in the book as Hilldrop — is the setting for four of the five sections of Enter a Child, and a stark contrast to the grim atmosphere of the stern Victorian London home where the book opens. Every summer, Dolly and her parents would travel there to relax with a dozen or more uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandmothers. The grownups would relax in the cool interior while Dolly would explore and play outside in the baking August sun. “All this warmth, this glow, is within me as well as without,” and that warmth pervades these pages.
The house at Roundway Park around 1900.
Part of that spirit was due to her Aunt Flora, a spinster who’d sacrificed her life in “self-immolation” to Dolly’s grandmother, but who nonetheless served as a prime specimen of the art of living: “let life offer her a handful of dust and her exuberance would so irradiate it that it was dust no more.” At times, though — particularly sunset — Aunt Flora’s enthusiasm could grow tedious:
“Yes, beautiful. Aunt Flora,” I would say because I had been taught to be polite, taught, when a grown-up said anything was beautiful, to acquiesce, but in my heart hating this flaming wreckage of the day’s reassuring blue sky.
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic, dear,” Aunt Flora would murmur, disappointed in her proselyte, then, catching sight of my mother coming down the stairs, “Here, dear!” she would cry, “such a lovely sunset … you must come and look at it … did you ever see such colours!” And then, realizing I was about to slip away, “No, dear, don’t go yet, it’s changing every minute — you really oughtn’t to miss it!…Oh! Look at that long streak of yellow by the green!” And in her excitement she would drub on the glass with her fingers as if, could she only reach the sunset, she would like to pat it in approbation.
Eccentrics like Aunt Flora fill these pages with their well-meaning ridiculousness. As The Observer’s anonymous reviewer put it, they are all “strait-jacketed from the cradle in conventionality, and carefully trained to feel, as well as to be, useless.” Yet collected together and put to such activities as loading into carriages for a picnic or organizing themselves for a photograph or giving Uncle Reggie’s trainset a go, they become completely charming. “There is a lucent airiness in the writing that is often a delight,” wrote Marjorie Grant Cook in her review for the TLS.
“The essential merit of Miss Creston’s book,” Anthony Powell wrote in The Spectator “is that, although it may be … an account of a child who suffered from misunderstanding and loneliness, it is entirely free from any sense of obsession or feeling that the words have been written for the author’s gratification rather than the reader’s; a failing from which even a great writer like Proust is not entirely free.”
One reason no shadow of lingering resentment hovers over Enter a Child is that Dolly — or Doreen, as her friends came to call her as an adult — was not fundamentally out of sympathy with her parents and their values. When she was in her sixties, she would write a testy letter to the editor of The Spectator complaining about a William Plomer article proclaiming the merits of Surrealism. “As the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of culture is ‘the training and refinement of mind, tastes and manners,’ she wrote, “it can scarcely be used to describe Surrealism. Its whole motive is exactly the opposite of this definition.”
Dorothy Julia Colston-Baynes, from a family photo.
Dorothy/Dolly/Doreen never married. She took up the penname of Dormer Creston out of discretion: like Hilldrop, few things or people in Enter a Child appear under their real names. After publishing a small volume of poetry in 1919, she took up biography and earned a solid reputation as a dedicated researcher and colorful writer.
Books about royals bookended her career: The Regent and His Daughter (1932), about Queen Charlotte and her domination by her father, King George IV, and The Youthful Queen Victoria (1952). Other titles included Andromeda in Wimpole Street: The Romance of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Fountains of Youth (1936), about the artist and diarist Marie Bashkirtseff. Her best-received work, In Search of Two Characters (1946), about Napoleon and his short-lived son François, won a Heinemann Foundation Award Royal Society of Literature award. Elizabeth Bowen wrote of this book, “A sort of lyricism and freshness comes from so much of the material having been drawn from young minds. This is in the best sense — and how good that can be! — a feminine book.”
She lived most of her life in London, sharing a house on Lowndes Square with her sister Christabel. She was great friends of the writer and preservationist James Lees-Milne, who would often drop in her for tea and a bit of gossip. Doreen found a happy statis in her life. “She writes in bed every day till 1 o’clock, lunches alone, then walks at breakneck speed, she says often running; returns for tea to receive some friend or other; reads at dinner alone and retires to bed immediately” Lees-Milne wrote in his diary. “She says happiness consists in finding the right rut and never leaving it.” She suffered, however, each time her books were published. She told Lees-Milne that she went through “such agonies over reviews of her books that she often retires to bed for a week, with blinds drawn, silently weeping.”
Her sister Christabel, who died not long after Enter a Child was published, was even less fond of publicity. Lees-Milne recalled a guest at one of Doreen’s lunch parties going to the lavatory in her house and finding Christabel sitting on the toilet, a Pekinese on her lap, reading a novel. “I attributed this to the sister’s intense shyness and reluctance to meet Doreen’s friends,” he wrote.
Enter a Child proved Alfred A. Knopf’s adage that many a book dies on the day it’s published. It came out in October 1939, earned good reviews, and vanished. There are no used copies available online and only a dozen library copies listed in WorldCat.org. Fortunately, it is available on the Internet Archive in electronic formats.
1 Among the other titles containing the phrase is a fascinating 1935 study titled Children’s Fears by Arthur T. Jersild and Frances B. Holmes which catalogued and analyzed an impressive and unsettling list of fears that included “queer, ancient, wrinkled, deformed persons,” “being shut in a small space,” “going up or down in an elevator,” “being abandoned by parents,” and “darkness plus imaginary characters other than animals.”
Enter a Child, by Dormer Creston (pseudonym of Dorothy Julia Colston-Baynes) London: Macmillan, 1939
